mattr was among several people to send in obscure and confusing links to japanese sites featuring pictures and foreign words about the latest Clie- Sony's PalmOS based handheld. However mattr wrote a good summary of what its all about, and you can read about it by just hitting that link below. Jogdial, Memory stick, capacity to store 2 hours of video, color etc etc. I've kinda considered WinCE handhelds to be way ahead in the game, but it looks like the score may be evening up.

Really. He does. Quite eloquently. Clay Shirky's answers to our questions could easily be turned into an all-day seminar on where the Internet is today as a communications medium, where it might be 10 years from now, and how it is going to get from here to there. This is information you need if your career or business is affected by the Internet in any way. Lots of good debunking, too, of everything from WAP to the myth of increased media homogenization, all put forth with enough humor to keep even Clay's most depressing thoughts from bringing (too many) tears to your eyes.

Here is the next in our Hellmouth Revisited series; below is Jon Katz' column "The Cost of Being Different," a look into what it means to grow up and face high school for a painfully large number of kids. What would make things better? Will being different always cause so much suffering?

Recently you asked Indrema founder John Gildred about the Linux-based console system his company plans to introduce. Here's what he has to say about its hackability, strategy, developers and more -- thanks for the in-depth answers, John.

This is Slashback. Read it before it's wrong again. Find out more about Mandrake's new honcho, the neurons firing in the American legal system's brains on Napster, Yet Another Cool GPLization, and Larry's new toy.

A few weeks ago, you asked questions of Ryan Lackey, CTO for HavenCo, a company dedicated to providing secure off-shore data hosting from Sealand, a principality off the coast of England. Ryan has lately survived dental emergencies, the loss of a laptop (it dropped into the North Sea -- how many people can say that?) and other stresses, but he's followed through with some interesting answers. He even has some ideas for how you can make a lot of money, and lists the tools you need to start your own data haven. Kudos to Ryan for taking the time to answer so thoroughly.

chromatic returns with a book tuned for anyone whose answer to heterogeneous networks is SAMBA, and wants 500 pages of practical advice (and answers to common problems) distilled from the fountain of SAMBA knowlege.

Online, hostile environments are driving almost every social group other than techno-savvy young white men away from coherent public discussion of technology. These men are invariably smart and skilled, but almost unable to communicate civilly or tolerate disagreement or difference. Are we breeding communities of impulsive and creative jerks?

Almost everybody sent this one in: "AOL and Time Warner merge!" See stories at cnnfn.com, Yahoo! News or almost any other online news outlet. Or go straight to the source(s); the Time Warner and AOL press releases, which make this sound like the greatest thing since the first two 'net nodes were connected together. Now you'll be able to get all your Internet needs, from connectivity to content to shopping, delivered by a single experienced company. No more need to deal with Web sites that stray from the party line, take risks (and screw up now and then), or any of that other messy old-fashioned "Internet as anarchy" stuff. To get online in the future, all you'll need to do is plug in your computer, turn off your brain, and enjoy!

In his new book, "Weaving the Web," Tim Berners-Lee describes how he created the WWW and his vision and hope for it. Any declarations from this brilliant and selfless man are important and worth paying attention to, but brace yourself: the writing style is somewhere between low-key and comatose, the vision noble but almost hopelessly naive.

Increasingly, Web information architecture may be the salvation for slow-to-change and older cultural institutions -- baseball, publishing, journalism -- trying clumsily to make the leap into the Digital Age and stay connected to their customers. Yankees.com, the new website of the New York Yankees, is a snazzy example of how this process can work.

mathowie writes "Here's my notes from the 30th Internet anniversary event that took place at UCLA on Thursday. This is a very long, very detailed piece, but worth your time to read if you're interested in learning where the Internet might be heading in the next 5 - 10 years.

Since no studio could possible make a movie as simple or original as the "Blair Witch Project" any longer, they're blaming the success of the movie on the Net, calling it the "first Internet movie. Wait a minute... It's a great movie, but is it worth the cover of both "Time" and "Newsweek?" The hype is getting scarier than the movie.

Like it or not, the FCC and other government agencies make decisions every day that affect the way the Internet works. Don Weightman is a Washington, DC attorney who is currently in the middle of the ongoing regulatory dispute over who controls the "last mile" of online access in the USA. Don's strong words make it unlawyerly obvious which side he's on, but the only disclaimer he asked us to add was, "The following opinions are mine and not my clients'."

Joseph Walsh wrote in to talk a little bit about his experiences lately getting a new job. It talks about using the various online services to try to get a geek job. It doesn't provide any answers but I think it raises a lot of good questions that are worth thinking about. As hiring becomes more automated, we'll see much more of this kind of trouble.

Since Littleton, the cost of being different has gone up. Thousands of powerful e-mail messages have chronicled an educational system that glorifies the traditional and the normal, and brutalizes and alienates people who are or who are perceived as different under various names -- geeks, freaks, nerds, Goths and oddballs. One of the powerful messages coming out of Colorado is that so many of these "different" kids say they find school boring, oppressive, and utterly hostile, feelings echoed by educational survivors, many of whom are now parents. The hysteria over Littleton has only made things worse. It's time geeks defined and lobbied for some new rights. From their own messages, here are some places to start.

In the powerful new book "Open Sources, Voices from the Open Source Revolution" Bruce Perens of the Open Source Initiative and others describe the process by which they helped create the Open Source movement and established the radical notion that computer users had rights. This was -- is -- a shocking idea for most of the people who buy computers and struggle with expensive equipment, rapidly-obsolete software, and companies that keep their operating systems and other programs secret. The Open Source Bill of Rights is an idea whose time has come. And for the sometimes beleaguered new citizens of the Internet, the notion could be taken even further

This Thanksgiving, I was far from home, visting with two young geeks who set across the country with $10 extra bucks looking for good computer jobs. On Thanksgiving eve, they helped me to my first online gaming kill, thus inspiring me to recount the many ways in which I give thanks for geeks.

Vote For Me and I?ll Set You Free -- Some of you have said loudly and repeatedly that I don't belong here. So herewith, an exercise in Interactive Media Democracy, Unprecedented in the Western World! Vote your media. Keep the Jerk or Get Rid of Him, a Slashdot Poll: