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yroJJory writes to recommend a piece up at SFGate on the history of Silicon Valley and its roots in radio, accompanied by some great old photos. "When the Traitorous Eight [founders of Fairchild], as they're sometimes called, held their hush-hush meeting in San Francisco, they had reason to fear discovery — but no way to know that by quitting safe jobs for a risky startup, they would earn a place among what Stanford University historian Leslie Berlin calls the 'Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley'... Roughly 30 years before Hewlett and Packard started work in their garage, and almost 50 years before the Traitorous Eight created Fairchild, the basic culture of Silicon Valley was forming around radio: engineers who hung out in hobby clubs, brainstormed and borrowed equipment, spun new companies out of old ones, and established a meritocracy ruled by those who made electronic products cheaper, faster and better."

Mainichi Daily News writes "Japan's leading English news site revolutionizes manga -- Manga lovers rejoice! A never-seen-before approach to manga made its debut on the Mainichi Daily News on Monday, July 3, 2006. Manglish takes some of Japan's hottest young manga talents -- showcased in the Mainichi's MangaTown site -- and places their creations on the MDN in their original Japanese format. However, cool thing is that while it appears on the site in the original Japanese, but if you run your mouse over it you get the translation in English.

Last year, I reviewed the original Das Keyboard, the all-black, all-the-time keyboard from MetaDot, and found it disappointing. MetaDot was kind enough to pass on an example of their next generation keyboard for comparison. The upshot is that the new version is quite a bit better than the original: it's now equal in keyfeel to the best keyboards I could find at local superstores, which dampens my major complaint. It's still a cool-looking but questionably useful all-black, and is still more eye-candy than finger-food. Just the same, this unique product now bears more consideration. (Read on for the rest of my review.)

What initially struck me about Freecycle was that it was the first useful thing on the Internet I learned about by reading a newspaper instead of through the leading-edge online news sources I follow. The next thing I noticed about Freecycle was that, unlike Craigslist, Flickr, and other "Social Internet" phenomena, it wasn't centered on major cities but had local groups all over the place, even in towns like Apache Junction, Arizona, and Bradenton, Florida. And then, when I actually used my local Freecycle group, I discovered something else: A high percentage of users were over 50, female, or both.

Black hardware just can't help looking cool (think TIE fighters, NeXT Cubes, and the hard-to-find black SE/30 case you might have lusted for in 1994), but have you ever wanted an all-black keyboard? Das Keyboard, from Austin-based Metadot, fills the craving for those so afflicted, and by "all-black," I mean something very nearly that: except a small white label ("Das Keyboard") in the upper left corner and labels for the three usual indicator lights -- num lock, caps lock, and scroll lock -- there's nothing but black to see. The keys are unlabeled in any conventional sense, though the index-finger keys of the conventional home row (F and J) are marked with the usual small bumps; theoretically, this should make typing more accurate after a time, just because cheating with one's eyeballs isn't a possibility. It's the aesthetic opposite of the recently announced Optimus keyboard; this is high minimalism applied to the modern keyboard. The truth is, I wanted to like Das Keyboard. It looks cool, and the concept sounds, well, sound. The thing itself left me a bit disappointed, though; I've outlined my reasoning below.

Those who've moved to broadband connections and wireless links to each PC on their home or office network are unlikely to look back fondly on the days of 56K (or the not-so-snappy 300 baud of my first modem). Still, even if most Internet users really do have broadband, and (unless you've forsaken a landline telephone completely), dialup is a useful adjunct to even the spiffiest broadband access. And sometimes, it's the only access available. Most city dwellers don't face the distance limits of DSL (or even the geographic limitations of cable service), and cheapskate travelers know that free local calls are more common than hotels with free WiFi. However, wireless access and modems aren't the most common combination (especially when you're talking about laptops with a built-in modem port), and it's not fun being tied to whatever length of phone cord you have to hand. AlwaysOn Wireless's device called the WiFlyer (about $150) combines a wireless access point, a DHCP server, and a modem to make dealing with dialup a bit easier, and tosses in a few other features as well. The WiFlyer is a brilliant device, with some limitations; read on for my review.

erikharrison writes "I just watched Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. And it is good. There are lots of things I would like to say about it that I won't, as Slashdot isn't the place. Slashdot is the place to ask two questions, however. 1) How are the special effects and 2)What has Lucas done to the possibly tattered remains of my childhood?" Read on for Harrison's answers to those questions, and for Jamie's quite different impression of the sixth (and final?) Star Wars feature film.

Today, read the continuation of Larry Sanger's account of the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia (below), in which Sanger talks about the difficulties of governance in a large, free-wheeling project, some final attempts to save Nupedia, and how he came to resign from the organization. (And if you missed it, you might want to start with yesterday's installment.)

Larry Sanger was one of the moving forces behind the pioneering Nupedia project. That makes him one of the people to thank for Wikipedia, which has been enjoying more and more visibility of late. Sanger has prepared a lengthy, informative account of the early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia, including some cogent observations on project management, online legitimacy, dealing with trolls, and other hazards of running a large, collaborative project over the Internet. As Sanger writes, "A virtually identical version of this memoir is due to appear this summer in Open Sources 2.0, published by O'Reilly and edited by Chris DiBona, Danese Cooper, and Mark Stone. The volume is to be a successor to Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1999)." Read on below for the story (continued tomorrow). Update: 04/20 19:19 GMT by T : Here's a link to the continuation of Sanger's memoir.

Mark Stone writes with a thoughtful look back at the year 2004 in open source, pointing out both major gains and inevitable uncertainties. He writes "2004 stands out as a year in which open source consolidated its position as a valuable and accepted approach to business and technology policy. A less obvious but significant trend underlies all of this: even as open source business models join the mainstream, the open source development model remains a mysterious process on which large technology companies struggle to capitalize. Key issues and developments have played out in four areas: legal, policy, business, and technology." Read on for the rest.

We've reviewed Wall Street Meat, by Andy Kessler. Andy's recently released Running Money. Andy sent this piece on to us, and it's one that I think will be appreciated.

The postman brought me a review sample last week of what is without doubt the best thing to hit my keychain in ... well, since keys. It's Canary Wireless's Digital Hotspotter, a Wi-Fi signal finder which, despite a few quirks, is the best (and most sophisticated) of the current crop of cheap hand-held detectors. Read on for my review of the device, which was also mentioned in this detector round-up linked to last month.

The drive to be an evil genius is an easily understandable one. Riches, power, eventual fame, and plenty of minions to order around are just some of the perks of the vocation. Vivendi's Evil Genius (flash required) gives you the opportunity to exercise your lust for worldly power in a seriously stylish way. A rich musical score, tons of polish, and enough dastardly deeds to keep even Dr. Claw happy are the game's high points. An overabundance of micromanagement and a lack of proper GUI interaction marrs what have could been a classic in the strategy genre. Read on for a more in-depth examination of the first real-time strategy game whose tag line could have been "Mwahahahahahahahaha!"

FuzzyBad-Mofo writes "On 8/24/2004, I took the plunge and bought a Rio Karma digital music player. My needs were simple: Decent storage capacity, Linux friendly, and Ogg Vorbis compatible. The Karma has a generous 20 GB capacity, decent battery life, is OS-agnostic, and plays a wide variety of file formats, including Ogg." Read on for the rest of FuzzyBad-Mofo's review.

SeanCier writes "The SIGGraph 2004 conference showed off a lot of trends: high-dynamic-range (HDR) displays and video, suddenly ubiquitous general-purpose GPU programmability (it's not just for polygon shading anymore), 3D and high-colour displays, ever-more-refined fluid dynamics, crowd animation, and point-based graphics, to name just a few. But there was an unspoken undercurrent, a trend that's waiting to happen in the visual effects community, and happen in a big way: Open Source." Read on for more.

Ian Felton writes "PHP 5's official release occurred on July 13th, with a complete overhaul of object-oriented programming features and improved MySQL functions. These are sure to be great additions to the package for PHP developers. However, many of the changes to PHP are hinting at something that PHP developers might not necessarily like down the road." Read on for the rest of Felton's thoughts on the downside to corporate involvment in PHP's future.

Scott Ritchie ended up delivered an angry rebuttal to Friday's OSCON presentation on the credibility of election software: What's strange is that his rebuttal came in response to a talk he himself had just delivered. Ritchie doesn't have a split personality, and wasn't simply playing devil's advocate. He found himself, though, in the strange situation of having agreed (as a last minute stand-in) to deliver a presentation he hadn't yet had a chance to read, provided by Dr. Clive Boughton of Australian software developer Software Improvement. (Boughton is also a Computer Science lecturer at Australian National University.) Between agreeing to fill in and arriving at the conference, Ritchie found that Software Improvement was switching its eVACS voting software from a Free, open source software license (specifically, the GPL) to terms "even worse than that on MS's shared source," and decided to do something about it. (Read more below.)

Time-travel thriller Primer has already gained some festival attention (it won both the Alfred P. Sloan Prize and the Grand Jury Drama Prize at this year's Sundance), and OSCON attendees got a chance to watch the film last Thursday. Primer follows a stretch of time (better said, a series of timeloops) in the lives of a group of young engineers (Aaron, Abe, Robert and Phillip) whose day jobs are just a distraction necessary to pay for their real pursuit: tinkering in Aaron's garage, laboring to come up with the Big Idea that will attract VC funding and make them wildly rich. Two of them certainly find something valuable, but it doesn't lead to easy wealth. (Read on for the rest.)

tyleremerson writes "With today's film release of "I, Robot," the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has launched a new website, 3 Laws Unsafe. 3 Laws Unsafe explores the non-fictional problems presented by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The Three Laws are widely known and are often taken seriously as reasonable solutions for guiding future AI. But are they truly reasonable? 3 Laws Unsafe tries to address this question." Reader Rob Carr has submitted a review of the movie, below, that he promises is spoiler-free.

nsayer writes "My wife and I just took delivery of an EyeTV 500 - Elgato's brand-new box for U.S. over-the-air digital television. Elgato makes PVR hard- and software for Macs. With the 500, HDTV reception and recording functionality has arrived for the Macintosh." Pudge reviewed the original (USB, NTSC) EyeTV nearly two years ago; read on for the rest of nsayer's review of the FireWire-based 500 model (first mentioned earlier this month). The 500 will play back both standard and high-definition digital signals, but only broadcast, not cable.