Russell Nelson has submitted a feature called "On Being Proprietary" which tries to explain why proprietary is bad, and vendors should really think about open specifications. Read on.

Last week, Lycos closed its purchase of Wired Digital, publisher of Wired News and Hotwired, officially ending the Wired Era. This is good or bad news, depending on your point of view, but worth marking either way.

The "Head Geek" at a U.S. High School wonders if geeks might band together in a powerhouse techno-union to represent their interests and fight Luddite blockheads in journalism and politics. It's a great idea, especially if they never try and meet.

The always non-political Tom Christiansen has written in with a nice little satire piece that you might want to read. I'll spare my own commentary on the piece.

"South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" is eerily timely. While often funny, it's as political as comedic, joyously taking the wood to America's booming Morality Industry.

Joe Shaw has sent us a feature on a topic that is near and dear to many of our hearts: Linux advocacy. Specifically related to the recent mindcraft email posting, and practically any journalist who writes an article with a non-glowing comment about Linux, and the hoards that swoop down and proceed to shove them through a cuisinart. Hit the link to read it.

Charles Wu has written an essay about the Microsoft Monopoly on office applications, as well as the importance of file formats and the irrelevance of browsers. Click below to read it.

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.

Several of you have written in to mention the Pirates of Silicon Valley movie that TNT aired last night and we've mentioned here in the past. Its the story of Jobs and Gates, but made-for-TV. Click the link below to read my brief review of the film, and to have a chance to give your opinion on it.

J. Paul Reed wrote in to send us an interesting feature regarding the increasing number of commercial entities coming to the Open Source table. Talks about Apple, Netscape, and more. Definitely worth clicking that link below and reading.

When I saw the original Austin Powers, I was unimpressed. It was funny- better than recent Mike Meyers fare (Axe Murderer and WW2 were each mediocre IMHO) but it certainly wasn't setting the world on fire. With word of the sequel coming out, I watched the tape again. And again. And again. It grew on me a lot. And so I was quite excited when I went to the theater (Holland has 2 theaters: wouldn't ya know it, Austin Powers was shown in the crappy one) to see it, I went in open minded, and enjoyed the ride. Click below to read my take on it.

Rounding out a week with a lot of Red Hat news, def con cyber has written a good piece describing what a lot of you have been talking about: changes in Red Hat over the last few years. I think that this one sums up quite well a lot of the email I've been getting regarding RH. As a side note, the Slashdot feed on their portal site has been blatantly deleting all stories about them. They say that the SEC is requires this of them, so all I can say is that if you want uncut Slashdot, get it here. But then again, you probably were anyway... *grin*

knarf noted a story linked from LinuxToday about Red Hat's IPO called Red Hat's Charity Case at Andover News. Several people noted that the story has many errors. Fortunately knarf has written a pretty good summary of what he considers wrong about the article. Several of them are a bit extreme, but many are good points. If you read the original, this is a good rebuttal worth reading.

Here's a Net riddle: What do fans of "Buffy" and the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have in common? This week, both are using the Net to radically change the rules about information: who controls it and who gets to see and read it. Oh...and both are catching Hell.

Miguel de Icaza , GNOME Guru, and candidate for most hyper human being in the history of humans being, has written an essay discussing Red Hat and the beating that they have taken within the Linux Community. This is worth a read.

"Buffy The Vampire Slayer" took down more than the usual assortment of demons and vampires last week. Buffy's fans took the wood to the craven WB, which cancelled the show's season finale in the post-Littleton hysteria. But not for long. The show and the transcript are all over the Net and the Web. Censorship doesn't seem all that practical anymore. There are all these strange wired people around. "We are the people," messaged one fan on a Buffy website. "We have the internet. We have the power. Any questions?"

Nope.

IBM's announcement that it was funding a Deep Computing Institute made news on the Web when it was announced on May 24, but little offline. That's a shame. Deep Computing is a hugely significant convergence of technology, deep corporate pockets, the open source software model, artificial intelligence, powerful new 3-D visualization programs, a new generation of supercomputers and some of the best researchers in the world. This won't solve all the world's problems, but it will sure tackle them in a radical new way. Especially the ones whose solutions have been beyond reach.

For more than a decade, various law enforcement agencies -- perhaps in need of bad guys to replace Soviet spies and jailed Mafia bosses -- have warred in a very public way against hackers, maligned by both media and law enforcement as a dangerous menace. So Kevin Mitnick ends up doing more jail time than a true convicted robber baron like Michael Milken. This stereotype is as false as it is dumb. Real hackers don't steal, vandalize or damage. They are most often freedom-loving and generous problem solvers and information sharers.

"The Matrix" and "Phantom Menace" are a great study in contrasts when it comes to looking at movies, technology and geek culture. "Matrix" might be the easiest and cheapest test of geekdom yet. Geeks will almost surely love it. Others might scratch their heads in wonder. This is the closest popular culture has ever come to capturing the strange world of virtual reality.

You won't see Colonel Sanders out shilling for "Trekkies," or that noxious little rat who works for Taco Bell, either. But this documentary, which bravely opened against PMenace this last weekend is a loving tribute to that other Force in sci-fi and techno culture -- Star Trek in its many incarnations, and its fans. At the end I post a mini-review of Menace, too. (The first one to read it wins some fried chicken, a Jar Jar air freshener and one of my dozen"How To Install Linux" handbooks.