Sage advice from Linus Torvalds: differentiate between the hype and the facts. Interworld covers his speech at Comdex.

Has anyone used a program that converts documents in other formats to RTF? If so, send me email.

The last paragraph of this story sums up the Salon acquisition of the Well perfectly.

Interested in life on the Internet fast lane? Why not try an alternative DNS server for awhile. People who are really name service geeks can even volunteer to become root name servers themselves. I love end runs around Network Solutions.

Fresh after redesigning its site to appear more portal-esque, changing everyone’s titles so that they don’t look like they work for a magazine, and buying the Well, Salon magazine (err, just Salon now) has filed for an IPO.

The most interesting story thusfar in the Kosovo crisis comes from the Glasgow Herald. According to the report, the bombing of civilians by US aircraft came about after the Serbs called in a strike on the position using a cell phone taken from a captured KLA member who was spotting Serb military units under the direction of the CIA.

Lance Larka has written an article about Wasteland, the classic role-playing computer game set in post-apocalyptic Nevada (and California). Wasteland was probably my second favorite computer game of all time, coming in just behind Wizard’s Crown (from SSI). The article is a fine appreciation of this wonderful game.

Even though I haven’t linked to stories about it much, the growing battle over audio distribution via the Internet is really fascinating. Robert X Cringely has a good column about it this week.

News.com has an article that says Apple will release some of QuickTime 4.0 as open source software. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t mention any specifics, like what the license will be, or what parts of QuickTime will be released as source.

The capitalization on the free software, I mean “open source,” phenomenon continues. Ziff-Davis is hoping to make some money through its open source conference.