For a full list of today's Salon Technology stories, go to the Technology home page. My five minutes with Bill Gates After a three-month campaign to get a word with the world's richest man, a writer gets all he had hoped for. No. 23 results How to destroy your computer, and other lousy ideas for online learning. Steve draws a bead on The Man. He had to tease out the details from his friend, NDA or not.
True hackers take great pride in being completely unpredictable.
Of the signal qualities of digital wizards, this fundamental perversity stands out most prominently. They took glee in thwarting expectation. That unpredictability had attained epic proportions of late. As a conflux of greedy industrial programmers poured into Silicon Valley to scramble for the winnings, the business-wary hacker underground was busy subverting and reinventing the very roots of digital commerce. In particular, they had been collectivizing their efforts in loosely structured, electronically networked federations, neatly segmenting and conquering sticky computing problems.