What started as something that looked simple -- a "double" interview with Michael Hart of the huge and venerable Project Gutenberg and Jimmy Wales of the brand-new Nupedia open content encyclopedia project -- turned into a series of interesting dissertations on the nature of copyright and online publishing, among other things. You may want to bookmark the page below and return to it a few times to grasp all that both gentlemen (especially Michael Hart) had to say.

kossico asks: "For any Mac users that have needed to run Windows(tm) applications, Virtual PC has probably helped them a lot. Does anyone know of any free/opensource projects that attempt this on Mac a la Wine? If not, who wants to start one?"

Vesuri writes "TransGaming Technologies has released a patch for Wine which makes it possible to run Direct3D applications under Wine. I ran 3DMark2000 and I was impressed - it really DOES work like they promised. It's not perfect but it's a really good start!"

chromatic writes: "Looks like a company called TransGaming Technologies has been improving DirectX support in Wine. They plan to use a modified Street Performer Protocol to make money, and will eventually relicense their patches under the Wine license. Maybe I'll finally be able to run Thief!" And maybe one day Xbill will run on Windows.

Hmmm... seems quite a few people (judging from email I've gotten) have figured out that this week's interview guest, Clinton Ebadi, is the 'unknown_lamer' who frequents irc.openprojects.net, not that this was a great secret or anything. Anyway, Clinton has a pretty good sense of humor about himself and this whole thing, and I think it shows through clearly in his answers (below) to your questions.

geek asks: "With all the buzz around Darwin running XFree86, is there any hope of porting WINE to OS X? This could be a major factor for some people to move over to the platform. Since OS X has some FreeBSD roots my guess is it wouldn't be terribly hard to get WINE working under it. Now that Apple has an OS with UNIX in the floor boards the possibilities seem endless."

Capt. Mondo writes: "Just found this press release on NEC's Web site featuring a wine glass with a diameter of 2,750 nanometers. Normally this sort of thing would make me think it's some silly holiday-themed publicity stunt for nanotech -- like the world's smallest ad placed on a bee for guinnessworldrecords.com -- but the fact that NEC is claiming to have a new process for creating nano-sized objects in 3D (with the "glass" being the result) makes this a bit more interesting. Apparently the new process uses an ion beam with a diameter of 10nm, a gas containing the base material for construction and good ol' CAD. "

Thanks to Jeremy White of Codeweavers for sending over some of the previews of Wine 1.0. I had a chance to see this during ALS, and was very impressed by what they are doing. 1.0 has Gnome/KDE integration, as well as new (better) config program, and some new launcher features. As well as doing this, they've also WineHQ, for all the Wine news that you can drink.

If you want to get muddy without paying huge corporations for the privilege, you may be interested in an Open Source MUD Engine some whippernappers have put together. If the idea of a WAP browser for the VIC20 is just a bit too obscure (and you don't have an spare PC to use as a proxy for it), have no fear. More on "enterprise level" features (take 2 buzzwords and call me in the morning), and how DigitalConvergence is being beaten with a Cue stick. All this and more, below.

LLurex writes: "There's a short comment and screenshot on Ian Schmidt's Wine Page about everyone's favourite Windoze Emulator finally running Excel2000 and Word2000 (imho the only really good applications Microsoft ever published)! No more lame excuses, time to switch OS ..." The screenshot of Excel looks pretty much, well, like a screenshot of Excel. With this, two of the most persistent reasons not to run Linux appear to be fading; of course, what's to stop Microsoft from releasing versions that won't work under Wine, ever? That could be a good reason to stick with GNUmeric and pico.

chromatic is back with a mini-compendium of introductory Linux texts -- and yes, they have the famously protected "Dummies" trademark. Don't scoff at the nature of these books, though; the skill of translating the arcana of any computer topic (and boy are they all arcane to the uninitiated!) into language that mom, kids and the guy down the street can understand is not a common one. If you don't know what a root prompt (or an editor) is, or why you might want one, it's hard to do much else with your system.

Interested in a free domain for your open-source project? Huh, are ya? "Too bad, sucker," says the .cx registrar. On the other hand, you can drink beer (or sarsparilla) and talk tech with folks smarter than your average bear, create poetry using such fine poetic-sounding things as "Python" and "Java," and even let other people know the names of those who you would call Spammers. Read on, if the gist is really not enough.

kuros writes: "Apparently, these guys feel the time has come for a MS Windows clone. The Open Windows Project aim is to create a 100% Microsoft Windows compatible operating system that is totally "free" of Microsoft proprietary code. As its name implies, O.W. will be completly open source and freely re-distributable. Open Windows will draw from current open source projects to expedite its production. These include: GXExplorer, FreeDOS, ReactOS and WinE. You may have seen similar projects that intend to use a modified version of Linux, etc. Open Windows will not be a Linux distribution; it will be written Windows compatible from the ground up." Without all the APIs, is this even feasible? (And after that, is it desirable?)

identity0 asks: "I was looking at old Slashdot stories, and there seems to be a few stories about various console emulators being sued for copyright and/or patent infringement. Now I have a question: is there a legal difference between "hardware emulators" like the console emulators, and "software emulators" like WINE? And what are the legalities of both kinds of emulators? The WINE FAQ says it's not an emulator because 'Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips.' - but since Windows also only runs on Intel boxes, I think I can call it an emulator."

zigzag noted a nice article Summarizing the Wine Architecture. It has some interesting technical stuff, as well as poll results asking what Wine's priorities should be (running Office came first, followed by games. I vote games, but I'm sick of having to run Diablo2 on my crappy old laptop w/o 3D Acceleration since it's my only windows box). Anyway, not a lot there, but this is a seriously important project so take a gander.

ikekrull asks: "I am, like many, stuck behind an MS Proxy Server 2 'firewall'. MS Proxy Server 2, refuses to route anything that doesn't go through a Windows-only MS Proxy Client. Supposedly it supports SOCKS5, but I have heard from various people that this support is also broken except for Windows clients. Is there a way, short of replacing the MS Proxy server with something a little more sane, to make non-Windows Operating Systems work behind this 'firewall'? Can I run another piece of proxying software alongside Proxy Server 2 just to service my Linux machines?"

Sukru Tikves writes "Today on Wine Weekly News' future issue I read from that ' The Wine team is preparing to begin on the road towards the long-awaited Wine 1.0 release, but there's still some way to go, and many usability issues to clean up before even a public beta release is possible. While the wizards churn out the machine-readable source code, the Wine Weekly News plan to help by providing human-readable language mere users can read. ' "

Welcome again to Slashdot's continuing education program. Take a seat, say hello to your neighbor (using #slashdot might help), pretend we never said that other stuff. Here's another smidgeon of truth, clarification and equivocation we've spritzed over the usual mishmash of lies, intentional misstatements and strained obfuscation that is the Slashdot home page. Enjoy!

Snaller writes "Everquest is an online roleplaying game where you have to work for long hours online to get your hands on the magical items... unless you buy them. Buy them in game using game currency, or on Ebay where players have been spending real dollars on buying virtual items. After you pay, you meet the seller in game and, hopefully, you get the item you payed for. But no longer, Sony has decreed that selling your virtual items is no longer allowed - try it and you may find yourself banned from the game. " As a somewhat related side note, obnoxious GMs are roaming the worlds and forcing people to change their nicks to crappy D&Dish names. Really ticked off friends of mine who spent months building up charachters only to have their identities forcibly stripped from them. Of course since EQ constantly crashed for me so I gave up and returned to hoping Diablo 2 runs under wine and is released before my first heart attack. But I find it interesting that virtual property is being regulated: trade restrictions between virtual worlds and the real one.

duesi writes, "According to c't 7/2000 at least one DVD contains manipulative messages. They have been sent a copy of "The march is over," about which a reader complained. He said that some scenes contained noisy pictures. The c't technicians found nothing technically incorrect. But when they filmed the DVD off the screen and checked picture after picture, they found hidden messages in some scenes. For example you see a guy drinking some wine and suddenly, just for a fraction of a second, the text "DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE" appears on the screen. There are other messages like "Respect your parents" or "No firearms at school". The best thing about the story: If you DeCSS the film, those funny messages disappear magically... To me, this seems to be like hidden censorship or even a test for mass manipulation. References: c't 7/2000 P. 42."