MechWarrior 4 wins Best Simulation game at the recent E3 show. The official site has a few cool screenshots, wallpaper images, etc. Droool.

Came across this nifty little utility called pshift, short for paradigm shift: "The pshift operator performs a paradigm shift on its input stream within the context of the current or specified zeitgeist. The full man page is here. :)

The Historical Armed Combat Association is a trove of information on how combat used to be. For example, check out the Harleian Manuscript Analysis, which is all about fighting with a the two-handed sword. Ugh, where was this stuff when I was playing D&D? (via Larkfarm)

Salon looks at the history of BSD Unix. A good quote from Bill Joy: "Most people are bad programmers," says Joy. "The honest truth is that having a lot of people staring at the code does not find the really nasty bugs. The really nasty bugs are found by a couple of really smart people who just kill themselves. Most people looking at the code won't see anything ... You can't have thousands of people contributing and achieve a high standard." (via ArsTechnica)

Fred Langa takes to task a recent Stanford study that concluded that Internet users are becoming more and more isolated.

Rumors that Apple is developing a wireless, ball-less mouse. If it's anything like that crappy round one they ship with their G4s, forget it.