Git is the version control system that inspired social coding, music videos, and now a party game (pdf).
posted by jeffburdges on May 7, 2011 - 36 comments

Derailing a train isn't as easy as you might think. [1944] (Declassified WW2 OSS training video.) [more inside]
posted by crunchland on Apr 11, 2011 - 55 comments

Operation Cornflakes was an action by the United States OSS in World War Two to distribute propaganda in Germany, using the Germany's own mail system with forged stamps and bombed mail trains.
posted by 1f2frfbf on Mar 24, 2010 - 10 comments

An uncredited contributor to A Star is Born; a writer for Little Orphan Annie; the writer of Nuremberg and a writer of December 7th – both productions of the Office of Strategic Services documentary unit led by John Ford; author of a 1940s hit, What Makes Sammy Run? – the story of Sammy Glick (Shmelka Glickstein)'s rise from newspaper office boy to studio production chief – oddly enough also made into a musical. And, of course, the man who put the words "I coulda been a contender" into Marlon Brando's lips. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg dies today, five years short of a century.
posted by WCityMike on Aug 6, 2009 - 13 comments

Julia Child apparently liked to mix cooking and covert operations. What did the beloved chef have in common with Arthur Schlesinger and baseball's Moe Berg? A career with the OSS, that's what. The CIA precursor's papers have recently been released, revealing Child's involvement in the agency. [more inside]
posted by mynameisluka on Aug 13, 2008 - 46 comments

Google's Android goes live for demo. Lots of video and stills. Cache.
posted by loquacious on May 28, 2008 - 62 comments

Love is everyone. Love is a not so massively multiplayer game that uses Verse. Worlds are built on top of a procedural engine (like Spore) and content creation is done in real time. Someone recently took a look at Love and it was good. Did I mention it was open source? And written by one guy, Eskil Steenberg. [more inside]
posted by ryoshu on Feb 28, 2008 - 19 comments

A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems – Amit Singh posts a free, 140-page PDF "bonus chapter" to his Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach.
posted by timeistight on Jul 25, 2006 - 18 comments

Bogart not the OSS Open Source is cool. Not only is it free-for-you, but you're also entitled to commercialize it as long as you follow some fairly simple rules. Software company Maui X-Stream seems to have run afoul of not just one OSS project but many, cobbling together entire product lines out of free software and branding them as their own -- and then heartily denying it. (More Inside)
posted by Ogre Lawless on May 24, 2005 - 12 comments

Independent coders remake Origin's Privateer. Once upon a time, Wing Commander and Free Enterprise had a beautiful baby. Then the dastardly Electronic Arts killed Origin Systems, the maker of the Wing Commander and Privateer series. The townspeople trembled in fear. From where would come their salvation? Sure, they had Freelancer, but you couldn't even use a joystick with that game! For a long time, it looked like the decent HOTAS and Sci Fi loving populace would be doomed to wander stickless through the desert of action oriented Space Simulation games, when Lo! from the far away land of Independent Game Makers came the 1.0 release of the Privateer remake for Linux, Windows and OS X simultaneously. And the people played it, and it was good. [via /.] [more inside]
posted by shmegegge on Mar 7, 2005 - 29 comments

The Pond is the history of a secret, independent US intelligence-gathering group which preceded (and outlasted) the OSS. Shuffled from Cabinet to Cabinet to the CIA, it eventually ran aground against the infighting of McCarthy's Red Scare hearings and was no more by 1955.
posted by trondant on Feb 2, 2005 - 8 comments