Eckhard Pfeiffer at Compaq fell on his sword. Bring back Rod Canion!

You know what? This kid has a brother.

First, the idiots at Swatch came up with the ridiculous idea of trying to see a new time standard to the public called Internet Time (of course), then they managed to piss off the HAM radio community by threatening to beam commercials from space via radio. They scrapped that idea, and decided to take credit for donating something to Mir that didn’t belong to them in the first place instead. On the upside, their Web site is built using PHP.

Does anyone else wonder if there’s a connection between Microsoft paying for Mindcraft to rate the performance of various operating systems, and Microsoft being rated first in the results every time? The Mindcraft studies have the same hollow ring as the studies on nicotine commissioned by tobacco companies.

The Milestone 4 version of Mozilla was released last week. If you’re willing to experiment, download it and give it a try.

The courts and NSI are in a race to the bottom in terms of domain name stupidity.

Guy Kawasaki’s dreaded (by journalists) EvangeList pro-Macintosh mailing list is no more. Now that Apple is doing pretty well, the need for a mailing list to talk about all the good things in the Mac world is unneeded. I’m glad to see EvangeList go, because it mainly served as a rallying point for the people who exhibit the worst traits of platform advocacy. Mass emailing companies who cancelled products for the Mac (even if the people sending the email messages never would have bought the products), and sending scores of irrational, conspiracy-theory-addled email messages to journalists who wrote about Apple were regular tactics employed by the shameless EvangeListas. I honestly don’t believe this mailing list ever did a good thing for Apple; it just served to reinforce the stereotype of Macintosh users as paranoid freaks.

Why is it that every defense of Microsoft that I read is produced by some brain-damaged libertarian, often paid by the Cato Institute?

Geeks will appreciate: The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System.

This CNN story exposes its fatal flaw in the second paragraph … you can’t measure programmer productivity by the number of lines of code that the programmer writes. This article talks about the fact that American programmers are much less productive than their overseas because they only produce about 7,700 lines of code a year compared to the overseas average of 16,700. I don’t know enough about programmers as in general to say whether Americans are more or less productive than non-Americans, but I do know that the study measures the productivity using a ridiculous yard stick. My guess is that Americans are less productive because they have to go to too many meetings.