Russ Nelson of NTBugTraq expounds on the case of the missing service pack in Risks Digest. It seems that every time there’s a major downloadable release from Microsoft, something screwed up happens and people wind up wasting tons of bandwidth downloading something other than what they really wanted.

Every time I get out, Apple drags me back in. The new PowerBooks are gorgeous, light, and hellaciously fast. I want one. Now.

Some bad experiences with Interwoven TeamSite have led me to investigate CVS further. The Windows GUI version of CVS is cool, but it’s very complex. I’m still struggling with getting a CVS repository up and running on my FreeBSD box.

I’m relenting to external pressure and changing the name of this page from “Outraged! Daily Edition” to the more staid “rc3.org daily.” Not because I like the latter name better, but because almost every site that links to this page just uses “rc3” as the name of the link, so it’s easier to just go with that. Besides, I’m not usually all that Outraged!, and billing the page as such is false advertising.

rc3.org gets a nice mention in Tasty Bits from the Technology Front, a weekly Internet zine. (Thanks to Lawrence Lee of Tomalak’s Realm for spotting the link.)

I love the history of computer science, so I find things like this interview with Ken Thompson (the creator of Unix) to be wonderful. My favorite Ken Thompson story appears in the New Hacker’s Dictionary entry for back door.

PC Week Labs issues its verdict on Windows 2000, Beta 3. My one sentence synopsis: things aren’t looking too good (at least on the server side).

Metrowerks is phasing out support for the venerable teaching language Pascal, much to the dismay of some Macintosh developers. Interestingly, the GNU Pascal compiler project seems to have been under way for quite some time; maybe the project will take off as one of the last two major commercial Pascal products is dying off (there’s still Borland’s Delphi). Of course, some people never liked Pascal anyway.

It looks like there are some security problems with Microsoft IIS and Site Server relating to some Web-based site management applications that ship with the server. These programs, whcih allow you to do things like remotely view the source code of your ASP pages over the Web, have security holes that can enable users to view the contents of any file on the server. These problems are interesting for two reasons; one is that they’re really similar to the recently exposed security hole with Cold Fusion that allowed malicious users to attack Web sites through the example programs that are installed with the Cold Fusion documentation. The second is that problems with these particular ASP programs are nothing new. A quick Web search on the name of one of the affected IIS programs (viewcode.asp) returned a security alert from over a year ago describing a denial of service attack that could be launched by abusing the program.

Peter Coffee has written an insightful column for ZDNet, in which he talks about Microsoft defining the market in terms of its own products. This is a mistake any company can make, but large companies seem most prone to make it, for obvious reasons.