If you’re not running Unix, but you want to know what it’s like to use WindowMaker, check out the DHTML Windowmaker Simulator. Even if you don’t really care about WindowMaker, it’s still an interesting DHTML application.

Contrary to popular belief, copy protection isn’t dead. Microsoft continues to strive vigorously to eliminate software piracy, probably because it hurts their profits so badly. I mean, they don’t have all of the money in the world yet, right?

This page provides an overview of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which regulates telemarketers. The most important sentence to know when a telemarketer calls: “Please place me on your do not call list.”

Looks like Jorn Barger (over at the Robot Wisdom Web Log) got suckered. Today, he links to this Usenet article, which discusses George Bush, Junior’s “radical stance” on corporate crime. Where did they find the quote? http://www.gwbush.com. That’s right, the parody site I linked to a couple of weeks ago. I see people talking about articles from the site all the time, apparently unaware of the fact that it is a media hack perpetrated by the clever guys at RTMark.

There are interesting rumors floating around that Wal-Mart is building the mother of all e-commerce sites. If you’re not interested in that, you should still read the article, just for a classic example of analyst stupidity that is buried within. I’ll ruin the surprise by providing the text of the quote here, from a (no doubt well paid) Forrester analyst: “Can Wal-Mart be the Amazon.com of the Web? The key to their success lies in their execution.” In case this analyst didn’t notice, Amazon.com is the Amazon.com of the Web.

PHPBuilder.com has an overview of Zend, the next generation engine for PHP. One question that’s not answered in the article is whether PHP 4.0 will provide a better layer of abstraction between the scripting engine and the database. As it is now, there are different functions for every relational database, so if you move to a different database, you have to change lots of code. I’d like to see that change so that you use the same set of functions no matter which database you’re using, a la ODBC, JDBC, or DBD/DBI for Perl.

Salon Magazine has picked up the sad story of computer hacker Kevin Mitnick. Obviously this guy is a habitual criminal, but the fact remains that the crimes he’s accused of aren’t heinous by any measure, and he’s languished in prison for over 4 years awaiting trial. Where are we, China?

Attention Perl geeks: libwww-perl, the incredibly useful group of modules for doing Web stuff in Perl, comes with three handy scripts — GET, HEAD, and POST. To grab the source for a Web page on the Internet, you can just use:

GET http://rc3.org/

To find out more about any of these wonderful scripts (you have to install libwww-perl to use them), just type in the script name at a shell prompt with no arguments.

The Zagat Survey has put all of the content in its restaurant guides online.

Red Hat has filed to go public. I wish I had time to read the S-1 (which isn’t available yet). I imagine it will be given close scrutiny by thousands of eyes, and that there will be a useful synopsis availabe shortly after it is published.