The Register reports on Microsoft’s continuing march toward charging an annual fee to use their products, and to actually get customers to pay for bug fixes. The indoctrination begins with Windows 98 “Special Edition.”

This is assinine.

Princeton professor Edward Felten was called back to the witness stand today to demonstrate his Internet Explorer removal program and talk about whether there are any technically valid reasons why IE should be part of the operating system. When presented with a computer supplied by Microsoft, his IE removal program failed to expunge the browser completely. Unfortunately, this idiotic exercise is meaningless with respect to the larger issue, which is whether there are any benefits to “integrating” the Web browser with the operating system. Anyone with any sense at all can tell you that there are no advantages presented by integration. Is it useful to have a Web browser bundled with the operating system? Sure, but that’s not the same issue. Integrating the browser, or any incredibly bloated and complex application, with the operating system is simply a bad idea. In this day and age, the larger computer industry trend is toward modularization and distributed computing. Zero management servers, distributed computing via Jini, and lightweight interapplication communication protocols are all examples of this trend. Only Microsoft seems Hell bent on building enormous software edifices of increasing complexity, not to aid their customers, but rather to extend their dominance of the computer industry. The success or failure of one person’s hacked application removal program doesn’t change any of that.

Salon’s media columnist James Poniewozik has an interview with Jim Romenesko of the Obscure Store. Jim’s sites are wonderful (he does a much better job of sifting through ridiculous amounts of stores than I ever could) and my traffic has gone up appreciably since he started linking to this page from the Obscure Store. Thanks Jim!

A little bird told me that Dell is dealing internally with an email virus that’s a variant of Melissa, except worse. I imagine that if Dell has it, so do plenty of other companies. It looks like the news stories are rolling in on the virus, here’s a link to the story from the Industry Standard. The article doesn’t say, but I imagine this virus affects Outlook articles the same way Melissa did. Netscape Communicator anyone? My friend who sent me the email about the virus forwarded the following message describing one company’s nightmare.

Salon has published a thoughtful article by Peter Wayner about how hacking is perceived as a crime, and whether the treatment of Kevin Mitnick and others like him by the justice system has been unfair.

Windows 98 “Special Edition” is being launched today. This marks a new low, as they hold a press event for the release of a service pack.

JavaWorld has a wide ranging interview with James Gosling (one of the creators of Java) that discusses future enhancements to the Java language, Java’s role in the enterprise, and even some interesting stuff. Particularly interesting is the brief digression into when to build things, and when to build new tools to help you build those things. I’m one of these people that likes to discover and build tools, and I like to read about what other people think of their tools too.

Steve Champeon has a page which charts the Amazon.com sales ranking for his new book on Dynamic HTML GUIs. I’d write such a script for the CGI book, but I need positive reinforcement while I finish up the SQL book.

Good old Andrew Leonard at Salon Magazine has done me the favor of reviewing Red Hat’s S-1. In an endearing twist of irony, one of the risks listed in the S-1 is that the free software community will stop supporting Red Hat if they become too commercial. Once you go public, your fiduciary duty is to be as commercial as possible. Good luck guys.