PC World has an article explaining the reasoning behind Microsoft’s sale of Sidewalk to TicketMaster. That’s not really news; Microsoft needed to sell something they had sunk a lot of money into but sucked at. The real news is buried in the article … an analyst made an accurate prediction! Again in the not news category, the analyst was very self-congratulatory about it.

This American Pie “fan site” was actually created by the studio, and is just guerilla marketing for the movie. I’m not sure about how I feel about that. I did see the movie, it was funny.

Did you know a UN agency was recommending an email tax to help out developing nations? I’m absolutely for helping out developing nations, but what a bad idea. How about a corporate tax?

The milestone 8 release of Mozilla is now available for download.

PC Week provides hammers more nails into the coffin for benchmarking in their shootout between 8 application servers. They provide so many qualifiers for the results of their testing that the numbers are meaningless. At least they state prominently that all of the products they tested are fast enough for anybody. Interspersed throughout the article are accounts of how the companies participating in the benchmark tweaked their software along the way to make it run better; most customers wouldn’t have the resources to do so. In fact, Microsoft wrote all of the state management code for their application specifically for the benchmarking. It forces one to wonder why anyone would take these benchmarks into consideration at all when deciding which application server to use. Reliability, capabilities of the development environment, and maintainability are all far more important than raw benchmarks, especially when you consider that all of the app servers tested support load balancing among multiple servers.

Former Microsoft exec Brad Silverberg, who left on an indefinite sabbatical after his push to open up Microsoft to Internet standards was shot down by Jim Allchin, has resurfaced as an investor in TellMe networks, a company made up mostly of former Netscapers.

It seems the Industry Standard uses some sort of glossary functionality to automatically add links whenever company names appear in their stories. In a Media Grok piece, a mention of Sun Valley, Idaho is magically transformed into a link to Sun Microsystems. (screenshot)

Tasty Bits from the Technology Front provides a guide to going straight to the printer-friendly versions of stories at many news sites. Pretty much everything on that page is useful (especially the link back to this site).

Request: if you’ve implemented an electronic commerce site using BroadVision’s products, I’d love to hear how it worked out.

This week’s Rapidly Changing Face of Computing points out that 46 states started fiscal year 2000 on July 1, and none reported any major problems. You can come in from the ledge now, Gary.