Netscape is now officially dead.

RTMark has struck again, this time with a fake campaign site for New York mayor and Senatorial candidate Rudy Giuliani. I’d call it a parody, except that the commentary on the site isn’t a joke.

Everyone is linking to the Hart Scientific unofficial Y2K compliance statement, but I’m linking to it anyway because it’s just that funny, and because there’s at least a small chance that someone reads this page who hasn’t already seen the link somewhere else.

Today Salon has the story of Elon Musk, a young rich guy who made millions by selling a failing company to the habitual suckers at Compaq and is now on his way to the next big thing. What’s the unique talent that allows Musk to garner millions in venture capital? He’s a blind hog who succeeded in finding a nut.

Phil Agre’s most recent set of notes and recommendations is fascinating as always. Most interesting in this dispatch is the discussion of how a company’s quality of service can be too high from an economics standpoint, and how that creates technology risk. Anyone who uses consumer software knows that software companies understand that their customers don’t expect or pay for perfection, and thus, they don’t spend the resources to strive for it. Microsoft Windows, the Mac OS, and Netscape Navigator (to name three popular examples) are and have been full of bugs. The reason open source software is, for the most part, reliable when it matures is that the people who work on it have no reason not to try to squish all of the bugs. On the other hand, commercial software publishers know that people pay for features, not bug fixes, so that’s where they expend their resources. (His rant on the dangers of public relations is fabulous as well.)

There was a small victory for common sense yesterday when a judge ruled that AOL could not trademark the phrase, “You have mail.”

CNet has a recent gossip column discussing the executive exodus at Microsoft.

Looking for a cool, free image viewer/converter for Windows? Check out IrfanView.

Cam rants about the advertising you see before movies these days. I was just bitching about that this weekend myself.

Wired News has an article about Starium, a company that’s building a crypto box to provide voice encryption for telephones. The box sits between the phone and handset, so you can use it wherever you are. Just like those cool secured government phones you see in the movies, the box has an encrypt button that scrambles the conversation from that point on (the person you’re calling needs one of the boxes too). It will be interesting to how the government tries to block the sale of this technology.