Recently, a Gartner Group report slamming Linux was publicized. At about the same time, the Microsoft Linux Myths article appeared (I’ve linked to it from this page at least twice). Coincidence? Apparently not. An intreped subscriber to the SVLUG mailing list has followed the paper trail and discovered that the Gartner Group’s analysis was bought and paid for by Microsoft, who then cited the analysis as though it was from an independent source.

The results of Sun’s releasing their reference implementations of Java server pages and Java servlets to the Apache group are finally beginning to take shape. The “Jakarta project” Web site is finally live. I’m eager for them to merge the Sun stuff with mod_jserv.

ComputerWorld has a mixed article about the Mozilla project. On the downside, it classifies the Mozilla project as a failure, because they haven’t released anything yet. I think that even the most ardent supporters of Mozilla would agree that the lack of a release at this point is definitely a disappointment. On the upside, the author doesn’t make the mistake of extrapolating problems unique to Mozilla to other open source projects. I still believe Mozilla will release a great browser at some point, but to most people I imagine that just looks like an article of faith on my part.

The Linux item in this gossip column (fourth item) is pretty funny.

One is forced to wonder if there is any meaning left at all in assigning a commemorative day, week, or month to an issue. I was OK with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, but everything past that has just been excessive. In San Francisco, at the behest of monied software companies, mayor Willie Brown actually decreed October 15 as No Piracy Day.

Slashdot has an interview with one of my favorite programmers around, John Carmack of Id Software.

I’ve often heard the joke that multimedia ads on the Net are the equivalent of the smelly perfume ads in magazines … annoying and invasive. DigiScents is going to enable smelly perfume ads to become the smelly perfume ads of the Internet.

Shift has an article describing what employment in the wonderful world of new media is really like. This is a great article.

Scientists have managed to devise a monitoring device that can be disguised as dust.

Intel is going to integrate graphics chips into their motherboard chipsets, eliminating the need for graphics adapters. I think this is bad news for mainstream video card makers like ATI, but won’t really hurt companies like Nvidia and 3DFX, who make all their money selling to gamers who demand the best performance available. Intel just can’t stay on the cutting edge like these graphics specialists.