The Internet should be creating the most efficient markets ever, right? According to The Economist, it’s not.

Gamasutra has republished an article from Software Development magazine about the pipe dream of using object oriented technology to create reusable components. His arguments in the article conform pretty well to my limited observations. Rarely is the extra time spent to create “reusable” components recouped later, and rarely are these components designed well enough to be reused on future projects.

Salon ran their “year in technology” rundown for 1999 today. Microsoft is a monopoly, investors with impaired judgement drove up the prices of pathetic .com stocks, people got worked up about Mahir … it’s all been reported here, I even linked to a Mahir story. I think that web logs are a pretty big 1999 trend that didn’t get any play. That’s fine with me.

More from the world of our broken government: in the wake of the Congressional hearings on general IRS abusiveness in 1998, this year the IRS is going to audit fewer wealthy people than ever, in order to avoid pissing them off. At the same time, they’re going to step up efforts to catch poor people who either don’t file tax returns or abuse the Earned Income Tax Credit (a program which Republicans hate). The New York Times article exposes that in order to meet Congress’s new “customer service” requirements, the IRS has reassigned highly paid corporate auditors to phone support positions, and even has some of them charged with greeting visitors to the IRS offices. We need to be nice to the fat cats who vote Republican, don’t we? Even if they are tax cheats.

Unsurprisingly, Christopher Locke (aka Rageboy) has taken the corporate scumsuckers at etoys.com to task for their mistreatment of the innocent artists at etoy.com. The quote from the etoys.com exec is just classic.

The League for Programming Freedom is out to educate the world on the evils of software patents. I can get behind that.

The New York Times has an obituary of novelist Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, one of the most powerful books I ever read.

In doing some research, I discovered this Randal Schwartz article on using file locking in Perl CGI programs. I’m ashamed to admit that many of the old programs I’ve written don’t use file locking, even though they should. These days, I try to store everything in a relational database so I don’t have to mess with nasty plain text files.

Phil Greenspun has lightened up on Vignette Storyserver a bit. Having done a Storyserver implementation myself, I’d say that it’s a flawed but servicable product that will work for companies willing to drink the Vignette Kool-Aid.

For future reference: GNU Emacs for Windows.