The Army is handing out medals to soldiers who worked on the Y2K bug. Maybe this is an idea that could find a home in private enterprise as well. I know I’d appreciate the “Distinguished Debugging Cross,” or the “Web Design Medal” were someone to award them to me.

Salon’s cover story today is about the increasing number of incredibly bloated magazines that cover the “new economy”. I have to confess that I don’t read any of them, but the last time I looked them over, I was amazed at how huge these things have become. Fast Company and Business 2.0 have gotten about as fat as Vogue or those JC Penny catalog-sized bridal magazines. And the sad thing is that these magazines are incredibly boring. Cast aside these magazines and pick up the New Yorker or the Economist. At least they’ll fit in your briefcase.

I’m probably incredibly late to the party on this, but I played FreeCiv yesterday, and it’s really, really cool. FreeCiv is an open source clone of Civilization, the ultimate turn-based strategy game. If you’re not running Linux, you can play FreeCiv using the Linux desktop at Workspot.

I’m always up for reading a Noam Chomsky interview. Aren’t you?

From deep within the bowels of AOL West … err … Netscape, the Navigator 6 beta has been announced. According to the press release, the beta will be available in less than a month. The biggest question I have is whether they’ll create some skins that actually look like the OS the browser is running on.

The Wired News redesign sucks.

Another nice PC hardware site is realworldtech.com.

Tom’s Hardware has an interesting article on the failings of RAMBUS memory. Even if you don’t care about PC hardware at all, this article is illustrative of two important truths. The first is the amazing gap between hype and reality. RAMBUS technology is ridiculously inferior to normal SDRAM (which nearly all PCs use today) in terms of price versus performance and even flat oiut performance, and looks to remain inferior to it for the foreseeable future. Even so, RAMBUS share prices are astronomically high because Intel partnered with them. Why did Intel partner with them? So that they could earn a fat chunk of cash through licensing fees on the proprietary technology. So Intel is foisting overpriced, bad technology on their customers in order to increase their profits. Same as it ever was. The second truth is that the Web remains a wonderful medium for exposing this kind of customer-unfriendly behavior on the part of companies like Intel. It’s wonderful that an independent Web site like Tom’s Hardware can publish well researched, comprehensive articles like this one that completely blow technology mirages like RAMBUS out of the water, despite the fact that the traditional purveyors of hype are completely behind them.

On the spam front, I’m finding lately that most of the spam I get is addressed to the email address I use in the whois database, or the email address I entered when I registered for eBay. It’s almost exclusively for Internet business services.

purl.org is a service that allows you to create Permanent URLs. Basically, they just provide a layer of abstraction between the user and the real URL you want to point to. If the real URL changes, you can just change the URL associated with the PURL and everyone who’s bookmarked or linked to that PURL will still be able to get to the resource you were pointing to.