startupfailures.com is an online support community for people who were involved in failed startups. It’s actually a for-profit company, doomed to failure itself most likely. At least they have a ready and growing market, which is more than you can say for many of the other dot com dead men walking.

The Standard has a tale of dot com greed and woe that will surely be repeated many times in years to come.

Even experienced Perl programmers can probably learn something from this article that refactors a program written by a newbie. And if you don’t learn anything from the article because you already know it all, you’ll feel better about yourself!

Steven Champeon blasts Microsoft for their damned lies, arrogance, and hypocrisy on all sorts of issues. Believe me, they had it coming.

I can’t wait until AIWA releases their in-dash MP3 player for cars. It plays both regular CDs and CDs with MP3s on them, which you can make at home.

Bad journalism in the Washington Post: XML was not invented by two guys at Microsoft. xmlhack has the reactions of some members of the XML community.

Tara Calishain sent along a pointer to this story: the Washington state Supreme Court ruled that shrinkwrap licenses are legally binding in a case where a construction firm sued a software company when a bug in the software caused them to underbid on a project by $1.95 million. I’m thinking that the construction firm should have reviewed the bid before submitting it, but I also think that allowing companies to disclaim responsibility for their mistakes like that is foolish. Certainly it doesn’t move us toward higher quality software. The scary thing is that UCITA hasn’t passed in Washington yet. Just wait until software makers can use UCITA to totally abuse their customers …

Apache.org was hacked recently entirely through configuration problems. Be careful.

A study conducted by the Poynter Institute and Stanford University concluded that Web surfers pay attention to text, not graphics. If you work on a news site or some other site focused on information delivery, you should check out the story and the conclusions of the study.

Billions of dollars in damages from I Love You? Come on. In other news, Microsoft refuses to take the blame for these virus problems even though they take advantage of features in their software that are easy to exploit. The story also misassigns JavaScript to Sun. Bad reporting everywhere!