MAPS (the Realtime Blackhole List people) have issued a press release in response to the lawsuit filed by the Harris Poll people against Microsoft, AOL, and their organization. I certainly don’t see how MAPS could be held responsible for anything, all they do is publish a list of IP addresses of sites they consider to be spammers, it’s the voluntary subscribers who are actually taking action.

Buzzword battle royale: O’ReillyNet on Microsoft .NET versus J2EE.

I don’t know about you, but I nearly choked when I first heard that AOL was buying Netscape. Now AOL is working on porting their client to Linux! What’s next, AOL becoming the new maintainer of GCC?

Are free computers in schools worth constantly exposing students to ads on those computers? I really doubt it. While I think that computer literacy is a key skill these days, distracting students with advertisements while they’re in school seems like a stupid idea to me. If we really think that having computers in schools is important, we should cough up the dollars necessary to put them there instead of allowing schools to pimp their students to advertisers.

Halliburton granted Dick Cheney a $20 million parting gift when he left the company to accept the Republican Vice Presidential nomination. I guess they don’t want to be forgotten if the Bush ticket wins this fall. Twenty million bucks is hardly an unusually large golden parachute for exiting CEOs, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t shock us.

Great Bridge, the company formed to support Postgres (the open source relational database), has released benchmarks showing that Postgres outperforms MySQL and Interbase by a wide margin, and keeps up with two unnamed proprietary relational databases. (We can all hope that they’re SQL Server and Oracle 8i.) The proprietary databases remain unnamed due to restrictive licensing agreements that disallow publishing of benchmark statistics. (These benchmarks, like all benchmarks, should be taken with a grain of salt.)

If you wonder what HTTP server will give you the most bang for the buck (I couldn’t resist the pun), check out what the porn sites are using at smutcraft.net. Unsurprisingly, Apache dominates.

There’s nothing more fun to read than a dot com post mortem. eCompany’s obituary for WholePeople.com is a good read, unless sordid tales of ridiculous launch dates, petty infighting, and millions of wasted dollars bore you.

It looks like GNOME is reaching critical mass. Sun is adopting GNOME for future versions of Solaris, in place of CDE, I assume. Some Linux organizations (the names are unmentioned in the article) are creating the Gnome Foundation, which I assume will be analagous to the Apache Software Foundation, with the backing of some industry heavyweights.

Wired News has compiled a set of legal tips for “sucks” sites. It also has pointers to some sites that I hadn’t seen, including this site critizing Coca-Cola for the refrigerant used in their vending machines.