Politics, politics, politics. Tim O’Reilly notes that if you lump UNIX and Linux together, they outsold Windows according to the latest IDC report. Unfortunately, Linux and UNIX aren’t lumped together due to crankiness on both sides.

There’s an official Sun coding convention for Java. Who knew?

David Strom recommends Microsoft Media Player despite his reservations about Microsoft in general. Outdoing companies like Real Networks and Musicmatch should be easy, because their software totally sucks. If I didn’t have to use RealPlayer to listen to baseball games over the Internet, I’d have uninstalled that piece of garbage long ago.

Jakob Nielsen shortbread cookies … yum!

Analysts seem to be missing the boat on Amazon.com’s new deal with Toys-R-Us. It seems pretty clear to me that Amazon.com is just acting as an outsourcer — they’re providing Toys-R-Us with an online store, because Toys-R-Us can’t do it themselves (as they proved last Christmas). Toys-R-Us is paying them money to build and maintain the store, plus a small percentage of revenues. Sounds like Yahoo Store on a grand scale to me …

Salon has a rundown of AOL’s woes involving MP3 sharing. Aimster seems to be particularly slick, I wonder if it’s being produced by a real company. Creating a business around illegally swapping MP3s by piggybacking on a proprietary network that attempts to shut out all unauthorized users doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

The FBI is going to send Carnivore out to one university to review. I think that’s just stupid. I guess it’s better than nothing, but if you’re going to let the cat out of the bag, why not just put it out there for public review so that everyone can be satisfied, and so that flaws can be found? Half measures make no sense.

Miguel de Icaza has posted a detailed followup to the Unix sucks talk he gave at the Ottawa Linux Symposium.

The State Department lost a laptop with information about nuclear weapons and is offering a $25,000 reward to get it back. Apparently they have no idea where it went, or who took it.

Sometimes I wish I lived in the UK. Check out this article from the business section of The Observer on intellectual property. It’s definitely not something you’d read in the Wall Street Journal, and that’s a crying shame.