Wanna get righteously pissed off? Read Jon Gilmore’s rant against copy protection. It’s incredibly jarring to read about all the different ways that corporations are conspiring to make sure that we have to pay them over and over. The fact that computer equipment makers are willing participants disgusts me most. As consumers, we don’t have to allow ourselves to be exploited by entertainment companies, but it will take a concerted effort to prevent it. I wonder if we’re up to it?

The O’Reilly Network has published part 2 of their series on JSP taglibs.

Pilsbury’s lawyers have notified bunches of geeks that they’re no longer to use the term bake-off to refer to events where systems are compared or tested, due to trademark issues. Oh, please.

Who let the DHTML out? Check out the International Herald-Tribune’s design for individual stories. You can alter the font size for the story and reflow it as one or multiple columns without reloading the page. You can also page through the story without an additional request. The pages also look decent enough in Netscape 4.x. Someone at the IHT just let their designers go wild there, and I think it worked out well. The stories even have very short URLs. Whoever designed their site really knows what they’re doing, it seems.

Simson Garfinkel, please give up. He posted a follow-on article to go over the responses to his previous anti-Java screed. Naturally, he paints all Java supporters as fanatics, and reprints more anecdotes about Java being bad, bad, bad. Unfortunately, he makes his opponents’ point for them with this simple quote: “There are tens of thousands of companies using Java and hundreds providing tools for the language.” Surely not all of those people are failing with Java. Clearly Java has plenty of problems, but dismissing it as an utter failure is as ridiculous as touting it as the solution to every programming problem. The bottom line with Java is that it’s a lot more accessible than C or C++, platform independent (especially in server applications), and yet much more structured and maintainable than most scripting languages. It’s not perfect, and I still use Perl for most of my personal programming, but Java clearly has a place in the world.

What Major League Baseball teaches its rookies. Fascinating stuff.

Dave Winer mentioned in Scripting News that the New York Times publishes links to their stories in an XML file. Anyone have a link to that file that they can send me? (I’ve already gotten several responses pointing to these directories. None of the feeds seem up to date there, unfortunately.)

Every once in awhile, a media company loses its mind and sics its lawyers on its fans, or on publications read by its fans. In this case, Nintendo is suing a game magazine for using screen shots and the Pokemon name in an unofficial strategy guide. Let’s face it, this is just bad business. I have to admit that I can’t see any harm at all in having people write about your game, but surely the harm that they’re claiming is offset by the huge amount of good will they fritter away by filing such a lawsuit. Making it clear to your customers that you hate them is not the best way to get them to keep giving you money.

The interesting parts of now defunct online retailer garden.com have been acquired by walmart.com. garden.com was a site that I really admired, so it’s good to see their assets go to a good home. Interestingly, I was checking out the walmart.com site, and noticed that their pages use the extension .gsp, one that I’m not familiar with. I quickly discovered that GSP is, in fact, a system similar to JSP for building template-based Web sites. It looks like the system hasn’t been updated since 1999, so I wonder if walmart.com is revising the code internally.

Sun is releasing a pretty well equipped server for under $1,000. The form factor is very nice, too. I can see this putting real pressure on the guys who are trying to make money selling boxes that run Linux (one of whom I mentioned earlier today).