When you link to a page at Amazon.com as an affiliate these days, the user is no longer taken directly to that product’s page. Instead, an intervening page is inserted promoting other items related to that item. The question I have is whether you get the full referral fee if the user buys a related item instead of the linked item. It seems like they’re kind of ripping off their affiliates to me. Of course, since I haven’t earned any affiliate money in ages, I don’t really care.

Microsoft, continuing its flight from comprehensible version numbers, has decided to call the version of Windows code named “Whistler” Windows XP. The next version of Microsoft office will be called Office XP. And today a thousand jokes were born.

A reader correctly points out that Pyra isn’t dead. My apologies to Ev.

The O’Reilly Network has spawned a new site focused on LAMP, the open source Web development platform. It looks promising, it certainly overlaps my interests in the world of Web development pretty closely.

Peter Molyneux’ new god game Black & White has finally gone gold, and I’m extremely excited. I’ve been following the development of this game forever, and I’m completely jazzed that I’ll finally get to play it. Things are pretty giddy here in rc3.org land.

If you’re like me, following this link will lead to general discouragement.

Pyra is dead. In all the laughter about the pathetically managed, badly conceived dot com companies shuffling off toward insolvency, it’s important to remember that in many cases the good guys go down along with the bad guys.

From Today’s Papers:

The WSJ reports that yesterday, without realizing that his remarks were being broadcast on a feed to some White House reporters, President Bush told the heads of some Catholic charities that his faith-based social services initiative was linked to his goal of curtailing abortions, a connection he did not make when he announced the initiative earlier this week. During the same meeting, reporters were also able to hear Bush say that his plans for federal funding for school vouchers may not succeed because a lot of Republicans don’t like them. Online, the NYT carries an AP dispatch about the same meeting, which plays the voucher comment and Bush’s joke that he’s about to name his brother Jeb ambassador to Chad above the abortion comment.

Make of it what you will.

Odd that even as Microsoft dismisses Linux as a failure, IBM continues to pump major dollars into Linux projects. Of course, Microsoft dismissed OS/2 as a failure as IBM continued to pour massive amounts of cash into it, but we won’t talk about that.