Netscape Communicator 4.6 has been posted to Netscape’s FTP servers, and the inevitable backlash has already begun in the public Mozilla newsgroups. People are unhappy that Netscape is doing any work at all on the existing codebase when the developers could be working on Mozilla. It’s amazing how myopic some of the people in the Open Source community are. Why do people think that version 2.0.37 of the Linux kernel was released even though 2.2 was almost out the door? You have to support your existing software while you create new versions if you want to keep your users happy at all. I imagine that there will be plenty of people who stick with version 4.x of the Netscape browser long after Mozilla has been released (and it’s going to be quite some time until Mozilla is released anyway). By the way, international users will be happy to know that the major change between 4.5 and 4.6 is that 56 bit encryption is supported instead of 40 bit now.
The next time you find yourself complaining about how cryptic the documentation that ships with Perl is, think about the fact that it could have been written by the person who produced this paper.
First it was Computer Literacy Bookstore changing its name to fatbrain.com. Then Deja News changed its name to the more generalized deja.com. Salon Magazine eschewed its publishing roots and paid the big bucks for salon.com. Now, The Mining Company has hopped onto the .com bandwagon and changed its name to about.com. Enough already!
Microsoft has released a new revision of Internet Explorer 5 to fix some bugs – but they’re not telling anyone that it’s a new release.
There’s an SSH client (a program used to open encrypted connections to computers running Unix) for the Palm Pilot. That’s so cool.
News.com is reporting that linux.com is going live tomorrow. It will be … dare I say it … a Linux portal.
If you’re using Netscape Navigator or Communicator on Unix, you can use shell commands to remotely control an instance of the browser that’s already running.