Wired News has the inside scoop on GUIDs. Unfortunately, the author seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what cookies are, and how they can be used. Yes, they can be used to track your behavior on the Web, but they can also be used for hundreds of other more innocuous things. Cookies are just a way for sites to store data specific to you that gets sent back to them every time you visit their site.
Janelle Brown has a review of the book NetSlaves, written by the creators of the famous web site of the same name. Even though I haven’t read the book, but I bet I can give a one sentence synopsis: There are plenty of jobs in this industry that suck, and at most companies, you’ll find a healthy number of assholes who can and will make your life miserable. Before people start feeling too sorry for themselves, they should realize that in another age, their best option for employment would have been to seek work at the local coal mine or steel mill.
For all the hype about overly complex Internet application development platforms, it still seems a huge chunk of the really cool development is being done with clean, simple, open tools. For example, the entire eGroups architecture is written in Python. Most prepackaged platforms like BroadVision, Vignette, and Interwoven TeamSite just aren’t flexible enough to build really cool stuff, and by the time you’ve plowed hundreds of thousands of dollars into software licenses, you’re pretty short on cash to pay programmers.