Mattel is going to offer really stupid looking PCs for kids. They’re offering a Hot Wheels model, and a Barbie model, if you’re into that sort of thing. The Industry Standard is reporting some depressing statistics from the world of browser market share. According to one survey, only 24% of the hits on Web sites are coming through Netscape; there are more rc3.org readers that use Netscape than IE, for what it’s worth. ...
Kevin Mitnick, the most famous hacker in the world, was sentenced yesterday to 46 months in prison, and should be out by the beginning of next year thanks to credit for time served. He was also ordered to pay $4,125 in restitution, which was about $1,495,875 less than the government was asking for. Now that Salon is a public company, they get to post their financial results for public perusal. Their revenue was just over a million bucks for the previous quarter. Ugh. ...
A former Oracle employee (with financial backing from Larry Ellison) has founded a service to provide small business accounting over the Internet for a monthly fee. It will be interesting to see whether businesses will do their books online over the Web, and how this affects the PC-centric application model. It will also be interesting to see whether it actually works, as with any Internet startup, I have my doubts. First Monday (the peer reviewed journal on the Internet) has an article about open source software, and whether it’s the first nail in the coffin of intellectual property as we know it. ...
This week, the Economist takes a look at stock options; specifically at whether granting boatloads of options to executives is really good for companies. Readers in a hurry might just want to read the leader instead of the entire article. The great John Dvorak-Janelle Brown nondebate about whether iBooks are girly continued on TV this week. (Well, it continued on ZDTV, which is sort of like TV, right?) In her article, Janelle decries getting dragged down into a polarizing debate more concerned with drawing ratings than presenting the issues of the day in a logical, nuanced manner. I guess ZDTV is TV after all. ...
Declan McCullagh follows up on the story of the court that discovered the word counting in footnotes bug in Microsoft Word. Perhaps lawyers should just stick with WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 after all. User Friendly had an informative cartoon the other day that sheds light on the great Linux vs. BSD debate. This Slate article offers hope for people who hate milk. (I love milk.) Yesterday, John Carroll’s column took on day trading as a social ill. As a bonus, the article ends with a clever slam of managed health company Providian. ...
http://10-10phonerates.com is a useful tool for getting past all of the crap you see on the inane commercials for long distance service. Dave Winer is taking a walk down memory lane at outliners.com. I love software nostalgia (really). Sega’s new video game console (Dreamcast) is going to come with internet connectivity provided by AT&T.; I wonder if it’ll be more successful than WebTV? Linus Torvalds is currently ranked #15 in Time’s “Man of the Century” poll, right behind Madonna. I wonder where Hank, the Angry, Drunken Dwarf stands in the voting. ...
Symantec suffered the ultimate indignity for any security software company when their site was hacked recently. (Actually, the ultimate indignity would be to ship an installer for an anti-virus product that is actually infected with a virus, but I don’t think that’s ever happened.) Here’s an interesting potential business practice being made available by Cisco – ISPs extorting money from Web sites by threatening to slow their customers’ access to those sites unless the sites pay up. That’s right, they’re setting things up so that, for example, Microsoft could pay @Home to provide slower access to Netscape’s Web site if they wanted. I guess this is the dark side of the Quality of Service feature set. ...
One thing I know for sure is that any legislation entitled the Tax Relief for Responsible Encryption Act can’t be good. This week, Web Review takes on the topic of Web browsing on the Palm. Phil Agre (of the excellent Red Rock Eater mailing list) has written a scolarly article about writing for webzines. A US Court of Appeals has warned litigants not to use Microsoft Word in preparing court documents, not because of anti-trust violations, but because of a bug involved with counting words. ...
A Virginia congressman has accused ICANN and the Department of Justice of colluding against NSI (which just happens to be based in his district). Maintaining the root name servers is a pathetically simple job, technically speaking. Running a registry for domain names isn’t much more difficult. Unfortunately, these jobs are so important that we can’t escape from all of the politically driven greedheads that want to control these two functions. Today, Salon has the first hand story of a Linux hacker who was invited by Red Hat to participate in their IPO because of his contributions to the community. Unfortunately, when he signed up for an ETrade account, as instructed by Red Hat, he was denied the right to participate because ETrade weeds out everyone who doesn’t have a lot of money. Apparently, this has happened to a bunch of people that Red Hat wanted to let in on the IPO. It remains to be seen whether Red Hat can convince ETrade to do their bidding and let the hackers that were personally invited invest in the IPO. ...
Isn’t the current battle over instant messaging stupid enough without Apple jumping in? More Congressional incompetence today: some Senators are investigating a bill that would ban drug recipes on the Internet. Not that doing so would help to prevent people from making drugs, or be constitutional. It sounds good in a TV ad during an election year, though. Wired News has a story about EverQuest addiction. Anyone who saw a friend or fellow dorm resident flunk out of college because they wasted a semester or two playing a MUD is already familiar with this phenomenon. ...