Posts

Uber-hacker Steve Wozniak has posted his comments on “Pirates of Silicon Valley,” the TNT original movie about the computer industry. I have a hard time believing this Wired News article was written by a professional journalist. I believe Torvalds gave a boring speech, but I don’t believe that a professional would engage in the sniping that’s found in the story, or that one would eagerly tout the speech of someone who’s on the Wired dole shamelessly in the same breath. Thanks again for the “way new journalism,” Wired, we appreciate it. ...

Business media tycoon Michael Bloomberg blasted the Internet stocks during a speech in Singapore yesterday. I quote: “If you want to look at a regular stock you go to either a financial analyst or an economist. If you want to value Internet stock, you go to a psychologist or publicist.” I do think that some sanity needs to be injected into the market for Internet stocks, but I don’t think that his knocks on electronic commerce are completely valid. There are plenty of areas where an electronic commerce site can add value to allow them to compete on terms other than price. ...

Somehow, EROS (an experimental OS), flew in under my radar. Eric Raymond posted about it on the Linux kernel mailing list (which I don’t have the time or inclination to read), and there’s a Web site describing it at http;//www.eros-os.org. It looks very interesting, but I have yet to wrap my mind around how it works, exactly. Thanks to Wes Felter for the original link. Robert Bruce Thompson (a computer book author) keeps a journal of his daily writing activity, and one of his recent journals has a lot of good information about how badly the FrontPage extensions suck. Interspersed in the comments about the suckiness of FrontPage are some fascinating comments about dogs as well. ...

The fallout over the outage at eBay continues. The SJ Merc has a story that surveys the fault tolerance landscape among big name commerce sites. In the course of the Bristol lawsuit against Microsoft, an actual Microsoft enemies list has been unearthed. This is less spectacular than it sounds; every company has a list of competitors that they don’t want to do business with. At a company I used to work for, we actually blocked connections from certain companies to our Web site (not that it did any good). ...

Do you think people who carry their Palm on their belt are geeks? Check out Stelarc. I don’t want to bash every site that redesigns, but I have to complain about InfoWorld’s new look. First of all, as Dave Winer and Lawrence Lee discovered, they broke all of the inbound links to the old site, so I don’t know if I can trust them enough to link to them any more. Secondly, they don’t have blurbs from the news stories they publish on the front page any more. Bad idea. I don’t find the new site visually appealing either; the design is kind of all over the place. The old site was plain, but it wasn’t visually offensive. And points off for using Arial. ...

The Industry Standard has a story describing a complex securities transaction that allows people who are locked out of selling their stock after an IPO to hedge against losses if the company’s value tanks. Paper millionaires, read and learn. If you thought the Internet was the ideal system for hacking, try the securities market. MSNBC has published a syndicated Wall Street Journal story about Microsoft’s litany of blunders in the anti-trust trial. It’s truly amazing how poorly they’ve done, although I’m not sure what their string of screw ups will cost them in the end. ...

java.apache.org has been replaced with jakarta.apache.org. It’s a merger with the old Apache Jserv code with some servlet code that Sun is donating. The jury is still out on whether this is a good thing; it depends on whether Sun provides any support beyond the initial code they’re dumping on the project. Recent rumors seem to indicate that Hewlett-Packard isn’t going to hire Jim Barksdale as their CEO, no matter what I say on this page. ...

Scott McNeally wants the trustbusters at the Justice Department to take a hard look at Microsoft’s investments. I don’t think that Microsoft’s billions of dollars in cash, or their willingness to spend them to buy into any company that might be onto something is monopolistic in and of itself, but they do complement Microsoft’s monopoly rather nicely. Does anybody else think that maybe Sun’s singleminded obsession with Microsoft will hurt them in the long run? Am I one to talk? ...

Companies spend thousands of bucks to send people to JavaOne, and what do they do? Stand in line for hours to save $150 on a stupid Palm V. 1,000 protest pages later, DIVX is dead. Another win for consumer awareness.

If you think your Palm handheld is cool, check out the Itsy. Too bad it’s only a proof of concept. The announcement of Java for the Palm platform has been a long time coming. Attendees of JavaOne will be able to get the version of Java for the Palm today, the rest of us will have to wait. Whoops, looks like there’s a big security hole in Microsoft IIS. It’s a buffer overflow in a Web-accessible program that allows users to change their passwords remotely. The real security advisory from eEye is here. ...