Posts

It looks like the blame for the eBay outage has finally been placed, and Sun is left holding the bag. It didn’t take Microsoft long to start gloating. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s argument is that it doesn’t matter how unreliable Windows NT is, if you cluster enough of the servers, you’ll always have enough of them up at one time to consider your site to be reliable. The idea that you can do the same thing with a real operating system, like Yahoo does, is foreign to them. ...

From the “Wake up idiot” file comes this Don Crabb column. In it, Crabb runs down the reasons why Apple is being dressed up for sale to an entertainment megacorp like Disney, Viacom, or Time-Warner. These rumors have been floating around since long before Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to Apple, so I wonder why it is that Crabb would close with the statement, “Remember where you heard it first.” Maybe he wants to remind us of all of those rumors we read on the 9,135 Apple-tracking Web sites over the years. ...

This is assinine. The Register reports on Microsoft’s continuing march toward charging an annual fee to use their products, and to actually get customers to pay for bug fixes. The indoctrination begins with Windows 98 “Special Edition.” One of my favorite news resources on the ’net is the Yahoo photo gallery.

Windows 98 “Special Edition” is being launched today. This marks a new low, as they hold a press event for the release of a service pack. Salon has published a thoughtful article by Peter Wayner about how hacking is perceived as a crime, and whether the treatment of Kevin Mitnick and others like him by the justice system has been unfair. A little bird told me that Dell is dealing internally with an email virus that’s a variant of Melissa, except worse. I imagine that if Dell has it, so do plenty of other companies. It looks like the news stories are rolling in on the virus, here’s a link to the story from the Industry Standard. The article doesn’t say, but I imagine this virus affects Outlook articles the same way Melissa did. Netscape Communicator anyone? My friend who sent me the email about the virus forwarded the following message describing one company’s nightmare. ...

Looks like Microsoft managed to piss off the judge again. Declan McCullagh reports from the Microsoft trial with coverage more favorable to the evil monopolists … err … defendants. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop is now an Internet millionaire. Good old Andrew Leonard at Salon Magazine has done me the favor of reviewing Red Hat’s S-1. In an endearing twist of irony, one of the risks listed in the S-1 is that the free software community will stop supporting Red Hat if they become too commercial. Once you go public, your fiduciary duty is to be as commercial as possible. Good luck guys. ...

Palm Power magazine has an article explaining how to run Infocom adventure games for the PC on your Palm Pilot. Awesome. I don’t know why Activision or whoever doesn’t just release the whole collection for the Palm, I’m sure they could sell a ton of them, and the games are already written. Here’s a list of all of the current and former names of countries around the world. The former names of places are prefixed with UF. ...

Contrary to popular belief, copy protection isn’t dead. Microsoft continues to strive vigorously to eliminate software piracy, probably because it hurts their profits so badly. I mean, they don’t have all of the money in the world yet, right? If you’re not running Unix, but you want to know what it’s like to use WindowMaker, check out the DHTML Windowmaker Simulator. Even if you don’t really care about WindowMaker, it’s still an interesting DHTML application. ...

PHPBuilder.com has an overview of Zend, the next generation engine for PHP. One question that’s not answered in the article is whether PHP 4.0 will provide a better layer of abstraction between the scripting engine and the database. As it is now, there are different functions for every relational database, so if you move to a different database, you have to change lots of code. I’d like to see that change so that you use the same set of functions no matter which database you’re using, a la ODBC, JDBC, or DBD/DBI for Perl. ...

This column is the perfect example of why magazines should edit online-only articles as well as the ones that get printed on dead trees. Or are the op-ed pieces in Dr. Dobb’s Journal this bad too? Red Hat has filed to go public. I wish I had time to read the S-1 (which isn’t available yet). I imagine it will be given close scrutiny by thousands of eyes, and that there will be a useful synopsis availabe shortly after it is published. ...

There’s an interesting interview at WebWord with Danny Goodman about using JavaScript to improve site usability. It starts at a really basic level, so if you don’t know anything about JavaScript, this will get you started. Personally, I really dislike JavaScript (except for validating forms), but I understand it’s quite popular. I ordered a Palm IIIx today, so you can probably expect to see more links to Palm-oriented stuff here in the future. I’m pretty excited about getting my life organized, we’ll see if I fare better with this gadget than I did with the Day-Timer organizer I bought a few years ago. ...