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News.com launched a minor redesign today. They still put their stories in lame packages in order to rob you of an extra click, though. Unfortunately for them, I never look at advertisements or click on sponsored links. Microsoft is paying ActiveState to beef up their version of Perl for Windows. I wonder where this will lead? My gut feeling is that Microsoft feels like they can steal away Unix customers if they can get Unix stuff working better on Windows. According to the article, Microsoft is paying for the addition of the fork function to the Windows version of Perl, among other things. ...

What do you know? The FreeBSD ‘Zine (which I linked to over the weekend) published a new double issue today. Looks like the browser makers have brought a Y2K problem upon themselves through their own incompetence. The root certificates in a bunch of browsers expire at the end of this year, and will prevent users from using SSL-enabled web sites unless they upgrade. Joe Nickell’s compendium of pithy quotes from the Microsoft trial is good for a laugh. I particularly like Judge Jackson’s comments on dead horses. See … now you have to read it. ...

If you want to use Unix, but vi and emacs give you the blues, you might want to try out NEdit, a text editor for Unix that acts more like a text editor for Windows. Jamais Cascio reviews Scot Hacker’s BeOS Bible for Byte Magazine, and sneaks in a review of the whole operating system as well! I’d like to see the BeOS succeed, but I really do think it’s caught in a nasty pinch between the mainstream users who are shackled to Windows, and the hacker community, which has settled on the free Unix alternatives. ...

GNU Fortran author Craig Burley has a nice writeup of his trip to Linux Expo. I am ashamed to admit that even though Linux Expo was held in the very town where I live, I did not go. Chalk it up to being too busy on the infernal SQL book and being busy with projects at work. Maybe next year. Did you know that auto manufacturers have been installing black boxes in cars for a few years? The New York Times reports. ...

This is the type of response I hoped to see from the Linux community in the wake of the Mindcraft performance survey that pitted Linux against Windows NT on quad-processor servers. Linux is free software, why whine about it when you can just fix it? Not content to dominate the world of personal computing, Microsoft seems intent on taking over the exploding market for reference books. Realizing an opportunity to enter an emerging market with few established players, Microsoft is about to publish a dictionary of its own. Merriam Webster and Ambrose Bierce weren’t available for comment, but I’m certain that they’re concerned about going the way of Digital Research and OS/2. I’ll be interested to see whether the definition of monopoly in the dictionary is as enlightened as the encyclopedia entry for Bill Gates in Encarta. ...

Hewlett-Packard is still looking for a new CEO. Why not Jim Barksdale? Do you ever use the “What’s Related” button in Netscape Navigator? I don’t. But I did click on it tonight and discovered that you can suggest related links for sites, if you like. I’ll save you the trouble of clicking on What’s Related, and just point you at the Alexa Related Links Editor. Editorial cartoonist Ted Rall takes on the body modification … dare I say it … fad … in his weekly op-ed column. And I thought he just drew funny pictures. ...

Not one, but two people set me straight with regard to the link to the search page for Microsoft support. They knew exactly which search interface I was looking for. I’m much obliged. (If only I could have found it myself.) Guy Kawasaki sells out. Cynicism reigns again. You’ll be hearing a lot more about Echelon soon. I don’t have any opinion on this yet, there’s not enough information available to draw any kind of reasoned conclusion. ...

Jim Romenesko has launched an Obscure Store spinoff … Jim Romenesko’s Media Gossip. Media Gossip has long been the bottom of the page item at the Obscure Store. I’m glad to see it’s grown up into a site of its own. alt.culture is a rather useful pop culture encyclopedia that I just discovered through a link from Jim Romenesko’s new site. Ahh … the Internet. The most empowering and egalitarian medium for communication yet invented. Andrew Leonard regales us with a tale of the democratic nature of the Internet, and the unfettered channels of communications it provides us with in his story about pro-gun activists, vegetarians, a hacked Web site, and neo-Nazis. ...

RedHat Linux 6.0 includes “boss key” functionality that instantly switches your display to look like the infamous Windows NT Blue Screen of Death, for those workplaces where alternative operating system lifestyles are not treated with respect by others. I thought it was hard to find the search interface for Microsoft’s technical support knowledge base before; it’s actually impossible now. I clicked on the Support link, but it was a total dead end. After wandering through their site aimlessly for twenty minutes or so, I clicked on the Search link (not where the search engine for their support stuff used to be) and learned that you could restrict your search to “Support & the Knowledge Base.” Even so, it doesn’t let you narrow your search by product the way it once did. Damnation. ...

Geeks will appreciate: Patterns for Scripted Languages. Did Netscape sneak native support for PNG graphics of version 4.6 of their browser? I don’t remember it working before. The New York Times is consolidating all of its online properties in a single company. Please tell me they’re not going to do some kind of portal. About 15 months ago, I wondered in this very space about the future prospects of GoTo.com. Now they’re offering 5 million shares of their company to the public at $11 to 13 per. An interesting detail in this story is that the search results on the site are provided by Inktomi (no surprise there), and the ad sales for the search results are managed by 24/7 Media. Despite the fact that they don’t have any internal technology, they managed to bleed about 6.2 million dollars last quarter. What does this company have to offer other than a domain name? Who cares, they’re a perfect candidate for an Internet IPO. ...