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The Milestone 4 version of Mozilla was released last week. If you’re willing to experiment, download it and give it a try. Does anyone else wonder if there’s a connection between Microsoft paying for Mindcraft to rate the performance of various operating systems, and Microsoft being rated first in the results every time? The Mindcraft studies have the same hollow ring as the studies on nicotine commissioned by tobacco companies. First, the idiots at Swatch came up with the ridiculous idea of trying to see a new time standard to the public called Internet Time (of course), then they managed to piss off the HAM radio community by threatening to beam commercials from space via radio. They scrapped that idea, and decided to take credit for donating something to Mir that didn’t belong to them in the first place instead. On the upside, their Web site is built using PHP. ...

Guy Kawasaki’s dreaded (by journalists) EvangeList pro-Macintosh mailing list is no more. Now that Apple is doing pretty well, the need for a mailing list to talk about all the good things in the Mac world is unneeded. I’m glad to see EvangeList go, because it mainly served as a rallying point for the people who exhibit the worst traits of platform advocacy. Mass emailing companies who cancelled products for the Mac (even if the people sending the email messages never would have bought the products), and sending scores of irrational, conspiracy-theory-addled email messages to journalists who wrote about Apple were regular tactics employed by the shameless EvangeListas. I honestly don’t believe this mailing list ever did a good thing for Apple; it just served to reinforce the stereotype of Macintosh users as paranoid freaks. ...

More claptrap about the Internet driving people to kill. Yesterday, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Dowd wrote incoherent columns that rode the incredibly tiresome Clinton impeachment for all it was worth all year. Her writing is bad, her lack of interesting thoughts is profound, and the level of vitriol in her columns is downright disturbing. If the Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for the writing which best typifies the American media, then truly Dowd would have been deserving, but for an award that professes to document “intellectual and artistic excellence,” this is a sham. ...

Microsoft is working on an intant messaging client. This is a market that’s already too cluttered with poorly implemented, proprietary solutions. One more isn’t going to make it any better. I love open source vaporware.

Elliotte Rusty Harold explains why he likes writing for O’Reilly right on the front page of his Java site. This makes me want to write a book for O’Reilly more than ever. Do I need one of these shirts? I’m thinking yeah. Planning your next vacation? Perhaps you and your spouse would find the Perl cruise to be a delightful diversion from your day to day life parked in front of your computer. Or, maybe not. ...

NTK reports on scary stuff going on in the Open Source movement. Is this a “tribe” you’d really want to be a member of? I added another email message I received from a reader to the reader comments page for TYCGI today. At first I thought that Al Gore’s open source web site wouldn’t attract much interest from the community. Clearly I was wrong. Since weekends should be more lighthearted than weekdays, I offer you this funny article about breakfast cereal. ...

For the first time in a long time, a new entry in the SQL book author’s journal. RFC 2555, “30 Years of RFCs.” For those of you who don’t know, all of the standards upon which the Internet is based are documented by the IETF in RFCs (Request for Comments documents). Unlike many more formal standards organizations, the IETF has based its standards on documenting things that work in practice, instead of creating pie in the sky guidelines that are never implemented. “Rough consensus and running code” is a credo which has served the IETF from the birth of the Internet to today’s wildfire growth, and I congratulate the volunteers who’ve supported this effort for 30 years of incredible work. ...

Al Gore’s campaign home page is Open Source -- the catch is, you provide the source. I want one of these for my computer. Here’s the incredibly predictable response from “leaders in the Open Source movement” to Microsoft’s statements about releasing the source code to some software. Yawn. It is interesting that the statement was issued by a PR firm. How far are we getting from our roots?

Interested in Jeff Bezos’ desk? Open your wallet. (At least it’s for a good cause.) Salon has acquired the Well. I’m too floored to provide any opinions on this just yet. My long-term online acquaintance Jamais Cascio locates the root of the problem that enabled the Melissa virus to flourish in a story in Salon today. I wanted to read Jakob Nielsen’s comments on the Salon redesign, and while I was at his site, I was completely floored by his unabashed self praise. The vaunted usability master could easily save readers a lot of time by leaving out all the claptrap about how every industry trend proves him to be right and just putting a large headline across the top of the page that says, “I consider myself to be very smart.” ...

Here’s a list of resources that provide information about what’s going on in Yugoslavia through Web and email updates. This guy has a hit counter on his resume. Netscaper Steve Dagley tells Macintouch that even without jwz, the Mozilla show will go on. I’d just like to point out at this time that Microsoft’s support site is the most confusing morass that I’ve ever attempted to navigate. All I wanted to do was search their Knowledge Base, and it took me forever to figure out how to get to the search interface. Ugh. ...