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New installment of the author’s journal.

Great news for Linux partisans everywhere. PC Week is reporting that next month, Red Hat and Compaq will announce a deal to ship Red Hat Linux on Compaq servers, for which Compaq will offer full support. Here’s a direct link to the DOJ’s documents from the Microsoft trial, including transcripts of the oft quoted Bill Gates depositions. Found in NTK: Nuclear Blast Mapper. Sponsored and powered by MapBlast! (go figure). Tech tidbit of the day. Studio B mailing list subscriber reports that a Linux box running SAMBA provides only 1/4 the performance of an NT box using the same hardware for SMB operations, like file and printer sharing. I don’t know if this benchmarking was done with Samba 2.0, which was recently announced. ...

Here are some links to the running coverage of the Microsoft-DOJ trial on the Web: New York Times [registration required] Washington Post Wired News In my opinion, the Wired News coverage has a certain anti-DOJ slant. Some I don’t follow personally: PC Week News.com CMP net

The Register takes a walk down memory lane, as it reminisces about Microsoft’s current and past pricing strategies. They also talk about one of the most interesting snippets of information to emerge from the antitrust trial so far; the fact that Microsoft bumped up the price of Windows 95 when the Windows 98 release was imminent, in order to prod OEMs into moving to Windows 98 as soon as possible. This smoking gun provides pretty solid evidence that Microsoft’s pricing stragegies are not dictated in any way whatsoever by competition, no matter what they say about Linux over the coming weeks. ...

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, the notorious former Special Master in the Microsoft antitrust case and general scholar on Internet issues, has filed suit on behalf of Eldritch Press, challenging the legislation enacted last year that tacked twenty years onto the length of copyrights. This bill extended copyrights from 75 years to 95 years, and was applied retroactively to all works that entered into the public domain over the past 20 years. This bill was enacted mainly on behalf of entertainment powerhouses like Disney, which risked losing its copyright protection for El Raton Mickey before twenty year stay of execution. ...

Every once in awhile, you read something that just tears you up inside. Flynt has spoken. According to a Reuters report, Bob Barr has been unmasked as an adulterer who refused to cop to his adultrous past when asked about it on the witness stand during his divorce trial. There’s also some stuff about him paying for and being party to his wife’s abortion, but upon close reading, it seems she had this abortion for health reasons. While that probably won’t help out his case among his more dogmatic right wing supporters, it makes it hard for me to fault the guy for that, even if it does seem to run counter to his 100% rating from the Christian Coalition in both 1996 and 1998. ...

Have you ever visited Go2Net? Their shares are up about 50 points today. IBM truly understands the importance of intellectual property. According to Wired News, they managed to receive 2,682 patents in 1998. I have a good friend who works for an IBM subsidiary, and most people would not believe the stuff they try to patent, some of it is just downright silly. The secret is that IBM employees get cash bonuses for applying for patents. ...

Who says newspapers aren’t funny? The Washington Post takes to the streets to raise funds for American patriot Linda Tripp. Why is it that more and more medical care decisions are being made by people who really don’t give a damn about our health? The New York Times reports on growing numbers of doctors who refuse to play the managed care game. [registration required]

The latest buzzword introduced in the vain search for profitability on the Web is “destination site,” at least according to this story from News.com. In the meantime, Internet stocks continue to spiral upward. Perhaps I’m too close to the Internet industry, but the valuations of companies like Yahoo, EBay, and Amazon.com are beyond my ken. The latest example of mass investor insanity: Broadcast.com’s sudden explosion in value. According to a “study” conducted by a consumer group, Microsoft has overcharged consumers by about 10 billion dollars over the past three years. (see story) I put these types of figures in the same category as the estimates of jobs and revenue lost to piracy released every year by software industry groups. The methodology used to come up with these numbers is always good for a laugh. ...

A short new entry in my author’s journal. Today I discuss consistency in exampes. There should be a new Outraged! this weekend. Declan McCullagh exposes Y2K wacko Gary North in a piece for Wired News today. It’s interesting to read that North has a long and distinguished history of Chicken Little behavior, and that indeed he relishes the thought of societal collapse so that a new dogmatic order can be imposed. Fortunately, the statute of limitations on Y2K lunacy will most likely run out in less than a year. ...