June '99

Kustodiev   Merchant's Wife

News.com gets the award as the slowest news site in the US. Bad job, folks.

Return back to the October embedded contest. Java got three points: Palm Pilot, Psion, Motorola's hand-held. Linux got two points: Intel's set-top boxes and Compaq's Factoid. Everybody else losers?

Was Stalin Zeus? In highly confidential documents revealed in court, partners of Sun-AOL-Netscape coalition referred to themselves by several nicknames. In one document Netscape is "Odyssey", AOL is "Apollo" and Sun is "Zeus". In another e-mail the Sun-AOL pact was compared to "the partnership between Stalin and Roosevelt against Hitler". Sure, they are not happy that pesky Microsoft sniffs the underwear in private pulp. At the same time Stalin receives the Zeus award.

Just one week after the last award for players in the October embedded contest, the battle rages on. BeOS gets the point after the rumor of talks between Microworkz.com and AOL. It may happens that AOL will distribute this device for free in exchange to online subscription fees. The small iToaster can take this new market by storm. What else to say... Do you know that BeOS is written on C++?

Joke of the month from Larry Ellison. Larry should hold the promise to do not introduce the network computer more often than three times per month. But hey, he can do it being the king of the hill ( Oracle got the last Samovar award in December and this month proved that honor worthwhile ). So Larry said: "Client-servers were a tremendous mistake. And we are sorry that we sold it to you". He was crying all the way to the bank?

Do you remember this boring new operating system installation procedure? I do, while I install over 20 new OS's every year. Now things are getting better while Caldera lets you play while computer works. Look at the screenshot here. Yes, that's the old good Tetris ( invented by Pajitnov ). So Caldera gets the award as the best sysadm entertainer. But there is another thing to say.. do you remember that real sysadm's hate graphic user interface?