In 1995, Microsoft came back to Netscape with another proposal: dividing the market. If Netscape would stop developing its browser for Windows, then Microsoft would leave the Mac and Unix markets entirely to Netscape.

Netscape declined, of course, and so in 1996 came the first release of Internet Explorer for Mac and the announcement of Internet Explorer for Unix.

It seems crazy today to think that Microsoft would have been interested in something so blatantly antitrust as dividing the market, but that's the kind of company they were back then.

For all of you who are pointing out, with some rightness, that Netscape Communicator 4 had quality issues - let me remind you of something.

This was the time period when Microsoft had decided to, as a Microsoft executive stated during the antitrust trial, "cut off [Netscape's] air supply". For each product Netscape was trying to make money on - web servers, proxy servers, ecommerce solutions - Microsoft was giving away a workalike product for free, funded with the earnings from Microsoft Windows.

And, at the same time, Microsoft was forcing its OEM partners to keep Netscape Communicator off the computers they sold. Any company that refused would no longer get volume licensing discounts on Windows, which would then price their computers out of the market.

So Netscape was starved for cash at the same time as it had to put in a lot of effort to keep up with the extremely-well-funded Internet Explorer. There was no way that Netscape could have survived, much less competed, against this.

There's a graphic novel titled "Tron: Betrayal" that helps bridge the gap between the two films. I read it before I saw Tron Legacy; I think it helped me enjoy the movie a lot more.

The graphic novel goes into more depth about Flynn being split between his responsibilities in the real world and in the computer world, his creation of Clu to help him achieve a perfect society in the computer world, and Clu's frustration at Flynn's increasing absence. Eventually Clu decides to take a more active role in realizing the perfection he believes Flynn wants. This makes him more of a sympathetic villain; instead of just being a generic "bad guy", he is genuinely trying to do what he sees as right and he resents Flynn for having a problem with it.

The graphic novel also goes into more of an explanation of the "Isos". In the novel they're interesting; I felt disappointed that the movie does away with them quickly and plays the whole "last of your kind" card.

Ten bucks from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tron-Betrayal-Jai-Nitz/dp/142313463X

Meanwhile, among the Top Free Apps in the iTunes App Store right now are "Sex Positions Game - 18+ Free" (#5), "69 Positions Lite - Sex Positions" (#8), and "Adult Sex Trick" (#25). What was this about Apple removing all sexual content from the App Store?

Another account of the story is at RationalWiki: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Lenski_affair

RationalWiki is a site that exists to poke fun at Conservapedia and the anti-science movement. (I particularly like its WIGO page, "What Is Going On At CP?".) Conservapedia forbids any mention of RationalWiki, going so far as to ban members who make oblique references to it. In fact, the part of Lenski's letter that was censored on Conservapedia as "Ed.: citation omitted due to spam filter" was, originally, a reference to RationalWiki; this is explained at "Censoring of Lensku's RW ref".

When I'm doing web development (HTML, JavaScript, XSLT), I use the free version of Aptana Studio Professional, which essentially is a bundle of the Eclipse editor plus the Aptana plugins. I add the free AnyEdit Tools plugin so that it tabifies and deletes trailing spaces for me.

Of course Microsoft charges for IE. This cost is hidden by being part of the cost of Windows.

Correct - they note that their statistics are likely to be skewed because most of their visitors are interested in using alternative browsers. This is probably why they show a 44% share for Firefox. However, it's still telling that 20% of their visitors are using IE6.

Right now, according to MarketShare, IE6 and Firefox 2/3 are roughly tied for market share (about 20% to each). TheCounter says that IE6 has 34% of the market while Firefox has 17%, and even W3Schools says that IE6 still has about 20% of users.

The moral of this story is: lots of people don't upgrade. They don't even run Windows Update. They use the browser they got when they installed XP, and they probably don't even know anything else is out there.

This is why, whenever Microsoft ties an application to the operating system, the market suffers. It becomes really hard to compete in that space. Right now, nobody's making money selling a web browser that competes with the one that comes with Windows. This is the way it's been for more than a decade now. The antitrust action against Microsoft was nothing more than a slap on the wrist; it did nothing to restore competition.

If Microsoft is so interested in bundling high-quality apps with the operating system for the good of its users, then why haven't they bundled Microsoft Word?

It's from a Douglas Adams speech in 1998, which was quoted by Richard Dawkins in his 2001 eulogy at Adams's funeral. The original speech is here:

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."