the Forty-Second Parallel

Happy new year ... woo hoo.

Joel Spolsky: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that's the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.

NYTimes: In fact, at least a third of all spam circulating on the Internet is now sent from or relayed by personal home computers that have been taken over, said Jesse Dougherty, director of development at Sophos, an antivirus and antispam company.

Which effectively means that stopping spam at the server level will be near impossible. Hooray for bayesian filters ...

december already? sheesh ...