Dahlia Lithwick sighting! She and Joel Stein (Time writer) are doing Slate’s Breakfast Table this week (meaning that we can look forward to postings throughout each day of the week) and even when she’s not writing about the Supreme Court, she is in her usual hilarious form.

An interesting concept: Personable, a Workspot-like service that gives you terminal server access to a Windows 2000 desktop. Unlike Workspot, though, it costs money, which will be its death knell; it will cost people less to just buy their own copies of Win2K.

I’m just sick to death of the whole Microsoft antitrust lawsuit. I abhor the notion that a judge can control whether or not Microsoft adds features to its operating systems; the addition of legit HTML widgets and controls to Windows has made my life easier, as both a programmer and an end-user.

One thing that really chaps my hide is Penfield Jackson’s finding that Internet Explorer is not now the “best of breed” web browser, “nor is it likely to be so at any time in the immediate future.” This is definitely untrue today, and probably was untrue when he and his minions engaged in discovery, and the notion that there’s some other magical browser out there that performs better or is more stable than IE is just plain ludicrous. (And if I have to restart my computer because of Netscape crashing one more friggin’ time, I’m going to start sending Penfield screen grabs of my GPF errors.)

This week, Netscape is going to announce the beta of Communicator 6, based on a Mozilla engine that Mozilla’s own developers don’t consider to be in beta yet. This means that there are some huge features that aren’t finished yet (CSS rendering being one of them), and what bothers me the most is that, with Communicator 6 in the public’s hands, I’m going to now have to start developing around its missing and broken features, code which will have to be ripped out once they get around to finishing everything.

Hee hee — Netscape “upgraded” their mail system, shutting out nearly half a million users. Apparently, they decided to send out the email about the upgrade the same day that they started the upgrade, which could very well be one of the most moronic systems administration moves I have ever heard of. (Wow — I didn’t intend for the first posts of the day to all be related to Netscape.)