jfruhlinger writes "News.com.com is reporting that AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app, will be available via IMAP starting Thursday. The story notes that this is part of a series of initiatives from AOL to move content beyond its walled garden and into standards-based formats such as HTML and IMAP that any Internet app can access. Supposedly a 'a dramatically different direction' for Netscape is in the works, too."

andyring writes "In the latest attempt by a big corporation with a failing business model to win by legislation and not in the marketplace, ClearChannel is whining to the FCC about XM Radio's recent foray into localized traffic and weather reports." Here I was thinking that satellite radio was a good thing for competition in radio.

fjordboy writes "John Battelle has posted a discussion and review of Amazon's new search engine: a9.com. From the article:"What makes this particularly noteworthy is that A9 is built quite literally on top of Google. In short, Amazon has taken the best of Google, and made it, to my mind, a lot better. Sound familiar? Yup, it's what Google did to Yahoo, Yahoo to Netscape...you get the picture." "

iswm writes "MozillaZine has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4. The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch as well as the trunk. Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird, a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to ensure that it is high quality."

Andrew writes "ARIA have released figures that show for 2003, album sales have reached an all time high. In fact, according to Peter Martin, who recently went on Australian radio, before file sharing and CD burning they were selling 10 million less. Total unit sales were also at an all time high at 65.6 million. CD single sales declined 1.9 million over the year, but as Peter said file downloading is doing a better job. Should help Kazaa's legal problems."

jsight writes with his review of Rob McGregor's Practical C++, published by QUE. He writes "Some books attempt to do one thing really well, and others attempt a little of everything. This book is clearly an example of the latter, in full force. Weighing in at a hefty 900 pages, you would expect this book to be crammed with chapters and details on every aspect of the STL and basic C++. In the following review, I am going to cover where it succeeds in doing this, and where it fails." (This book has been out for a few years; what books would make more sense today for a C++ learner's library?)

flyingember asks: "I code up PHP/CSS webpages and recently wondered about who to code for. We know that each browser supports CSS a little bit differently than the others, likening back to the Netscape/Internet Explorer HTML wars. Opera or Mozilla hacks are seen constantly across the net. Looking through two years worth of saved webalizer statistics, 95% of my visits came from IE and the rest from Mozilla, these are the teeming masses of the internet. Even the traffic to my site two years ago resulting from this article sent 50% IE users on Windows XP, and the total was 95% from IE. The numbers have only grown more IE 6-dominant since then. Given the overwhelming Internet Explorer user base, unless your webpage is specifically targeting The *nix or Mac crowd why code for anything except IE 6?" While each browser does support CSS, and even some HTML a bit differently, what functionality seem to be universal across all of the major modern players? Can you design a sharp looking website with such features, without resorting to browser-specific code? If so, how?

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that the first public beta of Nvu has been released. "What's that?", I hear you cry. Well, Nvu (pronounced 'N-View', short for 'New View') is a new open source WYSIWYG Web page creator/editor with FTP facilities that produces standards-compliant code. It is based on Mozilla Composer and is being developed by ex-Netscape employee Daniel Glazman's new company, Disruptive Innovations, under licence for Lindows.com. All the code for Nvu will be released back into the wild under the MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-licence. More information is available in the Nvu FAQ. Users of LindowsOS, other Linux distributions and Windows 98 and later can download Nvu 0.1 now." TheWanderingHermit writes points out that the feature list includes "(finally!) the ability to include and edit forms."

ph43thon writes "The New York Times business section has an article, The Coming Search Wars, about Google and Microsoft. It's fairly long and pretty interesting. Oddly, the writer or somebody out there, seems to think that Google v. Microsoft is analogous to Netscape v. Microsoft. I wasn't aware that you needed to download special software to run this Google search application. Somehow, I don't think Microsoft will find this fight to be as easy."

Slashback tonight brings you updates and corrections from recent and ongoing stories, including (this time around) non-silver silver paste, the return of the Orkut, Mike Rowe and his not-so-epic battle with Microsoft (one last time, I hope), the future of Zip for Microsoft Windows, and more. Read on below for the details.

scubacuda writes "News.com et al report that The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Wednesday found Playboy Enterprises can pursue charges that Excite and Netscape Communications violated its trademark by selling banner advertisements triggered by the terms 'playboy' and 'playmate.' The decision reverses a district court ruling that dismissed the suit without a trial in 2000. Playboy 'clearly holds the marks in question, and defendants used the marks in commerce without (its) permission,' a split three-judge panel wrote in its majority decision." This is a shame, because the first judge to look at this case seems to have pretty much gotten it right: "Although the trademark terms and the English language words are undisputedly identical, which, presumably, leads plaintiff to believe that the use of the English words is akin to use of the trademarks, the holder of a trademark may not remove a word from the English language merely by acquiring trademark rights in it."

ngunton writes "When is "good enough" enough? I wrote this article to take a philosophical look at the tendency for software developers to rewrite new versions of popular tools and standards from scratch rather than work on the existing codebase. This introduces new bugs and abandons all the small fixes and tweaks that made the original version work so well. It also often introduces incompatibilities that break a sometimes huge existing userbase. Examples include IPv4 vs IPv6, Apache, Perl, Embperl, Netscape/Mozilla, HTML and Windows. "

An anonymous reader writes "Like last year, MozillaZine has published a review of Mozilla's world in 2003. Obviously, the year was dominated by AOL's decision to murder Netscape (though various acts of 'brand necrophilia' will ensure that the Netscape name lives on in one form or another). This, combined with Mozilla Firebird's and Mozilla Thunderbird's steady progress towards replacing the Mozilla suite, made 2003 very much a transitional year for the open source project. Other memories to tell your grandchildren include mozilla.org's fifth birthday, the new roadmap, the Firebird name debate and a new chapter being added to The Book of Mozilla."

POds writes "Recently a Former Netscape Executive made a 2000 dollar donation to the Amizilla project, but for one reason or another, decided 2000 wasn't good enough and donated, yet another 2000 dollars. His only request is that he wants to see the amount get over $10,000 so is requesting others donate what they can. The Booty is now over $8400 and goes to the first developer(s) to port Mozilla to the Amiga platform."

Guppy06 writes "I'm too lazy to change my homepage in Netscape 7 to something else, and that's where I discovered an ad leading towards what appears to be a trial run of a new Netscape-branded ISP. While this isn't as momentous as, say, Netscape bundled with AOL would be, they seem to be aiming at Juno and NetZero with their price of $9.95/month ($1.00/month to participate in the trial run ending in February). This may just end up being a fizzle, or it could be part of a two-pronged attack on MSN by AOL."

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "Despite Microsoft's recent retirement of Windows 98, News.com reports that many users continue to cling to the company's older operating systems. The study cited in the article suggests that 80 percent of companies still have machines operating on Windows 95 or 98. While Windows 2000 was the most common OS in the study, just 6.6 percent of the desktop machines included in the survey were running Windows XP." The results aren't too surprising. I get a lot of user mail from Netscape 4 users, and it only makes sense that they're running it somewhere.

bmarklein writes "AOL has laid off 450 in California. The former Netscape campus is going from 675 employees to 300. The San Francisco office, which they obtained when they acquired Spinner (now Radio@AOL), and which housed Nullsoft after their acquisition by AOL, is being closed along with an office in San Diego. 100 employees have been offered jobs in Virginia or New York. No word on how this affects products like WinAmp. Justin, are you out there?"

kevcol writes "The SF Chronicle has an interview with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, talking about innovation after the dot-bomb crash, how AOL doesn't understand its own customers, his reaction to some comments by Larry Ellison, who believes that 'innovation primarily comes from big companies like Oracle', and Andreessen's post-Netscape experience as head of OpsWare (formerly LoudCloud)."

Alex Moskalyuk writes "There are dozens of titles on 'corporate excellence.' Management types like them. They teach the best practices from known companies and let you know how ABC Inc. or XYZ Corp. became such a glorious business as it is. In Search of Excellence (ISBN: 0446385077) is one of them, deserving the title of 'management bible' from its publishers. Apart from the minor detail that some of the data in the book was faked. At times like these, where do you turn for a good management advice?" Read on for Alex's review of an alternative text, Merrill R. Chapman's In Search of Stupidity.

prostoalex writes "In the high-tech industry few people achieve such glamour and general recognition as Larry Ellison, the chief executive officer of Oracle Corp. Ellison is known for provocative interviews, for being called the industry's 'other billionaire,' for being brutal to the competitors while staying within ethical limits, and for genuine opposition to a Redmond-based software company called Microsoft." Read on for the rest of Alex's review.