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Yes, Steve Jobs bought it from Lucasfilms in 1986. From here:

Lasseter had been working for Lucasfilm for three years when company owner George Lucas decided to divest the computer division and concentrate solely on filmmaking. It was then that Jobs stepped in and bought the division to form Pixar. For the US$10 million (£6.3 million) sale price, Jobs got a core group of about 45 talented Lucasfilm people, including Lasseter's cadre of animators and technical virtuosos, as well as the rights to some of the Lucas technology.

All Excel added was running with a native Windows UI.

On the contrary: Excel was the first spreadsheet program to take spreadsheets out of the financial planning domain and make them useful to everyone. People had been using spreadsheets for all kinds of other things before, but only Microsoft actually noticed this and gave people the tools for it (in Excel 5.0). Lotus, at the time, was working in the opposite direction with Improv, which was really good at financial planning but not so great at the rest. Joel Spolsky explains more here.

I wrote a blog post about this a while back: the basic spreadsheet model and its tools are incredibly useful for a whole bunch of different jobs, and Excel was the first software to really make use of this. The spreadsheet structure has become as fundamental and useful for data as the text file, the document object model or the relational database. The reasons for Excel's market dominance may have more to do with the marketing and positioning of MS Office in general, but both recognising the use of spreadsheets as a fundamental datatype and assisting it with easy tools is why it's revolutionary.

Microsoft has yet to release a browser that comes close to supporting standards

This is often shouted and an easy way to bash MS. It's also completely wrong.

Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time. IE3 was the first major browser (outside of W3C testbeds) with CSS support. IE4 brought CSS-P support, while NS4 introduced the totally non-standard LAYER tag, then made a bad stab at implementing CSS-P under sufferance. IE5/Mac was easily the most standards-compliant browser on the Mac for years. The Mozilla project had been going for a while when IE6 came out, and Mozilla might be considered the better browser of the two if you rate standards compliance several miles above stability and speed.

The reason IE6 is bashed so hard by designers these days is not that IE6 was a particularly bad release. It's that it's bad by today's standards, and nothing's been done to fix it. This is a different issue, and one that the IE7 team has been loudly busting a gut to address. (There is also the utterly shameful issue of IE6's many security problems, which is a different argument, but it's one of the main reasons I've been using Mozilla-based browsers since 1.0)

And if you're still not convinced of anything other than Firefox's total superiority over IE in all standards-related matters, how about we dig up an issue of HTML4 compliance which IE's had right for years, and Mozilla/Firefox never has.

Perhaps because it has nothing to do with the game?

On the subject of a movie of the game, Gabe Newell has nixed the idea for the forseeable future.

Is this the kind of image that is presented in the media in the rest of the world, or are they still running with the 'big brother is your friend' party line?"

...Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audiences, they're in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time - it's actually in a different business from all its competitors)...

Do they have Perl in yiddish? (It would just be so cool to program internet yiddish in yiddish)

Never underestimate the ability of this Wired writer Kahney to write any amount of portentuous material and tie it to an iPod:

"Why The Entire Population Of New York Cast Aside Their Old Religions And Now Worship A Giant Wicker iPod" by Leander Kahney

I particularly enjoyed it, and it made me wonder why I've always hated Excel. maybe it's time to forgive...

(I always used to like Pipdream on the Archimedes though. That was a combined spreadsheet and word processor).

Once I installed the latter and did some of the former, I've had almost no spam, vs several hundred over a couple of days. Now whether that is testimony to how well the tips work or that the spammers are going in short bursts then taking breaks is still unknown.

Jeremy Zawodny on this:

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Russell Beattie on this:
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Simon Willison on this:
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Michael Fagan on this:
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Scott Johnson on this:
A Possible Blog Comment Spam Solution