Simson Garfinkel’s rant against Java looks like it was written about three years ago. Everybody knows that Java is slow and that “write once, run anywhere” is largely a myth. He also spends a lot of time on Java applets , which are rarely discussed these days. I’ve got a little message from the present for Simson – all the Java action these days is on the server. He briefly mentions servlets (referring to them as “applets inside Web servers”), but hardly gives them the attention they merit, being that Web applications written in Java are at the epicenter of the Java world these days. I’m not enough of a computer scientist to make a reasonable comparison of Java to anything other than Perl, but it seems to me that many, many companies are successfully building applications in Java these days, hateful though it may be.
The latest entries in the ongoing series of articles about BSD at O’ReillyNet cover the FreeBSD ports system. The ports system works really, really well. It’s much better than anything I’ve seen for Linux and there’s not anything like it at all for Windows or the Mac OS. I sort of wonder if what Eazel plans on making is a graphical, souped up version of the BSD ports system for Linux.
A CPRM FAQ from The Register.
As the Clinton administration winds down, both the President and the media are spending a lot of time talking about what was accomplished over the last 8 years. Dean Baker is a bit incredulous about some of the claims being made about the United States’ economic achievements over that time.
Am I only the person who thinks that Judge Jackson should keep his mouth shut? I don’t think he’s doing a service to the bench by giving quotes about Microsoft and its executives.
The inability of companies worth billions of dollars to come up with decent sounding names for themselves is the source of endless amusement for me. Accenture? Give me a break. (Over at the Accenture site, they have an [ePresskit](http://www.accenture.com/xd/xd.asp?it=enWeb&xd=newsroom ewepresskitindex.xml) for the name change. I just linked to that because I think that the word “epresskit” is very funny, especially if you make the ‘p’ lower case.)