Posts

Chris Preimesberg has a report on an interview with Sun’s head software guy, Jon Schwartz. In it he describes plans to turn Java into money, basically with their Sun Enterprise System and Sun Desktop System programs that will offer comprehensive server and client packages to businesses at a subscription rate. I still don’t see this as exactly monetizing Java, but I guess it gets closer, and if Sun can sell bunches of seats of this, making a ton of money at it and pushing back against the ubiquity of Windows, I’m all for it. It has been much on my mind lately that while Java has been one of the great, unqualified successes of the computing industry, it has been a mixed bag for Sun itself. Java doesn’t run any better on Solaris than it does on Windows or Linux (indeed, evidence seems to indicate that Solaris is a lesser platform for Java than some others), so Java isn’t a great sales tool for Sun servers. And Sun seems like the only company other than Microsoft that isn’t making money off of Java-based software. There’s an entire Java software industry that supports BEA, Oracle, IBM, Borland, and plenty of other companies, and Sun isn’t at that party. It’s really amazing when you think about it. ...

Tim Bray proposes a solution for spam. It’s another rehash of the idea of charging a nominal fee to send an email, and would work if we could get everyone to adopt it rapidly, since it would be opt-in. In another item about Foo Camp, he describes a talk that Tim O’Reilly gave on computer book sales: Tim O'Reilly and one of his henchman gave a wonderful session which was just a brain-dump on technical book sales over the last year, broken down by publisher, by category (e.g. "Open Source," "Operating Systems," "Microsoft Technology," "XML"). I think one hour of this kind of intense numerical data is worth approximately six months of listening to prognosticators and analysts. I’m not going to try to summarize this universe of information, a couple of things are worth noting: First, Perl used to be a $6M business for them, it's down around $2M. The Parroteers need to buckle down and create some more book fodder, methinks. I’d love to have been there for that. ...

The Google Tag Library looks interesting.

Now that the spammers have done all they can do to ruin email, they’re working on killing weblogs.

Looks like the Washington Post reports today that my explanation of the motive for leaking Valerie Plame’s identity was correct. Plenty of other unearthed details are revealed as well.

This is downright embarrassing.

Fred Kaplan noticed that the $87 billion appropriations bill for Iraq and Afghanistan includes a few billion dollars of walking around money for Donald Rumsfeld.

I really, really hate Outlook. There may be hope, though, Eric Sink says that Outlook 2003 isn’t so bad. The ability to handle plain text email well would be a nice improvement.

Brad DeLong has posted a response to Arnold Kling’s open letter to Paul Krugman that I linked to a couple of days ago. (The comments for that post are pretty interesting as well.)

Harvard professor Howell Jackson had an op-ed in the New York Times today explaining what the federal government’s balance sheet would look like if it were held to the same accounting standards as public corporations. There are probably some good reasons why the government doesn’t do its accounting that way, but it’s still a scary editorial.