Quotes in 1998

Thursday, December 31, 1998

Java was really finished before it came out. That is, when it came out, it was, what, 7 years old, had had 2 or 3 different names, and was basically polished. What's more, the language isn't really groundbreaking; it's a very smooth act of engineering, taking the very best of the Algol family and integrating into that an elegant and predictable OO element. If the trail from Algol/Fortran to Java is viewed as a single design effort, it's the Right Way (tm): cyclic, and ending up by throwing away junk and keeping stuff that worked out. Stylistically, they just had to make it look like C++ so that people would actually use it.

--The Mitochondrion on the java-gods mailing list

Wednesday, December 30, 1998

JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness.

--Anonymous at NASA
Read the rest in J-Track Version Information

Sunday, December 27, 1998

When I saw the prospect of living the way the rest of the world was living. I decided no way, that's disgusting, I'd be ashamed of myself. If I contributed to the upkeep of that other proprietary software way of life, I'd feel I was making the world ugly for pay.

--Richard Stallman
Read the rest in The saint of free software

Tuesday, December 22, 1998

No one at this time fully realizes this, but with the introduction of Java, it is now possible for two or three people or so - you, and two other Middlesex University students - to write a system in Java that can be marketed, distributed, bought and used (or more profitably, re-used) over the World Wide Web. Already in that world, existing software houses realize this. And it worries the heads of those companies, but privately. Up until now, a typical software house needed to employ ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred people. Java is a shock.

--Sandy Anderson
Read the rest in Java at Middlesex: The Component Industry

Monday, December 21, 1998

Many politicians and journalists have feared, even loathed, the Internet, since its inception. Increasingly, it becomes clear why. It really does threaten them. It really does provide the means to take power away from them - and their co-produced spectacles like impeachment proceedings and presidential nominating processes - and distribute it more broadly. This week marks the perfect time to begin consider the possibilities of Digital Democracy. To broaden the notion of empowering individuals begin by the designers of the Internet, advanced by hackers, geeks, nerds, developers and designers and being played out on sites like this one today. From the moment the Internet began to grow, power and information began to leach away from entrenched institutions like government, the press and academe and towards hundreds of thousands, then millions of individual citizens. The impeachment proceedings are a powerful argument for the idea that it's time to take that idea farther.

--Jon Katz
Read the rest in Digital Democracy: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Sunday, December 20, 1998

In general, it would be nice if there was a Java release without _any_ gui (AWT, JFC, Java2D, Java3D, JavaSound, JMF, applet, etc) support. Considering that a good chunk of the serious Java development going on right now is server-side Java (servlets and EJBs in particular) and networking code, Sun should consider this option. At the very least, it would be easier to port from one OS to another.

--Jonathan Bodner on the mrj-dev mailing list

Saturday, December 19, 1998

How Microsoft influences standards clearly has changed. A few years ago, pre-Internet, Windows was the center of the universe. Microsoft said, "This is a standard," and it was so. It's not like that anymore in many areas.

--Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Giga Information Group
Read the rest in Platform ploys in the public eye

Friday, December 18, 1998

Q: How can you tell that a Haiku was written by a Microsoft Engineer?

A: After licencing the primitive Haiku technology from the Japanese, Microsoft has determined that its users want additional flexibility not present in the restrictive Haiku standard. In the innovative Microsoft Haiku (tm), each of the 4 lines has up to 20 syllables and follows a simple rhyming scheme to ease translation into 10 second pop songs.

In a related announcement, Microsoft has released a new poetry development tool, Microsoft H++, as part of its Visual Language Studio development suite. Microsoft H++ ships with several helpful Microsoft Haiku (tm) wizards which can automate the process for building Microsoft Haiku (tm), setting them to music, and releasing the sound files in NetShow format. Microsoft H++ can be used to generate a traditional, but less innovative, Haiku by editing several Registry flags and waving a chicken over your head in a graveyard at midnight.

--Jonathan Bodner on the mrj-dev mailing list

Thursday, December 17, 1998

A big selling point of Java is that you are (supposed to be) able to create apps, etc. that run on all platforms but were developed on only one platform; I should not have to learn UNIX, or buy a Windows machine just to get a product out (obviously this isn't the case, but it is the _idea_). I should be able to develop on one platform, and be relatively certain that it would work on all platforms. I do know how to run UNIX/Linux and Windows, but I don't think not having these skills would exclude me from the Professional Java Developers club if I only developed Java on the Macintosh.

--Jason Giles on the mrj-dev mailing list

Wednesday, December 16, 1998

This is clearly not a true open source license. One important feature of the open source definition is that users of open source software are free to change it in any way deemed necessary. Sun's license is directed at maintaining control of the Java technology standard, however, and so the compels licensees to keep in step with Sun's standard, both now and in the future.

--Stig Hackvan
Read the rest in Technology News from Wired News

Tuesday, December 15, 1998

We feel cryptography is one of the key elements required to protect human rights, specifically the 12th article of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights that states that privacy is a basic human right

--Austin Hill, president of Zero Knowledge Systems
Read the rest in Political News from Wired News

Monday, December 14, 1998

No agreement with Netscape is worth the ink it's written with. Go sign a deal with Saddam Hussein. It has a better chance of being honored.

--Jon Kannegaard, Sun Microsystems
Read the rest in Sun rebuffed Microsoft's Java offers

Sunday, December 13, 1998

It's sort of a funny thing where from the operating system's point of view, the Java Virtual Machine looks like an application, but from the application's point of view it looks like an operating system.

--James Gosling
Read the rest in U.S. vs. Microsoft : Day 27

Saturday, December 12, 1998

Java Business Expo attendees rattled around inside the Javits Center here this week like beans in an almost empty can of coffee.

--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Read the rest in Solutions scarce at Java Business Expo

Friday, December 11, 1998

Our view is that when Microsoft was holding out their hand, there was a knife in their hand and they were expecting us to grab the blade

--James Gosling
Read the rest in U.S. vs. Microsoft : Day 27

Thursday, December 10, 1998

The core of this trial is consumer choice and the premise is that consumers ought to make that decision, not Microsoft. Microsoft's argument that says Java would have died anyway is a little bit like saying if somebody shoots you they can defend by saying you have cancer.

--David Boies, lead prosecutor for the Justice Department
Read the rest in Microsoft jabs Sun on Java, browsers

Wednesday, December 9, 1998

People often say Microsoft wants to kill off Java. That's because Microsoft supposedly seeks to neuter the ability to run Java on any operating system other than Windows. Based on conversations I've had with Microsoft employees, it's more like they don't give a damn about Java for other operating systems, and if limiting its interoperability weakens Java, so be it.

--Nelson King
Read the rest in Of Two Minds About Java

Tuesday, December 8, 1998

I don't know if he's referring to pissing on JDK or JFC, nor do I specifically know what he means by pissing on

--Bill Gates
Read the rest in Government plays Gates video on Java

Monday, December 7, 1998

You may not publish or provide the results of any benchmark or comparison tests run on Software to any third party without the prior written consent of Sun.

--JDK 1.2 License agreement.

Sunday, December 6, 1998

The United States has been trying to maintain restrictive cryptography policies at home. Their own industry has been lobbying and fighting to remove these restrictions. The US government's answer to this is to "level the playing field" by imposing the same ridiculous controls on other countries through foreign trade agreements.

--Austin Hill, president of Zero Knowledge Systems
Read the rest in Technology News from Wired News

Saturday, December 5, 1998

the US government is leading the charge internationally to restrict personal privacy and individual liberty around the world

--Alan Davidson, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology
Read the rest in Political News from Wired News

Friday, December 4, 1998

Java and Perl are both well on their way to doing Unicode for real. I think it's mostly the C programmers that are being left behind.

--Nelson Minar on the Unicode mailing list

Thursday, December 3, 1998

To hear Bill Gates tell it, the powerful Microsoft chairman knows almost nothing about Sun Microsystems' lawsuit against his company, wasn't involved in -- or even aware of -- the development of Microsoft's version of the Java programming language and can't remember receiving nearly any e-mail sent to him when shown them a year later.

--Elliot Zaret
Read the rest in U.S. vs. Microsoft -- Day 23

Wednesday, December 2, 1998

That failed Netscape deal and others like it illustrate where Microsoft's real power comes from: it's the closely guarded and controlled Windows API, not Windows itself, that is the jewel in its crown.

--Mike Ricciuti
Read the rest in Platform ploys in the public eye

Tuesday, December 1, 1998

One could argue that the data model is the Platonic ideal and the serialization is the real world realization of that ideal. I guess it depends on what school of Greek philosophy one favours:-)

--Sean Mc Grath on the xml-dev mailing list

Sunday, November 29, 1998

There is this myth that J++ is somehow a great platform for writing Windows applications. Sorry, I don't buy it. If you want something that is slower than C++ and more cumbersome than Visual Basic, then J++ is for you.

--Cay Horstmann on the java-gods mailing list

Monday, November 23, 1998

Swing native look'n'feels are kind of like pod people UIs. The look like the real thing, they act like the real thing, but somehow they just aren't quite _right_. Dogs bark at them, and children aren't fooled at all.

--John Brewer, AutoDesk, on the mrj-dev mailing list

Saturday, November 21, 1998

We think there are some interesting advantages to the open source model

--Alan Baratz, president of JavaSoft
Read the rest in Sun plans Java licensing revisions following win over Microsoft

Friday, November 20, 1998

Sun's open process is broken. It's broken because only licensees can participate. It's broken because Sun's control is too arbitrary. There is too much not-invented-here syndrome at Sun

--Rick Ross, JavaLobby
Read the rest in Java Lobby president calls for reform

Thursday, November 19, 1998

You people are this town [Las Vegas]'s worst nightmare: People who don't like girls and are good at math.

--Bill Maher
Read the rest in At Comdex, Gates is the man

Wednesday, November 18, 1998

Since the court finds that Sun is likely to prevail on the merits and that it may suffer irreparable harm if Microsoft is not enjoined, a preliminary injunction is hereby issued against Microsoft, and its officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and those in active concert or participation with them who receive actual notice of this order by personal service or otherwise, pending trial, from:

(A) Selling or distributing, directly or indirectly, any operating system or browser product containing or implementing computer program code copied or derived from any Sun copyrighted program code for the Java Technology as that term is defined in the TLDA (i.e., the Java Runtime Interpreter, Java Classes, Supplemental Java Classes, Java Compiler, and all Upgrades), including Windows98 and IE 4.0, ninety (90) days after the date of this order unless such product includes a Java runtime implementation which supports Sun's JNI in a manner which passes the compatibility test suite accompanying the latest version of the Java Technology contained in, implemented by, or emulated by such product;

(B) Selling or distributing, directly or indirectly, any software development tool or product containing or implementing computer program code copied or derived from any Sun copyrighted program code for the Java Technology; as that term is defined in the TLDA, including SDKJ 2.0, SDKJ 3.0 and VJ 6.0, ninety (90) days after the date of this order unless such product:

(1) includes a Java runtime implementation which supports Sun's JNI (including help files, header files, etc.) in a manner which passes the compatibility test suite accompanying the latest version of the Java Technology contained in, implemented by, or emulated by such product,

(2) has the default mode in the compiler configured such that (a) Microsoft's keyword extensions and compiler directives are disabled and (b) has the compiler mode switch such that it enables, rather than disables, such keyword extensions and compiler directives, and

(3) includes a warning which appears when a user elects to use the extended mode of the compiler (either when the user accesses the compiler from a DOS command line or when the user checks a box provided during execution of the compiler software) and which warns the user (a) that use of Microsoft's language extensions will result in compiled code which may not run on all compatible virtual machines, and (b) that future versions of Microsoft's development tools may be prohibited by court order from incorporating keyword extensions and compiler directives not contained in Sun's Java Language Specification; however, nothing in this order prevents Microsoft from removing the mode switch, keyword extensions and compiler directives from its Java software development tools and distributing or selling such resulting implementations.

(C) Selling or distributing SDKJ 2.02 unless such product passes Test 601 and Test 2003;

(D) Conditioning the right to use the "Designed for Windows95(98)/NT" logo on the exclusive distribution of Microsoft's Java virtual machine;

(E) Conditioning any license to any Microsoft product on exclusive use or distribution of Microsoft's Java virtual machine;

(F) Entering into any agreement, condition or arrangement with any third party that requires such third party to exclusively use Microsoft's interfaces to its runtime interpreter when invoking native code;

(G) Advertising any product that contains, implements or emulates the Java Technology as the "official" Java reference implementation; however, nothing in this order prevents Microsoft from making advertising claims with respect to the performance of its reference implementation; and

(H) Incorporating any additional Microsoft keyword extensions or compiler directives into its Java software development tools.

Microsoft may seek a reasonable extension of the ninety-day period provided in sections IV(A) and (B) of this order upon a showing of good cause.

Nothing in this order requires Microsoft to recall any product or from upgrading its products so long as they do not include additional Microsoft keyword extensions or compiler directives. This order does not prevent any purchaser of Microsoft's products from continuing to use them. However, Microsoft shall provide upgrades that meet the requirements of IV(A) and (B) above (for example, by way of service packs on its Website).

Microsoft shall, within fifteen (15) days of this order, notify its customers of this order and the corrective steps to be taken. Such notice shall expressly indicate that the court has preliminarily found that Microsoft has violated its licensing agreement to Sun's Java Technology and that if a final judgment is entered consistent with the court's preliminary findings, Microsoft's keywords and compiler directives not contained in Sun's Java Language Specification (i.e. "multicast," "delegate," "@dll," "@corn," and "security") may be prohibited from being included in any future Microsoft software development tool for Java. Such notice shall be prominently posted on Microsoft's website and included in the next quarterly-release of the Microsoft- Developer Network.

As a condition of this preliminary injunction, Sun shall give security within ten (10) days of this order in the amount of $15,000,000 for the payment of such costs and damages as may be suffered by Microsoft if it is found to have been wrongfully enjoined.

--Ronald M. Whyte, United States District Judge
Read the rest in Order Re: Sun's Motions for Preliminary Injunction Against Microsoft

Saturday, November 14, 1998

...one could easily be tempted to conclude that even though there >>is<< a temptation (to wimps!) to take the mouse's share of a really large number of covered desktops and just give Microsoft the lion's share of your hard work (a mouse can certainly get fat -- for a mouse -- on the crumbs from the PC desktop table) a software developer would have to be brain dead stupid to develop any really GREAT idea for a Microsoft platform. Really smart computer scientists and software developers, the ones who like to work for themselves instead of being a vassal in a feudal corporate structure, the ones who have the Really Great Ideas, will Not Develop for Microsoft's OS or Windows Environment. Period. I think that we've been seeing this trend develop for several years now and that it is a major thing that has fueled the development of linux and freebsd.

This is what I REALLY think will cause Microsoft to change or die. Because right now, developing software for Microsoft is like brushing the teeth of a Great White Shark with a piece of raw steak.

--Robert G. Brown
Read the rest in Linux Today: Can Microsoft raise lawsuits against Linux projects?

Friday, November 13, 1998

Sun was way too scared of Microsoft, and as a result they created a contract that didn't help them. Java is in the die-back stage--it's going into niche markets. The Unix marketing people were too concentrated away from the desktop, and when they gave away the desktop, everything else followed."

-- Linus Torvalds
Read the rest in Oracle to Sun: Make Java open source

Thursday, November 12, 1998

Sun should still decide what goes into Sun-blessed Java, but if they open the process, all those freeware versions of Java would have a lot less momentum

-- Kevin Walsh, vice president of Oracle's Intel Technologies Division
Read the rest in Oracle to Sun: Make Java open source

Tuesday, November 10, 1998

We believe Netscape's Keyword System is the first step toward the elimination of domain names and the 'Fortune 500 Colonization of the Internet' where free speech and expression will be things of the past

--Dan Parisi, whitehouse.com
Read the rest in Adult Site May Sue Netscape

Monday, November 9, 1998 8:57:42 AM

We need more HOWTOs in this world, fewer specs, more working code, more things to be compatible with.

--Dave Winer on the xml-dev mailing list

Saturday, November 7, 1998

"Write Once Run Anywhere" is a charmingly naive religious belief, not any kind of law. It works to some degree, but if you really start pushing it you definitely find areas where you have to do things differently on different platforms, just because they _are_ different platforms, with different features and different user interfaces, and users expect things to work differently. The Java libraries can only hide that from you to a certain degree.

--Jens Alfke on the MRJ-Dev mailing list

Friday, November 6, 1998 9:33:01 AM

By now you have to figure out that Microsoft takes any competitive threat very, very seriously. In an industry where only the paranoid survive, we certainly are paranoid.

--Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's Java marketing chief
Read the rest in E-mails show animosity over Java

Thursday, November 5, 1998

history has proven over and over again that once a company has a lock on a market, product quality and innovation decline -- and prices rise

--Robert Denny
Read the rest in Chicago Tribune Silicon Prairie

Tuesday, November 3, 1998

DOM Level 1 is an ugly mess, and the only justification for it is to keep Netscape and Microsoft from implementing even uglier incompatible DOMs.

--John Cowan on the XML Dev mailing list

Monday, November 2, 1998 8:20:36 AM

You don't get a sense that there's a lot of testing going on out there, but once you realize that the company's major goal is to get you to buy its products again and again, then the fact that they're being shipped with bugs almost makes sense.

-- James Love, director of the Consumer Project for Technology
Read the rest in Digital Commerce: Year 2000 Bug Is Just Part of the Problem

Saturday, October 31, 1998

Sun's agenda is to sell Sun-manufactured iron of all shapes and sizes. Their software efforts are directed towards that goal. If they can convince other players in the industry to help them for a while, so much the better. Sun's history has many similar initiatives: NFS, SPARC, picoJava, etc. The common feature is that each, in its time, was heralded as a bold new direction for the entire industry, open to other implementations (though always with Sun's as The Reference Implementation, however buggy), and destined to change the face of the planet. You can judge for yourself the accuracy of these pronouncements

--Greg Guerin on the MRJ-dev mailing list

Friday, October 30, 1998

A recent survey says that 40 percent to 50 percent of the Fortune 500 are, in fact, using Java today, and this number will grow to 80 percent by the year 2001. Given the complexity of building a whole new software environment, three years is really a very short time. We think it's ahead of its schedule.

--John McFarlane
Read the rest in McFarlane on Sun, Solaris and the Java Industry

Thursday, October 29, 1998

...developing on the Mac opens your mind. If you develop on Windows, you may never test beyond that platform. When we develop on the Mac, we realize the relatively small market share that the Mac has, and that we can't afford to neglect Windows (or Solaris, etc), so we come up with a product that runs well on both Mac and Windows, instead of just Windows.

--Jim Cushing MRJ Dev mailing list

Wednesday, October 28, 1998

Microsoft is a very male, very nerdy company led by a very male, very nerdy leader, Bill Gates. The company will do whatever it takes to win in any business situation, primarily because Bill spends nearly every waking moment thinking in terms of winning or losing. And Bill HATES to lose.

--Rober X. Cringely
Read the rest in I, Cringely: The Pulpit

Tuesday, October 27, 1998

There isn't anything democratic about how legislation is passed. Forget about anything you learned in school.

--Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Congress, (D-CA)
Read the rest in Pelosi defends 'wiretap' vote

Monday, October 26, 1998

Welcome to the wonderful world of Java. We support both platforms: ours and Windoze.

Sun doesn't get the Mac. The less an environment resembles Unix, the less they get it (read through java.io.File sometime to remind yourself of this).

--Chris Adamson on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

Thursday, October 15, 1998

Nobody assumes EJB 1.0 is a high-production, high-volume platform. There are some holes in it, but it's not far off from being an enterprise-capable platform.

--John Capobianco, senior vice president of marketing at Bluestone Software
Read the rest in Sun To Fix Flaws In JavaBeans

Wednesday, October 14, 1998

Developers working on applications for deployment enterprise-wide in a corporate environment are more likely to be working with Java and to be aware of and proficient in Java-related technologies

--Janel Garvin, director of research, Evans Marketing Services
Read the rest in Not all developers created equal, survey says (InfoWorld)

Tuesday, October 13, 1998

Having a free operating system is the first step, but ultimately all software should be free, because users should always have freedom. A non-free program means there's an owner taking away your freedom.

--Richard Stallman
Read the rest in Linux's Brave GNU World

Monday, October 12, 1998

Microsoft has inflicted so much pain that people's views of government have been forced to change. People feel there is some role for government.

--Mike Orsak, Worldview Technology Partners
Read the rest in Microsoft antitrust case splits valley

Thursday, October 8, 1998

I can't find one example of self-regulation anywhere in the world that works for the benefit of the consumer. Self-regulation is a confidence trick, a sleight of hand.... If an organization's prime directive is the exploitation of personal data, self-regulation is a contradiction in terms.

--Simon Davies, Privacy International
Read the rest in Political News from Wired News

Wednesday, October 7, 1998

Overall, the market for Java chips seems to have cooled almost as rapidly as it heated up. Like its software alter-ego, Java chips have garnered a lot of attention but little in the way of actual usage.

--Jim Turley, senior analyst at Microprocessor Report
Read the rest in Sun scrapping Java chip plans, analyst says

Tuesday, October 6, 1998

I can work around bugs. I can't work around slow. We need some serious optimization here.

--Jon Pugh on the mrj-dev mailing list

Monday, October 5, 1998

Corporations are notoriously untrustworthy; the people we are dealing with may have integrity, but they could be overruled from above, or even replaced at any time with different people. When making a deal with a corporation, always get a binding commitment in writing.

-- Richard M. Stallman
Read the rest in RMS on UDI and the FSF

Thursday, October 1, 1998

Soon Linux will be bigger than all Unix combined. The stage is set for broader-based use.

--Marc Andreesen, Netscape
Read the rest in Netscape leans on Linux

Wednesday, September 30, 1998

If anyone had a strong argument for Java as a strategic platform, IBM has coopted the ownership of this product. Sun does not need Java because they are a single-platform company. IBM needs Java...Of the two companies, they are the ones more likely to make Java successful

--Rob Enderle, Giga Information Group
Read the rest in More Java components from IBM

Friday, September 25, 1998

If you can look at planets around other stars and actually see them, you can analyze the glow coming from them. And by observing certain things in that atmosphere, you would indeed know if life was developed there.

-- Nick Woolf, Steward Observatory
Read the rest in Technology News from Wired News

Thursday, September 24, 1998

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5

Wednesday, September 23, 1998

Java has met the expectations of rational human beings, of which there are few. Java as a language is not rich in user interface. It’s not a great pixel manipulator.

--Ezra Gottheil, former director of Internet Business Strategies Service for The Hurwitz Group
Read the rest in Chicago Tribune Silicon Prairie

Tuesday, September 22, 1998

CaffeineMark scores are going to vary no matter what, because the benchmark code isn't sensible enough to either GC or sync the Toolkit between tests; so the GC pauses and toolkit flushes can happen at random points during the tests, perturbing the scores. Die, CaffeineMark, die.

--Jens Alfke on the mrj-dev mailing list

Monday, September 21, 1998

Java will never kill C/C++, because that language fills a niche as well. If you need performance, if you need to optimize to a specific platform, then you go with C/C++. Java, by design, will never be low-level enough to get all of the available performance from a system.

--Christopher J Heino on the advanced-java mailing list

Saturday, September 19, 1998

We think the world needs a company that's not doing an Intel and Microsoft computer. There are better answers than just Wintel at every step along the way. I suppose there's a time and a place for a Wintel machine-we're trying to figure out where and when. We will do NT when Microsoft does Solaris, and we will do Intel when Intel does SPARC-maybe.

--Scott McNealy
Read the rest in Sun's McNealy: 'Cut over' from Windows to Java is under way

Friday, September 18, 1998

LAST spring, when Netscape Communications Corp. posted online the "source code" instructions for its World Wide Web browser, the company gave a tremendous boost to one of the technology industry's most fascinating movements: "open-source" software. By making the programming instructions freely available, while still retaining legal rights to the brand, the company was hoping that programmers worldwide would contribute their ideas and bug fixes to the upcoming version of Netscape Communicator.

Maybe it's time for Sun Microsystems Inc. to do the same with Java.

--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in Sun could learn a lesson on Java from Netscape

Thursday, September 17, 1998

 American businesses say they can police themselves. This is an obvious lie, given the rampant abuse of data that we hear about all the time. In a society designed for easy credit, where personal information is grease in the gears of commerce, protecting people from unauthorized use of their identities -- and the havoc identity thieves cause -- will take second place to the needs of business until the abuses become epidemic.

The most offensive part of the opt-out process -- of the entire personal-data industry -- remains its fundamental assumptions: Your personal information is not yours. Your life is a commodity like any other, to be bought and sold and traded. This may be the American way, but one of these days Americans will understand what a sleazy bill of goods they've been sold.

-- Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in Don't force me to opt out; allow me to opt in

Wednesday, September 16, 1998

Java's primary roots are out of the C++ world. From that standpoint, Java is a big step up. It's a cleaner, object-oriented language. And the benefits of a Virtual Machine on every platform are obvious.

But I came to Java from a different world of programming, the Smalltalk world. For people who program in Smalltalk, Java is a 30-year step back. Smalltalk is what made object-oriented programming real. It had a mature class library and culture from the day it was released, whereas the C++ world just kind of happened. Its class library still isn’t stable. The result for me is that Java is an absolute requirement in today’s software world, but sometimes it hurts me to use it.

--Steven T. Abell, formerly Java Technology evangelist at Netscape
Read the rest in Chicago Tribune Silicon Prairie

Tuesday, September 15, 1998

The same Republicans who want to censor the internet pushed to put up what is likely to be one of the biggest pieces of smut regarding an elected official we are likely to see.

--Rob Gruber on the WWWAC mailing list

Monday, September 14, 1998

We cannot get too radical about portability, to the extreme of wanting standard deployment/configuration mechanisms for different OSes; this is never going to work. For one thing, in the Win32 platform the only respectable place to store application cfg is the Registry and no Unix environment hack will make me happy on NT. All we need is core libraries to access stuff implemented in many ways (so a PureJava installer could be written, for example). What about the CORBA philosophy -- standard _interfaces_ are good, standard _implementations_ aren't.

--Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein on the advanced java mailing list

Sunday, September 13, 1998

Each passing day increases the chances the U.S. will fall behind. There are such a large number of encryption products available in the world today that it's virtually impossible to keep encryption out of the hands of terrorists and narcotics traffickers and organized crime.

--Jeffrey H. Smith, counsel for Americans for Computer Privacy
Read the rest in Encryption dealt a blow

Saturday, September 12, 1998

Please everyone, if you're developing applets become familiar with the security restrictions of the sandbox they live within. Any decent Java book that covers applets will discuss this. On every Java mailing list I've ever been on, questions about security exceptions thrown by applets are among the most FAQs of all.

--Jens Alfke on the mrj-dev mailing list

Friday, September 11, 1998

Until there is another language that does multiplatforming as well as Java and is as safe as Java (as in applet security), I don't see Java dying. These two strengths make Java a very useful internet language. Even if that becomes Java's niche, I believe it is enough to keep Java going for a very long while. And, once a language is entrenched, it is very difficult to kill. Also, implementations of Java are freely available. If we've learned anything, it's that free is a very good price, even for crap. As long as free Java implementations are available, it is likely to be alive.

--Christopher J Heino on the advanced-java mailing list

Thursday, September 10, 1998

Microsoft has unilaterally polluted the Java language by adding unauthorized, nonstandard keywords and compiler directives. Only Microsoft's products can understand this new language. It's like someone changing the English language by adding new vowels and consonants that change the meaning of the words that use them, and by changing the rules of grammar. Only the people who know the new alphabet or rules ... would make sense of the new books being written in the new, polluted form of English.

--Alan Baratz, president of JavaSoft
Read the rest in Wired

Wednesday, September 9, 1998

There are a few things that are in the way of Java becoming a well-established platform for applications. IMO, one obstacle is the CLASSPATH stuff. Another is the fact that applications are not as easy to install as native ones. Performance is a consideration too, of course.

--Jose H. Solorzano on the advanced-java mailing list

Monday, September 7, 1998

Personally, I don't trust them. The planet is littered with companies that did deals with Microsoft, expecting to win big, but ended up getting screwed.

--James Gosling
Read the rest in Microsoft and Sun ready for battle in S.J. court

Thursday, September 3, 1998

Companies tend to view Burning Man as the perfect marketing event. But we don't want it to become a trade show like Earth Day

--Evil Pippi
Read the rest in Culture News from Wired News

Wednesday, September 2, 1998

Intel has a fairly well-developed Java strategy, in equal parts composed of 1) keeping up with the Joneses, 2) benign neglect, and 3) pushing for advantage wherever possible. It's a low-key strategy, but it is still having an important impact on Java.

--Rick Cook
Read the rest in SunWorld - September 1998

Monday, September 1, 1998

Java is a reaction to the excesses of C++. Java has all sorts of things about it that are going to have to be fixed. The folks at Sun say, "There are so many JVMs out there that we can't change it." But the JVMs aren't all the same, there are inconsistencies, so eventually the JVM is going to be changed anyway. They have to standardize, but do so in a way that still allows innovation and development. That's a major intellectual challenge. You can't expect to get it right the first time.

I don't feel that the architects of Java are wicked so much as premature to think that they can write a universal language for every man to write everything to run everywhere. That isn't going to happen, it's going to be a turf war-Bill Joy against Bill Gates. It's a lousy reason to write a language, to write it in order to precipitate a turf war to bring things into a territory more advantageous to Sun than the current situation.

-- William Kahan
Read the rest in Dr. Dobbs Journal

Monday, August 31, 1998

The users of Java are going to be people who have no experience with floating-point computation, except for some isolated event. It's these people who will find that the Java language has a much larger capture cross-section for error than they ever imagined. It needn't be that way. That propensity for inducing people to do things badly is because of the ignorance that went into design, not because floating-point is such a dark art.

--William Kahan
Read the rest in Java cited as weak brew for tech applications

Saturday, August 29, 1998

Numerics can be a lot simpler than they are, but they are not as simple as Java thinks, and they are not as simple as Microsoft thinks.

In the case of Java, they made some hasty decisions that should be reversed. They decided not to support different floating-point semantics. They decided that everything should be exactly reproducible, but the fact is, "exactly reproducible" is useful only in certain circumstances. They denied people the advantage of better hardware when they have got it. And 99 percent of the people have that hardware now.

-- William Kahan
Read the rest in Dr. Dobbs Journal

Friday, August 28, 1998

Java's only 3 years old, but it has expectations put on it of a 20-year-old development technology. We have to recognize that it's going to take time. It will be well into 2000 before there are large numbers of big, complex Java applications

-- Daryl Plummer, Gartner Group, Inc.
Read the rest in Java use limited in critical apps

Thursday, August 27, 1998

If there's a java.lang hierarchy, why isn't there a lana.lang hierarchy too?

--Ed Poor in the comp.lang.java.advocacy newsgroup

Wednesday, August 26, 1998

It's fine that the government wants to fight terrorists but restricting encryption isn't the right way to spend its resources. Encryption can't blow you up. . . . They'd do better to make it illegal to possess fertilizer or rental trucks.

--Cindy Cohn
Read the rest in Programmer on hot seat for posting encryption software

Tuesday, August 25, 1998

Whatever Microsoft's costs, they don't seem capable of thinking in smaller is better terms, and neither do their competitors.

--Simon St.Laurent on the XML-L mailing list

Monday, August 24, 1998

...there are sincere employers who genuinely buy into this notion that you must have Java to do a Java project. If you're already an experienced programmer, you can learn Java in two weeks.

--Norm Matloff, UC Berkeley
Read the rest in Q&A: Norm Matloff

Sunday, August 23, 1998

The computer industry is moving into a mode where the independent consultant, programmer, or even writer is shunned in favor of the body shops -- who can provide second rate talent at third rate prices. These body shops exacerbate the problem of self-confidence, because they know that once they have you under contract, you can't go anywhere else, and usually are forced into paying the wages that they offer with little to no negotiation (you don't want to go to work for Microsquish for $25K a year doing testing? Well, I guess that means we won't let you know about this $45K job over here because you are a bad contractor). In addition to stunting your earning potential, these jobs are frequently demeaning, usually demand significant overtime with little compensation, and can make you feel like you have no worth in the marketplace (or as a human being).

--Kurt Cagle on the Computer Book Publishing mailing list

Saturday, August 22, 1998

...it's exactly the wrong time to be locking in changes. The Internet's changing like crazy. We shouldn't be passing laws. New legislation is mostly to satisfy interest groups. What it does is make the Copyright Act much more complicated and that, in itself, causes more problems than it solves.

--Trotter Hardy
Read the rest in Copyright report opposes new laws

Friday, August 21, 1998

One thing is that if you go after Microsoft, you don't do that by selling an expensive system. You need to give an NT person a reason to run your operating system. And Solaris was never that. Solaris was never something that a Windows person ever had any reason to switch to. It was way too expensive; it didn't give a Windows user much at all. It was completely unsupported, in reality, on PC hardware. Solaris x86 was there, but let's face it, it wasn't Solaris.

--Linus Torvalds
Read the rest in SunWorld, August 1998

Thursday, August 20, 1998

Coming from a Unix background, certain facets of MacOS can seem shockingly primitive. But the reverse is also true for MacOS developers who move to Unix or PC platforms. Every OS ever written comes with a different set of crosses that its developers and users must bear. OS religious wars are all about ranking the relative importance of these crosses.

--Greg Guerin on the MRJ-dev@public.lists.apple.com mailing list

Tuesday, August 18, 1998

The trade secrets of commercial software vendors are threatening the security of the global Internet -- and that threat extends to the future of electronic commerce as well.

--Denise Caruso
Read the rest in Secrecy of Software Code Creates Security Risk

Monday, August 17, 1998

...until we're willing to punish corporate malfeasance through public prosecution, greedy lawyers are among consumers' best defense.

--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in Plenty of time left to panic on Y2K bug

Sunday, August 16, 1998

This announcement (of JavaBeans) hit me, my management, and our engineering teams like a ton of bricks. We had offered to license COM to Sun and work in good faith to incorporate it into Java. Companies like IBM, Netscape, and Borland were at the conference announcing support and explaining how they would use JavaBeans. It was obvious that they had been briefed about the technology by Sun, and that Microsoft had been deliberately excluded from these briefings. Sun never mentioned JavaBeans to Microsoft until Mr. Baratz called me late in the afternoon on the day before JavaBeans was announced.

--Robert Muglia
Read the rest in Microsoft: Sun knew our Java plans all along

Saturday, August 15, 1998

There are eerie parallels here between what Sun did in 1982 and what Linux is doing in 1998. In many ways it's the same technical community. It's a community that's very focused on free versions of UNIX, running on commodity hardware, appealing initially to a very technical audience and eventually with a much broader relevance. Sun, in 1983 and 1984, totally and uniquely had an understanding that you could harness all this energy around BSD and commodity hardware and just get it out the door to this technical community. SGI and many other companies didn't get it back then, but Sun did.

Now they've done a complete 180. If you think about it, they are now a proprietary verticalized systems vendor: doing their own chip, their own complete systems architecture, their own software, their own operating system, their own applications in many cases, their own storage devices and so on. When they think of Java, they think, "we really need to control this." Wrong answer. Because the alternative is that there will absolutely be multiple implementations. There need to be Javas defined to lead naturally in the open direction. Sun is going to force them to emerge and to flourish by not opening Java up.

-- Marc Andreesen
Read the rest in Linux Journal #52: Betting on Darwin

Friday, August 13, 1998

What happened to WORAS (Write Once Run Anywhere Safely)? Has it now become "Write Once Run On Any Compatible VM for this particular platform that happens to be the right version"? OR "Write Once Test Everywhere"?

--Eric Gufford on the Java Study Group (sc22jsg1) mailing list

Thursday, August 12, 1998

Java has been the single reason we've continued to develop Mac-based software.

--Chuck Shotton, BIAP Systems, on the mrj-dev mailing list

Wednesday, August 12, 1998

java.io.File is a poster-child for Latent Subtle Unixisms, and arguably one of the worst classes in core Java.

--Chris Adamson on the MacOS Runtime for Java mailing list

Tuesday, August 11, 1998

AWT is about automatically being as platform specific as possible. The goal was to achive native L&F on every platform.

--Dirk Theisen on the mrj-dev mailing list

Monday, August 10, 1998

Microsoft has repeatedly shown little interest when contacted about security holes in their products in the past. In general, they have needed to have their noses rubbed in it before acknowledging any problems.

-- Cult of the Dead Cow
Read the rest in cDc responds to Microsoft about Back Orifice

Sunday, August 9, 1998

Java's claim to fame is WORAS, rapid app development and platform independence. That completely falls apart if library releases aren't backward compatible. For example, look at ostream. While it's changed markedly over the years (it's now a template), code developed 10 years ago can still instantiate one just as it always did.

--Eric Gufford on the Java Study Group (sc22jsg1@dkuug.dk) mailing list

August 8, 1998

C makes it too easy to slice your fingers off, and programmers all over the world are doing so with great regularity

-- Steven Bellovin, computer security specialist, AT&T Laboratories
Read the rest in Flaw in E-Mail Programs Points to an Industrywide Problem

August 7, 1998

I think everybody hates Java as a desktop thing. I see Java mentioned a lot lately, but all of the mentions within the last year have been of Java as a server language, not as a desktop language. If you go back a year and a half, everybody was talking about Java on the desktop. They aren't anymore. It's dead. And once you're dead on the desktop, my personal opinion is you're dead. If servers are everything you have, just forget it. Why do you think Sun, HP -- everybody -- is nervous about Microsoft? It's not because they make great servers. It's because they control the desktop. Once you control the desktop, you control the servers.

It's no longer something that will revolutionize the industry. It could have revolutionized the industry if it was on the desktop, but I don't see that happening anymore. I hope I'm wrong. Really. I just don't think I am.

--Linus Torvalds
Read the rest in SunWorld, August 1998

August 6, 1998

...it's exactly the wrong time to be locking in changes. The Internet's changing like crazy. We shouldn't be passing laws. New legislation is mostly to satisfy interest groups. What it does is make the Copyright Act much more complicated and that, in itself, causes more problems than it solves.

--Trotter Hardy
Read the rest in Copyright report opposes new laws

August 5, 1998

Standards are, among other things, supposed to provide islands of stability with a minimum life of five years. Currently Sun seems to be shipping new (not entirely compatible) releases of Java every year. To my mind that is clear evidence that the product is not yet stable enough to be standardised.

--Francis Glassborow on the SC22JSG mailing list

August 4, 1998

The point is that there is no effective way of submitting feedback to Sun, because it's not possible to track the progress of submitted comments. Sun's claim that there is a development process in which external bodies may participate is an empty one if the effects of that participation are invisible to the parties in question.

--Roly Perera on the SC22JSG mailing list

August 3, 1998

First they [Sun] say we're [ISO] too slow to work in Internet Time. Then they call us a bunch of maintenance programmers. Then they say they look forward to working with us, but they call the shots. Now they say that they're doing the work, but we'll watch over their shoulder. Why can't they just allow us direct participation? What do they have to hide?

--Eric Gufford, President TRIAD Systems Inc., on the SC22JSG mailing list

August 2, 1998

If Sun continues to delay at this rate, we could have had a full ISO standard for Java, -if- Sun had relinquished control of Java from the start. This would have been good for Sun, since it is unlikely that the ISO WG for Java would not have technically valid proposals from Sun, and it would have avoided all of the hassle surrounding the Sun PAS submission. And it would have been good for the rest of us, since all of the uncertainty around Java standardization would have been replaced with a well-understood process.

--David Emery on the SC22JSG mailing list

August 1, 1998

In theory, using "just in time compilers" Java can be made to run close to the speed of C/C++. With newer runtime technology, Java can theoretically exceed the speed of C/C++ in some cases.

Currently the best JITs approach the speed of C only in certain applications... I'd guess most apps run 3-10x slower than C...

But this fall Sun will start shipping their super-VM (HotSpot) which should change things significantly.

Sun's latest release is something like 10 times faster than the one from 18 months ago and twice as fast as one from late last year.

--Pat Niemeyer, author of Exploring Java, on the java-networking mailing list

July 31, 1998

7.Denies the allegations of Paragraph 7 of the Complaint, except (a) admits that (i) software providing web browsing functionality is a source of competition to Microsoft’s operating system software products, including Microsoft’s Windows operating system; and (ii) the "Java" programming language can be used by software developers who chose to do so to write Java applets that can run on more than one operating system and Java applications that can run on more than one operating system but only after additional development work is done specific to the Java Virtual Machines on which the developers wish their applications to run; and (b) avers on information and belief that (i) such "cross-platform" Java applications typically run more slowly and are less full-featured than Java applications optimized for a single operating system; and (ii) attempts to develop significant applications in Java, such as a Java version of Netscape Navigator or Corel WordPerfect, have ended in failure because of the shortcomings of the Java technology.

--Microsoft response to the DOJ

July 30, 1998

Implying that other people's programs are trivial to fix/improve is a common leisure time activity among all engineers, of course, but ends up being insulting to the people who have to do real work on that code.

--Jens Alfke on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

July 29, 1998

Time and time again, however, Congress has put the economic interests of various privacy invaders ahead of the privacy interests of the American public. When it comes to privacy, in fact, the agenda in Congress today seems to be set mostly by commercial interests.

--Charles Lewis, Chairman of the Center for Public Integrity
Read more details about how Congress is bought and paid for by big companies that want to invade your privacy

July 28, 1998

The reason is that in the physical world, if I make a customer unhappy, they'll tell five friends. On the Internet, if I make a customer unhappy, they'll tell 5,000 friends through Usenet news groups and list servers.

Online customers have the ability to be very loud -- in a totally appropriate way -- about experiences both positive and negative. So the merchant cannot control his message online as well as he can in the physical world. It's not that advertising isn't important online -- it is -- but it's a smaller fraction of what's important than you would find in the physical world.

--Jeff Bezos, Founder, CEO amazon.com
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

July 27, 1998

if we did everything in C, we would soon be in a situation in which no one would know how the systems worked because unless you work on a C program almost full time you will soon forget how you did things, and if you take up someone else's C program, even with lots of documentation, you probably won't understand it well: you have to accept it on faith and go on from there.

--Jerry Pournelle
Read the rest in Reflections on Programming Under The Wizard's Spell

July 25, 1998

Sun is trying to make Java all things for all platforms. Personal Java. Embedded Java. Secure Java. The list goes on and on. Then they also start adding all kinds of bells and whistles to the flavors they already have. If anything, this is _exactly_ why a standardization effort is needed. To get them to slow down and let the rest of the world begin to write serious applications with a stable code base.

Web designers and applet developers may want the 'coolest' stuff added ASAP, but those of us that develop real production quality systems don't. All we want is a stable base to code from. Otherwise we end up regression testing every week and never rolling out any systems. This is especially true on Wall Street, where aberrant language 'features' and undocumented heuristics can cost a firm millions.

--Eric Gufford on the SC22.JSG mailing list

July 24, 1998

The mainstream media has feasted on the Internet, making it out to be a cesspool of unreliable information. While there is an element of that, to be sure, the media can’t lay that rap on the Net anymore and keep a straight face.

The total debunking of the virgin hoax, even as the mainstream media were stumbling over themselves to get interviews with Wells and the two virgins, shows the Net at its finest: taking care of business and taking care of itself.

--Brock N. Meeks
Read the rest on MSNBC

July 23, 1998

there is no effective way of submitting feedback to Sun, because it's not possible to track the progress of submitted comments. Sun's claim that there is a development process in which external bodies may participate is an empty one if the effects of that participation are invisible to the parties in question.

--Roly Perera, Interactive Computers Ltd, on the SC22JSG.810 mailing list

July 22, 1998

The portability of Java itself gets in the way of any story you can tell about a Java OS

--Gavin Doughtie, Enfish Technology Inc
Read the rest in LAN Times

July 21, 1998

Why shouldn't any computer fall into the "cannot crash" set? I'd hate it if my VCR crashed, and I view my work on a computer as slightly more significant than recording the latest B5.

--Andrew Gideon on the WWWAC mailing list

July 20, 1998

These tests show enormous improvement. Things are looking so much better, even compared to six months ago. The pace of improvements is relentless. These Java platforms are now more than 10 times faster, vastly more stable, more than twice as scalable when adding processors, and able to handle roughly 10 times the number of network connections [compared to] just 18 months ago.

--John Neffenger, CTO and co-founder of Volano LLC
Read the rest in SunWorld

July 19, 1998

If a civil liberties group can build a DES Cracker for less than $250,000, practically anyone else can too. Do any of them want to read your messages? Advances in semiconductor technology will only reduce this cost. In five years,some teenager may well build a DES Cracker as her high school science fair project.

--John Gilmore, project leader for the EFF's DES Cracker

July 18, 1998

Despite changes in the ClassLoader implementation in JDK 1.1 and again in JDK 1.2 beta, ClassLoaders are still not safe. A malicious ClassLoader can still override the definition of built-in 'system' types like java.lang.Class. Under some circumstances, this can lead to a subversion of Java's type system and thus a security breach

--Secure Internet Programming Project, Princeton University

July 17, 1998

...we need unbundled products and open source software -- so we as customers don't have to put up with the 10% screwed-up anti-customer marketing-driven ideas in major products just so we can have the 90% good engineering

--John Gilmore
Read the rest on scripting.com

July 16, 1998

Call me a power user, or even a business user, but my home office has a domain name, DNS server, MX mail forwarding, Web server, reverse domain lookups, static IP addressing, and a nailed-up, 24-by-7, dual ISDN connection to the Internet. That's pretty standard stuff for a business LAN, and is well-suited to my lab duties and for the types of network traffic that I produce, but it's not so typical for today's average home office and telecommuter market. I think times are changing, though. Remember, the kids who are 15 years old today don't remember the AT bus, 386 CPUs, machines with 4 Mbytes of RAM, 14.4-Kbps modems, interlaced computer monitors, keyboards but no mice, 5.25-inch floppy drives, Windows 3.1, or other artifacts of yesteryear. In 10 years, they'll be expecting to run their own Web servers in their living rooms and do video-teleconferencing from the phone on the wall. They'll want just what I want.

--Jason Levitt
Read the rest in Information Week

Wednesday, July 15, 1998

There is _no_ specification of how the AWT peers are supposed to be implemented, so there's a lot of room for divergence. It's incredibly difficult to get a VM to behave compatibly with other VMs.

--Jens Alfke on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

Tuesday, July 14, 1998

I don't see any increased acceptance of WFCs [Windows Foundation Classes]. But it would be unrealistic to see that at this point. Once it's in the market and gets some positive reviews, C++ and Visual Basic developers see it, the level of use may increase.

--Mike Gilpin, Giga Information Group
Read the rest on news.com

Monday, July 13, 1998

I abide by the theory that says in the late 20th century, the scarcest resource is time. If you can save people money and time, they'll like that.

--Jeff Bezos, Founder amazon.com
Read the rest in the Washington Post

Sunday, July 12, 1998

I would support his use of terminology, the difference being that pointers have byte or word granularity (Java does not have that) and references have object granularity (Java has that). But we really shouldn't be getting into wars over sloppy language anyway.

--Chris Smith on comp.lang.java.machine

Saturday, July 11, 1998

I'm going to go way out on a limb and indulge in some wild speculation. (Remember, this is I, not Bereskin.) I predict that Apple is going to sell or spin off the Yellow Box, probably along with WebObjects, to some entity focused on Java. If it's sold, it could be to Sun, or Inprise (the former Borland, run by Del Yocam), or maybe part of Oracle.

--Henry Norr
Read the rest in MacInTouch

Friday, July 10, 1998

Sure, Java's great for distributed enterprise applications, and maybe even for embedded systems, but it simply hasn't lived up to its promise of "write once, run everywhere." And on the Web, even the smallest Java applets drive surfers crazy as they wait for their Java Virtual Machines to load. That's why many people turn off Java in their browsers. They're simply unwilling to wait for something that isn't that interesting in the first place.

And let's face it, the vast majority of Java applets on the Web are a drag. Most Java applets don't do anything but look cool. My advice to Web builders? Don't use Java unless you have a really good reason. And one more thing, banner ads usually don't qualify as a good reason to use Java. That goes even for advertisers on BUILDER.COM--if any of you are listening.

The bottom line: While Java on the server still shows promise, Java on the client is a certified bust. Sort of like the U.S. World Cup soccer team.

--Fredric Paul
Read the rest on builder.com

Thursday, July 9, 1998

The very nice Apple booth was populated by lots of very boisterous and knowledgable individuals. They all wore nice white polo shirts that featured the new 'Think Different' slogan and a black Apple logo. To clarify: They all wore the exact same white polo shirt, with the exact same hat that told us, despite what we see, to 'Think Different.'

--Anthony Burokas on MacInTouch

Tuesday, July 7, 1998

the Macintosh has a choke-hold on the minds and hearts of Web designers; anything that lives on the Macintosh Web -- like Shockwave or RealAudio -- stands a chance of becoming a Web standard. Technologies that ignore the Macintosh -- such as Java and VRML -- face a passive resistance which eventually renders them obsolete.

--Mark Pesce, July 21, 1997
Read the rest in VRMLUser

Monday, July 6, 1998

Why should loyalty mean anything to an employee whose company shows none in the other direction? The corporate bloodletting of the last decade has trained us all to view ourselves as little more than free agents.

Free agency now defines the valley culture, and increasingly it is becoming the way of business life throughout the economy. Fail to meet your Wall Street expectations -- or, if you're not public yet, give off the slightest whiff of failure -- and last month's happy, options-holding employees are this month's competitor.

--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

Saturday, July 4, 1998

To have people in Congress in control of these issues is like having a person with first-[year] algebra write a [thesis] on high energy physics, and the more I speak the more you'll understand that.

--Congressman Brian Bilbray, Republican, California
Read the rest in Wired

Friday, July 3, 1998

Java on the client doesn't work, and we at Netscape have done an about turn on client-side Java in recent months. But on the server side, Java is taking off quite quickly.

--Marc Andreesen
Read the rest in InfoWorld

Thursday, July 2, 1998

I've always believed Netscape's original mistake was that someone actually has to do the work. It's technically possible but no one is doing the work. The work is to make the Java Run-time stable and fast. There's an opportunity to do that. Right now, Microsoft is doing it. And...there you are.

--Marc Andreesen
Read the rest in Computer Reseller News

Wednesday, July 1, 1998

I firmly believe that on the client, DHTML has already won the war, and the combination of DHTML and XML is going to dominate there, where Java's future--if it's got one--is going to be in the back room doing server stuff.

--Eric Carlson, chief technology officer at SilkNet Software
Read the rest in Computer Reseller News

June 30, 1998

The high-altitude executive summary [as we see it right now] is that we use the underlying Java VM from Rhapsody, with the AWT from MRJ 2.1 (plus AWT-related pieces like JManager.) This has a nice ring to it because Rhapsody currently has a good JVM (very close to Sun's Solaris sourcebase) with an inefficient AWT, while MRJ 2.1 is going to have a good AWT with some inefficiencies remaining in the underlying VM due to current MacOS limitations. As with a lot of other stuff in OS X, combining the two should give us the best of both worlds.

--Jens Alfke, Apple Java toolkit Engineer, on the mrj-dev mailing list

June 26, 1998

People said, "Put java into a standards organization so it becomes a true standard!" Sun said, "Great idea! We will!" Then, a little while later, said "Oh, it turns out we ARE a standards organization! End of problem!"

--Randy Wigginton on the mrj-dev mailing list

June 25, 1998

Vendors try to create a sense of urgency about upgrades, as if you'll be left behind if you don't buy the latest and greatest version. But at the same time, many of the changes are often fairly superficial-like the chrome and tailfin changes that drove the auto industry for years.

We figured that millions of people will still be using Windows 95 for several years to come. And rather than rushing out a book on Windows 98 based on the beta releases, we figured we'd take some time to use the final version, figure out where the bugs are, and release a really useful Windows 98 book in September, just about when the bookstores are returning all the unsold and now out of date books that were rushed out to meet the initial software release.

--Tim O'Reilly, co-author of Windows 95 in a Nutshell

June 24, 1998

Java should be through its hype phase. We don't want to see Java applications that run on only one platform; sorry, Microsoft. We also don't follow the religion that espouses that a Java application is better just because someone wrote it in Java; sorry, Sun. Developers should use Java because it lets them make better applications, not because it scores them press coverage or venture capital.

--Mark van Name and Bill Catchings
Read the rest in PC Week

June 23, 1998

I think you shouldn't marginalize the value of Java as a better language. Getting garbage collection accepted in a mainstream language is a huge accomplishment. Removing features from an extremely bloated language, and adding just a key few improvments is also extremely important.

--Patrick C. Beard on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

June 22, 1998

we have lived under the philosophy that since the internet universe is changing daily, the most important thing was to put technology in the hands of users as quickly as possible, and to worry about refining things later.

--Michael Toy, Netscape
Read the rest on mozilla.org

June 21, 1998

The NC is the new OS/2.

--Nicholas Petreley
Read the rest in InfoWorld

June 18, 1998

I phoned Microsoft and got a >HELPFUL< tech support person. (Miracles >do< happen.) He said that Master Documents were a reported bug on WinWord 97. They were a bug on WinWord 95. They were a bug on WinWord 6.0. They'd even been a bug in WinWord 2.0 and 1.0. They'd probably have been a bug in MS Word for DOS v5.5 except they hadn't put them in the program yet.

--John Hedtke on the Computer Book Publishing list

June 17, 1998

In my experience, unless you're willing to live with only about 3 or 4 actual usable digits after repeated calculations, AND you're desperate for the possible speed increase, floats are more trouble than they're worth. Stick with doubles for things that involve calculation.

--Greg Guerin on the mrj-dev mailing list

June 16, 1998

Cheers to everyone who has pointed out to me that I should be using getResource() to load an image from a JAR file. This is one the those things that shows up the main weakness of the 1.1 JavaDoc documentation.

If you know how to do something, you can look it up. If you don't know how to do something the API documentation is not going to help.

--Andrew Thompson on the mrj-dev mailing list

June 15, 1998

Amid the annual lists of biggest companies, wealthiest people and top-earning bosses, we see those words misused again and again. So and so's "earnings" included a $2 million salary, $1 million bonus and $18 million in profits from stock options -- all of which brought his net "worth" to $247 million.

Please. Can't we re-capture these words from the people who worship money? Since when did extra zeroes on someone's financial statement have anything significant to do with his or her human value (or values)? Since when did the average corporate executive genuinely earn all that loot?

Since never.

--Dan Gillmore
Read the rest in Let's redefine the word 'earn' in the San Jose Mercury

June 12, 1998

I got my July issue of Byte in the mail today. The epoch has, officially, ended. Ironically, the cover article's on Y2K stuff, a problem which will outlive Byte itself.

--Alex Pournelle on the Computer Book Publishing mailing list

June 11, 1998

I don't know what happened, but somehow we have got confused in our approach to developers

--Sun Microsystems COO Ed Zander
Read the rest in InfoWorld

June 10, 1998

Like the still-kicking plague victim one devious townsperson tries to pass off as a corpse in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," Byte magazine is not quite dead yet. But it might as well be.

--David Futrelle
Read the rest in Upside

June 9, 1998

In terms of editorial content, BYTE had no competitors. The average computer magazine's idea of "new technology" is the latest ink-jet printer on sale at CompUSA. The average computer magazine will never explain how a new microprocessor chip works at the technical level. The average computer magazine views alternate platforms as threats because the average computer magazine is dedicated to only one platform. The average computer magazine is average. Throughout its 23-year history, BYTE never aimed at the bulge of the bell curve.

--Tom Halfhill
Read the rest in Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ

June 8, 1998

Few hands went up when Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's executive vice president, asked a packed ballroom how many people were using the popular Java computer language. Ballmer himself seemed surprised.

--Jodi Mardesich
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

June 5, 1998

What we see on the Web in general is a process of evolution in the Darwinian sense. Many solutions are not planned, they evolve.... The uses to which HTML has been put represent the results of experiments, a few of which have worked, and a great many of which fail. A successful idea (or 'meme' to use Richard Dawkins' term) can breed very quickly on the WWW.

--Peter Murray-Rust on the xml-dev mailing list

June 4, 1998

good theory does not guarantee usefulness--remember Prolog

--Rick Jelliffe on the xml-dev mailing list

May 30, 1998

To date, one of the major tradeoffs of selecting Java over other languages has been performance. The original Java virtual machines, which simply interpreted bytecodes one at a time, were clocked at 30 to 50 times slower than natively compiled C++. Just-in-time (JIT) compilers have narrowed the performance gap to 3 to 10 times slower than C++, but that performance gap is still big enough to eliminate Java as the language choice for certain applications.

--Bill Venners
Read the rest on developer.com

May 29, 1998

For some politicians, shredding the Constitution and ruining the potential of cyberspace are preferable to the possibility that some child, somewhere, might be able to see something ``dangerous'' or ``filthy.''

--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

May 28, 1998

I fear that many, and even commercial, software outfits use open source in their own non-source-disclosed products, and this is something that in my eyes must be fought at all costs, not just because it is illegal, but because it is the worst case of software piracy around (and MUCH worse than a student ripping off M$ Word).

--Richard Theil
Read the rest on MacInTouch

May 27, 1998

What is java? A programming language that makes developers more productive? Absolutely. A crucial middleware architecture that will help tie together disparate systems across heterogeneous networks? Without question. A platform that solidly supports nontraditional computing devices and embedded systems? Maybe one day, but not today. An eventually ubiquitous operating system that renders Windows obsolete? Not bloody likely.

--Luc Hatlestad
Read the rest in The Red Herring

May 26, 1998

With all the lawsuits, shifting alliances, corporate reorganizations and other shenanigans, the software industry is becoming more and more silly. We have clearly moved beyond farce and into some sort of fantasy world. Lewis Carroll would be proud.

--Willam Blundon
Read the rest in JavaWorld

May 18, 1998

Apple is a for-profit business, not a religion - to buy from them without criticizing them is to abandon our critical faculties as users and designers. No company is worth that.

--Clay Shirky on the WWWAC mailing list

May 15, 1998

In the case of Java, the promise of "write once, run anywhere" was exciting to developers. To think that I can build a fully functional fast application that can run perfectly on any computer without any compromise! Who wouldn't want that? But the reality is, write once run anywhere forced developers to compromise. What developers discovered when they started playing with the technology, is that generic or "one size fits all" applications aren't what their users are willing to pay for.

Users want the best software for their machine. They don't want compromised software that's less functional, slower performing, and may not run well on the machines they have.

--Todd Nielsen, General Manager Microsoft Developer Relations Group
Read the rest on MSDN

May 14, 1998

Sun's most telling error has been its failure to keep complete control of the virtual machine. With legions of programmers and plenty of cash to hire more, Sun should not have lazily allowed other vendors to implement the cross-platform engine. Microsoft and Netscape should never have been entrusted with this all-important component. Had Sun implemented the virtual machine itself for all the important operating system platforms (as it has now begun to do, belatedly, with its Activator plug-in technology), it would have had a hot product to license or even sell directly to end users for an immediate gain. (Sun's JavaSoft subsidiary, which is responsible for Java, has yet to turn a profit.)

What's more, were Sun the sole author (or nearly so) of Java virtual machines, 100 percent cross-platform compatibility would be easier to achieve, and divergence of the language would be a nonissue. Java the language could be released to standards committees with no negative effect on the platform's viability, eliminating the most strenuous objections to Java as a whole.

--Brett Glass
Read the rest in the Red Herring

May 13, 1998

Could it be that AWT's behavior is dictated more by an "it looks fine here, let's ship it" approach, rather than a formal process of defining what OUGHT to happen then reviewing the code to ensure that it DOES happen? Naahh... no software company EVER does THAT.

--Greg Guerin on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

May 12, 1998

Another year, another OS strategy.

--Henry Norr on Apple's latest vaporware OS
Read the rest on MacInTouch

May 11, 1998

Inheritance is about "getting stuff for free" (e.g. code, declarations, fields). Subtyping is about *fulfilling a particular role* (perhaps through a manual construction of an appropriate "interface" (in this case a content model)). Architectural forms allow you to specify an interface that must be fulfilled and declare conformance to that interface. It does not allow you to "get code for free" (i.e. markup declarations).

When I inherit from my father, I get his money without doing any work. I get to live in the same house he lived in without redoing everything he did to get it (not that I've had this experience...yet <evil grin>). But When I subclass from the class "husband" I agree to do things like be faithful and caring and so forth. They are very different things. I have to put forth effort to fulfill that role.

--Paul Prescod on the XML-DEV mailing list

May 10, 1998

The biggest problem Java now faces isn't so much Microsoft, but dissatisfaction among developers who want to license the Java platform. JavaSoft has not been easy to deal with. They seem to recognize that there's a problem, but it's not clear what they plan to do about it.

--Mike Loukides, O'Reilly Java editor
Read the rest in Looking back on JavaOne

May 9, 1998

We'd like to develop enough applications where people have to watch television 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

--David Beddow, senior vice president at TCI
Read the rest on news.com

May 8, 1998

Absent any other credible statement of purpose, I think Microsoft is just a ouija board, a self-perpetuating organization that must grow twenty percent per year profitably, or collapse on itself.

In other words Microsoft is a corporation.

The corporate system forces a relentless pace of growth. It can't stop on its own, Gates as the CEO of the company either has to feed its self-perpetuation need, or get out of the way for someone else to do it.

That's the structure imposed on Microsoft, as a public company. If anyone or anything deserves our criticism, it's the corporate economic system.

--Dave Winer
Read the rest in DaveNet

May 7, 1998

I saw parallels between M$ current wrangles with the DOJ and IBM's consent decree and the AT&T divestiture. In the end, the industries, jobs, and dollars that came out of those legal decisions were far greater than if the companies were kept whole. So, I say, force the balkanization of M$ because the industries that will be spawned will be worth far more than a monolithic M$.

--Clay Gordon, WebWideGuides, Inc. on the WWWAC mailing list

May 5, 1998

With Intel chips costing the same as potato chips, the argument for a Network Computer is dead

--Michael J. Pinto on the WWWAC mailing list

May 3, 1998

Standards are regularly created and adopted before anyone has performed the experiments necessary to determine if they are sensible. Even worse, standards are getting accepted before they are even written, which is a truly ridiculous situation.

How this arises is clear: standards are increasingly being viewed as competitive weapons rather than as technological stabilizers. Companies use standards as a way to inhibit their competition from developing advantageous technology. As soon as technical activity is observed by political/economic forces, their interest rises dramatically because they see a possible threat that must be countered before it gains strength

--James Gosling, 1990
Read the rest in Phase Relationships in the Standardization Process

April 30, 1998

Free speech shouldn't be reserved for those who have good legal counsel.

--Clinton Fein
Read the rest in Wired and annoy.com

April 28, 1998

Look at HyperCard. It was free for several years, and in that time, it enabled thousands of individuals to create small, useful solutions to specific problems. The fact that those solutions required HyperCard, which in turn required a Macintosh, meant the Mac was guaranteed its position in certain organizations as long as a HyperCard solution remained necessary. By trying to make HyperCard into a commercial multimedia authoring tool, Apple eliminated thousands of small developers who then never had a chance to create software that would ensconce the Macintosh in new places.

Adam C. Engst
Read the rest in TidBITS

April 26, 1998

Individuals and companies holding software patents may assert that software code violates their patent rights. Sometimes these assertions are well founded. In other cases, however, such assertions are without merit, either because the patent is invalid (for example, because it was invented by someone else and/or disclosed in publications --prior art-- before the date of the alleged invention) or because patent holders contend their patents cover software which was not part of the original invention, if any, and try to impermissably extend the scope of the claims. This behavior is an abuse of the patent system and a drag on software development. It will be incumbent upon the development community to squash invalid patents and help ensure that patent claims are enforced only to the extent that they are valid and reflect the actual scope of the invention.

--Netscape, patents and mozilla.org

April 24, 1998

This latest X situation brings up another good reason to support the term "free software" instead of "open source". The word "open" (as if "Open Group", "Open Software Foundation", "OpenVMS") has a bad reputation. You can virtually guarantee that if a vendor starts talking about an "open" product, there's more to the story than meets the eye. (Such as fragmentation of standards to protected market share). Reading "open group" and "open source" in the editorial makes it difficult to tell who's the good guys and who's the the bad guys!

--Aaron M. Renn
Read the rest on slashdot.org

April 23, 1998

Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.

--Mike Kay, designer of the GEDML XML DTD

This one's misattributed. Kay wrote me to say:

Nice to see my remark about compatibility in your list of quotable quotes, but it's far too clever to come from me. I heard it as a computer science student 25 years ago from David Wheeler of Cambridge University (the one in England). Wheeler is sometimes acknowledged as the inventor of the subroutine, so the awareness of compatibility as a constraint in software innovation goes back very early in the history of our craft!

April 19, 1998

Politicians have all but declared the end of the "one person, one vote" notion. With a cynicism that mocks our fundamental notions of self-government, they have adopted something closer to "more dollars, my vote." Last year's capital-gains tax cut padded the bank accounts of average top-tier taxpayers, and meant virtually zilch for everyone else.

Corporate leaders create modern oligopolies and monopolies, and sneer at those who note the negative implications for consumers. Executives mock traditional corporate governance -- the basic rules about how they deal with shareholders and run companies -- and line their pockets with escalating paychecks that bear no relationship to performance

--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

April 18, 1998

In brief, we discovered that in JDK1.2b3 Sun had added classes to the core java.* class hierarchy without following its own declared due process - without even exercising the open process at all. These classes were not part of any prior version of the Java API specifications, and they had not been through any of the phases of the open process to which Sun has publicly committed itself to the ISO. There is evidence that these classes were added by Sun as a favor to Kodak, one of its significant customers.

As you all know, Sun has asked for and obtained an unprecedented authority through the ISO PAS submitter process, and they have a serious, public obligation to honor the trust that they have requested and received. It cannot be permitted for Sun to use this authority in such a self-serving way. The rules about the open process must apply equally to all participants, including Sun themselves.

The addition of inappropriate classes to the core java.* class hierarchy will sound familiar to most of you, since it is the foundation of a significant part of Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft. Many people have suggested that Sun simply wants to displace the Windows monopoly with its own Java monopoly, and it is alarming to see Sun doing what it has challenged Microsoft for doing.

--Rick Ross, JavaLobby

April 16, 1998

Elliotte Rusty Harold is a prolific writer, and has several Java-related books to his name. (See Resources for a list of his books.) His newest effort, JavaBeans: Developing Component Software in Java (355 pages, IDG Books), is an accessible and entertaining introduction to JavaBeans technology. That this book was written in a bit more than four months, frankly, is astounding: There's a lot of valuable material here, and the book is well-written.

--Mark Johnson
Read the rest in JavaWorld

April 15, 1998

In the closed source world, your short-term profit incentive is to try and keep everything you do a trade secret and extract the absolute maximum rent from that trade secret in terms of initial cost of the software. And then your economic incentive is to put as little money as you can get away with into supporting the fiction that you support your software. OK? Now as a consumer do you want to live in that world, or do you want to live in a world where source is primarily open and the people competing for your dollars are service bureaus? This is why I think that ultimately the closed software model and the whole Microsoft paradigm is doomed, because eventually software consumers are going to wake up and realize that they are being scammed -- that the cost and pricing model of the software industry fundamentally does not fit the economics of the situation or the needs of consumer

--Eric S. Raymond
Read the rest in Salon

April 13, 1998

There's only one thing a renegade programmer likes more than getting free source, and that's a chance to help fight the Microsoft Menace.

--Laura Lemay, co-author of Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days
Read the rest in Salon

April 11, 1998

Many developers believe a web site can be made more usable by simply improving the icons, cleaning up ancillary graphics, or just making it look prettier. Wrong! The bottom line is that usability is the ability of a person to use something. With regard to web pages, this means the ability of viewers to get where they want to go, find what they're looking for, and do what they want to do. If a site has usability problems, changing the graphics is most likely not the solution.

--Jon Meads, Usability is not Graphic Design
Read the rest in View Source

April 9, 1998

...according to Jakob Nielsen's last AlertBox column (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980322.html), web users are now taking up to 2 years to upgrade their browsers. Java Activator may accellerate things slightly. But if it doesn't, then don't expect the average web user to be able to run your JDK 1.1 applet before the year 2000.

--John Brewer, Autodesk, Inc., on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

April 8, 1998

Without reverse engineering, you couldn't make applications that run on Windows. If you don't know how Windows works you can't write for it. The products couldn't be produced by anybody else but Microsoft if it weren't for reverse engineering.

--Skip Lockwood, coordinator of the Digital Future Coalition
Read the rest in Wired

April 7, 1998

I learned QWERTY when I was eight, and got stuck in a mode wherein I *had* to look at the keys. Oh, I could type 50wpm, but knew I'd never get much past that. Further, I was always frustrated when I was typing something in from a printed source: I'd have to keep jerking my head back and forth.

Dvorak was a godsend for me because it let me -- nay, *forced* me -- to relearn to type correctly. That is, looking at the keys wouldn't do me any good. :) I've never timed myself on Dvorak, but I'd guess i'm in the 80+wpm range now -- AND I can easily type stuff from printed sources. Hooray!

(For the record, I also use a Mac and speak Esperanto well. Champion of better ideas or sucker for lost causes? You decide.)

--Mac Annoyances author Tom Geller on the Computer Book Publishing Mailing List

April 6, 1998

At the influential Demo conference in February, where new products vie for the privilege of debuting, only one new Mac application was shown among 60 entrants. The rest of the cutting-edge applications, such as continuous speech-to-text interpreters, voice recognizers and visual user interface programs, all were built on Windows.

--Jodi Mardesich
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

April 5, 1998

Proponents of intrusive technology and tactics ask, "Why worry if you have nothing to hide?" That's the totalitarian's mantra, and it's wrong. It assumes the right to pry into others' lives. I can't imagine a more deadening world than one in which everyone is constantly spying on everyone else -- and the widespread use of lie detectors would be grossly intrusive even if they were foolproof.

--Dan Gillmor
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

April 3, 1998

You can deny the Sony Betamax analogy only so long. There's still hope, but let's get real. I'm not sure that even the most rabid Mac fanatics can look you in the eye today and say, without reservations, that everyone ought to buy a Mac.

--Bob LeVitus, self-proclaimed Dr. Macintosh
Read the rest in Clan Macintosh Feels the Pain in the New York Times

April 2, 1998

I think the standards process is weak. It gives an extrordinary voice to the large companies, and history has shown that they rarely are hotbeds of innovation, nor are they willing to take real risks on new technology. A confounding maze of computer science is the result, when (I believe) the only thing the market will actually consume is simplicity.

--Dave Winer
Read the rest on DaveNet

April 1, 1998

We feel we're 'filling' a need, if you'll pardon the pun, Plus, to be honest, our CEO was really pushing for an effective way to make headlines by getting a pie in his face. With this new technology, we can exploit the interactive power of the Internet to offer users fast access to the very latest in pie tossing right on their desktop...or tabletop, whatever the case may be. Calling it a 'Pielet' was some marketing guy's idea. We all hate the name, and when he suggested the slogan 'The Pastry Is the Computer,' we threw him out of the meeting -- after nailing him with a peach cobbler, of course.

--Marie Calendar, Senior Engineer, Project Rhubard, Sun Microsystems
Read the rest of the announcement about Sun's new Java Pielet API (but don't forget what day it is).

March 31, 1998

That's REALLY the secret of O'Reilly's success (at least our original success, since we've added other elements to the mix as they years have gone by): we just did books that were needed, because there just plain wasn't anything else. If you've got the only book on a topic, by definition, it's the best, even if it isn't very good.

--Tim O'Reilly on the Computer Book Publishing list

March 30, 1998

This is the nail in the coffin that put Cyber Promotions out of business. But Sanford Wallace is very much an entrepreneurial figure. I would not be surprised to see him back on the Internet in one form or another

--Pete Wellborn, Earthlink attorney
Read the rest in the New York Times

March 28, 1998

Sun should differentiate Java on the performance of the JVM and the richness of the classes and not fight battles in the courts to protect trademarks. I don't want the Fortune 500 and 1,000 afraid of investing in Java because of this cloud.

--Paul Ambrose, chief technology officer and founder of WebLogic.

March 27, 1998

I've seen a couple of incidents where some strongly worded invective came into Javasoft feedback addresses (e.g. one was ranting about how the @#$* Swing docs were unreadable due to the ##&% long filenames and why didn't Javasoft fix the @*&$ javadoc tool) and was widely forwarded, the reaction being (understandably) mostly an amused "jeez, look what kooks these Mac people are" -- kind of the way we feel about those poor Amiga zealots :) Being angry does NOT help Apple's cause at Javasoft.

--Jens Alfke on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

March 26, 1998

If I were betting at this point, I'd bet that Microsoft's lawyers have a tough road to hoe to turn around on these crucial issues. The judge has sort of indicated a leaning in favor of Sun on the key issues of compliance with these tests that Microsoft appears to be unwilling to comply with.

--Jeffrey Shohet, trademark litigator

March 25, 1998

It's like Apple (and/or Sun) is the only piano manufacturer in the world, and they keep telling you how _wonderful_ this instrument is going to sound when they get it done. Problem is, there are only 80 keys on the release version, even though the spec shows 88, and those 80 keys just aren't in tune.

We _could_ build our own piano to Sun's spec (like HP is about to do), we can try to make our own improvements to the piano (like Microsoft), or we can try to make beautiful music with an out-of-tune piano missing a bunch of keys.

Or we can go back to playing the harpsichord.

--Jon Bodner on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

March 24, 1998

Look, when most of America's schools were built before 1960, the one thing they need is a bank of expensive computers which no one will know how to fix or even change the software on. Why do they need them? Because we need jobs with people who will pay us for doing the most mundane tasks. Why spend money on books when you can spend money on Internet consultants. I want to go to Tuscany. Wire your school and help me get there with my fat consulting fees while your kids still can't read. Hey, the Home Depot which sells the plastic sheeting which will cover the machines when the roof leaks, will make out like bandits as well. Let's share the wealth.

--Steve Gilliard on the WWWAC mailing list

March 23, 1998

The war of words over Java is empty unless we back up our words by building powerful platform-neutral applications to prove what we say. A powerful new generation of free Java applications may be exactly what it takes to end the war of words once and for all.

--Rick Ross, JavaLobby

March 22, 1998

When a client is coming to us to place something online for the consumer market, they get scared if we tell them, "it only works on Windows and only on one of the main two browsers." It is hard enough to sell a solution that involves a plug-in that works on 95% of the web user's system...and then it is only because what they want to do can't be done any other way.

--Deke Smith on the XML-L mailing list

March 21, 1998

[Sun's] blown at least part of the opportunity. They've put such tight reins on Java that they've lost the participation of key players. Anyone who now goes to HP for the JVM will also not be in the Sun camp.

Dave Folger, Meta Group

March 20, 1998

"Write once run anywhere" is a line for marketing people. I accepted that this line is not 100% true the first time I got into bed with java. Because of this, I've made it my personal responsibility to make sure the software I write works well on every platform I can get my hands on. I want java to be accepted not because of "write once run anywhere" but because of the simple beauty of the language itself.

--Dave Fletcher on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

March 19, 1998

People sometimes think you're a freak for being concerned about privacy, because they're thinking X-Files -- black helicopters of the UN reading your e-mail and sending you to the concentration camps out in Wyoming -- but I think about the Mark Fuhrman's of the world. It's not the CIA that looks up your license plate when they see your car in front of the [insert your cause here] building, it's your local law enforcement official. And he or she will probably have access to any "backdoor" equipment too, even if not entirely legally.

--Steven Goldfarb on the WWWAC mailing list

March 18, 1998

This ain't France where a bunch of academics dictate what is and is not part of the language. This here is Amurika where what people say IS the language and academics come along like cleaners at the end of a circus parade and tidy up. If most people say GIF with a hard 'G' then that's what it is in spite of the 'specification'. Besides it just feels better in the mouth.

--Robert Morse on the WWWAC mailing list

March 17, 1998

the worst thing about SGML was SGML adherents. The Web drove a hot metal spike up the complacent ass of those accustomed to glacial standards bodies processes and high profits on paltry software. And with any luck, it's also made some of the SGML adherents a little more prone to action as opposed to merely engaging in endless pedantic discussions of the limitless arcana of 8859. Here's hoping that XML will kill some of those threads forever. (Who really needs an alternate concrete syntax, anyway?)

-- Steven Champeon on the Computer Book Publishing Mailing List

March 16, 1998

The next time you hear a big-time media mogul spout "at the end of the day, content is still king," slap him upside the head. Hard. Snap his flapping jaw like a twig, forcing the surgeons to wire it shut for a while.

Because if content is king, than the monarchy is a puppet to the Web marketers and with good reason. A glance at the recent headlines from Silicon Alley shows why. Competing for eyeballs amid millions of unpaid competitors with a pure content package -- no matter how cool, revolutionary, or worthy -- does not pay the kind of bucks it takes to satisfy investors, float an IPO, or make the publishers rich. Skimming a take from a huge percentage of traffic does pay, and quite well -- although the jury is still out on whether it pays more than it costs to amass that traffic.

--Tom Watson
Read the rest in @NY

March 15, 1998

Most companies put all kinds of unenforceable clauses into their license agreements, even ones that are flatly contradicted by existing court rulings (including Supreme Court rulings in some cases).

--Greg Guerin on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

March 14, 1998

When linguists talk about "grammar", they mean a value-free description of how people use the language. When English teachers talk about "grammar", they use the term prescriptively to describe the rules that separate Standard English, the dominant dialect, from non-standard dialects.

--Frank Willison, Editor-in-Chief, Technical Publishing, O'Reilly & Associates, on the Computer Book Publishing List

March 13, 1998

I don't have the religion. I have no interest in running a crappy-looking program on five different platforms. I'm really only interested in two, and I want to have control over how my program works and looks on those. Don't make me give up a good language because you have a different view. I don't trust Sun any more than I trust Microsoft. But I hope to be able to benefit from their competition. I think I probably am.

--Bob Estes on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

March 12, 1998

[The Internet] has completely changed the way used and out-of-print books are sold. Industry experts predict Internet sales of used and new books will total about $400 million in 1998, or about 3 percent of the $12 billion-a-year retail book market. Some retailers have shuttered their shops completely, now selling only through the Internet.

--Lore Postman
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

March 11, 1998

If a wheel falls off your car while it's still under warranty and the manufacturer doesn't fix it, you may eventually get your money back. If you encounter a rude serviceperson at the dealership who denies you the service that's rightfully yours, you've got grounds for a lawsuit. It took almost a century to enact legislation to protect us from shoddy automobile workmanship. Before that, car manufacturers and dealers were getting away with murder. I'm beginning to wonder if the same isn't true today in the computer industry.

--David Berlind
Read the rest in Windows Sources

March 10, 1998

once the copyright owner places a copyrighted item in the stream of commerce by selling it, he has exhausted his exclusive statutory right to control its distribution

--U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that effectively legitimizes the grey market

March 9, 1998

Gary Eichhorn, CEO of Internet commerce software vendor Open Market, last week pulled the pin out of a hand grenade in front of the e-commerce world. Let's see what he does with his explosive.

Appropriate for the virtual world of the Net, Open Market's new ammunition is abstract but powerful: three U.S. patents for its Internet commerce technology. One could affect most anyone making or receiving Internet card payments, one covers the common "shopping cart" at most Web stores, and one lays claim to tracking visitors passing through a Web site.

--Tim Clark
Read the rest on news.com

March 8, 1998

CERT is a government-funded organization whose function is to keep system administrators appraised about security matters.

Don't you think the government ought to be listening to its own security organization? Why didn't the Pentagon apply these patches?

--Dane Jasper, ISP for the Pentagon crackers
Read the rest in Wired News

March 7, 1998

Netscape Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp. continue to battle for control of World Wide Web servers and intranets, but the pesky Apache freeware product still rules as the leader of the Internet.

--Joe Paone
Read the rest in Lan Times

March 6, 1998

Only in California can you say 'affordable housing' with a straight face and price it at $300,000

--Rick Denman, vice president of land acquisition for Summerhill homes
Read the rest in the San Jose Mercury

March 5, 1998

The software industry conference world has been edging up to this level of commercialism, but the practice is crossing new frontiers. There is no separation of editorial from advertising. There is no guarantee that anything interesting will be said because the message is paid for. In other words, to me, these conferences are so commercial that they are just commercials.

--Dave Winer
Read the rest in Davenet

March 4, 1998

Any Joe Schmoe with a modem and a computer can become a hate group. You could have a handful of guys in South Carolina, and there's seven guys and there's also seven hate groups on the Internet.

--Talia Klein, research and development coordinator for the League of Human Rights of B'nai Brith, Canada
Read the rest on ZDNet

Runner up:

The Web site for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, not only solicits membership applications and offers Klan news and information, it also sells Klan paraphernalia like T-shirts and caps. Web surfers can order an introductory video called "This Is the Klan."

-- Matthew Broersma
Same Source

March 1, 1998

..."soon" is typically how long in Mac Java time? Six months or so? Oh wait, this is from Sun -- add another six months and then quietly drop it. :-(

--Chris Adamson on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

February 28, 1998

There's a technical revolution hidden inside Windows, a far-reaching architecture, called COM. Unlike other buzzwords, COM has substance, a long history, but has suffered from Microsoft's mishandling of the marketing job, and the industry's cynicism about Microsoft.

Even so, COM *is* Windows. It's the glue that connects Windows together, apps and .asps, system software and tools. It's Microsoft's biggest strength, and therefore it's the thing they need to defend the most. COM is their runtime, and runtime is a big thing with Microsoft.

--Dave Winer
Read the rest in Davenet

February 27, 1998

I too was frustrated regarding my computer. I was forced to reboot it when I installed more memory. Of course, that was back in October, and it has been running fine (read: never turned off) since then.

UNIX is a wonderful thing.

--Andrew Gideon on the WWWAC mailing list

February 26, 1998

If Java is going to take over we are just going to have to resign ourselves to having 64MB or 128MB machines by default.

--Bill Tschumy, Vignette Corp, on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

February 25, 1998

the FBI director's proposal for domestic encryption controls is really like asking them to make a duplicate of their front door key and leave it at the post office in case he wants to get inside

--Jack Quinn, legal advisor to Americans for Computer Privacy

February 24, 1998

The ease with which information, especially in its electronic format, can now be reproduced leads to the basic conflict within the information sector. On the one hand, information users tend to share copies of information products freely. On the other hand, information producers tend to hinder the free exchange of information, so that they can maintain the extremely high profit margins possible from the negligibly low reproduction costs.

--Roberto Verzola
Read the rest in Cyberlords: The Rentier Class of the Information Sector

February 23, 1998

The standard C++ library harks back to the UNIX times with its command-line oriented standard input and output, old ASCII string libraries with functions like strpbrk whose names are unpronounceable even in Czech. Try writing even the most trivial Windows program in C++ and you'll start appreciating the help that Java provides in its simple libraries.

--Bartosz Milewski
Read the rest in The Battle of the Languages

February 22, 1998

Java Secrets is one of the best books I have read on any technical subject, and certainly one of the best on Java. A good bit of this information is not available elsewhere in any form. We used the ftp chapter among others to good effect

Chuck Duff, President of Digital Frontiers on the MRJ-DEV mailing list

February 21, 1998

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

--Albert Einstein

February 20, 1998

After years of development, security is still an issue for ActiveX.

--c|net
Read the rest in news.com's special report on Microsoft's InactiveX

February 19, 1998

Microsoft is chronically unable to produce software that interoperates reasonably with non-MS systems.

--John R. Levine, author of The Internet for Dummies, on the Computer Book Publishing mailing list

February 18, 1998

as far as I can tell, the C++ community is growing at its usual rate and has not taken a hit from Java. There may be some people using Java instead of Visual Basic for things that don't demand as many skills from programmers. C++ is a language for system development for large scale systems, which demand more efficiency. This is an issue in larger systems because you have layers upon layers that make up the system.

Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++
Read the rest in InfoWorld

February 17, 1998

Now the question is, how do we get to the next level, so that the learning materials are good enough so that it doesn't require the president of the company to be there while the person is learning the software?

--Dave Winer
Read the rest on DaveNet

February 16, 1998

Operator overloading is an example of a language feature that is a Good Thing for one application: math libraries. But once it's added to the language people start abusing it in hideous ways.

--Brian Burton on the JavaLobbyCafe mailing list

February 15, 1996

think of the reputation TeamOS/2 had for a little while because of a *very few* individuals. (At least the stuff I heard - which kept me from joining for a while.) Or go visit an unmoderated comp.os.*.advocacy newsgroup, where flames many times outnumber reason.

There's a difference between advocacy (which is what the JavaLobby should be doing) and zealotry.

--E. McCann on the JavaLobby mailing list

February 14, 1998

The bazaar method *already* supports a community of millions of users (I'm one of them), and a software industry that is looking at a lot better growth prospects than the battered and hurting Macintosh world. You guys lost your war when Steve Jobs bent over and spread 'em for His Gatesness last year -- we, as witness the Netscape announcement, are beginning to win ours.

--Eric Raymond
Read the rest on DaveNet

February 13, 1998

I really wish people would accept Java as Java and stop trying to turn it into C++. Java does not need code obfuscation (overloading) or automatic code bloat (templates).

--Brian Burton on the JavaLobbyCafe mailing list

February 12, 1998

MFC is the perfect example of misuse of #define. When Java came out I was confused that there was no typedef facility, but after working with MFC where you have LPSTR, LPCSTR, LPTSTR, CHAR, TCHAR, char, wchar_t, char *, char **, wchar_t *, wchar_t ** to express a very small number of types, I realised that Java's decision was very sensible. In Java, you call a java.lang.Spade a java.lang.Spade.

--John Farrell on the JavaLobbyCafe mailing list

February 11, 1998

So Java applets crash my browser, and the Java technology that's supposed to be cross-platform plainly isn't. A good portion of the blame for this surely belongs to Sun; the company has declined to release its hold on Java to an independent standards body, and Sun and Apple have been extremely late in delivering this so-called cross-platform technology to Mac users.

If this is what Java is all about, I'll take decaf.

--Joanna Perlstein
Read the rest in MacWeek

February 10, 1998

If you want to be taken seriously and don't want to appear as a bunch of wild-eyed religious zealots - I suggest you deal with your detractors in a straightforward, factual manner. After all, Bill Gates calm demeanor and level speech have won him a large following. Right, wrong, or indifferent - the presentation is 50% of the communication - just watch Bill Clinton sometime.

--John Ingle on the JavaLobby mailing list

February 9, 1998

The only reason any of this crap is necessary is because the current Sun heap management code sucks. I've used automatic heap management systems for about a decade now, even written a couple myself, and never have I seen one that worked so badly out-of-the-box. There's really no excuse whatsoever for having performance problems with heap growth, and you gotta wonder why in hell we can't have heap growth limited by available virtual memory -- at least as an option.

--Jim Frost on the advanced-java mailing list

February 8, 1998

Microsoft boasts about all of its millionaires. I worked there (on a very low paid contract) a few years ago and could not afford dental care. Others who worked there as real employees were struggling from pay cheque to pay cheque. The may be no ethical and no moral reasons to share his wealth, but it certainly would be the decent thing to do, both with his low paid microserfs and with others in need. Bill has said that most of his estate is left to charity -- but there are many who need charity now.

--Gerry Lowry on the Computer Book Publishing list

February 5, 1998

The only apparent shortage is one of companies willing to hire and retain a long-term workforce by offering reasonable work hours, advancement, retraining, and a modicum of job security, especially to older workers.

--Marge Wylie
Read the rest on news.com

February 4, 1998

My experience with graphics designers has been that they use frames without ever understanding, considering and accepting the implecations. People will leave a site when it uses frames. You can't bookmark properly with frames. You can't print properly with frames. Not all browsers support frames. And I have explained all these points to them until I go blue in the face, they don't care. They just want the site to look exactly as they planned, nothing else.

--Philip Gwyn on the WWWAC mailing list

February 3, 1998

And the Martha Stewart award for creative use of computer detritus goes to...

I and a couple of my authors (mostly children's authors, actually) have been making outdoor mobiles from CDs that come in the mail -- I use clear fishing line, use old metal rods I scavange from other projects (spokes from my dead bicycle worked quite well, once cut properly), and counterweights of those cheap prisms you can find just about anywhere nowadays. They stand up to the New England weather pretty well ... proving that CD-ROMs really are rather indestructible. And they serve two purposes: (1) they look darn pretty, and (2) they keep the birds away from my blueberry bushes during the summer.

--Nancy Hanger on the Computer Book Publishing Mailing List

February 2, 1998

machine translation systems work their best on fairly bad writing. The more turgid the writing, the easier the translation since translating long technical words is easy, and turgid sentences tend only to use either the verb "to be" or terms like "facilitate" or "prioritize" which mean nothing regardless of what language you translate them into.

--John R. Levine, on the Computer Book Publishing Mailing List

February 1, 1998

"choice" in computing increasingly resembles what it once was in cars. Henry Ford famously said people could have any color Model A they liked so long as it was black. In the technology world the color of choice is Wintel.

--Jai Singh
Read the rest on news.com

January 31, 1998

In the real world, as you work to design software, you have several concerns to keep in mind -- several "monkeys on your back." Each monkey competes with the others for your attention, trying to convince you to take its particular concern to heart as you work. One large, heavy monkey hangs on your back with its arms around your neck and repeatedly yells, "You must meet the schedule!" Another monkey, this one perched on top of your head (as there is no more room on your back), beats its chest and cries, "You must accurately implement the specification!" Still another monkey jumps up and down on top of your monitor yelling, "Robustness, robustness, robustness!" Another keeps trying to scramble up your leg crying, "Don't forget about execution speed!" And every now and then, a small monkey peeks timidly at you from beneath the keyboard. When this happens, the other monkeys become silent. The little monkey slowly emerges from under the keyboard, stands up, looks you in the eye, and says, "You must make the code easy to read and easy to change." With this, all the other monkeys scream and jump onto the little monkey, forcing it back under the keyboard. With the little monkey out of sight, the other monkeys return to their positions and resume their activities.

Bill Venners
Read the rest in JavaWorld

January 30, 1998

Groupware developers must also balance the desire to keep detailed and accurate records on the organization with people's inherent desire to not look bad in public. For instance, time-accounting systems that require users to assign every working minute to a billable project will never track anything remotely resembling most employee's days. The plain fact is that bio-breaks, lunches, phone calls to spouses, and gabbing with coworkers about last night's "Seinfeld" episode go hand in hand with project work. Even the most dedicated employees can seldom live up to a work day where every minute is truly billable. Instead, they fudge to protect their reputation. Budgeting and expense-tracking systems that want dollar amounts to the penny often fall prey to the same sort of "creative adjustment."

--Peter Bickford
Read the rest in Netscape's View Source

January 29, 1998

Anyway, in the good old MIT Lisp Machine days, any programmer worth his salt had two monitors on his desktop. The b&w one was for looking at source code and documentation (i.e., text). The color one was for looking at graphics generated by computer programs. When you moved a window over to the (vast more expensive) color monitor, the reduction in quality was obvious. The Macintosh community picked up this idea in the mid-1980s when the Mac II came out. But somehow the PC world never noticed that color monitors were fuzzy. I guess everyone's brain was working so much more efficiently with the help of the quality Microsoft operating systems that any slight reduction in mental acuity from monitor fuzz wasn't noticed.

--Philip Greenspun on the computer book publishing mailing list

January 28, 1998

Upside: Over the past year, Netscape has emphasized that its future lies with the enterprise side of the business. There's some justification for saying that switch is because Microsoft is eating up Netscape's browser business.

Marc Andreesen: No shit, Sherlock!

Read the rest in Upside.

January 27, 1998

So as Mac users slowly gravitate toward Windows, we can expect to hear the moaning and groaning of the self-anointed superior sect for years on end.

It's going to be far worse than the whining of the Amiga cult, which I now believe actually started as an alien invasion that was botched. The stranded aliens are Amiga users, and they're none too pleased. I, for one, was not surprised that in last week's discussion thread, an Amiga user chimed in with some propaganda. These people are like the proverbial bad penny. Thank God that Howard Stern never became an Amiga user! Talk show call-in: "Stern rules! Amiga FOREVER!" But I digress.

The thing that always stuns me, and that I saw a lot in the TalkBack comments, is the materialism of the Mac crowd. They internalize the Mac in such a way that my comments about the machine are taken as personal insults. So they feel obliged to insult me personally. I suggest that these people seek counseling (especially some of the characters whose filthy remarks caught the attention of our automatic filter and were sent straight to our virtual "penalty box"). To the fellow who demanded a reply to his assertions: This is it, buddy. In New York parlance, I got your answers right here.

--John Dvorak
Read the rest in PC Magazine

January 26, 1998

So, it's 8:00 PM in Denver, and I came to my office about an hour ago to escape from my lunatic wife and kids, who were all downstairs shouting at a TV screen showing a bunch of guys running into each other. My wife feels the need to shout at the TV because some of those guys come from the city we live in -- I can't tell which ... and not that we know them, of course, nor did we go to school with them, or even grow up in the same neighborhood, because neither my wife nor the men actually lived in this area when they were kids, and we've no real stake in this thing ... no financial gain or anything.

Anyway, I have to assume that "our" guys moved the ball further than "their" guys, because now I've got to listen to a bunch of jerks driving up and down outside, honking their horns, and shouting out their windows. I've never understood this stuff, and I guess I never will.

--Peter Kent on the Computer Book Publishing mailing list

January 25, 1998

You know, I'm not that old, but I remember the old days when people used 486 in the same sentence as "mighty" and "powerful". Now, it's in the same sentence as "3rd world country" and "testing for backward compatibility."

--Nathan Strutz on the WWWAC mailing list

January 24, 1998

I've been developing for a long time with so-called platform independent tools, and generally have found that it becomes an exercise in lowest common denominator programming; you eschew features that optimize performance and significantly enhance capabilities in favor of that "all-important" OS independence. In the end you get an application that runs in a mediocre fashion on two platforms (if you're lucky) rather than one that runs great on one. Personally, I'd rather have a real hot Windows application that reaches 90% of the market than a poor cross platform application that reaches 96% of the market.

--Kurt Cagle on the Computer Book Publishing list

January 23, 1998

Too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world -- which may explain why the average quality of software originated in the Linux community is so high

--Eric Raymond
The cathedral and the bazaar

January 22, 1998

I wouldn't consider DES strong anymore, however Triple DES still gives the Govt. the willies.

--Will Wood on the advanced-java mailing list

January 21, 1998

Some people may argue that they are bright enough to understand the program as a whole and optimize it best from that standpoint. That may be true for small programs. Everyone, no matter how bright, has a limit as to how much complexity they can process at once. When a program is architected in a well structured way, with coupling between its various parts minimized, it becomes easier to focus in on those parts that need optimization and give them the attention that they need. When you have your user interface talking directly to database access objects, business rules and processing logic become intertwined with one or both to these. In that situation it becomes difficult to think clearly about a time consuming business rule when it is intertwined with the user interface.

--Mark Grand on advanced-java

January 20, 1998

Big companies only respond to threats. They hear their competitors much better than their friends. Hey they don't really have friends! Name me one company that's being honest when they say Apple is their friend? Repeat the same exercise for Microsoft. That's not how we do it in this business.

Dave Winer

Read the rest on DaveNet

January 19, 1998

You can apply biological metaphors to languages. They move into niches, and as new needs arise, languages change over time. It's actually a practical way to design a computer language. Not all computer programs can be designed that way, but I think more can be designed that way than have been. A lot of the majestic failures that have occurred in computer science have been because people thought they could design the whole thing in advance.

--Larry Wall, creator of Perl
Read the rest in Dr. Dobb's Journal

January 18, 1998

What a lot of people are feeling now is this huge backlash. A lot of my friends in the company are wondering if it's all worth it. I mean, how did Microsoft become more hated than the government?

--Rick Segal, a former department head who left Microsoft last year
Read the whole story in the New York Times

January 17, 1998

I think of Core API as an abstract interface layer encapsulating both hardware and OS, regardless of whether runtime environment is JVM or something other. However, it's only a library. The libraries have always been an indirect source of fragmentation of PLs [programming languages] because they've been shipped as compiled images not available for an arbitrary platform. The only way to provide a portable library for C++ or Fortran or even Ada was to ship it in the source form.

Java gives a unique option of portable binary images of the libraries, even ones relying on native calls. So, Java is inherently more fragmentation-proof than all its predecessors.

--Igor I. Lisyansky on the JavaLobby mailing list

January 16, 1998

Americans must be free to communicate privately, without the government listening in.

--Senator John D. Ashcroft (R-MO)

Full story on Wired.

January 11, 1998

Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.

--unknown

January 9, 1998

The promise of Java, once so bright, is not so bright now. Sun is playing a stock market game. Their developer story is full of lies and unanswered questions.

--Dave Winer (read the rest on DaveNet)

January 8, 1998

If Microsoft is going to insist that their case be investigated and judged entirely by people who have never suspected Microsoft products of screwing up something on their system, they might as well insist that no one who owns a computer can assess their guilt.

--Charles Herold on the WWWAC mailing list

January 7, 1998

Sun really ought not to try to control the standard, but rather should trust ISO to do this, after all this is why the ISO exists - in the ideal world - to be an commercially impartial body to umpire between competing parties. Sun cannot be umpire and competitor, otherwise things will most certainly go awry and we will slay one dragon only to replace it with another.

--Mark Kettlewell on the JavaLobby mailing list

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