Tablets didn't fail so much as tablet PCs failed. Stuff like cell phones, GPS units, book readers, personal media players, PDAs, smart remote controls and the like are all quite successful and available as small tablets, but they're not PCs. Designing a bigger and better one of those is more natural than trying to make a laptop usable without a keyboard.

After 1.6_10 and JavaFX, they're effectively one and the same. There's a JavaFX demonstration of an experimental feature where you can drag the Applet from its spot in the page and it becomes a regular JWS application with only the slightest pause as it spawns a new OS-level container. I'm pleasantly surprised to see all that Sun's done to improve Applets even after they've mostly failed in the market.

I wait with bated breath for a hyperlink that I can click on to play an Ajax version of Quake 2. Until then I'll just have to make do with http://www.bytonic.de/downloads/jake2_jogl11.jnlp instead.

If the new codecs work the same way image formats do, you just put the new set of codecs in a jar, stick them in the extension directory, and then every single Java app can use them with no further configuration.

I figured they just kept one zeroed page and made it copy-on-write so that it's not actually cleared out until it's actually needed. That way if you decide that you want every program you run to have a 32 MB stack and they only use 128 kB on average, they've all got room to grow without using much real RAM. It also eliminates the need to handle a special zeroing operation since copy-on-write of a zero page would do the exact same thing.

Yep. Windows is really just pretty damn aggressive about it and will happily back everything to disk if it's given the chance. That way when it needs more room to cache a file for instance it's got a lot of different choices.