He created his webpage with Netscape 3.0, running on Windows 95. Wow.

That must be why his message is very short: Bad movies should be much more compressible... =)

There is also some pain in the ass procedure

Eww... I won't be travelling there soon....

In my experience, in a modern server PHP uses more CPU than Java. You might be right about slow machines though. I don't understand why you make such a big deal about servlets vs jsp, as jsp is just a technology to ease the construction of servlets (every jsp gets converted into a servlet)... And I don't agree you can't compare PHP to Java, they try to serve the same purpose.

Some time ago I *had* to work with PHP. I haven't known it before that. Now I hate it =). At that time I wrote a comparison, out of anger about PHP being so much used. This is the comparison Java - PHP I have wrote.

The standard desktop is better than Google desktop. Yes, everybody says, to put Google in a good light: "standard compliant" browsers, but that means nonstandard compliant mail, nonstandard everything else. We won't own software, we'll be always customers, dumb terminals, served from huge company's "clouds". Free software will be over, irrelevant. We won't be able to improve and modify our environment, we can't improve Gmail ourselves, there's no alternative/better/innnovative client for Gmail.

Economic forces are taking technology down a terrible path. The past is better: a world of protocols, servers and clients. A common neutral space...

The "portable" desktop, having your data everywhere should be solved by other means... I don't know, perhaps we should have personal servers, or at least we should contract personal servers from some kind of "personal server providers", which should be a standard and non-monopolistic thing. The "presence providers" envisioned by the XMPP protocol comes to mind...

There's no need. There are no segementation faults in Java. There's no way you can access memory you don't own. And then, any error just provokes an exception, which can be catched.

You are right that Java model help with the need of having finer-grain-than-a-process security. It's partly because it was made for applets. Java supports running safely completely untrusted code.

And your objection to "virtualness" can be replied with an analogy of C vs assembly language. In Java you loose control, but the VM gains control to optimize... just as in C, gcc usually knows more about how to optimize. And speed-wise Java is very good, is at most 2x slower than pure C (I think it's even faster), which is a great thing actually.

Java "machine code" targets an abstract CPU which can handle "objects", "methods". You can disassemble compiled Java code and you see "invokevirtual" which means "invoke a virtual method on an object".

Then, an object in Java is a fundamental thing, there's no way to "decompose" it. There no way of getting its memory image. This has some nice properties:

• The vm can reorder object fields to play nice with machine's alignment.
• Security, you only can access the objects you have been given to. There's no pointer arithmetic. At all.
• All objects know who they are, there are no undetected wrong casts (similar to the newer dynamic casts C++ now have)

Absurd, Marx was a "hit" well before any revolution happened. And there were lots of other "revolutionaries" in the XIX century that nobody care about now. Marx is relevant because the amazingly sharp analysis of capitalism.

... so... wouldn't it be the same just putting your data in the body of an ICMP echo message (ping)?