Please quote old chap Feynman on that Cargo Cult thing here, too.

Hmm, /tmp/JAVAjava - will they change their SUNW package names too, I wonder?

Suns use and abuse of JAVA is pretty well known but I thought they made their real money in hardware these days at least it won't matter at all because the only people currently active in the NASDAQ and NYSE are pros those 300 up/down days are shaking the idiots out of the market pretty quickly you would need to be drunk to buy their stock anyway.

Remember when that other company nearby that used to be called Hewlett Packard had its ticker symbol 'HWP'. Now the company is now just 'HP' and its ticker symbol is 'HPQ'. Regrests that Bill and Dave are not with us, but I don't think they would approve. Of course Agilent is 'A' where the real legacy of Bill and Dave resides, but that is another story.

Other ticker symbols of note:

BUD - Anheuser-Busch

LUV - Sowthwest Airlines

Or will people mostly associate the word JAVA with....

"A New Java Update is Available for Download!

Click this Bubble To Continue!"

I think this will be an exciting boost to the Sun stock! If only for a short time...it will be sooo fun to watch it explode-which I'm sure it will!

Wow. Around here, JAVA is synonymous with slow, buggy, brain-damaged applications.

How many times has a group announced a major new tool everyone has to use ... and you need Java 2.37363a. But if you have Java 2.37362b it will work sometimes. But not other times. And if you have 2.37263a, forget it ... your system may never work properly again.

And even if the application does work, it's slow and quirky and frustrating. JAVA has become so synonymous with crud, people groan when they hear the word.

And the company wants to identify with it? Wow.

Java is actually a fantastic enterprise programming language. The tools for developing it, profiling it, refactoring it blow away the competition. Sun should be proud. In many many cases its performance outstrips the likes of C++. I don't know what environment the previous poster is working in but my experience has been very different.

Anyone can write buggy software. But with Java applets, you can write software which works on all versions of Java.

Java was the only way we could write an application which supports real time editing, publishing and hosting of full frame rate video, used by broadcasters around the world to make TV programmes, on their exisiting computers (which have a wide range of ages and capabilities).

And all from a web browser without requiring installation or granting permissions.

Is that you Bill ? Lowering yourself to posting on TheReg now? Still pursuing that .NET thing of yours? hehe

"Java is actually a fantastic enterprise programming language."

Yes, it really is, but it's still associated with a lot of really, really shitty programs.

Your experience was probably more in developing it, it sounds. Mine too, and I love it.

But before that, my exposure was through Limewire, a horrifically slow, quirky, defective program. And Java applets which are all horrifically slow, quirky and defective and often crash the whole browser.

It's a great system with a lot of terrible software written with it. For a lot of people that builds bad associations even though we as developers may love it.

...kill the entire marketing division of Sun.

They make the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation look professional.

Not on my quad core - it now runs as fast as my basic programs did on my commodore 64.

Want bad code? Look at Visual Basic. *That's* bad. Java / J2EE is much, much better on that, in fact so good that good ole Billy Gates copied it over and branded it as .net, which is j2ee for retards.

As for Sun changing its ticker ... sad. As much as they are defined a lot by Java, SUNW looks better for a ticker. :(

When Java first came out it was interpreted and slow. But that was many years ago.

These days the just-in-time compiler is often as fast (and sometimes faster) than C++. It can, after all, make use of information not available until the program is running, unlike a language like C++.

We find that our Java applets automatically use the multiple CPUs on modern machines, giving excellent performance.

I have worked on systems that now run at major banks in North America. If it was that slow you would never be able to be able to do a withdrawal at those banks :p

Slow Java blah blah blah since about 1995. Supposing that the slowsayers have actually gotten away from Mom's PC, one can only write this down to "permanent juvenile phase" or the evident need to have their company replace that white box that's been written off for 5 years. So tiresome.

Only now it's not applet execution anymore. It's the VM itself.

On my 2 GHz dual-core it still takes at least 10 seconds to load the Java runtime, with non-stop disk activity the whole time. During this waiting period Firefox grinds to a halt and before the coffee cup even appears I can tell that, yes, it is another website loading a 30MB+ Java VM into memory to display a ticker or some other crap that has been possible with the <MARQUEE> tag since HTML 2.0, minus the 10-second delay. Now I say this without even mentioning the irritation that their dialog controls bring me... and yes, I'm talking about the buttons and scrollbars that look like they were designed to emulate a UNIX box from 1992.