[rant] I'm not one to spend time understanding what type of business model mantra PC Week and Infoworld chant, but their lack of presence at the local newstand has been an irritation for years. Add the fact that they offer free subscriptions to "qualified" individuals and you'll end up finding me spending 20-30 minutes at every Comdex forging an application that I believe represents the type of reader they're looking for (read: I WORK FOR A BIG CORPORATION. I HAVE SIX DIGIT HARDWARE BUDGET. Please send this to my home address. PLEASE BELIEVE ME). So far, I've managed subscriptions for four of the past eight years.

Why not PC World? Or Byte? This monthly periodicals are great, but they're snail-like in their coverage. We're living in the industry where Microsoft fires a volley across the bow of Netscape on Monday morning and Netscape had better shoot back before Monday night or you'll see a six point drop in their stock come Tuesday. In a month the battle is over, so who cares? What news in this industry needs an expiration date. Weekly periodicals have solved the time issue to a certain degree, but, thankfully, the web solves it better.

[sift this] When the Apple Newton arrived, they're were news crews wandering local malls, interviewing folks about what they thought about the latest craze -- personal digital assitants. They're was intrigue, this is a computer? But there was confusion, my name isn't Cucumber, it's Christopher.

I was this close to buying a Newton a year agobut it just never came together. There was nothing compelling that pushed me over the cusp. It seems someone was learning from Apple's mistakes....

[?] I asked Chuck in Colorado about the feeling of futility folks have while competing against Microsoft, his reply "Just because the MS crowd has been at it a little longer, and are ruthless in their approach, should not imply they cannot be beaten. If you can relate to someone who kills for pleasure, then you have access to the required skillset necessary to destroy your enemy. What could be more fun?" Chuck creates high-performance abstract-machine based prolog and common lisp compilers. He also hunts.

[rant] While they were reconfiguring my office for the "high" configuration, I had some time to peruse O'Reilly & Associates' Java in a Nutshell. I'll be honest, I haven't spent much time digesting the Java model, but I kept hearing that it didn't have pointers -- this concerned me. After reading Nutshell, I'm comfortable with the market Java is going for -- it's the "We don't write device drivers folks" it's trying to appease and, from what I can see, it's a compelling language.

What I haven't seen is the killer app. Nothing I've seen in Java has been more than a glorified proof of concept and some of the better applets took the better part of two to three minutes to execute on my machine (P133, Navigator 3.0 B4, big fire hose of a net connection). Who is going to write the killer app? Is it going to work on the ever-slowing Internet of 1996? No clue, but I think I know what it might look like.