It hits me that Apple's idea of calling the newest version of its operating system "OS X" at the same time they hit version 10.0 overall doesn't scale very well. What happens when they eventually go to version 11.0? Do they use OS XI? That seems a little silly. Do they keep it OS X though it's now version 11? How do you now pronounce "OS X" anyhow?

This is even worse than having MRJ's version number on OS 9- (MRJ is Apple's Java virtual machine) have absolutely nothing to do with the version of Java it represents. MRJ 2.2 is not Java 2; it's actually Java 1.1.8 (or maybe even 1.1.7).

Course Java 1.2 is called the "Java 2" platform -- as is Java 1.3 and 1.4, so Sun's not much better.

Then of course there's Windows 2000, which tells you on each boot up that it's based on Windows NT technology. Course NT means "New Technology", so I'm not sure where that's going (Win2k is based on ["old and proven'] New Technology technology) -- and Win2k isn't related to Win98, but WinME is based on Win98 -- but in its turn doesn't share a kernel with WinXP, another Windows version with two letters instead of approximate years. And Win98SE? You'd think we'd ordered a custom-built car from the factory.

And don't get me started on ASP's relation to ASP.NET. Suffice it to say that ASP stands for "Active Server Pages" in one acronym and apparently stands for *nothing* in the other, if you believe all Microsoft tells you. And then there's the whole Visual J++ 3.0 (?) to 6.0 jump before its switch to Visual J#. Is there something about Java that makes things hard to name?

It's all horribly confusing.