Great news from the JavaOne conference!

To me, the single biggest overall announcement at this year's JavaOne was that both Dell and HP will be bundling JREs onto all of their computers. This is a huge end-run around Microsoft's attempts at balkanizing and marginalizing Java on the desktop. Over time, this sort of bundling can dramatically change the network effects of becoming much more ubiquitous for normal users. From this perspective, the creation of the java.com portal for consumers is good support, and a clear indication that Sun is finally starting to do something about the needs of the end users of Java technology.

That's huge. That's great. I can't wait. Hope it's true, ie "pans out".

Lesser-ly-great, but interesting:
Apple PowerBooks are now definitively the developer's choice for laptops. At this JavaOne, the ratio was about 50% PowerBooks and 50% everything else. More specifically, most were the older Titanium PowerBooks, but there was a nice showing of the new Aluminum PowerBooks. I toted my new 17" PowerBook (the "aircraft carrier") for the entire week -- it wasn't as painful as I expected. :-) In terms of Java, Apple's machines support hardware-accelerated Swing, which makes for a much nicer Java GUI experience.

Makes me want that 12" Powerbook G4 again.