BW thinks Apple's School Days are Numbered.  "Mom and dad have spoken, and what they say is this:  Why should my child work on a Mac in class when most people use PCs at home and in the office?"  Good point...  I love Macs myself, and all my kids have one, but this point is tough to work around.

The Rolling Stones, one of the last marquee holdouts against online music distribution, have finally agreed to sell their music online.  They'll be on Real's Rhapsody exclusively (i.e. not Apple Music Store).  Guess they're showing some sympathy for the devil...

Dan Gillmor says RSS is hitting critical mass.  Excellent.  It isn't mainstream - yet - but it sure is useful, and its use is spreading quickly.  Do you use an RSS aggregator?  (Please take my survey :)

Remember Nutch?  (An open source search engine, sometimes mentioned as a competitor for Google.)  My friend Gary points out "Nutch is written in Java.  End of story – it'll never compete.  You need native code for this kind of stuff."  Yeah, probably true.

I continue to mess around with Java, in the form of IBM's eclipse framework.  It is a beautiful IDE and makes Java development of desktop applications very easy.  However, deploying desktop applications is not easy; you have to use Sun's Java Web Start, which is a whole lot more complicated than simply distributing an .EXE.  And there seem to be performance problems...  Of course, it is cross-platform, but that only helps developers, not users.