So, Microsoft wasn’t shipping Java? Boo-fucking-hoo. Java on the web has been an insecure, browser-crashing nightmare from day one, and applications written in it are poorly integrated into native GUI libraries and sloooooooooow.

By begging the courts to force Microsoft to ship Java with Windows, Sun has publicly admitted something I’ve suspected for a long time: consumers don’t want Java enough to download it. What this means is that after years of hype and shelves full of overpriced programming books, there’s still nothing written in Java that’s cool enough, sexy enough, useful enough for ordinary people to be willing to download the installer from Sun’s web site and run it.

Will this court order change that? Will the Java hackers of the world wake up with stiffies tomorrow and start madly coding those killer apps they’ve been putting off for five years? Will Sun’s stock price come back out of the gutter? Probably not.

Hell, the only thing I use Java for is PCGen. I don’t see that changing any time soon.