Throwback Thursday isn’t for the Java Runtime Environment

The Java Runtime Environment is one of the nastiest pieces of software ever foisted upon mankind. It’s difficult to secure when people have the will, and few people have the will to even try. So nasty ancient versions of the JRE live forever.

That’s not to say I’ve completely given up on the Quixotic quest to get rid of it. Earlier this week, I exhorted, “Can we please not use the JRE that Ada Lovelace wrote for Charles Babbage?”

That stopped everyone dead in their tracks with a laugh. “That’s good.”

Hopefully they think it’s a good idea too. Because with all the hacks they would have had to do to get Lovelace’s JRE running on a Von Neumann architecture machine, there’s no way the thing can be stable, let alone secure.

Speeding up Openoffice

This week the usual sources were flooded with stories about how slow and bloated Openoffice is. I guess this came on the heels of the release of version 2.0; it’s never been much of a secret that Openoffice was big and slow. It’s descended from Staroffice, after all, and it was big and slow too.

Speedup tips ensued.

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