My post asking about one 30" monitor or two 23" monitors generated quite a few comments. After reading The Large Display Paradox, it seems like I should either find something like WinSplit Revolution for the Mac, or get 2 monitors. I agree with everything that Jeff Atwood says about maximizing windows, that's why I originally thought two 23" monitors might be better.
However, the problem with two monitors is I'd need to get Matrox's DualHead2Go Digital Edition to run both on my PowerBook MacBook Pro. Frederic notes some issues I might experience with this device:
It worked ok with 2 17" LCD monitors but did have some issues with most games... One thing to keep in mind is that it may not have the bandwidth to drive anything over 2x1280x1024.
I don't play games (too addictive), but if I can't drive both monitors at 1900x1200, it's probably not worth it.
So you're getting a 30" monitor then?
Maybe, but there's a problem with the 30" that I didn't think of: I'd need dual video cards in my Windows box to drive it. Not only that, my KVM switch probably can't handle a 30" monitor. If I'm wrong, and I can drive a 30" monitor through a single DVI KVM switch, let me know. In the meantime, I'm strongly considering a single 23" with my MacBook Pro on an iCurve next to it. That gives me dual monitors when I'm on the Mac, but not on Windows. That's OK - I don't use my Windows box that much anyway.
When I first read The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, I didn't think much of it. I believe I read it on some sort of news website, so I didn't realize folks would be so passionate about it. Reading the comments on Jonathan's blog is quite entertaining and smells somewhat of a TSS thread - except there's no back-and-forth banter. Dave provides a good roundup of reactions in Blogs on Sun's new stock ticker.
For me, one of the most interesting things to fall out of this is James Duncan Davidson's Remembering Java Naming Blunders Past.
Back in 1998 or so, there were a bunch of people in Cupertino?working in a building that used to belong to Apple?working to finish up the largest and most complicated release of the JDK to that date: JDK 1.2. Compared to JDK 1.0 and 1.1, it was enormous. It had slipped schedule a few times. And there were lots of changes and new APIs everywhere. So many that it was the first release where it was almost impossible to know how to use every Java API out there.
The powers that be really wanted to commorate this in a big way. They wanted to make a big splash when they officially launched the new version of Java in December of 98 at the Java Business Expo in New York. So, they decided to rename Java. I found out about this, along with all the other engineers working on Java, at an all-hands meeting in Cupertino.
The name was? wait for it? Java2000.
I met James at a MySQL Conference a few years back and he's full of stories like this. If you ever get a chance to hear one of his stories about the early days of Java at Sun - I highly recommend it.
