Being justifiably suspicious about how Java does things, I checked the Java directory. Sure enough, there was shiny new "Java JRE 5.0 update 2". It was right next to the "Java JRE 5.0 update 1" folder. That's right, it installed 128 meg of updated JRE and left 128 meg of the previous JRE right there to sit unused forever.
The Java people are the most brilliant I've ever seen at shooting themselves in the foot. Every time they decide to embrace a feature that everybody seems to be doing nowadays (like making software automatically check for updates and update itself) they do it in a boneheaded way which will get fixed for the next major revision in two years.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Sun screwed up Java royally. They grabbed everyone's attention early on with web page applet scripting technology that was literally years ahead of everyone else. They could've owned the friggin' market for web applets, and they totally blew it with unfriendly installs, runtime versioning nightmares, and general stuff that's gone completely against everything that made applets promising --applications that are seamlessly cross platform, are easy to maintain, and are trivial to administer.
Zero outta three ain't bad. Oh wait, yes it is.
