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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Patriot Scientific - PTSC -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bob who wrote (6283)	3/13/1999 9:15:00 PM
From: bob	Respond to of 8581

I'ts a long and lonely road we've been on, but I do think there is light at the end of the Java tunnel after all. Patriot could be a big winner someday. zdnet.com e-volution Renewed faith in Java casts Sun in savior role ... again By Scot Petersen March 8, 1999 9:00 AM ET No one said being a savior is easy. Just ask the Sun Microsystems unit formerly known as JavaSoft. Just last spring, Java was in trouble. The platform that was going to save the computing world from Microsoft, with cross-platform computing, seemed to be going nowhere fast. Java Development Kit 1.2 and the HotSpot compiler were far from ready, and corporate Java deployments were going slowly. Meanwhile, Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft was languishing, and a corporate reorganization was pending. Up the coast, Microsoft had just staked an in-your-face claim to Java with the release of platform-centric Windows Foundation Classes and an upgrade to the Visual J++ tool. Worst of all: Java's hype was gone. Today, Sun's Java 2 platform has been met with praise from developers and ISVs. HotSpot is due for real in April, and Sun's sweet deal with America Online and Netscape will enable millions of users to get the advanced Java run-time (see story). Meanwhile, all indications are that Microsoft, notwithstanding legal maneuvers and appeals, will lose its lawsuit to Sun and be forced to play ball with Java or take its ball and go home. "We went through a very difficult period," said Alan Baratz, president of Sun's Java division, in a recent interview with PC Week. "When we first launched Java [in late 1995] we could do no wrong. The press loved us. We were the darlings of the industry. Everybody viewed [Java] as industry-transforming technology, the universal cure. About a year and a half into it we started to get questions like, Where's the performance? Where's the stability? Where are the applications? Is this thing real or not?" The criticism was well-deserved and, in many cases, still is. No one is going to mistake a Java applet running over the Web with a local application or ActiveX control. And nothing could live up to the expectations Scott McNealy set for it. If anything, his wisecracking sermons served to turn people off to Java. The problem now facing Sun, Baratz asserts, is getting the technology into developers' hands and end-user computers. That's why the AOL deal is so important: Pending shareholder approval this spring, it gives Sun a broad and accessible channel to get Java--and Java updates--to users faster and easier than before. The idea is to get people to use Java without them necessarily knowing it. That will happen when Java becomes part of a computer's base platform. Sun would be wise not to get too giddy. There's much work to be done. Java's most fertile ground, in embedded systems and server components, has yet to be sowed. The advanced JavaBean architecture won't be ready until 2000. More important, with all that opportunity comes responsibility. Totalitarian methods may garner market share, but they don't win friends and influence people. Sun needs to prove its technology serves the public more than it does Sun's bottom line. Sun took a big step with its Community Source License plan, but it needs to take the next step and free Java completely. It won't, on the grounds that it can't guarantee compatibility otherwise. But if Linux and the open-source movement have taught us anything, it's that it will work if you want to make it work. Hey, no one ever said being a savior is easy.