Comedian Denis Leary has a routine about cocaine that reminds me of my reaction to Java animations. He says, "Yeah, cocaine makes a lot of sense. I want a drug that makes my nose bleed, sucks all the money out of my bank account and makes my penis small. Sure." And what do I think about Java? "I want to spend all day waiting for an applet to load that may compromise my system's security and is about as entertaining as watching a guy making a dog out of balloons. Sure."

If Java animations are so wonderful, would anybody be using animated GIFs? I'm tired of LED billboards and scrolling text and little sprites jumping around. So instead of wasting your time by putting a Java program in the frame above, I just put in a placemark.

I want you to realize that I'm a firm believer Java will be important for writing cross-platform applications. It's just not a graphics tool until we get more bandwidth and bandwidth is farther off than you think — unless you live in really large cities or in those towns that are testing sites.

I recently received an e-mail from someone working at a very large corporation who had some very interesting comments to add that might contradict what I said in the paragraph above.

"...Not to mention that the whole platform independence idea is just a crock. Take it from a guy who spent weeks writing a Java applet (no, not just a silly graphic tool), only to find out that it crashed in every other operating system than the one I designed it in. Platform independence at its best."