Following on from Adam Fields, I'd like to add (with lots of spoilers):

• In a galaxy far, far away, missiles that release funny little robots that try to eat your spaceship are considered far more useful than missiles that, say, explode.
• Maybe the Jedi temple should just spend less time on that flashy lightsaber stuff, and more time teaching novices to “Use the Brain.”
• Dragonball Z shows up in the weirdest places these days: “Dooku! My power-level has doubled since we last fought!”
• Given how only one person made the connection between a pregnant senator and the guy who was living with her, we can assume that people a long, long time ago haven't yet worked out where babies come from.
• Clones always inherit the New Zealand accent of their parent genetic material.
• Two wookies looking sideways at each other and moaning could be considered homoerotic, but only if it were possible to tell what sex a wookie is.
• Jedi: from tortured conscience to baby-killer in sixty seconds.
• Jedi also go from ‘impossible to kill’ to ‘deer in headlights’ whenever it's convenient, so to ensure success in killing Jedi just make sure you plan to do it in a way that advances the plot.
• Using the cutesy sci-fi term ‘younglings’ over the perfectly servicable English equivalent ‘children’ makes me far less sympathetic when they're slaughtered.
• After defeating the man you loved as a brother in combat, the compassionate Jedi way is to leave him to burn alive rather than deliver the coup de grace.
• A Jedi's power to be unaffected by the heat of several million tonnes of molten rock quite obviously resides in his feet.
• ‘Because it would be cool’ is sufficient excuse for any abuse — no matter how flagrant — of continuity, the laws of physics, or just plain common sense.

Music thing is doing a pretty cool series on the origins of various little sounds that are played every day: they've covered the THX "deep note", the Macintosh startup sound, the Brian Eno Windows 95 sound and the Intel Inside notes.

To hear the Channel 4 Jingle (notable because it earned its creator £3.50 every time it was played, or approximately £1000 a week over ten years -- not bad for four notes!), it seemed I would have to download RealPlayer.

Credit where credit is due, Real finally include on their homepage a prominent, obvious link to download the free version of the player. That said, I still don't feel well enough disposed towards this company to trust them with my email address. So when prompted for the necessary registration, I type in goober@example.com. (By using example.com, you ensure there's no chance any poor innocent bystander will be spammed).

real.com's response was immediate:

So it seems not only am I not alone in having a serious mistrust of Real's address-harvesting policies, I'm sufficiently not alone that my utterly lame random address has been used before.

(Picking a slightly more random @example.com address worked fine, so it wasn't just a blanket block on the domain.)

There's possibly a lesson in this, somewhere.

Featuring employee blogs on your company's website is a very cluetrain thing to do. It exposes the unedited, individual voices that make up your organisation, free from the sanitised, corporate veneer. Generally it makes your company look alive, progressive and interesting.

So what happens when you're a magazine publisher whose founder and CEO has apparently just said "What does ethics have anything to do with professional reporting and journalism?" in a published interview, and the senior editorial staff of one of your magazines has resigned in protest?

Well, the front page of your flagship website looks something like this:

If this sounds like a bit of a cheap shot, it might be because my opinion of this particular publisher was already soured by previous experiences.

Update: An hour later, of course, the offending posts have been excised from the front page. But it was funny while it lasted.

Today's big Slashdot Java news was the announcement of Harmony, an Apache-licensed implementation of J2SE 5, Tiger.

I hate to be the bearer of stop energy, but I really can't see anything useful coming out of this project in the short, medium, or even the long-term.

Exhibit A, from the Harmony FAQ:

10) Do you have any code to start?
-----------------------------------

No, we don't. We didn't want to "bless" any given implementation that might be donated (if such a thing could happen) but would rather let the community decide how it will create and develop the platform.

I've written this rant before, twice, but I'll say again that this is the worst possible way to start. I would almost go as far as saying that starting an open source project with no code and a committee trying to decide what to do next spells inevitable doom.

The best way to start an open source project is with code. Working code. Hack away at home on weekends, maybe get a couple of friends to help you out, and don't go public until you have something to show people that does something interesting, and that other people can use to build more interesting stuff on top of. You need this for a bunch of different reasons: it establishes the original contributor's bona fides in the open-source meritocracy, it shortcuts all sorts of damaging debates about coding styles and architecture that can stop a project before it starts, and so on.

Most importantly, though: working code attracts people who want to code. Design documents attract people who want to talk about coding. I've seen what happens on projects that start with no code and a commitment to produce a design. Some of the procession of UML diagrams were really well put together, but that's about the extent of it.

Even looking at the initial Harmony proposal document: with twelve names on the list of people volunteering to assist with design and architecture, only nine of them have also volunteered to contribute code. And the fact that these nine felt they needed an incubator, a formal structure and an official public announcement before they started hacking together doesn't bode well.

Exhibit B is the state of the art in existing open-source Java implementations, which is cheerfully dismal. All the existing projects are very worthy, have had a lot of hard work go into them, and are only useful as curiosities, research projects, or something to package with a Linux distribution that will cause all sorts of conflicts when you install a real JDK.

The problem is that with the gratis availability of a fully-featured, mature and advanced Java VM from Sun, there are really only two reasons to write a Free replacement:

1. An ideological objection to non-Free software
2. So Linux distributions can package a JDK

Most developers are pragmatists. Give us the choice between hacking on something new and interesting, and slaving away over a lot of compatibility edge-cases to reproduce something that is already freely (gratis) available, just so Linux geeks don't have to download the JDK from Sun like the rest of us, and... you get the idea. Unless one of the few remaining cashed-up Linux distributors (are there any?) decide to invest some serious developer time to bringing Free Java to the masses, most hackers are going to see it as a dead-end.

Maybe Harmony will prove me wrong. All I'm saying is the odds are stacked pretty heavily against it, and maybe we should have waited until there was something to show before trumpeting the project across the blogosphere.

Proffered without comment:

The Powermac range was refreshed, and the Final Cut suite updated last month. Tiger was only released last week. The iMac was refreshed today.

Meanwhile, it's only a month until WWDC. There's the usual scattering of "TBA" sessions throughout the schedule, and I can't imagine Steve Jobs not saving up something cool to announce during the keynote.

So I guess the question is: what's Apple doing next? Well, I had a few ideas.

• ChiaMac - Organic Computing for the Masses
• Following the success of the Mac Mini's BYODKM approach, Steve introduces the G5 Powerbook with BYOLNCS (Bring Your Own Liquid Nitrogen Cooling System)
• OS X 10.4.1, 'Tigger'. With FIVE new features!
• The Mac Tablet (delivered to Steve on stage by a squadron of flying pigs)
• Nothing, but in an accidentally double-booked Garageband demo, Trent Reznor builds a five minute musical opus from the sound of John Mayer being stabbed to death.

(If you have a Livejournal account, you can vote for your preferred option here.)