While it is a small change, it is fairly radical to tinker with an area of hardware which has been largely unchanged since the 19th century.

Every keyboard I've ever used has been different. I wish there was a spec, and it was tied to a circa 1997 Microsoft Natural keyboard.

A store would be interesting, especially if Sun leveraged the cross-platform power of Java to let people run the same game on multiple computers. Play something on your desktop at home, get up in the morning and play the same game on your mobile device on the train.

But that's not what he's talking about at all.

Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism.

As Schwartz mentions in his post, the Java update mechanism recently offered to install the Google toolbar. It was configured to install by default.

What Schwartz is talking about is getting paid to distribute applications by the Java update mechanism. That install by default unless you tell it not to.

The first time somebody runs the Java updater, it will install some software. The user will promptly uninstall the software and the Java updater, and perhaps Java itself.

I have an iPhone. I used to have a Treo on VZN. I really miss the ability to tether my phone to my laptop, and I really miss the great speed and coverage of VZN. It cost the same as the data plan for the iPhone, too.

The iPhone is cool, but there's no Rhapsody client, actually doing anything in ssh with the iPhone kbd is impossible, as is remote desktop over VPN.

Researchers from HP Palo Alto studied videos uploaded to YouTube

I see I'm not the only one who gets paid to do this.

Note that many desktop apps hit web services or communicate via HTTP now, mostly because it's 1. easy and 2. SOA became the flavor of the month about a year or so ago.

Also, many enterprise web apps, at least that I've used, have some sort of plugin/JVM requirement. Are they a desktop app? Web app? Some awesomely funky in-between?

Personally, I think these "thick vs. thin" client discussions are a nice waste of time and excuse to get page impressions.

Let's deconstruct, shall we?

What sense does that make when any modern laptop packs enough CPU and GPU power to put yesterday's Cray supercomputer to shame?

Running Outlook and Office will immediately slow that poor laptop to molasses. Add a nice shiny .NET app, or worse, Java, and you've got yourself a tarpit.

Web UIs are a mess

You, my friend, have never used internally developed VB6 apps. I say no more.

Browser technologies are too limiting.

For some applications, I completely agree. But not everybody needs to see dynamic fluid modeling or stock quotes for 3000 securities in a real-time heatmap.

The big vendors call the shots.

Good call, time to turn to Java and .NET, which aren't controlled by big vendors.

Should every employee have a browser?...But if your internal applications are Web-based, you'll need to either host them onsite or maintain careful router or firewall rules to prevent abuse of your Internet services.

Because deploying and maintaining desktop apps across thousands of machines is wicked easy.