Thanks to Susan and her Small Business Server blog for reminding me of one of the most wasteful programming practices from which we PC users suffer: Sun's Java update program. If you've been using and updating Java for a while and you check Add/Remove Programs (Programs and Features on Vista), you'll see more than one copy of Java installed. Susan's PC shows quite a few, a situation I've seen myself in the past. When you install an update, Sun leaves all of the previous versions on the system. If I remember correctly, the rationale for this is that there may be applications on the system that require that version of Java, but this seems like a thin basis on which to leave 136MB of useless stuff on the computer. And is Java really that vulnerable to version dependencies? So if I install a new system with a new copy of Java, the app won't work because it required last week's version? Susan is right, this is something that Sun needs to fix. We complain about a lot of other companies; we need to put some heat on Sun.