During a recent visit to my parents, I upgraded their win95 box to use Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox by default. This is a real milestone for me since it's the first time I've felt comfortable promoting free software solutions to this particular pair of senior citizens. Real problems are being solved: Thunderbird's spam filtering handles the unbelievable quantities of spam they receive, and Firefox can render modern web sites that the win95 compatible IE can't. Upgrading to XP wasn't even an option, since it won't install on their IBM Aptiva. Hurray for Free Software!

java benchmarks

I really need to update my java benchmarks page now that GCC 3.4 and mono beta 1 are available. Today I found a benchmark that tests thread creation/destruction and I/O that runs almost 4 times faster with gij than IBM's JVM. Definitely one for my fair and balanced benchmark list...