brainsnorkel.com

This is a screenshot from the Add/Remove Programs interface on a Windows 2000 PC I’ve used for 18-24 months as my primary work machine. I’ve changed to a laptop, so I’m gradually cleaning it up for backups and its inevitable acquisition as a testing asset. I was almost all the way through removing my Java SDKs when I thought “that’s a long list of…”

In fact, that’s quite a hunka-hunka burning Java love! That’s almost 700MB in assorted Java Runtime Environment (JRE) goodness.

I realise that disk space is getting cheaper by the minute, but that’s still quite a number. It’s entropy in action. Write once, run anywhere there’s a compatible JRE (that’s usually installed along with the application you need to use) in action too.

Sun recommends that “…you keep older versions of the JRE on your system. If you are running low on disk space, you can uninstall older versions of the JRE.” I’m not running low, so I’ll take their advice. After all I run two “HTML runtime engines,” — they take up plenty of space and one of them can’t even *be* removed.