Maintainance release… nothing ground breaking 
Over at Apple’s Developer Connection registered devs can find “Java 1.4.2 Update 1 Developer Preview 1” for Mac OS X, wich should be on the level of Sun’s Java 1.4.2_04.
Um. If it fixes my chroot problem, that’s pretty groundbreaking - the difference between “java runs on a system” and “java doesn’t run on a system”.
There are quite a few interesting fixes that look potentially significant, although my browser just crashed and I lost them :(.
EDIT: Note to self: when working on a large MMOG server engine, do NOT leave a recent test build running all day in the background on your main workstation and forget about it. I’d copypasted some interesting links for this post, but my workstation just crashed and on restart I found I have a gigabyte logfile. Um, I guess there was something broken in that test build…Oops.
Whoa! Those b*stards at Sun that are responsible for the “no-one is allowed to see our site without password and confirmed email access” policy have turned up the heat (…at least, since the last time I had a JDC id).
If you have a JDC login and have set it to auto-login, even attempting to download the latest JRE/SDK triggers background checks (and if there’s anything on your JDC login they want more info on, it demands to update your membership info etc before you are allowed to download the files. Including your address info!).
To bypass it, you have to logout, and then - lo and behold! - you’re “allowed” to download stuff without the checks.
…Just like the bad old days of 2003 where some evil scum-sucker @ sun decided to make “logging bugs” require username, password, email address, home address (this may have been optional can’t recall - but it wasn’t optional for the JDK downlaod just now!! :o ), etc. And then attempt to rewrite 9 years of history by making an official declaration to the support teams that “logging java bugs has always required a JDC account”.