Don't Use System.out.println! was Tuesday's hot story at Java.blogs, believe it or not.

Using System.out.println is worse than I thought, though - David Johnson points out that it can really slow your system down. Yuck!

One other thing to consider - if there is any possibility, any possibility at all, that you might want to run something as a Windows service, then you can't use stdin, stdout, or stderr at all. (BTW, if you do need to run Java as a service, check out jsrvany.)