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I moved to Europe 10 years ago to work for a startup. I'm still there, still in the same job (with much of the same team, even), but now I work for the American megacorp that bought out the American megacorp that bought out my European employer.

You do realize that Oracle owns MySQL, right?

They should run it on Sun hardware to stay even farther away from Oracle.

> Also, yes, various Linux virtualization technologies you can hot-migrate running systems between software VMs within the same chassis (and warm migrate with downtime between hardware chassis).

In this case, it was a live migration over two different chassis.

> But the price/perf/features just don't add up in the modern world versus commodity hardware and open source software, except...

In the existing case with a large corporate environment with a Linux/x86 cloud and a Solaris/SPARC cloud, Oracle wins the spot for lowest price point for a system, and wins at the higher end because Linux doesn't (reasonably) scale that big.

> You just have to install the "mcelog" package on e.g. Debian/Ubuntu. I'm sure the same software exists for the other distros.

Will it simply retire bad pages (at a page level) as they happen, or is it able to detect when enough errors have happened on a single DIMM and to retire all the pages on the DIMM (because it understands the hardware layout and can map those pages to specific hardware)? That's the advantage of controlling the OS and controlling the hardware. Here is an example of multiple errors being detected by Solaris on a DIMM and it identifying and retiring all pages on the entire DIMM:

Fault class : fault.memory.dimm_sb
Affects : mem:///motherboard=0/chip=1/memory-controller=0/dimm=3/rank=0 degraded but still in service
FRU : "CPU 1 DIMM 3" (hc://:product-id=Sun-Fire-X4200-Server:chassis-id=0000000000:server-id=oryx/motherboard=0/chip=1/memory-controller=0/dimm=3)

Description : The number of errors associated with this memory module has exceeded acceptable levels. Refer to http://sun.com/msg/AMD-8000-2F for more information.

Response : Pages of memory associated with this memory module are being removed from service as errors are reported.

Impact : Total system memory capacity will be reduced as pages are retired.

Here's an example ("writeOutput") from the official Sun Java Tutorial on how you're supposed to write out a UTF-8 file. And it's broken. It works when your text never takes up more than two bytes per character but when it does it translates the multichar UTF-16 representation incorrectly and produces a non-standards-compliant UTF-8 that some readers will read but others won't. here's someone posting a workaround and several dozen people talking about having that problem and thanking them for the solution.

That's just one problem among many - Java's unicode support is a bit clunky. Don't get me wrong, it's leaps and bounds better than what C/C++ have, but that doesn't make it great. I tend to concur with the argument that UTF-16 is in general harmful. You tend to get these sort of problems on pretty much every platform that uses it. People know that it can take up more than two words yet there's always someone who makes the mistaken assumption that all characters are one word, and because longer sequences aren't used that commonly, the code often ships broken rather than being caught in development.

(chrome is 32 bit, and java 1.7 is 64 only.)

Total bollocks. Here's 32-bit Java for:

Windows

Linux (tarball)

Linux (RPM)

(chrome is 32 bit, and java 1.7 is 64 only.)

Total bollocks. Here's 32-bit Java for:

Windows

Linux (tarball)

Linux (RPM)

(chrome is 32 bit, and java 1.7 is 64 only.)

Total bollocks. Here's 32-bit Java for:

Windows

Linux (tarball)

Linux (RPM)

yep. we have an internal applet application that uses a self signed certificate. it's deployed to the local file system and launched from a remote page, thus we're stuck using java less than 1.6.24 due to a security change^^^bug oracle made.

http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7020285

exactly, but "java is slow" meme, just won't die...

That's because there are certain ways in which Java *is* slow:

* AWT is a heap of shit, very badly designed, and takes a positive age to initialize. Swing is no better, because Swing is built as a layer on top of AWT.
* Java's performance for floating point leaves a lot to be desired because Java's specification of some mathematical operation means that processor-specific instructions cannot be used, e.g., to calculate the result of Math.exp() on x86 processors, so it must be done in software. This bug: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=7174532 suggests they may have recently found a solution, but I don't think this is in any released version of Java yet.
* Garbage collection is much slower than hand-optimized memory allocation, and heap allocation is much slower than stack allocation, so a well written C++ application can always outperform Java on memory handling.

This doesn't mean that Java isn't perfectly suitable for the vast majority of tasks, particularly those that are I/O bound like a typical server application, but there are things that it really isn't good enough for.

(Signed, somebody who once attempted to write a high-performance neural network simulator in a language that can't do exp() at a reasonable speed.)

Ants in Weird/Odd Places:

Bugs in the computer: Sun
Microsystems, Inc. knows why Brazil is known to its native inhabitants as the kingdom of the ants.

Ants in yer... Pants? NOT!
(Toshiba notebook/laptop); Ants
Invade Apple iBook; "Yep, those are ants in that laptop".

(Tele)phones: Panasonic Cordless Phone and Ants In My Nokia Mobile Phone (A Yahoo! account is required).

Ants in Omniview switchboxes: An e-mail story of ants invading a network
switchbox.

Argentine ants invade a network hub.

Computerworld on "Ants had taken up residence in a guy's external hard drive. Seen on /.).

A photograph showing ants nesting in a guy's phone box, affecting his
digital subscriber line (DSL) connection and phone system.

A 38 seconds YouTube video showing crazy ants in a computer mouse.

One minute and 19 seconds Break video, from VideoSift: "Creepy Surprise. -- Wife asked me to try to get the printer to work, since she was having some problems with it. Imagine my surprise when I looked inside..."

Help,
A Colony Of Ants Attacked My Enterprise Rental Car And Ruined My
Vacation!

Fair points but I'd say there's a few places that Java just doesn't cut it - strict scheduling and / or real time needs. O, and GUI stuff, too.

So basically, no GUI, no audio, no video. Which only more or less leaves what it currently is king of the hill for - server side business processing.

I've tried real time and Java, and the jitter that garbage collection introduces (yes, even with parallel garbage collection and all that stuff) makes it hugely unpredictable.

Strangely enough, the company formerly known as SUN knew this, and tried to create a "real time" flavour of Java with such extensions - but it takes so much effort to port your code (and the JVM is slightly less than brilliant) that you're far better off going to C/C++.

Instead, the Java programming language specifies that an exception will be thrown when semantic constraints are violated and will cause a non-local transfer of control ...

Explicit use of throw statements provides an alternative to the old-fashioned style of handling error conditions by returning funny values, such as the integer value -1 where a negative value would not normally be expected. Experience shows that too often such funny values are ignored or not checked for by callers, leading to programs that are not robust, exhibit undesirable behavior, or both. ...

This process continues until a handler is found that indicates that it handles that particular exception ... thus every effort is made to avoid letting an exception go unhandled. ...

The exception mechanism of the Java platform is integrated with its synchronization model (17), so that locks are released as synchronized statements (14.19) and invocations of synchronized methods (8.4.3.6, 15.12) complete abruptly.

(From here, emphasis mine) The lessons here seem pretty clear. If colleges want to stop cheating, they should:

1. * Pass control to a non-TA/Prof. to address the cheating
2. * Force clear, semantic allegations. This is a one-way communication, not a discussion
3. * Dedicated staff to address cheating
4. * Integrated with the fundamentals. For colleges this would be graduation and degree granting. (alternatively: enforcement centered on the student (the thread) not the course)

I dislike dealing with Java exceptions as much as anyone (try/catch everywhere.) Considering what it would take to really handle cheating, it seems clear why colleges are structured to suppress any allegations. It's just easier, and after all, they don't have to catch every exception.

There is your problem, you are running as root ;-)

But seriously, it looks related to these two bugs - http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6935229 and http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6896647. Try enabling the XX options suggested and see if it fixes them (and upgrade to JDK7 when you can; there are lots of things fixed in JDK7 that annoyingly haven't been backported to 6.0).

There is your problem, you are running as root ;-)

But seriously, it looks related to these two bugs - http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6935229 and http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6896647. Try enabling the XX options suggested and see if it fixes them (and upgrade to JDK7 when you can; there are lots of things fixed in JDK7 that annoyingly haven't been backported to 6.0).

Not sure if the GP was talking about this, but Sun did have things like this :
http://java.sun.com/docs/white/langenv/Simple.doc2.html

which pretty much states what they were trying to go for. To be honest, it's pretty close to what Gosling himself stated.

Heh... I woudn't mind if someone hacked oracle and found these docs for me :P nobody cares enough to go through the legalese to release them. Kidding aside it wouldn't be proper and probably no SO would accept the code :-/ .

If you are a Sun/Oracle engineer please, get me these docs! I woudn't even mind being under NDA myself as long as I could write BSD/GPL drivers for the hardware. Heh NDA on 20 year old hardware would be weird but whatever. http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home
Leo Hardware Reference Manual (800-7216-10; June 1993)
Leo Theory of Operation (800-7220-10; June 1993)

I also wouldn't mind having Fujitsu AG-10E docs and binary drivers for both .... sigh.... I guess this is what turns some people to doing luzsec things they can't have any fun with whatever interests them so they join a "cause" ... not that I would hack anyone I just don't have any interest in that sort of hacking though no doubt my interesting old hardware and reverse engineering will lead to at least some understanding of that sort of things. Hey I may not get my

While yes, technically that means it's assembly, not C++, the ability to drop into a low-level language for those 10 lines of high critical code means that you can easily hand optimize better than any interpreted or JIT language could ever dream. Audio decoding + SSE/MMX = Win.

J2SE platform version 1.4.2 now uses SSE and SSE2 instruction sets for floating point computations on hardware and software platforms that support this feature.

JITs can't dream, but the people who write them can. And are probably far more experienced with assembly than you are, for most values of "you".

I suggest you learn networking as well as Ethernet, oh and take your lithium your Bipolar is showing.

Here is some reading material that might be too advanced for you, but I like to share...

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/passive_ethernet_tap.jsp -- how to receive only network traffic.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~sksrini2/Projects/TFTP/AP36.pdf -- basics on how to broadcast data on transmit only, might be too advanced for you.
http://www.stearns.org/doc/one-way-ethernet-cable.html -- more info for your basic education.

and that was with 3 seconds of Google searching... another thing you seem to be incapable of understating, there are a lot of websites out there that can help you learn how to use a search engine and google.

Also look up what UDP broadcast is, you seem to be significantly deficient in your education as a whole. Networking is hard, you should leave it to those of us that know what we are doing and actually have an education in it.

Doesn't Project Looking Glass use a lot of similar techniques? This in particular looks pretty much just like Cover Flow to me. Here's someone else who seems to think the same.

Not to be a dick, but mysql.com is written in php and you cannot bind variables in php (based on a simple google search).

Are you sure you actually fired up a Google search? The second result of a search for "php mysql bind variables" leads you directly to this function. Not to mention ADOdb can fake it even if you don't use the mysqli driver, and I'd bet PDO and the other libraries can do the same. Seriously, even if you're a PHP developer (I'm one), you have NO EXCUSES for not using bind variables. The hassle is quite low, and the peace of mind is priceless...

http://blogs.sun.com/OTNGarage/entry/sun_com_will_disappear_after "A few days ago I wrote: The www.sun.com site will be decommissioned on June 1 of this year. In the comments I went on to say that I doubted there would be 1:1 redirects. I was wrong. (Don't tell my wife I'm capable of saying that!) The www.sun.com domain will NOT be decommissioned or sold on June 1 of this year. Rather, sun.com URLs will redirect to oracle.com URLs, with 1:1 redirects where possible. Most of the content that was on BigAdmin, OpenSolaris.com, and some sections of SDN has already been migrated to the System Admin and Developer Community of the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Our engineering team is working on a solution for the Hardware Compatibility List. I'll let you know where it ends up and in what form as soon as I know. If you find content on those legacy sites that you'd like to ensure we make available on OTN, please let me know. - Rick"

If the domain changes hands, that's going to break a lot of XML files containing xsi:schemaLocation attributes and DTD references pointing to documents within http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/ .

Actually I did a little research on this and it has been anticipated and fixed as an issue (see http://playground.sun.com/ipv6/specs/ipv6-address-privacy.html) ... perhaps ... there is some randomization and temporal cycling of auto assigned IPv6 addresses although not everything seems to implement this at present. The worry for me is that it is possible and it is very difficult for the average consumer to detect (and understand) so it is likely to be used. NATing and more importantly the generally dynamic nature of IPV4 addresses as you roam around between home, work and mobile helps to enforce (although does not ensure) privacy.

"My former boss, who was a closed source stooge blamed the DB. Others like me knew these SSDs were not yet ready for prime-time. By the way all this was about 2 years ago. Technology could have changed for the better now."

That is almost certain. First of all, everybody that is serious in the field will tell you that you that that kind of application requires a enterprise (read: SLC flash drive). Chances are that the SSD you've tested with was an older drive with the failed Micron chipset, or maybe even older tech. If you compare those niche products with e.g. a well tested Intel SLC drive with TRIM support, you'll see not just a huge performance boost over the older SSD. Don't forget that earlier flash drives were mostly of interest because of high reliability (as in: crash resistant) and power and weight ratios.

Of course, if you're a real player with some money to spend:
https://shop.sun.com/store/product/8be96180-a21a-11dd-a2a2-080020a9ed93
# Over 1 million IOPS

That oughta do it, especially made for DB applications :)

For home users, the IOPS of a Vertex 2 drive should be ample, for workstations I would still go for the G2 - also because of reliability.

I am quite happy that these SSD are becoming so fast. Hopefully soon personal desktops will come out with one of these as well as a disk HD. These SSDs serve a really neat niche of providing mid-range speed (compared to RAM) while still providing a large enough memory to store meaningful stuff. ZFS is really taking the right idea with smart usage of the speed and storage capacity of SSDs.

ZFS and SSDs

These, particularly the second sample (The Opera Game) sound like something Richard D James would do. A certain random, almost generative quality.

The details of the Sun (now Oracle, I guess) patent grant can be found here. Basically:

you are free to use, copy, distribute, or compile, the Java SE system and Sun/Oracle promises not to use its patents against you. So the countless army of people using Java are fine. However, if you break the Java specification, or your JRE only implements a subset of the specification, then suddenly the entire weight of the Java patents are free to be used against you. Most people do not break the Java specification.

Google, or at least the AOSP, did. The full Java is too big to implement on a phone (presumably), so they only implemented a subset, and thus they opened themselves up for patent damages.

Note that this is not a copyright dispute: Google still has the full right to use the Java source code, since it is under GPL* (see caveat), it is their non-java virtual machine that is violating patents. Google couldn't have avoided this by using a different language, like C#, because the patents cover most modern virtual machines. Microsoft has already licensed these patents for their 'managed' code.


*Caveat: There were some small bits of code that were not directly part of the Java source code, and not under the GPL, that Google was distributing. They've since stopped.

Yup, because Java didn't have assert before!

The review also failed to mention that glassfish v3 runs on osgi

Ever hear of TimeMachine on MacOS? Well, ZFS provides a similar feature to roll back changes, without the hassle of actually backing up your system. There is even a pretty Gnome UI. Of course, ZFS simplifies performing the backups, too.

Oh, did I forget to mention that despite the complexity of ZFS, the performance is stellar? Yes, it vastly out-performs traditional filesystems. Of course, that is compared to UFS on Solaris, but then again, that filesystem is on par with or faster than EXT3 (faster with logging, on par otherwise)

1) Whether it is an IPv6 address or an IPv4address+DNAT port, the exposure is the same, the outside world has a door into a specific system.

Unless you are running the ipv6 privacy extensions :
http://playground.sun.com/ipv6/specs/ipv6-address-privacy.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc3041.txt

My thought is that running an open wifi does not provide plausible deniability. It's more likely that someone will do something malicious behind your gateway and you'll take the blame than vice-versa. *Especially* if you seem technically capable, the fact that you explicitly left your wifi open would be taken as a sign you were *trying* for plausible deniability. Face it, for the residential case, *there is no plausible deniability*, at least with respect to traffic that originates from your residence, *unless* you have a trusted proxy shared with others out there that you *know* won't retain enough data to trace your identity. The only way to have plausible deniability is to find an open-wifi somewhere and hope there's no security camera. If it is some poor sap's house, then they will probably get blamed, if a business, that business may be required to discontinue open wifi under legal pressure.

Here I think we will have to agree to disagree. Particularly when you consider some of the advantages to the privacy extensions. My point is that at present, there is no happy medium. You have a choice between a centralised traditional firewall, and a decentralised randomised more privacy friendly solution.

I think we can agree that ipv6 could be far better than it is with what we know today verses when it was designed 15 years ago. I'm just willing to wait a little longer for my feature set than you are for yours.

But why do you care if they're known outside your network? You have a stateful firewall that protects them from the world. Here's my printer's IPv6 address: 2001:453:da65:1:94ab:7c00:8cba:beb5. Go ahead, have fun trying to connect to it.

You have far more confidence in your firewall than I have. One slip in the coding, one unchecked buffer is all that it takes for it to be breached.

Yes, of course. Why wouldn't you?

Privacy.
http://playground.sun.com/ipv6/specs/ipv6-address-privacy.html
http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc3041.txt

On a Sun note, their Sparc hardware can install Solaris over a WAN with HTTP. See here:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5504/6mkv4nh5i?a=view

Java at no point specified that there wasn't going to be any memory management at all.

O rly?

Under section 2.1.6 Memory Management and Garbage Collection and I quote:

Java technology completely removes the memory management load from the programmer.

This white paper was written in 1996 by James Gosling and Henry McGilton. M-M-M-MONSTER FAIL!

There are all sorts of common database paths where slow cores are troublesome. Acquiring locks, access to shared memory, writes to redo logs; these are all examples of things that can end up serializing more than is optimal if individual cores are slow. Because of this, half as many cores that run at twice the speed is not the same net speed; it's probably faster, because each process is introducing less contention. Reducing the time things hold onto shared resources is really important for database workloads, and the easiest way to do that is to make the cores so fast they get in and out of holding access to those resources as quickly as possible.

This is not at all limited to Oracle either. I used to have a Sun Fire T2000 server using the 32-thread UltraSPARC T1 chip at my office. Running PostgreSQL, that system was trounced every time we compared it to x64 systems from Intel and AMD with much lower core counts but higher clocks. Sun released some specific compiler tuning magic for MySQL to make it perform better on that processor that helped. It sounds like after looking at the same trade-offs here, Oracle has decided to just go for the traditional solution--faster cores--rather than to try and optimize their software design for the processors. Can't say I blame them.

There is another gotch too. Previous releases of Solaris have been backwards compatible, but in order to change to Solaris 11 Express from OpenSolaris, you must remove PostgreSQL first!! http://blogs.sun.com/observatory/en_US/entry/upgrading_from_opensolaris_2009_06 I bet that pus a smile on the face of the PostgreSQL developers!

Here's hoping there's a push for clean integration into the user experience, a la Sun's TimeSlider integration in Nautilus. I was surprised to use Windows 7 recently, it's got a crude TimeSlider now. I think OSX has something similar too.

I'm surprised nobody in Canonical has put this forward yet but it's only a matter of time, once btrfs is declared stable.

One of the more amusing blog entries from Sun engineers was a discussion of the amount of energy needed to completely fill a ZFS file system. A 128-bit address space isn't just optimistically big, it's "freaking huge!"
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you

This post is extremely dishonest. If you've actually installed enough to get that output, that necessarily means you already realize (1) you installed from some experimental .tar.gz file with all kinds of undocumented tampering, meant for development, not from the actual release .iso the way the 2.4 'lx' brand installs, so 'cat /etc/redhat-release' doesn't actually mean the installer ran up to that point which is something it would imply to any reasonable individual. In fact the GNU tar that extracted that .tar.gz was probably the solaris one, not even Linux tar.

And (2) it's so broken that basic programs like 'rm' don't run! That page says, b131 was the first one with enough basic syscalls for 'rm' to work. and lx brand was moved to the attic in b143 (search for EOF lx brand).

This field is full of overwhelming arcania, and without the good faith effort of people like yourself we'll make bad decisions and garble our own history. Please don't spew out deliberately misleading teasers just for the contrary LULZ of it.

Sun embraced JRuby, it is fully supported in their GlasshFish J2EE application server. It can host most well behaved rails apps inside JRuby runtimes.
There was even a GlassFish Ruby gem Sun maintained. Pretty badass how well Ruby & Java mesh at the rails/j2ee level. All you needed was the GF gem, a rackup script, and maybe jdbc-mysql gem.

From what I've read the GF gem maintainers didn't make the Oracle transition, but hopefully the community can pick that up.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/821-1759/abppa?a=view
JRuby, Jython, Grails are still supported in the latest Oracle branded Glassfish

A lot of things bug me about the Ruby language, but running it on a bulletproof Java application server lets me sleep better at night. Someday, MRI might be suitable for the enterprise, but not today, not for Ruby 1.8.x

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-6223

It seems quite clear that the original poster was describing his/her personal experience with the language. It is like asking for a citation when someone says that their favourite colour is blue. The better response would be to ask for an example of the problem.

"My favorite color is blue." is an opinion. There are no facts to back it up.

"Mozilla Firefox's New tab button work differently on different platforms, but it shouldn't." is something I'm presenting as a fact. You and the Mozilla devs would presumably want me to give you some sort of demonstration of this to be logged in Mozilla's bug tracker.

Therefore, to "Java often requires tweaks because different builtins work differently on different platforms, even though they're not supposed to." the proper response to "Citation needed." here would be to some sort of explanation of which builtins and what systems they act differently on, presumably with a test case attached and what systems give the unexpected results. Presumably filed on the Java bug tracker.

Of course, in this case it was likely hyperbole stemming from Java's problems in the mid to later 90s. What's next, complaining about how slow Java is?

Wrong.

Android isn't a subset of the Java environment. And Google hasn't accepted any Java license agreement.

The java license agreements are for
* the implementers of Java environments (which Microsoft agreed, broke, got punished for, etc). Google provide a complete alternative tool stack and hasn't agreed to this agreement

* the users of the SDK, which prevents (in section D of the SUPPLEMENTAL LICENSE TERMS) the user from altering elements under the java[x], sun, etc packages. http://java.sun.com/javase/6/jdk-6u2-license.txt Google hasn't accepted this user agreement either. The developer may have.

Oracle cannot control what Google does with code written in Java that doesn't target the official Java platforms. The language isn't copyrighted (nor copyrightable - http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=478), and except if they have specific patents in the conversion mechanism (which for example Gemalto is suing Google for - http://lwn.net/Articles/411852/), or in the implementation techniques used by the Java SE platform (which Google refutes) then Oracle should probably will lose (IANAL)

you don't have lots of beginner/intermediate level programmers introducing memory holes left, right and center.

Hehe, sure sure, just wait till they start adding action listeners to things, you'll be leaking memory in no time.

Good point. Maybe one day Unicode will win out

It's not a question anymore. Unicode has already won. The sheer amount of other specifications and standards that reference various versions of Unicode spec is such that it's going to stick around for decades to come.

Yes, we still don't have 100% support in software (but we do have 99%). Time will fix that.

or perhaps EBCDIC will have a resurgence. 'twixt now and then it's best to write the text in ascii, perhaps with a well-documented human-readable escape table for symbols that aren't represented - perhaps even a complete Unicode escape table current to the document.

For programming languages, we already have that - \u1234 or \U12345678 are used as escape sequences in C++, Java and C# for just this purpose. There's nothing stopping an IDE from rendering them as if they were actual symbols and not escape sequences, too, though I haven't seen that in practice.

But this is purely an encoding issue, not a character set issue, which is what TFA is about. They are asking why we still design languages with syntax that is restricted to characters only present in the ASCII character set, even though Unicode has many handy symbols that can represent the same things better and/or shorter. Quote:

Unicode has the entire gamut of Greek letters, mathematical and technical symbols, brackets, brockets, sprockets, and weird and wonderful glyphs such as "Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave" (0x23c7). Why do we still have to name variables OmegaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?

For a good example of what is possible there, have a look at Fortress [PDF] programming language, which uses various traditional math symbols heavily.

Unicode? How many revisions will Unicode see between now and then? Thousands?

Unicode has been there for 18 years now (the second volume of Unicode 1.0 spec was published in 1992), and we've seen 5 revisions, so the rate is roughly 1 per 3.5 years. Assuming it stays the same, we're looking at Unicode 35.0 by 2100. But it won't, because in practice it will slow down eventually as we add most (and, eventually, all) scripts that we know and care about. In fact, if you look at the recent additions to the standard, they do not affect the vast majority of texts ever created in any way.

On the other hand, it doesn't really matter in the slightest, since Unicode versions are all backwards-compatible (characters get added, but never removed or moved around). Assuming that trait persists, they'll just use the most recent version of the spec available to them.

But then why would things be any different for ASCII-encoded text with escapes for Unicode characters? You'd still need a Unicode character table to make sense of those escapes.

It would seem that you're arguing that any character set other than basic Latin is not future-proof. This implies that any text written in any language other than English is also not future-proof. I think this assertion is rather Anglo-centric, and not very realistic.

Don't forget the horrible hacks on SMTP for lines that consist of just a period "."

Also, if you want to see a brand new bad protocol, look at XMPP.

I think the all time worst protocol I've seen is SyncML. vCards wrapped in XML, with embedded plaintext passwords.

Note that in either case (SCSL or JRL), if you decide to use your project internally for productive use or distribute your product to others, you must sign a commercial agreement and meet the Java compatibility requirements.

Dalvik from Google definitely does not meet the Java compatibility requirements. Now, if they did a clean room implementation they should be ok from the copyright standpoint, but the patents will be hard to get around.

From Mike's blog (in reference to the ZFS+Fishworks effort), probably the highest profile departure from the aforementioned article is this fun fact:

"What began as a mere $2.1M incremental engineering investment for 2.8 years has now shipped more than 100 petabytes, more than 6000 systems, and 100X in revenue. "

However, Oracle has already fixed that problem, so the GP is just trolling.

http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/oracle-demostrates-great-community-support-and-fixes-eclipse/
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6969236
http://bewarethepenguin.blogspot.com/2010/07/tip-of-hat-to-oracle.html

New security update for Java today: 6u22, critical so you now get Carbonite slamware instead of Bing!

For your convenience, here's a spam-free win32 Java installer: Deep link to jre-6u22-windows-i586.exe or start clicking here for other platforms (last page before the cookiewall).

Now that Java is officially owned by pure evil , and installs quickstarters all over your OS and browser, consider it deprecated.