All those Java developers who brought their MacBook Pros to JavaOne, between 1/4 and 1/3 of them depending on who you talk to, probably disagree with you.
Doesn't matter. The submitter stated it as a fact. The article doesn't make much of a case for it either.
I won't say that OS X has a perfect security record, but Windows historical has an abominable security record. Things are much better now, but I still read about vulnerabilities in Windows 7 and IE, and Microsoft still patches very frequently after 0-day exploits come out.
Besides, the techrepublic link you posted still says that OS X's security architecture is much stronger than Windows and only really makes a case for saying that Apple's secrecy and slow patching are the problem, in addition to applications like Safari. Granted, Safari is distributed with OS X, but saying that the OS itself is insecure is very different from saying that individual applications are to blame.
Still, it's really an incredible claim to say that any OS can be more insecure than Windows. The reason Windows will always have security problems is the legacy baggage, including old APIs and developer expectations of users having administrator rights out of the box. A complete rewrite of Windows and elimination of any expectations of backward compatibility will be needed to address the fundamental security flaws in Windows' architecture.
"For as much as Mac OS X has a reputation for being safer than Windows, security researchers won't hesitate to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true."
Have any quotes or links to back that up, Mr. Submitter?
I don't know what Oracle's going to do with Netbeans but it's too early to say based on dropping Ruby on Rails support (not, AFAIK, the Ruby language). If Oracle doesn't want to keep every feature under the sun (no pun intended) in Netbeans, then I can't say that's a bad decision on their part. If they start charging for Netbeans and/or intentionally crippling the free version, that will be when it's time to cry foul. I don't count dropping a discretionary feature as RoR support as "crippling".
He may figure that the Oracle lawsuit won't go so well, and either paying Oracle off or being forced to join OpenJDK won't do wonders for the Android business plan.
I hope Google gets its way on court, scales up the Dalvik VM and we stop using anything coming from Oracle. Tomcat would run happily on it and we would use a completely Free/Free/No patents virtual machine. Kind of like they are doing with WebM. That would result in companies becoming really careful when trying to take open source code and screw up with it.
Google fragmented the Java platform because they were too cheap to pay Sun. That's the bottom line. There are now two incompatible Java specs instead of one (I'm not talking about competing implementations of the same spec like IBM JDK, etc). What Google did is terrible for Java because it's no longer write once run anywhere.
And if you don't think Google violated Oracle's VM patents, then you're deluding yourself.
I really don't understand this bias against Oracle.
If any other company was the victim of a GPL violation, for whatever reason and whereever the code was distributed, Slashdot would cry foul. I guess as long as it's done to Oracle, it's OK.
It doesn't matter if you distribute the code as part of a product that makes money or if you use it internally. If you slap an Apache license header on GPL code, you're violating the GPL. Copyright law doesn't require you to make money in order to infringe. Why do you think the RIAA is going after P2P users and getting massive settlements?
Does it? The MPEG-LA has not produced any patents that it infringes, On2 presumably checked the (easy-to-find) list of MPEG-LA patents before shipping VP8, and the MPEG-LA is currently asking people to come forward with patents that cover VP8 - not something it would need to do if it already had a large pool of them.
Why give Google the opportunity to work around those patents? Also, Sun took years to open source Java, yet Google open sourced VP8 in months, indicating to me that Google was sloppy and didn't do their due diligence.
The MPEG-LA does not offer indemnity either. This was demonstrated quite well a couple of months ago when MPEG-LA licensees were sued for patent infringement over H.264.
MPEG-LA indemnifies users for the patents they own, not for patents outside their patent pool, which is way more than Google is offering to do.
Most 'H.264 hardware' is really a DSP with a few things like [I]DCT in hardware. This same hardware can used for VP8 (it's typically already used for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP).
More hoops to jump through.
YouTube is owned by Google, and they're going to be making everything WebM soon. I wouldn't be surprised if they only made the low-quality versions H.264 in the future and required WebM for the higher-quality encodings. This would let them keep iPhone users happy (low quality encoding isn't such a problem on a tiny screen), while forcing desktop users to install a WebM plugin.
I'm going to get modded down as a troll again for saying this (even though every one of my posts on this topic has been sincere, and labelled "troll" by reactionary Slashdotters), but Google doesn't own any of the content outside of users' home videos. The RIAA, MPAA, and gave studios produce most of the content that people are interested in, and that comprises more than 10 minute clips, and they're not going to re-encode in WebM. Even Apple couldn't bring those companies to their knees so what makes you think Google will?
1) SCO was about non-existent copyright rights and claims. MPEG-LA has real patents on video formats and compression. 2) Google hasn't offered to indemnify anybody, as MPEG-LA has. That shows Google has little to no confidence in WebM's patent standing. 3) What are you talking about? Why go through the trouble of encoding to WebM when H.264 is the path of least resistance? 4) YouTube doesn't serve full movies or tv shows. It only serves 10 minute video clips. What's your point exactly?
I'm not privy to the technical details, but the U.S. patent office hands out patents to pretty much anybody who asks for them, and I'm willing to bet MPEG-LA has way more patents than Google has.
H.264 infringes on a patent I own. When adoption is sufficient, I will sue everyone who uses it (MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify its users against outside patent claims either).
How many lawyers do you have, how much do you pay them, and how good are they?
1) WebM/VP8 probably infringe on several MPEG-LA patents (I don't agree with software patents, but U.S. courts do) 2) Google has not offered to indemnify anybody who uses WebM. 3) Mobile hardware has H.264 compatibility built-in, not so for WebM, 4) The media companies have encoded their content in H.264, they can't be bothered to re-encode it to WebM.
This is the same reason that Linux won't catch on on the desktop (arguably, the only reason). Media companies (RIAA, MPAA, and game publishers) will never support these open formats (OGG Vorbis, OGG Theora, WebM). The developers of the closed formats (MP3, H.264, GIF) will insist on getting paid one way or the other, which means their formats can't be natively supported by an open source OS.
Think about this. Something like 80% of Google's revenue is from web advertising. In theory, all that would be required to kill Google would be for all browsers to include ad blockers by default and for them to be turned on. I'm not saying this is ever going to happen. I'm just illustrating how fragile their business model is.
Google is exhibiting reckless behaviour because they think they're invincible, and it's all going to come back and bite them in the ass really soon:
1) Google "borrowing" Overture's ad-search business model, and paying them off not to sue them. I guess they got away with this one. 2) Google "borrowing" Sun's Java patented IP for use in Android/Dalvik with a Java-like language because they didn't want to pay for J2ME, not to mention the GPL code they slapped with an Apache license header. Oracle is fending to get payback, and I believe this case will be settled with Google either paying off Oracle with lots of money, or joining OpenJDK and paying license fees to Oracle. 3) GoogleTV, which is an attempt to serve ads over cable companies' signals. The cable companies are now blocking GoogleTV. 4) Google picking stupid fights with former partner Apple, including Android, NexusOne, Chrome and ChromeOS, leading Apple to develop iAd and go after HTC and others for patent infringement. 5) Google's end run around H.264's patents with a similar patent-encumbered codec simply to prop up Flash and screw up Apple serving H.264. Again, Apple is getting payback. 6) Google coming out with ChromeOS, Google Docs and corporate Google Mail. Microsoft hit back with Bing (although I don't see how this will succeed) 7) Google allying themselves with Adobe, having been a staunch supporter of web standards but now bundling Flash. If Flash won't cut it on mobile devices, as it still performs poorly on anything besides Windows and in 32 bit.
The day of reckoning is coming for Google because the world of computing is shifting away from the desktop at a rapid rate, and if Apple's iPad wins, then Google's ad revenue will dry up at the expense of iOS.
Let me be clear that I don't support software patents. Unfortunately, that's the way the game is played, this is accepted by all parties involved with large investments of capital made with an understanding of , and Google is trying to cheat. What goes around comes around, and Google is in for a rude awakening.
If the Supreme Court rules the wrong way, the decision won't stand.
Everybody from Google to Bell and Rogers will lobby heavily against this. This would certainly kill Google's business in Canada outright, seriously harm Microsoft through MSN/Windows Live and even result in less internet subscriptions for Bell and Rogers. Also, any Canadian news site would be doing a full court press against this. What's more, I don't see how any powerful companies would benefit from this wrong decision.
Rest assured that all these companies would lobby Parliament to change the laws so that this decision gets reversed.
You propagate an incredible fallacy, which is absolutely mind-boggling, that, and I quote:
For the longest time Linux (and OS-X) types hated on Windows because people ran as administrators. They talked about how amazingly insecure that was, how big a problem, how MS didn't care about security and so on. Many people tried to explain to them that it really doesn't matter, since people will just hand out the credentials to elevate without thinking, you can't protect people from themselves.
WTF? There's a difference between making a conscious decision to elevate my privileges to execute a command, most commonly to install software, and having all processes kicked off while my user account is running, many times without my knowledge or consent having administrator privileges.
As a user, there are all kinds of processes I didn't kick off or have knowledge of, from daemons, to Flash sites, to some JavaScript heavy site. Any of these processes could do damage to my system (and most probably anything under my user account, such as my home directory, but I digress) yet more often than not, I'm not aware of.
This underscores the importance of administrator privileges being turned off by default, which you don't seem to understand. Microsoft made a horrible design decision in allowing root access to be turned on by default, and I'm quite certain they regret it every single day.
Because then they run a much higher risk of JavaFX never gaining traction, more importantly among end users but also among developers. If Oracle gives up 20% of the potential JavaFX market, then their investment in that platform has less potential return.
Oracle can license or buy the Apple Swing implementation outright and sign a strict NDA as part of the deal, with only 2-3 Oracle developers actually privy to that source code. It doesn't even need to be open sources, as Oracle could release a closed-source JDK for OS X. What exactly is the problem here?
First of all, I heard anecdotal evidence that 50% of laptops at Java One were Macs. While I doubt this exact figure is true, I think 33% is probably conservative and reasonable.
Secondly, server market share is irrelevant, since Macs are used as *development* machines for Java. This isn't about XServes.
Third, at 20% market share, OS X is hardly marginal as a desktop platform. That's a pretty big incentive the way I look at it.
Yes they do because many of their enterprise Java GUI products run on Mac. They've also made a major commitment to JavaFX 2.0, and ignoring 20% of the desktop market would make no sense to them.
The question is whether Apple will give them their OS X Swing implementation, or whether Oracle will have to write it themselves.
The ball is now in Oracle's court. It's their responsibility to provide a JVM for Mac, just like they have the responsibility of providing it for Windows, Linux and Solaris. Instead of people blaming Apple for slowly bowing out of their 2000 commitment, it's time to step up the pressure on Oracle to treat OS X like they do their other platforms.
And, yeah, I know that AIX and HPUX are exceptions, but OS X is a much larger platform that Oracle can't afford to ignore if they want to follow through on their JavaFX 2.0 commitment.
Slashdot Mirror
All those Java developers who brought their MacBook Pros to JavaOne, between 1/4 and 1/3 of them depending on who you talk to, probably disagree with you.
Doesn't matter. The submitter stated it as a fact. The article doesn't make much of a case for it either.
I won't say that OS X has a perfect security record, but Windows historical has an abominable security record. Things are much better now, but I still read about vulnerabilities in Windows 7 and IE, and Microsoft still patches very frequently after 0-day exploits come out.
Besides, the techrepublic link you posted still says that OS X's security architecture is much stronger than Windows and only really makes a case for saying that Apple's secrecy and slow patching are the problem, in addition to applications like Safari. Granted, Safari is distributed with OS X, but saying that the OS itself is insecure is very different from saying that individual applications are to blame.
Still, it's really an incredible claim to say that any OS can be more insecure than Windows. The reason Windows will always have security problems is the legacy baggage, including old APIs and developer expectations of users having administrator rights out of the box. A complete rewrite of Windows and elimination of any expectations of backward compatibility will be needed to address the fundamental security flaws in Windows' architecture.
"For as much as Mac OS X has a reputation for being safer than Windows, security researchers won't hesitate to point out that the opposite is, in fact, true."
Have any quotes or links to back that up, Mr. Submitter?
And I've yet to ready a coherent reply to that question.
I don't know what Oracle's going to do with Netbeans but it's too early to say based on dropping Ruby on Rails support (not, AFAIK, the Ruby language). If Oracle doesn't want to keep every feature under the sun (no pun intended) in Netbeans, then I can't say that's a bad decision on their part. If they start charging for Netbeans and/or intentionally crippling the free version, that will be when it's time to cry foul. I don't count dropping a discretionary feature as RoR support as "crippling".
There's conflicting information out there:
They say it's just RoR:
http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html
They say it's the Ruby language too:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/01/ruby-dropped-in-netbeans-7
Who's right?
He may figure that the Oracle lawsuit won't go so well, and either paying Oracle off or being forced to join OpenJDK won't do wonders for the Android business plan.
I hope Google gets its way on court, scales up the Dalvik VM and we stop using anything coming from Oracle. Tomcat would run happily on it and we would use a completely Free/Free/No patents virtual machine. Kind of like they are doing with WebM. That would result in companies becoming really careful when trying to take open source code and screw up with it.
Google fragmented the Java platform because they were too cheap to pay Sun. That's the bottom line. There are now two incompatible Java specs instead of one (I'm not talking about competing implementations of the same spec like IBM JDK, etc). What Google did is terrible for Java because it's no longer write once run anywhere.
And if you don't think Google violated Oracle's VM patents, then you're deluding yourself.
I really don't understand this bias against Oracle.
If any other company was the victim of a GPL violation, for whatever reason and whereever the code was distributed, Slashdot would cry foul. I guess as long as it's done to Oracle, it's OK.
It doesn't matter if you distribute the code as part of a product that makes money or if you use it internally. If you slap an Apache license header on GPL code, you're violating the GPL. Copyright law doesn't require you to make money in order to infringe. Why do you think the RIAA is going after P2P users and getting massive settlements?
Does it? The MPEG-LA has not produced any patents that it infringes, On2 presumably checked the (easy-to-find) list of MPEG-LA patents before shipping VP8, and the MPEG-LA is currently asking people to come forward with patents that cover VP8 - not something it would need to do if it already had a large pool of them.
Why give Google the opportunity to work around those patents? Also, Sun took years to open source Java, yet Google open sourced VP8 in months, indicating to me that Google was sloppy and didn't do their due diligence.
The MPEG-LA does not offer indemnity either. This was demonstrated quite well a couple of months ago when MPEG-LA licensees were sued for patent infringement over H.264.
MPEG-LA indemnifies users for the patents they own, not for patents outside their patent pool, which is way more than Google is offering to do.
Most 'H.264 hardware' is really a DSP with a few things like [I]DCT in hardware. This same hardware can used for VP8 (it's typically already used for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP).
More hoops to jump through.
YouTube is owned by Google, and they're going to be making everything WebM soon. I wouldn't be surprised if they only made the low-quality versions H.264 in the future and required WebM for the higher-quality encodings. This would let them keep iPhone users happy (low quality encoding isn't such a problem on a tiny screen), while forcing desktop users to install a WebM plugin.
I'm going to get modded down as a troll again for saying this (even though every one of my posts on this topic has been sincere, and labelled "troll" by reactionary Slashdotters), but Google doesn't own any of the content outside of users' home videos. The RIAA, MPAA, and gave studios produce most of the content that people are interested in, and that comprises more than 10 minute clips, and they're not going to re-encode in WebM. Even Apple couldn't bring those companies to their knees so what makes you think Google will?
1) SCO was about non-existent copyright rights and claims. MPEG-LA has real patents on video formats and compression.
2) Google hasn't offered to indemnify anybody, as MPEG-LA has. That shows Google has little to no confidence in WebM's patent standing.
3) What are you talking about? Why go through the trouble of encoding to WebM when H.264 is the path of least resistance?
4) YouTube doesn't serve full movies or tv shows. It only serves 10 minute video clips. What's your point exactly?
I'm not privy to the technical details, but the U.S. patent office hands out patents to pretty much anybody who asks for them, and I'm willing to bet MPEG-LA has way more patents than Google has.
H.264 infringes on a patent I own. When adoption is sufficient, I will sue everyone who uses it (MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify its users against outside patent claims either).
How many lawyers do you have, how much do you pay them, and how good are they?
Why?
1) WebM/VP8 probably infringe on several MPEG-LA patents (I don't agree with software patents, but U.S. courts do)
2) Google has not offered to indemnify anybody who uses WebM.
3) Mobile hardware has H.264 compatibility built-in, not so for WebM,
4) The media companies have encoded their content in H.264, they can't be bothered to re-encode it to WebM.
This is the same reason that Linux won't catch on on the desktop (arguably, the only reason). Media companies (RIAA, MPAA, and game publishers) will never support these open formats (OGG Vorbis, OGG Theora, WebM). The developers of the closed formats (MP3, H.264, GIF) will insist on getting paid one way or the other, which means their formats can't be natively supported by an open source OS.
Think about this. Something like 80% of Google's revenue is from web advertising. In theory, all that would be required to kill Google would be for all browsers to include ad blockers by default and for them to be turned on. I'm not saying this is ever going to happen. I'm just illustrating how fragile their business model is.
Well, let's hope Apple dies.
What a realistic scenario. And I get modded as a troll, when I was being sincere, as the Slashdot bias is at work.
Google is exhibiting reckless behaviour because they think they're invincible, and it's all going to come back and bite them in the ass really soon:
1) Google "borrowing" Overture's ad-search business model, and paying them off not to sue them. I guess they got away with this one.
2) Google "borrowing" Sun's Java patented IP for use in Android/Dalvik with a Java-like language because they didn't want to pay for J2ME, not to mention the GPL code they slapped with an Apache license header. Oracle is fending to get payback, and I believe this case will be settled with Google either paying off Oracle with lots of money, or joining OpenJDK and paying license fees to Oracle.
3) GoogleTV, which is an attempt to serve ads over cable companies' signals. The cable companies are now blocking GoogleTV.
4) Google picking stupid fights with former partner Apple, including Android, NexusOne, Chrome and ChromeOS, leading Apple to develop iAd and go after HTC and others for patent infringement.
5) Google's end run around H.264's patents with a similar patent-encumbered codec simply to prop up Flash and screw up Apple serving H.264. Again, Apple is getting payback.
6) Google coming out with ChromeOS, Google Docs and corporate Google Mail. Microsoft hit back with Bing (although I don't see how this will succeed)
7) Google allying themselves with Adobe, having been a staunch supporter of web standards but now bundling Flash. If Flash won't cut it on mobile devices, as it still performs poorly on anything besides Windows and in 32 bit.
The day of reckoning is coming for Google because the world of computing is shifting away from the desktop at a rapid rate, and if Apple's iPad wins, then Google's ad revenue will dry up at the expense of iOS.
Let me be clear that I don't support software patents. Unfortunately, that's the way the game is played, this is accepted by all parties involved with large investments of capital made with an understanding of , and Google is trying to cheat. What goes around comes around, and Google is in for a rude awakening.
If the Supreme Court rules the wrong way, the decision won't stand.
Everybody from Google to Bell and Rogers will lobby heavily against this. This would certainly kill Google's business in Canada outright, seriously harm Microsoft through MSN/Windows Live and even result in less internet subscriptions for Bell and Rogers. Also, any Canadian news site would be doing a full court press against this. What's more, I don't see how any powerful companies would benefit from this wrong decision.
Rest assured that all these companies would lobby Parliament to change the laws so that this decision gets reversed.
I can't believe this nonsense got modded up.
You propagate an incredible fallacy, which is absolutely mind-boggling, that, and I quote:
For the longest time Linux (and OS-X) types hated on Windows because people ran as administrators. They talked about how amazingly insecure that was, how big a problem, how MS didn't care about security and so on. Many people tried to explain to them that it really doesn't matter, since people will just hand out the credentials to elevate without thinking, you can't protect people from themselves.
WTF? There's a difference between making a conscious decision to elevate my privileges to execute a command, most commonly to install software, and having all processes kicked off while my user account is running, many times without my knowledge or consent having administrator privileges.
As a user, there are all kinds of processes I didn't kick off or have knowledge of, from daemons, to Flash sites, to some JavaScript heavy site. Any of these processes could do damage to my system (and most probably anything under my user account, such as my home directory, but I digress) yet more often than not, I'm not aware of.
This underscores the importance of administrator privileges being turned off by default, which you don't seem to understand. Microsoft made a horrible design decision in allowing root access to be turned on by default, and I'm quite certain they regret it every single day.
It's in Oracle's best interests to have desktop Java running on the 2nd most popular (light years ahead of Linux) desktop platform.
Because then they run a much higher risk of JavaFX never gaining traction, more importantly among end users but also among developers. If Oracle gives up 20% of the potential JavaFX market, then their investment in that platform has less potential return.
Oracle can license or buy the Apple Swing implementation outright and sign a strict NDA as part of the deal, with only 2-3 Oracle developers actually privy to that source code. It doesn't even need to be open sources, as Oracle could release a closed-source JDK for OS X. What exactly is the problem here?
First of all, I heard anecdotal evidence that 50% of laptops at Java One were Macs. While I doubt this exact figure is true, I think 33% is probably conservative and reasonable.
Secondly, server market share is irrelevant, since Macs are used as *development* machines for Java. This isn't about XServes.
Third, at 20% market share, OS X is hardly marginal as a desktop platform. That's a pretty big incentive the way I look at it.
Yes they do because many of their enterprise Java GUI products run on Mac. They've also made a major commitment to JavaFX 2.0, and ignoring 20% of the desktop market would make no sense to them.
The question is whether Apple will give them their OS X Swing implementation, or whether Oracle will have to write it themselves.
The ball is now in Oracle's court. It's their responsibility to provide a JVM for Mac, just like they have the responsibility of providing it for Windows, Linux and Solaris. Instead of people blaming Apple for slowly bowing out of their 2000 commitment, it's time to step up the pressure on Oracle to treat OS X like they do their other platforms.
And, yeah, I know that AIX and HPUX are exceptions, but OS X is a much larger platform that Oracle can't afford to ignore if they want to follow through on their JavaFX 2.0 commitment.