My first question is: What OS projects are "driven" by ATG?
I'm betting none. From TFA...
“The addition of ATG, which brings market-leading products used by some of the largest and most well-known retailers and brands, furthers Oracle’s strategy of delivering industry-specific enterprise applications"
This is a commercial entity which sells eCommerce software to other commercial entities.
Sometimes, the story has nothing to do with Open Source. This is one of them. So, feel free to get on with your "so why do we care" rants now.
They wanted Sun because their OS and hardware are a good platform for their database, which is where their money comes from.
I fear we will lose Sun as general-use machines and have them replaced as being only for running Oracle. I know people are already getting burned with Oracle basically saying "unless you're on a support contract, you get nothing for your existing machines". If anything, they might drive people to replace Sun's with something else sooner.
They want Java because their primary commercial competitor, IBM, is heavily invested in Java, so it gives them a solid inroad to luring IBM's customers away and breaking compatibility with IBM's Java solutions.
Well, that and the fact that all of Oracle's stuff is written in Java. They've got a massive investment in Java that need to maintain.
They just wanted MySQL just to kill it.
I believe that.
I just don't think that this acquisition will be good for the industry, but only for Oracle; certainly not for the customers of the former Sun. In the long run, it might make things crappier overall.
However, being honest and not a fan-boy it isn't that great for GUI apps. LibreOffice people, please remove Java from Open Office. If you do, it will jump in popularity. Right now users have the choice of Open Office either performing clunky because of the Java based wizards or turning the wizards off, which people actually do want to use sometimes.
One thing Java has going for it is that it (in theory) will run on all of the platforms.
If you removed the Java, then you would need to write the interface code for each platform you support. I gather that can actually create a fair bit of extra work, and make it harder to maintain.
I don't mean to be ignorant or trollish, but isn't this a good thing for Oracle?
I've been trying to figure out if this is a strategy by Oracle, or a side-effect they don't really care about.
Oracle is only interested in things that make them money. Something free, not so much. Now, we know they want Java because they've invested a lot in it. And, they want Sun hardware so they can have the revenue stream and ship Oracle appliances on a nice shiny support contract.
But I can't tell if Oracle is being ass-hats because they want to, because they're incapable of being anything else, or if there's an end-game for them in it. It seems like they're alienating everyone who works with the products they've bought at an alarming rate.
I'm not sure if gutting OO.org is good for them, bad for them, or such a trivial impact that they don't care.
One would think that "work" usually being the most anal about "security" it would be the place where IE was seen least.
At my old company, HR were among the worst offenders -- regularly requiring us to go to survey sites or various 3rd party sites to do various stupid tasks. Sometimes Finance did this as well.
Several times I tried to tell them "why the hell are you sending me to a 3rd party site when we have something that does this in house" or pointing out that the sites were requiring way too many permissions for what they were doing for us. Unfortunately, the tedious people in the beaurocracy of some organizations just don't understand why you're objecting to being sent to a 3rd party site that needs to install an ActiveX control.
Not visiting these sites for the stupid reasons cited was something which would get you in trouble.
In many cases, requirements from HR and some of the other groups more or less meant you couldn't have your IE set to the level of security IT mandated. So, they essentially forced us to run IE as an insecure tool, and only use it for very limited things.
It really does come down to stupid and lazy outranking sane and careful in some cases.
Yes, they throwing things at the audience in an obvious manor id a gimmick. However that's poor use of the tool, not the tool itself.
But, even well-used (like in Avatar), the technology still hurts my eyes and gives me a headache.
For my experience, no matter how well you use the tool, the tool still sucks. The cheesy thrust something at the camera is pretty weak, but overall, I just don't find even good attempts to 3D to be of value to me.
Don't you mean, "for years it was the only browser worth attempting to exploit"?
No, I don't mean that at all. I love how people on Slashdot think that they know what I mean more than I do. Firefox and Mozilla have been around for a long time, it's not like they're brand new and nobody is aware of them.
I mean IE ran with a security policy that more or less was wide open, and that you could set to "allow everything" or "allow nothing" -- invariably some %^$#^& POS web-site the company I worked for would force us to use basically expected to be able to run everything. When it didn't work, HR would say "oh, just turn down your browser security".
Basically these shitty IE specific sites would only work if you ran in the most unsafe mode that existed. The solution was to keep IE as an insecure browser because the stuff I was required to use it for demanded it.
Perhaps with a greater market share we might start seeing exploits (coughFiresheepcough) for other browsers.
I have no idea that people are going to work on exploting Firefox -- though, the example you give isn't an exploit against Firefox, it just uses it.
Things like NoScript allow me to turn off the most likely vectors of attack, or at the very least, get rid of some of the annoyances. While it doesn't stop all of them, it at least gives me better control over what I'm willing to run. I am not aware of a tool in IE that allows me to selectively say "run this, don't run that" -- I can go through the nuisance of setting a site as a trusted site, but for a one-time thing, it just doesn't work.
I've never understood why government and businesses don't just change their operating hours... people would adjust to the schedule as well. It seems simpler to have summer and winter hours without messing with setting the clocks.
Because, everything else around us won't change.
We still have to schedule everything else with the world around us, and, quite frankly, I don't want to feel like I'm getting up at 5am to go to work.
Like I said, those of us who grew up with it can't fathom those of you who didn't. We mostly view your suggestion of change the working hours as a dumb idea.
I only ever use IE for work machines, because far too many web sites I use at work are Microsoft stuff that doesn't always play well with other browsers. For most stuff at work I use Firefox.
I just don't trust IE -- for years it was one of the worst vectors for exploits, malware, and all sorts of annoying shit. If there's an equivalent to noscript for IE, I might consider using it.
Until then, IE is a "when all else fails, and you have to trust the site", otherwise, it's something I stay away from as much as possible.
So in actual fact this is an argument for your region to take steps to choose&apply a time zone appropriate for its location, rather than making the rest of the world change their clocks twice a year for admittedly no benefit at all.
We have, and it involves daylight savings time.
We're not making you do a damned thing. If you don't like it, don't do it. You'll just have to keep track of what time we're operating on if you need to be calling us. (And, if we need to be calling you, we need to track that.)
Are you under the impression that you are forced to have DST just because (you think) we said so? Even within North America, there are places that don't do DST.
If your own government makes you do this, bitch to them. We don't care if you change your clocks. Heck, I don't care if you even have a clock.
Wake me 15 minutes early if is snowed last night. No you cant buy it, I built it.
Why am I picturing some crazy Rube Goldberg device which hangs a snow collection device out the window that sinks down as it fills with snow and then sets some crazy machine motion that turns on your alarm clock?;-)
It's snippy, egotistical little things that really piss me off about the open source movement.
Those of us who have been around long enough to really like open source, had to do that years ago.
Slashdot is mostly full of foaming-at-the-mouth "Free as in Libre" types who respond to almost everything with "that wouldn't have happened on open source" and who like to deride anything that is closed source.
Anyone who has used it long enough to either see a piece of software that is covered in warts, or just simply can't be made to do what a commercial products does knows better -- open source can be good. But, it isn't automatically good by virtue of being open source.
For almost everyone else in the world, the rabid "open source" fanboi-ism mostly leads to the conclusion that you should back away without making eye contact lest you have to endure a lecture from some kid who hasn't been around long enough to understand where this stuff breaks down.
It has it's place, but it's by no means a cure-all. Sometimes, it just creates crappy, unmaintained software.
But really, which century are we living in here? Why would anyone still wants to adjust their clocks twice a year, and what are we "saving" here exactly?
People's sanity.:-P
I live in a place with DST -- basically it means in the summer, we get extra-long days so it's light until late into the evening (almost 9pm around the solstice). It shifts the hours of usable daylight into hours people might actually use during the summer instead of it being light out at 5am or something stupid.
It also makes up for the fact that in winter it's dark when you get up and leave for work, and dark by the time you leave for home after work. In winter there's a good 1.5 month period where you don't get to see much daylight -- as short as about 8h42m of daylight. DST doesn't fix this, but it gives us some of it back in the summer.
Much like you can't fathom why we have it -- if you grew up with it, you can't fathom why everyone else doesn't have it.
I had no idea millions of people used their phone as an alarm clock.
Well, companies like iHome make clock radios and the like that are meant for it. They even make a nice app for i(Phone|Pad) which allows for multiple alarms with sleep music and wake music.
When I traveled on business last, I was pleased to discover that both hotels I stayed in had these and I could use my iPod in the hotel, as well as my iPad propped up on the nightstand. Charging your iPhone and using it as an alarm is fairly easy with these.
Once you have a device with all of your calendaring and email on it, using it as an alarm clock isn't a big stretch. Heck, even my several year old iPod nano has built in alarms that will work if you're in a docking station.
I'm not sure why you might even be remotely surprised by this.
3D is great, so long as a movie is made from the very beginning with it in mind, isn't used in a gimmicky sort of way, and isn't thrown in "just because".
I've only seen three movies that meet those requirements: Avatar, UP, and Coraline.
To me, 3D isn't worth the resulting headache. Just not a fan of it for what it's supposed to bring to the table.
Saw Avatar twice in 3D, both times I had eye strain and a headache for a couple of hours after. My copy of Coraline came with 3D glasses -- 20 minutes into the movie, I took off the glasses, flipped the disk back to the 2D side, and never thought of it again.
I'm sure people will continue to spend the money to see 3D. Me, I'll studiously avoid it -- it's a gimmick, and it detracts from my viewing experience rather than adding to it.
On a slightly related note, I watched a Vincent Price movie last night from 1953 -- it was filmed for 3D, but broadcast on TV so not in 3D. You could see the parts of the movie that were quite obviously intended to milk the 3D effect. Quite cheesy -- and just as much of a gimmick then as now.
This reminds me of Geico commercials. "15 minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance." If you think about that sentence, it really doesn't say anything. The sentence would be true if 1 in 10,000 people who took 15 minutes to call Geico saved more than fifteen percent off their car insurance.
My personal favorite example of such claims has always been "baked with real vegetables" on some snack crackers.
In no way does that imply that the vegetables are ingredients. Merely that they were baked with real vegetables. Throw a carrot in the oven, and the statement becomes true.;-)
The time, money, and effort to initially write it was huge too, except that unlike rewriting it, it was known at the time it was done to be a waste of resources. You're talking about organizations that have already said, "we have money to burn in exchange for getting hardly anything," so what's so radical about the position "we have money to burn in exchange for massive gains"?
Oh, bullshit.
Companies wrote those things because they had an immediate business need to get things done. Over time, they added onto them, and the tools became much more entrenched and something they can't get away from.
No organization said "hey, let's just waste some money and implement something we won't be able to replace". If you think that, you're an idiot who has never worked in the real world.
In the real world, people need solutions now. The reality is, when XP and IE6 were corporate standards, that was the toolset you had to work with.
Has anyone from these companies tried running XP in a VM to maintain compatibility
Did you even make it through the summary?
In order to deal with this, companies are looking at virtualizing IE6 only (instead of a full operating system) so that it can run on Windows 7 — even though Microsoft says this violates licensing agreements.
Yes, they have looked at it. As usual, Microsoft are being asshats. Heck, I think Microsoft even claims you can't run their operating systems on virtual machines unless it's their version of it.
Just goes to show you that no matter how annoying you can claim Microsoft to be, their user base can be equally so with their instance that decade-old software be their ONLY solution.
I don't think you understand the scope of the problem. Not even a little.
Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.
Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary? If so, then I think you have absolutely no understanding of what IT works like on a corporate scale.
I believe the entire Government of Canada has to use IE6 because they have apps that tie them to it. I suspect many really large organizations have this issue as well. It's not like these organizations can just stop using that software that they have.
If Microsoft didn't make stuff that was incompatible with everything else by design, companies wouldn't have this problem. But, as long as Microsoft continues to decide that their way is the best way, companies who have had to work around this are the ones who bear the burden.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm betting none. From TFA ...
This is a commercial entity which sells eCommerce software to other commercial entities.
Sometimes, the story has nothing to do with Open Source. This is one of them. So, feel free to get on with your "so why do we care" rants now.
What clients do they have? Migrate them to Oracle!
I fear we will lose Sun as general-use machines and have them replaced as being only for running Oracle. I know people are already getting burned with Oracle basically saying "unless you're on a support contract, you get nothing for your existing machines". If anything, they might drive people to replace Sun's with something else sooner.
Well, that and the fact that all of Oracle's stuff is written in Java. They've got a massive investment in Java that need to maintain.
I believe that.
I just don't think that this acquisition will be good for the industry, but only for Oracle; certainly not for the customers of the former Sun. In the long run, it might make things crappier overall.
One thing Java has going for it is that it (in theory) will run on all of the platforms.
If you removed the Java, then you would need to write the interface code for each platform you support. I gather that can actually create a fair bit of extra work, and make it harder to maintain.
I've been trying to figure out if this is a strategy by Oracle, or a side-effect they don't really care about.
Oracle is only interested in things that make them money. Something free, not so much. Now, we know they want Java because they've invested a lot in it. And, they want Sun hardware so they can have the revenue stream and ship Oracle appliances on a nice shiny support contract.
But I can't tell if Oracle is being ass-hats because they want to, because they're incapable of being anything else, or if there's an end-game for them in it. It seems like they're alienating everyone who works with the products they've bought at an alarming rate.
I'm not sure if gutting OO.org is good for them, bad for them, or such a trivial impact that they don't care.
At my old company, HR were among the worst offenders -- regularly requiring us to go to survey sites or various 3rd party sites to do various stupid tasks. Sometimes Finance did this as well.
Several times I tried to tell them "why the hell are you sending me to a 3rd party site when we have something that does this in house" or pointing out that the sites were requiring way too many permissions for what they were doing for us. Unfortunately, the tedious people in the beaurocracy of some organizations just don't understand why you're objecting to being sent to a 3rd party site that needs to install an ActiveX control.
Not visiting these sites for the stupid reasons cited was something which would get you in trouble.
In many cases, requirements from HR and some of the other groups more or less meant you couldn't have your IE set to the level of security IT mandated. So, they essentially forced us to run IE as an insecure tool, and only use it for very limited things.
It really does come down to stupid and lazy outranking sane and careful in some cases.
Yes, I understand that if you go far enough forward, DST won't really do anything for you.
I've known people from places like northern Sweden -- I don't think I could do that perpetual dark that happens during winter at higher latitudes.
It's bad enough where I am -- several weeks/months of being always dark would not work out so well for me.
But, even well-used (like in Avatar), the technology still hurts my eyes and gives me a headache.
For my experience, no matter how well you use the tool, the tool still sucks. The cheesy thrust something at the camera is pretty weak, but overall, I just don't find even good attempts to 3D to be of value to me.
No, I don't mean that at all. I love how people on Slashdot think that they know what I mean more than I do. Firefox and Mozilla have been around for a long time, it's not like they're brand new and nobody is aware of them.
I mean IE ran with a security policy that more or less was wide open, and that you could set to "allow everything" or "allow nothing" -- invariably some %^$#^& POS web-site the company I worked for would force us to use basically expected to be able to run everything. When it didn't work, HR would say "oh, just turn down your browser security".
Basically these shitty IE specific sites would only work if you ran in the most unsafe mode that existed. The solution was to keep IE as an insecure browser because the stuff I was required to use it for demanded it.
I have no idea that people are going to work on exploting Firefox -- though, the example you give isn't an exploit against Firefox, it just uses it.
Things like NoScript allow me to turn off the most likely vectors of attack, or at the very least, get rid of some of the annoyances. While it doesn't stop all of them, it at least gives me better control over what I'm willing to run. I am not aware of a tool in IE that allows me to selectively say "run this, don't run that" -- I can go through the nuisance of setting a site as a trusted site, but for a one-time thing, it just doesn't work.
Because, everything else around us won't change.
We still have to schedule everything else with the world around us, and, quite frankly, I don't want to feel like I'm getting up at 5am to go to work.
Like I said, those of us who grew up with it can't fathom those of you who didn't. We mostly view your suggestion of change the working hours as a dumb idea.
I only ever use IE for work machines, because far too many web sites I use at work are Microsoft stuff that doesn't always play well with other browsers. For most stuff at work I use Firefox.
I just don't trust IE -- for years it was one of the worst vectors for exploits, malware, and all sorts of annoying shit. If there's an equivalent to noscript for IE, I might consider using it.
Until then, IE is a "when all else fails, and you have to trust the site", otherwise, it's something I stay away from as much as possible.
*laugh* Watching it in 2D helps me just fine. ;-)
We have, and it involves daylight savings time.
We're not making you do a damned thing. If you don't like it, don't do it. You'll just have to keep track of what time we're operating on if you need to be calling us. (And, if we need to be calling you, we need to track that.)
Are you under the impression that you are forced to have DST just because (you think) we said so? Even within North America, there are places that don't do DST.
If your own government makes you do this, bitch to them. We don't care if you change your clocks. Heck, I don't care if you even have a clock.
Why am I picturing some crazy Rube Goldberg device which hangs a snow collection device out the window that sinks down as it fills with snow and then sets some crazy machine motion that turns on your alarm clock? ;-)
Those of us who have been around long enough to really like open source, had to do that years ago.
Slashdot is mostly full of foaming-at-the-mouth "Free as in Libre" types who respond to almost everything with "that wouldn't have happened on open source" and who like to deride anything that is closed source.
Anyone who has used it long enough to either see a piece of software that is covered in warts, or just simply can't be made to do what a commercial products does knows better -- open source can be good. But, it isn't automatically good by virtue of being open source.
For almost everyone else in the world, the rabid "open source" fanboi-ism mostly leads to the conclusion that you should back away without making eye contact lest you have to endure a lecture from some kid who hasn't been around long enough to understand where this stuff breaks down.
It has it's place, but it's by no means a cure-all. Sometimes, it just creates crappy, unmaintained software.
People's sanity. :-P
I live in a place with DST -- basically it means in the summer, we get extra-long days so it's light until late into the evening (almost 9pm around the solstice). It shifts the hours of usable daylight into hours people might actually use during the summer instead of it being light out at 5am or something stupid.
It also makes up for the fact that in winter it's dark when you get up and leave for work, and dark by the time you leave for home after work. In winter there's a good 1.5 month period where you don't get to see much daylight -- as short as about 8h42m of daylight. DST doesn't fix this, but it gives us some of it back in the summer.
Much like you can't fathom why we have it -- if you grew up with it, you can't fathom why everyone else doesn't have it.
Well, companies like iHome make clock radios and the like that are meant for it. They even make a nice app for i(Phone|Pad) which allows for multiple alarms with sleep music and wake music.
When I traveled on business last, I was pleased to discover that both hotels I stayed in had these and I could use my iPod in the hotel, as well as my iPad propped up on the nightstand. Charging your iPhone and using it as an alarm is fairly easy with these.
Once you have a device with all of your calendaring and email on it, using it as an alarm clock isn't a big stretch. Heck, even my several year old iPod nano has built in alarms that will work if you're in a docking station.
I'm not sure why you might even be remotely surprised by this.
To me, 3D isn't worth the resulting headache. Just not a fan of it for what it's supposed to bring to the table.
Saw Avatar twice in 3D, both times I had eye strain and a headache for a couple of hours after. My copy of Coraline came with 3D glasses -- 20 minutes into the movie, I took off the glasses, flipped the disk back to the 2D side, and never thought of it again.
I'm sure people will continue to spend the money to see 3D. Me, I'll studiously avoid it -- it's a gimmick, and it detracts from my viewing experience rather than adding to it.
On a slightly related note, I watched a Vincent Price movie last night from 1953 -- it was filmed for 3D, but broadcast on TV so not in 3D. You could see the parts of the movie that were quite obviously intended to milk the 3D effect. Quite cheesy -- and just as much of a gimmick then as now.
You don't have high enough clearance for that. Don't ask questions above your paygrade. ;-P
My personal favorite example of such claims has always been "baked with real vegetables" on some snack crackers.
In no way does that imply that the vegetables are ingredients. Merely that they were baked with real vegetables. Throw a carrot in the oven, and the statement becomes true. ;-)
Oh, bullshit.
Companies wrote those things because they had an immediate business need to get things done. Over time, they added onto them, and the tools became much more entrenched and something they can't get away from.
No organization said "hey, let's just waste some money and implement something we won't be able to replace". If you think that, you're an idiot who has never worked in the real world.
In the real world, people need solutions now. The reality is, when XP and IE6 were corporate standards, that was the toolset you had to work with.
Sadly, it's their enterprise customers which will suffer the consequences.
Did you even make it through the summary?
Yes, they have looked at it. As usual, Microsoft are being asshats. Heck, I think Microsoft even claims you can't run their operating systems on virtual machines unless it's their version of it.
I don't think you understand the scope of the problem. Not even a little.
Companies and governments have massive amounts of custom code which runs only on IE6. The time, money, and effort to rewrite this would be absolutely huge.
Are you seriously suggesting that organizations just toss out a mission-critical bit of software either because it's old or proprietary? If so, then I think you have absolutely no understanding of what IT works like on a corporate scale.
I believe the entire Government of Canada has to use IE6 because they have apps that tie them to it. I suspect many really large organizations have this issue as well. It's not like these organizations can just stop using that software that they have.
If Microsoft didn't make stuff that was incompatible with everything else by design, companies wouldn't have this problem. But, as long as Microsoft continues to decide that their way is the best way, companies who have had to work around this are the ones who bear the burden.
Sometimes, a cake is just a cake.
I've had cake, and that's no lie. ;-)