For chrissakes, will somebody just fork Java and have done with this persistent Oracle nonsense?
I mean, sure, it's good Oracle is doing this. They're just way late, as usual.
Why doesn't somebody just fork it (from back when it was easily forkable), then re-implement the security fixes?
Granted, it would take a lot of work to do that NOW, but if somebody had done it way back when it should have been done, it would have been lots easier.
I firmly believe that an active open source community would be a much better caretaker of Java. Oracle has proven again and again that it doesn't care much about people who actually use Java.
And why exactly would "someone" want to do that? Why exactly would "someone" want to take on something that you admit is "a lot of work". Whats in it for that "someone"? What do they get for the many, many months of hard work that would be required to do this?
Instead of demanding that "someone" do it, why don't YOU do it?
What's that you say? You don't have the programming skills? You don't know anything about the code base and wouldn't even know where to start? You don't feel like spending an enormous amount of your life on something for no benefit other than "hey look what I did"?
Congratulations. You have just illustrated the fallacy of open source.
Doesn't' a 'renewed' focus on security imply the existence of a focus on security at some prior point in time?
a "renewed" focus on security implies that they were focused on security but then quit, and now are going back to it. So the real question is why did they abandon the focus on security.
Of course, the obvious answer is that there never was any focus on security and now saying that they have a "renewed focus on security" is 100% pure Public Relations Bullshit.
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth. So, you could have a planet that evolved at the same pace as Earth, but started millions (or hundreds of millions) of years earlier.
Then, form a new company, a joint venture, dedicated to rolling out "Google" fiber, er, Gapple Fiber... nationwide before 2015.
Even *IF* this Google/Apple partnership happened, it would take a lot longer than 2015. You would be very. very lucky to see a significant portion of the U.S. served with fiber by 2035.
And that's the problem. The U.S. is a really big place. More importantly, what is the track record of projects (of any kind) that cost a lot of money and take a lot of time? Hint: it's not good. People come and go, priorities change.
Rather than waste time and money chasing the fiber fantasy, we would be better served to work on breaking the current monopoly on broadband service. The current ISPs can deliver speeds that are sufficient for most people, at a reasonable price, using existing infrastructure. But they don't have to because they have no competition. Force the monopoly ISPs to open up their networks and almost over night you will see higher speds, lower prices and no more nonsense like download caps.
I don't have the numbers, but how much did it cost when they first got those cables to homes? Inflation adjusted, I doubt today's fiber is any more expensive than coax cables decades ago.
The key phrase is "decades ago". It took decades to get cable to the level it is today. It also took a lot of money, but it wasn't just one company spending all that money. It was spread out among many companies.
If there were several other companies like Google who were willing to roll out fiber, THEN it would put tremendous pressure on the current monopolies. But it's never going to happen. Google will do Austin and maybe 1 or 2 other cities and that will be it. It takes too long and costs too much. Google has a lot of money, but even Google can't afford to run fiber to more than about 1 percent of the U.S.
Raymond Lane, who was recently re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholders.
Winning an election with 58% of the vote is perfectly fine. Until you realize that he had no opponent. Just like elections in the old Soviet Union or other dictatorships, elections for most boards of directors are a complete fraud. If there is one seat open on the board, there is exactly one candidate.
Headline says Microsoft is "making millions". I think it would be more accurate to say Microsoft is "just about breaking even" on renting office space to vendors.
It would be more accurate to say that Microsoft is "charging millions". But then we all know how well accuracy is regarded here.
It's arrogance plain and simple and Microsoft is slowly and steadily becoming less relevant in computing today.
You're absolutely right. Microsoft is so totally irrelevant that last year they only had $68 Billion in revenue and only had the highest profits in the company's history. Yep, you nailed it. Microsoft is failing and failing fast.
A while back I was looking at an advertisement for a medication used to treat people with a bladder problem. In the fine print it said that in clinical trials, 79% of the people who took this medication reported an improvement in their bladder problem, compared to 49% who reported an improvement after taking a placebo. Half the people who took a placebo claimed they got better.
These must be the same people who believe that vinyl LPs " have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack"
the state estimates the tax may bring in a quarter billion dollars in 2014
These estimates are always way off. And even *IF* it did bring in that much money, the money would simply be wasted on all sorts of uneccessary bullshit and the state will be no better off than they were before.
Those apps aren't going away (a lot are there to meet contractual/legal obligations and aren't trivial to redevelop / recertify)
I have no sympathy for companies that used bad software. They're in their position because of bad business decisions in the first place.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
Browsers and the World Wide Web in general didn't just suddenly appear one day, fully formed with a complete set of perfect specifications and standards. They evolved slowly over time. And while everything was evolving, and while everyone was trying to figure out exactly what those web standards should be, the rest of the world wasn't standing still. Billions of web pages were being created, based on whatever shitty browsers and standards existed at the time.
For a long time, it didn't matter what "standards" there were. Internet Explorer *WAS* the standard, because it was the only major browser -- there was no Firefox or Chrome -- and so that's how web pages were designed. Then when things changed, when there was competition among browsers and more emphasis on adhering to standards, there was a problem. There were all these billions of web pages and applications based on old shitty browsers. Suddenly businesses had all this stuff that worked perfectly fine in IE6 but broke horribly with any other browser. It's easy to make fun of their "lack of foresight" but back when IE6 was the only browser from a big well known company, people had no way of knowing that things were going to change tremendously in just a few years.
And so browser developers were forced to resort to all sorts of hacks and kludges to make sure that their browser properly rendered all those shitty poor designed web pages. Sure you could design a browser that refused to display all those improperly coded pages. (Hey, remember "Strict HTML"?) And you would watch usage of your browser drop to zero. When the average person goes to a page that does not display properly how many of them think "this page wasn't designed properly" versus "there's something wrong with my browser".
Everyone else listening on the little earphones that came with their cellphone can't.
Now, in grand slashdot tradition, could we please have a debate about the use of 192KHz sample rates between those people who know what they are talking about
Saying that A sounds better than B is purely subjective and has absolutely nothing to do with "knowing what you are talking about".
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication. These must be the same people who rail against mp3s.
Just because Neil young and Dave Grohl are famous musicians, it doesn't mean that they actually know what they are talking about. 40 years of exposure to loud music has probably damaged their hearing enough that they really don't know what they are hearing.
Saying that A sounds better than B is completely subjective and affected by many things. Not just how the music was encoded, but the quality of the DAC used for playback and the quality of the speakers/headphones used.
Music sales may be continuing, but the difference is that people tend to buy bands like Justin Bieber or other pop stuff pushed by the record labels.
In the 1990s, before piracy, one could do well as an independent band, or have a good chance at getting signed and making it big. Back then, if you were good, you had a chance of making it big. Trent Reznor is a good example.
Fast forward to now. Music as a way of making income is dead, just like textiles and meat-packing. You cannot live off of CD sales
Sorry, but you've got it wrong. Piracy didn't kill bands, technology did.
Just as you can no longer make a living selling buggy whips, changes in technology has greatly reduced the demand for physical media. The inconvenient truth that nobody wants to admit is that iTunes and other sources of *legal* downloading is the biggest thing hurting musicians and the record companies. Here's why:
Until a few years ago, buying music meant going to a store and buying an album. Regardless of the format (CD, Vinyl LP, etc.) buying an album was your only choice. Even if half the songs on those albums weren't so great, it didn't matter. Buying an album was the the only option available to consumers. This was a great deal for musicians and record companies because it meant that they sold a lot of albums and both musicians and record companies made a lot of money.
Then along comes the iPod, iTunes and all the rest. Suddenly, people can now buy individual songs and put them onto their mp3 player of choice. Not only does this greatly reduce the demand for physical media (CDs), but when their favorite band puts out a new CD they can just buy the 4 or 5 good songs that everyone is talking about and ignore the 5 or 6 shitty ones.
At this point it becomes a matter of simple arithmetic. Instead of selling a million albums, an artist sells a million copes of 5 songs, and 5 million songs at 99 cents each is a lot less than 1 million albums at $12-15 each.
The same is true for publishing royalties. Once again, the math is simple. Sell a CD and you get publishing royalties for all 12 songs. Sell individual songs and you only get royalties for the songs sold. The shitty songs that everyone ignores generate no money.
Why do I suspect that those with the 2.1 billion downloaded CDs would be listening to the radio instead of purchasing a CD if downloading them was not an option.
You're exactly right. All of the Media Cartel's claims of lost revenue are based on a fallacy - that every song/movie downloaded equals a lost sale. No matter how many times this is shown to be false, they keep repeating the same lie over and over. Considering the number of times that the Record/TV/Movie companies have cheated artists out of money, this is not surprising.
A few years ago I found a magazine article about music "piracy" from 1981. Back in those days most of the technology we use today didn't exist. Almost no one had a computer, there was no Internet (as we know it today), etc.
The villain back then, according to the RIAA was cassette tape recorders -- people were making tapes of their friends albums rather than buying them. So the RIAA commissioned a study that they hoped to take to Congress to convince them that they needed new laws to combat this terrible problem. But the report was shelved and never widely publicized because it showed that people who owned high end cassette decks, on average, bought 75% more albums than people who didn't.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Maybe Mr. Singhal, "one of the executives heading up the company's search-engine operations", needs to spend some time explaining why Google's search results suck so much and have gotten steadily worse. But that will never happen. Because then he might have to talk about what a lot of people already know -- shitty search results are good for Google's bottom line.
Shitty search results increase the number of links you click on, trying to find what you want, and if any of those links belong to people in Google's AdWords program, more clicks means more money for Google. Shitty search results also increase the chance that someone will click on one of the paid ads trying to find what they are looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
For chrissakes, will somebody just fork Java and have done with this persistent Oracle nonsense?
I mean, sure, it's good Oracle is doing this. They're just way late, as usual.
Why doesn't somebody just fork it (from back when it was easily forkable), then re-implement the security fixes?
Granted, it would take a lot of work to do that NOW, but if somebody had done it way back when it should have been done, it would have been lots easier.
I firmly believe that an active open source community would be a much better caretaker of Java. Oracle has proven again and again that it doesn't care much about people who actually use Java.
And why exactly would "someone" want to do that? Why exactly would "someone" want to take on something that you admit is "a lot of work". Whats in it for that "someone"? What do they get for the many, many months of hard work that would be required to do this?
Instead of demanding that "someone" do it, why don't YOU do it?
What's that you say? You don't have the programming skills? You don't know anything about the code base and wouldn't even know where to start? You don't feel like spending an enormous amount of your life on something for no benefit other than "hey look what I did"?
Congratulations. You have just illustrated the fallacy of open source.
Doesn't' a 'renewed' focus on security imply the existence of a focus on security at some prior point in time?
a "renewed" focus on security implies that they were focused on security but then quit, and now are going back to it. So the real question is why did they abandon the focus on security.
Of course, the obvious answer is that there never was any focus on security and now saying that they have a "renewed focus on security" is 100% pure Public Relations Bullshit.
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth. So, you could have a planet that evolved at the same pace as Earth, but started millions (or hundreds of millions) of years earlier.
Oh right, this guy: http://www.icann.org/en/groups/board/cerf.htm
The guy who spent 8 years as Chairman of the Board of ICANN, one of the most corrupt organizations on the Internet.
Wordpress is a cancer on the Internet. It really needs to die.
I wish Apple and Google would kiss and make up..
Then, form a new company, a joint venture, dedicated to rolling out "Google" fiber, er, Gapple Fiber... nationwide before 2015.
Even *IF* this Google/Apple partnership happened, it would take a lot longer than 2015. You would be very. very lucky to see a significant portion of the U.S. served with fiber by 2035.
And that's the problem. The U.S. is a really big place. More importantly, what is the track record of projects (of any kind) that cost a lot of money and take a lot of time? Hint: it's not good. People come and go, priorities change.
Rather than waste time and money chasing the fiber fantasy, we would be better served to work on breaking the current monopoly on broadband service. The current ISPs can deliver speeds that are sufficient for most people, at a reasonable price, using existing infrastructure. But they don't have to because they have no competition. Force the monopoly ISPs to open up their networks and almost over night you will see higher speds, lower prices and no more nonsense like download caps.
I don't have the numbers, but how much did it cost when they first got those cables to homes? Inflation adjusted, I doubt today's fiber is any more expensive than coax cables decades ago.
The key phrase is "decades ago". It took decades to get cable to the level it is today. It also took a lot of money, but it wasn't just one company spending all that money. It was spread out among many companies.
If there were several other companies like Google who were willing to roll out fiber, THEN it would put tremendous pressure on the current monopolies. But it's never going to happen. Google will do Austin and maybe 1 or 2 other cities and that will be it. It takes too long and costs too much. Google has a lot of money, but even Google can't afford to run fiber to more than about 1 percent of the U.S.
And the current monopoly ISPs know this.
Raymond Lane, who was recently re-elected by only 58.8% of shareholders.
Winning an election with 58% of the vote is perfectly fine. Until you realize that he had no opponent. Just like elections in the old Soviet Union or other dictatorships, elections for most boards of directors are a complete fraud. If there is one seat open on the board, there is exactly one candidate.
Headline says Microsoft is "making millions". I think it would be more accurate to say Microsoft is "just about breaking even" on renting office space to vendors.
It would be more accurate to say that Microsoft is "charging millions". But then we all know how well accuracy is regarded here.
It's arrogance plain and simple and Microsoft is slowly and steadily becoming less relevant in computing today.
You're absolutely right. Microsoft is so totally irrelevant that last year they only had $68 Billion in revenue and only had the highest profits in the company's history. Yep, you nailed it. Microsoft is failing and failing fast.
$650 for a phone
[rolls on floor laughing]
There really is a sucker born every minute.
Vinyl remains king in the electronic/hiphop/whatever DJ scene.
Where sound quality is of absolutely no concern.
A while back I was looking at an advertisement for a medication used to treat people with a bladder problem. In the fine print it said that in clinical trials, 79% of the people who took this medication reported an improvement in their bladder problem, compared to 49% who reported an improvement after taking a placebo. Half the people who took a placebo claimed they got better.
These must be the same people who believe that vinyl LPs " have a depth and warmth that CDs and MP3s lack"
the state estimates the tax may bring in a quarter billion dollars in 2014
These estimates are always way off. And even *IF* it did bring in that much money, the money would simply be wasted on all sorts of uneccessary bullshit and the state will be no better off than they were before.
Those apps aren't going away (a lot are there to meet contractual/legal obligations and aren't trivial to redevelop / recertify)
I have no sympathy for companies that used bad software. They're in their position because of bad business decisions in the first place.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
Browsers and the World Wide Web in general didn't just suddenly appear one day, fully formed with a complete set of perfect specifications and standards. They evolved slowly over time. And while everything was evolving, and while everyone was trying to figure out exactly what those web standards should be, the rest of the world wasn't standing still. Billions of web pages were being created, based on whatever shitty browsers and standards existed at the time.
For a long time, it didn't matter what "standards" there were. Internet Explorer *WAS* the standard, because it was the only major browser -- there was no Firefox or Chrome -- and so that's how web pages were designed. Then when things changed, when there was competition among browsers and more emphasis on adhering to standards, there was a problem. There were all these billions of web pages and applications based on old shitty browsers. Suddenly businesses had all this stuff that worked perfectly fine in IE6 but broke horribly with any other browser. It's easy to make fun of their "lack of foresight" but back when IE6 was the only browser from a big well known company, people had no way of knowing that things were going to change tremendously in just a few years.
And so browser developers were forced to resort to all sorts of hacks and kludges to make sure that their browser properly rendered all those shitty poor designed web pages. Sure you could design a browser that refused to display all those improperly coded pages. (Hey, remember "Strict HTML"?) And you would watch usage of your browser drop to zero. When the average person goes to a page that does not display properly how many of them think "this page wasn't designed properly" versus "there's something wrong with my browser".
The main culprits I've seen which do this are telephone system providers (Mitel/iPecs etc).
The issue being that people are very touchy about updating telephony software, primarily following the old adage, "if it ain't broke don't fix it".
The problem is that it is IS broken.
Everyone else listening on the little earphones that came with their cellphone can't.
Now, in grand slashdot tradition, could we please have a debate about the use of 192KHz sample rates between those people who know what they are talking about
Saying that A sounds better than B is purely subjective and has absolutely nothing to do with "knowing what you are talking about".
It's like asking "can you win a race against a Toyoda?" where do you even start with that....?
Since Akio Toyoda is 30 years older than me, I'm pretty sure I could beat him in a race.
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication. These must be the same people who rail against mp3s.
Just because Neil young and Dave Grohl are famous musicians, it doesn't mean that they actually know what they are talking about. 40 years of exposure to loud music has probably damaged their hearing enough that they really don't know what they are hearing.
Saying that A sounds better than B is completely subjective and affected by many things. Not just how the music was encoded, but the quality of the DAC used for playback and the quality of the speakers/headphones used.
Read this. Memorize it. It tells you everything you need to know as a developer:
http://tommyrefenes.tumblr.com/post/45684087997/apathy-and-refunds-are-more-dangerous-than-piracy
Music sales may be continuing, but the difference is that people tend to buy bands like Justin Bieber or other pop stuff pushed by the record labels.
In the 1990s, before piracy, one could do well as an independent band, or have a good chance at getting signed and making it big. Back then, if you were good, you had a chance of making it big. Trent Reznor is a good example.
Fast forward to now. Music as a way of making income is dead, just like textiles and meat-packing. You cannot live off of CD sales
Sorry, but you've got it wrong. Piracy didn't kill bands, technology did.
Just as you can no longer make a living selling buggy whips, changes in technology has greatly reduced the demand for physical media. The inconvenient truth that nobody wants to admit is that iTunes and other sources of *legal* downloading is the biggest thing hurting musicians and the record companies. Here's why:
Until a few years ago, buying music meant going to a store and buying an album. Regardless of the format (CD, Vinyl LP, etc.) buying an album was your only choice. Even if half the songs on those albums weren't so great, it didn't matter. Buying an album was the the only option available to consumers. This was a great deal for musicians and record companies because it meant that they sold a lot of albums and both musicians and record companies made a lot of money.
Then along comes the iPod, iTunes and all the rest. Suddenly, people can now buy individual songs and put them onto their mp3 player of choice. Not only does this greatly reduce the demand for physical media (CDs), but when their favorite band puts out a new CD they can just buy the 4 or 5 good songs that everyone is talking about and ignore the 5 or 6 shitty ones.
At this point it becomes a matter of simple arithmetic. Instead of selling a million albums, an artist sells a million copes of 5 songs, and 5 million songs at 99 cents each is a lot less than 1 million albums at $12-15 each.
The same is true for publishing royalties. Once again, the math is simple. Sell a CD and you get publishing royalties for all 12 songs. Sell individual songs and you only get royalties for the songs sold. The shitty songs that everyone ignores generate no money.
Why do I suspect that those with the 2.1 billion downloaded CDs would be listening to the radio instead of purchasing a CD if downloading them was not an option.
You're exactly right. All of the Media Cartel's claims of lost revenue are based on a fallacy - that every song/movie downloaded equals a lost sale. No matter how many times this is shown to be false, they keep repeating the same lie over and over. Considering the number of times that the Record/TV/Movie companies have cheated artists out of money, this is not surprising.
... as I recall.
A few years ago I found a magazine article about music "piracy" from 1981. Back in those days most of the technology we use today didn't exist. Almost no one had a computer, there was no Internet (as we know it today), etc.
The villain back then, according to the RIAA was cassette tape recorders -- people were making tapes of their friends albums rather than buying them. So the RIAA commissioned a study that they hoped to take to Congress to convince them that they needed new laws to combat this terrible problem. But the report was shelved and never widely publicized because it showed that people who owned high end cassette decks, on average, bought 75% more albums than people who didn't.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Maybe Mr. Singhal, "one of the executives heading up the company's search-engine operations", needs to spend some time explaining why Google's search results suck so much and have gotten steadily worse. But that will never happen. Because then he might have to talk about what a lot of people already know -- shitty search results are good for Google's bottom line.
Shitty search results increase the number of links you click on, trying to find what you want, and if any of those links belong to people in Google's AdWords program, more clicks means more money for Google. Shitty search results also increase the chance that someone will click on one of the paid ads trying to find what they are looking for.
As Paul Frampton has now learned.