Exactly, fear the good translation, not the poor one. These are not diplomats using AIM to talk to each other. A well-crafted insult stings far worse than an accidental one.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultu[r]es, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. -- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galexy
I remember being a kid on an Eastern Airlines flight to Orlando and I got to go into the cockpit while the plane was flying. The pilot also gave us little plastic wings. Seems foolish now in retrospect.
Keeping the world safe from trained kid terrorist/pilots is what we learned on 9/11? I may disagree on whether that was as foolish as present policies. If thousands of people can die every year just from the right of smokers to blow smoke in non-smokers' faces and the department of homeland security isn't concerned about that, I am willing to risk letting kids back into cockpits and, even their parents.
You really didn't realize that Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.4 are mostly the same code? Not only could you choose to use Mozilla by choosing Netscape, but the experience of people using Netscape 7 is relevant to experience of people using Mozilla.
But not one that only grants use of the code to someone who does not use their own IPR to restrict use of the code, such as Caldera distributed Linux under. To me, that is a big difference.
These rules are good. I think both notification and public notices of being hacked should be required. But merchants and customers should be smarter to start with.
Many prominent ecommerce sites insist that if you buy with them, you have to open an account where your credit card info will be stored permanently (read the fine print on PayPal, for example, what happens when you try to erase it).
In order to permit you to reuse the credit card number without reentering it later, it generally has to be stored in a place accessible to the web server applications, aka a very hackable location. They usually claim to protect this via n-bit encryption, but their application can easily decrypt it, generally meaning that a hacker who owns the web server can as well.
If a brick-and-mortar merchant insisted on storing a xerox of the credit cards of all his customers in a filing cabinet on the sales room floor in case any time in the future they forgot their credit cards, I would still feel more secure than this sort of e-merchant makes me feel (because the volume of CC numbers is less and it can't be accessed remotely) than a database with millions of card numbers. There is a huge difference between temporarily using the credit card info in a transaction database and making it permanently available in an account database. Not only can transactions records be more-fully isolated from the web servers than account records, but in the transaction case, the most compromised is far less than the millions of credit card numbers compromised in an account database. You make yourself vulnerable forever if you do business with someone who wants to keep your credit card available in your account, and they probably will not even tell you if it is compromised.
IMO, good merchants do not insist on storing your credit card number in the account, but rather permit you to manually reenter it every time. Just like all the Microsoft email conveniences that turn out to be security holes, this sort of ecommerce convenience is asking to have your credit card number abused, with no notification. The number is safer in your wallet or travelling across SSL than in a web-server database with millions of other credit cards.
PayPal refuses to erase the account info even if you erase it. Perhaps this sort of law will eventually force irresponsible merchants to rethink the way they expose millions of cards to cracking. You can't hack what is not on the server.
While Red Hat is at it with rpm and apt-get, they should build the equivalent cygwin system. That is the way to start invading windows desktops. Get people hooked on free software and then show them the better and free OS that runs the applications natively.
Because they are fools with an attention span of a couple of months when it comes to visions that take quite a few years, and an expert at Corel who is an old-timer is one who has been with them for three years rather than the normal 6 months. They are also laying off, again, as we speak, caches of non-temporary workers that had clung on a bit too long for their liking.
I know of submissions I did, for example, citing new news stories wherein SCO says that it has not gone after Linux distributers because of GPL, and saying a fair amount about GPL as though they had never noticed it before -- that McBride finally seemed to have gotten a clue that it would be extremely difficult to collect Linux royalties because of the GPL. It made for a good discussion of the very real protections of the GPL and the whole GPL angle of the case, choices and outcomes matrix, etc.
Sorry I no longer have the whole text of the article or of my writeup. When I wrote the article, the text of this article was freely visible for about a week, but in the last few days it has become password protected:
There have been good submissions over the last several days containing new information and perspectives on the SCO case. This is not one of them. This is SCO trying to stay in the news and Slashdot editors resurrecting his interview again a number of days after the interview. In terms of SCO news, this is very tired and old.
Yes, but not an open one. Sun could not deal with the fact that others in the community might have valuable contributions that did not coincide with their own.
Sun's implementation of the Java spec is the reference implementation, not the only one. And at this point it's a reasonably open specification at that.
The implementation is clearly not open. If it were, it would be easy to do experimentation. A "reference implementation" that cannot be openly experimented with and trivially redistributed as a derivitive to try out a new idea with users leaves experimenters with very little to work with.
The JCP is a farce, you say? Then how do you explain the fact that the all of the new features coming out in Java 1.5 went through that process?
My point exactly. To have reasonable improvements you would have to have a more open process. I worked for a major Java licensee for a number years and it was impossible to get even the smallest critical fixes let alone improvements. I am not the only one to ever make this observation.
Or that the majority of optional class libraries, such as Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE) and Java Advance Imaging (JAI), also went through that process? Have you tried participating in the process, or is bitching about it enough to satisfy you?
I have certainly attempted to work with the process in a major way over an extended period of time, although not within the past 3 years. The process probably works if what you want to do happens to resonate with Sun and they have extra resources lying around to do it. That makes for a very limited path for fixes and improvements. If you are so perfectly satisfied, is it perhaps because your needs are very low, or you work for Sun?
Other folks (most recently Redhat, as discussed in this Slashdot story) have been considering doing a completely open-source implementation for some time. I'm guessing we'll see one at some point, although realistically I don't see the need for it.
I don't see the need for it either, when either: 1) sun could open-source their implementation and let them contribute as an equal, or 2) if the open source community group is going to do it, they should make a competing language rather than trying to play catch up to an ever-shifting monstrous target with a proprietary standard. Perhaps you do not see the need because, again, you have never had any demands that went beyond the capabilities of the basic tools.
Secondly (and this provided me with my biggest laugh of the day by the way), do you actually believe that Microsoft was trying to fix the problems with Java?? In that case, I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge if you want it.... But getting back to the point here, from scores & scores of court documents it's obvious that Microsoft's purpose for "extending" Java was to fragment it & keep their desktop monopoly intact.
Certainly Microsoft had monopolistic motives, but Sun is the pot calling the kettle black in their desire to control Java. Microsoft really was trying to fix certain real problems they had with Java, for example in providing an alternative to JNI, which has always been quite broken. Each company tries to solve its own problems and if it were an open standard, it would give various groups the ability to vary as appropriate. I would never expect Sun to try to fix Microsoft's problems or of any others of its licensees. It certainly did not prioritize things in a reasonable way when we were trying to get enough fixed to write reasonable business software. Had it been GPL, we could have at least fixed it to work the same and according to their spec on the platforms we supported. An open standard would have identified the many places that Sun did not follow their own documentation or standard, and would still keep a bar for interoperability. Sun has often not deserved it's own Java label for violating basic interface represe
It is no suprise to most here that poor behavior from any supplier, be it Microsoft, Sun, SCO, IBM, Redhat, etc., is not desirable. It has nothing to do with Microsofts "cause", but a few AC's, being part of that majority which automatically takes for granted what is handed to them by the mainstream, continue to try to make topics that present alternative analyses and experiences look like monochrome religious causes.
NT was one of the first efforts by Microsoft to create a real operating system acknowledging that not all PCs are simple consumer devices and there was merit to something stronger like OS/2, which they had abandoned. Open source and standards would have made it even more interesting, but the world being what it was, it was clearly of great interest and a great step forward, perhaps greater (performing, more stable, and/or secure) than any later advance from Microsoft in terms of OS kernels.
And Sun Java is well worth what you pay for it, unless you are a licensee with things you need to have fixed.
If it were GPL and open standards, it would be worth much more, and distributers could choose the best alternative, and there might be better responsiveness for improvements and fixes.
Sun, if you want people to use Java, you need to start being competetive with it or let other people be competetive with it. GPL of your implementation and open standards would be a good start (although it would likely take a few years to revitalize Java). But that would let other users do exactly what Microsoft was trying to do -- fix problems with it, which is exactly what Sun prevents. Licensee programs and JCP are a farce, and do not help enough to most users. As such, users need to be able to easily create derivitive works and show the merits of changes, which Sun could choose to integrate in their distribution or not under GPL.
I have worked with GCJ. It works somewhat, but in my informal tests, is 1/3 as fast in completely-compiled mode as Sun's Jit, and has generally the same limitations of Sun's implementation because it attempts to copy it. It has the same problems as OS/2's windows interpretation or Wine. It generally goes no further than what it emulates, and people look at Sun for the Java standard.
If Sun wants Java to succeed, Sun needs to do this or convince me how I can begin to get necessary support to make using Java more generally successful. I have long since done my duty presenting the case to Sun and then abandoning Java when they repeatedly did not listen to major licensees. All I hear from them is paranoia that someone else might be empowered by it, be it Microsoft, IBM, or others.
Standardization has never been a real ongoing debate. Sun has not listened. If Sun will not open the standard or otherwise make it so people can help themselves and distribute modified environments, then, as I said before, the open way is clearly to create a different language standard, not try to muddle through with one that Sun is trying to control and has been causing to stagnate for so many years.
The current framework or status quo is of limited value, and Sun has had plenty of feedback along those lines. It would probably be easier to convince Microsoft to open their stuff up more than Sun.
So, they compared RH (Linux), UnitedLinux (Linux again) against Windows (not Linux). Guess which OS has 66% chances of winning, given that, honestly, modern Linux distros and Windows are very close in features and user friendliness ?
This is one of the silliest assertions of numbers I have seen. It might be true if the comparison were Linux versus Windows, and you were rolling dice to determine the outcome, in which case the comparison is useless. If it is a valid comparison, it takes only one to win, and you can add all the inferior ones you want, and it does not affect the chances of the winner winning. It is not the preponderance of similar entries that makes that sort of entry likely to win.
Had you read the article, you would find that Windows was not being compared at all. Oh my, a rigged comparison where only Linux could win. And the Formula 1 is rigged so that only cars can win, no bicycles or NASA spacecraft... how sad!
I have developed lots of significant things in Java, but have repeatedly been confronted with bad / stupid limitations of the environment and implementations. Even expending considerable resources and being a full Java licensee, it has never been possible to get simple issues resolved within a reasonable time frame. Occasionally I see something being addressed 5 years or more after the corresponding project gave up on Java because of the lack of a reasonable response. Other issues are never addressed. As such, I do not trust the Java base to deliver the necessary tools, fixes, etc. I see release after release that fixes some things and breaks a number of others and there is no real recourse.
Swing is far worse for many applications than some of the toolkits it displaced. There need to be some larger set of viable competing UI toolkits, not just relying on Sun because they control the environment.
Another big problem is lack of a more efficient incremental class loader. I gave a presentation at Sun many years ago explaining how this could revolutionize web applications. I helped create prototypes that never made you wait and incrementally downloaded as needed, but there was never the ability to integrate the solution into the environment as would be possible in a GPL environment. As a result, you have the dilema that on the one hand, you would like to only load what a particular user will execute, but on the other hand, loading it class by class using the default class loader and http is completely unacceptable for complex applications, so you wind up with a jar file, and you may as well have had an executable file, as far as modular download goes. This is part of what makes it, for example, prohibitive to use your own UI library instead of Swing, because it cannot be incrementally downloaded.
Sun wants to control things, but does not innovate nearly as quickly as an open community would solving their own real-world problems.
If Sun would GPL Java, I would come back to it in a major way. But often the sorts of things I might add are the same sorts of things Sun protested when Microsoft tried, such as tight XPCOM support in Mozilla so that it has equal browser integration to Javascript, Python, etc. Sun clearly wants to suppress this sort of thing.
As such, what can be done with Java is largely limited to Sun's imagination, rather than that of the community. JCP does not seem realisticly useful or credible. Perhaps it is for some, but not for me and many I know of, for whom that perception is everything. I could go on and discuss a thousand issues. The wait time for required innovations is just too long from Sun.
I know I have been out of Java for some time. If this is suddenly different now, then I hope to hear about it. Any GPL effort started now from scratch should define a new open standard unless Sun is willing to work with a standards body to standardize its offering, IMO.
Redefine "personal computer" enough and they could claim to have the only personal computer. Or others could claim that Mac's are clearly not PC's and therefore not personal computers.
It is all in the marketing spin, but I used a nice Digital Alpha workstation many years ago that was 64 bit, and had personal computer software such as WordPerfect and Corel Draw 8 running on it natively as it ran Windows NT.
I would be quite surprised to see an actual Microsoft buyout because there are a variety of reasons it is not in their interest, and would raise insurmountable antitrust criticism. But I would not be surprised if SCO attorneys, in their many other grand delusions, think something like that might happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I swear I checked this s/Galexy/Galaxy/.
Exactly, fear the good translation, not the poor one. These are not diplomats using AIM to talk to each other. A well-crafted insult stings far worse than an accidental one.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultu[r]es, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. -- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galexy
I remember being a kid on an Eastern Airlines flight to Orlando and I got to go into the cockpit while the plane was flying. The pilot also gave us little plastic wings. Seems foolish now in retrospect.
Keeping the world safe from trained kid terrorist/pilots is what we learned on 9/11? I may disagree on whether that was as foolish as present policies. If thousands of people can die every year just from the right of smokers to blow smoke in non-smokers' faces and the department of homeland security isn't concerned about that, I am willing to risk letting kids back into cockpits and, even their parents.
You really didn't realize that Netscape 7.1 and Mozilla 1.4 are mostly the same code? Not only could you choose to use Mozilla by choosing Netscape, but the experience of people using Netscape 7 is relevant to experience of people using Mozilla.
But not one that only grants use of the code to someone who does not use their own IPR to restrict use of the code, such as Caldera distributed Linux under. To me, that is a big difference.
They clearly have not filed suit against Linux distributors -- only against a Unix licensee for his Unix license.
So, there have been no contributions to BSD since that piece of paper was written? Unlike BSD, Linux has a GPL proving they don't owe SCO a thing.
These rules are good. I think both notification and public notices of being hacked should be required. But merchants and customers should be smarter to start with.
Many prominent ecommerce sites insist that if you buy with them, you have to open an account where your credit card info will be stored permanently (read the fine print on PayPal, for example, what happens when you try to erase it).
In order to permit you to reuse the credit card number without reentering it later, it generally has to be stored in a place accessible to the web server applications, aka a very hackable location. They usually claim to protect this via n-bit encryption, but their application can easily decrypt it, generally meaning that a hacker who owns the web server can as well.
If a brick-and-mortar merchant insisted on storing a xerox of the credit cards of all his customers in a filing cabinet on the sales room floor in case any time in the future they forgot their credit cards, I would still feel more secure than this sort of e-merchant makes me feel (because the volume of CC numbers is less and it can't be accessed remotely) than a database with millions of card numbers. There is a huge difference between temporarily using the credit card info in a transaction database and making it permanently available in an account database. Not only can transactions records be more-fully isolated from the web servers than account records, but in the transaction case, the most compromised is far less than the millions of credit card numbers compromised in an account database. You make yourself vulnerable forever if you do business with someone who wants to keep your credit card available in your account, and they probably will not even tell you if it is compromised.
IMO, good merchants do not insist on storing your credit card number in the account, but rather permit you to manually reenter it every time. Just like all the Microsoft email conveniences that turn out to be security holes, this sort of ecommerce convenience is asking to have your credit card number abused, with no notification. The number is safer in your wallet or travelling across SSL than in a web-server database with millions of other credit cards.
PayPal refuses to erase the account info even if you erase it. Perhaps this sort of law will eventually force irresponsible merchants to rethink the way they expose millions of cards to cracking. You can't hack what is not on the server.
It must be that it will be easier to take extra flammable fuel on board an airplane than extra batteries!
While Red Hat is at it with rpm and apt-get, they should build the equivalent cygwin system. That is the way to start invading windows desktops. Get people hooked on free software and then show them the better and free OS that runs the applications natively.
Because they are fools with an attention span of a couple of months when it comes to visions that take quite a few years, and an expert at Corel who is an old-timer is one who has been with them for three years rather than the normal 6 months. They are also laying off, again, as we speak, caches of non-temporary workers that had clung on a bit too long for their liking.
I know of submissions I did, for example, citing new news stories wherein SCO says that it has not gone after Linux distributers because of GPL, and saying a fair amount about GPL as though they had never noticed it before -- that McBride finally seemed to have gotten a clue that it would be extremely difficult to collect Linux royalties because of the GPL. It made for a good discussion of the very real protections of the GPL and the whole GPL angle of the case, choices and outcomes matrix, etc.
Sorry I no longer have the whole text of the article or of my writeup. When I wrote the article, the text of this article was freely visible for about a week, but in the last few days it has become password protected:
http://www.computerwire.info/brnews/6FF330841285 6B4D80256D4E005D45FA
There have been good submissions over the last several days containing new information and perspectives on the SCO case. This is not one of them. This is SCO trying to stay in the news and Slashdot editors resurrecting his interview again a number of days after the interview. In terms of SCO news, this is very tired and old.
Also, its not going to be just $500/month. Since he is gonna have to take their payment plan, they will probably tackle interest on top of it.
One percent a year, 1.8 million a year. Right.
First off, in essence, Java is a specification.
Yes, but not an open one. Sun could not deal with the fact that others in the community might have valuable contributions that did not coincide with their own.
Sun's implementation of the Java spec is the reference implementation, not the only one. And at this point it's a reasonably open specification at that.
The implementation is clearly not open. If it were, it would be easy to do experimentation. A "reference implementation" that cannot be openly experimented with and trivially redistributed as a derivitive to try out a new idea with users leaves experimenters with very little to work with.
The JCP is a farce, you say? Then how do you explain the fact that the all of the new features coming out in Java 1.5 went through that process?
My point exactly. To have reasonable improvements you would have to have a more open process. I worked for a major Java licensee for a number years and it was impossible to get even the smallest critical fixes let alone improvements. I am not the only one to ever make this observation.
Or that the majority of optional class libraries, such as Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE) and Java Advance Imaging (JAI), also went through that process? Have you tried participating in the process, or is bitching about it enough to satisfy you?
I have certainly attempted to work with the process in a major way over an extended period of time, although not within the past 3 years. The process probably works if what you want to do happens to resonate with Sun and they have extra resources lying around to do it. That makes for a very limited path for fixes and improvements. If you are so perfectly satisfied, is it perhaps because your needs are very low, or you work for Sun?
Other folks (most recently Redhat, as discussed in this Slashdot story) have been considering doing a completely open-source implementation for some time. I'm guessing we'll see one at some point, although realistically I don't see the need for it.
I don't see the need for it either, when either: 1) sun could open-source their implementation and let them contribute as an equal, or 2) if the open source community group is going to do it, they should make a competing language rather than trying to play catch up to an ever-shifting monstrous target with a proprietary standard. Perhaps you do not see the need because, again, you have never had any demands that went beyond the capabilities of the basic tools.
Secondly (and this provided me with my biggest laugh of the day by the way), do you actually believe that Microsoft was trying to fix the problems with Java?? In that case, I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge if you want it.... But getting back to the point here, from scores & scores of court documents it's obvious that Microsoft's purpose for "extending" Java was to fragment it & keep their desktop monopoly intact.
Certainly Microsoft had monopolistic motives, but Sun is the pot calling the kettle black in their desire to control Java. Microsoft really was trying to fix certain real problems they had with Java, for example in providing an alternative to JNI, which has always been quite broken. Each company tries to solve its own problems and if it were an open standard, it would give various groups the ability to vary as appropriate. I would never expect Sun to try to fix Microsoft's problems or of any others of its licensees. It certainly did not prioritize things in a reasonable way when we were trying to get enough fixed to write reasonable business software. Had it been GPL, we could have at least fixed it to work the same and according to their spec on the platforms we supported. An open standard would have identified the many places that Sun did not follow their own documentation or standard, and would still keep a bar for interoperability. Sun has often not deserved it's own Java label for violating basic interface represe
It is no suprise to most here that poor behavior from any supplier, be it Microsoft, Sun, SCO, IBM, Redhat, etc., is not desirable. It has nothing to do with Microsofts "cause", but a few AC's, being part of that majority which automatically takes for granted what is handed to them by the mainstream, continue to try to make topics that present alternative analyses and experiences look like monochrome religious causes.
NT was one of the first efforts by Microsoft to create a real operating system acknowledging that not all PCs are simple consumer devices and there was merit to something stronger like OS/2, which they had abandoned. Open source and standards would have made it even more interesting, but the world being what it was, it was clearly of great interest and a great step forward, perhaps greater (performing, more stable, and/or secure) than any later advance from Microsoft in terms of OS kernels.
And Sun Java is well worth what you pay for it, unless you are a licensee with things you need to have fixed.
If it were GPL and open standards, it would be worth much more, and distributers could choose the best alternative, and there might be better responsiveness for improvements and fixes.
Sun, if you want people to use Java, you need to start being competetive with it or let other people be competetive with it. GPL of your implementation and open standards would be a good start (although it would likely take a few years to revitalize Java). But that would let other users do exactly what Microsoft was trying to do -- fix problems with it, which is exactly what Sun prevents. Licensee programs and JCP are a farce, and do not help enough to most users. As such, users need to be able to easily create derivitive works and show the merits of changes, which Sun could choose to integrate in their distribution or not under GPL.
I have worked with GCJ. It works somewhat, but in my informal tests, is 1/3 as fast in completely-compiled mode as Sun's Jit, and has generally the same limitations of Sun's implementation because it attempts to copy it. It has the same problems as OS/2's windows interpretation or Wine. It generally goes no further than what it emulates, and people look at Sun for the Java standard. If Sun wants Java to succeed, Sun needs to do this or convince me how I can begin to get necessary support to make using Java more generally successful. I have long since done my duty presenting the case to Sun and then abandoning Java when they repeatedly did not listen to major licensees. All I hear from them is paranoia that someone else might be empowered by it, be it Microsoft, IBM, or others. Standardization has never been a real ongoing debate. Sun has not listened. If Sun will not open the standard or otherwise make it so people can help themselves and distribute modified environments, then, as I said before, the open way is clearly to create a different language standard, not try to muddle through with one that Sun is trying to control and has been causing to stagnate for so many years. The current framework or status quo is of limited value, and Sun has had plenty of feedback along those lines. It would probably be easier to convince Microsoft to open their stuff up more than Sun.
So, they compared RH (Linux), UnitedLinux (Linux again) against Windows (not Linux). Guess which OS has 66% chances of winning, given that, honestly, modern Linux distros and Windows are very close in features and user friendliness ?
This is one of the silliest assertions of numbers I have seen. It might be true if the comparison were Linux versus Windows, and you were rolling dice to determine the outcome, in which case the comparison is useless. If it is a valid comparison, it takes only one to win, and you can add all the inferior ones you want, and it does not affect the chances of the winner winning. It is not the preponderance of similar entries that makes that sort of entry likely to win.
Had you read the article, you would find that Windows was not being compared at all. Oh my, a rigged comparison where only Linux could win. And the Formula 1 is rigged so that only cars can win, no bicycles or NASA spacecraft... how sad!
Why would I compile it when I can download a pre-compiled build from the mozilla home page?
Preferably with a clean VM and library implementation.
I have developed lots of significant things in Java, but have repeatedly been confronted with bad / stupid limitations of the environment and implementations. Even expending considerable resources and being a full Java licensee, it has never been possible to get simple issues resolved within a reasonable time frame. Occasionally I see something being addressed 5 years or more after the corresponding project gave up on Java because of the lack of a reasonable response. Other issues are never addressed. As such, I do not trust the Java base to deliver the necessary tools, fixes, etc. I see release after release that fixes some things and breaks a number of others and there is no real recourse.
Swing is far worse for many applications than some of the toolkits it displaced. There need to be some larger set of viable competing UI toolkits, not just relying on Sun because they control the environment.
Another big problem is lack of a more efficient incremental class loader. I gave a presentation at Sun many years ago explaining how this could revolutionize web applications. I helped create prototypes that never made you wait and incrementally downloaded as needed, but there was never the ability to integrate the solution into the environment as would be possible in a GPL environment. As a result, you have the dilema that on the one hand, you would like to only load what a particular user will execute, but on the other hand, loading it class by class using the default class loader and http is completely unacceptable for complex applications, so you wind up with a jar file, and you may as well have had an executable file, as far as modular download goes. This is part of what makes it, for example, prohibitive to use your own UI library instead of Swing, because it cannot be incrementally downloaded.
Sun wants to control things, but does not innovate nearly as quickly as an open community would solving their own real-world problems.
If Sun would GPL Java, I would come back to it in a major way. But often the sorts of things I might add are the same sorts of things Sun protested when Microsoft tried, such as tight XPCOM support in Mozilla so that it has equal browser integration to Javascript, Python, etc. Sun clearly wants to suppress this sort of thing.
As such, what can be done with Java is largely limited to Sun's imagination, rather than that of the community. JCP does not seem realisticly useful or credible. Perhaps it is for some, but not for me and many I know of, for whom that perception is everything. I could go on and discuss a thousand issues. The wait time for required innovations is just too long from Sun.
I know I have been out of Java for some time. If this is suddenly different now, then I hope to hear about it. Any GPL effort started now from scratch should define a new open standard unless Sun is willing to work with a standards body to standardize its offering, IMO.
Redefine "personal computer" enough and they could claim to have the only personal computer. Or others could claim that Mac's are clearly not PC's and therefore not personal computers.
It is all in the marketing spin, but I used a nice Digital Alpha workstation many years ago that was 64 bit, and had personal computer software such as WordPerfect and Corel Draw 8 running on it natively as it ran Windows NT.
I would be quite surprised to see an actual Microsoft buyout because there are a variety of reasons it is not in their interest, and would raise insurmountable antitrust criticism. But I would not be surprised if SCO attorneys, in their many other grand delusions, think something like that might happen.