...logged flight time has seen these ideas crop up time, after time, after time. The radical change in pilot skills required, the creation of entire new solutions to low-visibility landing navigation signals, and the fact that it only applies to commercial airports (small airstrips take less space than the circle (unless you're willing to accept wing bank angles over 30 degrees during the most critical phase of flight) mean mostly only major destination passenger-service airports would be appropriate. Finally, every runway has two "approach plates" (pilot instructions on how to fly the approach to landing over all potential obstacles), one for each end. Pilots practice with each to ensure they know the ropes. How many "approach plates would be needed with a circular runway? Perhaps 36? And, many of those would be prohibited because they would require approaching the airport at altitudes lower than the tops of existing high-rise buildings!
This is an example of "thinking in the small." This designer is like a politician: Solve one problem by creating 30 more that "weren't anticipated."
...but they'll never see the light of day on/. Too many smart-ass wannabees flinging their feces at others...and likely to "not want to be bothered" with pre-coding design, or meaningful comments, or a "design document" prior to writing code against which the final result can be compared...and frequently updated.
Having been a programmer since 1961, I have developed lots of skills in teaching others. Having a trusted mentor is vital...someone with whom one can have a discussion, in-the-moment, about how to make decisions like "top-down" vs. "bottom-up." About leaving a trail of explanations "why" both in the code, and in all supporting documents. Good basic foundation in the principles of programming, irrespective of language, like Bohm-Jacopini...and it's variants. Practicing how to visualize a nascent program in execution, at multiple levels of granularity. All are essential...and I've probably missed a few.
The forecast destruction of the American economy from one technological advance or another has been accurately forecast future economic strength exactly ZERO times, since the founding of the United States of America. Most economic reversals have come from financiers and banks (e.g., 1929, 2008, et. al.) lining their own pockets through variations on the Ponzi scheme.
So, you think that "employment" is an instantaneous measure of political prowess? Here'n all, I was under the mistaken premise of large-economy economics that it takes lots of work to create a sustainable grows in jobs, like more than the first two months. Gee, I wonder why it took Obama so-o-o long to reverse the downward spiral in jobs he inherited from Bush...probably not very good at his job, I suppose.
You assert "Well most businessmen are republicans." First, I'm curious where that statistic comes from...and I would discount the Republican party as a valid source.
More importantly, I believe you can more validly say, "Well most business men are greedy, and the larger the business, the greedier they are, and in pursuit of their greed, they grease the palms of the Republicans in office."
And, this story is just another example of how the contemporary media simply no longer CARES to do a good job of citing the underying facts. Alt-news is the new "white." (All implications you can draw from that sentence are valid.)
I have written programs in over 50 (programming) languages, and probably well over 5,000 different products, from local scripts to big team efforts. I have no memory of how the code appears; it's done, I Iorget it...but I don't forget the methods and practices I've honed over the years. Most of my experience is with Procedural languages; throw me the requirement to use one of the Functional languages, or some unique Operating Systems' scripting language, and I'd be lost. On the other hand, CHOOSING the right language for the need (e.g., a real-time transaction-processor versus a Linear-programming solver) is a key part of the job.
In fact, it knowing more about which algorithms are useful, and which are not, for a particular class of application. That's the issue, because choosing the right language is a key part of doing the job most efficiently. And, even more relevant than "writing a sample program" is debugging: A large part of most programmers' jobs is actually trying to decipher somebody ELSE's code, to find the defect(s) and repair it (them).
Absolute agreement. Every since the Neanderthals on Wall Street started dictating policy to Fortune 500's (and small firms let it trickle down to them), we've been at a growing war with the 1%. Latest news says there are SIX people who have more wealth than the bottom 50% of population of the WORLD! Their interests are served first. And, yes, Marx predicted that. Now, it's our job to get vocal, get active, and take our Democracy back, including the fundamental Constitutional right to privacy that has been so eroded by lawyers (and politicians, who are mostly made up of the lawyer class) in the past decades. And, not just in the U S of A, but throughout the world. It's pitchforks time, folks, and time to bring the corrupt interests (Exxon, GE, Microsoft, and thousands of others, and their kin in other countries) to heel. We, the masses, need to hone our skills at defeating their self-serving game.
Glad you used AC to post, because you assertions are utterly false. Silicon Valley is a hot-bed of people on the left, and it's been that way since the 1960's. Who do you think actually INVENTED most of the basis for new technology. Sure most of it was based on a Brit (think of Alan Turing), but the capital was in San Francisco, and most of those capitalists are (and were) left-wing thinkers, interested in making money by delivering stupendous new products/services. It's only LATER that Wall Street, and their greed, on into the act, and they are decidedly Republican, virtually to a man (of course, no women allowed).
I've been LIVING this stuff since 1961 (started on a vacuum-tube based RCA 301!) and I've watched it. What I can't abide is your attributions that are informed by mere ignorance. And, no, I don't post anonymously, because I'm confident of my facts.
Sure, in my earliest years, I was accumulating experience (I remember having the title "Junior Programmer"), but once I was valuable, I named my own price. My last decades were as a consultant, and I peaked out at $2,000/day, because I had letters of recommendation from major executives (with phone numbers, so prospective clients could call them; the never did, but that was often a convincer.
The 1%-ers win because there's always some jerk who will accept their offer, no matter how demeaning it is. Turn the tables: Spend all you time performing, and learning how to perform even better, and ask superiors (the highest-level you dare approach; preferably "CxO") for letters of recommendation that describe how much money the company made and continue to makes, because of your work. The best time to ask is right when the project is about to become that "all hands" push near the end...they NEED you then, and if you promise not to leave for some time, they'll give you the kind of recommendation you can use a year later, when the project's been long done.
Some tricks from a well-paid consultant, now happily retired.
The 1%, who control the budgets of corporations, have no interest in spending enough money to attract customers, no matter what their individual GUI/platform is. They firmly believe that "OSFA" (One Size Fits All). Yea, I'm looking at YOU, Wells Fargo. A GUI that is equally unsuited for all platforms.
Corporations are focused on THEIR margins. Most fail to answer one question correctly: "What is the first thing you must have to be a successful company?" They'll answer "Money" (or "Capital"), "Product" or "Service," or "cheap employees," etc. There is but one answer that is correct: CUSTOMERS. If you have no customers, everything else is irrelevant. But, if you're just an investor, you have no interest in customers, you have only your own wealth as the focal point of your interests. And, investors insist on larger dividends (or rises in stock value), which motivates corporations to cheapen everything, including "customer service" (now an oxymoron).
And there is the driver for unusable UIs: Focus on lowering expenses in IT development, without paying attention to what attracts more customers, but might cost more. So long as customers are an afterthought, the same UI mistakes will keep being made.
The Pixel has been a dog because it's wicked over-prices (and, you get to give them all your data, too!) So, it seems to me, this announcement is about how they're going to perform a Solomnic cutting of the baby into two equally incomplete devices, and charge more money for each!
Oh, that's just great: Now they'll be attempting to break the systems of those of us who've built strategies to restore Windows Update to working order.
Microsoft has lost all credibility with me, and I'll give up on Windows 7 when I need some third-party software that won't run on Windows 7. I don't expect that to be very soon. Microsoft's greed knows no bounds: I buy my computer...and they want to have sole authority over how I am allowed to use it with their software. I buy my own products, but M$ deems it essential that I be a data source for their sale of information about me, collected without my permission from my computer. They have removed all customer rights from their "agreements," so they now hold all the rights, and I am left without legal protection from further offensive actions on their part.
I am retired now (after 55 years in the computer industry), and they treat me as a bottomless revenue source, without bothering to communicate with me...or, through their lack of competent support, my ability to communicate with them. (Fortunately, I've removed most of the spyware--aka telemetry "updates"--they've foisted of on me, and blocked known harvesting IP addresses from accessing my network.
We, as an industry, allowed Microsoft to become so arrogant and self-serving, by continuing to buy their progressively-more-invasive and bug-laden products, and rewriting all their "license" terms to eliminate any rights I may have had. It took me a full six months to finally resolve all the Windows Update bugs they distributed to their customers over the past two years.
If I am forced to change my operating system and security systems, because they build in "alternate routes" through my defenses, it will be to Linux or Android. At least, then, I'm not PAYING to be abused.
The only thing that can kill the PC is a better product, with a more reliable operating system, and I see nothing on the horizon that prohibits that evolutional step.
And, if under Trump, computers are outlawed (it would be a typical move for he and his kind), then only outlaws will have computers.
Pundits get paid to make outrageous predictions, only to fade into obscurity when their ignorant nightmares prove inept and ill-advised. Instead, they should think beyond their own limitations and ask: "What will supercede the Personal Computer and be even more desirable?" Quantum computers, perhaps? More likely: Things we've not yet even yet imagined, as was the Intel 4004 (which, after all, was invented because Busicom Corp. wanted a "better calculator" engine).
So long as the minions that keep posting above abuse you for taking a stance (and, exhibit their essential ignorance of negotiating strategies), corporations will keep using current employees "at will," and then abuse them, "at will." You have taken a bold stance, and while I doubt you'll completely succeed, you may be the "Rosa Parks" of employee rights.
Salaries need to be negotiated, and if you possess unique skills that are of value to the employer, they should be compensated equitably. While I am retired, I can tell you that as a self-employed consultant for over three decades, my ultimate income was over $1,000/day (in 1990's) because of the VALUE I delivered. If the corporation wanted that value, they expected to pay for the price. But, the return they got was, for example, with one large chemical company, over $400 Million in the first year.
What US employees have to do is to show their employers (or clients) how much VALUE they create...when you do that, each client is happy to share their success with other potential clients looking for similar value. So long as you "occupy a chair" for a modest salary, you have no-doubt signed an "at will" employment clause that grants the employer all the rights in your relationship.
Matthew Culver: You are challenging that perverse relationship, and I applaud the attempt. As Inequality.org points out, "...the 1 percent has 35.6 percent of all private wealth, more than the bottom 95 percent combined." And sacking the people that actually CREATED that value, because labor costs can be reduced, producing more margin for the 1% to harvest, is one of the ways they do it. And, even it you don't win, you can be proud of initiating a movement of other employees engaging attorneys seeking out such cases with ever-evolving innovative arguments. And, if that process fails, we all may as well admit we've reintroduced slavery back into Western cultures.
Oh, and Microsoft is, no doubt, waiting for the first "change order" (which they will have built into the contract), so they'll get More money in the future for things they left out of this initial proposal. That means ratcheting up the total $$$ volume of the contract for things that will magically become "essential" once the contract starts.
...in Windows 10 that remain to this day...and in 8.1 and 7. They used to save money (e.g., by offloading product testing off (to the unfortunate group called "Insiders.") Now they're getting paid nearly One Billion Dollars because their product is so buggy and insecure.
What a great scam the plutocrats at the top of Microsoft have created. Now, they've "MADOFF" with our tax money by providing services to their incomplete product to the U.S. Government.
This is why we, mere citizens, stand to lose Medicare under Trump: To pay for these kinds of schemes, to take taxpayers $$$ and redistribute them to corporations who have created the very problems they'll be paid to solve.
...where Elon Musk does not know how much he doesn't know. Believe me, unless he's "boring" down 1 KM or so, he's going to have HUGE problems with existing infrastructure (not pipes, so much as pilings and things that hold up large buildings). And, there's no central compilation of those details that have been installed over the past 50 years!
Whatever happened to the concept of "testing" and "fixing" defects ("bugs") in code. Apparently, end-users are not as eager to be willing to be guinea pigs for untested code, not that they have to PAY for this kind of punishment.
Remember: If the product is claimed to be "Free," YOU are the product!
But, for REAL system design and implementation, it's the professional interaction and collaboration that is the source of novel ideas, and the casual walker-by who intrudes with a few relevant facts that change the entire narrative. These have no comparable form in "discussion groups," because you have to make a specific effort to join a conversation, which eliminates the "casual listener" that sparks a radical rethink. That's why it's called "group think."
Many programmers like the solitude of doing their work alone, and when I'm writing code, I shut the door for just that reason. But the number of times in my career when I've overhead some dialog in the hallway (well, I do have go to the "can," once in a while) and injected a diametrically opposed viewpoint and made a difference in the outcome convinces me that there is a reason to work together in the same space.
Ultimately, we need both: Solitude, and Bullpen. Either extreme as a sole choice is a losing end game for careers and for ideas.
How about Oracle focus on its' well-deserved greedy reputation, and resolve to actually produce products that have been designed for reliability and verified by competent testers before unleashing bags of bugs on the Internet?
The whole POINT of Java has been: Make the platform open source, and license the developer half of the project: Developers pay for the tool, and right to run on the freely distributed platform.
The whole RESULT of Java has been: Customers have to frequently update "free" Java to "fix bugs," which--in the process--makes prior dependent code unreliable.
The entire idea is founded on a thin layer of fermenting bullshit, and I wish we'd just all abandon it. In fact, all platforms serve a (usually short) useful life, compared to other durable products. If we developed cars like we develop most commercial software, we'd still be driving V8.111 of the original Nash Rambler, with its' monthly required return to the shop for repairs.
Slashdot Mirror
...logged flight time has seen these ideas crop up time, after time, after time. The radical change in pilot skills required, the creation of entire new solutions to low-visibility landing navigation signals, and the fact that it only applies to commercial airports (small airstrips take less space than the circle (unless you're willing to accept wing bank angles over 30 degrees during the most critical phase of flight) mean mostly only major destination passenger-service airports would be appropriate. Finally, every runway has two "approach plates" (pilot instructions on how to fly the approach to landing over all potential obstacles), one for each end. Pilots practice with each to ensure they know the ropes. How many "approach plates would be needed with a circular runway? Perhaps 36? And, many of those would be prohibited because they would require approaching the airport at altitudes lower than the tops of existing high-rise buildings!
This is an example of "thinking in the small." This designer is like a politician: Solve one problem by creating 30 more that "weren't anticipated."
Idea rating: DOA.
...but they'll never see the light of day on /. Too many smart-ass wannabees flinging their feces at others...and likely to "not want to be bothered" with pre-coding design, or meaningful comments, or a "design document" prior to writing code against which the final result can be compared...and frequently updated.
Having been a programmer since 1961, I have developed lots of skills in teaching others. Having a trusted mentor is vital...someone with whom one can have a discussion, in-the-moment, about how to make decisions like "top-down" vs. "bottom-up." About leaving a trail of explanations "why" both in the code, and in all supporting documents. Good basic foundation in the principles of programming, irrespective of language, like Bohm-Jacopini...and it's variants. Practicing how to visualize a nascent program in execution, at multiple levels of granularity. All are essential...and I've probably missed a few.
Fortunately, you're so insecure about your premise you had to post that as AC!
So sad!
The forecast destruction of the American economy from one technological advance or another has been accurately forecast future economic strength exactly ZERO times, since the founding of the United States of America. Most economic reversals have come from financiers and banks (e.g., 1929, 2008, et. al.) lining their own pockets through variations on the Ponzi scheme.
So, you think that "employment" is an instantaneous measure of political prowess? Here'n all, I was under the mistaken premise of large-economy economics that it takes lots of work to create a sustainable grows in jobs, like more than the first two months. Gee, I wonder why it took Obama so-o-o long to reverse the downward spiral in jobs he inherited from Bush...probably not very good at his job, I suppose.
You assert "Well most businessmen are republicans." First, I'm curious where that statistic comes from...and I would discount the Republican party as a valid source.
More importantly, I believe you can more validly say, "Well most business men are greedy, and the larger the business, the greedier they are, and in pursuit of their greed, they grease the palms of the Republicans in office."
Hey! It's the Republican Way!!!
And, this story is just another example of how the contemporary media simply no longer CARES to do a good job of citing the underying facts. Alt-news is the new "white." (All implications you can draw from that sentence are valid.)
...Programmer:
"Do you know how to do (any relevant topic here)?" (Keep doing that until the answer is No.)
Response: "How would you find out?"
I have written programs in over 50 (programming) languages, and probably well over 5,000 different products, from local scripts to big team efforts. I have no memory of how the code appears; it's done, I Iorget it...but I don't forget the methods and practices I've honed over the years. Most of my experience is with Procedural languages; throw me the requirement to use one of the Functional languages, or some unique Operating Systems' scripting language, and I'd be lost. On the other hand, CHOOSING the right language for the need (e.g., a real-time transaction-processor versus a Linear-programming solver) is a key part of the job.
In fact, it knowing more about which algorithms are useful, and which are not, for a particular class of application. That's the issue, because choosing the right language is a key part of doing the job most efficiently. And, even more relevant than "writing a sample program" is debugging: A large part of most programmers' jobs is actually trying to decipher somebody ELSE's code, to find the defect(s) and repair it (them).
Absolute agreement. Every since the Neanderthals on Wall Street started dictating policy to Fortune 500's (and small firms let it trickle down to them), we've been at a growing war with the 1%. Latest news says there are SIX people who have more wealth than the bottom 50% of population of the WORLD! Their interests are served first. And, yes, Marx predicted that. Now, it's our job to get vocal, get active, and take our Democracy back, including the fundamental Constitutional right to privacy that has been so eroded by lawyers (and politicians, who are mostly made up of the lawyer class) in the past decades. And, not just in the U S of A, but throughout the world. It's pitchforks time, folks, and time to bring the corrupt interests (Exxon, GE, Microsoft, and thousands of others, and their kin in other countries) to heel. We, the masses, need to hone our skills at defeating their self-serving game.
Read George Lakott's take: https://twitter.com/georgelako...
and https://georgelakoff.com/2011/...
Glad you used AC to post, because you assertions are utterly false. Silicon Valley is a hot-bed of people on the left, and it's been that way since the 1960's. Who do you think actually INVENTED most of the basis for new technology. Sure most of it was based on a Brit (think of Alan Turing), but the capital was in San Francisco, and most of those capitalists are (and were) left-wing thinkers, interested in making money by delivering stupendous new products/services. It's only LATER that Wall Street, and their greed, on into the act, and they are decidedly Republican, virtually to a man (of course, no women allowed).
I've been LIVING this stuff since 1961 (started on a vacuum-tube based RCA 301!) and I've watched it. What I can't abide is your attributions that are informed by mere ignorance. And, no, I don't post anonymously, because I'm confident of my facts.
Sure, in my earliest years, I was accumulating experience (I remember having the title "Junior Programmer"), but once I was valuable, I named my own price. My last decades were as a consultant, and I peaked out at $2,000/day, because I had letters of recommendation from major executives (with phone numbers, so prospective clients could call them; the never did, but that was often a convincer.
The 1%-ers win because there's always some jerk who will accept their offer, no matter how demeaning it is. Turn the tables: Spend all you time performing, and learning how to perform even better, and ask superiors (the highest-level you dare approach; preferably "CxO") for letters of recommendation that describe how much money the company made and continue to makes, because of your work. The best time to ask is right when the project is about to become that "all hands" push near the end...they NEED you then, and if you promise not to leave for some time, they'll give you the kind of recommendation you can use a year later, when the project's been long done.
Some tricks from a well-paid consultant, now happily retired.
The 1%, who control the budgets of corporations, have no interest in spending enough money to attract customers, no matter what their individual GUI/platform is. They firmly believe that "OSFA" (One Size Fits All). Yea, I'm looking at YOU, Wells Fargo. A GUI that is equally unsuited for all platforms.
Corporations are focused on THEIR margins. Most fail to answer one question correctly: "What is the first thing you must have to be a successful company?" They'll answer "Money" (or "Capital"), "Product" or "Service," or "cheap employees," etc. There is but one answer that is correct: CUSTOMERS. If you have no customers, everything else is irrelevant. But, if you're just an investor, you have no interest in customers, you have only your own wealth as the focal point of your interests. And, investors insist on larger dividends (or rises in stock value), which motivates corporations to cheapen everything, including "customer service" (now an oxymoron).
And there is the driver for unusable UIs: Focus on lowering expenses in IT development, without paying attention to what attracts more customers, but might cost more. So long as customers are an afterthought, the same UI mistakes will keep being made.
The Pixel has been a dog because it's wicked over-prices (and, you get to give them all your data, too!)
So, it seems to me, this announcement is about how they're going to perform a Solomnic cutting of the baby into two equally incomplete devices, and charge more money for each!
What could go wrong with That Idea???
Oh, that's just great: Now they'll be attempting to break the systems of those of us who've built strategies to restore Windows Update to working order.
Microsoft has lost all credibility with me, and I'll give up on Windows 7 when I need some third-party software that won't run on Windows 7. I don't expect that to be very soon. Microsoft's greed knows no bounds: I buy my computer...and they want to have sole authority over how I am allowed to use it with their software. I buy my own products, but M$ deems it essential that I be a data source for their sale of information about me, collected without my permission from my computer. They have removed all customer rights from their "agreements," so they now hold all the rights, and I am left without legal protection from further offensive actions on their part.
I am retired now (after 55 years in the computer industry), and they treat me as a bottomless revenue source, without bothering to communicate with me...or, through their lack of competent support, my ability to communicate with them. (Fortunately, I've removed most of the spyware--aka telemetry "updates"--they've foisted of on me, and blocked known harvesting IP addresses from accessing my network.
We, as an industry, allowed Microsoft to become so arrogant and self-serving, by continuing to buy their progressively-more-invasive and bug-laden products, and rewriting all their "license" terms to eliminate any rights I may have had. It took me a full six months to finally resolve all the Windows Update bugs they distributed to their customers over the past two years.
If I am forced to change my operating system and security systems, because they build in "alternate routes" through my defenses, it will be to Linux or Android. At least, then, I'm not PAYING to be abused.
The only thing that can kill the PC is a better product, with a more reliable operating system, and I see nothing on the horizon that prohibits that evolutional step.
And, if under Trump, computers are outlawed (it would be a typical move for he and his kind), then only outlaws will have computers.
Pundits get paid to make outrageous predictions, only to fade into obscurity when their ignorant nightmares prove inept and ill-advised. Instead, they should think beyond their own limitations and ask: "What will supercede the Personal Computer and be even more desirable?" Quantum computers, perhaps? More likely: Things we've not yet even yet imagined, as was the Intel 4004 (which, after all, was invented because Busicom Corp. wanted a "better calculator" engine).
So long as the minions that keep posting above abuse you for taking a stance (and, exhibit their essential ignorance of negotiating strategies), corporations will keep using current employees "at will," and then abuse them, "at will." You have taken a bold stance, and while I doubt you'll completely succeed, you may be the "Rosa Parks" of employee rights.
Salaries need to be negotiated, and if you possess unique skills that are of value to the employer, they should be compensated equitably. While I am retired, I can tell you that as a self-employed consultant for over three decades, my ultimate income was over $1,000/day (in 1990's) because of the VALUE I delivered. If the corporation wanted that value, they expected to pay for the price. But, the return they got was, for example, with one large chemical company, over $400 Million in the first year.
What US employees have to do is to show their employers (or clients) how much VALUE they create...when you do that, each client is happy to share their success with other potential clients looking for similar value. So long as you "occupy a chair" for a modest salary, you have no-doubt signed an "at will" employment clause that grants the employer all the rights in your relationship.
Matthew Culver: You are challenging that perverse relationship, and I applaud the attempt. As Inequality.org points out, "...the 1 percent has 35.6 percent of all private wealth, more than the bottom 95 percent combined." And sacking the people that actually CREATED that value, because labor costs can be reduced, producing more margin for the 1% to harvest, is one of the ways they do it. And, even it you don't win, you can be proud of initiating a movement of other employees engaging attorneys seeking out such cases with ever-evolving innovative arguments. And, if that process fails, we all may as well admit we've reintroduced slavery back into Western cultures.
Once governments feel the pinch and start to regulate it, it's game over! I'd expect the EU and the US are already planning just that!
Oh, and Microsoft is, no doubt, waiting for the first "change order" (which they will have built into the contract), so they'll get More money in the future for things they left out of this initial proposal. That means ratcheting up the total $$$ volume of the contract for things that will magically become "essential" once the contract starts.
I wonder how much Drumpf gets out of this deal...
...in Windows 10 that remain to this day...and in 8.1 and 7.
They used to save money (e.g., by offloading product testing off (to the unfortunate group called "Insiders.") Now they're getting paid nearly One Billion Dollars because their product is so buggy and insecure.
What a great scam the plutocrats at the top of Microsoft have created. Now, they've "MADOFF" with our tax money by providing services to their incomplete product to the U.S. Government.
This is why we, mere citizens, stand to lose Medicare under Trump: To pay for these kinds of schemes, to take taxpayers $$$ and redistribute them to corporations who have created the very problems they'll be paid to solve.
Your tax money at work.
...where Elon Musk does not know how much he doesn't know. Believe me, unless he's "boring" down 1 KM or so, he's going to have HUGE problems with existing infrastructure (not pipes, so much as pilings and things that hold up large buildings). And, there's no central compilation of those details that have been installed over the past 50 years!
Boring may be what he bends his pick on :-)
...notably excluding the one's they DON'T:
https://blogs.windows.com/wind...
Scroll down to "Known Issues."
Whatever happened to the concept of "testing" and "fixing" defects ("bugs") in code. Apparently, end-users are not as eager to be willing to be guinea pigs for untested code, not that they have to PAY for this kind of punishment.
Remember: If the product is claimed to be "Free," YOU are the product!
But, for REAL system design and implementation, it's the professional interaction and collaboration that is the source of novel ideas, and the casual walker-by who intrudes with a few relevant facts that change the entire narrative. These have no comparable form in "discussion groups," because you have to make a specific effort to join a conversation, which eliminates the "casual listener" that sparks a radical rethink. That's why it's called "group think."
Many programmers like the solitude of doing their work alone, and when I'm writing code, I shut the door for just that reason. But the number of times in my career when I've overhead some dialog in the hallway (well, I do have go to the "can," once in a while) and injected a diametrically opposed viewpoint and made a difference in the outcome convinces me that there is a reason to work together in the same space.
Ultimately, we need both: Solitude, and Bullpen. Either extreme as a sole choice is a losing end game for careers and for ideas.
How about Oracle focus on its' well-deserved greedy reputation, and resolve to actually produce products that have been designed for reliability and verified by competent testers before unleashing bags of bugs on the Internet?
The whole POINT of Java has been: Make the platform open source, and license the developer half of the project: Developers pay for the tool, and right to run on the freely distributed platform.
The whole RESULT of Java has been: Customers have to frequently update "free" Java to "fix bugs," which--in the process--makes prior dependent code unreliable.
The entire idea is founded on a thin layer of fermenting bullshit, and I wish we'd just all abandon it. In fact, all platforms serve a (usually short) useful life, compared to other durable products. If we developed cars like we develop most commercial software, we'd still be driving V8.111 of the original Nash Rambler, with its' monthly required return to the shop for repairs.