Oracle's attempt is pretty lame in comparison to the methods of their tech peers. Apple, Microsoft and Google ship entire mobile operating systems filled with software to collect data and have built vast app stores filled with spyware that does not offer the user a chance to opt out.
But what makes Oracle's acts so lame is that the actually respect enterprise and don't bake the spyware in. Their peers, on the other hand, push BYOD.
Oracle has the right to bundle whatever crap-ware they want. If that sullies their reputation or draws out alternatives, that's a good thing.
My problem is that as of now, they don't.
Similarly, I think Java's worst nightmare scenario wouldn't be end users deciding they don't like it. (Heck, like with Flash most of them don't even know when they're using it.) It would be some massive headline-making Java-related security breach at a Fortune 500 company convincing IT departments around the world to start thinking that it's time to migrate to a less risky platform.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Killing Java would be a ridiculous thing to do. You live in such a bubble.
Tail calls, value types, easier direct calls to C to process large regions of data without copying (e.g. lapack): there are many things which could benefit non-Java languages on the JVM like Clojure and Scala that are taking too long with Oracle stewardship (as they did with Sun's as well). Maybe these things are in fact too hard to implement for small or unfunded groups?
I hope not, I think it's high time.
How hard is it to discern even our sleep habits? We put them on the charger beside the bed at night and tune in to Pandora. If our phones can't tell if we're sleeping around or alcoholics already, it won't be long until they can.
Like most petitions this one is a distraction. It keeps our energy focused on the wrong part of a larger issue and one where any leverage we have cannot create fundamental change.
Yeah, we carry devices that are spying on us. Why do they spy? To sell us more stuff. They don't try to hide that fact. Your fearmongering is off topic here, and fairly irrelevant elsewhere too.
They spy because they can. They spy because the companies involved believe that the data they collect has value. They spy because the companies involved believe that the data they collect might have even more value in the future.
The companies involved aren't in the business of selling you stuff. They sell data about you to others. Sure that might be a retailer of Hello Kitty backpacks with scenes of unicorns shitting rainbows. It might be a presidential campaign. It might be a government - and in that case, the value exchanged might be trade privileges rather than cash.
Large commercial ventures willing to harm many people for the sake of profit are not unknown to history e.g. the East India Company and International Association of the Congo. Likewise, industries adopting standard practices which do so - e.g. tetra-ethyl lead.
I may be wrong. But I don't think that just because I live in the US corporations have any more respect for my human dignity than they do for the citizens of Honduras or Pakistan or Albania.
You're thinking of this type of consequences: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860457748...
The problem is this type of consequences: http://www.newcreditrules.com/newcreditrulescom/2009/01/bewa...
Secret formulas deciding our credit limits and insurance premiums because spying gives them information is the problem. Not the information that we might pay more for a hotel room.
One big reason they spy because there are a lot of webdevs who either have no idea or do not care about PII. Why would someone put a link on their website, to Facebook or Twitter for example, basically giving them all of their extremely valuable web logs for free? These companies make big bucks from those unnecessary "live links" and go to great lengths to avoid questions about why they "need" to be live (and they don't).
Oracle is not the poster child for spyware.
That's some great FUD. In fact I think I've heard it somewhere before..
Isn't this the reason that RMS refuses to carry a phone?
You can care about it or not, but saying it's false is kinda bold.
If the petition were asking Oracle to establish a nonprofit that could support Java and offering to pay the first $10,000 toward it, I'd have a quite different reaction. But this seems to me no different from agitating for "free healthcare" without even mentioning who might pay for it, just, "it should be free!"
Second, Java is the basis for a lot of very expensive Oracle software. Does the Java updater work differently on their machines?
Anyway, as someone who regularly writes software for artists and designers with Java, I lately find myself avoiding JVM-based workflow on the client-side. It's just too much of a hassle for anyone I work with.
I mean, what the hell are they thinking anyway? That we're going to be so awed by it just because it's rammed down our throats? Nobody is ever going to use JavaFX any more than they're going to use Silverlight. They should get over it already.
Seriously though, we'd lose all our Ninite Pro customers if we pulled any crap with our installations. Since the free version is our marketing department we'd be idiots to mess that up too.
I think this is extra worse than normal bundling, because its a friggin platform! A basis for applications, it smells as bad as Microsoft asking to install a toolbar during the OS install.
Seriously, how worse stuff can get?
I imagine a future.
A bright future.
A future where everyone sees data, with Google Glasses like technology and beyond.
And thus, where they have ads in front of them all the time, you arrive home, look at your daughter in the crib, and suddenly your entire vision is plastered with a semi-transparent ad for diapers, and you blink, it goes away, and another shows up, a ad for automatic cribs with quad core processor and capable of singing and telling stories on its own.
I believe ORCL wants to drive off all their nuisance D and E customers, which is all the riffraff not paying them $50m/yr. After taking over Sun, they've moved all the good stuff behind a paywall, jacked the cost of legacy products and of supporting them, added onerous contracts with stiff penalties. For example, if you ever drop support, there's a big fine to rejoin. Another example is if you're an OEM they make it very very hard to simply sell their stuff. My $work is an OEM that also uses several products ORCL bought that used to be okay, but now we're getting off them before the sleaze and expense kills us.
So Java is probably one of those standalone business units they need but hope it will make a little profit of its own. The first attempt to monetize, sue GOOG, didn't go so good if you recall.
Does anyone remember if Sun at any time bundled adware or other forms of crapware, esp. using deceptive tactics?
Note: I have no problem with Java on the server or client, just the applet and browser plugin model.
Commission collections and ethics aside, I actually cannot understand the venom towards Ask (its search results). I believe in keeping web searches open with multiple choices made available to users, so I actively support all viable alternatives (meaning I use Ask, Blekko, ddg, lycos, yahoo (bing) among others instead of Google for regular everyday searches). Ask search results are very much comparable to Google's, i.e., the search is not "inferior" as claimed.
As for ads, google's adsense ads are just as much in-your-face as the others (ymmv), so don't think this point is such a big thing either as claimed.
On google I saw no ads, and the links on the first page of results usually contain the search term.
On Ask there are ads, and they look very much like search results - there's no coloured background to identify them as such - and the search results contain irrelevant links to other Ask properties like "Can I Copy From Youtube? | Ask Jeeves" and "How Memory Stick | ask.co.uk/how"
Personally I won't be switching from Google to Ask.
I'll admit we might see different things - let me know if you'd like screenshots.
[1] http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cuda+device+to+host+memory+... [2] http://uk.ask.com/web?q=cuda+device+to+host+memory+copy
Good show. I checked your links on Maxthon [my IE without the IE baggage] and on Firefox (default browser with ABP add-on) for comparison.
1. On FF I have ABP installed, but there were no ads on Maxthon either for Ask. Is it due to "search bubble" or something else? Not sure. However, I too use uk.ask.com for my searches like you, so the 'bubble' should be the same for me as well. Hmmmm.
2. I got those two false positives also. But the rest of the search results were similar between both search engines (SO, rice.edu, stanford.edu, sourceforge, NVIDIA). I'll admit that I would have simply filtered those two anomalies visually and not given it a second thought. But wouldn't you say, search-for-search, the landing pages were pretty similar in the results returned (barring those two stupidities)?
You can't really split Ask in half and talk about the quality of its search results vs the ethics of the company.
2) You can set Java update mode to manual.
3) Chrome (and possibly another browser) asks permission before using Java on any page, so I consider it a low-risk vector for drive-bys.
If you have to ask the average user for permission to update, updates won't get done. It's that simple.
Oracle should take a page from Chrome's book, here. Update silently in the background, and then notify if a restart or a relaunch is required to effect the change.
When I need to deliver an app written in Java to the end user I just include my own JRE. You have to do it pretty much anyway in order to guarantee that your app works regardless of quirks of particular system/installation.
Because, I'll tell you what, I sure didn't get any crapware when I typed `sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk`.
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/OpenJDK+is+n...
Either way, it'd be a nice way to give Oracle the middle finger about this.
