Java Runtime updater now installs ask.com toolbar on Macs

Ah, and yes: it is an awful place to work. For the same reason: they don't care about anything but money... Employees are COGs, nothing more, nothing less. If you find the right niche, you can live a quiet salaried life there for some years, btw... like probably in any other giant company.

This is really tragic, since the Java language and VM are nice pieces of technology. Unfortunately Oracle is killing them. I'd never use them for a new project now.

* You will take the corporate standard laptop and like it.

* You will take the corporate standard screen and like it.

* You will take the one corporate standard virtual machine you are allocated and like it.

* Everything moves slowly, even for a corporate bureaucracy.

* None of the above applies to Sales - they can have whatever they want whenever they want, including brand new MacBook Pros yearly. (That says a lot about priorities)

* Stack-ranking system that tries to force managers to give 1/3 of the team bad rankings every year. In theory the top 1/3 are supposed to get bonuses/options, but in practice managers just spread the pain around so even as a top-performer I got screwed.

* Pay used to be kinda average, but now that the wage fixing cartel was shut down and wages have risen it makes Oracle look hilariously low.

* Lots of mandates from on high about what technologies to use

* Above mentioned technologies are heavily designed by architecture astronauts; if it makes the install 8 GB and take 15 hours all the better to push customers to consulting services. Lots of XXXFactory classes and useless abstractions.

* Be forced to tell a customer you can't restore your copy of their database to test with because ProdDev IT won't give you NAS space to store it (not that it would be fast enough to be usable anyway)

* Everything interesting or good for customers will get massive pushback; the focus is on checkboxes that CTOs can understand

* Manager turf wars and pompous blowhards abound, all looking to carve out a nice little kingdom to lord over.

It's a place to go earn a basic salary until you retire. After the acquisition, everything got much worse.

If your company is acquired by Oracle, plan your exit strategy and stay just long enough to cash out whatever options you have.

If a company you rely on is acquired by Oracle, look for an alternative immediately. They will eventually strangle you, even unintentionally just by neglect. Never put yourself in the position of relying on Oracle unless you're on the Fortune 1000 list.

Again, all my personal opinion and does not rely on any confidential or non-public information. I was just a developer and have no knowledge of strategic decisions at Oracle.

I'm sure if it were somehow possible and legal to bundle some kind of mind-control adware into a vaccine that forces you to buy the sponsor's brands, someone would be doing it.

Of course getting slapped in the face by a crapware-bundling Java update won't make you skip your kid's vaccination, but where do you think the lack of trust for doctors comes from? It's from living in a society where almost every organization you interact with tries to pull a fast one on you (if you don't believe that, go and talk with some antivaxxers - you'll quickly realized that they're not stupid - they're afraid and don't trust authorities because they see themselves getting constantly abused by them). So if you decide to abuse your user's trust for a quick buck because "it's a common practice", you're part of the problem - just like the girl who sold you that twice washed meat or the guy who insists that it's the factory that mislabeled the lightbulbs, even though your handy multimeter confirms what's on the label (EDIT: both are real examples I have direct knowledge of; heck, because I'm nice to the people working in my local grocery store, they discreetly signal me to pick something different when I want to buy meat that is old and was washed).

Still, I think that our complex technological civilization needs a higher base level of trust for it to work than the civilization of Sumer, because we depend on it much more than ever in history.

"When you have a commercial relationship like this, not only are you dealing with your [own] corporate policies on communication, and revenue recognition and all that kind of stuff, but you also have a commercial partnership and agreement that you have to abide by and follow," said Smith during the call.

Smith also defended the practice by saying Oracle had inherited the deal when it acquired Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, in 2010. "This is not a new business, this is not something that Oracle started," Smith said. "This is a business that Sun initiated a long time ago."

Sun had bundled third-party software with Java since at least 2005, when it offered a Google toolbar. In the following years, Sun made similar arrangements with Microsoft and Yahoo, before switching to Ask.com.

With Java, it's true our installer waits 10 minutes before running the install process, but this to ensure the JRE [Java Runtime Environment] updates properly without additional strain on a user's computer," an Ask.com spokeswoman said in an email reply to questions Monday. "This is not intended to trick users."

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2494794/malware-vulnera...

It's telling that Facebook, a company that's not known for treating their users as anything other than a commodity to be packaged and sold, would never stoop to something like this.

In an era where a photo sharing site sells for over a billion dollars, Oracle must be raking in hundreds of millions on this deal for it to be worth the damage to their Java brand.

Which isn't the case for Oracle AFAIK... ;-)

I'd really like to listen in to one of the meetings where decisions to do such kind of blatant platform-abuse is being discussed. Possibly alternatives A/B/C (you always have to have 3 alternatives, right?) are the Ask-Toolbar, a bitcoin-miner or adding the end-user-PC to a botnet for DDOS-extortion, so we can be lucky that they agreed to do "A".