diebir

Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway.

Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner and older.

There's essentially no way forward for Oracle. They can use hostage tactics to squeeze money out of exiting customers for a few more years, but otherwise they are irrelevant in the tech landscape.

Except for Java, that is. The current tech is powered by Linux and there isn't really anything as big as Java on Linux. Python has been pretty significant and Go is making inroads, but the default is all Java. It is going to be interesting to watch how this will play out.

Anecdotally, as a former H1-B worker, I would not say I was underpaid or the employer ever exploited the fact that I was on H1-B. From my standpoint it has always been a fair deal.

Okay, the gist of the article is that H1-B should require higher salaries (in the 75th percentile). This would have the effect of cutting off younger and less experienced workers. The problem here is that more experienced and older people are less likely to want to move. In other words, this would mean that the US tech would lose out on the potential talent. Again anecdotally my current tech org is 60-80% foreign born. It is also one of the most selective places around. Would it be like it is without H1-B program? I doubt it.

So perhaps the system needs tweaking, specifically in the area of making the system work faster and being less arcane. I highly doubt this is what's going to happen. Ten years from now we'll be having the same conversation, as we were ten years ago (I have been watching this since '99).

We have been through this. It is not like this council is anything other that Trump administration looking for endorsement from the tech industry.

Do you seriously think that it would all be fine, if only Kalanick and Musk mentioned to Trump that it was a bad idea to ban muslim refugees?

This is not to mention Trump's trying to control businesses by giving out favors in exchange for endorsements is a path to legitimizing autocracy. The administration wants feedback from business leaders? Fine, go ahead and listen to the media or read their open letters.

The CEOs having to prize and endorse Trump in exchange to not being slammed on Twitter is so wrong I do not even know where to start.

This endorsement was a bad business and morally and ethically wrong.

As an Uber employee and an immigrant I am very happy to see this. It's a good day.

As an Uber employee, I would also like to NOT see TK at the Trump's "business forum". Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and others are staying away.

RS-232 is invaluable. Give me a new piece of hardware and as long as there are 2 wires for the serial port I can port Linux kernel to it.

I have ported Linux to a custom ARM board many years ago. Started with a boot loader written in assembly and writing a single char into serial port for a debug console. It takes a single line of assembly or C. Infinitely easier than USB. From there on, I was able to unwind the whole system, develop USB drivers, TCP tunnels, etc.

Taxi companies are "small businesses"? Like in NYC, where taxi medallions used to be a safe investment? I guess mafia enterprises are "small businesses" and taxi and limo companies are not far from those. Zero compassion for those.

At this point in time, those who don't support Linux are only hurting themselves.

I highly doubt these Linux games will amount to much for Microsoft, but it's fun to watch.

Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well).

MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years. It's fun to watch them scramble and try this and that, but I suspect that the train has left the station long ago.

I think Oracle Linux has been a joke. I don't know anyone in their right mind using that. RH or CentOS, yes. Oracle Linux? Most IT professionals will pay extra to have nothing to do with Oracle. Heck, I am considering risking moving to OpenJDK, just so I have nothing of Oracle in sight.

April fools.

Coming next: Windows 11 will use Linux kernel.

Oh, I don't have a good feeling about this...

First, I am worried that instead of being able to just assume that "all of Java is there", there will be "no we just did a minimal install". Second, after watching the video briefly, we may already have tools for most of what this tries to solve (Maven, Spring boot, etc). Third, I suspect that there's some sort of nefarious scheme by Oracle to start charging for "premium" parts of JVM.

My initial feeling: it works just fine now, don't fix it. Or maybe I am wrong and it will be great.

For things that are likely to carry malware, use a separate account. Probably a good idea for a Bittorent client in any case.

In practice, however, it is much easier to deal with malware if there's no admin rights. It matters even for a clueless user, since the OS mechanisms of detection can't be altered and more much so for a power user.

This specific malware installs a kernel module, as far I can tell. I am guessing it would be harder to encrypt data and not be noticed and removed quickly.

Of course, there are even more obvious reasons, like sharing a computer with... kids that tend to bring malware at every turn.

We really need to educate the devs and change the culture. There's no reason for something like a word processor and file sharing app to require full access to the system. That's why we have access controls in the first place.

1. Petition vendors to stop distributing .pkg's

2. Most packages can be extracted with pkgutil and then just copied into ~/Applications.

It is infrequent that somebody needs to modify your OS and if they do, then they better explain why.

First, obviously you can make an account for running the untrusted software, like Bittorrent clients (which are known to carry malware frequently).

Second, most malware requires and counts on having admin privileges on target machine. The task of auditing, cleaning and finding out that malware is present is significantly easier if malware is limited to a non-privileged account. With malware running as a non-privileged user you still have to clean up and recover, but you can easily switch an account, compare, audit and trace. The anti-malware tools also still have a chance when OS is not compromised, otherwise it's all lost the moment you ran a malicious post-install script.

The more common problem, however, is a regular app install. The goal of the application packager is to make their application work first, and preserve your environment second. So, in many cases even not malware does bad things to your OS. The scripts are usually written by devs that are fairly clueless, which leads to some pretty awful stuff in them. Almost 100% of the time the install/uninstall action is not idempotent, although it should be.

What really needs to happen is a shift in a mentality that accepts the idea that apps need to be installed as an administrator (unless the apps are a part of the main OS distro).

This is a good illustration of why you should not install apps as administrator. Specifically, you should not install Mac OS packages, which allow for arbitrary pre- and post- install scripts to be executed as root.

Same is true for Windows and Linux.

There are privilege escalation bugs in any OS, but it is usually not a given. Throw the application into ~/Applications as a Mac bundle, worst that will happen is your account will be compromised. Much easier to detect and clean. Most trojans won't even succeed.

We are going to have these problems until the developer community realizes that executing a randomly downloaded package installer as a privileged user is giving away the keys to the kingdom.

Application stores is one solution, but really is not an open one. I'd rather see the apps distributed in a form similar to Apple app bundles, where a non-privileged user can just install the app into their home.

There are some interesting comments below the article. The article claims to derive Maxwell equations based on Newtonian mechanics (Galilean transformations), which sounded a little strange. I remember pretty well that one had to consider Lorentz transformations to obtain Maxwell equations. Sure enough, the comments indicate that this is required and the proof does not quite succeed.

Well, Apple software does kind of suck in some areas (tragically broken package manager is one area!!), but it is not too unstable. I have got here a 2 year old MacBook Pro.

The uptime on this thing is usually around 60 days, at least. I have at all times around 40 tabs open in Chrome and do heavy Java development in IntelliJ IDEA.

I don't think this laptop has ever crashed in these 2 years. Just never happened. I reboot once in a while when something like audio goes crazy or just in case after running out of memory with IntelliJ and a handful of other JVMs a few times in a row.

I have no illusions on usability of Apple software. I think they are teeming with idiots (iTunes, already mentioned package management, photo import app, text editor), but the OS is kind of rock solid. Why wouldn't be, it's a POSIX OS and consequently is relatively simple and logical, at least from API standpoint.

There are two things that drastically help with stability:

1. My account does not have admin privileges and I never give admin password to any prompts, unless I know for certain why.

2. I never install any software as administrator. If something does not want to install into ~/Applications (you know, drag and drop), I take it apart and "convince" to install.

3. I guess there's #3, no updates. Only clean OS installs once in a few years. It's a little scarier than the same tactic on Linux, where I am sure that this is not a real problem, but in most cases it's not an issue on Mac OS X either.

Awesome, can we now move Docker somewhere ever further, where it can't be seen or found all together?

This does not take into account the fact that IDEs provide massive amount of help for statically typed languages and marginal to no help for dynamically typed ones.

For instance, every IDE I have tried fails miserably on Python. Javascript is even worse, even with a very smart tool like Idea.

I would rather say "goodbye docker", period. Having used it a bit, I have concluded that it is just not a very good or mature tool. Once you scratch under the surface, things cease to be easy or stop working at all. It makes you wonder how it's been this long and nobody stumbled upon an issue that you uncover 30 minutes into tool's use.

Docker does have it's uses, but in the majority of cases you are better off using native OS package and dependency management (RPM/YUM in the case on Redhat-based distros). One very obvious thing is that package managers usually track versions and dependencies and allow for install actions to happen based on the versions delta. With Docker you just replace the whole environment, which is fine, unless some of the data context is outside of Docker.

I think the majority of Docker uses are of a class "I can't figure out how to manage dependencies for a given OS, so I am going to skirt the issue by using Docker".

He's not going to be the CEO for much longer. Quite probably, being too smart is detrimental to CEO career, but being obviously dumb in interactions with the media is not tolerated at all.

There was once a CEO of Seagate that could not contain himself and said something to the effect that people "buy drives to store porn". He was gone soon there after.

I suspect that regardless of how good a device MS comes up with, they can't win with the consumers, since Windows is strongly associated with the dreadful office computers and the IT-tyranny of the workplace. Who wants to use Windows at home after using it in the office all day?

Besides, every single Windows computer I have had in family after a 6 months of use turned into slow as crawl horrible insufferable piece of junk. A full minute to switch users on a pretty powerful machine! The Macs, on the other hand, seem to be holding pretty well. Viruses, crappy drivers, bad software, the entire Windows ecosystem just does not work all that well, and it is very apparent to people using it at home.

I suspect the same group of people that bought Lumina phones and Zunes will buy this, a couple of idiotic suits at work will show up with it, and a couple of years later this will wither and die like all other things Microsoft. MS is yesterday and there's nothing they can do about it.

So, what can one develop using this beside "hello, world?"

Can I build a cross platform GUI application? Is there a servlet container? How about an IDE?