User revolt over Java bloatware(news.techeye.net)
news.techeye.net
User revolt over Java bloatware
http://news.techeye.net/software/user-revolt-over-java-bloatware
57 comments
Here's something I don't understand: it can't be that ask.com pays Oracle that much money for that. How is it worth to Oracle to tarnish their image and piss off their enterprise clients for that? It's not like they are so desperate for money they are grasping at straws, are they? What's next, would they propose Java users to introduce them to a certain Nigerian prince that is looking for business partners?
> How is it worth to Oracle to tarnish their image and piss off their enterprise clients for that?
Well, since Oracle is doing it and accepting the pubic outcry, it must be that they have no image to tarnish. Also, we don't know how much ask.com is paying for this deal, but given that the Java downloads are free, any payment deal with ask.com represents an infinite increase in profitability.
> It's not like they are so desperate for money they are grasping at straws, are they?
I see you haven't talked to any stockholders lately. Most only care about profits and don't ask where they come from.
Well, since Oracle is doing it and accepting the pubic outcry, it must be that they have no image to tarnish. Also, we don't know how much ask.com is paying for this deal, but given that the Java downloads are free, any payment deal with ask.com represents an infinite increase in profitability.
> It's not like they are so desperate for money they are grasping at straws, are they?
I see you haven't talked to any stockholders lately. Most only care about profits and don't ask where they come from.
> but given that the Java downloads are free, any payment deal with ask.com represents an infinite increase in profitability.
That would make sense if Oracle was a company whose only business were providing Java downloads. However I heard they also have some other source of income, and I suspect compared to those whatever ask.com is paying is rather minuscule.
That would make sense if Oracle was a company whose only business were providing Java downloads. However I heard they also have some other source of income, and I suspect compared to those whatever ask.com is paying is rather minuscule.
> However I heard they also have some other source of income, and I suspect compared to those whatever ask.com is paying is rather minuscule.
A modern corporation consists of individual departments, each of which must strive to justify its existence as though it were a separate entity. No rational corporate manager is willing to say, "We don't have to turn a profit -- we're an insignificant, small part of a hugely profitable corporation."
The fact that the second claim is true cannot be used to justify the first claim.
A modern corporation consists of individual departments, each of which must strive to justify its existence as though it were a separate entity. No rational corporate manager is willing to say, "We don't have to turn a profit -- we're an insignificant, small part of a hugely profitable corporation."
The fact that the second claim is true cannot be used to justify the first claim.
There are units that aren't meant to turn an immediate profit - such as R&D labs. And Oracle people very well know that, as any competent corporate manager does. So yes, a rational corporate manager is very well willing to say "we don't have to turn a profit because we're part of the whole corporation and can contribute in other ways than selling our reputation for a handful of ad dollars".
And even for turning a profit, there are better ways than forcing crapware down users' throats. After all, they have enough sense not to put porn banners (which probably would pay handsomely) on their download pages - why wouldn't they not have enough sense to not stuff their product with unrelated crapware that nobody wants?
I have a Java free software project that started back in 2001, and my users are very unhappy about all this BS from Oracle. I don't have the time or the willpower to port everything to a different language, so "just tell people to uninstall Java" is not a good solution in my case.
Some Java bashers should show a little more empathy towards the independent Java developers that are suffering the consequences of Oracle's decisions.
Some Java bashers should show a little more empathy towards the independent Java developers that are suffering the consequences of Oracle's decisions.
Oracle makes tons of money using this scheme.
They can milk that cow for about one more year, with Win XP/Vista/7.
Windows 8 is pushing hard to control the installation process. Oracle knows it is coming to an end.
With the title I was expecting that people were finally fed up with getters/setters and all the other ceremonial bloat that's associated with java. Maybe tomorrow.
Instead of signing a petition, I simply choose not to install Java on my computer.
Thankfully with my needs I'm really not missing much.
Thankfully with my needs I'm really not missing much.
> Oracle Corporation decided to sacrifice the integrity of Java
Java having integrity. Good joke.
Java having integrity. Good joke.
[deleted]
I feel for the end users, but developers really ought to know better and get OpenJDK instead.
Another option for developers is to just install JDK directly from Oracle site[1] instead of going to java.com.
[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/inde...
[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/inde...
Can you point me to openJDK binaries for Windows? I would love to use that.
Another option: http://ninite.com/
Having setup a new computer and installed Java on it recently, I found the inclusion of this bloatware very tacky. It's also frustrating because in the past, I have told family members to "just answer yes" to Java update prompts. I'll probably just remove it from their computers now, if given the chance.
My preferred method of setting up many apps on a new PC is using ninite.com's installer, which includes Java as an option. Does anyone know if this path to installing Java bypasses the cruft the article speaks of?
I did the recent new Java update and it did not come with any Ask Toolbar prompts.
But why did you install Java on a home desktop computer for non-technical users?
Devlopers would have their own machines or VMs plus install and control the update cycle, often manually, by downloading the JDKs directly (which have no bloatware).
Applets and other front-facing Java services are also almost never used on the web due to the dominance of Flash, Javascript and other technologies.
In short, there are no common non-development desktop applications or task profiles that require Java.
Devlopers would have their own machines or VMs plus install and control the update cycle, often manually, by downloading the JDKs directly (which have no bloatware).
Applets and other front-facing Java services are also almost never used on the web due to the dominance of Flash, Javascript and other technologies.
In short, there are no common non-development desktop applications or task profiles that require Java.
"You can sign the petition here. So far, 6,000 people have done so,"
6000 people? The more appropriate subject here would be "Most users don't care about Java bloatware".
6000 people? The more appropriate subject here would be "Most users don't care about Java bloatware".
I'm skeptical about whether signing a petition would do any good and whether it'd be worth the effort. If Oracle gave a crap, it already wouldn't be an issue. I expect a lot more people care about this issue than signed the petition. I know I'm one.
I agree with it and don't see why your comment has been downvoted. 6000 people signing is pretty small compared to the scale of Java. That negligible number is more a sign for Oracle that they can bundle whatever crapware they want with Java.
They don't, because they just want to be able to play Minecraft.
He has to make up for overpaying for a dying company somehow. Squeezing Google for money didn't work, so I squeezing everyone else that has anything to do with Java is the answer.
well i'm sure suing google's ass was in their business model when they bought sun. But hey , it is their products, someone needs to pay for it. Oracle is not known to give away freebies like that. Sun did not manage to make money with Java , Oracle will not.
Let Oracle bundle their bloated adware. Don't provide them a free service by telling them how stupid and self-destructive this practice is; if they're too dumb to work out that it isn't in their long-term interests, they deserve the consequences.
Publicly traded corporations are all the same; they're all equally obnoxious, a-moral, and hostile to customers when it suits their perceived interests. Oracle's Java adware is just a tiny little symptom of this; the actual problem is systemic to public corporations.
This kind of obnoxious user-hostility is what made me abandon closed source software for personal use. Additionally, my company (a private company) doesn't use any closed-source software in our systems, and never will. For us, open source software is better, more flexible, more supportable, and the nail in the coffin is that there simply aren't any vendors that can be trusted by a small organisation such as us.
Oracle don't care about little people signing a petition anyway. If one of their large corporate customers told them directly that this was unacceptable, they would stop it in a minute.
Publicly traded corporations are all the same; they're all equally obnoxious, a-moral, and hostile to customers when it suits their perceived interests. Oracle's Java adware is just a tiny little symptom of this; the actual problem is systemic to public corporations.
This kind of obnoxious user-hostility is what made me abandon closed source software for personal use. Additionally, my company (a private company) doesn't use any closed-source software in our systems, and never will. For us, open source software is better, more flexible, more supportable, and the nail in the coffin is that there simply aren't any vendors that can be trusted by a small organisation such as us.
Oracle don't care about little people signing a petition anyway. If one of their large corporate customers told them directly that this was unacceptable, they would stop it in a minute.
This idea of petitioning Oracle would be comical were it not so pathetic. In case it needs to be said, Oracle is a corporate sociopath -- it cannot empathize. One could have a petition with quite literally 6.9 billion signatures on it; it would change nothing. As I've cautioned before[1], do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison...
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-...
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-...
>do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison
Hilarious! That dude is the worst of the worst, and should be on the wall of any Oracle using companies engineers as a reminder of why you want to put in the extra hours to implement Postgres to deny that asswipe his next megayacht.
Hilarious! That dude is the worst of the worst, and should be on the wall of any Oracle using companies engineers as a reminder of why you want to put in the extra hours to implement Postgres to deny that asswipe his next megayacht.
O.R.A.C.L.E. - One Rich Ahole Called Larry Ellison. Sorry to jump on the bandwagon here, I've just always loved that pseudo-acronym.
I loved this presentation. Thanks for all the work on Illumos!
The odd thing that presentation doesn't cover is that if Oracle was really only about making money, they would be less evil. Oracle inflicts many, many wounds on itself, at the expense of their bottom line, because of an OCD-like compulsion to deny their customers what they want. Every product they have has less marketshare and revenue than it could bring in if they actually managed it in a way that is less hostile to their own customers.
It's become popular recently to talk of corporations as psychopathic. I have to say I that I find this diagnosis quite compelling. There's a great documentary about this sort of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(film)
The present 6,000 / 250,000 ratio of signers versus the signing goal might be a measure of the remaining idealists among Web netizens. Modern corporations have turned their back on customers in order to face the stockholders, the only players that count.
Predictable. I really wish Google or IBM had acquired Sun.
We could be seeing a second life for Java rather than this disgusting shuffle of the undead.
We could be seeing a second life for Java rather than this disgusting shuffle of the undead.
Maybe creative destruction is for the best. The JVM platform is much nicer than Java the language. We've learned a lot since Java and the JVM were created. The death of Java might be a nice opportunity for some Spring cleaning.
Off the top of my head:
IntelliJ's @Nullable annotation as a core part of the language (I would suggest spelling "Nullable" as "*" to avoid freaking out the C++ converts) would greatly improve static type safety. Let's stop re-inventing Tony Hoare's Billion Dollar Mistake.
Call me a heretic, but for most real-world uses (particularly financial calculations) IEEE 754-r decimal floating point is a better default than IEEE 754 binary floating point, plus it's less confusing for inexperienced programmers. Excel does some ugly ugly tricks to try and hide IEEE 754 binary artifacts from display, but the artifacts still show up from time to time. Even experienced programmers often mistake binary floating point artifacts for software bugs.
UTF-16 also fools many programmers into thinking it's a fixed-width representation, and Java's APIs force Strings to at least pretend that they're using UTF-16 internally. Chars should be 32-bit, since 16 bits aren't enough to represent all Unicode codepoints. Iterator-like String APIs are often more appropriate than Java's array-like String APIs, and give implementors more design flexibility.
These days, even a lot of embedded systems are beefy enough that a register-based or SSA-based bytecode is a better choice. (For small embedded systems, I'm sure a few companies would spring up with cut down standard libraries and tools to either generate native code or a stack machine representation from the standard bytecode.) Bytecodes manipulating NaN-tagged types would make the VM a better target for dynamically typed languages.
We know that CSP/Actors are a less bug prone concurrency abstraction than forcing developers to work directly with threads, but Java chose threads to make C++ programmers feel comfortable.
The use of type erasure in Java's generics was a compromise necessary to maintain compatibility with old class files. Safety and performance would be improved by starting out with a system that supports generics.
Off the top of my head:
IntelliJ's @Nullable annotation as a core part of the language (I would suggest spelling "Nullable" as "*" to avoid freaking out the C++ converts) would greatly improve static type safety. Let's stop re-inventing Tony Hoare's Billion Dollar Mistake.
Call me a heretic, but for most real-world uses (particularly financial calculations) IEEE 754-r decimal floating point is a better default than IEEE 754 binary floating point, plus it's less confusing for inexperienced programmers. Excel does some ugly ugly tricks to try and hide IEEE 754 binary artifacts from display, but the artifacts still show up from time to time. Even experienced programmers often mistake binary floating point artifacts for software bugs.
UTF-16 also fools many programmers into thinking it's a fixed-width representation, and Java's APIs force Strings to at least pretend that they're using UTF-16 internally. Chars should be 32-bit, since 16 bits aren't enough to represent all Unicode codepoints. Iterator-like String APIs are often more appropriate than Java's array-like String APIs, and give implementors more design flexibility.
These days, even a lot of embedded systems are beefy enough that a register-based or SSA-based bytecode is a better choice. (For small embedded systems, I'm sure a few companies would spring up with cut down standard libraries and tools to either generate native code or a stack machine representation from the standard bytecode.) Bytecodes manipulating NaN-tagged types would make the VM a better target for dynamically typed languages.
We know that CSP/Actors are a less bug prone concurrency abstraction than forcing developers to work directly with threads, but Java chose threads to make C++ programmers feel comfortable.
The use of type erasure in Java's generics was a compromise necessary to maintain compatibility with old class files. Safety and performance would be improved by starting out with a system that supports generics.
I'm not familiar with @Nullable (just looking it up now), but have become quite fond of Guava's Optional<T>. It's a bit wordy, but it seems like a great example of how to make the type system work for you by finding your mistakes as early as possible,
> Chars should be 32-bit, since 16 bits aren't enough to represent all Unicode codepoints.
This would be a lot better, but even this is oversimplifying things and is going to cause problems. In this case, thinking "chars are 32 bits" ignores the fact that, in Unicode, a "char" (that is, a codepoint) and a single character you see on the screen (that is, a glyph) are not the same thing: Some codepoints don't map to glyphs, such as bidirectional markers, [1] and some codepoints modify existing glyphs, such as combining forms. [2] And Zalgo waits for people who forget about combining forms. [3] Zalgo hungers, mortal. [4]
The underlying 'problem' is that Unicode is the first text processing standard that's actually complex enough to be useful for more than one language. Its complexity reflects how complex the real world is.
[1] http://www.iamcal.com/understanding-bidirectional-text/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character
[3] http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Zalgo
http://eeemo.net/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar
This would be a lot better, but even this is oversimplifying things and is going to cause problems. In this case, thinking "chars are 32 bits" ignores the fact that, in Unicode, a "char" (that is, a codepoint) and a single character you see on the screen (that is, a glyph) are not the same thing: Some codepoints don't map to glyphs, such as bidirectional markers, [1] and some codepoints modify existing glyphs, such as combining forms. [2] And Zalgo waits for people who forget about combining forms. [3] Zalgo hungers, mortal. [4]
The underlying 'problem' is that Unicode is the first text processing standard that's actually complex enough to be useful for more than one language. Its complexity reflects how complex the real world is.
[1] http://www.iamcal.com/understanding-bidirectional-text/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character
[3] http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Zalgo
http://eeemo.net/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinistar
so use openjdk?
the irony of peddling the Ask Toolbar to users without ever asking them if they want it.
I'm not signing that petition, because fuck Oracle, and fuck Java in the browser. We don't need it anymore. I hope they keep bloating it until people simply refuse to install it, and even corporate IT departments start saying "what the fuck?" and start porting their software to something else. JavaScript, CSS3, Canvas, even SVG does everything the Java plugin did, but better. Way better.
EDIT: Wow. Didn't realize I felt that strongly until I wrote this. But client-side Java, which I spent many years programming, is a tragedy of epic proportions, and my anger hides a real sadness.
EDIT: Wow. Didn't realize I felt that strongly until I wrote this. But client-side Java, which I spent many years programming, is a tragedy of epic proportions, and my anger hides a real sadness.
>fuck Java in the browser..
>client-side Java ... is a tragedy of epic proportions
client-side Java != browser jvm In fact, all of your client-side Java code will run perfectly well without a browser on your Mac, Windows & Linux boxes. I still do a lot of client-side Scala, running on Mac & linux, with no browsers involved at all. The simplest way for a data scientist to process say ~10 GB of records & display linegraphs & scatterplots is like 20 lines of straight client-side Scala, no browser, no html, no CSS3, no JS, no canvas. Throw it in a generalpath & apply an affine transform & you have your curve.(http://bit.ly/WWoaKS). Almost all my work these days is client-side Scala, and I've never used a browser.
client-side Java != browser jvm In fact, all of your client-side Java code will run perfectly well without a browser on your Mac, Windows & Linux boxes. I still do a lot of client-side Scala, running on Mac & linux, with no browsers involved at all. The simplest way for a data scientist to process say ~10 GB of records & display linegraphs & scatterplots is like 20 lines of straight client-side Scala, no browser, no html, no CSS3, no JS, no canvas. Throw it in a generalpath & apply an affine transform & you have your curve.(http://bit.ly/WWoaKS). Almost all my work these days is client-side Scala, and I've never used a browser.
That may be, and I'm glad you found an application that works for you, but in general it's far harder to write client-side Java GUIs (in the browser or out) than to write a webapp that does the same thing. Not to mention that it's easier to hire for webapp skills, these days.
In the time it takes to learn GridBagLayout you could have finished your whole project, and the web version is going to be far easier to modify, and your architecture is almost certainly going to make the data easier to access.
When it comes to analyzing big data, I'd do the majority of the crunching server-side, and only pass viz data out to the client (which is always going to be orders-of-magnitude smaller than the source data).
In the time it takes to learn GridBagLayout you could have finished your whole project, and the web version is going to be far easier to modify, and your architecture is almost certainly going to make the data easier to access.
When it comes to analyzing big data, I'd do the majority of the crunching server-side, and only pass viz data out to the client (which is always going to be orders-of-magnitude smaller than the source data).
It's already happening. Our desktop support IT guy came by to do some updates to my computer and he asked me if I wouldn't mind if he uninstalled Java. I said sure, no problem.
Sweet. Now people just have to remove the strangle-hold Oracle has on their companies data.
If we removed the stranglehold that incompetent people had over corporate spending decisions then maybe this just might happen.
Unfortunately, I think we're still a decade or so away from having technologically enlightened people saturated throughout our corporate landscape for that to happen.
Until then, we're stuck with know-nothing managers who make decisions based on how likely they are to get fired if things go wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment")
Unfortunately, I think we're still a decade or so away from having technologically enlightened people saturated throughout our corporate landscape for that to happen.
Until then, we're stuck with know-nothing managers who make decisions based on how likely they are to get fired if things go wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment")
Forget the petition, just stop installing JRE.
This article is nonsense full of blatant half-truths, e.g.
"a respected corporation such as Oracle"
Give me a break.
"a respected corporation such as Oracle"
Give me a break.