My work has group policy that removed all Java from everyone's computers. We still didn't get it back so it seems that our IT is cautious enough that they didn't jump on the first patch they saw as an opportunity to give everyone their Java back.

But the quickness of the exploit poses a question to my mind: how much can hackers exploit a system before people just stop using the system? Especially with things like programming languages/frameworks chances are there is an equivalent solution to your problem that runs on a different framework. So how vulnerable can something like Java be before everyone just stops using it to develop there software? I think there must be some sort of equilibrium point where you can hack the system but no so frequently that people completely give up on it.

Perhaps this just shows that you can't just think about your language you might actually have to spend a few minutes thinking about the platform you'll run on. Don't throw it on Tomcat just because that is the first java server you find or IIS because it comes in the box.

But ultimately at any sort of scale you are going to have redundant web servers, data servers, caching nodes etc. This is like testing how quickly the gas pedal goes down on the latest Porche when the engine, tires, transmission etc all have a part in determining how fast the car can handle the same road (load pattern in the case of a web presence).

Yeah that is about the going rate.

But than how are you going to run Vuze?

Because clearly energy which is a part of science is more important than all science :)

Exactly. You don't have to debug and maintain the code you don't write.

When someone breaks into your R & D shop and the only thing they see of value is someone else's gear.

Love trains or crazy trains you pick :)

For a company I think the way around it is to make the copyright be owned by the employees that create the work. Their contract can say that the stuff they make is licensed exclusively and royalty free to the company. When the employee dies the copyright could still go away. This would have the advantage for the employees of being able to prove exactly what they did (I'm the twin alien guy) which also would be great for software devs. I don't mind giving my work to my employer but I think it should be clear as things get patented or copyrighted exactly who did what (I think patents are more clear in this regard).

Where I live IP belongs to the employee unless stated otherwise in a contract. My current employer is getting burned by this because I created in house software (my own idea) that they would like to commercialize. They sent me their "patent/IP disclosure" workbook with language all over it saying things like "The following individuals were involved in creating corp Xs new discovery Y". I told them hold on I haven't given you the IP yet and I'd appreciate it if you didn't claim that things have been assigned to you before compensation has been negotiated to which I've heard crickets :)

Sad really because it could be useful and is healthcare related and we have socialized health care so would be a net good to the public via tax savings paying multiple times for the same thing to be developed everywhere but still bottom line the IP is mine. Not big enough for me to bother making contacts at other hospitals and handling the sales and installation myself but not small enough that it is trivial for others to duplicate. So it looks like every hospital gets to spend a week of someone's time developing this tool over and over again on the tax payers dime. In this space my proposal would be for at least the 90% of the world with government run healthcare to have centralized development/business side of things so things get made well once and then pushed out to everyone. Every employee at every hospital/clinic has to sign over the related IP as part of their employee contract to this state/federal level body and since the division of payments has already been worked out ad hoc groups involving multiple developers at different hospitals could collaborate to make things without needing a roomful of lawyers and directors everywhere to agree that their isn't some strange liability issue they want to avoid.

I think it is a matter of protecting personal property at that point. Perhaps theft laws could deal with it I guess but it seems kind of strange to protect a creators rights only if they are going to publish. It pretty much says "one way or another this will be published, do you want your cut or not?" Things might get leaked before they are good enough for the author to want to share it with others, the story could involve personal details that they don't wish to share but just felt compelled to write about etc. Like a conversation until the person who created the ideas wants to share it, and who they chose to share it with, there should be the expectation of privacy. Granting copyright to everything that the author doesn't explicitly grant rights to seems to be a pretty good way of helping protect privacy.

MSFT "legacy customers" will be pretty much everyone though. So they might be a really slow decline as people find alternatives but if you have those half dozen must have apps on windows well ... you'll be running Windows.

Admittedly I work in a very technology intense field (radiation therapy) but there are a LOT of in house apps in the organizations I worked in. They aren't simple "create a PO form" either. We are talking communications software for $100k + pieces of test equipment, domain specific medical databases etc. Drivers tend to be the kicker in a lot of cases. We have hardware that we can't upgrade past 32 bit XP because the drivers are from the mid 90's even on new pieces of equipment (a medical device maker will not change anything they don't have too because of all the regulations) and the driver was only ever made for windows. Heck I worked with a Sun tape storage library 4 years ago and it was using Win 2k Pro because that was what they had drivers for, for a new to the market piece of kit, sure your SAN is running on Solaris but your tape library needs to rock solid win 2k :)).

I wasn't a fan when I first upgraded but have been won over a bit.

Don't like not having a start button? If you make the desktop your first tile you just got to hit enter to jump right to the desktop again. Since the "start menu" search is so good anyways I don't bother using a mouse to launch apps "Win button type enter" is my workflow.

In the desktop small features but nice: progress info (I'm a data nerd) when moving files is nice, live preview when you hover over view options in explorer again nice (not really needed if you know what you want but if your mind is numb sometimes having a visual clue is just nice). The new task manager is nice too sort of an middle point between the old task manager and process explorer from sys-internals. Has pretty much everything I use routinely easily accessible per app disk, network etc usage etc.

As for the win 8 apps: don't really like them but don't have a touch device. I suspect that is the biggest factor out there right now there isn't a whole lot of choice for touch devices. When it becomes a standard feature more people will jump on the bandwagon I think. Using existing hardware to get touch doesn't make sense, picking from one of ~10 options for laptops that have touch vs just going for whatever your local best buy has on sale just doesn't make sense for a lot of the market.

Good info thanks.

Well in the case of a author "hoarding" their works I'd side with the author. I might like to read that unpublished book but if they don't chose to publish it than I don't have a write too. Even if the person is already a well known professional writer they still should have the right to only publish some of the stories and keep some of them as personal projects keep them for later years so they can go away for a while without losing their audience because nothing new comes out etc.

It could just be the author doesn't think it is as good as the rest of their stuff and isn't interested in working on it any more so stops. Pirating and then publishing this kind of think is similar to publishing someone's diary: it is still their personal ideas for them to chose to share with or without payment involved as they see fit.

I think that is the whole "patented pending" sort of thing. What I mean is they don't start your patent expiry after you actually have your product on the shelves. If you take too long too bad. Not sure why copyright things like books should be any different. Value is most definitely lost over time "Who Let the Dogs Out" was relevant for ~3 months, you miss it too bad. Similarly, though I guess the free market would discount things appropriately, most books are only relevant for a short period of time. Even with fiction who wants to read the "new" detective fiction book featuring a crime that happened in the latest model of a Chevy Bel Air? Most books won't end up being great classics if they didn't come out than the next book on the shelf would get a buy instead bathroom/plane reading isn't that picky (and you should see my mother go through romantic trash books, 1-2 a day she doesn't care who wrote what she'll read them all).

Its even worst than that with some photographers they keep the copyright for themselves not just so they can charge you to print additional copies but so they can use it for advertisement, sell them to stock image houses etc. The next time you buy a picture frame you could end up with a picture from your wedding already in the frame :)