Between Java and their Enterprise platforms, if Oracle spent as much time listening and responding to their customers as they spent threatening them, they might be in a far better position today. Any major platform transition is going to have problems unless you're exceptionally lucky. There's just too many moving parts in Enterprise systems for humans to get everything right on the first try. Oracle won't tout all of the problems people have moving ONTO their software from a competitor, but that transition pain happens too.

Every year that goes by, it seems like Oracle is in a more tenuous position, despite their increased revenue. They've already lost the SME space -- I don't know of a single company anywhere in our client base, or within my sphere of influence, that still uses Oracle software. Organizations are bumping up against the limits of NetSuite -- the costs to integrate 3rd-party or industry-specific components, compared with other ERPs, are turning out to be more significant than expected. So we have clients and vendors migrating ERPs over time.

Oracle is becoming the Comcast of the software world. They treat everyone like crap, but were so deeply embedded that they were hard to dislodge. With every passing year, that is less true, and I think Oracle knows it. Unfortunately, they seem to be choosing to double-down on the "treat everyone like crap" strategy, rather than actually fixing the systemic problems that might eventually sink them...

That's wonderful... but just because Amazon is a dismal working environment, doesn't mean that, as a company, they're also criminally stupid. I could name dozens of companies that I'd never work for on my worst day. Which makes it even more interesting that this Guardian article tries to paint Haslet TX as some kind of isolated podunk town, where Amazon is the only employer in town and employees make 60-mile commutes for the only work they can get.

It's on the edge of the DFW metroplex. There are, literally, thousands of un-skilled jobs within 25 miles of the Amazon facility. Pick one and apply. Pretending like Amazon has a warehouse full of mis-treated slaves that can't do anything else is more than slightly disingenuous.

Amazon being a terrible company doesn't mean that most of the "tragedies" in this article hold water.

Look, you can believe what you want to believe. There are certainly real cases, where real people have been hurt by actual negligence, or discriminated against with true malice. It happens, and those people deserve to be protected. There are lots of resources to help those people, and whatever the newspaper says, there are far more gov't departments that tend towards over-reacting with severe enforcement, moreso than turning a blind eye to true workplace violations.

But you have to recognize that when you credulously accept every story about injury and discrimination at face-value, you're not helping the real victims -- you're hurting all of the people who REALLY HAVE been wronged by dumping resources, attention and time on cases that distract from real problems.

There's just too many problems with this story. There are thousands of vacant jobs, requiring few or no skills, in the DFW market. A 60-mile commute in that area, for a specific job, makes too little sense because of how dense that area is. Rents are not that high -- $500/month median rent for a 1Br/1Ba, which is less than 33% of even a $10/hr job working 35-hours per week. She claims to have willingly gone back to doing an un-safe job, even assuming the employer was stupid enough to allow that to occur -- and, in terms of safety gear, that "all important" brush guard that the article hangs its hat on, isn't actually an OSHA-recognized piece of safety equipment!!

I see the horrible crud that happens to people every day, and I do count my blessings. But you do nobody any good when you get outraged and demand action based on "investigative journalism" like this crap. It has every hallmark of trying to make the "Amazon is evil" point, and too many warning flags that no sane person (or employer) would ever actually commit. If this piece is even 75% accurate, then it should be making the point of needing better mental-health counseling in TX, not one about workplace safety.

Uh uh... sorry. It's not like Haslet TX is the armpit of nowhere, and Amazon is the only employer in town. It's on the edge of the DFW metroplex. As plenty of others have indicated up-thread, she could have gotten a job at Burger King, or WalMart, or very likely some nice quiet job that requires no lifting and no skills, like a page in a library, or receptionist or filing clerk in one of 10-zillion companies. We're at ~4% unemployment, in case you haven't seen the news -- there are more jobs right now than people able to fill them.

In 2008, I'd believe it. In 2018, if she's living out of her car, it's because she's holding out for a 6- or 7-figure settlement from the mega-corporation that "wronged" her.

Go find Haslet on a map. Tell me that there aren't thousands of jobs that someone, even with an injury/disability, could get, to afford the ~$500 average rent in that area. Or wait, I'll do it for you: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c... 1030+ jobs within 25 miles of Haslet, TX.

Lovely attack piece by the Guardian, but sorry... no sale.

The hysteria of frequent media smear pieces notwithstanding, it's tough to take articles like this seriously at face-value. Lots of broad generalizations and impossible-to-prove (or disprove) allegations of straight-line relationships between an alleged safety issue with an employer, and outcomes like homelessness or disabling injury.

Unfortunately, part of my job is working with EPLI (Employment Practices Liability Insurance) carriers and risk managers. For every actual issue reported, there are multiple instances of people "gaming the system", fraudulently claiming workplace injury or discrimination, or filing repeated false HR reports to attempt to build up a "history" of abuses, being terminated for their bulls**t, and then pointing to that "history" as the REASON for their termination. Maybe I'm just too used to seeing the seedy underside of the Workers' Comp business, but to take light-on-details reports like this, and draw inferences of chronically deficient, or criminal, practices on the part of the large employer, is hard.

Most employees want to do a good job, be fairly compensated, and be appreciated at work. But a small percentage view work as a scam. Those aren't just the ones that spoil the party for everyone, but they're ALSO the ones most likely to turn up in press reports, because "going loud" and getting a company to pay them to go away is part-and-parcel of the scam.

If these folks were legitimately injured and abused by dumb-ass managers at Amazon, then I feel for them. But it's equally likely that a papercut became a "permanently debilitating hand injury", if historical reports like this are any guideline. Sad, but true.

The problem that so many of these initiatives have, when it comes down to IMPLEMENTATION, is that governments have a major problem with "wealth" as distinct from "income". Because wealth can be hidden, obfuscated and invested in so many ways, most give up trying to tax it by traditional means. So they focus on Income.

And there's a HUGE problem there, because income != wealth. At least, again, the way most governments choose to define "income".

I'm a small business owner, and when I get my K-1 every year, it never ceases to amaze me about the spread between how much money I'm being taxed on, versus how much money I took home. Technically, if I were to somehow, magically, close up the company without any spin-down expenses or other costs, I could capture that money and be "rich". But, in reality, the amount of money sitting in the company for expenses, payroll, etc... that is "mine", but I will never see, touch or capitalize on, is significant. So every time you talk about taxing the "rich", you're taxing guys like me who run mid-sized businesses, and are personally allocated a share of the company's earnings, THAT WE HAVE NEVER TAKEN HOME, AND NEVER WILL.

Tax policy is a steaming pile of dung. I'm all for taxing the truly rich... likely because I pay more taxes than most of them already!! But you need to be very careful about how to define "rich", because more often than not, these "tax 'em all and let god sort 'em out later" plans end up netting and hurting small- and mid-sized business owners more than it does the truly-Wealthy.

My $0.02...

Heh... it's not that I disagree with you, philosophically. It's just that, where the rubber meets the road, a huge proportion of the applications and systems out there are not robustly designed.

It's very common for applications to expect either success or failure. Success implies that it's behaving correctly. Failure means anything went wrong. In many ways, FTDI's previous attempt at this -- bricking the devices -- was PREFERABLE to this, as it always resulted in failure. You can be angry that they killed your device (which you may or may not have even known was counterfeit), but it pretty much would always fail.

In this case, intentionally manipulating the output could have innumerable unpredictable effects. As noted, can FTDI know that there's not an application out there looking for a value in a specific position? Now, their error message aligns the "DE" in "DEVICE" in that position... the application doesn't fail. It just starts assuming a hex value of '222' for all data runs. What impact might that have?

Look... you can apportion blame and responsibility all you want. Ideal-world politics don't work well in situations like this. The real world is a lot messier, and anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something. I'm not predicting life-ending disaster from this change. All I'm saying is that FTDI has no way to know if it _could_ result in life-ending disaster, and are being ridiculously foolish to take the risk, when they're well aware that their end-users have no way of knowing whether they're affected.

No, I don't... and that's because I'm not an idiot. ;)

Unfortunately, 20 years in this business have taught me that a significant share of people doing this kind of work are. Furthered by the fact that a significant share of business owners/managers (even in large companies) will shave costs anywhere they think they can get away with it.

My basic point is that "non critical" links in the infrastructure can still cascade into critical failures. Many of the developers/integrators in the chain never even recognize the ways that their outputs will be used downstream. And subtle or not, it's never safe to assume that modifying the output of something low-level like a serial controller will not have un-subtle effects on the application. The way these industrial apps often work, it might assume the value is 0. Or it might line up where the "DE" in the word "device", in that error message, is interpreted as the integer 222. There is literally no way for us (or FTDI) to know.

Point is, I can foresee hundreds of ways this could go bad, in places that people don't view as "mission critical". (The desktop PC of a warehouse manager, a dumb throw-away "converter" PC that was simply stuck in a remote location to turn a serial device into a "network server", etc... People do ALL kinds of crap to engineer solutions for specific scenarios, often in small suppliers or companies too tiny to have good control processes or discipline.)

Murphy's Law, and all...

Not necessarily true. Low-level technology like this is frequently the source of "cascading failure" that can endanger people or property.

For instance, we have many USB-to-Serial devices installed in chains that capture weight readings from industrial scales. If this suddenly and inobtrusively starts causing that measurement data to be misaligned in the output, those weight readings could be transmitted to shippers who may or may not re-weigh the product based on our volume. In the worst case scenario, something like this could be done as the last check-weight for loading an aircraft -- a weight-critical application where getting it wrong can cause a tail-strike on takeoff.

Screwing with low-level data INTENTIONALLY is never a good thing. End users have no way of ever knowing that it's happening. Pushing it by Windows Update, where no devs are involved to catch the error, is a recipe for potential disaster somewhere.

This IS Pure Crap... on the part of FTDI.

There are two fundamental dichotomies that hide under this argument, and they've been going on for years, if not decades.

First, there's the disconnect between large business and small business. Second, there's the disconnect between what people have previously been paid (or their peers have), and what they are actually worth. This is coming from a guy who has hired 5 software developers so far this year, and has 2 slots still available...

A lot of developers are looking at what happens at Google and Microsoft (aside from the layoffs...), and try to use that as a standard when they apply for a position at a 50-person shop in the midwest. This creates an expectation disconnect where someone gets an offer for $65k, but won't take it because they've been convinced by the Internet, their Career Planning & Placement department, or the job postings on career boards, that their skills are worth $90k.

This is an "expectation shortage", and results when there are not enough candidates willing to take the positions that ACTUALLY EXIST. It's all well and good to say that employers are under-paying developers, and looking for cheap labor. But the market does set rates, and the fact is that most software projects away from the coasts just don't support paying developers $120k/year - at least not sustainably.

The second disconnect occurs when people misconstrue what it takes to be hired and promoted in the majority of companies, other than the mega-corporations who can have 200 people doing the same job. The sad fact is that you pretty much have to be a specialist to GET a job, and then you have to be a generalist to KEEP it. The specialists who stay in their pidgeon-hole are always the first against the wall when the next re-org comes. But the generalists who have 75% competency in an array of skill-sets rarely make the cut during interviews, but have enormous job security in their current positions -- though often feel themselves "stuck" in positions where they may not feel like they're advancing quickly enough.

This is a failure of cultivation and and expectation problem on the part of employers. It creates a market distortion where people are encouraged to specialize, and then dumped back onto the market with inflated expectations of their overall worth when that very specialization becomes a liability. (Ruby, anyone...?)

From the inside, I think it's undeniable that there is a shortage of quality, trained developers, with attitudes and ethics that will lead to long-term advancement and quality employment. That doesn't mean that there is a shortage of bodies with the raw skills necessary to do the job. But, in the end, that hardly matters... companies aren't hiring automata, even if some of them want to pay as though they were.

There are ample failures on both sides of the equation, and large companies are exacerbating those problems with their treatment of many H-1Bs and "mass hiring" of fresh graduates (at insanely inflated salaries) who then get culled 9 months later.

But candidates are also making the problem worse by viewing software development as a single, unified market, and clinging to the belief that just because Company X in Boston could afford to pay $x for a given product/project, that their skills are still worth $x when they move to Company Y in Pittsburgh, creating software for a completely different industry.

The end result is a shortage of jobs that don't require specialists to get through the door, and a shortage of employees able to adjust their expectations to the realities of the market we are in. When you meet in the middle, it's a real shortage, regardless of how it came to pass.

So while I'm not a tin-foil-hat wearing conspiracy theorist, I do note amongst the young technorati something of a double-standard. Surveillance, big data and privacy violations are bad when they're used to infringe social rights, but GOOD when they're used to attack people perceived as infringing social rights... C'est la vie.

But more to the point, single-issue activists ALWAYS misunderstand the voting habits of multi-issue voters. Particularly Republicans, who are not just straight-up conservatives as they are often portrayed, but often socially liberal _fiscal_ conservatives who choose not to vote based on social policy. Turning multi-issue swing voters into single-issue activists isn't a straight-forward process, even if you identify who they are.

Finally, this kind of effort makes the assumption that such voters are simply awaiting the right contact or motivation to write their congressperson and demand action. Whereas, in reality, while activists often view the disengaged as "against the cause", the reality is, in most instances, such voters just don't care about that cause.