Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Java

Oracle May Have Stopped Funding and Developing Java EE (arstechnica.com) 115

Posted by EditorDavid from the quiet-cubicles dept.
While anticipating new features in Java 9, developers also have other concerns, according to an anonymous Slashdot reader: ArsTechnica is reporting that Oracle has quietly pulled funding and development efforts away from Java EE, the server-side Java technology that is part of hundreds of thousands of Internet and business applications. Java EE even plays an integral role for many apps that aren't otherwise based on Java, and customers and partners have invested time and code. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened, but the implications are huge for Java as a platform.
"It's a dangerous game they're playing..." says one member of the Java Community Process Executive Committee. "It's amazing -- there's a company here that's making us miss Sun." Oracle's former Java evangelist even left the company in March and became a spokesman for the "Java EE Guardians," who have now created an online petition asking Oracle to "clarify" its intent and resume development or "transfer ownership of Java EE 8".
Privacy

WikiLeaks Publishes Secret International Trade Agreement 222

Posted by samzenpus from the like-minds dept.
schwit1 (797399) writes "The text of a 19-page, international trade agreement being drafted in secret was published by WikiLeaks as the transparency group's editor commemorated his two-year anniversary confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Fifty countries around the globe have already signed on to the Trade in Service Agreement, or TISA, including the United States, Australia and the European Union. Despite vast international ties, however, details about the deal have been negotiated behind closed-doors and largely ignored by the press. In a statement published by the group alongside the leaked draft this week, WikiLeaks said "proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets," and have participated in "a significant anti-transparency maneuver" by working secretly on a deal that covers more than 68 percent of world trade in services, according to the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research.

Comment Re:PolarSSL (Score 2) 304

by Nightshade (#46764235) Attached to: OpenBSD Team Cleaning Up OpenSSL

Yes, openssl is a piece of junk that is far too widely used. Polarssl looks nice and especially interesting is the version that was mathematically proven to be immune to a whole bunch of CWEs: http://trust-in-soft.com/polar...

But for OpenBSD they can't use polarssl since it's gnu licensed. The sad thing is polarssl was originally called xyssl and xyssl was originally BSD licensed. If only OpenBSD would start with the final xyssl codebase and replace OpenSSL with that...

Comment South Africa (Score 1) 290

by Nightshade (#46475377) Attached to: Interview: Ask Theo de Raadt What You Will

Theo, you left South Africa at the age of 9. Do you have any connection to the country? Have you been back? Do you think of yourself as a South African or a Canadian? Do you speak any Afrikaans? Places like Cape Town are beautiful and hike-worthy. I believe you enjoy hiking so was wondering if you've ever been back there for hiking.

Also, it is interesting that there are so many South Africans in tech. Elon Musk (Tesla), Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), etc. Do you feel any connections to them due to a common heritage?
Google

First Evidence That Google's Quantum Computer May Not Be Quantum After All 224

Posted by samzenpus from the emperor's-new-keyboard dept.
KentuckyFC writes "In May last year, Google and NASA paid a reported $15 million for a quantum computer from the controversial Canadian start up D-Wave Systems. One question mark over the device is whether it really is quantum or just a conventional computer in disguise. That's harder to answer than it sounds, not least because any direct measurement of a quantum state destroys it. So physicists have to take an indirect approach. They assume the computer is a black box in which they can input data and receive an output. Given this input and output, the question is whether this computing behavior can be best reproduced by a classical or a quantum algorithm. Last summer, an international team of scientists compared a number of classical algorithms against an algorithm that relies on a process called quantum annealing. Their conclusion was that quantum annealing best reproduces the D-Wave computer's behavior, a result that was a huge boon for the company. Now a group from UC Berkeley and IBM's Watson Research Lab says it has a found a classical algorithm that explains the results just as well, or even better, than quantum annealing. In other words, the results from the D-Wave machine could just as easily be explained if it was entirely classical. That comes on the back of mounting evidence that the D-Wave computer may not cut the quantum mustard in other ways too. Could it be that Google and NASA have forked out millions for a classical calculator?"

Comment Re:Wait, wait , WAIT a moment. (Score 3, Interesting) 277

by Nightshade (#45968979) Attached to: OpenBSD Looking At Funding Shortfall In 2014

I tried to do the math on this too. First of all, I'm not sure if the number is 20,000 USD or CAD (Since OpenBSD is based in Canada not the US). Next up is the fact that many of the machines are older non x86 machines that are not power efficient. For example when the SGI/AlphaStations/VAX/SparcStations were produced, focus was on MHz not power utilization. Finally, I think the project might use some type of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) as well as network switches, etc.

So by your math you're looking at CAD 20,000 = EUR 13,500 which at EUR 0.20 per kWh would buy you 67500 kWh = 7.7 kWh.

Now the project has supports about 20 architectures. And there are dedicated machines used to build the base system and dedicated machines used to build ports so at least 2 of each machine. On top of that there's probably an NFS server to host the source code, some UPS, network switches, etc, etc. So say about 50 machines total.

So 7.7kWh / 50 machines gets you to 154 watts per machine. I do believe they are on 24x7 as there are daily builds for many architectures, etc, etc. 150 watts is not unreasonable power consumption in my opinion.

Comment very misleading (Score 1) 376

by Nightshade (#44369709) Attached to: The Last GUADEC?

Take a closer look at the google trends data. If you click on the "qt" tab you actually see that most of the searches are related to "qt syndrome" or "long qt". these are medical conditions and have nothing to do with UI toolkits. if you click on the "gtk" or "gnome" tab, the search terms are all related to UI toolkits.

Perhaps it's not something specific to gtk/gnome, but maybe all the toolkits including qt are in decline. Either due to smartphones/mobile or ubunut's unity or something else.

Comment just like BSD (Score 1) 74

So they're basically "reinventing" how BSD does things? They even blatantly copied an OpenBSD image for this presentation...

(Compare slide 13 from the presentation with OpenBSD 4.9 art)

In all seriousness though, it's a pretty good plan. Everyone knows that BSD means real engineering while Linux is "just a hobby, won't be big and professional"

Comment nothing new here, please move along... (Score 1) 311

by Nightshade (#44063445) Attached to: Are You Sure This Is the Source Code?
Even if you have the source, it doesn't mean you can confirm what the binary is doing. See the classic "Trusting Trust" attack which is decades old. In my experience the most common reason for binaries that are not reproducible is due to build timestamps being embedded into the binary. For example, the ar command added the D flag in the past few years exactly for the purpose of being able to output reproducible results. (see the man page at http://linux.die.net/man/1/ar) It's true that reproducible binaries are probably a good thing from a security stand point, but in practice it can be a lot of work to make sure the build produces these. And even then, as Thompson showed, that doesn't always guarantee that what you see is what you get.

Slashdot Top Deals

Is your job running? You'd better go catch it!

Close