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Comment Leave us alone!? (Score 1) 395

by karianna (#41187335) Attached to: Can the UK Create Something To Rival Silicon Valley?
To be blunt, the Silicon roundabout area has exploded in the last 5 years without government 'help'. RedMonk now estimate over 3000 tech related start-ups in the area (and the area is geographically small). Government wants to help? They should pretty much stay out of the way, excepting helping create more space for this environment to flourish in. The local council recently rejected a bid to renovate a derelict building into a tech start-up campus and community space with major ties to the local community (high school kids from the more deprived side of the area). It would've been nice if the government had supported that sort of initiative.

Comment Re:Oracle and the Java Community (Score 1) 119

by karianna (#37579782) Attached to: Oracle: Proud, Self-Reliant, Increasingly Isolated
This always saddens me slightly, the Java platform/ecosystem has delivered and continues to deliver amazing things for developers, at the moment it's going throuhg a clear resurgence, so 'going nowhere fast' is I think somewhat incorrect. Like I said Oracle's done some good things and some not so good things, but they _are_ moving that platform forward and that's awesome for everyone involved in Java. Are there other cool technology stacks outside of Java? Hell yes, I love using other languages - Horses for courses and all that.

Comment Oracle and the Java Community (Score 5, Interesting) 119

by karianna (#37572086) Attached to: Oracle: Proud, Self-Reliant, Increasingly Isolated

FYI - I'm the London JUG co-leader, we have a seat on the Java Standards Body (aka the JCP) and I've seen first hand the Oracle and Java community challenges :-).

I think Oracle's record with the Java community is turning around in the right direction. They clearly didn't know how to the deal with the community to begin with, but I'll give em credit for trying their damnedest to get better at it! For example:

  • They offer amazing amounts of (no strings attached) support to the Java User Groups (we've certainly had it better than we did under Sun). They put their $/£ where their mouth is and offer logistical support for user group events to boot (again, no strings attached).
  • They set a date for Java 7, and they delivered the darn thing.
  • They're working on the JCP reforms, starting with openness and transparency (JSR-348) and they will have a follow-up JSR to address all of the legal/licensing etc concerns (promises to be a humdinger of a mailing list).
  • They've gotten a number of major community players into the OpenJDK (some will argue dubiously, but hey having Apple, SAP, IBM, RedHat on board is not to be sneezed at).

Now before the sceptics spit out their coffee:

  • Have they screwed up a bunch of times? Yeah sure they have, Hudson/Jenkins, the Java Web Start thing and a few others.
  • Do they communicate in a way that the community would like them to? Definitely not always, they like to keep silent until they get the official ducks in a row.
  • Are there issues around legal/licensing? Heck yes. and that's going to make for an interesting 2012, I suggest you become part of the JCP process so you can have your say.

So there's definitely stuff to work on, but they are listening and the community has worked with them on many occasions in the past year to get some really cool things done. Let's not forget they're mainly individual engineers like you and I trying to do the very best they can for the platform.

Now I'm off to put on my Kevlar ;-)

Games

Fallout 3 DLC Detailed 137

Posted by Soulskill from the ninjas-out-of-nowhere dept.
Eurogamer spoke with Bethesda's Jeff Gardiner about the upcoming downloadable content for Fallout 3. The new gameplay will be bundled into three different segments, the first of which is due this month. The last segment will raise the game's level cap to 30. Gardiner had this to say about how the Strike Teams would work: "The player will be able to choose, from a limited resource pool, what type of team members will accompany him or her on several missions within the simulations. These choices include different troop types like snipers or heavy weapons troops. They'll also be able to make tactical decisions on how to deploy these troops in certain situations. The Chinese Stealth Suit was what I was hinting at last week — it works similar to stealth boy every time you crouch!"
Communications

The State of UK Broadband — Not So Fast 279

Posted by kdawson from the but-you-have-actual-competition dept.
Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

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