Power corrupts, they say. There probably are many cases of ideological activist wikipedia editors throwing their weight around. Another example of outright bullying and insults, and the impact on the Bouml project. In this case, the author of the open source project, Bouml, one of the best UML tools out there, in my opinion, including commercial, has now decided to stop work on his project, this being the only way to protest the actions of the dreaded wikiPedia "administrator from hell". Bouml vs. wikiPedia

and bouml vs wiki (in French)

You forget that it's the YOU that make or break the site. So if Slashdot still has the interest of some sharp folks out there, with excellent insight and comments, then it's still a viable site. Note the crazy topsy-turvy world of Digg (talk about dupes and poor summaries), now there's Reddit, and others, and I guess Facebook, but as long as Slashdot attracts good readers, they'll do fine.

Wow, thanks. I am going to check that out.

I've been dumbfounded by how a renowned company like HP, and a company in the printer business, can make such an unbelievable piece of *#(&*@%(*&@@ software that their scanpro or what not is. It's like using a Model-T, with careful nudges, and coaxing, and a few crash/reboots later, I am able to scan my expenses. And before that, HP was great for hiding it's drivers, so while I had an ancient but reliable LaserJet III, I could only get it working under Linux. I was once able to find the Windows drivers, but after a crash of my system, and a restore, I was unable to get it working again (more on Windows crashes later).

And to the chap who said - don't buy a mac, well, I bought a mac out of similar frustration with the outlandish piece of equal *#(*#&@ that Microsoft sold called Windows ME.

So in my opinion, you take two companies that make second-rate, sloppy software, and you will get a combined company that makes second-rate, sloppy software, and that's if everything works out and their cultures don't clash, creating worse problems.

Yes, yes, MSFT redeemed itself with 2000/XP, (Vista? uh, no) 7 ain't that bat (git and rails runs on it ok), and yes, Word is ok, not bad at all sometimes, but if customers are treated with such disregard, it sure makes it easier to switch to Linux or the Mac.

Thinking that the Mac App Store indicates that Mac OS X will become closed like iOS is like saying that bringing Pages to iOS indicates they are going to open that system.

No, not at all. The parent has a good point. It's really reading the news releases verbatim i.e. when apple states something like "all updates/software installs will be done via iTunes/App Store", well, one really has to wonder. Is there a clause in there that says "homebrew/macports/git" will still function? Sure, there would be outcry, Microsoft used this tactic to test the waters, big enough fuss and they'd relent. But these days, with Apple deprecating Java, many in the Java world are puzzled. And then on top of that Oracle vs. Apache vs. Google vs. JCP. And maybe that's good. At this point, if there's no Java on the Mac, as DHH puts it "Meh". But not so with other stuff, yes there would be an outcry alright, you betcha.

I think that's probably true, but it would be just as true for your average PC user too. There are the Mac users that drool over the latest chipset, and video capabilities, just like anyone else, and then there's everybody else. I'd imagine that, besides someone setting up a server farm (business user), for the typical home user, the guy that cares about the technology, and is willing to pay for it, is your heavy duty gamer. Anyway, point is your statement is flawed in that it assumes that PC users are "techies" and Mac users are arty, creative types. And that's hardly the case, I mean, how many millions of PCs are out there?

Hm, mod the parent up, that is informative, thanks. Suddenly it occurs to me that this might have more to do with the skyrocketing exploits of vulnerabilities with Java recently, which I've seen nary a mention in all the comments here. Well, maybe a few. Apple may just realize that it would be easier keeping up with closing these security holes if they open up the JVM more.

I've never installed anything via the App Store other than iPhone apps like Carcassonne. Did you know you can also install via disk images (.dmg) files? And then there is also macports
As for Lion, it's all speculation right now it seems. Kind of does remind me of Microsoft a little. Companies do this, see what kind of reaction they get from their leading edge fans, then adjust accordingly.

Qt is awesome. I'm using bouml, a designer that supports UML models. Just curious, but does anyone know what Apple builds Safari in, such that it runs cross-platform? I have researched this a little but haven't found any information. I would imagine that Safari is built with Objective-C and Cocoa libs, so assuming that, there must be some way to talk to Win 32. Any thoughts?

Just my simple opinion, but Oracle only sees Java as a cow to be milked, not one to be nourished.

Right, sure, but there is certainly a fat profit in that, to use the COBOL example from the previous poster, IBM has been quietly upgrading COBOL & Mainframe technologies for years. Sure it doesn't have the spotlight that things like HTML5 and iOS (iPad, iPhone) have. And one other thing to consider is that Oracle is heavily invested in Java because their apps use a bunch of Java/J2EE technologies, for example Oracle Fusion and Call Center Anywhere. So Java won't get the fame and glory it once did, but they will still be significant investments. It's a little disappointing to see all the stuff that *won't* be in the newer version of Java (1.7? I can't even keep track anymore), but after now starting to use Java 1.5, and being fairly impressed by annotations and seeing the implications (who needs Spring? I can use Guice), I certainly hope I can continue to use Mac OS X as a development platform. Because utlimately making a less than adequate support for stuff like this is not a good idea. what next? Deprecate the Apple gcc?

Mac has a LOT of catching up to do before their package management is as nice as that of Ubuntu et al. Granted, it's better than the one on Windows, but that's not saying much.

Actually, for OS X, there is macports. Personally, I like things like apt-get, but since that steers you towards downloading binaries, and macports compiles the source, you get an application built exactly for your system. Anyway, main point is that, while I do believe that, I think it was Red Hat first with the RPM standard, Linux and other distros (SuSE) have pushed the envelope on making it easier to install software, I would say it's just as easy on the Mac. But golly, with this "deprecated" business, I'm just as cautious as everybody else here. At the very least, Apple should *communicate* things of this nature, so you don't have a bunch of /.s postulating various theories about what they are doing, so we have theories ranging from

This is because they don't want people developing Android apps on OS X

to

No worries, this is just that Apple's work is done, they've contributed everything back to the Sun/Oracle JVM, and we will all happily run the Oracle JVM when it comes out

Watch the video - she puts it away immediately after he "asks" her. More correctly, he threatens to arrest her, which seems to happen later anyway. Was the cop looking for any excuse to arrest the people? It seems so. If you watch the other videos, the cops can do pretty much what they want. They were saying things like "That guy has a number on his shirt! Arrest him!". Anyway, it's good to see Canada's finest doing their best to protect the country from bubble blowers. We're all safe, I'm glad that $1 billion dollars was spent wisely, they earned it.

Sure, of course that's a disadvantage and you would only want to encrypt when you need to. Although there are solutions, I believe IBM has a hardware solution for DB2 on the mainframe called "Crypto Express", so they are able offload the number crunching.