Category: news

Java EE Abandonware

From the latest Nov/Dec 2017 Java Magazine (viewing of their terrible reader, or downloading a PDF with no bookmarks, only works in Chrome):

In an unexpected and widely applauded move, Oracle announced just before the JavaOne conference this year that it would be moving development of Java EE to the open source community.
This action, efectively unthinkable a few years ago, is being done by giving control of development technologies and of project governance to the Eclipse Foundation. Included in this transition are the full source code of the diferent reference implementations and of the many test suites that ensure conformance and compliance with Java EE speciication requirements.
This migration shows emphatically that Oracle is giving the technology to the community. That is, this move should not be confused with the occasional dumping of technologies to open source foundations by companies no longer interested in supporting them—a phenomenon known as “abandon-ware.”

Spin, spin, spin the Oracle death spiral! But given the state of J2EE, I can't really mourn its impending demise.

I only rarely have to touch Java anymore, and the JavaFX front-end stuff is pretty weird from my old AWT/early Swing perspective, but my old Java games still work, and all the server side and image processing, which are all I use it for now, had been nice and stable.

But look at this nonsense for CDI (Context and Dependency Injection) 2.0 replacing JSF/Spring/Hibernate (which weren't lovely to start with), they want you to use:

public class CdiExtension implements Extension {
    public void afterBean(@Observes AfterBeanDiscovery afterBeanDiscovery) {
        afterBeanDiscovery
            .addBean()
            .scope(ApplicationScoped.class)
            .types(MyBean.class)
            .id("Created by " + CdiExtension.class)
            .createWith(e -> new MyBeanImpl("Hi!"));
    }
}

The actual work is new MyBeanImpl("Hi!"), which you could do in one line in a startup script/class, without this giant framework. At least with all the XML nonsense in Spring or JSF, you could change it at runtime instead of recompiling the project.

People Should Not Fear Advertisers, Advertisers Should Fear People

Good. You know what a "campaign" is? It's a prolonged military action against an enemy. Advertisers call it a campaign because you are the peasants being mass-surveilled by their soldiers for their profit.

Ad-block everything.

On iPhone and Mac I currently use Better, and on Mac ublock for eliminating single annoying elements.

"Oh no how will papers make money if they can't surveil us?!" Patronage or subscriptions. Maybe schwag, like "Democracy Dies in Darkness" tshirts, sold exclusively on Amazon.

Apple Special Event

  • Live video doesn't work in Safari beta. Had to watch on iPad.
  • Steve Jobs tribute. Makes me a little uncomfortable. I don't think Steve would've liked being deified like this. Not sentimental, he wanted the work to speak for itself.
  • Apple Park. Very pretty as a modern cathedral, but still that open plan is going to be Hell for developers.
  • Apple "Town Squares". This is a very 20th Century kind of thing, a real-world gathering place, where you're supposed to learn from others. But now everyone just lives by their computer and talks online, watches online video. There's a lot of "we're restoring historic buildings" in this; the Medicis funding arts while politicking to get their Popes elected.
  • The stream isn't doing the usual dual-camera picture-in-picture of presentation and zoomed-in view of presenter, so often I only see a tiny bit of a presentation screen, then it flips out for context. Very jarring.
  • Apple Watch, exercise ad, lot of heart health study. Almost every watch app is getting redesigned again, because they can't figure out what it's for, beyond being a watch. "Now you can take a phone call, while you're surfing!" Streaming audio is their solution to killing the iPod… But how much is that going to impact your data cap?
  • AppleTV. A presentation screen on streaming video can't show HD vs. 4k HDR video, so they desaturated the "HD" image to make the images look different.
    • Aside: I've never much liked Spider-Man, but the new movie looks stupid, the costume looks like a plastic CGI figure (which it is, I guess), and the fight scene was so over-choreographed it looked like ballet, not a kid in a brawl with thugs.
    • Aside 2: I love thatgamecompany's games, Flower and Journey are amazing. Sky looks just as good. But I'm dubious to the extreme about social gaming in it; that's the weakest part in Journey, which has almost no interaction.
  • "For the first time, you were actually touching the button!" And then iOS 7 destroyed that UI by removing buttons and making everything a bland white void. Thanks IVE-1138.
  • Ha ha everyone who had "iPhone X" on their bingo card, it's "iPhone 8". There's a regular fat model, and a super-fat + model.
  • The camera is much better. I dislike the term "portrait mode", which doesn't mean portrait-vs-landscape, but bokeh.
  • Using AR (Augmented Reality) Kit to put virtual objects on the real world is still silly, you're still staring at your phone. It replaces a convenient on-screen camera control with having to spin around like a doofus, you can't just sit in your chair and play comfortably.
  • There are sane uses of AR to overlay physical things, like landmarks, or provide auto-translation. If Glassholes and naked Robert Scoble hadn't ruined Google Glass, it might be have a useful interface. But holding up your phone to do it is still silly.
  • Wireless charging is a nice thing. In a car is a strange use for it, since it'd just bounce around without something holding it in place, like a cable.
  • One More Thing: A separate model of iPhone X, with all the crazy rumor stuff. No home button, edge-to-edge screen.
  • FaceID: From now on, you need to wear a mask at all times or anyone can use your "true face" to unlock your phone. The pigs can just hold your phone up in front of you to dig thru it. Good thing there's animoji, so you can send a completely virtual face (panda, poop, robot, or alien) to replace that pesky human interaction.
    • Aside: I am wearing a Star Trek Mirror, Mirror tshirt. I'm the one with the goatee.
  • iPhone X (pronounced "Ten"), and Qi chargers (pronounced "Chi") provide all new ways for Apple devotees to "well, actually" everyone else.
  • Skate to where the oh not this quote again.

Probably makes sense for me to wait a couple months for the iPhone X and get the bleeding-edge device rather than a better what-I-already-have.

OK, get back to work.

Oracle Murders Solaris

For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product.

—Simon Phipps

FUCK.

Solaris was a better server and development platform than anything else (OK, after HPUX and SunOS reached EOL), but getting management to spend money up front was always a massive battle. SUN did themselves no favors by going back and forth with SPARC and x86, and getting a freebie OpenSolaris running was a challenge.

But now the world runs servers on piece of shit free-as-in-freebase-heroin Linux, paying fedora-wearing dipshits at DeadRat for "support" consisting of "no, you go fuck yourself".

This future has been brought to you by lawyers and the lowest bidder.

I'm too bummed out to make a playlist for today, so here's a couple of Apple's:

W3C DRM OMGzors

Oh sweet zombie jesus the DRM whining again? You can have fucking Flash (you goddamned savages), or you can have DRM and a nice native player. Ebooks and downloaded music are mostly watermarked and DRM-less (except on Kindle), but you can't do that on the fly with video encoding.

You aren't going to convince Sony/Netflix/etc to just give you non-DRM copies of a $100M budget movie or series. And once in a while I like a Guardians of the Galaxy, Inception, or Justified. If you don't, the presence or absence of DRM in the browser makes zero difference to your life. You're just bitching about something that doesn't affect you.

For a slightly more calm, less profane explanation, read Tim Berners-Lee's post.

News Snark

OK, what's going on in tech today?

  • Apple's bragging about the fucking trees on their spaceship compound. link

  • Tech companies are powerless against coal/oil company politics. link

  • Google's ad-blocking everyone except Google ads. link

  • Nintendo wants you to pay $20/year for online multiplayer, still no backup, and an NES emulator (back when their games were good). link

(I don't expect to do this often, but my sarcasm levels are higher than my bullshit-tolerance this morning)