Episode Details

Should you pay for Java support? Now you get to decide! It’s more kindle for the lock-in fire. Also, some uninformed commentary on “surveillance capitalism.”

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Relevant to your interests

• Oracle Will Charge for Java Starting in 2019.
  • What was Java treated like way back in the mid-2000s Sun days?
  • Should you pay for this kind of thing?
  • It seems like the answer is just to run an OpenJDK version (Oracle even has one) or pay for support. With OpenJDK you have to do updates/patches yourself…but, then, that’s why you don’t have to pay for it. Pay for it, and you’re paying someone else to worry about that.
  • Forrester Report:
  • “The new subscription's prices for Oracle Java SE support — $25 a month per server core and $2.50 a month per Java client — apply to all Oracle Java SE commercial customers. Previously, only Oracle's Java SE Advanced customers paid support fees to obtain security patches among other benefits ($5,000 per processor, plus 22%).”
  • Oracle to do two Java releases a year, but many companies are way behind and don’t like upgrading. Like, if you haven’t reached release management maturity: “Executing manual regression tests multiple times each year to stay on the latest version of OpenJDK will prove to be a labor-draining exercise, but so will automating existing manual tests and keeping them up to date.”
  • Old stuff likes old pricing models: “For Java runtimes, however, monthly subscriptions have minimal advantage, as most applications are now stable workloads. Most customers don't need pricing that allows them to scale down, as they almost never will.”
  • From their blog on the topic: “Under the best of circumstances, a technology base of Java’s size, age, and complexity can’t pivot within six months to new support structures carrying big potential additional costs.”
• Thieves of Experience: How Google and Facebook Corrupted Capitalism.
  • “surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.”
  • If you’re not buying a product, you are a product “gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.”
  • The question is: what’re other options?
  • The latest The Weeds episode (Feb 5th, 2019) has a discussion of Facebook making you unhappy, and also compared to the TV rotting your brain meme.
  • Side-note: what’s up with podcasts (like The Weeds) that don’t have actual show notes in a web page?
• Crypto CEO dies with the password to unlock $200+ million of customers' Bitcoin.