Java 7 Ships With Severe Bug 180
Lisandro writes "Lucid Imagination just posted an announcement about a severe bug in the recently released Java 7. Apparently some loops are mis-compiled due to errors in the HotSpot compiler optimizations, which causes programs to fail. This bug affects several Apache projects directly — Apache Lucene Core and Apache Solr have already raised a warning, noting that the bug might be present in Java 6 as well."
Not just a malware trap (Score:5, Interesting)
And I was only avoiding updating it because the last time our PCs were clamoring for Java updates it was actually a (well disguised) trojan.
The next thing Windows needs to add is a "don't bother me with this update" API where software vendors need to ask the OS permission before prompting the user for updates - and also allow preference settings like "don't install a damn desktop launch icon when you update" (looking at you Adobe.) Personally, I'd set my preferences to "don't tell me about updates until they are at least a month old." There is a balance to strike between getting the latest patches for security and waiting until a patch has proven itself in the wild.
Of course, we could all just stop using software from vendors who don't do these things voluntarily (like check for bugs before pushing an update, or making an easy to access preference for launch icon settings (hint: if I've deleted the last 12 of them, I likely don't want the 13th!) but the software that I'm talking about here is Java and Acrobat - kind of hard to get around the web without those.
Re:Sounds just about right for Oracle. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's quite common for more aggressive optimization flags on any compiler to come with warnings that things may break in odd ways. It's even considered acceptable as long as those flags default to off.
It is NOT acceptable to set them on by default in that condition. At no point did Sun violate that, but Oracle just did.