CWmike writes "Oracle CEO Larry Ellison declared the company is ready to offer 'the most comprehensive cloud on the planet Earth,' during a webcast event on Wednesday. 'It's been a long time coming,' Ellison said of the Oracle Public Cloud, which encompasses Oracle's suite of Fusion Applications delivered as both SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) features, including the Java Cloud Service and Database Cloud Service. It's also the home of Oracle Social Network, the company's foray into Facebook-like collaboration tools for enterprises. Wednesday's event — and Twitter (where his first tweet is a gem) — also provided Ellison with an opportunity to tout what he called Oracle Public Cloud's many advantages over rivals such as SAP and Salesforce.com, as well as to engage in some of his traditional competitive trash talk."

lucky4udanny writes "My client says any software/website we develop for them should be supported with bug fixes forever, with no further compensation. We have generally supported our work for two months, to give the client adequate time for real-world testing, after which we charge by the hour for all support. How long should a company fix bugs without compensation in software they developed? What is the industry convention?"

New submitter another random user writes "Oracle violated its contract with Hewlett-Packard (HP) after it decided that future versions of its database software would not support a line of HP servers, HP's lawyer has said in court." The issue at hand: Oracle agreed to support Itanium, and has since pulled support. "... Hewlett-Packard estimates it should be awarded more than $4 billion in damages, based on an extrapolation to 2020 that accounts for projected losses, said the person, who didn’t want to be identified because the court document containing the damages request is confidential." Oracle is using the Itanic defense: "In cross-examination today, Oracle attorney Dan Wall asked Livermore [HP board member] if she had heard Itanium called 'Itanic,' a reference to the 'Titanic' oceanliner sinking. 'I've heard lots of terms,' Livermore said. 'I understand the reference they are making and I don’t like it. It is not done by anyone I like or respect.'"

rayk_sland writes "Progress is being made on the long awaited Samba 4 release. On Tuesday the Samba 4 team announced their first beta. Those of us who refuse to have a closed-source server at the core of our networks will be encouraged to see this milestone. Here are a few of the new features: 'Samba 4.0 beta supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain join and domain logon operations with these clients. ... Samba 4.0 beta ships with two distinct file servers. We now use the file server from the Samba 3.x series 'smbd' for all file serving by default. For pure file server work, the binaries users would expect from that series (nmbd, winbindd, smbpasswd) continue to be available. Samba 4.0 also ships with the 'NTVFS' file server. This file server is what was used in all previous alpha releases of Samba 4.0, and is tuned to match the requirements of an AD domain controller. We continue to support this, not only to provide continuity to installations that have deployed it as part of an AD DC, but also as a running example of the NT-FSA architecture we expect to move smbd to in the longer term. ... Finally, a new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python.'"

angry tapir writes "It's not unusual for a freelance Web designer or developer to be burnt when a client refuses to pay up, citing one excuse or another. And what can you do about it? If a contract only amounts to a few thousand dollars, litigation to recover your fee can be far too expensive, and an increasingly vituperative exchange of emails is often not enough for client and contractor to come to agreement over who owes whom what. Into this gap steps judge.me: A start-up founded by Peter-Jan Celis that aims to provide internet-based, legally binding arbitration services — a 'small claims court' for the internet — with a particular eye on settling the conflicts that arise over freelance development and Web design."

davidwr writes "What are a reasonable temporary-worker or immigration-visa rules to apply to workers whose skills would quickly net them a 'top 20th percentile wages' job (about $100,000) in the American workplace, if they were allowed to work in the country? Should the visa length be time-limited? Should it provide for a path to permanent residency? Should the number be limited, and if so, how should we decide what the limit should be? The people affected are already likely eligible for special work-permit programs, but these programs may have quotas, time limits, prior-job-offer-requirements, and other restrictions. I'm asking what Slashdotters think the limits and restrictions, if any, should be. (Let's assume any policy to keep out criminals and spies remains as-is.)"

RWarrior(fobw) writes "PJ reports at Groklaw that Oracle has sued well-known patent troll Lodsys, asking for declaratory judgement in the Eastern District of Texas that Oracle and its customers don't need Lodsys licenses, and that Lodsys patents are invalid anyway. 'It seems that Lodsys has been going after Oracle customers, and they in turn have been asking Oracle to indemnify them. Lodsys, methinks, has made a mistake. One doesn't go after Oracle's money. No. No. Never a good plan. I suspect Oracle will go for damages, tripled, and all their expenses, legal fees, etc. when this is over.' PJ also points out that which companies are the good guys and which are the bad guys depends on which case you're looking at. "

secretrobotron writes "As a developer who spends most of each day at the same desk in the same chair, I'm concerned about ergonomics and what I can do to keep my body from wasting away while I program. Some IT professionals have the relative luxury of being able to walk around on a headset, solving problems, installing equipment, etc. My utopia (albeit a pretty low-bar) is a world in which technology exists to allow me to walk about as I program. My question is, what's available? Are people working on mobile-programming in this way? Are there hybrid standing workstations which allow me to take advantage of pacing-enabled programming?"

Reader rtfa-troll writes: "'GPL enforcement by Software Freedom Conservancy puts electronics makers on notice, leaves business users untouched,' says Infoworld, going on to explain 'You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be raided by your proprietary suppliers, in the form of the Business Software Alliance, than to ever hear from SFC, let alone face any action. License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the case concerns an end-user license agreement (EULA), not a source license.' The article gives a good summary of why having GPL licenses enforced helps everybody, except for 'hardware manufacturers — typically those creating low-cost consumer and business electronics' who need to verify that they pass on the same rights to others as they received with the original code."

New submitter sdoca writes "I am a Java developer and for the past number of years I have mainly been working on server side code. I have an idea for a webpage/application that I would like to develop. For the general public, it will be a site where they can view upcoming events, filter them by type, date etc. and view details of events they're interested in. There will also be an admin section to the app where organizations who want to post their events can log in and set them up. In the long term, writing a view-only version as an Apple and/or Android app is on the radar, but I want to focus on the generic web app for now. I'm not sure what languages/frameworks to look at using for the webpage portion of my project. Many (many!) years ago, I wrote some applets. After that I did some work in WebObjects and after that I tinkered with Wicket. I have no experience with PHP and would like to stay in my Java comfort zone as much as possible, but want to use the right tool. I'm concerned about browser compatibility issues. Chrome didn't exist when I last did web page development. I'm looking for good resources (books, internet) that will guide me through the potential issues and your recommendations for a web development framework."

omar.sahal writes "Chris Granger's Light Table IDE, covered here previously on Slashdot, has been successfully funded by a Kickstarter campaign. 7,317 backers brought in $316,720, obliging Chris to support the Python Programming language with his first release. Chris and his team have also been successful in being funded by Y Combinator. Here's some more background (video) on the concepts developed by Bret Victor found in Light Table.

aonsquared writes "In a previous Slashdot story, I demonstrated a voice-controlled robotic arm using the open-source speech decoder Julius. This time, I have managed to port the system to a Raspberry Pi to control the same robotic arm, and as usual, posted the tutorial and source code. Some negative reviews of the Raspberry Pi are starting to appear, and they're missing the educational point of this device — I'm hoping this will counter the naysayers, and help inspire a new generation of hackers, as well as also bring open-source speech recognition the same attention as proprietary solutions (i.e Siri) are getting!"

New submitter lsatenstein writes with this snippet from The H:"The regional government of Spain's Basque Country has decreed that all software produced for Basque government agencies and public bodies should be open sourced. Joinup, the European Commission's open source web site, cites an article in Spanish newspaper El Pais [English translation], saying that the only exceptions will be software that directly affects state security and a handful of projects which are being conducted in conjunction with commercial software suppliers."

Liberated Pixel Cup is an ambitious project backed by the FSF, Creative Commons, the Mozilla Foundation, and OpenGameArt to "program a bunch of free software games"; before the programming can get properly underway, though, they're looking for art that the game logic can manipulate, and they're using a contest to organize collecting it. Now, writes new submitter paroneayea, "Liberated Pixel Cup has announced that the art contest phase has just started. Several other bits have been announced as part of the post, including prize amounts, and a style guide, asset directory, and interactive demo section. Let the liberated pixeling commence!"

blackbearnh writes "Everyone these days knows that you have to double- and triple-check your code for security vulnerabilities, and make sure your servers are locked down as tight as you can. But why? Because our underlying operating systems, languages, and platforms do such a crappy job of protecting us from ourselves. The inevitable result of clamoring for new features, rather than demanding rock-solid infrastructure, is that the developer community wastes huge amounts of time protecting their applications from exploits that should never be possible in the first place. The next time you hear about a site that gets pwned by a buffer overrun exploit, don't think 'stupid developers!', think 'stupid industry!'"

Asmodae writes "Judge Alsup in the Oracle vs Google case has finally issued his ruling on the issue of whether or not APIs can be copyrighted. That ruling is resounding no. In some fairly clear language the judge says: 'So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API.'"

itwbennett writes "In a blog post, Steve Hanov explains how 20 lines of code can outperform A/B testing. Using an example from one of his own sites, Hanov reports a green button outperformed orange and white buttons. Why don't people use this method? Because most don't understand or trust machine learning algorithms, mainstream tools don't support it, and maybe because bad design will sometimes win."

darthcamaro writes "Guess what — you don't have to support Microsoft's IE web browser any more to build a successful website. In fact, you might just be able to save yourself a pile of cash if you avoid IE altogether." (Here's the story, from a few days back, in Canada's National Post, about the frugal financing of social startup Huddlers.) Evidently, no one complained about the lack of IE support either. I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though; not being dependent on IE sounds great, but loses some sparkle if it means requiring Chrome or Firefox.

theodp writes "If you're a COBOL programmer, you're apparently persona non grata in the eyes of the nation's Chief Information and Chief Technology Officers. Discussing new government technology initiatives at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel quipped, 'I'm recruiting COBOL developers, any out there?,' sending Federal CTO Todd Park into fits of laughter (video). Lest anyone think he was serious about hiring the old fogies, VanRoekel added: 'Trust me, we still have it in the Federal government, which is quite, quite scary.' So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators — the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.' Within 24 hours of VanRoekel's and Park's announcement, 600 people had applied to be Presidential Innovation Fellows."

mikejuk writes "Google has been improving the way that its Googlebot searches dynamic web pages for some time — but it seems to be causing some added interest just at the moment. In the past Google has encouraged developers to avoid using JavaScript to deliver content or links to content because of the difficulty of indexing dynamic content. Over time, however, the Googlebot has incorporated ways of searching content that is provided via JavaScript. Now it seems that it has got so good at the task Google is asking us to allow the Googlebot to scan the JavaScript used by our sites. Working with JavaScript means that the Googlebot has to actually download and run the scripts and this is more complicated than you might think. This has led to speculation of whether or not it might be possible to include JavaScript on a site that could use the Google cloud to compute something. For example, imagine that you set up a JavaScript program to compute the n-digits of Pi, or a BitCoin miner, and had the result formed into a custom URL — which the Googlebot would then try to access as part of its crawl. By looking at, say, the query part of the URL in the log you might be able to get back a useful result."