Free Republic

The long reigning king of the desktop OS is in trouble. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is rapidly steering the company into the back office and service spaces, while their nascent mobile and desktop platforms are crumbling around them. Microsoft is putting on a brave face continuing to heavily advertise the 2-in-1 Surface debacle, but Nadella is only buying time, as he must surely know that Apple and Google is the two-headed beast that Microsoft can not stop. In less than a decade, Microsoft will be associated with IBM or Oracle, not Apple or Google. Apple’s iOS is poised for...

October is stacking up to be a bumper Patch Tuesday update with nine bulletins lined up for delivery — three rated critical. Cloud security firm Qualys estimates two of the lesser "important" bulletins are just as bad however, as they would also allow malicious code injection onto vulnerable systems. Top of the critical list is an update for Internet Explorer that affects all currently supported versions 6 to 11, on all operating system including Windows RT. Vulnerabilities discovered in most versions of Windows Server, Windows 7 and 8, and the .NET framework are covered in the other pair of critical...

Larry Ellison, a college dropout who built Oracle Corp. ORCL +1.00% into one of America's largest companies, is stepping down as chief executive, in one of the momentous corporate handovers in the history of Silicon Valley. Mr. Ellison, aged 70, has been the only CEO in the history of Oracle, which he founded in 1977 and turned into a dominant seller of database software with a market value of $182 billion. Oracle shares fell 2% in after-hours trading following the CEO news and the company's disappointing quarterly results. Mark Hurd, 57, and Safra Catz, 52, two of Mr. Ellison's deputies,...

It has been raining hard, with thunder and lightening since 10am this morning in the Oracle area with flash flood alerts. I am 30 minutes away and I was concerned how the protester on our side were doing. They are for the most part senior citizens from the adult community called Saddlebrook, which is nearby, and the citizens of this rural community. Here is the interview with Sheriff Babau with KNST conservative talk host Garrett Lewis: http://www.knst.com/onair/garret-lewis-41270/interview-sheriff-paul-babeau-live-from-oracle-protest-about-illegal-alien-minors-12567556/ Here are the highlights: The sheriff got information about this transfer of illegals from two separate sources. He has not gotten any response...

According to AZ Central which can't be posted here per copyright complaint, things are about to get ugly, Murrieta-style, in Arizona. A group of citizens in Oracle is planning to try to block the federal government from delivering 40 or more Central American children to a boy's ranch that houses at-risk kids...

Sure there are technical forums that discuss btrfs, the shiny new filesystem for Linux but my experience has shown that FReepers meet or exceed the technical expertise anywhere on the net. The two cutting-edge filesystems that are (supposedly) impervious to bitrot are btrfs and zfs (which has a Linux implementation, older than what Oracle has now closed off).

PORTLAND, OR - The former IT manager of the troubled Cover Oregon website is speaking out. Carolyn Lawson resigned following the state's health care exchange problems but says she is not at fault. She blames the technology's contractor, Oracle Group, and says she warned her superior, Bruce Goldberg, several times that the exchange was in trouble. Goldberg is the interim director of Cover Oregon now and would not comment on Lawson's claim.

President Barack Obama is teeing off on a private California golf course owned by supporter Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of the Oracle software company. Ellison ranks third on Forbes’ annual list of the 400 richest Americans, with an estimated $41 billion fortune.

A former Oracle sales manager is suing the vendor, alleging he was fired shortly after complaining of discriminatory actions by his superior and other company officials. Ian Spandow was a high-performing sales manager at Oracle in Europe and later California, according to his lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. After coming aboard in 2005, he trained more than 1,000 new hires and gave skills coaching to hundreds of others, the suit states. Spandow was subsequently promoted in January 2008 to the position of coaching manager, and after continued success was promoted to...

As Oracle Corp. programmers try to fix problems with its work on the state's health insurance website, Cover Oregon is bringing in outside experts to make sure the company isn't adding new bugs at the same time. The exchange's interim director, Bruce Goldberg, said Monday he's hiring people with the skills to look at programming code as it is being written to ensure "it is done correctly and we don't have to continue to go back and fix bugs in the system." Goldberg's statement turns up the heat on Oracle and provides perhaps the most direct acknowledgement yet that the...

Oregon, one of a handful of states that got federal money to be an “early innovator” in an online health-care registration system, now has the only system in the nation that still hasn’t launched.

Oracle, which is developing the website, has assured Rocky King the site will be operational by Dec. 1 The same problem that’s plagued the federal health insurance exchange – healthcare.gov – appears responsible for Cover Oregon’s failure to implement its web-based portal on Oct. 1: technology. Even though Cover Oregon has paid Oracle, the technology giant, $43.2 million this year, the site’s still not working, and temporary workers are processing paper applications. As of Tuesday, Cover Oregon had received 17,000 applications but can’t say how many people may require subsidies, or want to enroll in the Oregon Health Plan, Healthy...

(CNN) -- Tech titans Oracle and Red Hat are joining the effort to "address the problems around HealthCare.gov," the federal website for Obamacare, according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "As part of the 'Tech Surge,' we've added key personnel from the government and private sector, including expert engineers and technology managers. These dozens of people are strengthening and reinforcing the team we have working 24/7 to address the problems around HealthCare.gov," said Julie Bataille. The experts come from Red Hat and Oracle, and include Michael Dickerson, a site reliability engineer on leave from...

This week, as programmers in Washington scrambled to fix the glitch-ridden healthcare.gov, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act architecture, their counterparts in Silicon Valley viewed the situation with a mixture of rolled eyes and sympathy. Many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have experienced a flawed launch of a big product, accompanied by unexpected delays and over-budget implementation. It's the way things go here, and failure is often embraced as a learning experience. Still, around the coffee shops of San Francisco and the tech campuses of the South Bay this week, the topic of the government's health-care push often elicited...

Skipper Jimmy Spithill and Oracle Team USA won the 34th America's Cup today in one of the greatest comebacks in sports history. Spithill steered Oracle's space-age, 72-foot catamaran to its eighth straight victory, speeding past Dean Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand in the winner-take-all Race 19 on San Francisco Bay to keep the oldest trophy in international sports in the United States. All but defeated a week ago, the 34-year-old Australian and his international crew twice rallied from seven-point deficits to win 9-8 Wednesday.

Patches 42 security holes Oracle has released a major security update for the version of Java programming language that runs inside Web browsers. The patch fixes 42 vulnerabilities within Java, including "the vast majority" of those that have been rated as the most critical. Oracle Executive Vice President Hasan Rizvisaid that a series of big security flaws in the Java plug-in for browsers have been uncovered in the past year by researchers and hackers, and some have been used by criminal groups. One hacking campaign infected computers using Microsoft Windows and Apple software inside hundreds of companies.Earlier this year the US Department...

Over the course of the last two years, Oracle's Java has been exploited time and again as hackers eviscerate the technology, seemingly at will.As each exploit emerges against Java, Oracle typically responds within a short period of time with a security update, only to have the update exploited within days. While Oracle has pledged with its successive releases that it is improving Java security, the company has not publicly spoken out about the string of exploitation that has crippled confidence in Java in recent months. That is until now."As many of you are keenly aware, there has been a...

New Java exploit can be yours for $5,000 Unpatched Java installations may have helped spread the malware responsible for the recently uncovered "Red October" cyber-spying campaign, researchers at Seculert have revealed. Kaspersky Labs first disclosed the existence of Red October on Monday, claiming that the program had been responsible for attacks on systems in Eastern European countries, former Soviet republics, and Central Asian nations over the last five years. The primary vectors used to install the malware were emails containing attached documents that exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word and Excel. Recipients who opened the documents became unwitting participants in the...

[No quote due to Reuters source. Title is accurate representation of article. Please see link.]

Apple tries to kill its own Java on most Macs Pushes users to deal with Oracle, which maintains Java 7 for OS X By Gregg Keizer October 18, 2012 03:01 PM ET Computerworld - Apple yesterday started scrubbing most Macs of older Java browser plug-ins, a move that will force users to download the software from Oracle. The company also patched Java for OS X, the second time Apple synchronized its Java security update with Oracle's, releasing its patches for OS X the same day as the Java software maker. Along with the Java patches, Apple beefed by OS X...