It probably will, along with mobile phone contracts and other such things.
Crapita already do remind you ahead of time that they're going to start collecting the money for next year's TV license if you already have one, and there's no such thing as a "free trial just enter your card details", you either buy a TV license or you don't.
Of course, as is their modus operandi, if you were to cancel your TV licence, they'd immediately start bombarding you with URGENT WARNING: YOU NEED A TV LICENCE TO WATCH TV AND YOU CAN GO TO PRISON IF YOU WATCH TV WITHOUT ONE after precisely 6 months.
They do that even if you inform them the TV license holder has died, and remains dead 6 months later, and 12 months later yup still dead and nobody watching TV, 18 months, uhuh, let me check, oh sorry yes mum is still dead, guess she doesn't need the TV license, 24 months yup yup pushing up daisies Crapita, don't think you're going to get a TV license out of her...
The humans you talk to are apologetic, but the whole operation is to continually mailshot every address in the country that doesn't have a license in the hopes they buy one. I love the BBC and pay my own license, but someone please round up the entirety of Capita and fire them all into the sun.
How Crapita continue to get government contracts despite all their failings is simply beyond me.
Their latest cockup is fucking up civil service pension administration, so it's not like those who work for the government are except from their screwups.
> While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license.
Ha ha, that's really funny timing given the recent launch of Cleanroom As A Service, promising that you can licensewash other peoples' code quickly and easily: https://malus.sh/
I'm not saying they did that, but it's ironic timing.
Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it, then cashes in on licensing.
So for example, they bought Micros (most EFTPOS terminals in the world are powered by them, I think), they bought Cerner (big supplier of IT to healthcare companies), they bought PeopleSoft. If your big company isn't using SAP, it's probably using that. Mundane but essential things for large businesses: CRM, ERP, payroll/HR.
So that's what you'd use Oracle for. Or perhaps you wouldn't use Oracle, then Oracle would buy your IT supplier and either you have to change your IT supplier (costing you millions) or congrats you're an Oracle customer now.
Oracle used to have EBS which competed primarily in SCM/Procurement (or ERP) domain.
They acquired the leaders in HCM (PeopleSoft) and CRM (Siebel) domains and combined them all (SCM, HCM, CRM) into a single (new) product called Fusion.
Their pitch also was - PeopleSoft and Siebel required people with different skill sets (PeopleCode for PeopleSoft, Siebel eScript for Siebel); but with Fusion, customization would not require any programming language knowledge and in the rare cases that it did, you just needed Java. This meant it was cheaper for enterprises. This was a big selling point for a lot of enterprises and helped them reduce their IT cost.
I presume what that actually means is that the Java programmer needs to learn the now-Java APIs of what PeopleCode did, and the now-Java APIs of what eScript did, and they're all probably JavaBeans...
But I suppose that does help a company get staff in the door if the job advert just says "Java programmer", they won't be immediately scared off.
Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.
For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].
Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.
EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:
> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.
Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.
Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.
It's not used in 4G/5G; Diameter is used instead. Most cellular telcos are ending or planning to end their 2G/3G networks (3G moreso than 2G). In the US, the FCC continues to push for IP-only networks, and AT&T is turning off their landline services (though they keep pushing out the date, it's currently at 2029). Obviously, the US is not the only country, but this seems to be the global direction.
Nonetheless, I can imagine that Oracle will still worm its way into telco recordkeeping and billing systems even if the protocol changes...
There are probably millions of corporate projects written in Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much middleware crap in Java.
Both Java and C#/.NET are super-popular in Enterprise land, with the choice between them mainly being if the enterprise is a Microsoft shop or not.
Everything SAP touches is written in Java too, and it's boring old payroll stuff. There's the entire Android user interface with millions of Java-only app developers.
Oracle may well be in bed with the spooks, but it's not a Java-specific thing.
I landed on Inconsolata, which makes sense as it's directly inspired by Consolas. I already use Inconsolata most places, since I'm not usually on Windows.
What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest. "Loads the network driver" - ok, which one? There's no standard network driver, only a specification for writing drivers (SANA-II). Was it a driver for SLIP/PPP over the serial port, or a PCMCIA Ethernet adaptor, or something else? Was it a copy of a driver someone's already written?
Also, it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock, or insinuating that the bootblock did it. Demo bootblocks take over the hardware and start using their loading routines, eschewing the main AmigaOS, and that's the implication of saying something was done in the bootblock (you have under 1KB of space so the first thing you need is your own loader).
What's much more mundane and normal is a standard bootblock which returns control to AmigaDOS and lets it run the startup-sequence, whereupon you can use normal files, libraries, devices, including a full suite of other people's networking software, including BOOTP (AmiTCP comes with a client) and TFTP (see Olaf Barthel's tftpclient: https://github.com/obarthel/amiga-sana-ii-tftpclient). But it stopped being the "bootblock" that did it as soon as it started AmigaDOS.
That gives you a standard OFS bootblock that returns to AmigaDOS. Mine is a custom bootblock, same DOS\0 magic and checksum format so Kickstart accepts it, but it never enters AmigaDOS.
> What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest
Fair, I should have been more specific. The network driver is the popular cnet.device which is compatible with my PCMCIA ethernet card. It's loaded from fixed floppy sectors.
> it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock
Agreed, and I don't. It's a multi-stage boot that stays at exec level throughout, AmigaDOS is never started, no process is created, no startup-sequence runs, _DOSBase is explicitly NULL.
The disk is a standard 880K ADF with no filesystem at all, it's just raw binaries at fixed sector offsets. The only ROM libraries used are exec.library, intuition.library and graphics.library for a debug display. Everything else is self-contained on the disk.
So you're right that it isn't the bootblock doing the networking.
More to the point: the reason you find so many people advocating for pirating textbooks specifically, is because textbooks have often been used by authors/institutions/publishers to fleece students:
> Some textbook companies have countered [the second hand market] by encouraging teachers to assign homework that must be done on the publisher's website. Students with a new textbook can use the pass code in the book to register on the site; otherwise they must pay the publisher to access the website and complete assigned homework.
> Harvard economics chair James K. Stock has stated that new editions are often not about significant improvements to the content. "New editions are to a considerable extent simply another tool used by publishers and textbook authors to maintain their revenue stream, that is, to keep up prices."
Students can tell when they're being scammed, and are more than happy to go to war with scammers such as these.
But it's not piracy either. People just want to make the crime sound worse then "infringement" Might as well call it "software rape" as that crime is closer to what is being done than than theft or piracy.
Crapita already do remind you ahead of time that they're going to start collecting the money for next year's TV license if you already have one, and there's no such thing as a "free trial just enter your card details", you either buy a TV license or you don't.
Of course, as is their modus operandi, if you were to cancel your TV licence, they'd immediately start bombarding you with URGENT WARNING: YOU NEED A TV LICENCE TO WATCH TV AND YOU CAN GO TO PRISON IF YOU WATCH TV WITHOUT ONE after precisely 6 months.
They do that even if you inform them the TV license holder has died, and remains dead 6 months later, and 12 months later yup still dead and nobody watching TV, 18 months, uhuh, let me check, oh sorry yes mum is still dead, guess she doesn't need the TV license, 24 months yup yup pushing up daisies Crapita, don't think you're going to get a TV license out of her...
The humans you talk to are apologetic, but the whole operation is to continually mailshot every address in the country that doesn't have a license in the hopes they buy one. I love the BBC and pay my own license, but someone please round up the entirety of Capita and fire them all into the sun.
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