Tim Holloway wrote:Enjoyable as it would be to ding Oracle, I'm afraid that if I was making a product and certifying that it was "unbreakable" (snicker), I wouldn't want to have to support platforms whose primary vendors had discontinued them. If a JVM goes sour because of a bug in Windows Server 2002, Oracle shouldn't expect Microsoft to fix the Windows bug for them and neither would then want to expend time and effort in working around a flaw in a dead product.
Some people take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to software coupled with the idea that software doesn't contain parts that degrade over time. But the truth is, software typically rots from the outside in, bit by bit, since even if the app isn't changing, the OS and other vital externalities do. Or, they reach End of Life, someone finds a new way to break/exploit it (or it doesn't support some essential new hardware), the vendor is no longer going to help out. and eventually it all just gets to be too much.
Software does not have a "fixed cost", and people who budget like it does sooner or later get a rude shock. It's more a case of do you pay sooner or pay later?
Yeah, but I did notice that my Comparator did the sort differently in Java 8 vs Java 6. In my code, after the sort, I took the last element in the sorted array which under Java 6 was the newest. Yet, in Java 8, that last item was the oldest item so I took the array[0] and THAT was the most recent item. Don't have time to run this one down....still trying to get a certificate installed from GoDaddy in
Tomcat 8...it's not cooperating.
Thanks Tim!
-mike