Robert Pogson

“Java was responsible for 50 percent of all cyber attacks last year in which hackers broke into computers by exploiting software bugs, according to Kaspersky. That was followed by Adobe Reader, which was involved in 28 percent of all incidents. Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer were involved in about 3 percent of incidents, according to the survey.”

see Java security bug: Oracle releases updates, experts say its not enough.

That’s quite an indictment. It remains to be seen whether Oracle will wake up or cut Java loose to be truly Free Software. After suing Google over Java, and losing seriously, they burned a lot of bridges to the world of Free Software. If Oracle is unable or unwilling to do the work required, they should step aside and let the world manage. In the meantime, we should slack off on creating new Java applications lest we lock ourselves into vulnerability forever. The world is rapidly moving to web applications and should reconsider the role of Java in that. I use Pascal and PHP for most of my web applications. Heavily-used applications may need to ship Java applets over the web in order to scale but relying on Java puts that all to risk.

“Whereas as once we imagined a world in which individual users would have both a PC and a tablet as personal devices, we increasingly suspect that most individuals will shift consumption activity to a personal tablet, and perform creative and administrative tasks on a shared PC. There will be some individuals who retain both, but we believe they will be exception and not the norm. Therefore, we hypothesize that buyers will not replace secondary PCs in the household, instead allowing them to age out and shifting consumption to a tablet.” 

see Gartner Says Declining Worldwide PC Shipments in Fourth Quarter of 2012 Signal Structural Shift of PC Market.

See that, fans of M$, the inevitability of M$’s monopoly was just a dream. We never did and certainly no longer need a Wintel PC. Tablets and smartphones will do many tasks and you can hook a keyboard and monitor to some tiny thing to get more done. It is inevitable that a large share of Wintel PCs will be replaced with GNU/Linux or Android/Linux tiny boxes running ARMed processors.

Only a few years ago, Gartner and many businesses equated the PC with Wintel but not any more. Many businesses are asking employees to drag in whatever works, people are using the web while commuting, shopping, and whatever they do outside of work. The infusion of that vibrant IT environment into business is inevitable. There is no longer a widespread belief that business needs Wintel everywhere on a big fat PC. For about five years more businesses have been seeking leaner alternatives and the market has provided many solutions from which to choose besides Wintel. We have seen Wintel try to jack up the prices of PCs just to hide the cost of Wintel but it’s not working. Folks are buying tablets rather than “ultra” Wintel devices. Folks are buying */Linux and ARM.