Why no mention of the (beta) Java 7?
http://download.java.net/jdk7/binaries/

Java sucks big time, that's all.

Something struck me while reading this that made wee myself a little bit... Well, okay. Mainly I was just a bit concerned.

So, Sun are saying they wouldn't release updates to general users for a few days, in case there was a critical issue with it. But most enterprise customers skip the auto-updater, and pull updates from java.sun.com as vulnerabilities are reported, do some minimal app testing and deploy to the enterprise within around 72 hours (depending on SLAs).

As the person responsible for deploying these sort of updates in my company, I'll be waiting around for updates to hit the consumer site in future - unless Sun gives a more clear stance on whether an update is GA release, or "go for it, but if it cacks things up, soz - lol".

:\

I disable all auto update checkers as I manually do it on my machine, I have windows update disabled and I manually check every 2nd tuesday because there's point in it always checking when there's practically nothing to download plus it can slow system performance down sometimes.

For Java I only know whens there an update because of Filehippo.com I usually check every week and they have practically a new version of my drivers, java and ccleaner etc.

I rely on my machine for major parts of my work, and there is nothing worse than having it go down because of bugs in the "latest and greatest" software. I think this notion of theirs is both wise and commendable. I almost never download the latest upgrades of anything, and I have seldom had my machine down while browsing the forums filled with complaints of new problems with new installs.
No beta test is as sound as the "real world".

Probably born of much experience of things going wrong with stuff.

But in the spirit of transparency they could simply give customers the choice and label the versions they are not sure about as betas and give the updater a toggle to ignore or download betas, then have it set to ignore by default.

Then at last we would all be equal in the eyes of the machine.

FIN

That is not new. The practice this already since years. But as java updates are less commonly applied most useres don't notice it. (and i just know because of betanews) It usually takes a few weeks till you get the update through the updater

To my opinion software makers installing update checkers should be put against the wall. Do I really want to have hundreds of little programs running in the background constantly calling home to see if there's an update ?

Come on...

Sun is improving though... their earlier Java releases even didn't uninstall the old version.