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NASA

Submission + - Infertility could impede human space colonization (independent.co.uk)

intellitech writes: The prospect of long-term space travel has led scientists to consider, increasingly seriously, the following conundrum: if travelling to a new home might take thousands of years, would humans be able to successfully procreate along the way? The early indications from NASA are not encouraging. Space, it seems, is simply not a good place to have sex.
Image

Experiment Shows Not Washing Jeans for 15 Months is Disgusting But Safe 258

dbune writes "Young people who argue with their parents over wearing the same pair of smelly jeans can now cite the work of a 20-year old University of Alberta student who wore the same jeans for 15 months straight. From the article: 'Josh Le wore the same pair of jeans to break in the raw denim, so it would wrap the contours of his body, leaving distinct wear lines. He had his textile professor test the jeans for bacteria before washing them for the first time. The results showed high counts of five different kinds of bacteria, but nothing in the range of being considered a health hazard."
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Blizzard Won't Stop World of StarCraft Mod 129

On Wednesday we discussed news of an impressive-looking mod for StarCraft II that transformed the game into a WoW lookalike, which quickly drew a copyright infringement warning from Activision Blizzard. The company has now released an official statement green-lighting the mod for continued development. "'It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor,' Blizzard said in a statement. 'As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we've done with our strategy games in the past.' Blizzard went on the say that it's looking forward to seeing development of the mod continue, and that it has invited Winzen to the company's campus to meet the game's development team."

Comment Re:Memory Management (Score 2) 45

While I agree with your argument about the difference between the programmer and the administrator, the original book review says:

Java programmers need to understand JVM tuning, and here it is given a whole chapter

which is a poor choice of words from the reviewer.

Programmers don't need to understand JVM tuning. Administrators do. A lot of the time 1 person will perform both roles, but they are still different roles.

Of course, I'm not sure how that poor choice of words on the reviewers behalf justifies Lunix Nutcase's rants.

Comment Re:Memory Management (Score 2) 45

Right. But server administrators are not programmers.

Nothing (*) in the Java Language Environment (which is what the linked document covers) requires the programmer to do explicit memory management.
Optimally tuning your system requires additional knowledge beyond the language environment. That's true in every system.

CGI removed the need for developers to understand the implementation details of HTTP and TCP/IP, but if you want to tune your web-server, then you're going to need to understand those.
"Everything is a file" is all well and good for a C/Unix developer, but the system administrator needs to know the difference between the kernel parameters for TCP/IP and for Disk I/O.
SQL developers care about tables and indexes and queries and don't need to worry about physical storage or the number of execution engines, or the size of the procedure cache, but DBAs need to care about all those things.

If you somehow believed that because "Java technology completely removes the memory management load from the programmer", then no one was ever going to need to think about how much memory was used by a system built in Java, and somehow system administrators could run large Java applications without even thinking about how to tune them, then I don't know what I can say to help you.

Yes, for good or bad, Java removes memory management load from programmers - but it does not remove it from administrators, and I'm not aware of any documentation that claimed it would.

(*) Direct memory buffers (which were added long after that document was written), allow the programmer to do some memory management if so desired, but they are still not required

Comment Re:OT: Isn't Atlassian Confluence a POS? (Score 1) 150

You should be able to see recent edits on the user's profile:
/users/viewuserprofile.action?username=jsmith

The fact that you didn't know about that is probably a validation of the complaints about the UI.

Disclaimer: I don't have any vested interests in Atlassian, but one of the founders is a friend-of-a-friend

Comment Re:The graphics in FOSS games.. (Score 1) 103

I agree.
His writing style is pretty ordinary, and he expresses his ideas badly, but I don't think that what he actually said was that bad.
It mostly boiled down to:
  • Hiring freelancers through DeviantArt is cheaper than going out to a "professional" artist and gets better results
  • Ask them to set their own price for the work you 're requesting
  • Pay a fixed price, rather than a % of sales.
  • Pay on completion of the work, not upfront.
  • Once the deal's done, and you've paid them the agreed price, it's none of their business how much you are/aren't making from the game.

I think the way he expressed himself leaves a lot to be desired, and it's might well be the case that he's out to screw people. But the actual process he recommends seems to be fairly standard for freelance artwork.

Comment Re:Next step to prevent PC piracy (Score 1) 795

That's completely ridiculous.
Replay value impacts the appropriate price-point, but that doesn't make a game "suck".

There are plenty of movies that are worth renting on DVD for a few dollars, that are absolutely not worth watching a second time (because you know the ending). Do they automatically suck?

Every game has some limits to how many times you want to replay it. For some games that's high. For others it's lower. That doesn't mean every game sucks.
WoG provided you with 3 hours of entertainment. Is that worth $20? Perhaps not. Is it worth $3? I would assume so. (Surely you value entertainment at at least $1 per hour)

Oh, and the other part of your thesis is also false - WoG has an OCD goal, where you try and complete each level within a set of defined limits (like number of moves, % saved, etc). I very much doubt anyone has hit all the OCD goals in 3 hours of playing. If you aren't interested in doing that, then that's your choice, but there certainly is replay value for people who enjoyed the game.

Comment Re:Let Them (Score 1) 1123

Any system which relies on a particular assumption to be true (and remain true) needs to be designed so as to create the greatest possibility of that assumption holding true.

In this case, that should mean making the police aware that they are being watched, that their behaviour is being monitored, that certain behaviours are unacceptable, and that there will be consequences if they engage in those behaviours. Since those safeguards are not being supported by the courts, they are making it increasingly more likely that their base assumption will disappear entirely.

Fundamentally, you can't build any system on top of a set of assumptions and then rely on blind hope to make those assumptions true - or worse, actively work to erode them.

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