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Comment Re:Delete YOUR email account... (Score 2, Funny) 173

Your never going too get you're weigh on this. Their are just two many people out they're using there words wrong too get to upset. Sew don't loose you're cool about it. You can sea mini common examples that exist of incorrect usage. People pick the write words two use according too there porpoises. But you'd have two be a fool to begin or end a sentence with the word "but". And only an idiot would begin or end a sentence with "and". And a preposition is a very bad word too end a sentence with.
Earth

ESA Satellite Shows Sudden Ice Loss In Southern Antarctic Peninsula 268

ddelmonte tips news that the ESA's CryoSat spacecraft has detected a sharp increase in the rate at which ice is being lost in a previously stable section of Antarctica. In 2009, glaciers at the Southern Antarctic Peninsula began rapidly shedding ice into the ocean, at a rate of roughly 60 cubic kilometers per year (abstract). From the ESA's press release: This makes the region one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise in Antarctica, having added about 300 cubic km of water into the ocean in the past six years. Some glaciers along the coastal expanse are currently lowering by as much as four m each year. Prior to 2009, the 750 km-long Southern Antarctic Peninsula showed no signs of change. ... The ice loss in the region is so large that it has even caused small changes in Earth’s gravity field, detected by NASA’s GRACE mission. Climate models show that the sudden change cannot be explained by changes in snowfall or air temperature. Instead, the team attributes the rapid ice loss to warming oceans.

Comment Re:Easier to learn != easier to use (Score 2) 382

While operator overloading can be used for good, it is far more often used to create huge messes. It makes the simplest expressions impossible to understand locally because now, everywhere there is an operator, you cannot be sure what is actually going on. IMO, operator overloading is evil, despite the good intentions.

I hear you about type erasure for generics.

Lambda statements in Java are a recent addition. But I hear you about first class functions. There are a lot of other languages that run on the JVM platform and are interoperable with Java. And many of these have first class functions. JavaScript (Nashorn), Clojure (a modern lisp with concurrency and immutable structures), Groovy, Scala and many others. And the interoperability is very real -- because they all pass around the very same underlying types and objects from the underlying runtime system.

I hear you about lack of properties and the annoyance of getters/setters. IDEs help, but its not the same thing. (like kissing your boyfriend through a veil)

Comment Re:Java programmers? - don't make me laugh (Score 1) 382

You forgot: . . . and not check the licensing conditions of all those 3rd party packages.

I have not switched to Maven . . . so far.

But your 'three line loop' example is NOT a Java problem. That same kind of stupidity transcends languages, platforms and tools, and often opens up career paths into management.

Comment Re:language is OK, programmers are terrible (Score 4, Informative) 382

Don't blame Java for that. It is the fault of many managers. They want cheap, interchangeable droids to build their applications. Run them hard, burn them out, throw them away like a used spark plug. They're cheap to replace. So those managers want a language all these droids understand. So not only do you get experts, but hoards of below average drones who's main skill is interviewing and taking certification exams. (aka 'certified idiots')

Any programming language could have stumbled into that phenomena. It just happened to be Java. That doesn't make Java itself bad. If anything, the huge community of wealthy enterprise Java users has benefited the Java ecosystem tremendously.

The platform itself has its major strengths. For just one example, in 2012, Twitter switched from Ruby to Java because Java could scale. You need major scalability when you handle a billion tweets per day and must route each of them to many destinations and platforms. It doesn't matter how much cpu / memory the platform uses, it matters that you can scale it linearly by just adding more boxes. Java already has a lot of ecosystem and infrastructure that enables that kind of scalability. You can google for twitter's 2012 switch from Ruby to Java, and they also have (last time I looked a year or so ago) a lengthy YouTube video presentation discussing the benefits of the change after the fact.
Firefox

Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users 531

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced plans to launch a feature called "Suggested Tiles," which will provide sponsored recommendations to visit certain websites when other websites show up in the user's new tab page. The tiles will begin to show up for beta channel users next week, and the company is asking for feedback. For testing purposes, users will only see Suggested Tiles "promoting Firefox for Android, Firefox Marketplace, and other Mozilla causes." It's not yet known what websites will show up on the tiles when the feature launches later this summer. The company says, "With Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users’ privacy and giving them control over their data."

Comment Re:forever and ever? (Score 1) 382

In ways that affect most programmers, for most everyday purposes, Java is an advance over Pascal just as Pascal was an advance over earlier languages. Just as Pascal gave you new powerful tools (structured programming without GOTO, data structures, strong typing, recursion, etc), Java gives you more new tools (objects, inheritance, polymorphism, garbage collection, a very large standard library, object code portability across platforms), later on the JVM brought portable source level debugging, dynamic profiling and hotspot compilation, better and more sophisticated garbage collection, and more.

Ultimately it depends on what your goals are. If you are writing high performance video codecs, or signal processing, for example, then you would probably not use Java.

But for many everyday things, Java is great. That is probably why it is so widely used to build huge enterprise software projects that should run for decades;.

Comment Re:Don't make me puke... (Score 1) 382

> you could in theory make an Enterprise class application in GWBASIC.

In theory you could make Enterprise applications in assembly language. Or write the direct machine instructions in Hex. An IDE might help. But the language you use also plays a large part. Perhaps larger than the IDE. The IDE is a lever that helps leverage the power of the language that you start with. If the language you start with (GWBASIC or machine code) isn't that high level, abstract or powerful, then the IDE can only help you leverage what you have, which isn't much.

Comment Re:Plant? (Score 3, Insightful) 382

You seriously have no clue what Java is used for nor how huge its ecosystem is. For years and to this very day Java is always shifting between the number one and number two spots of most widely used programming languages. The amount of enterprise software written in Java is so large that Java may never go away. There are certain things that Java is very good at, which is why it is used. It's not perfect for everything. If there were one perfect language, everyone would already be using it.

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