Comment Re:naysayers (Score 1) 387
They don't point to research of climatologists to show the earth has always experienced climate change, they point to the research of geologists.
Apparently you have never heard of paleoclimatology.
Comment Re:Ron Paul (Score 2, Insightful) 565
Feingold was part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, which I would say makes him a limiter of free speech.
I would argue that you are falling into the same mistake the Supreme Court has made repeatedly, equating money with free speech. Money is not speech, money is power. Misuse of this monetary power is what has seriously corrupted the US political process.
While McCain-Feingold may not have been perfect, it was a step in the right direction to limit the influence of money on the US political system. It is one of the great ironies in that international election observers would consider the US campaign contribution system highly corrupt if it were replicated in any election they were monitoring.
Comment Re:Is it an issue or not? (Score 2, Insightful) 182
The vendor refused to acknowledge it was a security issue.
Then it's either a feature or a regular old non-security-related bug, and I don't see the problem with announcing it to everybody. Right?
If you are really certain it is a valid issue, take a look at their marketing page and find out who their reference customers are. If you can get some of their important customers to raise this issue as well, you may have better luck getting some action on it without disclosing the vulnerability to the world at large.
After Learning Java Syntax, What Next? 293
Niris writes "I'm currently taking a course called Advanced Java Programming, which is using the text book Absolute Java, 4th edition, by Walter Savitch. As I work at night as a security guard in the middle of nowhere, I've had enough time to read through the entire course part of the book, finish all eleven chapter quizzes, and do all of the assignments within a month, so all that's left is a group assignment that won't be ready until late April. I'm trying to figure out what else to read that's Java related aside from the usual 'This is how to create a tree. This is recursion. This is how to implement an interface and make an anonymous object,' and wanted to see what Slashdotters have to suggest. So far I'm looking at reading Beginning Algorithms, by Simon Harris and James Ross."
Pluto — a Complex and Changing World 191
astroengine writes "After 4 years of processing the highest resolution photographs the Hubble Space Telescope could muster, we now have the highest resolution view of Pluto's surface ever produced. Most excitingly, these new observations show an active world with seasonal changes altering the dwarf planet's surface. It turns out that this far-flung world has more in common with Earth than we would have ever imagined."
The Final Release of Apache HTTP Server 1.3 104
Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache HTTP Server Project are pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.42 of the Apache HTTP Server ('Apache'). This release is intended as the final release of version 1.3 of the Apache HTTP Server, which has reached end of life status There will be no more full releases of Apache HTTP Server 1.3. However, critical security updates may be made available."
Visual Studio 2010 Forces Tab Indenting 390
An anonymous reader writes "For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors. With VS 2010, it appears that they have taken the next step of forcing tab width to be the same as the indent size in code. Two-space tabs anyone?"
How Do You Measure a Game's Worth? 188
RamblingJosh writes "Video games can be very expensive these days, especially with so many great games on the horizon. So I wonder: how exactly do you get the most gaming entertainment for your dollar? '... the first thing I personally thought about when approaching this was money spent versus time played. Using Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions as an example: I bought the game for about $30 Canadian, and played it for roughly 85 hours. That comes out to 2.83 hours per dollar spent, a pretty good number. In this case, the game was a lot of fun and it was cheap, and so the system works fairly well. There are so many other things to think about, though. What if the game wasn't so good? What about the fact that it's portable? ... What about the new content? Multiplayer?'"
Revisiting the "Holy Trinity" of MMORPG Classes 362
A feature at Gamasutra examines one of the foundations of many MMORPGs — the idea that class roles within such a game fall into three basic categories: tank, healer, and damage dealer. The article evaluates the pros and cons of such an arrangement and takes a look at some alternatives.
"Eliminating specialized roles means that we do away with boxing a class into a single role. Without Tanks, each class would have features that would help them participate in and survive many different encounters like heavy armor, strong avoidance, or some class or magical abilities that allow them to disengage from direct combat. Without specialized DPS, all classes should be able to do damage in order to defeat enemies. Some classes might specialize in damage type, like area of effect (AoE) damage; others might be able to exploit enemy weaknesses, and some might just be good at swinging a sharpened bit of metal in the right direction at a rapid rate. This design isn't just about having each class able to fill any trinity role. MMO combat would feel more dynamic in this system. Every player would have to react to combat events and defend against attacks."
Comment Re:WTF? (Score 0) 189
I think they were shooting for influential in business, in relation to open source. Still, I think they missed their mark considerably.
Definitely missed their mark. Seriously, look at the "mentions" - Steve Ballmer. Would really need to see the way they worded the survey to see how that name made the list.
Finding a Personal Coding Trifecta 188
jammag writes "For Seinfeld's George Constanza, his dream of the ideal moment was having sex while watching TV and eating a pastrami sandwich. He called this Nirvana state 'The Trifecta.' Developer Eric Spiegel adapts this concept of Nirvana to the act of writing your best possible code. He examines all (or most) of the possible things that might contribute to the 'The Trifecta' for developers — food, beverages, time of day. Spiegel also describes his personal Trifecta."
Comment Re:Mono needs a similar testsuite. (Score 1) 271
C# has yield iterators, i.e. real iterators like in Python. Try writing an iterator in Java for a tree structure. You pretty much have to think about breaking it into a state machine. In a language that has real support for iterators it's as simple as writing your standard-issue traversal function.
Unless you are picking a bad example, I still don't see any purpose to this.Of course in Java you can do that contrived example as TreeSet.iterator( ), so it really doesn't take any significant code using the basic libraries in the language.
Your type inference is really just shorthand, I don't really see that as an advantage in any significant way either.
C# and Java are now both heavily plagiarized from each other. If you are explicitly coding for Windows, C# has the advantage that it mimics the underlying Windows API. If your code ever has to run anywhere else, Java is probably the better choice. Unfortunately I think Java picked up a few of the bad ideas from C# in the last couple of revisions, but that's just my opinion.
Unique Visitors = 1/10th of Unique IPs? 261
Max Fomitchev submitted a little blog entry where he proposes that the ratio of unique IPs to actual unique users is 10:1. This flies in the face of the numbers you usually see attached to these sorts of things. I'm not sure about the logic he uses to come up with these numbers either.
