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Submission + - The Reason For Java's Staying Power: It's Easy To Read

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Java made its public debut twenty years ago today, and desite a sometimes bumpy history that features its parent company being absorbed by Oracle, it's still widely used. Mark Reinhold, chief architect for the Oracle's Java platform group, offers one explanation for its continuing popularity: it's easy for humans to understand it at a glance. "It is pretty easy to read Java code and figure out what it means. There aren’t a lot of obscure gotchas in the language ... Most of the cost of maintaining any body of code over time is in maintenance, not in initial creation."

Comment Quid pro quo (Score 4, Insightful) 102

by tomhath (#49739141) Attached to: Do Russian Uranium Deals Threaten World Supply Security?

Someone's trying to use Hillary's "What difference does it make?" defense.

The original story was that she influenced the sale in exchange for donations. Now the response from her defenders is "So what? We have plenty of uranium".

Nice attempt at changing the subject; I say "What difference does it make if there's plenty of uranium ore, the deal still looks shady"

Comment Demolished? (Score 0) 102

by tomhath (#49739085) Attached to: Do Russian Uranium Deals Threaten World Supply Security?

Steve Fetter and Erich Schneider demolish the idea that Russian control of uranium stocks is a threat to global security.

No, they don't demolish the idea.

Their argument is that since demand in the past was lower than the global supply of uranium ore, there is no reason to worry that Russia and China are trying to corner the supply. That doesn't make any sense to me based on what we've seen from both countries.

Submission + - Oldest Stone Tools Predate Previous Record Holder by 700,000 Years (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: Scientists have discovered the oldest stone tools ever found, dating back some 3.3 million years to Pliocene Africa—long before the rise of humans' first ancestors in the Homo genus.

The artifacts were found near Lake Turkana, Kenya, and predate the next oldest tools by a whopping 700,000 years. That is an enormous margin, and it will have far-reaching ramifications for our understanding of how material culture initially arose in early hominin communities. An in-depth analysis of the site, its contents, and its significance as a new benchmark in evolutionary history will be published in the May 21 issue of Nature.

Comment Re:NTY - You aren't gonna like this. (Score 1) 17

The push is to industrialize coding so that we have good little workers

That's like saying Little League baseball is...I don't know. Your comment makes no sense.

The push is to enlighten the next generation that you can control a computer, not just depend on "an app for that" which someone else wrote.

Submission + - Martian moons may have formed like Earth's (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Astronomers have long believed that Mars snatched its two moons--Phobos and Deimos--from the asteroid belt. That would explain why the objects look like asteroids—dark, crater-pocked, and potato-shaped. But computer simulations by two independent teams of astronomers indicated that Mars's moons formed much like ours did, after a giant space rock smashed into the planet and kicked up debris.

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