I have issues with super bright screens but I also find bright text on a dark background difficult to read. Have you tried simply using a slightly off white background. By just using a slightly cream or grey (so little off white that you barely notice) it significantly reduces the "glare" you're trying to avoid. When I do like to get old school with light text on dark background, I do the same in reverse, I use a dark grey background, not black, and it then doesn't require the text to be so bright/high contrast to stand out easily. There's something about #000000 and #FFFFFF that make everything worse.

As with everything in life, it's hard to admit, and often even harder to see, your own failings. I have no idea what your code looks like, it would have been nice if you'd elaborated on exactly what this intern thinks is bad (architecture, syntax/coding standards, algorithm choices). Maybe there's nothing wrong with it. Plenty of developers are too locked into their own way of doing things and can't get on in a team when the team's way is different to their own.

If this person can specifically come to you and say "X,Y and Z are bad, do A,B and C to make it better" he may have a case, otherwise he's just blowing steam. The worst thing you could do is completely write him off just because he's young. Ask him to come up with an action plan that identifies 2 or 3 key improvements that could be made.

I attended an excellent lecture by a software consultant that was hired by a large financial institution to work on their trading platform. The platform was used internationally across their offices, was in excess of 500,000 lines of code and any attempt to add features was running months longer than it should have done. After 6 months working with his team on refactoring and rewriting large parts of the code the revised platform, with exactly the same functionality, was ~200,000 lines of code and features were on a one month release schedule. Some of the original developers quit as all the code they had written, and based their career on, was deleted.

I'm not saying one or the other of you is right, but neither should either of your opinions be entirely discounted. You have 50,000 lines of code and a team that understands it, you can't change it all overnight, but maybe you can make it better over the course of a few months, there's always room for improvement.

I agree many of the longer movies are tedious, but I wouldn't ask for Les Mis to be any shorter. I was mostly getting fed up with movies getting shorter while ticket prices skyrocketed... I don't want to be paying $15 a ticket for sub 90 minute film... Now I just hit up the first showings in the day on weekends to get $7 tickets, and less crowded theaters.

I hope your employer doesn't collapse when you get hit by a bus because you were the only person that understood some critical system and you failed to build it in such a way that somebody else could easily understand it. I'm not even asking for comments, just clean and clear code.

It's not naivety, it's common sense. I do my work properly so that when the people I have worked with leave and get jobs elsewhere and their new boss asks if they know anyone good, the say "You need to hire that guy!" That's exactly how I ended up in my current job, and the one before.

Bad code is the opposite of job security. No company can afford to have a single point of failure, the person that wrote the bad code. EVERYONE is replaceable. Good coders get job security through doing an awesome job, over-delivering on their promises and being somebody their colleagues enjoy working with.

the longer movies that are coming out. I was getting really fed up of more and more films creeping under the 90 minute mark. For kids films I understand keeping them shorter as most kids won't stay interested for the duration of a 2 to 3 hour film. As an adult though, I appreciate the extra character development and depth that can be provided in a longer film (not that I would ever use Avatar as an example of a film where the extended time was well used).

Calm down my dear. I think you need a brown paper bag to breathe into before you start hyperventilating.

Submitter was a moron. From the book: "For a one-line program that loops forever..." also "...it uses GOTO 10 to loop back..."

I would suggest that most of the code on stackoverflow, while answering a question to which the answer probably wasn't easy to find, is often so trivial as to make any license terms realistically unenforceable. Not that it doesn't have that license, but good luck trying to enforce it.

Case in point, anything in this search: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/css

Bitbucket does the same thing but gives you unlimited private repos. Why not use that if you don't want your code shared. That's what I do...

Whether I'm actually watching or just have it on as background noise, I consume about 40 hours per week minimum of media, mostly via Hulu and Netflix over my home broadband connection. That comes in at about twice the US national average for TV watching. On top of that, I'm an active online gamer and I work as a software developer (sometimes from home) for a cloud storage company (testing involves a lot of data flying back and forth). I go through about 100GB of bandwidth per month (so far I've maxed out at 120GB). As long as Comcast keeps its cap at the 250GB level I really don't see the average user going anywhere near that...

That being said, I would like to see mobile caps increasing (without an increase in price obviously). At the moment, I just use my phone for email, navigation and some news. If I had a more reasonable cap, I could see myself getting a 4G tablet and using it for Netflix and Skype with family abroad.

It's not that the server is less likely to go down, it's that it's less likely to get stolen/dropped/otherwise broken than your laptop. Servers typically (in a well managed setup) also have their data replicated somewhere so if they do die, it is recoverable. Do you take daily backups of your code from your desktop? I do, it's called pushing my code to the server's repo :-)

I'm a predominantly Python dev on Linux but when we needed a Windows 8 presence, I built a Metro app. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was using the HTML5/JS setup. The MSDN docs are pretty crap, mostly because the relevant information to get anything done is spread between 3 separate areas of the site for any given thing. However, the overall process of using visual studio and packaging the final product was pretty painless.

Some good things: localization is stupidly simple, the grid and list layouts are very well implemented, lots of caching and paging optimizations with no extra code required.

Some stupid things: Excessive HTML generated by using WinJS.UI stuff, pretty much any JS error crashes the whole application, sometimes I want something to be synchronous but I don't have that option, when doing a file upload (using the Windows.Networking.BackgroundTransfer module) you can get at the headers of the server response, but not the body (seriously... I did a major wtf when I was told that).

Well done /. I'm doubly pleased because I now have something to buy with the ThinkGeek voucher I've had sitting on my desk for the last year. (I'm not saying ThinkGeek doesn't have lots of cool stuff, I just don't have any more room for cool toys, but I always have a need of more t-shirts)