Why would I want to do that in Java? I'd just use a TreeSet and have the objects implement the Comparable interface.

C/C++ is faster than Java but having to re-invent the wheel all the time is what makes me prefer Java. Another good example is loading a configuration file. In Java I just create Properties object with a file path and I've got access to a configuration file. In C++ you have to mess about with streams, write your own string parser and then create a map to store everything.

I think it sums up everything wrong with Watchman, the whole film seemed to be trying to be edgy to an unnecessary degree.

What did seeing it do? The story for Dr M already showed him disconnected from reality several well aimed shots could easily show he was naked without having to see a bare ass or penis.

Its like Torchwood, Dexter or True Blood, the first time you see something edgy is cool but for example I've grown bored of the sex scenes in True Blood and skip through them. If I want to watch porn, I'll watch porn. Watchmen was edgy for edgy for edgy's sake.

The Dark Knight was far darker and adult when compared to Watchman.

I really hate this urban legend, read the wikipedia article on the Mayan Calender.

Basically they had the Tzolk'in which provided a 260 day year (13 months of 20 days) which was used to plan ceremonies and events. Because that doesn't match up with the length of the year they developed the Haab which lasts 365 days this provided 18 months consisting of 20 days, with 5 "nameless" days.

However neither of these calenders providing a way of keeping track of the year, so the mayans worked out the year by using the Tzolk'in and Haab calenders, since those dates reset every 52 years the Mayans called that a Calender Round.

The Long Count was created so dates which occurred outside of the 52 year cycle could be stated, the end of the world myth exists because 1 Bakturn consists of 144,000 days. On December 21st 2012 this bakturn cycle ends, that doesn't mean the world will end to the Mayans the end of such a cycle is a time of celebration.

In short the Mayan calender system is a giant overly complicated mess.

For compile time checking your better off using static code analysis, Coverity is very good at finding reverse/forward null/memory leak problems. Findbugs is good for finding some of these issues as well because it looks at the code from a byte code perspective.

Personally I use, coverity, findbugs & pmd and don't use things like assert because assert relies on the coder actually knowing what to do and doing it and these tools can be loaded into the IDE. They don't catch everything but they do find 99% of the obvious stuff.

One of the things which did stun me was running Tomcat 6.0.18 through Coverity it found 529 defects, about 180 were parameter checking ones. I've been tempted to join an open source project and spend my time resolving these kinds of bugs.

It's depressing, the guy involved with Windows Phone 7 becomes Nokia's CEO and the first thing he does is move Nokia completely onto WP7. Nokia's strategy of moving Symbian onto their feature phones and offering Meego for the Smartphone market made sense.

I could understand Elop when he was complaining about the slow release rate of Nokia's, I would even get on board of a multiple OS strategy (putting out the same phone with different operating systems).

This move annoys me, it's shutting down Ovi, killing off QT and telling any developers not to bother developing for your platform. All so the CEO can have his pet project rolled out.

What's worse is Nokia has always thought long term, his actions (mass firings) are the typical kind of stock market decided actions which are short term and will ultimately lead to a worse phone ecosystem.

WP7 was my fore-runner for my next phone, it isn't any longer. There's no point buying any Meego or Symbian phone because Elop won't have it supported. Guess I'll have to get an andriod phone.

RIP NOKIA.

The iPhone 4 doesn't just have a death grip issue, your right if you hold 99% of phones in a death grip they will lose signal. However Apple placed the wifi and phone antenna's on the outside. If you touch the gap between the antenna's with your little finger and bridge the antenna's the iPhone 4 will start losing signal strength. You don't actually need to be even holding the phone to repeat the problem.

Thanks for buying into Apples marketing, yes you are correct al phones will drop signal when you block most of it in a "Death Grip". You don't need to actually hold an iPhone 4 to cause this problem, because Apple placed the wifi and phone antenna's on the outside you can bridge them with your little finger. Bridging antennas causes them to detune and your signal quality to drop.

The reason for the hate? First I like many other slashdotters have been annoyed to death by iDevice owners telling me how wonder full and innovative their new iDevice is, but mostly because any microwave engineer can tell you putting the antenna's on the outside like that is a stupid thing to do and it was one of Apple's major "innovations" for this phone.

No dropping from 4 bars to 3 is a huge performance drop on an iPhone 4. Tests show the iPhones 5 bar coverage is actually quite a weak signal. I'm not certain if 3 bars is enough to do anything more than send text messages. See here for Apples admission of the problem, Slashdot also had a story with the actual numbers.

While there is no standard for displaying signal strength Apple massaged the figures by quite a bit. For an example a friend lives in a signal trouble area. In that area my Nokia reports 1 bar, you can make calls (quality is terrible) but text messages can sometimes pick up a delay. My friends iPhone 3GS reports 5 bars (still) although if he tries to make a call it's dropped quickly.

Your demonstrating one of the most annoy traits of an iDevice owner (any fanboy really) rather than accept there's a flaw in your device and it isn't perfect everything else is to blame. I love Symbian I think Nokia would be foolish to drop it but I long ago accepted that a lot of people seem to be gifted at breaking Symbian devices. My biggest concern with phones right now is Elop will drop Meego. I've waited over a year to have a play with one before I lock myself into a 2 year contract (current plan is for a WP7 phone)

While your correct, pretty much every Andriod, Symbian, Windows Mobile phone and even a lot of feature phones have had the ability to act as file stores for almost a decade. Heck my Nokia 5800 has a mode which makes a PC see it as a USB mass storage device (I'll admit a lot of phones require their software to be installed to access the file share abiity).

The posters point was the fact Apple have chosen to close their devices off for profit. Trying to move my little sisters files from her iPhone so her Galaxy S was a nightmare. My Nokia will sync with half a dozen email clients and will export my contacts as VCF,CSV,etc.. To claim Apple don't lock up your data when compared to others is silly. Don't get me wrong Samsungs early feature phones pc suite software was far worse but most manufacturers are embracing open standards.

Airplay is another great example, most of the Airplay gadgets I've seen would work fine using bluetooth (the stereo headset profile), but Apple felt the need to develop their own standard.

Foolish troll. The European Data Protection directive places restrictions and responsibilities on how information gathered on EU citizens must be stored and handled. In this particular instance if you are serving customers in the EU, then you are operating in the EU. If you are operating in the EU you have to abide by EU law.

In this case if your Twitter hosting EU data in a place where you could be forced to breach those law would be foolish.

The EU are looking to investigate because it would appear the US government would be using its powers in order to violate EU privacy for its own end.

As for never being able to work outside your own borders. Global companies tend to work on a policy of following the most restrictive laws of the countries they operate in regardless of local law. They then insulate their activities, so actions demanded by country A don't cause them to violate Country B's laws

I can't tell if your trolling or not, The lockerbie bomber blew up a plane over Scotland with US citizens. The UK tried him, when it came to his release Scotland with their devolution powers decided if he should be released or not.

Sure a bunch of US senators set up an inquiry and demanded people from various parts of the UK government attend. None of them did, That senator panel had nothing apart from publicized information to use in their inquiry.

Because Investment banking is dull, involves long hours with heavy responsibility and you need certain people skills which I flat out lack. I do software engineering it's something I enjoy, I earn good money and I'm told I excel at it. When you factor in the fact investment banking is in London financially I wouldn't be better off. Why would I want to be a banker?

My comment about bonuses was an example, currently small and medium sized businesses are finding it incredibly hard to get credit. Services many business have used for years have suddenly dried up and larger businesses are delaying payments for as long as possible. The UK government has been trying to force banks to lend more to small businesses. They have been refusing because they need to store up more capital as per government rules. The suspected bonus pot is something like 45% of their profits. Considering the current economic climate that money could be better invested in all sorts of ways.

You also have to ask if they are worth the salery they are being paid. I remember reading a university economic study which believed CEO pay was not competitive and realistic. It argued hedge fund/pension managers agreed to CEO pay deals in the knowledge that the CEO would agree to their own. They believed this had distorted the market by as much as 40%. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of it, although BBC news did cover it.

As for greed I have two issues with the market. Pay/bonuses are paid regardless of performance. While this is starting to change. Large rewards are still being given before their actions are shown to be fruitful. I don't know about you but my bonus is paid based on the companies performance over the last year, intangible future profits are ignored. Currently with top investment bankers up to half of their bonus is now being paid out as deals mature and provide profit.

My second issue is the coupling of investment banking with commercial and retail banking. Commercial and Retail banking are required to keep the economy functioning. Investment banking does provide a service but it is far riskier ultimately if a Investment bank fails only stoke holders are affected. Basically I want Investment banking to be separate from Commercial and Retail banking.

It's a lovely idea which doesn't work, read up on the velocity of money.

The basic premise is if you give 100 people £10 most will spend it leading to the majority of the money being re-invested into the economy. If you give a single person £1000 they may spend some of it but not nearly the same amount.

Most individuals can only spend so much on wants an desires which means eventually they start hoarding wealth. This takes money out of the economy and slows growth.

You keep hearing how bankers deserve their income but I can't help but think they aren't that bright. I have no doubt the UK banking industry will pay out ~£7B in bonuses. If the banks were really thinking they would reduce the bonuses and instead channel the money into risky small business loans (with the expectation of the loan failing). Sure the amount of bonus they receive would be smaller as a percentage but this policy over time would enlarge the pool they are extracting their money from.

In the case of the recent student riots the current UK government is a coalition of 2 parties the Conservative and Liberal Democrats. Before the last election Every Liberal Candidate made a point of publicly signing a pledge stating they would oppose any raise in tuition fess. This government just voted to raise tuition fees. How does one hold a MP accountable at the beginning of their term?

I wrote to my local MP asking him to hold his pledge and vote against tuition fees rise and implement a graduate tax. I told him I thought the arguments being made were the result of short term thinking and explained why. He wrote back telling me those arguments wern't short term and then voted for a tuition fees raise.

The legal system in the UK works differently to that of the USA. Here you have to show proximate cause and then show the law violates basic rights granted to you as a citizen. For example the Digital Economy Bill wasn't in acted until the end of last year. We will have wait until someone is prosecuted by the law, then that person will have to slowly move up the ladder until the Supreme Court of EU Court of Human rights strikes it down. Which will mean a legal means of revoking the law will take years. In the case of a tuition fees rise I doubt it would be possible.

I'd also like to point out that watching the Sky News and BBC News coverage the violent protesters numbered in the dozens while the peaceful ones were in the thousands.

A number of people at the protests have stated the crowd seemed "infiltrated" or "some people here don't look like they would ever have gone to uni". Making me think the protests we prey to football hooligan types. By that I mean people who claim to support a football team go to where the matches are played and never watch the match but instead find people who support the other team to fight.

Lastly the police continually "kettled" the protesters effectively bottling them up and away from everyone else. There have been a lot of complaints about police brutality during the event. There's even a video of police pulling a student protester out of his wheelchair and then dragging him into the kettle zone.

Britain as a rule is calmly accepting the necessary austerity measures and has done a lot to mitigate its effects. What has been getting people on to the streets is the fact alot of MP's stood on a platform for something and now in power are doing the complete opposite.

I'm running Windows 7 HP and Pro on two Intel Atoms a N230 and a N330. Current Arm processors are pretty close to those in performance. Both machines have 1GB of ram

Windows feels snappy and responsive, the idea of a windows 7 tablet running on Arm actually appeals to me because my tablet could be hooked into my home networks Homegroup. The idea of having something like a Samsung Galaxy tab which would just integrate with my other PC's might be usefull.