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Comment One hour more light in the summer (Score 1) 241

People complain that twice a year their sleep schedule changes.

But they don't see the advantage of summertime: that you have an hour more light every day throughout the summer. Talking to friends in the garden, barbecues, walking on the beach with your loved one: the things you have the best memories of now get dark an hour earlier.

Comment Re:NONE (Score 2) 55

Letting all the people with all the knowledge go is indeed not so smart. You better have a development team with both employees and freelancers. So knowledge about the software keeps inside the company. Working with employees only has the danger of getting tunnel vision: "This is what we always did and it works for us". Working with (experienced) freelancers has the benefit of bringing in new knowledge and new insights.

Of course you also need to have some code standards, but there's no difference between employees and freelancers in this respect.

Space

How Civilizations Can Spread Across a Galaxy 272

New submitter kanweg writes: If you look at the Milky Way at night, it appears not much is changing. But over time, stars get closer and further to each other. Coryn Bailer-Jones, an astrophysicist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, found that of 14 stars coming within three light-years of Earth, the closest encounter is likely to be HIP 85605, which now lies some 16 light years away in the constellation of Hercules. It will get a close as the Oort cloud.

This could be a (very long-term) method for human or alien civilizations to practice star hopping. Why travel 16 light-years through space when you can just wait until a star with a suitable planet gets close enough that you only have to cover the last stretch with an artificial spaceship? Take your time for a thoughtful response; it will take another 250,000 to 470,000 year before the close encounter.

Comment Re:Full Stack? (Score 2) 354

In the web development world a stack is the combination of webserver, database and programming language, so you have the well known LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and the Java stack (Tomcat [for example], Oracle [for example] and Java) and the Microsoft stack (Windows, IIS, SQL Server and C#). Now you also have the JavaScript stack (Node.js [with build in webserver] and MongoDB).

Comment Re:I don't.. (Score 4, Insightful) 453

The problem is not JavaScript, but programmers who think "it's just a scripting language, how hard can this be". And they hit a brick wall again and again because JavaScript is a language with its own features, features that has to be learnt.

And JavaScript is unmaintanable? It's just a programming language. It's up to the programmer to structure your code. How is that different from other languages? Of course it's possible to write maintainable large projects in JavaScript.

I agree best practices and frameworks are still being developed and improved, but is JavaScript a horrible language? No, it isn't.

Google

StarOffice Dropped From Google Pack 135

Barence writes "Sun's StarOffice suite has been mysteriously dropped from the Google Pack of free software. The office suite has been axed without any warning or explanation on the Google site. Is Google trying to drive more people towards its own online suite of office applications? Or has it been stung into action by Steve Ballmer's recent comment that Microsoft Office faces stronger competition from StarOffice than it does Google Docs and Spreadsheet?"
Television

Viacom Claims Copyright On Irrlicht Video 258

stinkytoe writes in with the news that Nikolaus Gebhardt, developer of the cross-platform game engine library Irrlicht, recently had one of his video tutorials taken off of YouTube. A thread on Irrlicht's forum contains a copy of the takedown notice. From Gebhardt's blog: "Viacom, the corporation behind MTV, DreamWorks and Paramount is now claiming they own the copyright on a video of an Irrlicht tutorial. Which is completely ridiculous, of course: The whole thing has been written by me and the Irrlicht team, even textures and skins and logos have been created by me, and an Irrlicht Engine user... simply filmed and published it on YouTube.com. Here is a screenshot of the tutorial, it's really just a 2D GUI rendered using the 3D engine, nothing special at all."
Java

Sun Releases First GPLed Java Source 206

An anonymous reader writes "You can now get GPLed JVM sources from Sun. Everyone seemed to be expecting the desktop version (J2SE) but J2ME has been released first. It looks to be buildable for Linux x86, MIPS, and ARM platforms. Sun now calls it 'phoneME.' Enjoy."

The Dark Side of the PlayStation 3 Launch 505

An anonymous reader writes "Kotaku is running an article prompted by an email from a foreign student in Japan. The reader unveils the sad reality of the modern gaming industry. Japanese businessmen made ample use of homeless people and Chinese nationals to obtain PS3s for re-sale. There was also a large amount of pushing and shoving, some fights, and almost no police presence at the most crowded stores." From the article: "Based on my observations of the first twenty PS3s sold at Bic Camera, they were all purchased by Chinese nationals, none of whom bought any software. After making their purchase, television crews asked for interviews but all were declined. These temporary owners of PS3s would then make their way down the street where their bosses waited. After several minutes, a dozen PS3s were rounded up, as their Japanese business manager paid out cash to those who waited in line for them. I witnessed a homeless-looking Chinese man, in his sixties or seventies get paid 20,000 yen for his services and was then sent away." Update: 11/12 05:40 GMT by Z : You're right. Sony only shares a portion of the blame here. Offsides on my part.

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