Posts by a person

Here we go again: Critical flaw found in just-patched Java

Re: 2 birds with one stone

"While it may be true on paper, in reality every language has its quirks and oddities and the first laguage you learn does have an influence on how you think about problems, and how you solve them. Of course you can learn new languages, and perhaps shift views as a result, but it's certainly far from instant and one could argue that you will never completely lose the reflexes induced by your first language."

I started with Pascal - can't remember any of it now. I do know Java, Python and a few other languages fairly well though ... Python and Java are quite distinct, and it does take at least 5 minutes to move from one mindset to the other.

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

Cost of the cleanup?

Ignoring for now that the world effectively has no safe way to dispose of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste, this mess is going to cost an almighty sum of money to clean up. Wikipedia's description of the 3-mile island disaster:

Cleanup started in August 1979 and officially ended in December 1993, having cost around US$975 million

So, 14 years and a billion dollars in them day's money for the cleanup of one reactor vessel and containment building. Good value, that ... lets hope there's no more tsunamis while they're cleaning up these four.

Opera: Can someone free Korea from IE?

huh?

Since when do you filter net access at the browser? Muppet.

Hurd's HP legacy: Dell racer, IBM chaser

I have an ok hp printer

Certainly better than the other shit out there. And they support Linux really well.

Vetting database is mighty maths mess

I may be missing something, but ...

"at present anyone aged 16 or older who frequently or intensively does regulated activity with children or vulnerable adults must ISA-register."

Given that kids are generally in school until the age of 16, but that most of the other kids in the school are under 16, including children in the same class as the 16-year-olds, does this not mean that every child must be ISA-registered at the age of 16 in order to continue in full-time education, which is a regulated activity?

Open source code quality improving

registration required?

you mean a random sequence of strings and something that looks like an email address is required. Why do they bother?

EC rejects Microsoft's browser promises

The problem isn't IE ...

The problem is the difficulty in getting a computer without Windows in the first place.