Daddl

Marvelous find! This brings back (very) old memories! :D

Folding@Home is available on every PS3 - keeps the machine busy during short breaks, but a waste of money having it running 24/7.

There's quite a bit of great music released under Creative Commons licences (usually free for non-commercial use). Just check the web.

I guess with all that 'mine's better than yours' going around we should stand back for a moment and be very, very happy that this discussion actually is hypothetical.

Nice! Loved it up there when I was still studying in Freiburg - those pics bring back memories! :D

:) personally I prefer sed... ;)

Notepad++ is THE text editor when using Windows. What i really like with Notepad++ are its filtering options and support for regex based search (perfect for checking huge log files from multithreaded apps). My work environment is usually Linux, tho, so I mostly use gedit for things like SQL scripts, or quick changes to C source or header files.

I prefer Netbeans over Eclipse - being a former .Net/VisualStudio developer now doing mainly Java EE and some C development, I somehow never could warm up to Eclipse. The good thing: using Maven the actual IDE doesn't matter. You use the ide you like and collaboration works just fine. As for the Java vs .Net topic: If you're doing Windows-only development then .Net is perfect: good integration and support (on newer OS versions the runtime is already installed) and you have easy access to all parts of the OS (even to COM components and native apis). If you want to go multi-platform then .Net is crap. Mono supports only part of the Windows .Net api, and you would be a fool to trust M$ to care the least for anything but their own OS regarding patents or changes to the API. If you want to do desktop apps that are truly multiplattform then I'd rather recommend good old C/C++ (maybe combined with QT or another multi-platform gui framework) instead of Java: you get an executable that just works on a specific platform - without the need to install a seperate runtime - and you have better access to hardware specific features (which may be something as simple as accessing a serial port or reading special system data). There's C/C++ compilers available for almost any hardware available and while the standard libraries are much smaller compared to .Net or Java many popular libraries are also multi-platform. The downside with using Java for desktop apps is the need for users to install a specific runtime - and the problems you get when you actually need to use native apis. The latter can be done but is quite tedious compared to .Net (on Windows) or C/C++ (on any platform). The real advantage for Java is its server-side usage (Java-based web apps and J2EE): you can easily write software that will run - without recompiling - on Linux, Windows or Unix and which integrates really well into existing enterprise IT structures (where Windows servers are rather rare and support for Java is great). So Java works really well for enterprise applications, for web apps (as a - imo - better alternative to PHP etc.), and for mobile apps (like Android or Java ME stuff) where you have a pre-installed runtime on the device. The point being: there's no 'X is better than Y' here: both have their place, weaknesses and strengths. The IT world is much bigger than the (almost) Windows-only end-user market, and out there .Net is rather useless. Java on the other hand missed it's opportunity of becoming a platform for great desktop apps long ago - mostly due to performance issues with older versions of the runtime and Microsofts early attempts to fight it's usage on the Windows platform. The good thing: there's always C/C++ :)

I played both, Morrowind and Oblivion, and while Oblivion had some annoying 'improvements' (like the auto-levelling bandits and monsters, the weak ending of the main story,...) I found it a smoother (as in: often less annoying and tiring) gaming experience that was still very satisfying. Morrowind had the more interesting and darker setting while Oblivion was more easy going and provided better story telling. Both were very good games and Bethesda has a long history of providing good rpg games, so I'm sure they'll deliver again.

Some more picture from a trip to a small island at the German North Sea coast this October: First days were quite stormy: not that this stopped some people from surfing (and/or taking a dip... brrrr!) German frigate 'Brandenburg' passing by (probably on it's way to nearby Wilhelmshaven, where it's stationed): At the beach... Sunset over the Wadden Sea:

Inside the Sagrada Familia: I really like this church - not so much from the outside (to many styles mixed together), but the inside is very, very impressive.

old vs new: siesta: reconstruction of an old spanish galley:

Congrats, topaz! Here's some pictures I took in Barcelona this september: La Rambla: View across the old harbour and the beaches...

Uh, it's radio show, a tv show, a computer game (with extra cool gimmiks - and actually the first computer game I bought!), a book triology in six parts, and - for the young ones - a movie... And I'm pretty sure someone probably made it into a theatre play and a musical, too!Anyways, current 'official' explanation for the cloud is an approaching airplane. Might be possible, especially if the original recording was done with heavy zoom. Still images look (for someone without any factual knowledge) very much like a missile, tho.

In the southern Black Forest there's a valley called Höllental ('Hell's Valley') - and guess what the village at the valleys exit is called? Right: Himmelreich ('Heaven'). Names like these aren't really uncommon - Wikipedia lists for Germany alone 7 more villages (and four mountains) with the same name...