ooo, pretty...

This page has a range of very high-detail pictures of the sun and sunspot regions. Very pretty.

(warning for the non-broadband-enabled: we're talking 3MB GIFs here...)

[link: Slashdot

leaky abstractions...

Overall, this article is talking utter sense. I was particularly taken by the line "the history of the evolution of C++ over time can be described as a history of trying to plug the leaks in the string abstraction".

Java *generally* improves this situation, but life still gets interesting when you're the guy who has to install the platform that all the java code relies upon. So why is it that so many C/C++ programmers hate Java?