Comment Re:100% Accuracy? (Score 1) 200
Read the report: it's not accurate in any useful or unexpected sense: it blocks the URLs that are on the block list. Neat, huh? They just get to make a claim with a pretty, round number.
Haskell 2010 Announced 173
paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."
Comment Re:Fixes problems misguided people think C++ has. (Score 2, Insightful) 831
What on earth do you need multiple inheritance, virtual functions and templates for if you're writing a memory management system or interrupt handler?
The problem with C++ is that it keeps C++ programmers from moving on to more productive languages with more support for real abstractions, by having them believe that they should use it to write the tiny amount of code that would be better written in C.
Get over it: you've got a perfectly useful set of interrupt handlers and memory management in your favourite OS and runtime. Write the useful code in something that will *leverage* that, rather than re-inventing it over and over again.
Octopuses Have No Personalities and Enjoy HDTV 482
Whiteox writes about an Australian researcher named Renata Pronk, who has discovered that octopuses prefer HDTV. She recruited 32 gloomy octopuses from the waters of Chowder Bay. Previously, researchers have reported little success when showing video to octopuses. Miss Pronk's insight was that the octopus eye is so refined that it might see standard PAL video, at 25 fps, as a series of stills. She tried HDTV (50 fps) and her subjects reacted to the videos of a crab, another octopus, or a swinging bottle on the end of a string. A further discovery is that octopuses show no trait of individual personalities, even though they exhibit a high level of intelligence. It would certainly be possible to quibble about the definition of "personality" employed, and whether Miss Pronk had successfully measured it.
Comment GCC and Binutils are being shipped with routers? (Score 1) 409
The lined FSF news item names GCC and binutils as licenced items that Cisco is not doing the right thing with. GNU libc I can understand (but thought that most of those sorts of gizmos used newlib), but gcc itself? How are GCC and Binutils being brought into the complaint?
Comment Meccano and Fischertechnik have it all over Lego (Score 1) 785
I guess this is a give-away that my Dad is an engineer. I started with plastic meccano, moved on to metal meccano and fischertechnik before ever encountering Lego (which was hugely uninteresting in comparison.)
Model aeroplanes had a look in there, too. Once upon a time model cars and aeroplanes came in cereal packets (around the time of plastic spacemen). The ones that you build out of balsa and laquered paper are better though: they can fly, and you can cut yourself quite badly with the scalpels and other knives that you use to cut the pieces of wood
