0xBABECAFE or 0xDEADBEEF are both slightly less controversial.

How many alpha particles are going to make it outside of the car?

Can it measure the marigolds?

Algorithms only work well if they fit well with the hardware they're targeting. You have to make certain assumptions, but depending on what your algorithm is, you should know which things you really need to think about (memory, branching, process communication, disk, ...)

Algorithms that get synthesised into hardware will only work well if they're written in such a way that lends itself to synthesis. There's going to be a huge heap of stuff that doesn't fit well, or doesn't work at all. Writing things like Verilog and even System C is very different to writing a piece of software. And let's not even mention the backend stuff like layout - stuff that can have a big impact on performance of the thing you're spending a lot of money fabricating (oh, I guess I /did/ mention it...)

So, maybe a bit ambitious, but if they've solved even some of the problems and helped bring software development and hardware design closer together, well, that's a good thing.

Indeed. That and the fact that I was taking the piss... which the GP doesn't seem to have noticed.

Except maybe they did, and I've just fallen into a trap...

Seeing as this is the British *Broadcasting* Company we're talking about here, they *must* be referring to RDF Television: http://www.rdftelevision.com/

So if such an incredible amount of effort went into getting the HCI/UI/UX right, then why does it look... awful, just awful? It's a shame really, for a site that's existed for so long.

The problem is not just generating the power... it's delivering it and consuming it without breaking/melting. And that's what they're getting at here - getting more FLOPS per watt... not finding out how to push more watts into a system. A silly amount of the energy going into a supercomputer comes out as heat... and a silly amount of energy is then used to remove that heat. Hopefully, by significantly improving the energy efficiency of chips and systems, we can make them a lot more powerful without them needing a whole lot more power. And I haven't even mentioned the mobile/embedded side of the spectrum where its about battery life and comfortable operating temperatures... the same energy efficiency goals apply.

This is the sort of thing we over the pond are very interested in too. Like for example *cough* the Microelectronics Research Group that I'm a part of.

My personal web site's home page is 2KB. It's HTML5, no CSS, no JS. My research group site has a bit of all three plus a handful of images and comes in at 125KB. Big website I sysadmin weighs in at 1.1MB. A nice variety there. I think my personal site claims the crown as the fastest loading and quickest to render.

Perhaps across the board things aren't so good, but at the institution I graduated from (University of Bristol), most everyone from CS I've seen since I graduated 2 years ago has a decent job, or is now studying for a PhD.

Endnote would be my primary example, but I use Mendeley instead.

For some services such as wifi there are instructions for various flavours of OS - Windows, Mac, Linux, Android. We have Enterprise WPA2 and the university requires you to install their certificate, but they've done a pretty decent job of documenting it for these OSes. Unfortunately some of the software they advocate is very Microsoft or Windows centric. The Computer Science department goes quite a bit further - its lab machines run CentOS. Up until a couple of years ago there were some old Sun machines knocking about somewhere in the Engineering Faculty.