Waiting on the laws of physics and chemistry to change.

Deja vu. My supervisor told me he had the code for his model from 20 years ago. Not surprisingly, not one of the 5 1/2 floppies found were readable and I doubt all of the floppies were locatable. My project changed from "translate the code and amend it with additional equations", to "reimplement the model from scratch and then amend it for the new equations".

Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry merry king of the bush is he
Laugh kookaburra laugh kookaburra
Gay you life must be.

Sung to the flute riff on "Land Down Under"

What have alligators got to do with Australia?

Battletech on the SNES was my favourite. It had a story line and you could customise your mechs for each mission. Mechwarrior I on the PC was clunky in comparrison, but it did have Inner Sphere Mechs which was great. Mech II had awesome cut scenes but no real customisability. FASA selling to MS sent it over the edge. I can understand the financial reasons, but the passion for the Battletech universe was never there. VR Battle Tech was fun, but it died in Australia. Never got to gain full control of the cockpit. I would play a game that had the tactical and build flexibility of the tabletop game but kept track of conditions etc.

In earler Slashdot times, creationsts were rife and the same tired rubbish that had been done to death on talk.origins was argued vehemently for kilometres of threads. I think they either did get educated or left for forums steeped in ignorance.

The old SGI/Silicon Graphics hadn't been in the Graphics game seriously for years. HPC was their main grame.

SGI is not dead. The "G" in SGI, however, just got buried again.

http://www.vizworld.com/2009/08/breaking-sgi-terminates-graphics-division/

Can't talk for the others, but SGI still sell IRIX support.

Sad Really. I'll let my .sig do the talking.

Everything warmer than ??? K behaves as a fluid, given enough time.

I voted with the bunch of people who went for the funniest/most contrarian answer. I declare "No answer at all; I refuse to vote." the "Cowboy Neal" option.

I agree with tb()ne. While I am impressed with FORTRAN and its durability, Python is the tool for my scientific programming. The Sage notebook to be precise, with its access to a raft of mathematical tools and libraries. If you are going to teach programming to science and engineering students, you could do a lot worse than teaching them to do it in Python.

That being said, I have punched cards in FORTRAN IV and slaved over a vt100 with FORTRAN 77 and most recently written some code in FORTRAN 95. When the times comes to do some heavy-lifting with MPI, FORTRAN will be the choice. [With a bit of work on Sage, perhaps writing something to use MPI from Sage that played nicely with schedulers such as PBS and derivatives would be worth looking into.]

Funny you should mention that. I fired up my supervisor's old Windows 95 box just the other week. [The box was earmarked as an instrument control system "one day"]. It had a 5 1/4 drive that I tried unsuccessfully to read some floppies with.

In my 28 year career I implemented a sorting algorithm once. I chose bubble sort in COBOL because n was small so the difference in performance compared to a more sophistcated algorithm was not going to be noticable.