Comment Windows 1.0 (Score 2, Funny) 528
Isn't this basically Windows 1.0? All applications tiled onto fullscreen?
What goes around comes around...
Check out the new SourceForge HTML5 internet speed test! No Flash necessary and runs on all devices.
×
Comment Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score 1) 578
There is another argument which is all too prevalent among enthusiastic language designers, that efficiency of object code is no longer important; that the speed and-capacity of computers is increasing and their price is coming down, and the programming language designer might as well take advantage of this.
This is an argument that would be quite acceptable if used to justify an efficiency loss of ten or twenty percent, or even thirty and forty percent. But all too frequently it is used to justify an efficiency loss of a factor of two, or ten, or even
more; and worse, the overhead is not only in time taken but in space occupied by the running program.
In no other engineering discipline would such avoidable overhead be tolerated, and it should not be in programming language design.
-- C.A.R. Hoare, 1973
Texas Makes Zombie Fire Ants 398
eldavojohn writes "What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and — oddly enough — electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches."
Comment Re:ROI (Score 2, Funny) 274
ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL
Submission + - Researchers create 'rubbery metal'
Space_donkey writes: Researchers at Virginia Tech have developed a new type of metal that also has the vibration-dampening properties of rubber. That's according to a patent filing discovered by New Scientist. Ultimately, it might be used in aircraft engines and other systems that experience a lot of vibration. In the shorter-term it could also be seen in sports equipment such as tennis rackets and baseball bats.
