Purdue researchers have applied the idea of an ionic breeze to cooling computer chips. This seems like a slam-dunk to me: more flexibility than a fan in terms of structure, the ability to generate the wind without a dead layer near the surface, and thereby more efficient. Presumably much quieter …

In the past 96 hours, I've been exposed to:

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meteors,

an earthquake,

a hurricane,

a tsunami watch,

annoying frogs (which, while not exactly toads, are still amphibians), and

\<a href="http://arted.osu.edu/160/images/50rnr/hollyband.gif"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">annoying crickets (which, while not …

We stayed over \<a href="http://www.plumhall.com/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Tom & Lana Plum's house last night, hoping to take advantage of their very dark skies to see the Perseids. Slept on the porch on thin mattresses, beautiful milky way / Sagittarius / Scorpio in the evening hours. Saw …

Jon Skeet wonders:

I've been looking at C# 3 in a fair amount of detail recently, and likewise going over the features of C# 2....I feel sorry for someone wanting to learn C# 3 from scratch. It's becoming quite a big language....It's often been said in the newsgroups …

Harry Pierson wonders "Where Have All the SOA Mashups Gone?" Well, \<a href="http://www.sdtimes.com/printArticle/column-20070515-03.html"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this one went well. I'm not sure if it counts as a "mashup" in that all the data I was working with was XML and …

For weeks, I've been chewing over \<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/07/23/4003873.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this post by Raymond Chen, in which he says:

[T]he real cost of compatibility is not in the hacks. The hacks are small potatoes. Most …

The Piss-Screen is a pressure-sensitive inlay for urinals, to play a game with your pee. The game is displayed on a screen above the urinal. Link

The game development industry is the most miserable sector in the software development industry: lower pay, more bozos, worse management. And within that sector …

The Baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin, appears to be the first cetacean \<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiji"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">driven to extinction by man. No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main …

Jeff Atwood wonders "what's worse than crashing?" and gives a general "application causes data loss and/or corruption." Uh huh. Let's fill between the lines on that:

I once worked on a supply chain system where one of the returns of the supplier's Cancel() function was along the lines of …

Silverlight steadfastly refuses to install on my development Tablet PC or in my "Orcas Beta" Virtual PC. Those are the only two machines on which I'll put an under-development CLR, since experience has shown that it can be very difficult to cleanly uninstall anything in Microsoft's browser-CLR-plugin axis. This is …