Bill de h?ra makes an intriguing pitch that programming will be impacted by increasing data volumes more than by the transition to multi-/many-core. His basis is anecdotal -- we don't have the same metaphysical certainty that all of us will be dealing with much-larger datasets as we have the …

Dustin Campbell does a good job explaining the mechanics of currying in C#, although I'm afraid he stops before truly explaining why currying is considered an essential building block of functional programming. He promises to get to that in "the next post" so I won't offer my own take. As …

Antonia Vargas sent me some links to some new "demos" (very small programs from which complex graphics and music emerge):

http://winden.wordpress.com/2007/08/05/a-little-bit-of-assembly-2007/
http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=7&when=2007

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 …