Wed Jun 17 05:04:09 UTC 2009
good news, everyone
Two things of note for enormous nerds:
A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
Here's the situation: it's 1984, and you're assigned to write the spellchecker for a new MS-DOS word processor. Some users, but not many, will have 640K of memory in their PCs. You need to support systems with as little as 256K. That a quarter megabyte to contain the word processor, the document being edited, and the memory needed by the operating system. Oh, and the spellchecker.
For reference, on my MacBook, the standard dictionary in /usr/share/dict/words is 2,486,813 bytes and contains 234,936 words.
The tone of the article is, "Computers used to suck, but now they don't. And you kids better appreciate it."
New Exotic Material Could Revolutionize Electronics (paper abstract)
ScienceDaily (June 16, 2009) — Move over, silicon—it may be time to give the Valley a new name. Physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips.
Recently-predicted and much-sought, the material allows electrons on its surface to travel with no loss of energy at room temperatures and can be fabricated using existing semiconductor technologies.
Bullshit. Room temperature superconductors are like gravity shields or picotechnology. Would be nice to have, but zero evidence suggesting their actual existence.
I know, right, italics man? Apparently it's not a general room temperature superconductor, existing as a thin layer on a substrate, and capable of carrying only tiny amounts of current. But transistor interconnects don't need to carry a lot of current. And man, it would be nice to have.