Dr. Dobb's Journal September 2006
The tension has been palpable but the official results are now in.
In perhaps the finest example of Polish coding since Jan Lukasiewicz wrote
6 9 *
and his HP calculator came back with
42,
Polish programmer Tomasz Czajka has won the first European Code Jam, sponsored by Google and TopCoder. Czajka beat programmers from all over Europe and walked off with a cool 2500 euros.
In a survey of over 1200 developers conducted by Evans Data, Eclipse came in dead last in a comparison of 11 popular IDEs. No cash prize accompanied the award. As they say in Warsaw, Weze w Samolocie.
Speaking of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, Mark Twain said, "If it weren't for the honor and glory of the thing, I'd just as soon walk."
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz was bemused by an honor he shared with Steve Ballmer and Linus Torvalds. They were all being acknowledged by Business 2.0 magazine as among the "Ten people who don't matter." Business 2.0 magazine once called Fire in the Valley one of the top 100 business books of all time, so they clearly know a viper from a python.
Monty Python's Spamalot won a Tony award for best musical last year. This year, "MySQL for Python" was the second runner-up in the Database category in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards. MotorWeek magazine chose the Dodge Viper SRT 10 Coupe 2006's Best Dream Machine. Snakes on a roll.
IBM's BlueGene/L is another kind of Dream Machine, the world's fastest supercomputer at a fifth of a petaflop.
IBM and Georgia Tech researchers claim to have created the world's fastest chip, at a zippy half a terahertz. It has to operate at five degrees Kelvin, though, about twice the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation. Call it two cosmos.
The fastest-spinning neutron star, discovered this year, has the IM chat-looking name of Ter5ad and spins at 716 times a second.
German and Scottish researchers have developed the fastest-walking robot, RunBot, which ambles along at 3.5 leglengths per second, which is apparently how such records are measured. That's what, an 8-minute mile for a person?
Fred Markham, age 50, is the new holder of a world speed record for biking. 53.4 miles in one hour on a recumbent bike. Oh, well, on a recumbent, sure.
Microsoft wins Formula 1, a headline reads. Mon dieu! Serpents sur un Avion! But no, it's the Formula 1 contract that Microsoft won. MS will be the sole supplier of engine control units for Formula 1 racers starting in 2008. Insert Windows-insulting joke here.
Nature magazine picked the most popular science blogs that are actually written by working scientists. PZ Myers' Pharyngula (scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/) and The Panda's Thumb (www.pandasthumb.org) topped the list.
David Hasselhoff has declared himself King of the Internet.
In the Generalissimo Francisco Franco Award category, Jim Hall announced that his Open Source MS-DOS project, FreeDOS, is, contrary to reports, not dead and Version 1.0 could be released by the time you read this.
SGI expects to come out of Chapter 11 in September.
Regarding the death of White Collar Supercriminal Ken Lay, the New York Post advises making sure he's actually in the coffin. Actually, Lay was cremated. The Lay legacy, consisting of thousands of ruined lives and Sarbanes-Oxely, lives on.
A "Survivor" winner proved to be a loser when he was arrested for shooting a puppy with an arrow. Tom DeLay lost in a Federal courtroom and as a result will not be allowed to run for Congress in Texas. Microsoft lost in European court and faces annoying fines, gays lost in New York and Georgia, Portland (Oregon) lost its chance to have an Apple store, and Apple lost a couple of high-profile users to Ubuntu. Also, chef Bobby Flay is one for four this year on "Iron Chef America."
But in the win column, the Open Document folks won concessions from Microsoft, An Inconvenient Truth got special recognition from the Humanitas Prize, and the Dixie Chicks sold a million albums declaring their independence from their country fans. Girls gone wild going platinum.
In another big win, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, already the world's largest transparently operated charitable foundation according to Wikipedia (where you can tell a viper from a viper because they have a Viper Disambiguation Page), got a pledge from the world's second richest person for a sum that effectively doubled the foundation's nest egg. And they didn't even have to hold a telethon.
In an act of Bill Frist-ian divination, Wired magazine picked Snakes on a Plane as the best worst film of 2006, without even seeing a trailer—or waiting for 2006 to be over.
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
mike@swaine.com