Just saw a program about the largest cosmological simulation ever, requiring 5 years, a 512 cpu supercomputer, a terabyte of RAM and producing 20 Tb of data. The head researcher described how they almost lost all the work due to an integer overflow, and then went on to explain how computers can’t count above 4 billion. Funny, my 1 cpu laptop with a mere thousandth of a terabyte of RAM can count to much more than 4 billion.

All of which tomfoolery just reinforces my opinion that, unless you’re writing an operating system, device driver, or similar then you have no business using C or C++.

It would be really cool if Skype allowed SkypeIn and SkypeOut to be bridged, so I could have my Skype client running, and set it to dial my mobile phone (or whatever number I happen to be near) over SkypeOut whenever it received a SkypeIn call.

Even cooler if I could leave Skype running on my home broadband connection and send it commands via the web to change the number it calls when it gets an inbound call, thus allowing me to call the nearest phone to my physical location.

That would be truly awesome.

Microsoft have announced their new ‘Open Standard’ XML file format for the next release of Office.

Being a curious sort, I went and had a look at the license here.

Where it all goes wrong for me is in the phrases below (emphasis mine):

Notwithstanding the foregoing, “Necessary Claims” do not include any claims: (i) that would require a payment of royalties by Microsoft to unaffiliated third parties; (ii) covering any Enabling Technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product incorporating a Licensed Implementation, or (iii) covering the reading or writing of files other than those complying with the requirements of the specifications for the Office Schemas. “Enabling Technologies” means technologies that may be necessary to make or use any product or portion of a product that complies with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas, but are not expressly set forth or required in those specifications, such as general word processing, spreadsheet or presentation features or functionality, operating system technology, programming interfaces, protocols, and the like.

Not being a lawyer, I may be mistaken, but I interpret this to mean that the license explicitly does not allow competing productivity suites such as OpenOffice to read and write the new file formats. So much for openness then…

I was blown away when Skype introduced SkypeOut, allowing me to call friends all over the world for the price of a local call. Now they’ve closed the loop with SkypeIn.

Now it really doesn’t matter where in the world you are, your friends can call you up for the price of a local call!

Did I mention this is going to be totally huge?