Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-3-2010

[andrewducker]

• Possibly the geekiest judge in the world. Read the commentary...
  (tags: comics gaiman geekery funny)
• Solar-powered process could decrease carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in 10 years. Anyone care to comment?
  (tags: solar technology energy environment co2 science carbon)
• Intuit lobbying governments to making it hard to file taxes. I am so glad that I don't have to work out my own taxes.
  (tags: government politics taxes usa)
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time - a short story by Catherynne M. Valente. Well worth reading
  (tags: fiction short_story scifi)
• The US will cease all combat operations in Iraq by the end of August.
  (tags: iraq afghanistan military obama politics)
• Headline of the day:Radioactive Boar on the Rise in Germany
  (tags: germany nuclear environment europe wildlife)
• Western civilization runs on the mainframe
  (tags: ibm hardware software mainframe technology)
• Pixar's 3D guy writes to Mark Kermode about how they see the role of 3D.
  (tags: 3d movies pixar)
• How social security reduced inequality
  (tags: welfare inequality uk)

Comments

[skington.livejournal.com]

I read the third headline as "Inuit lobbying government" etc. and wondered why Alaskan tribes cared about doing other people's taxes for them.

[andrewducker]

I did that myself the first time :->

[simont]

Thank goodness, I wasn't the only one!

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I first read that one about tax when you tweeted it as 'Inuit'. I was thinking, 'Why do Eskimos want taxes to be hard?'

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Re: mainframes; I've always said that the move to "cloud computing" isn't really a glorious new era in data processing but rather a return to the "smart terminals plus mainframe" model.

-- Steve never liked that model, vastly prefering the greater speed and flexibility of local processing.

[andrewducker]

It's definitely more flexible - but it's not necessarily faster.

Being able to run a massive amount of processing on a huge amount of data, all on the same machine, is a big speed boost over retrieving the data from the database to a processing machine, and feeding the results back again.

The company I work for has terabytes of data being processed back and forth, a mainframe is pretty much our only option for processing it all in one night.

[crm.livejournal.com]

re mainframe:

sussh freetards! dont take my mainframe away! people need it to make a living, and i doubt theres a bank in the world which could migrate of Z onto open without paying 10 times more on migration/physical space and all the bloodshed that involves.

just because its not free or open doesn't mean it isn't worth keeping about.

besides, its not like IBM are malign with it, they improve the platform regularly, they are good stewards of the billion programs, new, old, vendor and bespoke which run on it. Hell they straight up *told* us how to save money on licensing costs by juggling about our LPAR distributions.

CA however, are a bunch of bastards.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Solar-powered process could decrease carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels in 10 years. Anyone care to comment?
(tags: solar technology energy environment co2 science carbon)

Uh, go for it?

:)

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I agree with Kermode when it comes to 3D. I can't stand it, and will go to see the 2D version of a film if possible. I really hope it proves to just be a novelty and will then disappear into the ether.

[andrewducker]

God, I hope not. I like 3D when it's done well. How To Train Your Dragon looked awesome. I'd rather people had the option of whether to see a 2D or 3D showing though - round here they do, but we're probably lucky because the cinemas have lots of screens.