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

[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.