Posts by Chris 155 56 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2009
With very rare exceptions, all audio cd players run at the same speeds they did when they first came out. There's only 700 MB of data on them at most and the corresponding music has a playtime of about 74 minutes. You don't need to spin very fast to draw a little under 10 MB a minute.
Your xbox 360 on the other hand is dealing with a disc with 4.5 GB on it, and at that same rate of transfer it'd take about 7.5 hours to finish reading that dis, which you'd find rather unacceptable. There are some differences in read methods for dvds which account for some of this transfer difference, but a lot of it comes down to rotating the disc substantially faster.
In short it's one hell of a lot easier to control something going relatively slowly than something going very very fast.
Microsoft is at the moment at least pretending to care about promoting open source which runs on windows and doesn't compete with Office. It's in their best interests to do so as it enhances the Windows environment and makes their product more desirable. Open source is after all people doing development for free, and every corporation likes that.
As part of this, they are willing to coexist at least nominally with open source software which doesn't benefit them. They want to make a buck off it if they can, but they're ok with it existing even if they don't. This is mostly because trying to destroy it cost them more than it gained them, but Microsoft are a for profit company after all.
On the other hand, they would probably very much like the free software movement to cease to exist, which is perfectly fine since the free software movement would very much like to see Microsoft cease to exist. Free Software and Microsoft are fundamentally incompatible, and are likely to remain so for the forseeable future. There's still a war there, and there always will be.
You see, the thing is, karma is a bitch.
Microsoft left IE6 to rot for the better part of a decade, making the lives of every web developer since just the tiniest bit more painful and unhappy. The ironic thing is that now that they've realized they have to move with the times, the people who most want it to go away are actually Microsoft.
Unfortunately for them(and for everyone else) getting rid of that boondoggle is proving a lot harder than anyone might have anticipated.
Microsoft have to keep supporting it because at this point they really have no choice, if .NET applications don't work in their own browser they'e pretty much sunk. On the other hand they need to support real web standards these days for pretty much exactly the same reason. If .NET applications don't work in other browsers(as well as more modern versions of IE itself) they're still pretty much sunk.
JQuery is really their best way forward, they can distribute it and count on its libraries to sort the whole tangled mess out as much as is humanly possible MVC applications will now "just work"(for a rather wide definition of work) in all browsers including Microsoft's, and they don't get their new technology sunk by their old one.
IBM is a service provider now. It's what they do and it's how they make their money. You pay IBM money and they provide and take care of your systems for you. It's a perfectly sensible thing to do, mainframe experts aren't exactly growing on trees these days and IBM made the damned machine. If they did indeed screw this one up(and even if they didn't) this kind of failure isn't going to be good for their core business.
Outsourcing isn't always bad, I don't do my own electrical work or plumbing I outsource that to someone with the relevant expertise. It's not cheaper, but it's usually a lot better.
Certainly outsourcing normal business functions is stupid and generally bites you in the long run. Outsourcing things which you can't do to people who can isn't stupid though. Having enough staff on hand to provide 24 hour support to a mainframe is expensive, you essentially need four people to cover it fully. If you have only one mainframe it's generally not cost effective for the company or the staff. IBM has a lot of mainframes and can provide that support.
Why does everyone presume that because it's "nuclear" or "radioactive" it must be the same as a nuclear reactor or an atomic bomb. It's not. There are tonnes of things which are radioactive but not plutonium or uranium.
Your smoke detector is probably radioactive. Those little bags you put in camping lanterns are radioactive. Any number of things in your house are mildly radioactive.
That doesn't mean this stuff is safe, but it doesn't mean it's going to explode all over the place.
As for disposal. The thing about radioactive material is that when it stops giving off radiation(and in this case power) it's because it's stopped being radioactive. When your battery runs out of juice it's because it's not generating enough radiation anymore to power your device. It probably also isn't generating enough radiation to cause anyone any harm, and will probably stop generating any radiation at all within a fairly short period of time(just because the fallout from an atomic bomb lasts for a thousand years doesn't mean that this stuff will, the author is an idiot).
I'm not saying I'd be super thrilled to stick this sort of thing in my pants pocket or hold it up to my head until they've done a bit more research on its safety, but an isotope of sulfur is a long way off from Uranium or Plutonium.
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