Posts by John Savard

Indeed

Atoms change energy levels when electrons descend from one shell to another. This is what happens when fluorescent lamps or neon lights shine. If radioactive decay took place, the watch would run out of gas eventually as the gas changed to another element, or at least another isotope.

After seeing so many watches that set themselves via short-wave time signals, I was waiting for a watch like this to go beyond quartz. Too bad it's so expensive. Hope that a cheaper, slightly less accurate, but more stable, rubidium version comes out soon.

Good Idea

Given that Windows 8 alienated many by imitating a tablet interface, if OS X goes after desktop power users instead, it will be offering an attractive alternative, and could gain a few new customers. Unfortunately, though, there really isn't anything out there - OS X or Linux - that's really ready to replace Windows for most people, who instead will feel they have no choice but to suffer with whatever Microsoft does.

Question

Although it's an old site, are you quite sure it doesn't work with a current version of Firefox?

Of course, they should have designed it to work on Mosaic - then it would work on any browser, not using any special browser features.

What Concerns Me

If a conviction is achieved, will all of those who have incurred out of pocket expenses as a result of this unlawful activity be able to recover their expenses from him?

Terrible Mistake

The PC business was so price-competitive, IBM risked compromising its reputation for quality by staying there. In the case of servers, X86 benefits from the large desktop market bringing down prices - whereas the PowerPC and the z/Architecture platforms do not. So it would be a huge mistake to be left only with non-competitive entries in the server market; a niche premium-price market will in time shrink, even if it's profitable for the moment.

Instead, IBM should be looking at the declining PC market and the surging laptop market, and the demand for energy efficiency, and it should add a lineup of ARM servers to its offerings sometime in the near future. It doesn't have to be the first - in fact, some other companies are already doing it - but when the ARM server makes sense, IBM should be there.

Puzzled

From the headline, I thought maybe IBM was going to fire those of its engineers who aren't able to change the laws of physics. IBM invented the hard disk and set the standards for magnetic tape for a long time; and twice it's been responsible for significant innovations in PC hard disk density.

But this isn't about their cutting-edge activity; it's about routine disk servers, and for that, of course the cheapest adequate product will win for most customers, even if IBM's traditional reputation for and emphasis on reliability keeps a loyal customer base.

If I were IBM, I'd be content with that niche rather than damage the brand by trying to compete in the cut-price market, especially given IBM's exit from the PC field. The alternative will leave those seeking high-reliability storage with no place to go. But, on the other hand, neither IBM nor any other company should ever be content with selling product not much better than the next fellow's at inflated prices, so a critical examination of their server line-up is not a bad thing - as long as it has a sensible plan behind it.

Lifetime

But flash memory has a strictly limited lifetime in write cycles. So, while it's fast, there are a lot of applications for which it is not well-suited.

Aluminum and Heavy Water

Why can't they just locate their facilities in places like Norway or Colorado or Ontario where the power comes from hydroelectricity? That way, it would be cheaper as well as environmentally virtuous - or at least carbon-free.

Legendary Car

I think we've finally found the next Batmobile.

Weather

This is Iran, where they banned weather forecasts on the TV, because only God can see the future. So it is the last place I would have expected a story like this to come from. Russia is full of silly-season stories like this, on the other hand.

Fuels

I thought the V2 ran on hydrogen peroxide and kerosene - not liquid hydrogen for oxidizer, and certainly not ethanol diluted with water as fuel. Some people might seem to use that latter substance as fuel... but there's no need to dilute ethanol with water for safety reasons when using it as fuel.

They may have left some water in with the hydrogen peroxide, though, even if what they used was stronger than hair bleach.

Sounds Familiar

They used to be a Norwegian company that made tape recorders. Now, apparently, they were bought by Cisco, and their products deal in data storage.

Good News?

Maybe this will be the start of a new era in computing. Perhaps South Korea will abandon SEED, and even develop its own highly secure operating system to finally put an end to all the shenanigans on the Internet.

Amstrad PPC 640

I think that the Amstrad PPC 640 deserves an honorable mention here, looking like something out of Space: 1999.

Valkyries

And here I thought it was well settled that Tolkien drew his inspiration from the Ring of the Nibelungs. Still, having seen an actual artifact, with a curse on it, yet, would have affected him, even if the one in the Nibelungenlied made from Rhinegeld is a bit closer in details, it (the Roman artifact) might have helped to decide him on using that other source of inspiration.

I Was Wondering

Knowing the meaning of "NSFW", and not being aware that there was a Unix process by that name, I wondered about this, but not very strongly... it really didn't occur to me that this could have been an April Fool's joke, not being crafted to be obvious enough not to cause harmful confusion.

Amiga 500

I'm just amused that the headline for the article was illustrated by a picture of a really old computer, an Amiga 500.

I'm Not Surprised

As SPARC chips had RAS features, competing head-on with IBM in providing their own hardware for the Oracle database seemed like the obvious reason for buying Sun - the only one with synergy to their core business.

Now that Intel has the RAS features originally confined to the orphan Itanium available on some x86 Xeons, though, which was announced shortly after the Sun purchase, I felt that the purchase was a waste of money - Oracle could have done just as well to compete with IBM with commodity mainframes, and that would avoid vendor lock-in fears by customers as well.

But since Oracle now owns Sun, it needs Sun to succeed and be profitable too, so as not to have lost money. So putting Oracle on SPARC helps to do that.

I think that Oracle faces great challenges - and so does IBM, since, at least on the zSeries machines, it's trying to do the same thing as Apple - use their popular software to charge premium prices for hardware. That's difficult to keep up for long when other people know how to build and program computers.

Well, It's Partly Right

Internet messages are sent in packets, and it's true that they may not arrive at the destination in order. So they are timestamped by the sender. However, since these timestamps don't get rewritten by the stations in between according to their own clocks, it doesn't matter how accurate the clocks are. (And there are also serial numbers involved; otherwise, when your web browser was retrieving an image from a slow server, it might wait forever for two packets between every packet it got if it just used the time.)

Interesting

I see someone else already remembered "Red Flag Linux", but that looked too much like Windows XP, which is now old-fashioned. As for Windows finding its way into North Korea, that would be piracy, not Microsoft violating U.S. export laws.

The Fundamental Problem

Except for Sinclair, few of the British computer companies had a wide enough customer base to have a lot of software written to run on their computers. CP/M software was shipped on floppy disks, in formats for particular computers - and color graphics, which were used in games, weren't a standard part of the CP/M environment.

Being The Standard let the Apple ][ continue to sell well despite being not much more powerful than the much less expensive Commodore 64, and since the market had already demonstrated this phenomenon very clearly, no one should have been surprised when the IBM PC basically took over.

Tizen Proves Why Windows Beats Android

I can't defend Windows 8; I'd much prefer an improved version of Windows XP, with a "Windows 3.1 mode" available even in the home version.

But while the Android platform is nowhere near as restrictive as the iPhone platform, there are times when people want real computers to get real work done. A Windows machine, a Macintosh, or a Linux box are all real computers - you can run Libre Office, you can compile programs, and so on and so forth.

Tizen is one example of an attempt to put full Linux capabilities on tablets. It demonstrates that full computer flexibility is sometimes needed, and so even if Android is currently the hot-selling item, it won't make real computers go away. Even if they turn into dull, not-very-profitable, commodity items.

Puzzled

The player who was part of the conspiracy, while he might be out of reach of the law because he has "returned to his overseas home" - I'm surprised he isn't named in the news stories, and there isn't a warrant for his arrest.

In general, wherever gambling is legal, any interference with it is criminalized. In Canada, people can even be jailed for card counting at Blackjack.

Trees

Hey, back under Ronald Reagan, there was something about how trees cause pollution! So this is not a first, and, in fact, except for the fact that cars emit much more greenhouse gases than bicyclists, it almost makes sense.

Without the Breakthrough

If they couldn't switch the nanodots from rectangular to radial, I guess we could always go back to drums from disks.

Slow

When I read the article, it seemed they were saying it was 100 times slower to compress, but only 2 or 3 times slower to decompress, and so the latter was seen as inconsiderable, while the former restricted it to compress once, decompress many applications.

Fare

A friend of the fare of the cabbie who died posted a message about it a comment to a song on YouTube I was watching; I think it was by Peter Paul and Mary.