whitroth - Slashdot User

Submission + - US power grid added battery equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors in past four years (theguardian.com)

Submitted by whitroth on Thursday October 24, 2024 @02:17PM

whitroth writes: People here and elsewhere have been yelling for more nuclear power, and that renewables can't meet demand. Surprise — the corporations are betting on them, and massive numbers of batteries can be produced a lot faster than nuclear plants can be built.

Submission + - SPAM: The Subprime AI Crisis 1

Submitted by whitroth on Monday September 23, 2024 @10:28PM

whitroth writes: I've been saying all along that the AI bubble — and make no mistake, it's a bubble, is dot.com 2.0 Here's the story that lays out all the details, at length.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Bad software runs the world (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by

whitroth

on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @01:08PM

whitroth writes: "Excerpt:
What do most people think of when they think of software? A decade ago, probably Microsoft Word and Excel. Today, it's more likely to be Gmail, Twitter, or Angry Birds. But the software that does the heavy lifting for the global economy isn't the apps on your smartphone. It's the huge, creaky applications that run Walmart's supply chain or United's reservation system or a Toyota production line.

And perhaps the most mission-critical of all mission-critical applications are the ones that underpin the securities markets a large share of the world's wealth is locked up. Those systems have been in the news a lot recently, and not for good reasons. In March, BATS, an electronic exchange, pulled its IPO because of problems with its own trading systems. During the Facebook IPO in May, NASDAQ was unable to confirm orders for hours. The giant Swiss bank UBS lost more than $350 million that day when its systems kept re-sending buy orders, eventually adding up to 40 million shares that it would later sell at a loss. Then last week Knight Capital — which handled 11 percent of all U. S. stock trading this year — lost $440 million when its systems accidentally bought too much stock that it had to unload at a loss.* (Earlier this year, a bad risk management model was also fingered in JP Morgan's $N billion trading loss, where N = an ever-escalating digit.)

The underlying problem here is that most software is not very good. Writing good software is hard.
--- end excerpt ---"

Submission + - Why There Are Too Many Patents in America (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by

whitroth

on Thursday July 12, 2012 @02:33PM

whitroth writes: "The judge who just dismissed the lawsuit between Apple and Motorola writes a column explaining what he considers to be a resonable use of patents, and unreasonable ones. One of his thoughts would be to require a patent holder to produce the patented item within a certain time, to cut out patent trolls."

Submission + - How much virtual memory is enough?

Submitted by

whitroth

on Tuesday August 29, 2006 @07:02PM

whitroth writes: "Ten years ago, Received Wisdom said that virtual memory should be, on the average, two to two-and-a-half times real memory. In these days, where 2G RAM is not unusual, and many times that not that uncommon, is this unreasonable? What's the sense of the community as to what is a reasonable size for swap these days? mark"

Slashdot Top Deals