Not so simple. The "useful" nuclear power involves sending refined uranium/plutonium to Mars, and constructing a nuclear reactor. Not that it can't be done, and I'm all for doing so if properly done, but I don't think we've put that much nuclear material into orbit since Galileo(?).
The less useful nuclear power is the nuclear power packs that create electricity through the radiative heat of the nuclear material. Its not going to cut it. Has anyone evaluated the feasibility of putting a solar collector into Mars orbit, and beaming down its collected energy via microwaves?
Businesses such as pornographic enterprises, need to inculcate an employee "team" mentality. You can just let Starbuck shit on your company, and erode employee solidarity with their job, or energize the employee base, with an "us vs them" distraction. YouPorn is not Google, and they replace one branded caffeine junkie employee with one who better desires collecting a paycheck and can get their caffeine fix from a different brand.
The google engineers would be fired and replaced by people who will happily work on the thing.
But the project managers/owners may not find the replacement to be either the top talent in the industry, or even capable of moving a project forward. Google has good reason to be "cagey" concerning employee morale.
> they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month.
It would take more than a month. They would need nuclear reactor grade fuel, and would then have to convert one of their civilian nuke plants to work as a breeder reactor. They would have to design and implement their own manufactured equipment to handle the plutonium and shape it into nuclear weapon components. And they would still need to live test their weapon design.
The gov't team developing the materials & the bomb would require bureaucratic omnipotence; I'm not sure that's possible for Taiwan. If the Taiwan executive branch decided that war was imminent and the a-bomb was needed to "survive", could assemble competent scientists, engineers, and project managers, and avoid political/legal challenges, I just don't see it getting done sooner than 3 months, and probably longer. Of course, it would require Taiwan already having made the secret preparations and has put the project into hibernation status. And at the end of the day, simple fission bombs may not have sufficient destructive force to deter the invader. Its fusion bombs (thermonuclear) which have scientists talking about the end of human life and civilization, not fission bombs.
I don't do anything as important as a kernel though, I just have to make sure that airplanes don't fall out of the sky................./s
I don't fly, so all you need to do is keep those planes from falling on me. What are you doing on this time wasting website??? Get back to work, you lazy bum!!!
The idea that the linux kernel is developed by unpaid volunteers is an out of date misconception. All the major maintainers are paid by the Linux Foundation, subsidized by the computing industry, and even ground level submitters are salaried employees paid by the manufacturer that wants their hardware to run on Linux.
Sadly, this is what makes SJW feminists and snowflakes objections almost valid. Linux is now a not-for-profit industry consortium, and success in it can determine future career advancement. Its a business environment now, with financial consequences.
I come from the era where everyone in society bottled in their anger. The overwhelming majority just chose to die of degenerative diseases before hitting seventy.
Poor guy, bottling in all that anger. He may cut his lifespan short by 10 years if he has to deal with a lot of incompetent code submitters. And then picture some of those morons mouthing off because Linux responded so blandly. All so a bunch of sensitive snowflakes feelings aren't hurt.
The outer space debate is swamped by the clueless on both sides.
How is it that advocates nor detractors not understand that in space, you only expend energy to leave a gravity well and to enter a gravity well? And that its only "expensive" to leave Earth's gravity well. It should be screamingly obvious that materials needed to get from Earth orbit to Mars (H2O, O2, & propellant) don't have to be launched from Earth. A future self-sustaining Mars expedition will have to produce its own O2, H2O, and foodstuffs from the Mars environment. Most important, it could be much, much more affordable to send out a robotics mission to Mars to produce H2O & propellant, and then send it to Earth's orbit, rather than lifting it all from Earth. (I am also interested in the possibility in using Martian produced H2O to act as a radiation buffer around the spacecraft.)
The other thing that bugs me is how no one understands the basic economics of the history of manned space exploration. Its so ridiculously expensive, the Apollo (and Shuttle) program chose to have its astronauts die, rather than have a backup rocket available to "rescue" them. There's no reason to expend hundreds of billions of dollars on a program to sustain humans on the Moon as a test case. Being only three days away doesn't make rescue "cheap" enough to be worth using it as a "stepping stone". The Moon has less exploitable H2O, and it near-definitely doesn't have anything worth "mining" that could offset the cost of an extended Moon expedition. The riskiest result of a successful Moon mission would be that neither a nation state or corporation would have the available investment capital to then try going to Mars.
generally pretending to be smarter than I feel I am.
My God, I'd hate working with you. Your ego could probably fill the building. j/k
As for tech for funsies, God bless. We all do tech for funsies, but there's too much out there to master to retain a functional level one could consider competence. And no one gives you the heads up that your mental faculties decline with age. You learn to cut out low value pursuits from your bucket list; kind of like when you get married and have kids.
It doesn't stop a pointy haired boss from mandating a fork, and then realizing 3 years later your point. Even worse, that pointy haired boss could be off messing up another division of the company by that point. Why do people do stupid things?
And all indications are that IBM is going to mostly leave Red Hat alone as an autonomous unit.
In which case, IBM will still fail. IBM needs to bifurcate its money making hardware and services section (legacy concierge computing) out of its decision making and make some "big bets" on where they think they can create new computing markets. They're advancing technological research, but they're not converting it into a money making advantage.
Microsoft tried to do this by laying bets (investments) on various market niches like gaming hardware, developer tools, and cloud, and then forced out Ballmer for a technologist who could better advance that agenda. They understand that desktop OS will eventually be a dead duck, and are now trying to convert their market advantage into all sorts of endeavors, primarily in cloud computing (Azure). Unfortunately, I think they're only looking to convert their business customer base towards their new "products", but at least they understand they need to provide value in order to create a stable new market.
Google's response was to recognize that their search/advertising engine is mature, and they can't allow it to "interfere" with entrepreneurial efforts, so they separated their major startups outside of Google (Alphabet), and can now "budget/invest" in those startups entrepreneurially, while not affecting the share price of their butter and egg company Google. It would be nice to think that they will still enable Google to be a form of incubator and talent pool for new, internal endeavors, but that remains to be seen. (If only they could fix their horrible, clueless marketing and operations infrastructure.)
IBM may have figured out that their current, money making operations is a dead duck, but they still have to figure out how to transition beyond it, and they'll have to make some big gambles for them to stay relevant. Gina Rometty strikes me as someone utterly unequipped to decisively lead that kind of transition. They can't dump 3 billion dollars to acquire Red Hat, and then expect to get their money back from customer leads and business "synergy". I sort of speculate that they will see Red Hat as leading their transition towards smaller businesses with larger overall market (the customers they currently can't attract), but it won't work without RHEL providing better value (and probably small margins). And its still a losing strategy; you grow market value by creating new markets, not finding ways to better monetize acquisitions.
One day you'll be fifty years old, and you won't be doing technology for funsies. At that point, you'll be looking for the "stablest" environment that requires the least amount of technical apochrypha necessary to accomplish your basic tasks. I have seen so many old technologists move to Apple products for that reason.
The company that ends up dictating the cloud industry will not be doing so by infrastructure lock in. Forget about industry leaders like Amazon, Google, and (way behind) Microsoft. The company that "wins" will do it by offering the best ROI, and constructing a set of cloud services that seem indispensable and intrinsic, at the lowest operational cost.
IBM isn't buying a distro. They are buying a computer services company.
Red Hat doesn't make its money from its distro. That's why you can get it for free. Red Hat produces its distro as a form of "branding", and then sells support services off of its flavor of distro. Red Hat could eliminate its distro and just work off of Debian, but then they would lack the ability to prioritize infrastructure issues and development, and they would have a harder time of convincing paying companies to purchase their services. The sad truth is its cheap to hire coding monkeys, even industry leading monkeys, and that's why Red Hat is providing them for free. The real money is being made attracting customers with real money to part with it for their support services.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM, so I have no first hand clue whether anything I say here is accurate.
People associate IBM from epic computing market leader to afterthought. So they conclude that because IBM isn't as valuable as Microsoft or Google, that their management must be fuckups. But that may not be the case.
Computing was vastly different 2 to 3 decades ago. PCs only had a presence in large companies, and were extremely uncommon in the home. In this era, IBM was the biggest beast in the industry, because the industry was all mainframes and COBOL. For IBM to have grown in the computing market in that time period, they would have had to have been market leaders in the bleeding edge of consumer technology, and it wasn't their bailiwick. Its not that IBM did a Wang, and sat comatose while the PC ate their lunch. They saw themselves as a computing infrastructure company, and they chased developments that related to their industry, like SQL and cloud. They didn't do crappy consumer products.
You can try to fault them for not going into those fields, but those fields started as entrepreneurial endeavors, and IBM didn't do startups. PC/internet startups are also unusual in that it took them an extremely short time to become large cap industry leaders (Google went from nobody to industry monopoly in less than 5 years.). In that instance, they are too "highly valued" to even be bought out. Its not like IBM became brokeass penniless; they are still the company to go to for computing infrastructure. They are also close to the same valuation they were 10 years ago; IBM just didn't become 1000x more valuable in that market segment. If you want to call IBM management incompetent, you can say the same for any large industrial company, like GE or GM. None of them went into the consumer computing field, like Microsoft, Apple, or Google.
The only way IBM can fuckup RHEL is if they shitcan their current CEO/COO and force RHEL to behave and price their product/services like an industry monopoly that it is not. I think its unlikely they will do that. What IBM is doing now is converting what "little" capital they still have to acquire a business they have no footprint in. IBM is a computing services company now, but they behave in a manner that makes it extremely unlikely they will become leaders in cloud or netstorage or any other nascient computijng service likely to experience explosive growth. (Basically, they provide concierge computing services, and charge unsustainable, ridiculous prices for it.) In any case, IBM is not any more likely to fuckup their acquisition than what Oracle, Google, or Microsoft has done. (But oddly, IBM is tiny compare to the market valuations of the previous three.)
Is any of the LIVE555 software used to stream VLC video to an android device? e.g. chromecasting or miracast(?) from a media PC to android TV?
When vlc had the bug that wouldn't allow streaming from a vlc client on a PC to a TV (using chromecast), I recall a precursor protocol that allowed DLNA devices connectivity between each other for streaming purposes..
Nope. You don't understand how US civil suits work.
The plaintiff (Apple/Amazon) only needs to demonstrate that it was harmed and what was said by the defendant was untrue. BUT Bloomberg is a journalistic entity, so the plaintiff is also required to "prove" malicious intent in order to win the lawsuit. It is exceedingly difficult to successfully sue news media in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
> So, don't use solar panels, go nuclear.
Not so simple. The "useful" nuclear power involves sending refined uranium/plutonium to Mars, and constructing a nuclear reactor. Not that it can't be done, and I'm all for doing so if properly done, but I don't think we've put that much nuclear material into orbit since Galileo(?).
The less useful nuclear power is the nuclear power packs that create electricity through the radiative heat of the nuclear material. Its not going to cut it. Has anyone evaluated the feasibility of putting a solar collector into Mars orbit, and beaming down its collected energy via microwaves?
100 thousand? It may not last past our great grand children...
Its also a way to weed out employees who value their branded coffee more than their paycheck.
That VP is making YouPorn look pretty stupid.
No, you're the one who's stupid.
Businesses such as pornographic enterprises, need to inculcate an employee "team" mentality. You can just let Starbuck shit on your company, and erode employee solidarity with their job, or energize the employee base, with an "us vs them" distraction. YouPorn is not Google, and they replace one branded caffeine junkie employee with one who better desires collecting a paycheck and can get their caffeine fix from a different brand.
The google engineers would be fired and replaced by people who will happily work on the thing.
But the project managers/owners may not find the replacement to be either the top talent in the industry, or even capable of moving a project forward. Google has good reason to be "cagey" concerning employee morale.
Professional ethics are taught in many schools, but seldom practiced.
That is because you cannot make a person ethical by completing a class. Duh.
> they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month.
It would take more than a month. They would need nuclear reactor grade fuel, and would then have to convert one of their civilian nuke plants to work as a breeder reactor. They would have to design and implement their own manufactured equipment to handle the plutonium and shape it into nuclear weapon components. And they would still need to live test their weapon design.
The gov't team developing the materials & the bomb would require bureaucratic omnipotence; I'm not sure that's possible for Taiwan. If the Taiwan executive branch decided that war was imminent and the a-bomb was needed to "survive", could assemble competent scientists, engineers, and project managers, and avoid political/legal challenges, I just don't see it getting done sooner than 3 months, and probably longer. Of course, it would require Taiwan already having made the secret preparations and has put the project into hibernation status. And at the end of the day, simple fission bombs may not have sufficient destructive force to deter the invader. Its fusion bombs (thermonuclear) which have scientists talking about the end of human life and civilization, not fission bombs.
I don't do anything as important as a kernel though, I just have to make sure that airplanes don't fall out of the sky................./s
I don't fly, so all you need to do is keep those planes from falling on me. What are you doing on this time wasting website??? Get back to work, you lazy bum!!!
The idea that the linux kernel is developed by unpaid volunteers is an out of date misconception. All the major maintainers are paid by the Linux Foundation, subsidized by the computing industry, and even ground level submitters are salaried employees paid by the manufacturer that wants their hardware to run on Linux.
Sadly, this is what makes SJW feminists and snowflakes objections almost valid. Linux is now a not-for-profit industry consortium, and success in it can determine future career advancement. Its a business environment now, with financial consequences.
Torvalds can't say that in the new Linux.
I come from the era where everyone in society bottled in their anger. The overwhelming majority just chose to die of degenerative diseases before hitting seventy.
Poor guy, bottling in all that anger. He may cut his lifespan short by 10 years if he has to deal with a lot of incompetent code submitters. And then picture some of those morons mouthing off because Linux responded so blandly. All so a bunch of sensitive snowflakes feelings aren't hurt.
If you're that sensitive to the restaurants plight, there's no way you could patronize uber or lyft.
...I can still get my favorite programs without paying my (monopolistic) cable provider's rates?
The outer space debate is swamped by the clueless on both sides.
How is it that advocates nor detractors not understand that in space, you only expend energy to leave a gravity well and to enter a gravity well? And that its only "expensive" to leave Earth's gravity well. It should be screamingly obvious that materials needed to get from Earth orbit to Mars (H2O, O2, & propellant) don't have to be launched from Earth. A future self-sustaining Mars expedition will have to produce its own O2, H2O, and foodstuffs from the Mars environment. Most important, it could be much, much more affordable to send out a robotics mission to Mars to produce H2O & propellant, and then send it to Earth's orbit, rather than lifting it all from Earth. (I am also interested in the possibility in using Martian produced H2O to act as a radiation buffer around the spacecraft.)
The other thing that bugs me is how no one understands the basic economics of the history of manned space exploration. Its so ridiculously expensive, the Apollo (and Shuttle) program chose to have its astronauts die, rather than have a backup rocket available to "rescue" them. There's no reason to expend hundreds of billions of dollars on a program to sustain humans on the Moon as a test case. Being only three days away doesn't make rescue "cheap" enough to be worth using it as a "stepping stone". The Moon has less exploitable H2O, and it near-definitely doesn't have anything worth "mining" that could offset the cost of an extended Moon expedition. The riskiest result of a successful Moon mission would be that neither a nation state or corporation would have the available investment capital to then try going to Mars.
generally pretending to be smarter than I feel I am.
My God, I'd hate working with you. Your ego could probably fill the building. j/k
As for tech for funsies, God bless. We all do tech for funsies, but there's too much out there to master to retain a functional level one could consider competence. And no one gives you the heads up that your mental faculties decline with age. You learn to cut out low value pursuits from your bucket list; kind of like when you get married and have kids.
It doesn't stop a pointy haired boss from mandating a fork, and then realizing 3 years later your point. Even worse, that pointy haired boss could be off messing up another division of the company by that point. Why do people do stupid things?
And all indications are that IBM is going to mostly leave Red Hat alone as an autonomous unit.
In which case, IBM will still fail. IBM needs to bifurcate its money making hardware and services section (legacy concierge computing) out of its decision making and make some "big bets" on where they think they can create new computing markets. They're advancing technological research, but they're not converting it into a money making advantage.
Microsoft tried to do this by laying bets (investments) on various market niches like gaming hardware, developer tools, and cloud, and then forced out Ballmer for a technologist who could better advance that agenda. They understand that desktop OS will eventually be a dead duck, and are now trying to convert their market advantage into all sorts of endeavors, primarily in cloud computing (Azure). Unfortunately, I think they're only looking to convert their business customer base towards their new "products", but at least they understand they need to provide value in order to create a stable new market.
Google's response was to recognize that their search/advertising engine is mature, and they can't allow it to "interfere" with entrepreneurial efforts, so they separated their major startups outside of Google (Alphabet), and can now "budget/invest" in those startups entrepreneurially, while not affecting the share price of their butter and egg company Google. It would be nice to think that they will still enable Google to be a form of incubator and talent pool for new, internal endeavors, but that remains to be seen. (If only they could fix their horrible, clueless marketing and operations infrastructure.)
IBM may have figured out that their current, money making operations is a dead duck, but they still have to figure out how to transition beyond it, and they'll have to make some big gambles for them to stay relevant. Gina Rometty strikes me as someone utterly unequipped to decisively lead that kind of transition. They can't dump 3 billion dollars to acquire Red Hat, and then expect to get their money back from customer leads and business "synergy". I sort of speculate that they will see Red Hat as leading their transition towards smaller businesses with larger overall market (the customers they currently can't attract), but it won't work without RHEL providing better value (and probably small margins). And its still a losing strategy; you grow market value by creating new markets, not finding ways to better monetize acquisitions.
I'd say IBM and all the Microsoft haters missed their chance at schadenfreude by not wielding the knife while Ballmer was the CEO.
One day you'll be fifty years old, and you won't be doing technology for funsies. At that point, you'll be looking for the "stablest" environment that requires the least amount of technical apochrypha necessary to accomplish your basic tasks. I have seen so many old technologists move to Apple products for that reason.
The company that ends up dictating the cloud industry will not be doing so by infrastructure lock in. Forget about industry leaders like Amazon, Google, and (way behind) Microsoft. The company that "wins" will do it by offering the best ROI, and constructing a set of cloud services that seem indispensable and intrinsic, at the lowest operational cost.
IBM isn't buying a distro. They are buying a computer services company.
Red Hat doesn't make its money from its distro. That's why you can get it for free. Red Hat produces its distro as a form of "branding", and then sells support services off of its flavor of distro. Red Hat could eliminate its distro and just work off of Debian, but then they would lack the ability to prioritize infrastructure issues and development, and they would have a harder time of convincing paying companies to purchase their services. The sad truth is its cheap to hire coding monkeys, even industry leading monkeys, and that's why Red Hat is providing them for free. The real money is being made attracting customers with real money to part with it for their support services.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM, so I have no first hand clue whether anything I say here is accurate.
People associate IBM from epic computing market leader to afterthought. So they conclude that because IBM isn't as valuable as Microsoft or Google, that their management must be fuckups. But that may not be the case.
Computing was vastly different 2 to 3 decades ago. PCs only had a presence in large companies, and were extremely uncommon in the home. In this era, IBM was the biggest beast in the industry, because the industry was all mainframes and COBOL. For IBM to have grown in the computing market in that time period, they would have had to have been market leaders in the bleeding edge of consumer technology, and it wasn't their bailiwick. Its not that IBM did a Wang, and sat comatose while the PC ate their lunch. They saw themselves as a computing infrastructure company, and they chased developments that related to their industry, like SQL and cloud. They didn't do crappy consumer products.
You can try to fault them for not going into those fields, but those fields started as entrepreneurial endeavors, and IBM didn't do startups. PC/internet startups are also unusual in that it took them an extremely short time to become large cap industry leaders (Google went from nobody to industry monopoly in less than 5 years.). In that instance, they are too "highly valued" to even be bought out. Its not like IBM became brokeass penniless; they are still the company to go to for computing infrastructure. They are also close to the same valuation they were 10 years ago; IBM just didn't become 1000x more valuable in that market segment. If you want to call IBM management incompetent, you can say the same for any large industrial company, like GE or GM. None of them went into the consumer computing field, like Microsoft, Apple, or Google.
The only way IBM can fuckup RHEL is if they shitcan their current CEO/COO and force RHEL to behave and price their product/services like an industry monopoly that it is not. I think its unlikely they will do that. What IBM is doing now is converting what "little" capital they still have to acquire a business they have no footprint in. IBM is a computing services company now, but they behave in a manner that makes it extremely unlikely they will become leaders in cloud or netstorage or any other nascient computijng service likely to experience explosive growth. (Basically, they provide concierge computing services, and charge unsustainable, ridiculous prices for it.) In any case, IBM is not any more likely to fuckup their acquisition than what Oracle, Google, or Microsoft has done. (But oddly, IBM is tiny compare to the market valuations of the previous three.)
Is any of the LIVE555 software used to stream VLC video to an android device? e.g. chromecasting or miracast(?) from a media PC to android TV?
When vlc had the bug that wouldn't allow streaming from a vlc client on a PC to a TV (using chromecast), I recall a precursor protocol that allowed DLNA devices connectivity between each other for streaming purposes..
Nope. You don't understand how US civil suits work.
The plaintiff (Apple/Amazon) only needs to demonstrate that it was harmed and what was said by the defendant was untrue. BUT Bloomberg is a journalistic entity, so the plaintiff is also required to "prove" malicious intent in order to win the lawsuit. It is exceedingly difficult to successfully sue news media in the US.