Money isn't everything. If you can afford it spend as much time as you can with your kids if you have the chance.

If you are a mere 'Salaryman' there's no way your loss of income is worth more than the experience and relationship you gain.

But what is IBM truly good at that can be applied at Redhat? A lethal legal department? Super efficient HR processes? Office supplies management?

I doubt something in engineering and sales? Or perhaps sales is the closest answer.

Procuring large contracts from enterprise and government. It's pretty handy in business.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", is what they used to say. IBM has 100 years of brand-name recognition going for them. They have to be doing something right.

I think in most cases the synergies are thinning out rather fast, and the only positive effect that truly grow is financial muscles. If you do not depend on aggressive funding I suspect growing inefficiencies and complexities are the major forces.

An example from a customer that confided that after merging 8 national processes for reporting to various government agencies, the total running cost was unexpectedly almost 8 times higher than before due to the increased complexity and the amortised investment.

I suppose people know this, except the worst kind of bean counters, so this move is primarily motivated by “product brochure“ enhancement, absorbing a competent competitor that show some promise in a strategic area for IBM. The OpenShift business is just another mainframe in IBMs rather long history of "hybrid cloud“ strategy. They've been doing it for 50 years.

Given a huge codebase: Spring. Blue-coloured j2ee containers. Old non-mavenized applications found as source jars, etc.

Incredibly, there might be non-spring applications that need to be maintained, or even non spring-boot ones /s

I've heard some rumours about that, but wrote them off as too implausible.

I wouldn't worry about that until much much larger animal models. Besides, it's just the visual system.

I don't know where there's a moral limit. Several millions of neurons? A billion?

Before dreaming on, why not make a Roomba that actually works.

I have an older Roomba and a newer BotVac, and the BotVac is slightly more clever, but it's about 10% chance that I won't find it bleeping helplessly on some new minor obstruction that it found. It's impossible to have a house where there are absolutely no cables, dropped socks, dropped toys, rugs, furniture with "tank stopper" properties, curtains that are slightly too low, etc, etc.

When my vacuum cleaner can untangle itself, I will pay silly money for something that takes care of my laundry.

After that, something that loads, unloads and sorts my dishwasher would be nice, but nothing comes close to pairing socks...

On that last bit - pairing socks: finally threw out 50+ multi-colored pairs and bought 20 in just two colors. All get dumped into one bin after drying. Three blind pulls guarantees a matched pair. Nice timesaver.

Wait until they start fading at different rates...

You can solve the uneven wear problem by not replacing them in the bin until the bin is empty. The laziest way to do this is to not launder your socks until you run out.

Now I understand why I didn't see what the problem was... :)

I personally gave up on this years ago. These days I find myself wearing flip-flops most days, but when I wear shoes, I grab two socks and don't care if they even match. Naturally, my sock purchases have tended towards only black in my preferred style, but for almost two years there was a good chance the socks I wore didn't match at all. 99% of the time people never noticed or cared enough to comment, and the 1% who did made it a fun conversation piece.

Yeah but those pesky kid socks are what kill me.

All of mine are white.

I agree. I had to redo my home to make the Roomba work. Put in smart lightning that would turn on when the Roomba wanted to clean (it can't see in the dark). Put new carpeting in the bedroom because the Roomba would generate errors on it (error 6). Keep all the doors open for it to do all rooms and thus having to rewrite my thermostat to keep heating costs acceptable (leaving all doors open kills your multi-room thermostat system). Replace light-weight furniture with thin legs by sturdier furniture that also had a wide base so the Roomba sensor could detect it and not just push it across the room. Raise the bed so it wouldn't trap itself.

In the end I just returned the Roomba to the store. Too much work.

Agree with your botvac comment. It's quite thorough when it doesn't get hung up on something, but it has eaten (damaged beyond repair) about half a dozen power cables (for laptops, phones, etc) in the 3 years I've had it.

I like it, although it eat my cables and gets stuck. There's potential but it's far from perfect. It finds a lot of dust.

To be honest, the worst part is emptying the dustbin,which i need to do every 2-3 days.

But i forgive it whenever I see it find it's way back to the charger. It's magic.

They were initially close to a high altitude stall, the margins are not that large at that altitude, so just dropping everything isn't really an option.

The report highlighted training, which I guess is always possible to point out, but looking at the event I think they could have made more conclusions regarding how the control system performed counterintuitive by emitting stall warnings at the time they actually did the right thing, and provides little feedback when it drops into alternate law making a standard full pullback into a potentially dangerous move.

I guess this is the core of why there's no permit.

Typically a permit stipulates that a building should be finished within a certain time. It can probably be prolonged, but I think the project was in hiatus for a long time. Or a couple of times actually.

Yeah — there were a few wars, revolutions, and such in Spain in the 20th century.

Judging by a few nights in Helsinki a long time ago, the main strategy for men seemed to be drinking themselves into such a helpless state that it triggered some sort of maternal instinct in a girl walking by.

It seemed to work for them. Actually talking to a girl also worked if I remember correctly.

I'm pretty sure this is more related to a rather radical shift to a more industrialised agriculture the recent 40 years.

Grazing land and more importantly meadows are simply gone. According to Wikipedia, England and Wales have lost about 97% of their hay meadows. Meadows are artificial, but they increase the biodiversity significantly.

Neonicotinoids are probably also to blame.

Climate change must be negligible in comparison, but it seems that everything can be blamed on climate change. War in Syria for instance.

The article specifically addresses and refutes this:

>Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico... [it] remains the only tropical rain forest in the National Forest system

>Lister pointed out that, since 1969, pesticide use has fallen more than 80 percent in Puerto Rico

The article also provides several - reputable, scientific - references that demonstrate a predicted loss of insects in tropical regions from thermal pressure.

>>Lister pointed out that, since 1969, pesticide use has fallen more than 80 percent in Puerto Rico

The article does make this claim, but it doesn't appear to back it up in any way. Additionally, nothing is said about the type of pesticide. If I use a pesticide that is 10x stronger by weight than what was available in 1969 and possibly doesn't need to be applied as often, then we're not comparing apples to apples.

Additionally, it's not mentioned what is meant by 'pesticide' Is that just insecticide or herbicide? Perhaps the application of herbicide (roundup) has increased, killing off native food-stuffs and poisoning the insects that eat them.

You should read the linked studies before posting, they answer all these questions.

You should read it. They don't actually answer any of the questions I raised.

And the insect and bird die off extends comparably to Europe and South America, which likely use a different mix of fertilizers and pesticides than in the US.