
correction
"Former Reg writer turned New York Times journo Ashlee Vance ..."
I believe it should read:
"Former Reg hack turned New York Times journo Ashlee Vance ..."
Former Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz has opted for the hard life of Silicon Valley startup rather than running another Fortune 500 mega corp into the ground. Schwartz has blogged that he is teaming up with an old friend to form something called PictureOfHealth.com, and Schwartz will serve as chief …
(1)... Take control of a company with nice share options for directors.
(2)... Break off assets worth spinning off as separate parts of a company.
(3)... Sell off remaining core of company.
(4)... Profit! (for directors from the "successful sale of the company").
(5)... Find new company and goto (1)
Sadly this is a common CEO's game plan, where success is defined by how much they profit from it, not the workers or even the share holders (and lets not forget a lot of workers can even end up out of a job that they may have worked at for decades, when another company buys up their company), but the directors see it as a great success (for them). :(
But then sadly thats to be expected when they employ Narcissistic self interested power hungry people as directors. :(
Oracle has created an additional version of the Solaris operating system it acquired in 2009, when it bought Sun Microsystems.
The new cut of the OS is called a Common Build Environment (CBE). As explained by Oracle senior software engineer Darren Moffat this week, a CBE is akin to a beta because it includes prerelease builds of a forthcoming Solaris release.
Those releases are called Support Repository Updates (SRUs) and now arrive each month. Any security fixes delivered in Oracle's quarterly Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) are delivered in SRUs.
OpenSolaris ‘spork’ Illumos has decided to deprecate support for SPARC CPUs.
A README posted to GitHub says the decision to drop SPARC is rooted in the fact that the OS was written for silicon that hasn’t been sold for a decade.
“The most recent SPARC machines for which we have relatively direct and complete support were contemporary at the time of the fork; viz., the UltraSPARC T2 family of servers, such as the T5120 and T5220,” wrote Illumos core team member Joshua M Clulow. “The last of these systems reached their end-of-life between 2011 and 2012.”
As we near the northern winter solstice, the Sun continues to produce a steady power output of 384.6 yottawatts resulting from the fusion of hydrogen into helium in two distinct nuclear reactions. Direct observation of the secondary cycle was published in the journal Nature for the first time yesterday.
A team of physicists and engineers going by the name of The Borexino Collaboration have been working on their neutrino detector for 30 years, shedding light on the Sun's nuclear processes at the same time. Through the gradual finessing of the apparatus, including stabilising temperature with layers of thermal insulation, they have been able to reveal the actions of these elusive subatomic particles emitted by the Sun's secondary carbon–nitrogen–oxygen (CNO) cycle.
The primary source of nuclear energy in our solar system's star comes from the proton-proton (p-p) chain, which is responsible for about 99 per cent of its energy output. In the secondary CNO cycle, helium is produced from hydrogen fusion using carbon, nitrogen and oxygen as intermediary catalysts in a process also emitting wayward neutrinos.
Pic Not only does the good ol’ Sun provide us with light and warmth, its solar wind casts around the planetary system a protective magnetic bubble that’s probably shaped like a... deflated croissant.
You’d probably get away with describing it looking like a slightly misshapen spleen or a stomach if you're not into baked goods analogies. Regardless of what you see in the image, scientists have attempted to study this odd structure for years. Initially, they reckoned it resembled a comet: spherical with a trailing tail.
The latest computer model, however, shows the shape is more lumpy and vague. NASA has dubbed it a depressed pastry.
One of our Sun's large, recent solar flares was formed from the release of 10 to 100 billion trillion joules per second of magnetic energy through gigantic sheets of near-light-speed electrons, scientists say.
Those sheets of electric current stretched more than 40,000 kilometres across, or more than three times the diameter of the Earth, and sat at the base of the familiar loops of plasma seen bursting from our nearest star. This is according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.
"During large eruptions on the Sun, particles such as electrons can get accelerated to high energies," said Kathy Reeves, who cowrote the study and is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US. "How exactly this happens is not clearly understood, but it is thought to be related to the Sun's magnetic field."
Pic and video Astronomers say they have snapped a multi-planetary system containing a Sun-like star for the first time.
Hundreds of stars harboring two or more orbiting exoplanets have been discovered, though taking decent photos of these systems is difficult. The brightness of the star normally drowns everything else, and less than one per cent of known exoplanets have been directly imaged so far.
“A nice comparison is a tiny firefly that you want to image right next to a giant lighthouse – and you are standing 500km apart from this lighthouse,” Alex Bohn, first author of a paper [PDF] detailing the photograph, to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, told The Register.
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