fubarx

That I slept through the Rapture.

Again.

I looked into CubeSats in a previous job. Basically, there are four questions:

• What's the purpose?
• How to design and build one?
• How to launch it?
• How to collect the data?

Part 1: this is the back of the napkin sketch. What are you trying to do? Weather, water, fire, radiation, or air data? Imaging? Has anyone already done this? What's the plan?

Part 2: you can DIY the whole thing, starting with the CalPoly CubeSat workshops: https://www.cubesat.org/. They're the folks that started the whole thing.

There are also kits and services out there. One example is Pumpkin: https://www.pumpkinspace.com/, but there are a lot of others like it out there. You want to figure out what sensors you need, mechanisms to orient the sensors, radios, power management, etc. Also, what's the lifespan before it descends into the atmosphere and burns out.

Part 3: The big problem is launch. You need to eventually get it up into space. There are commercial services, but you're looking at $10K-$50K and up to get into the queue. Another option is to go through NASA's Launch Intitiative: https://www.nasa.gov/kennedy/launch-services-program/cubesat-launch-initiative/ or ESA's Fly Your Satellite program: https://www.esa.int/Education/CubeSats_-_Fly_Your_Satellite

These require being part of a non-profit or educational institution. And the waiting list is long. Like, years.

Part 4: OK, now that you got it up in space, what do you do with the data? It's circling the globe and there's a narrow window where the radio can connect to an earth station, send the data, and maybe receive instructions like where to point the sensors. Forget about OTA. You won't have a large enough connection window or bandwidth to do that.

You can roll your own comms, or you can see about using an existing service, like AWS Ground Station: https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/. Microsoft had a similar service called Azure Orbital, but they retired it last year.

After all is said and done, you now have some cool data. You'll want to process it and use it for something. This goes back to step 1. Figure out what's the purpose, what you want to get out of it, and work backward. You can use the AWS service, pipe it into an S3 bucket or store it in a database, then run analytics and visualizations on it. If you want realtime, it'll cost extra.

It won't be cheap, but it will likely be a lot of fun. I proposed several projects in a past life. We got pretty far, but the launch window was years away and by then I was heading out. All this is an infodump of what I learned back then. Hope this helps.

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

For a second I thought this was about forcing people to AI interact with the Start Menu.

Oracle came out when most databases were on mainframes and usually came from IBM. For the longest time, they were the only production-ready option if you had a server from the likes of DEC, Sun, or HP. That was, until MSFT came up with SQLServer, and MySQL and Postgres showed up as open-source options.

Then Oracle went into application verticals, like manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, government, etc. These were all complex applications with lots of knobs and levers to tweak, making for long contracts and a lot of professional services. To this day, a lot of their money comes from these sticky apps and long-term contracts.

Whether they were funded by CIA or not, many early software vendors needed government subsidies and contracts to survive. Oracle was also pretty late to the cloud market. They didn't really jump in until AWS started offering Oracle license "lift and shift" along with migration support to RDS. Before that, all Oracle DBs had to be self-hosted.

This article implies the connection to CIA gives the government access to customer data. In reality, until their cloud offering, all Oracle instances were inside corporate firewalls, with no external access. I'm not a big fan of their software, but this article smells like guilt by early association.

Not only is it doable, you can have a script download the job listing, feed it your resume, and have it rewrite your resume and cover letter to match everything they list in the posting, then submit it.

Exercise left to the reader.

And !bang searches all the bangs.

They write some of the best post-mortems out there. No "mistakes were made" nonsense.

We done f-ed up. Here's how and why, and what we're doing about it.

I smell an AI lurking somewhere in the shadows.

Pretty well done. Have been a print subscriber since the relaunch.

Come back when you have building content data.

No, wait...

"... at today's infrastructure costs."

If everyone talks up the AI crash, there will be a lot of hardware that will become available at fire-sale prices. Anyone with a lot of cash or a line-of-credit will be able to pick them up for pennies on the dollar.

NVidia, however, will have to deal with a glut of 1-2 yo GPUs re-entering the market. They may get into buying them and trashing them just to keep the supply low and prices up. Sort of like a stock buyback.

Either way, strange times ahead.