216577
submission
IpSo_ writes:
Josh Berkus just posted on his blog :
"First, the bare facts: we just published 778.14 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard with the Spec performance publication organization."
He continued with: "No more "slow elephant." For ages a reputation of sluggish performance has dogged the PostgreSQL project, due to both unfavorable comparisons with MySQL back in 1998 and due to our ongoing lack of auto-configuration (yes, yes, I'm working on it!). This publication shows that a properly tuned PostgreSQL is not only as fast or faster than MySQL (720.56 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard), but almost as fast as Oracle (since the hardware platforms are different, it's hard to compare directly). This is something we've been saying for the last 2 years, and now we can prove it."
216135
submission
AC writes:
If you have ever lost tens of gigabytes of data due to sudden hard drive failure (which, of course, typically happens the day before your backup solution was scheduled to be deployed), you are not alone in this. This article documents for the common good how to recover nearly everything off a badly broken drive thanks to a variety of tools ranging from a freezer to a small Python script.
216115
submission
muffen writes:
It seems like the Swedish police came up with a new idea for blocking PirateBay, confirmed by the swedish police.
Basically, the Swedish police maintains a list of child pornography sites in Sweden, and on a voluntary basis, the ISP's in Sweden block access to the sites. This week, PirateBay will be part of the list so almost every ISP in Sweden will block access to said site.
Since the news leaked, the swedish police website has not been reachable and is suspected to be under a DoS attack.
Furthermore, several sites in Sweden, most of them belonging to sport-clubs, have been hacked and the page replaced with the page you get if you are on the Swedish child pornography blocklist.
It should be noted that the people behind PirateBay hasn't argued against the child pornography claims (also, some links are to Swedish webpages, the links in the story are going via Systran for the English translation).
215679
submission
Silver Sloth writes:
The British Observer newspaper — dead tree version so no URL — reports that Donald_Michie died yesterday in a car accident.
Whilst not a name that all will know, especially on a US centred site like /., Donald Michie was a major force in British computing working at Bletchley Park and founding the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at Edinburgh University.
199133
submission
Tathagata writes:
I have been using GNU/Linux for quite sometime now. Though I'm from Computer Science background, getting into a project that really involves you into programming was not possible, as people(read teachers) run away, if you utter the word "linux". Being least bothered about mentoring an exciting project, they would suggest you to get settled with visual basic, .NET, — and would prefer a 24 hour solution when it comes to programming.(I'm a student in my final year, from a West Bengal, India). So my programming endeavours have remained limited to writing few lines of C/C++, Java.
For last few days I've been googling, and trying to read how to join an existing open source project, and avoid reinventing the wheel by starting yet another. I read people suggesting to start by submitting patches, fixing bugs, becoming package maintainer — but most are overloaded with jargon like upstream/downstream, nightly builds, etc. Added to that how does joining the mailing list, or irc channel help when you don't even understand their slangs, forget about the tech discussion? Distributed/centralised scm, track, bugzilla, launchpad, with sourceforge or freshmeat laden with an unlimited number of projects regarding everything you have ever come across — it quite an overwhelming world to step in. Could you suggest a road map, links to essential tools or a few projects, for people like me, who would want to improve their skills by contributing FOSS?
