GordonCopestake - Slashdot User

Submission + - How to manage database changes (MySQL)? 1

Submitted by pimpam on Thursday November 26, 2009 @05:40AM

pimpam writes: I'm in charge of deploying a reasonably high-traffic dynamic web site built on PHP/MySQL. We are a team of 5 developers and we update the site every 2 weeks.

We use rsync to deploy code to staging and then production, but can't decide on the best approach to managing changes to the database schema. Ideally I'd like a reliable automated solution but haven't found any, and am weighing up whether it's better to keep looking (so any of the developers can easily deploy) or just to managing changes manually (in which case deployments are tedious and error-prone). We only have a single master database server.

How do fellow slashdotters do this?

Submission + - SPAM: Air Force research to meld unmanned/manned flight

Submitted by coondoggie on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @10:41AM

coondoggie writes: The Air Force today said it was soliciting research on a variety of new technology needed to integrate unmanned aircraft into general airspace.

The Air Force and federal agencies obviously insist that before any unmanned aircraft are allowed in the commercial airspace they must be able to perform the same essential functions as a pilot of a manned aircraft with respect to collision avoidance capability in all manner of aircraft safety operations.

The Air Force is looking to spend about $2.4 million on research that begins to explore what will be necessary to achieve successful unmanned and manned flightspace integration.

[spam URL stripped]
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Submission + - 100K Californians to be Gene Sequenced (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @10:11AM

eldavojohn writes: "A hundred thousand elderly Californians (average age 65) will be gene sequenced by the state by using their saliva samples. This would be the first time such a large group has had their genes sequenced and is hoped to be a goldmine for genetic diseases--from cardiovascular diseases to diabetes and even the diseases associated with aging. Kaiser Permanente patients will be involved and they are aiming to have half a million samples ready by 2013. Let's hope that they got permission from the patients' doctors first."

Windows 7 On Multicore — How Much Faster? 349

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday October 21, 2009 @09:40AM from the where-do-i-buy-a-256-core-netbook dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Andrew Binstock tests whether Windows 7's threading advances fulfill the promise of improved performance and energy reduction. He runs Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, and Windows 7 Ultimate against Viewperf and Cinebench benchmarks using a Dell Precision T3500 workstation, the price-performance winner of an earlier roundup of Nehalem-based workstations. 'What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch,' Binstock writes of the benchmarks, adding that the principal changes to Windows 7 multithreading consist of increased processor affinity, 'a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources,' permitting Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty, but delivering little performance gains for systems with only a few processors. 'Windows 7 performs several tricks to keep threads running on the same execution pipelines so that the underlying Nehalem processor can turn off transistors on lesser-used or inactive pipelines,' Binstock writes. 'The primary benefit of this feature is reduced energy consumption,' with Windows 7 requiring 17 percent less power to run than Windows XP or Vista."

Submission + - SPAM: NASA spacecraft crash into the moon 3

Submitted by coondoggie on Friday October 09, 2009 @08:11AM

coondoggie writes: NASA' Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellites (LCROSS) took dead aim and crashed into the moon at about 5,600mph at around 7:31 am ESD. Watching the results on NASA TV, scientists were pleased with the impact of the two satellites.

The impact of the $80 million LCROSS satellites into the moon was to create what the space agency hopes is an ice-filled a debris plume that can be analyzed for water content.
[spam URL stripped]
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Submission + - SPAM: A.I. Researcher Offers Singularity Survival Tips

Submitted by destinyland on Friday October 09, 2009 @08:04AM

destinyland writes: A.I. researcher Ben Goertzel reports back from the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York. Stephen Wolfram discussed Wolfram|Alpha, an IBM researcher described brain emulation, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner spoke "on his firm's potential role in the Singularity." But in this follow-up article, Ben Goertzel describes what he learned in a day-long workshop/discussion group on averting catastrophic outcomes: his list of "11 ways to avoid a bad Singularity." For example, tip #5 suggests that humanity should simply refrain from building any artificial intelligences that are autonomous...
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Submission + - True 3D Structure of DNA in Nucleus Imaged (mit.edu)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Friday October 09, 2009 @07:39AM

eldavojohn writes: "Even the picture to right of this text shows you that DNA is a helical structure (as discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953) but if it was laid out a strand would be two meters long. So how is it stored in the nucleus of a cell (one hundredth of a millimeter in diameter)? Up until now, the popular theory was that it resided as a highly tangled 'equilibrium globule' inside the nucleus. A new report from MIT, Harvard and UMass Medical School shows this isn't true, it's actually very organized and resists knotting. They also suspect this will also explain how cells control which pieces of DNA are transcribed and which remain silent or even how gene expression change as cells develop or become cancerous. In 1993, this new structure was theorized by Alexander Grosberg of New York University but now it has been confirmed in detail with plans to use the same 3D imaging to follow stem cells into mature cell types to better understand the process."

Submission + - First European provider to break Net Neutrality (astute.nl)

Submitted by

Rik van der Kroon

on Sunday August 23, 2009 @08:34AM

Rik van der Kroon writes: "Major Dutch cable provider UPC has introduced a new network management system which caps users their bandwidth for certain services and providers at 1/3rd of the bandwidth during a 12 hour daily time span between 12am and 12pm.

After that COAX, the consumers front for cable providers in The Netherlands, received many complaints about network problems and slow speeds UPC decided to take this as an excuse to introduce their new "network management" protocol which slows down a large amount of traffic. All protocols but HTTP are capped to 1/3rd and within the HTTP realm some websites and services which take up bandwidth are capped as well.

So far UPC hides themselves behind the common excuse: "We are protecting all the users against 1% of the user base which abuses our network"

The original statement in Dutch can be found here: http://www.coax.nl/news/reageer/index.php?NewsID=2218"

Submission + - Sears.com Squelches Web Programming Blunder (foxnews.com)

Submitted by blitzkrieg3 on Thursday August 20, 2009 @11:19PM

blitzkrieg3 writes: Earlier today someone made public a trivial exploit on the Sears.com website. Sears was storing page paramaters from the client editable url into the catagory of the page, leading to some pretty funny results. Once the catagories were loaded into the cache, every subsequent hit would pull up the same user submitted catagories, even without any page paramaters. TMZ and Fox News have their own reports. Reddit has since been forced to take the post off of their front page by their parent Conde Nast, but the page can still be accessed via permalink.

Submission + - New York MTA asserts copyright over schedule (greatergreaterwashington.org)

Submitted by

Presto Vivace

on Thursday August 20, 2009 @02:22PM

Presto Vivace writes: "Greater Greater Washington reports that
The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority's lawyers are going after a local blogger, and attempting to block an iPhone application showing Metro-North railroad schedules. The blog StationStops writes about Metro-North Commuter Railroad service north of New York City, and often criticizes its operations. Its creator, Chris Schoenfeld, also created an iPhone application to give Metro-North riders schedule information. Now the MTA is insisting he pay them to license the data, and at one point even accused the site of pretending to be an official MTA site.

I can't believe that this the MTA's actions are going to go over well with the public."

Submission + - Woman changes name to "Princess-Rainbow.com &# (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by GordonCopestake on Thursday August 13, 2009 @08:03AM

GordonCopestake writes: A woman from Manchester has become the first person to change her name by Deed Poll to a web domain, according to the Legal Deed Service.

Twenty-four-year-old Claire Forshaw changed her name to Princess-Rainbow.com earlier this week. She had previously been put off changing her name by her boyfriend, 23-year-old Robert Morris, who had tried to dissuade her by claiming it would cost hundreds of pounds.

"I knew that if ever I got the chance I would change [my name] to a web domain, to hopefully become the first. My boyfriend has always told me it cost hundreds of pounds to do, so I just forgot about it," she told press, adding:

"When I realised it actually cost as little as £10 my boyfriend said that Princess-Rainbow.com was ideal for me because I am mad on rainbows!"

The Legal Deed Service says it "firmly believes" the former Ms Forshaw is the first person to change her name to a web domain. Princess-Rainbow.com, who currently works as a care assistant, plans to use her namesake web domain (which her boyfriend bought for her this week) to set up an online business selling artwork.

She's not the first of the Legal Deed Service's satisfied customers to hit the headlines. Last November teenager George Garrat made the Guinness Book of Records when he changed his name to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined, making him the holder of the world's longest name.

Submission + - "Terminator Vision" is here for the iPhone (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by musefrog on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @08:42AM

musefrog writes: The BBC is reporting that so-called Augmented Reality has arrived — in the UK at least.

From the article:
"Via the video function of a mobile phone's camera it is now possible to combine a regular pictorial view with added data from the internet just as the fictional Terminator was able to overlay its view of the world with vital information about its surroundings. For example, UK-firm Acrossair has launched an application for the iPhone which allows Londoners to find their nearest tube station using their iPhone."

The page features an impressive video demonstrating AR in action.

Submission + - Google chrome OS X with FLASH (nerdradamus.com)

Submitted by

Pie Face

on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @08:35AM

Pie Face writes: "Started up chrome today and BANG flash was running inside of it. Very exiting. Doesn't seem to slow anything down. I am trying to figure out if they are loading flash outside of the browser as a separate process like they do in windows. Screenshots available."

Comment Re:I think that there is a lack of imagination her (Score 1) 642

by GordonCopestake on Friday July 31, 2009 @01:12PM (#28898313) Attached to: Fewer Than 10 ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy?

I doubt very much we will find another planet with a breathable atmosphere given we (read earth life) had to make our current atmopsphere ourself over billions of years. In fact the oxygen in our atmosphere is actually poisionous to most life, the few that survived the plant worlds "attack" evolved to deal with it.

I personally could cope with a planet at 0 degees C and a 1000 millibar pressure. That way at least I only need an oxygen mask and a coat rather than a full space suit.

Submission + - SPAM: A.I. developer challenges pro-human bias

Submitted by

destinyland

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @03:27PM

destinyland writes: "After 13 years, the creator of the Noble Ape cognitive simulation says he's learned two things about artificial intelligence. "Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence," and "There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence." Both Apple and Intel have used his simulation as a processor metric, but now Tom Barbalet argues its insights could be broadly applied to real life. His examples of durable non-human systems? The legal system, the health care system, and even the internet, where individual humans are simply the "passive maintaining agents," and the systems can't be conquered without a human onslaught that's several magnitudes larger."
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