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Debian

Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? 544

Posted by CmdrTaco from the slow-like-a-fox dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article where they provide Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 benchmarks and had ran many tests. In that article, when using an Intel notebook they witness major slowdowns in different areas and ask the question, Is Ubuntu getting slower? From the article: 'A number of significant kernel changes had went on between these Ubuntu Linux releases including the Completely Fair Scheduler, the SLUB allocator, tickless kernel support, etc. We had also repeated many of these tests to confirm we were not experiencing a performance fluke or other issue (even though the Phoronix Test Suite carries out each test in a completely automated and repeatable fashion) but nothing had changed. Ubuntu 7.04 was certainly the Feisty Fawn for performance, but based upon these results perhaps it would be better to call Ubuntu 7.10 the Gooey Gibbon, 8.04 the Hungover Heron, and 8.10 the Idling Ibex.'"
Wii

Nintendo's Homebrew-Blocking Update Hacked 157

Posted by timothy from the initiative-applied dept.
ElementC writes "Team Twiizers, the group behind almost all of the Wii Homebrew scene, has released an update to the Homebrew Channel (and installer) that allows for installation on a Wii with the most recent update installed. While the team still recommends against installing the Nintendo update, those who accidentally updated or purchase games that require the update are no longer left out to dry. This update to the Homebrew Channel also adds SDHC support, a feature Nintendo has not implemented in vanilla Wiis. The community has also created an app that updates just the Wii Shop Channel — allowing users to purchase Wiiware and Virtual Console games without losing their homebrew. It took the team only two days to get the fix out."
Space

One of HST's Cameras Is Back In Action 47

Posted by timothy from the skynet-makes-this-look-like-a-science-experiment dept.
StupendousMan writes "One of the two big cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope is the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, or WFPC2 for short. As the most recent HST status report indicates, the camera was recently powered up again and sent commands to take some test images. Today (Sunday, Oct 26), I received E-mail from a colleague at STScI indicating that the calibration images were 'nominal.' That's NASA-speak for 'fine and dandy.' The E-mail goes on to say 'The data look nominal, indicating that Hubble optical imaging capabilities are in fine shape. (We can expect more glorious Hubble images in the near future.) ... Science with WFPC2 has resumed, and plans are underway to restore ACS/SBC to service this coming week.' Let's hope that the other big instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), also comes back to life successfully. We should find out in just a week or so."
Data Storage

100x Denser Chips Possible With Plasmonic Nanolithography 117

Posted by timothy from the powers-of-10-are-nice dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"
Software

OpenOffice.org V3.0 Sets Download Record, 80% Windows 451

Posted by timothy from the constant-companion dept.
thefickler writes "The newest version of OpenOffice, version 3.0, has set a download record in its first week of availability. Most surprising is the fact that over 80% of downloads were from Windows users. As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor."
Communications

Submission + - Mr. Klein goes to Washington (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by
Themer
Themer writes: "[Quote] "A Story of Surveillance Former Technician 'Turning In' AT&T Over NSA Program
By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 7, 2007; D01
His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
"What the heck is the NSA doing here?" Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.
Klein is in Washington this week to share his story in the hope that it will persuade lawmakers not to grant legal immunity to telecommunications firms that helped the government in its anti-terrorism efforts." [EndQuote]

As an American Citizen this sickens me to the deepest parts of my soul. How can we as a nation even begin to think about allowing the telcos to get off scott-free on something of this magnitude?
What can we do to get this the media attention it deserves?
He is quoted being asked what "they" had gotten in terms of information from the taps, his response was "All of it".
WTF!! So now the government is looking to give them immunity, then the government will hide behind national security or CIA top secret clearance BS..
Man I really need to motivate my friends and family to actually give a crap and get out and vote.."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "http://lunapark6.com/ubuntu-704-feisty-fawn.html Review of Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn. Reviewer's pretty ecstatic about the way Feisty makes Linux easy to use. "From Feisty's new migration assistant in their installer, to the new Restricted Drivers Manager, to the ease of setting up Beryl or Compiz things went so smoothly that I was amazed. This would be the first Linux distro that I have encountered where I would think even my mother could use.""

Feed Nissan's Intelligent Transportation System adds pedestrian avoidance (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS, Transportation

Although Nissan's anti-drunk driving technology should keep the worst of the unaware from actually cruising down the freeway, certain distractions that we just wouldn't do without could indeed lead to a pedestrian-related crash. Thankfully for us, Nissan is on the lookout, as its Intelligent Transportation System is now getting an additional feature before it's even released. Aside from helping you avoid congestion and emit less fumes, the ITS will now be able to communicate with handsets via 3G networks and GPS in order to alert drivers of upcoming individuals. Of course, we have to assume that only humans within a reasonable line of danger will appear on screen, but Nissan claims that this technology will decrease the amount of car vs. pedestrian mishaps and "reduce road accidents particularly in a blind-spot situation." The automaker is currently collaborating with NTT DoCoMo and researching "what types of pedestrian data are most relevant to help prevent accidents," but unfortunately, the launch date for all of this in-car madness is still a good ways out.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Operating Systems

Michael Dell Using Ubuntu Linux At Home 236

Posted by kdawson from the hmmmm dept.
whoever57 sends us a link from the Dell site noting that Michael Dell is using Ubuntu Linux at home (7.04, Feisty Fawn) on a Precision M90 laptop loaded with Openoffice.org and Evolution. If one were betting on which distro Dell will eventually ship pre-installed, this factoid might be food for thought. Oh, and Micheal Dell's gaming system uses XP Media Center edition.
Operating Systems

Fragmentation in Linux Documentation? 61

Posted by Cliff from the where-is-an-up-to-date-repository-for-docs dept.
twilight30 asks: "While trying to figure out why a supposedly-supported SATA-II controller isn't recognized on my motherboard I thought I'd go back and visit the Linux Documentation Project's pages. It was a trip down memory lane, but I soon wondered about the state of many of the documents there. Much of TLDP is old, maybe even crufty. So, I'd like to ask what you think of TLDP.org and its 'competitors'. Do people get info from other sites or Wikis? Are people more likely to look at their distro's forums first? Are distros good enough now that TLDP is basically irrelevant? For the BSDheads, do you think the BSDs' documentation pages have lessons to teach TLDP? Is TLDP still relevant to you? If not, what would have to change for TLDP to become relevant again?"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Chimps lead "evolutionary" race

Journal by mapkinase

News column by Hopkin in Nature reports that chimps' genes are more "positively selected" than humans' and conludes that chimps are "more evolved".

Positive selection

occurs when natural selection favors a single allele and therefore allele frequency continuously shifts in one direction.
Databases

Submission + - MySQL vs PostgreSQL benchmarks

Submitted by spatialguy
spatialguy writes: Tweakers is a dutch community of online tweakers that are deciding on new hardware for their website and databases.
The link http://tweakers.net/reviews/674/7 [tweakers.net] leads you to some stunning performance graphs on a 8-way opteron system.
It shows that not only postgresql 8.2 is faster then MySQL 5.0, it also scales much better on heavy loads.
The tweakers community are longterm MySQL users and were new to PostgreSQL. However they even brought in a MySQL/Solaris expert to configure it optimally.
Still PostgreSQL turned out to be the better dbms under heavy loads.
They are very thorough in their tests, are themselves MySQL users, and give insight in which optimizations they used to perform these tests.

Interesting is that they discovered a small issue in the stable release of postgresql 8.2 which was subsequently patched by the postgresql developers.
The version pg 8.2.1 did ship with these patches.
They also revealed issues with Solaris, which were investigated by Sun developers, who helped in configuring the Solaris installation.

This second link http://tweakers.net/search?DB=Reviews&item_catId=1 2&productCatId=&Query=postgresql&x=0&y=0
will give you a search results page with links to many similar benchmarks on different architectures of MySQL vs PostgreSQL on their site.

All in all a very convincing read.

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