Comment more than just social networking (Score 3, Insightful) 122
Drupal is a general CMS, not just social networking, a facet they just teased out for this particular book.
Researchers Create Database-Hadoop Hybrid 122
ericatcw writes "'NoSQL' alternatives such as Hadoop and MapReduce may be uber-cheap and scalable, but they remain slower and clumsier to use than relational databases, say some. Now, researchers at Yale University have created a database-Hadoop hybrid that they say offers the best of both worlds: fast performance and the ability to scale out near-indefinitely. HadoopDB was built using PostGreSQL, though MySQL has also successfully been swapped in, according to Yale computer science professor Daniel Abadi, whose students built this prototype."
Comment Re:They're called digital cameras (Score 1) 443
I have a neighbor who still occasionally takes Daguerrotypes (Bequerel method, all safe). They preserve the aura of the subject because they are 'negatives' created directly by the light that struck the sitter. There will always be a place for alternative photography.
Comment British Commonwealth? (Score 1) 330
I obviously don't know much about Australia, but does anyone know how a country like them in the English-speaking world became so extreme in their Internet censorship? I'm amazed at this. I would expect this in the third world if at all.
Comment Re:Needless loss (Score 1) 450
The problem is, some of the more interesting sites to me at least like running their own content management platforms and end up in a homebrew situation which can be disaster-prone. We in the GLB community were lucky that pamshouseblend.com was able to regroup after some creep hacked the site. Now they have implemented soft security (mirrors etc.) but it still took people and $ and rising to the occasion.
Comment Re:Food for Stallman (Score 1) 450
I think Richard's argument is more in line with his discussion of ownership of information rather than the fragility of the cloud per se. Cloud angst has been rather building broadly lately for general reasons with such tremors as google abandoning services like notebook and yahoo pulling the plug on Briefcase. There are also some interesting talks on TED about this topic. We are not very far in coming to grips with it, perhaps economic collapse will help with that.
Comment astronomy (Score 2, Informative) 250
A lot of astronomers use IDL but NASA projects in general must put their software in the public domain, so it is not surprising to find packages like the Astronomical Image Processing System (AIPS), the C Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) I/O (CFITSIO) libraries and many other packages and interfaces in SciPy.
Comment Re:Why would you buy this? (Score 1) 309
For pocket-sized Internet radio, Skype, e-mail not associated with a cellphone. There was a story on one of the eee blogs about Toshiba creating a pocket-sized umpc-type of machine but it was a prototype. So it would not be surprising to see some of the umpc machines morph in this direction. There are Zaurus descendants sold in Japan but they are very expensive to buy in the US and not really made for us.
Submission + - Cyberbullying gains momentum (bbc.co.uk)
interglossa writes: "A report by the Pew Internet Project reported on the BBC news web site indicates a rising incidence of cyberbullying among online teenagers, with slightly higher incidence among those visiting social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Tactics cited include being "the victim of an aggressive email, IM or text message" and "having a rumor spread about them online"."
