I liked that theory at first, but then I took a look at the orbital parameters... It seems to be almost pefect sun-synchronous orbit. Public experts where holding reaching sun-synchronous orbit out of reach impossibility for NK given the need to launch it at such an angle as not to have spent stages fall on ground where they could be construed a hostile action.

I'm sure we'll hear more on this in the coming hours, but it looks to me like they must've spent a lot of effort and risk on reaching sun-synchronous orbit (one conductive for earth-observation, such as spy or weather-satellites which NK claimed it would be). It doesn't seem credible that they would've done that just for a ballistic missile test and dummy payload. Also something about the way most news-sources quote the "tumbling out of control" seems to give up the impression they believe it initially had attitude control, though to be honest I'm curious to hear how they would determine when it had or didn't have attitue control.

The GPS satellites have altitude well in excess of 20.000km, so for a North Korean ballistic missile launched satellite with an orbit at just around 500km to hit them would make for some big news indeed. That problem aside, you should probably know the GPS satellites are not something you go pick up at a nearby hardware store - they have a lead-time of years, decades if you count slipping them in to the budget somewhere and generally mucking around.

While at any given time there are a few irds hold on spare, should a significant number (enough for GS network to take a hit) of them be lost due to a runaway Kessler syndrome or repeat Carrington event, it would be far longer than few weeks to recover the situation. Indeed, the big worry people are hinting at is a Kessler syndrome, where our satellites decide to play a big game of billiards at orbital velocity in the sky. Not only would in theory ALL currently orbiting satellites be lost, but the debris would prevent ANY space-launches for centuries to come.

The ISS, by the way, is below 410km so quite far below the North Korean satellite for now, though the satellite's orbit is sure to decay in the future. Luckily ISS presents fairly small footprint for collissions, in the big scheme, but countless other satellites and debris lay below the satellite's current orbit. It's not good, but it's probably not catastrohic considering how frequently some satellite or other malfunctions. Our near orbit has grown so crowded however that satellites have for long been de-orbited or moved to safe orbits when taken out of service (Like that Russian satellite that was simply de-orbited rather than re-purposed because it might've received more than its alloted dose of radiation in the Van Allen belts and was therefore a risk).

I have to wonder where you're living that you consider Europe high-crime. In particular, US comes always near top on any crime rate surveys. Specifically, with the exception of Belgium and Spain the rest of the Europe is virtually safe: http://www.civitas.org.uk/crime/crime_stats_oecdjan2012.pdf Certainly it's also true a small town will be safer than a big city anywhere on this account.

More than that I'm wondering what's your point with the cheap phone. It won't help any if your phone gets stolen. I suppose you could get one cheap dumb-phone for two-factory authentication, another for city night-life, a thir one to call your female friends, and lock the expensive smart-phone in a safe vault with the keys to the vault. Just to be safe.

Unless the thief gets both the phone and online-banking user-id, password and single-use key-lists the phone won't help them any. Unless the implementation in question is severely broken, the phone/SMS acts only as an extra factor in authentication. How it works for me for example is I log on the online banking site, authenticate with extra-long user-id (which in itself acts as a password), a pin I've memorized, and check a number from a key-list just to log on. If I try to transfer money, they will send an SMS to my phone telling to enter n:th number on my keylist on the online banking site.

Now I'm no fan of the SMS-authentication, mostly because it makes things too slow, but one has to admit it increases security. Only way I am screwed is if I keep my user-id, password, key-list and phone at the same place, and then I would be screwed whether there were SMS authetication or not.

Of course, it's already possible to buy all kinds of services and rake up phone-bills with a mobile phone, so it's a bad idea to lose one either way. Not too long some thief stole a mobile phone, used it to buy every bottle in a soft-drink vending machine, poured the bottles empty and returned the empty bottles for bottle recycling fee. He sure didn't make a lot by hour, but the point is there already exist actual security issues with SMS that have nothing to do with banks.

First I should probably burn some karma and say "what a load of garbage". The headline asks what OSS database to HELP with, but the article summary might as well read "Which free SQL-compatible database to learn to use". And on top of that it contains the answer already, along with questionable dirt-showing on MySQL which makes it read like a guerilla-ad for PostgreSQL.

But in any case, it makes a major, huge difference whether the question is "which database codebase to contribute improvements to" or "which free database to learn for best amployment chances". Sounds like it's the latter, and in that case a follow-up question is what kind of employment. The one correct answer is "whichever database your employee is using" - don't expect to be able to choose a job on the basis of what database engine they happen to be using in one of the departments at the time. Second best answer is go with both; and again it makes a huge difference whether it's for self-employed web-site design or financial analysis for stock brokerage firm.

And if you actually went with MySQL, next question is which database engine. Huh, you ask? Well you see, MySQL is not a single database engine, in actuality it's a front-end to pluggable database engines. The stock release fetures at lest MyISAM, InnoDB, Heap, BDB, NDB and Archive (and few variations). In general it's a choice between MyISAM or InnoDB which are whole different story. When most people say "MySQL has such and such problem" they're actually talking about MyISAM, but MySQL has defaulted to InnoDB engine for years.

But the third and best answer is "none of the above". In most cases everybody seeking employment in relevant job will be fluent in SQL and have at least some experience with both MySQL and PosgreSQL, and it'll be rare for the employer to be at all interested in your ability to actually "hack" the database source. NoSQL databases offer ample opportunity to differentiate both on the job-market, and on the business competitiveness arena by improving the source-code (and in most cases as long as the binaries stay in-house, so can the source which makes bosses happy, but consult your OSS license).

Maybe it's worth noting the context that understand first of all some 10.000 people in Finland have been laid off from Nokia or their subcontractors, such a thing generates a lot of ill will against a company. Combine that with the Finnish mindset, and you'd be truly hard pressed to find anyone with a single good thing to say about Nokia in Finland, even if the company had in truth been saints of the highest order. Of course they weren't, they were far from perfect like every company in every market, the bigger the worse - this is what gives rise to such gems as Dilbert which I'm sure most tech workers have no trouble identifying with.

It's just that when your livelihood depends on said company, or you know there's a strong chance it directly or indirectly might in the future, you're going to get VERY different opinions and interviews than from a man who's just been given the boot by said company (and the company is left in state where it's not going to be affecting employment for a long time at the very least). So I don't really think people should consider what gets said now as the final word and declare the case tried and closed on that. Give it a few years where those employees have ha a chance to work with other companies for even half the time they worked with Nokia, and you might get very different views. If you want your answers today, though....

It's a bit complicated to try to look at that way, since MeeGo is open source, anyone is free to fork it and make their own version, which is what kept happening all through. If you really try to look at it with the "Whose project" mindset, since MeeGo is Linux, at the root you'll find out it's a Linus Torvalds project :)

However, if you look at its more recent history, MeeGo was Intel's Moblin + Nokia's Maemo (Except that the only released MeeGo phone was never true MeeGo, much of the Moblin code was still unusable so it's more Maemo than Moblin/MeeGo). Of course the irony is that Intel's Moblin was in reality little more than just an earlier version of Maemo. For a long time after Intel announced their Moblin project, their project-site just linked to Nokia's Maemo source-repositories. Of course in open source it's fairly common to see forks and merges of codebase, and this is usually hailed as a strength and a good thing. I myself view the whole Moblin/MeeGo merger more as a marketing gimmic ("Now running software from world's #1 chipmaker!") and an excuse to make incompatible changes to the system, though doubtless there were many useful parts Intel had added to their fork (Which Nokia could've just uplifted into their branch anyway without committing to Intel).

But then, Maemo itself was based on earlier work by others, including Intel, as well, but getting already too longwinded :)

An old topic, but I still gotta look through them sometimes :) Good point on actually doing out the math, though there's a lot on the problem setup we don't know. If the goal of the school is to do (well, almost!) nothing but teach the students to type on computer as fast as possible, then indeed that is insufficient. On the other hand if it's a school that's aiming to give the students pretty rounded education, which one should hope is the case, then the situation is little different.

From my upper secondary school aka. high-school days in first world country I recall, we graduated in three years and courses on computers/typing would not even be on the schedule much of that time. When they were, there were two hours a week (like most other subjects, really). If only third of the students are taking computer classes at the same time and then only take 2 hours a week, then the amount of computers is more than sufficient. They'd still have up to hundred hours of computer education. And I'm not entirely in the wrong in remembering our rate of computers to students was somewhat similar.

On the other hand reading in between lines, it might be a typing bootcamp like idea where all the students are simply crammed with tying lectures as fast as possible might be more the case. Putting aside moral questions and reservations, there's some practical issues, like finding suitable classrooms and teachers for all of them. I know big classes are all the rage, but I don't think it'd be possible efficiently teach classes more than around 25 students in something like that. Assuming sick leaves, vacations, preparation time etc. does the budget allow for 20 class-rooms and 40 teachers? All in all I think in that kind of mass-teaching just giving them printed or photocopied keyboard layouts and having them practice on that, maybe in pairs taking turns spotting errors, and then giving the best of them 2 hours a week on actual computer would be best solution.

But of course as noted, we don't even know if the existing computers can actually be made to work...

Or vent it out because the stockpiles are being sold off at price below the cost of collecting and stockpiling it? Which is what they're doing now. Of course it would change once the current stockpiles are sold and price starts going up, right up until those helium-rich oil-wells dry up. There used to be a saying about keeping all your eggs in one basket, but I'm sure that's not appropriate here.

Looking below this seems to have been hashed to death and back already of course, including Mythbusters this and that etc...
But just for the "Hydrogen burns, lulz" people who seem to have taken over Slashdot, hydrogen is indeed flammable, but it does not burn without oxygen and a source of ignition present. Thus hydrogen inside a balloon is entirely safe, unless you put oxygen and candle inside that balloon as well. Now when that balloon develops a leak it's a whole different story.
Also hydrogen flames burn in the ultraviolet spectrum and are hardly visible to the human eye. Thus it's clear something else was burning alongside the hydrogen when Hindenburg burned. Unknown to most people the American helium-filled airships suffered very similar burning accidents. Safety regulations were far laxer then than they are today, the main problems with Hindenburg were its design allowed large static charge potential differences to develop between its parts and it was not covered in flame-retardant fabric. In addition being part of the Nazi propaganda machine it was being pushed far beyond the stresses and uses its original developers intended, and likely to be leaking all over the place. "Hindenburg burns and crashes, people die, American trade embargo on helium to blame" was merely the politically correct (at least to the Nazi-party, and they worked hard to hide any evidence to the contrary) summary.
But where does this leave us with hydrogen balloons? Not sure, any current party balloon designs I can think of are highly flammable, and preventing a leak is not really an option. Luckily, there's one other option for flying your party balloons: Sky lanterns! There's no way anything could go wrong with those... (Apologies for being too lazy to make every word of last sentence a link to similar article... would be ugly, too:)

I love the solution to the power availability here: if the area has limited electricity, just chain up progressively more inefficient electricity connections out of the computer. Problem solved! This reminds me of the old solution to get rid of the evil nuclear power plants, just take the power from the wall-outlet instead.

I was going to say the whole issue of limited electricity is little beyond the scope of Slashdot, but I suppose in a way this would be a perfect question to ask from Slashdot crowd, but it'd have to be entirely its own topic. Also the original question doesn't really clarify if the currently existing computers can be powered and if so how - I would assume this is very much an on/off situation, with poor electricity quality, brownouts and frequent blackouts. It's entirely possible they've never been powered up because they can't be as well.

DC power from batteries rigged up to photovoltaics would seem like fairly idea solution to me, but this assumes there isn't a risk of stuff like that getting vandalized intentionally or out of ignorance and of course availability of the batteries and panels (and a couple of high power diodes, or preferably solar charger circuits), but sunlight should be plentiful. Since the computers themselves will use a maximum of 12v of voltage, a PV system should be ideal for powering the computers themselves while avoiding many of the potential pitfalls, displays might still need an inverter. Unfortunately the direct DC power-supplies needed are hard to come by, but then we seem to be dealing in wishful geek thinking anyway :)

Any microcontroller/custom solutions might be powered off car-batteries (charged with PV or maybe whatever is available) either with individual simple regulators, or preferably laptop car battery adapter powering a bunch of them. But I think the Raspberry PI/Arduino/etc. ideas are pipe-dreams in themselves, though it's certainly nice to think the students could be taught to build up their own microcontroller computers and there'd be no problem getting the neccessary components and materials, and there was ample time to pull it all off...

A bunch of USB keyboards on HUB's (provided the computers have USB or can be retro-fitted with it) and a program displaying what they type on a line per student would IMHO seem much more like the way to go. If having so many students per computer is indeed needed; at least in my days of basic education it felt like we had even less computers per student, yet somehow managed with a "complete" computer-science curriculum. Perhaps a class time-table design software is all that is needed :)

Considering the very submission reads " I considered using typewriters but they are in limited supply on the market." I bet that must be the case... and all the non-trollish replies to the article so far just point "use a typewriter". That said, this does seem bit of like a solution looking for a problem, or what have you - any other solution one could come by would be even more "limited supply on the market", given there's not general demand for that.
Only thing that comes to mind to me is that USB-attached keyboards should be easy to come by, surplus, used, sponsored deal whatever. Get a few USB hubs and connect them together to a single computer with a handy software. Unfortunately that's far from ideal, as the screen will have to be shared, and electricity is still required. But as far as an easily available geeky solution goes, I think that's a start. Maybe blink the lights or something if they make a typo - actually learning/teaching on them would be harder, but then you can do that even on a blackboard or so.

I'm not sure how much I should really say, because I work on similar system too. It's not just vehicle tracking, of course, you could say it's "data processing services for mobile units", and the irony is that description covers a fair amount of everything done in IT these days. But I'll freely admit the example is partially fictitious, there's no point in getting to the nitty-gritty details of data representation and reduction here, nor can I reveal numbers that could be considered trade secrets. But suffice to say the example is realistic, and pretty close to what we do for some clients.

Fuel economy is presently one of the biggest needs driving this influx of data. While few of the companies care themselves, but many public sector service contract competitions now require or are going to require companies to implement economic driving systems. For this you may require down to the second data on what the driver did with the controls, how the vehicle responded, and what were the environmental conditions. Some public transit companies want to go even further, optimizing their performance and time-tables to the max. Equipment failures are also VERY costly, especially when you have an expensive time-dependent and possibly climate controlled cargo riding on it, so companies will do anything to prevent, predict and detect them. EU has recently mandated automated accident detection and emergency call system on future vehicles, while this can work in-vehicle, it's another thing driving adoption of remote data-loggers and detailed logging, the systems being needed in the vehicles anyway.

Mobile networks won't particularly mind large amount of data, as long as they get to set the price. 3G/4G and other mobile broadband solutions exist for just such cases. Sending real-time video isn't really sensible in general, of course. But just to be sure, it's easy and often necessary to store the data locally until it can be downloaded via WLAN to wired network at depot of the like. Unless you're Google, there's limited things you can do with it, it's not easily searchable and nobody's going to watch hundreds of simultaneous streams like that, most of it is noise and not data. But extracting data from it, like road signs, driving distances and other more complicated parameters, or snapshots of specific situations (why did the vehicle brake, what's the weather like etc.) are done.

The data needed increases a lot the moment you have time dimension to anything. But as nobody seems to want to come up with an example, from something I have experience with, lets say you're running a shipping & logistics company. All your vehicles, trailers etc. have sat-nav, wireless broadband, sensor arrays for temperatures, weather, heck maybe even a video feed or two. But I'll stick into a "small" example.

The vehicle control-buses alone can generate thousands of messages per second, but if you don't want to go overboard, you might be tracking maybe 64 values on per-second basis. Oh, and naturally you have hundreds of trucks in the fleet, say you're a relatively small operator with 250 trackable vehicles. At bare minimum you're looking at something like vehicle-id, timestamp, flags and data per each item. This would be roughly 2k per row on a naive database, or half a megabyte for whole feet. Times the seconds, coming to whopping 14 gigabytes per day even if they're only in use 8 hours a day on average. In a year, you'll amass 5 terabytes of data.

If you're said logistics company, you probably want to outsource it somewhere, the company may be handling data from dozen or so logistics companies and then it's 60 terabytes per year. It might be desirable to save that data for 5 years, at which point you'd looking at 300 terabytes in active storage, from whence you'll want answers like "Who was driving on 5th Street on the new year's eve" or "Was the temperature of the cargo over 10C at any point during shipment XYZ" to the utterly complex data-mining for fuel economy etc.

Of course, in reality the amount of data you'd want to store would vary widely, you would also store much other data from administrative to legal, have different storage approaches for different uses, and employ different compression schemes starting with storing only when values change, but that's primarily an example of how the amount of data easily balloons once you figure in matters of scale and time-dimension. Even in something as simple as getting fresh bread delivered to your local store. I can imagine quite a few businesses having similar situation, especially as society gets more and more data-driven, which I guess is what this article is supposed to be about.

Yeah, I definitely think it's time for Slashdot to get back to its roots - "News for nerds, stuff that matters, unless it's embarrassing to the Republicans".
That said, the revelation in this Slashdot article is hardly news or previously unheard of, as usual. Nor should the number of Twitter followers or Likes matter, but quite obviously there are many who believe they do.
Just to quote the above news article as a teaser, "We subjected Barack Obama's account, @BarackObama, to the same analysis."