glyn.phillips - Slashdot User

Submission + - PostgreSQL publishes first real benchmark (ittoolbox.com) 1

Submitted by

greg1104

on Monday July 09, 2007 @11:03AM

greg1104 writes: "The current version of PostgreSQL now has its first real benchmark, a SPECjAppServer2004 submission from Sun Microsystems. The results required substantial tuning of many performance-related PostgreSQL parameters, some of which are set to extremely low values in the default configuration — a known issue that contributes to why many untuned PostgreSQL installations appear sluggish compared to its rivals. The speed result is close but slightly faster than an earlier Sun submission using MySQL 5 (with enough hardware differences to make a direct comparison of those results unfair), and comes close to keeping up with Oracle on similarly priced hardware — but with a large software savings. Having a published result on the level playing field of an industry-standard benchmark like SPECjAppServer2004, with documentation on all the tuning required to reach that performance level, should make PostgreSQL an easier sell to corporate customers who are wary of adopting open-source applications for their critical databases."

Submission + - PC Power Management, ACPI Explained In Detail

Submitted by DK on Monday July 09, 2007 @10:04AM

DK writes: Computer performance have increased at an amazing rate in recent years, and unfortunately so does power consumption. An ultimate gaming system equipped with a quad-core processor, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 4 sticks of DDR2 memory and a few hard drives can easily consume 500W without doing anything! To reduce power wastage, a few industry standards have been developed to make our computers work more efficiently like APM and ACPI. ACPI is the successor of APM and is explained in detail in this article.

Submission + - China's new ballistic-missile sub on Google Earth

Submitted by MsManhattan on Monday July 09, 2007 @09:09AM

MsManhattan writes: A rare public view of China's new ballistic-missile submarine is available on Google Earth, according to Hans Kristensen, a researcher at the Federation of American Scientists. The Chinese military typically keeps a low profile, by the image was captured by the commercial Quickbird satellite late last year. While some features of the sub are discernible from the photograph, such as the overall length, 'the picture was not clear enough to resolve a debate over whether the Jin-class submarine has tubes for 12 or 16 nuclear-tipped missiles,' Kristensen says.

Submission + - Watching cities in 4D 1

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Monday July 09, 2007 @08:14AM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "Computer scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Microsoft Research have developed 4D Cities, a software that shows the evolution of a city over time. New Scientist writes that you can see a city change in four dimensions. So far, the team has only modeled Downtown Atlanta by scanning historical photos. The software automatically sorts these snapshots into date order and then builds an animated 3D model that shows changes. This application will be useful for architects, historians or town planners. Now the researchers want to develop models for other cities. Read more for additional references and a 4D map of Downtown Atlanta."

Submission + - IRS Tracking Party Affiliation (thenewstribune.com) 1

Submitted by

cybermage

on Monday July 09, 2007 @08:00AM

cybermage writes: "According to the News Tribune, the IRS is tracking the party affiliation of taxpayers in the over twenty states that require identification of party affiliation on voter registration forms. The IRS is using the voter registration data to try to locate tax cheats. Some in Congress are looking to take steps to have the IRS purge such information and put a halt to IRS plans to outsource collections until the issue is resolved."

Submission + - Germany's Home Seretary plans new anti terror laws

Submitted by on Monday July 09, 2007 @07:11AM

An anonymous reader writes: According to Germany minister of Interior Wolfgang Schaeuble terror suspects should not be able to use the phone. Heise reports about the new plans of the controversial politician:

In an interview with German newsweekly Der Spiegel, Germany's Home Secretary says that "conspiracy" needs to be made a crime and "dangerous parties" need to be "incarcerated" as "combatants." [...] Schäuble also says that the "intentional killing of suspects" is not a taboo strictly ruled out by the German Basic Law, but rather a "legal problem" that the Home Secretary says "still has to be looked into." The example he mentioned was the possible capture of Osama bin Laden. Schäuble is thus calling for the German government to be given more legal "leeway."[...] Germany's Home Secretary believes that these measures are necessary because Germany is "in the crossfire of Islamic terrorism"; he also remembers the time before September 11, 2001. For that reason, Schäuble says the "monitoring of communication" is "vital.

Schaeuble plans also to enact a law that would allow state authorities to search computers per internet connection, but many experts suspect that the Federal Police is not capable to enforce this "online searches".

Submission + - Recovering A Hosed HD... For Dummies 1

Submitted by AC on Monday July 09, 2007 @06:03AM

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.

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