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Bug

Relicensing of MySQL Man Pages Just a Bug 68

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the oracle-still-evil dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As reported earlier on Slashdot it appeared the license covering the MySQL man pages was changed from the GPL to something less good. However, as speculated, this appears to be a bug." The build system was grabbing the wrong files, oops. The fix should be coming shortly: "Once the fixes have been made to the build system, we will rebuild the latest 5.1, 5.5, 5.6 releases plus the latest 5.7 milestone and make those available publicly asap."
Databases

A New Approach To Database-Aided Data Processing 45

Posted by Soulskill from the think-of-the-database-as-free-child-labor dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Parallel Universe blog has a post about parallel data processing. They start off by talking about how Moore's Law still holds, but the shift from clock frequency to multiple cores has stifled the rate at which hardware allows software to scale. (Basically, Amdahl's Law.) The simplest approach to dealing with this is sharding, but that introduces its own difficulties. The more you shard a data set, the more work you need to do to separate out the data elements that can't interact. Optimizing for 2n cores takes more than twice the work of optimizing for n cores. The article says, 'If we want to continue writing compellingly complex applications at an ever-increasing scale we must come to terms with the new Moore's law and build our software on top of solid infrastructure designed specifically for this new reality; sharding just won't cut it.' Their solution is to transfer some of the processing work to the database. 'This because the database is in a unique position to know which transactions may contend for the same data items, and how to schedule them with respect to one another for the best possible performance. The database can and should be smart.' They demonstrate how SpaceBase does this by simulating a 10,000-spaceship battle on different sets of hardware (code available here). Going from a dual-core system to a quad-core system at the same clock speed actually doubles performance without sharding."
Businesses

Are Commercial Games Finally Going To Make It To Linux? 242

Posted by Soulskill from the yes-no-maybe dept.
colinneagle writes "Those of us who actively promote Linux as a viable desktop alternative to Windows are often greeted with the following refrain: 'Nobody will use Linux because there are no good games.' The prevailing wisdom is that the abundance of high-quality, commercial video gaming is a key factor in the market-share dominance that Microsoft Windows enjoys. And, in all reality, this is somewhat true. So, then, the obvious course of action is to convince the video game publishers and developers of the world that Linux is a viable (if, perhaps, a bit niche) market. And by 'viable' I mean one thing and one thing only – 'profitable.'Luckily, there have been three high-profile recent examples of Linux users going absolutely nuts over video games, forking over their hard-earned cash in the process: the Humble Indie Bundle (drawing in huge numbers of sales — for a DRM-free product, no less — with sales numbers by Linux users consistently beating out sales to MacOS X users); Canonical's Ubuntu Software Center (where video games make up the top 10 paid software packages); Valve's announcement that it is bringing the Steam store, and community portal, to Linux desktop (specifically Ubuntu). Will the indie game developers (along with Valve) reap the bulk of the rewards that releasing games on Linux is offering...or will some of the big publishers realize what they're missing out on and join in the fun?"
OS X

How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop 933

Posted by Soulskill from the linux-mobile-seeking-vengeance dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Klint Finley discusses Miguel de Icaza's thoughts on how OS X killed Linux on the desktop: 'de Icaza says the desktop wars were already lost to OS X by the time the latest shakeups started happening. And he thinks the real reason Linux lost is that developers started defecting to OS X because the developers behind the toolkits used to build graphical Linux applications didn’t do a good enough job ensuring backward compatibility between different versions of their APIs. "For many years, we broke people’s code," he says. "OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility."' This, he says, led developers to use OS X as a desktop for server programming. It didn't help that development was 'shifting to the web,' with the need for native applications on the decline."

Comment Re:Try straighttalk (Score 1) 288

by Dunega (#41010805) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: A Cheap US Cellphone Plan With an Unlocked Phone?

I'm using them right now with a Galaxy Nexus. So far so good. It's been great being free of a contract. I had some issues porting my number over due to the zipcode not matching the area code of the phone number I was porting. Their customer service was extremely helpful in getting it resolved. Once they made the needed changes everything was up and running within an hour.

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