Gregb05 - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Useless (Score 1) 60

by Gregb05 on Thursday October 09, 2008 @02:30PM (#25317893) Attached to: Aquaduct Bike Purifies Water As You Pedal

Or for earthquake-prone areas where the roads may be mostly intact, however the drinking water could be bad.
Of course, that would require having the bike beforehand.

Submission + - Building a (fast) Wikipedia offline reader (softlab.ntua.gr)

Submitted by

ttsiod

on Monday August 13, 2007 @11:45AM

ttsiod writes: "An internet connection is not always at hand... I wanted to install Wikipedia on my laptop to be able to carry it along with me on business trips... After trying and rejecting the normal (MySQL-based) procedure, I quickly hacked a much better one over the weekend, using open source tools. Highlights: (1) Very fast searching (2) Keyword (actually, title words) based searching (3) Search produces multiple possible articles, sorted by probability (you choose amongst them) (4) LaTEX based rendering for Mathematical equations (5) Harddisk usage is minimal: space for the original .bz2 file plus the index built through Xapian (6) Orders of magnitude faster to install (a matter of hours) compared to loading the "dump" into MySQL — which, if you want to enable keyword searching, takes *days*. Enjoy!"

Submission + - Intel release threading library under GPL 2

Submitted by littlefoo on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @06:16AM

littlefoo writes: Intel Software Dispatch have announced the availability of the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under the GPL v2 with the run-time exception — so this previously commerical only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commerical offerings (although they are explicitly encouraging open source use). The interface is more task-based then thread-based, but with a somewhat different view of things than, e.g. OpenMP. From the Intel release

"Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability."

8 Reasons Not To Use MySQL (And 5 To Adopt It) 288

Posted by Zonk on Friday May 25, 2007 @04:48PM from the for-every-product-turn-turn-turn dept.

Esther Schindler writes "Database decisions are never easy, even — or maybe especially — when one choice is extremely popular. To highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the open-source MySQL DBMS, CIO.com asked two open-source experts to enumerate the reasons to choose MySQL and to pick something else. Tina Gasperson takes the 5 reasons to use MySQL side, and Brent Toderash discusses 8 reasons not to. Note that this isn't an 'open source vs proprietary databases' comparison; it's about MySQL's suitability in enterprise situations."

When a CGI Script is the Most Elegant Solution 256

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday March 04, 2007 @12:52PM from the the-answers-is-always dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Writing local Web applications can be quick, easy, and efficient for solving specific Intranet problems. Learn why a Web browser is sometimes a better interface than a GUI application and why experienced Web developers find themselves struggling to learn a GUI toolkit, and descover that a simple CGI script would serve their needs perfectly well, if not better."

Month of PHP Bugs Has Begun 165

Posted by Zonk on Saturday March 03, 2007 @02:28PM from the quick-hide-the-furniture dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The previously announced Month of PHP Bugs started three days ago, and already lists 8 security vulnerabilities in PHP and PHP related software. From the site: 'This initiative is an effort to improve the security of PHP. However we will not concentrate on problems in the PHP language that might result in insecure PHP applications, but on security vulnerabilities in the PHP core. During March 2007 old and new security vulnerabilities in the Zend Engine, the PHP core and the PHP extensions will be disclosed on a day by day basis. We will also point out necessary changes in the current vulnerability management process used by the PHP Security Response Team.'"

A Free XML-Based Operating System 175

Posted by Zonk on Saturday March 03, 2007 @06:36AM from the xml-versus-adam-oh-forget-it dept.

Dotnaught writes "For the past five years, Xcerion has been working on an XML-based Internet operating system (XIOS) that runs inside a Web browser and promises radically reduced development time. To provide developers with an incentive to write for the platform, Xcerion's back-end system is designed to route revenue, either from subscription fees or from ads served to users of free programs, to application authors. Think of it as Google AdSense, except for programmers rather than publishers. Is it absurd to think this poses a threat to Google and Microsoft?"

Marvin Minsky On AI 231

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday March 02, 2007 @12:18AM from the dreaming-of-electric-sheep dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a three-part Dr. Dobbs podcast, AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky examines the failures of AI research and lays out directions for future developments in the field. In part 1, 'It's 2001. Where's HAL?' he looks at the unfulfilled promises of artificial intelligence. In part 2 and in part 3 he offers hope that real progress is in the offing. With this talk from Minsky, Congressional testimony on the digital future from Tim Berners-Lee, life-extension evangelization from Ray Kurzweil, and Stephen Hawking planning to go into space, it seems like we may be on the verge of another AI or future-science bubble."

Oracle to Buy Hyperion for $3.3 Billion 52

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday March 01, 2007 @11:43PM from the big-ticket-items dept.

Oolala submitted an article that opens: "Business software maker Oracle Corp. will buy Hyperion Solutions Corp. for $3.3 billion in cash, renewing a shopping spree aimed at toppling rival SAP AG. The deal announced Thursday will give Oracle an arsenal of Hyperion products that are widely used by SAP's customers. Hyperion's tools, known as "business intelligence" software, help chief financial officers and other top corporate executives track their company's performance."

Who Wrote, and Paid For, 2.6.20 238

Posted by kdawson on Thursday March 01, 2007 @12:52PM from the names-and-companies dept.

Corbet writes "LWN.net did some data mining through the kernel source repository and put together an analysis of where the patches came from. It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work — but the list of companies sponsoring kernel development has a surprise or two." The article's conclusion: "The end result of all this is that a number of the widely-expressed opinions about kernel development turn out to be true. There really are thousands of developers — at least, almost 2,000 who put in at least one patch over the course of the last year. Linus Torvalds is directly responsible for a very small portion of the code which makes it into the kernel. Contemporary kernel development is spread out among a broad group of people, most of whom are paid for the work they do. Overall, the picture is of a broad-based and well-supported development community."

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