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Databases

Submission + - Visualizing Complex Data Sets (omninerd.com)

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "My company recently began using SAP as its ERP system and as we move into our second year with the software, there is still a great deal of focus on cleaning up the "master data" that ultimately drives everything the system does. The issue we face is that the master data set is gigantic and not easy to wrap one's mind around. As powerful as SAP is, I find it does little to aid with useful visualization of data. I recently employed a custom solution using Ruby and Graphviz to help build graphs of master data flow from manual extracts, but I'm wondering what other people are doing to get similar results. Have you found good out-of-the-box solutions in things like data warehouses, or is this just one of those situations where customization has to fill a gap?"
Programming

Submission + - Balancing Performance and Convention (omninerd.com)

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "My development team was recently pondering over a finding a practical solution to the problem that's haunted anyone who's ever used a framework: convention vs. customization. We specifically use Rails, but like most frameworks, it's great for 95% of our situations, but it's creating big bottlenecks for the other 5%. Our biggest worry isn't necessarily that we don't know how to customize, but rather that we won't have the resources to maintain whatever customize code going forward, i.e., it's quite simple to update Rails as it matures versus the alternative. What have been your experiences with this problem? Have you found any best practices to avoid digging custom holes that you can't climb out of?"

Comment The Factors Affecting Fuel Efficiency (Score 2, Informative) 1114

by mvea (#25353925) Attached to: Fuel Efficiency and Slow Driving?
All of your concerns are addressed in Improve MPG: The Factors Affecting Fuel Efficiency which was Slashdotted more than two years ago.

In a nutshell, yes, the horsepower requirements increase with added speed as your engine must fight with increased drag. So driving slower mitigates the energy required to overcome the additional force.

HOWEVER, going too slow and you don't cover enough distance for the amount of gas you use. In an extreme example, idling at 0mph is an asymptotic point on the mpg graph. All cars have different "sweet spots" where they are optimal. Those "sweet spots" are typically dictated by particular RPM ranges and the corresponding speeds by which a chosen gear will drive the car within those RPM ranges.

Some people will say that simply driving in the highest gear at the lowest speed will always produce the best mpg. Not necessarily so (though generally so). As an example, a 2006 Jeep Wrangler turning 35" tires gets exactly the same mpg in 6th gear as it does in 5th gear at 75mph. This is counter-intuitive but one must remember there are more factors at play within the engine computer than simply RPMs. Looking deeper at the situation reveals that while 5th gear requires more RPMs, the ignition timing is advanced nearly 20 degrees on 6th gear plus the higher RPMs are actually in the engine's torque zone meaning it requires less air (and hence less gas based on the stoichiometric ratio) to produce the same amount of power.

Feed Science Daily: Phoenix Mars Lander Puts Soil In Chemistry Lab, Team Discusses Next Steps (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander placed a sample of Martian soil in the spacecraft's wet chemistry laboratory June 25 for the first time. Results from that instrument, part of Phoenix's Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, are expected to provide the first measurement of the acidity or alkalinity of the planet's soil.
The Internet

Submission + - Quarter of the planet to be online by 2012

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Researchers are predicting that one quarter of the world's population will be connected to the internet within the next four years. According to the report by Jupiter Research, the total number of people online will climb to 1.8 billion by 2012, encompassing roughly 25 percent of the planet. The company sees the highest growth rates in areas such as China, Russia, India and Brazil. Overall, the number of users online is predicted to grow by 44 percent in the time period between 2007 and 2012.

Feed Techdirt: If China's Great Firewall Is So Effective, Why Can't It Stop All The Malware Hos (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
We all know about the "Great Firewall" of China that's designed both to keep certain website inaccessible from China, but which is also supposed to block certain content in China from reaching the outside world. While there already are some questions about how effective the Great Firewall really is, it does seem odd that the majority of "badware" sites are all hosted in China. Is it that China just doesn't care or is it that the Great Firewall isn't actually that effective? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between. The Great Firewall definitely has some holes, and if the purpose of it is more focused on political speech than malware, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the powers that be ignore the malware and let it go through. Or, of course, you could take the conspiratorial viewpoint, and say perhaps China blocks malware within the country, but doesn't care if others get it. Given the various rumors and reports lately about Chinese hackers breaking into computers in other countries, that last possibility may not be so far-fetched.

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It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - A Snarky Halloween History: Monsters Edition (omninerd.com)

Submitted by
uriah923
uriah923 writes: "Nick Dilmore has published the second edition in his Snarky Halloween History series, featured on Slashdot last year. This time around, he concentrates on movie monsters: vampires, werewolves and zombies. From the article, "[D]id you know the movie monsters we've all to come to know and love (in a platonic way, of course) have colorful histories stretching back to the earliest civilizations? What, you didn't think some Hollywood hack actually had enough imagination to invent vampires, werewolves, and zombies, did you? Silly, silly non-monster-trivia knowing person.""
Robotics

The First Evolving Hardware? 148

Posted by kdawson from the many-generations dept.
Masq666 writes "A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on and off its 'genes' it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 - 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 - 900,000 years." The University of Oslo press release linked from the article came out a few days ago; the researchers published a paper (PDF) that seems to be on this same technology at a conference last summer.
Security

Submission + - Top 12 Operating Systems Vulnerability Summary

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "Have you ever wondered how vulnerable your computer is from the first bit you write to the hard drive all the way until you have a fully patched system? If so, Matthew Vea has posted a concise summary of security strengths and shortcomings for twelve of the major operating systems of 2006/2007. In his summary, Matt tests each OS with widely available tools like nmap and Nessus, and notes responses at install, pre-patch, and post-patch times for each system. After the tedious job is done, he produces results that will make both the Apple and Windows communities cringe with regards to security. From the article, 'As far as "straight-out-of-box" conditions go, both Microsoft's Windows and Apple's OS X are ripe with remotely accessible vulnerabilities. ... The UNIX and Linux variants present a much more robust exterior to the outside. Even when the pre-configured server binaries are enabled, each [Linux] system generally maintained its integrity against remote attacks.'"
Biotech

Semi-Identical Twins Discovered 224

Posted by kdawson from the my-brother's-a-keeper dept.
daftna writes in with a story from Nature about a pair of twins who are neither identical nor fraternal: they are semi-identical. Researchers discovered twins who share all of their mother's DNA but only half of their father's. Both children are chimeras — their cells are not genetically uniform, but include a mix of genes from two separate sperm cells that fertilized a single egg. This is, apparently, not as rare as one might think; but the resulting fetus is rarely viable. This report marks the first known incidence of two half-identical twins resulting from a double fertilization.
Supercomputing

Quantum Computer Demoed, Plays Sudoku 309

Posted by kdawson from the more-qubits dept.
prostoalex writes "Canadian company D-Wave Systems is getting some technology press buzz after successfully demonstrating their quantum computer (discussed here earlier) that the company plans to rent out. Scientific American has a more technical description of how the quantum computer works, as well as possible areas of application: 'The quantum computer was given three problems to solve: searching for molecular structures that match a target molecule, creating a complicated seating plan, and filling in Sudoku puzzles.' Another attendee provides some videos from the demo." Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit" (as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?

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