SHOWDOWN: MYSQL 8 VS. POSTGRESQL 10
Now that MySQL 8 and PostgreSQL 10 are out, it’s a good time to revisit how the two major open source relational databases compete against each other. Before these versions, the general perception has been that while Postgres is superior in feature sets and its pedigree, MySQL is more battle tested at scale with massive concurrent reads/writes. But with the latest releases, the gap between the two has gotten significantly narrowed.
Read moreANCIENT ROME’S COLLAPSE IS WRITTEN INTO ARCTIC ICE
On March 15, some time ago, several dozen famous politicians—sturdy men, duly elected senators who claimed to love their republic—attacked their chief executive while he walked into the Senate. They stabbed Gaius Julius Caesar 23 times, as he fell to the floor, defenseless, and bled to death, setting off a chain of wars that formally ended the Roman Republic and initiated the Roman Empire. Some 2,062 years have passed since that day, but we haven’t stopped arguing about it.
Read moreA NEW EXPERIMENT HINTS AT SURPRISING HIDDEN MECHANICS OF QUANTUM SUPERPOSITIONS
It is the central question in quantum mechanics, and no one knows the answer: What really happens in a superposition—the peculiar circumstance in which particles seem to be in two or more places or states at once? Now, in a forthcoming paper a team of researchers in Israel and Japan has proposed an experiment that could finally let us say something for sure about the nature of this puzzling phenomenon. For decades researchers have stalled at this apparent impasse.
Read moreSCANNER: PROCESSING TERABYTES OF VIDEO ON HUNDREDS OF MACHINES
There are now many state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms which are a git clone away. We found that existing systems for distributed data analysis were not well suited to dealing with the computational challenges of applying computer vision algorithms to terabyte or petabyte sized video collections, so we designed and built a system called Scanner to make efficient video analysis easier. Source: cmu.edu
LEADING UK SCIENTIST REVEALS LIKELY CAUSE OF CHILDHOOD LEUKAEMIA
Professor Mel Greaves from The Institute of Cancer Research, London, assessed the most comprehensive body of evidence ever collected on acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – the most common type of childhood cancer. His research concludes that the disease is caused through a two-step process of genetic mutation and exposure to infection that means it may be preventable with treatments to stimulate or ‘prime’ the immune system in infancy. The first step involves a genetic mutation that occurs before birth in the foetus and predisposes children to leukaemia – but only 1 per cent of children born with this genetic change go on to develop the disease.
Read moreGOOGLE SUED FOR ‘CLANDESTINE TRACKING’ OF UK IPHONE USERS’ BROWSING DATA
Google is being sued in the high court for as much as £3.2bn for the alleged “clandestine tracking and collation” of personal information from 4.4 million iPhone users in the UK. The collective action is being led by former director Richard Lloyd over claims Google bypassed the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser on iPhones between August 2011 and February 2012 in order to divide people into categories for advertisers. Tomlinson said the data was gathered through “clandestine tracking and collation” of browsing on the iPhone, known as the “Safari Workaround” –
Read moreNASA’S EM-DRIVE IS A MAGNETIC WTF-THRUSTER
A group of German scientists has now gotten a reasonable amount of money under the rubric of testing all the things. Basically, because the various space agencies have whispered that no idea is too silly to ignore, we need an effective way to quickly test all the stupid space stuff on the Internet. The Germans are currently building something that is designed to do all that testing.
Read moreCHINA IS GOING TO BE THE FIRST COUNTRY TO LAND ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
On Sunday night the China National Space Administration launched a communications satellite on a Long March rocket on a 280,000 mile journey to orbit the moon. The lunar orbiter is the initial step in realizing China’s ambition to be the first country to place a lander on the far side of the moon. As the first communications relay satellite in orbit around the moon, the orbiter’s name, Queqiao, is fitting.
Read moreA GERMAN TEAM IS NOW TRYING TO MAKE THE ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ EMDRIVE ENGINE
Since the beginning of the space race over half-a-century ago, humans have walked on the moon and remotely explored the surface of two other planets in our solar system with robots. But so far, only a single spacecraft has made it to interstellar space: Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is currently speeding through the void at a blistering 40,000 miles per hour and covering about 325 million miles per year. Yet even if it was headed in the direction of Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor, it would take Voyager over 80,000 years to arrive.
Read moreTHE PENTAGON CAN’T ACCOUNT FOR $21T
There are certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few thousand, we can feel and conceptualize. We’ve all been in stadiums with several thousand people. We have an idea of what that looks like (and how sticky the floor gets). But when we get into the millions, we lose it.
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