December 17, 2012
by sjvn01
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Wikipedia moving from MySQL to MariaDB

For years, MySQL has been the dominant open-source database management system (DBMS). Recently, MariaDB, the MySQL fork created by MySQL’s founder, has been making in-roads and Wikipedia, the world’s sixth most popular Web site, is shifting over from MySQL to MariaDB.

Asher Feldman, Site Architect at Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the group behind Wikipedia wrote recently, that he had” migrated one of the main production English Wikipedia slaves, db59, to MariaDB 5.5.28.” I then asked him if Wikimedia planned to move all of Wikipedia to MariaDB. He replied, “We will indeed be migrating more of our production databases to MariaDB. I’m hoping to have one of our major projects (such as the English language Wikipedia) fully migrated in production by the end of the year. I don’t have a specific timeline yet, but if the assessment continues to be positive, we may fully migrate production in the first quarter of next year.”

Why is Wikipedia making this move? Feldman wrote, “The main goal of migrating to MariaDB is not performance driven. More so, I think it’s in WMF’s and the open source communities interest to coalesce around the MariaDB Foundation as the best route to ensuring a truly open and well supported future for mysql derived database technology. Performance gains along the way are icing on the cake.”

Wikipedia moving from MySQL to MariaDB. More >

December 15, 2012
by sjvn01
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Top Holiday Tech Buys… of 1983 (Gallery)

Back in 1983 in Compute magazine, my friend Kathy Yakal wrote, that 1983 “might be the Christmas of the computer.” It would be the first holiday season when “the home computer [was] well withing the budgets of many American consumers.” So, what computing toys did you have to choose from in 1983? Brace yourself, there won’t be a smartphone or tablet to be seen.

You may be too young for this, but one of IBM’s best ad campaigns ever featured Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. And, he was touting IBM’s newest PC stars: the IBM PC and the IBM PC XT. The XT came with 4.77MHz 8088 processor, a 10 MB hard drive, 128KB RAM and a 360KB floppy drive. For this top of the line business machine, you only had to pay $5,000.

Top Holiday Tech Buys… of 1983 (Gallery) More >

December 13, 2012
by sjvn01
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Good-Bye 386: Linux to drop support for i386 chips with next major release

To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die and a time for Linux to discontinue support for Intel’s 27-years old, 32-bit 386 CPU in its next major release of the Linux kernel: 3.8.

Ingo Molnár, a Red Hat engineer and Linux kernel developer, asked Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder on December 11th to “consider pulling the latest x86-nuke386-for-linus git tree. For those of us who haven’t been Linux kernel enthusiasts since day one, Molnár explained, “This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit of complexity.” He continued, “Unfortunately there’s a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won’t be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore. Sniff.”

Indeed, back in 1991, Torvalds sent out a Usenet posting saying, “I’m doing a (free) operating system. (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu [Gnu] was, and is, the free software collection of programs originated by Richard M. Stallman) for 386(486) AT clones.” From that modest beginning Linux began.

Gallery: The 20 most significant events in Linux’s 20-year history

Torvalds responded the next day, December 12th. I’m not sentimental. Good riddance.”

Good-Bye 386: Linux to drop support for i386 chips with next major release. More >

December 12, 2012
by sjvn01
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Windows has fallen behind Apple iOS and Google Android

Windows may still be winning the desktop operating system war, but according to a Goldman Sachs report, Clash of the Titans, that doesn’t matter because Microsoft has been badly losing the far more important computing device war to Apple iOS and Google Android.

Why? Because, “The compute landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade with consumers responsible for the massive market realignment. While PCs were the primary Internet connected device in 2000 (139mn shipped that year), today they represent just 29% of all Internet connected devices (1.2bn devices to ship in 2012), while smartphones and tablets comprise 66% of the total. Further, although Microsoft was the leading OS provider for compute devices in 2000 at 97% share, today the consumer compute market (1.07bn devices) is led by Android at 42% share, followed by Apple at 24%, Microsoft at 20% and other vendors at 14%.“

Goldman Sachs’ analysis isn’t in a vacuum. Mary Meeker, once a superstar Wall Street analyst, and now a well-respected venture capitalist, recently presented a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers report titled Internet Trends Year-End Update. The report found that tablets and smartphones were out-selling PCs in 2010’s 4th quarter and have since left them in the dust. By 2013’s 2nd quarter, Meeker predicts, the Apple- and Android-dominated smartphone and tablets installed base will be greater than the Windows PC installed base. Today, by Meeker’s numbers, Apple iOS and Google Android have 45% of the market to Windows’ 35% .

Windows has fallen behind Apple iOS and Google Android. More >

December 11, 2012
by sjvn01
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Linux 3.7 arrives, ARM developers rejoice

Only months after the arrival of Linux 3.6, Linus Torvalds has released the next major Linux kernel update: 3.7. The time between releases wasn’t long, but this new version includes major improvements for ARM developers and network administrators. The 3.7 source code is now available for downloading.

Programmers for ARM, the popular smartphone and tablet chip family, will be especially pleased with this release. ARM had been a problem child architecture for Linux. As Torvalds said in 2011, “Gaah. Guys, this whole ARM thing is a f**king pain in the ass.” Torvalds continued, “You need to stop stepping on each others toes. There is no way that your changes to those crazy clock-data files should constantly result in those annoying conflicts, just because different people in different ARM trees do some masturbatory renaming of some random device. Seriously.”

ARM got the message. Thanks to Olof Johansson, a Google Linux and ARM engineer, unified multi-platform ARM was ready to be included in Linux 3.7.

Linux 3.7 arrives, ARM developers rejoice. More >

December 10, 2012
by sjvn01
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It wasn’t just you: Gmail went down briefly

Gmail, Google’s popular email service, crashed at approximately U.S. 11:45 AM ET/ 8:45 AM PT. At this time, we do not know why nor how this happened. Google has now said, “We experienced an issue with Gmail and some users experienced slow performance or errors. For everyone who was affected, we apologize – we know you count on Google to work for you, and we worked hard to restore normal operation for you. Although our engineering team is still fully engaged on investigation, we are confident we have established the root cause of the event and corrected it. Our current best estimate is that a significant subset of users’ Gmail web queries were affected for an aggregate of 18 minutes, from ~08:54 – ~09:00 and then from ~09:04 – ~09:16 Pacific Time.”

While the Google Apps Status Dashboard didn’t show any trouble with Gmail at the time, numerous users on Twitter, Google+, and other social networks reported the service was down. The handy Down for Everyone or Just for Me Web site also reported that Gmail was down.

It wasn’t just you: Gmail went down briefly. More >

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