Cody Taylor

Gary Pendergast writes “Monty Widenius, the ‘father’ of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun.” Related to this, an anonymous reader writes that “MySQL has announced a project to refactor MySQL to be a more Drizzle-like database.”

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Death Metal writes with an excerpt from the website of defense attorney Evan Levow: “After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc. By making itself a party to the litigation after the oral arguments in April, Draeger subjected itself to the Supreme Court’s directive that Draeger ultimately provide the source code to the defendants’ software analysis house, Base One. … Draeger reviewed the code, as well, through its software house, SysTest Labs, which agreed with Base One, that the patchwork code that makes up the 7110 is not written well, nor is it written to any defined coding standard. SysTest said, ‘The Alcotest NJ3.11 source code appears to have evolved over numerous transitions and versioning, which is responsible for cyclomatic complexity.'” Bruce Schneier comments on the same report and neatly summarizes the take-away lesson: “‘You can’t look at our code because we don’t want you to’ simply isn’t good enough.”

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If you live in Madrid or Barcelona, you might not notice the air pollution due to your contact buzz according to a new study. The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations found the air in those cities to be laced with at least five drugs: amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids, lysergic acid and most prominently cocaine. Researchers found cocaine in concentrations between 29 and 850 picogram per cubic meter of air. The group stresses that the air samples were taken in high drug areas and don’t represent most of the air in the cities.

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mbone writes “Earlier today there was a confirmed Google outage which got a lot of attention from network operators. From a post to NANOG after everything calmed down: ‘Google ack’da maintenance on their core network did not go as planned-Forced traffic to one peer link that was unable to handle all the traffic. Maintenance has been rolled back. Issue has been restored.’ This is exactly what makes me nervous about cloud computing and data storage. It’s bad enough when I screw up a config and it takes down my mail, but what about when it happens to the entire globe at once?” Several readers also point to CNET’s coverage of the outage. Update: 05/14 19:25 GMT by T : CWmike adds this: “Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that what may be happening is a massive DDoS attack. Based on the size of the attack that would be needed to interfere with Google, I believe that it’s quite likely to be the result of an attack from the controllers of the Windows worm, Conficker. Another theory that has been put about — that the problem was due to AT&T NOC routing problems — does not appear to hold water, writes Steven.”

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eldavojohn writes “GamePolitics is writing about a proposal to tax on things that make your kids fat. The logic from its author: ‘Almost all experts agree that the primary reasons [for the obesity epidemic] are increased consumption of larger quantities of high calorie foods, snacks and sugar sweetened beverages… and lack of physical activity as vigorous play is replaced by sedentary activities such as watching more television, movies and videos and playing video games. This bill would raise revenues from modest surcharges on the very food products and sedentary activities that are linked to the lifestyle changes involved in the explosion of childhood obesity in the last 20-30 years.’ Not as explicit as Japan’s fat tax but we’re getting there.”

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Craig writes “Gamepark have officially released the follow up to its successful Linux handheld the GP2X, the GP2X Wiz is a 533Mhz Linux-based handheld that’s a similar size to the GBA Micro with a touchscreen and 12 games preloaded into memory, many of which are demos of commercial games. The system comes with 1GB of flash memory which can be expanded with SD cards. The Homebrew Community have already released ports of games such as Quake, Wolfenstein3d, Warcraft and emulators for SNES, Genesis, Commodore 64 and the arcade emulator Mame.”

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IN THE GREAT TRADITION OF KANYE WEST