PC Mechanic, New Article |
- Have You Seen The DTV Reception Map?
- 8 Database Types You’ve Never Heard Of
- Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Is Now Available
| Have You Seen The DTV Reception Map? Posted: 06 Jan 2011 03:15 AM PST If you’re considering doing the cord-cutter thing where you cancel your cable or satellite subscription in favor of DTV or DTV+Internet television, it helps to know what type of reception you’re going to get so you know what type of outdoor antenna to buy. In most instances if you need a DTV antenna, chances are you probably don’t need some super-ritzy $300 setup – or then again maybe you do. DTV.gov is the web site for all things DTV, and arguably the most useful part of the web site is the DTV Reception Map. When you go there, punch in your City/State or just your ZIP code, and all channels available will be shown in the sidebar on the left. It’s color coded so you can easily figure out what you’ll get. Green is strong, yellow is moderate, brown is weak and red means not available (in that area). Here are two example locations: Tampa, FL: You can see from the results on this link that there are plenty of channels in the green, meaning a basic indoor antenna should get the job done with no problem. Webster, MA: This location has only one channel in the green, one channel in yellow and the rest in brown. If you lived in this location, it would be more or less mandatory to use a roof-mounted outdoor antenna. If you want to cut the cord, use the DTV map to see what’s available for free and how much antenna you actually need to buy to receive stations. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.       |
| 8 Database Types You’ve Never Heard Of Posted: 06 Jan 2011 03:00 AM PST In the early-early days of internet, web pages and other information were retrieved via static file (ex: a plain HTML standalone document) or flat-file database via Perl. In the later days of internet, MySQL ruled the roost as the #1 choice most people use as a database backend. For example, WordPress blogs all unless specifically engineered otherwise use MySQL as the primary database. There’s a small rumbling going on right now to drop MySQL and switch to something else because there are those who feel it’s simply not scalable enough – and in some instances they’re correct. This rumbling is typically coined as having a "NoSQL" attitude. Super-large web sites these days routinely use alternatives to SQL because they consistently run into the wall of what SQL can do. If you ever wondered "What do the big guys run?", several examples of what they use will be listed below. Cassandra is used by many super-large web sites including Twitter and Reddit. On their home page they boast the largest production cluster has over 100 TB of data in over 150 machines. Yes, production cluster. Very impressive. If you want to know the answer to the question "What database should I learn that will make me valuable to hire in the future?", this is the one. A bit more friendly to non-enterprise programmers, CouchDB is a document-oriented db which can be utilized with JavaScript extensively, which is something you may already know. Hadoop is more than a database as it’s comprised of 10 different pieces for complete distributed computing. The database it uses is called HBase. Hadoop is known best for research and production purposes. 4. Membase This database is described as such: "Membase is a distributed key-value database management system best suited for applications that require predictable, low-latency, random access to data with high sustained throughput." In other words, consistent fast access to your data no matter how hard you hammer it. 5. FlockDB This is Twitter’s database. It’s described as: "FlockDB is a database that stores graph data, but it isn’t a database optimized for graph-traversal operations. Instead, it’s optimized for very large adjacency 6. Memcached This isn’t technically a database but rather a caching system. As described on their web site: "Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load." The best thing about Memcached is that you can get familiarized with it very quickly and it’s very easy to use. Anyone adept at programming will experience little to no learning curve with Memcached. 7. MongoDB This is a C++ written document-oriented database promoting big-big scalability perks. If you have a ton of data to move and mirror often, MongoDB is definitely worth checking out. 8. Riak Riak is well-suited for development prototyping before going live, although it can obviously deploy with ease. Riak also touts that it has "no single point of failure", allowing devs to decide for themselves what fault tolerance they want to use instead of having the db decide it for them. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.     |
| Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Is Now Available Posted: 05 Jan 2011 12:00 PM PST In a relatively unadvertised event, Microsoft released version 2.0 of their anti-virus product, Security Essentials. Ars Technica has a write up on the release but the primary change is that the detection engine is now heuristic based in addition to signature based. In a nutshell, signature based protection can only detect known threats which have a particular "pattern" identified by their signature, whereas heuristic detection allows the system to pick up potential threats based on behavior. Obviously, this provides better protection but at the risk of potentially more false positives. Overall, however, Microsoft Security Essentials gets very good reviews so if you want to download the newest version you can get it now. It has not hit Windows Update yet but I imagine it will in the near future for users running the previous (non-beta) version. Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.     |
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