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https://www.percona.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/best-practices-database-security.jpegAnyone working with databases knows that data is the driving force behind every online activity, and data security is always a top concern. Seeing as how they store and manage vast amounts of sensitive and valuable data, ranging from financial records to personal information and intellectual property, a lapse in database security measures can trigger […]Percona Database Performance Blog

In this episode, we’ll add a ‘cart’ page where users can review the contents of their respective…Laracasts

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Backing up your smartphone images usually involves sending them to the cloud or manually syncing them to a computer. Seamless? Maybe, until you have to start paying monthly storage fees. And while you can plug a hard drive into many modern smartphones, it isn’t quite user-friendly or universal across all smartphones.

PhotoCube PD+, launched via Kickstarter and Indiegogo by Hong Kong electronics company Photofast, aims to make cloud-free physical backups of phone photos more straightforward.

Built for USB-C devices, the PhotoCube PD+ attaches directly to your smartphone or tablet and is compatible with both iOS and Android. It accepts microSD cards with up to 2TB of storage space, and you can interchange your cards if needed.

Supporting SD cards up to 2TB in size, the PhotoCube PD+ can be configured to automatically back up photos when plugged in, as well as additional data like contacts, without the need for additional cables.

An obvious downside is that the device won’t work with iPhones older than the iPhone 15 or any other device that doesn’t have a USB-C port. Android users shouldn’t have an issue using the portable device, even with slightly older handsets.

While there’s no monthly fee, PhotoCube PD+ obviously costs money upfront. Also, PhotoCube PD+ doesn’t come with built-in storage or a card included, so prepare to bring your own.

The device is currently available for preorder, with two devices at an early bird price of $115 (USD) through Indiegogo with an estimated ship date of August 2024. As with all crowdfunded campaigns (and preorders in general), caveats apply. Crowdfunded products are no stranger to delays or quality control issues. The company’s previous model eventually came to Amazon. Presumably, this one will too. Whether it’s worth the gamble to get an early bird discount is up to you.

Note/disclaimer: Remember to do your research with any crowdfunding project before backing it. Pledges to crowdfunding campaigns are not pre-orders. DPReview does not have a relationship with this, or any such campaign, and we publicize only projects that appear legitimate, and which we consider will be of genuine interest to our readers. You can read more about the safeguards Kickstarter has in place on its ‘Trust & Safety‘ page.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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There’s a new boss at a storied 47-year-old Formula 1 team, and he’s eager to shake things up. He’s been saying that the team is far behind its competition in technology and coordination. And Excel is a big part of it.

Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel.

The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked for information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

"When you start tracking now hundreds of 1000s of components through your organisation moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race (which uses British spellings). Because of the multiple states each part could be in—ordered, backordered, inspected, returned—humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are."

The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."

The devil you know strikes again

The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, inside a resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization.

Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long—more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.

Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.)

One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it.

Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

But spreadsheets continue to show up where they ought not. Spreadsheet errors in recent years have led to police doxxing, false trainee test failures, an accidental $10 million crypto transfer, and bank shares sold at sorely undervalued prices. Spreadsheets are sometimes called the "dark matter" of large organizations, being ever-present and far too relied upon despite 90 percent of larger sheets being likely to have a major error.

So Excel sheets catch a lot of blame, even if they’re just a symptom of a larger issue. Still, it’s good to see one no longer connected to the safety of a human heading into a turn at more than 200 miles per hour.

Ars Technica – All content

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team’s systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel. The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.
"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in — ordered, backordered, inspected, returned — humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that’s exactly where we are." The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team’s factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."
The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you’ve ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization. Then again, it’s not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One’s Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long — more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.
Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.) One year prior to Anthony’s excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it. Banks cited Tim Worstall’s 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The data storage journey is as old as computing, tracing a path from the earliest days of room-sized machines to today’s cloud-based ecosystems. Large-scale data storage has evolved dramatically to meet the ever-increasing demands of information technology. Understanding this evolution is not just about acknowledging past innovations but appreciating the complexities and challenges that have… Read More »The evolution of large scale data storage solutions

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Based on the synopsis for Star Wars: The Acolyte, you can expect more than just the typical action scenes and sci-fi world building from the show. It seems to have a mystery-thriller slant to it that you could find appealing even if you’re not a Star Wars fan but love that particular genre — and now Disney+ has released its official trailer to give you an idea of what you can expect. Star Wars: The Acolyte’s story is set at the end of the High Republic era, around a century before the events of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace. 

It revolves around a former padawan played by Amandla Stenberg (Everything, Everything and The Hate U Give) who reunites with her old Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae from Squid Game) to investigate a series of crimes. They, of course, unearth more and more clues as they look into the crime spree, which Disney says will lead them "down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems…" As a big fan of mystery and detective stories, it sounds promising, and I’d love it if Disney can nail the execution to give us a satisfying (and unpredictable) ending, as well. 

Star Wars: The Acolyte will be available for streaming on Disney+ starting on June 4. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/watch-disneys-official-trailer-for-star-wars-the-acolyte-150246523.html?src=rssEngadget

https://planetscale.com/assets/blog/content/the-problem-with-using-a-uuid-primary-key-in-mysql/the-problem-with-using-a-uuid-primary-key-in-mysql-social.jpgUnderstand the different versions of UUIDs and why using them as a primary key in MySQL can hurt database performance.Planet MySQL