database

Every now and then, having the ability to look up old Mac models can be fun. If not for nostalgic reasons, you might be needing to help someone revive an old Mac and wish to look up some of the specifications and capabilities of the system. For instance, if you have some spare RAM modules and wish to see if they can be used in an old Mac, then checking the Mac's RAM type as well as its maximum supported RAM may be useful information to have.

You can always use a search engine like Google to find information … Read more

Captchas are those squiggly, random words or numbers you type in a box to prove to a Web site that you're a human being and not another computer. The word isn't a variation of "capture," it's an acronym: Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Internet Captcha is a free tool that creates colorful animated Captchas you can embed in your Web site to limit traffic to people and exclude other computers. The Captchas it creates use number codes with distortion, animated effects, and background objects that make them impossible for … Read more

EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, today announced Postgres Plus Cloud Server, which the company has billed as "a full-featured, Oracle-compatible, enterprise-class PostgreSQL database-as-a-service for public and private clouds with support for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and GoGrid."

We've seen other database-as-a-service offerings come on the scene from the likes of Salesforce.com's Database.com, Amazon RDS, as well as from startup Xeround. But they're not based on PostgreSQL, which has had years of hardening and development by a committed community. The other databases are not "Oracle compatible," … Read more

SeriesGuide Show Manager helps you keep track of all your favorite TV shows using your Android device. It comes with a comprehensive database of episode lists, series information, and television schedules, some of which you can access, even while offline.

To get started, hit Menu, then Add Show. The SeriesGuide Home screen will list the shows you've added, their networks, and their time slots. From there, you can go through full episode lists and mark episodes you've already watched, pull up a list of upcoming episodes, read episode descriptions, find IMDb links, and share episode or series info … Read more

Skype releases and then pulls its iPad app, Microsoft stops publishing the locations of millions of mobile and Wi-Fi devices, and Apple opens up iCloud.com for testing and reveals pricing for extra storage.

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Running an Internet cafe isn't just a matter of setting up a few computers and inviting customers to use them. You have to have a way to monitor and charge for the amount of time that customers use. Internet Cafe Management Software, or IncaMS, is a simple program that lets you do just that. It's not particularly sophisticated, but if you need a basic way to track computer usage and ring up transactions, it could be exactly what you're looking for.

IncaMS includes both client and server software, and we installed both without any issues. The program … Read more

Let's just get this out of the way right up front. The best "Star Trek" series was the original. Second-best: "Star Trek: Voyager." Worst by far: "Enterprise."

I say that so you know who you're dealing with: a lifelong Trekkie who has strong feelings about the shows and movies. (I also thought J.J. Abrams' reboot was good, but not great.)

Assuming you're still reading (most people shun me after hearing of my love for "Voyager"), you'll be glad to know there's finally an official Star Trek PADD app for the iPad. And by official, I mean produced by CBS Interactive (which owns both Paramount Pictures and, it should be noted, CNET).

The highly prescient Personal Access Display Device featured prominently in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and later series. It employed the still-sexy Library Computer Access/Retrieval System, or LCARS, interface, which the app reproduces like never before.… Read more

Contact managers don't have to be complex to be useful, and E-Z Contact Book takes that fact and runs with it. This simple program makes it easy to keep track of friends, family, business associates, and anyone else, and it includes a few extra features that set it above the no-frills competition.

E-Z Contact Book's interface is plain and intuitive, and we had no trouble getting started with it. To add contacts, you must first create a new group within the All Contacts heading. This makes it easy to keep contacts from different parts of your life organized … Read more

The Amazon Web Services outage in April created uncertainty about the reliability of the cloud. And while the outage may have cast doubt about its ability to handle mission-critical applications, Xeround CEO Razi Sharir, whose MySQL cloud database-as-a-service goes into general availability today, sees the event as an opportunity to better understand the unique characteristics of the cloud environment--namely availability and elasticity.

Via an e-mail interview, Sharir maintained that high availability in the cloud is different from maintaining availability in a traditional data center because there is limited control over the cloud infrastructure. He notes that in the cloud, high … Read more