Aggregator

England legend Stuart Pearce has become the latest star to pick his all-time World Cup XI as the clock ticks down to the start of the biggest tournament ever.

When a medical problem can be fixed quickly and simply, it is genuinely one of the most satisfying moments in the job of a GP.

The island of Sensay, located off the western Philippine coast - was acquired in 2025 by British tech founder Dan Thomson - who seeks to turn it into a nation led entirely by AI robots.

Halifax banks could soon be disappearing from Essex and UK high streets after reports Lloyds Banking Group are looking to scrap the brand.

Halifax banks could soon be disappearing from Essex and UK high streets after reports Lloyds Banking Group are looking to scrap the brand.

Last Monday, I found myself standing with Kemi Badenoch at a private dinner. Eager to hear her plans for the country, I chose my question carefully.

A California mother desperately tried to alert police that her teenage son and his friend may pose a threat hours before they opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego.

New royal aide Theo Rycroft, hailed as a diplomatic genius, is seen as King Charles's great hope. Insiders believe he could be the key to mending ties with William and Harry.

Former DIY store shut last year after more than 30 years of business in the town

National Highways are warning motorists of night closures of the A120 between Galleys Corner and Mark's Farm between May and July

Europe is testing laser-based satellite communications through a new mountaintop ground station in Greece, aiming to deliver faster, more secure links than traditional radio systems as bandwidth demand grows. The Register reports: Lithuanian space and defense biz Astrolight says that it has commissioned a new optical ground station in Greece that will support ESA-backed CubeSat missions testing laser-based communications between satellites and Earth. The Holomondas Optical Ground Station was built through the PeakSat project, led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with backing from the European Space Agency and Greece's Ministry of Digital Governance. Its job is to receive data from satellites via infrared laser links rather than the radio systems that space operators have relied on for decades. PeakSat and ERMIS-3, two Greek CubeSats launched in March under ESA's wider Greek IOD/IOV mission program, both carry Astrolight's ATLAS-1 optical communication terminal. Astrolight also built the ground segment, giving the project a fully integrated end-to-end optical communications setup. [...] The company says the station uses an 808-nanometer laser beacon and an optical C-band receiver capable of receiving data at up to 2.5 Gbps. Unlike traditional RF systems, optical links use tightly focused infrared beams that are harder to intercept or jam while also supporting significantly higher throughput.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CFO says GPU rentals are ‘structurally higher margin than CPU cloud’

Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, were found dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds after the shooting on Monday which saw three people killed.

Owners of the club were charged earlier this month with a string of crimes, including rape, human trafficking, and sexual assault

Southend's Reform leader has claimed a council training document on cutting carbon footprints asks councillors to join what he called 'disruptive groups' like Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace

JB has a database table that, at first glance, looks like one of those data warehouse tables that exists to make queries performant. You know the sort, the table that contains every date between 1979 and 2050, or every number out to 1,000,000 or something. It looks dumb, but it helps make certain joins and queries performant.

The database table is called three_alpha_numerics. It has two columns: digit, which contains three characters, and is_numeric, which is a a single character: 'Y' or 'N'. It looks roughly like this:

+-------+------------+ | digit | is_numeric | +-------+------------+ | 009 | Y | +-------+------------+ | 00A | N | +-------+------------+

So, for example, if you wanted all the possible numeric triples, you could SELECT digit FROM three_alpha_numerics WHERE is_numeric = 'Y', which is obviously the easiest thing one can imagine.

So what is this for? Well, it's used by a stored procedure that generates unique IDs. That stored procedure does a left join against another table to find all the unused digits. And here's the real gotcha: that stored procedure only ever uses the rows where is_numeric is Y, meaning the vast majority of the data in this table is never used.

Unique IDs, of course, are an incredibly difficult task for databases to do, so it absolutely makes sense that we create a system that allows us to only have 1,000 unique IDs. That's more than 640, which should be enough for anyone. Having many thousands of unusable alphanumeric triplets is just the cost we have to pay.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Ricky Gervais rewrote the rules for the TV sitcom with his portrayal of cringe-making boss David Brent in The Office.

Andy Burnham made two major U-turns within hours yesterday, amid growing concern his Left-wing agenda will wreck the economy.

Motorists are facing delays near Stansted Airport following a crash that has affected the A120 and the M11.

Shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride said taxpayers face a 'Burnham premium' as markets push up government borrowing costs because of concerns that he will drag Labour further to the Left.