WASHINGTON — Satellite imagery shows significant new construction at North Korea’s main rocket launch site in a sign of leader Kim Jong Un’s determination to pursue a space program despite international censure, a U.S. research institute said Thursday.
North Korea is barred under U.N. Security Council resolutions from launching rockets as that technology can also be used to launch ballistic missiles. Kim, however, declared this month that its space program “can never be abandoned.”
The U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies says the North completed an expansion of its launch tower late last year to take larger rockets. Commercial satellite imagery shows that since then, the North has been working on a support building and what appears to be a moveable platform to allow an assembled rocket to be shifted on rails to the launch pad. The institute likens it to facilities in China but says there’s no publicly available evidence to suggest Beijing is providing help.
“The Sohae facility upgrade program represents a significant investment of financial, material and personnel resources and is another indicator, along with its public statements, that North Korea is determined to pursue its space program,” read the analysis provided to The Associated Press ahead of publication on the institute’s website, 38 North.
Concern is rising over North Korea’s weapons development. The North recently claimed it tested a new type of missile from a submarine and reiterated that it had built a nuclear warhead small enough to be mounted on a long-range missile. Outside analysts are skeptical about both claims, but they believe the North has built a small but growing nuclear bomb arsenal and advanced its missile program since international nuclear disarmament talks stalled in early 2009.
The North’s unpredictable leader, Kim, has closely associated himself with the space program. In early May, state media reported Kim inspected a newly-built satellite control and command center, but didn’t specify the location. Kim was quoted as saying the North would launch satellites into space at the time and locations chosen by the ruling party.
There is speculation that North Korea could mark the 70th anniversary of the ruling Korean Workers Party with a rocket launch. The institute says it would be difficult to complete construction at the launch site by then, but the North could go ahead with a launch by pausing construction and using the existing facilities at Sohae.
Left: Analysis from 38 North shows a newly completed complex of buildings and pad, taken Sept. 13, 2014, in North Korea. Photo DigitalGlobe/38 North via Getty Images
Maybe your first database started as a simple way to replace a spreadsheet that had grown unwieldy. But over time you added features, and now your database has lost all of its original simplicity. Now you have Microsoft Access installed on every workstation, with the data files on a shared network volume. Like any good IT manager, you have started to look ahead, and you're considering a move up.
There are several reasons to consider migrating your shared Access database to a client/server implementation of Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle 9i Database, or Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE). As the number of people using a single database increases, Access is less able to manage file sharing efficiently. And when network traffic increases, Access's responsiveness decreases. Access can handle databases only up to 2GB and has few high-availability features. A true database server can back up and restore files dynamically while databases are in use, and transaction logging makes it possible to roll data back to any point of failure. The desire for better security and a dynamic Web back end complete the list of benefits to moving up.
Before you upgrade, you need clear goals. Are you interested in migrating just the database or migrating the database in addition to the logic and user interface (including forms, reports, and queries)? Though not a trivial process, migrating only your database is much simpler than migrating both. Each database server has its own migration wizard (Oracle Migration Workbench, Microsoft Upsizing Wizard, Sybase Access to SQL Anywhere Migration Kit). These wizards typically do a better job of migrating data than application code. Third-party tools, such as Diamond Edge's Access Converter, Java Edition (see the screen), and FreeSoft's Access2Java, can migrate Access application code to Java.
Sybase has a clever approach to migrating from Access to Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), allowing for a phased implementation. As an intermediate step, you can use SQL Anywhere Studio's Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA) as a back-end database and continue to use your Access front end while you develop application logic for ASE. Using ASA's built-in remote data access capability, you can treat your Access database as an ODBC source and create proxy tables. Then you can reverse the process and expose your ASA tables as ODBC data sources to the Access applications running on users' desktops.
Make sure your accounts have adequate permissions and you have the necessary passwords to all involved files and directories.
Make sure all original field and table names comply with what the server requires in terms of length and legal characters and that all relationships in the original database are legal in the server version. You must understand table dependencies to know the order in which to migrate them: If you load a child before the parent, the migration wizard cannot populate the new tables.
Install the new database server and create the database and logs. You should allocate at least five times as much space for the server database as for each MDB file.
Run whatever migration/upsizing wizard is appropriate. It's usually a good idea to migrate the table structure and data in two separate steps, so that you don't lose data as a result of a flawed table structure or relationship. Make sure to read status messages as they appear and print or export application logs afterwards, so that you can trace problems and correct them. Once you believe that table structures are correct, back up the database again.
Rewrite data entry forms, queries, and reports into either a proprietary format or a combination of HTML and Java. (These last two steps will probably take longer than all other steps combined.)
Acer president Scott Lin said that despite pessimistic statements to the contrary, the netbook category will not die out.
At a press conference in Taiwan, Lin had been asked about PC makers shifting towards tablet PCs and away from netbooks, Digitimes reports.
Lin forecast that global netbook shipments for 2010 will be around 40 million units, roughly 20 per cent of the entire notebook market.
He didn&apos;t go far as to say that growth could be expected in the category, instead saying that 2011 will remain around the same level. Acer and fellow Taiwanese manufacturer Asus would have more of the market to themselves following the withdrawal of Dell and HP.
Pinning hopes on Intel&apos;s new Atom N550 CPU offering better performance at the same price, Lin said that the price to performance ratio for netbooks based on Intel&apos;s revamped Atom CPUs would be attractive to consumers.
Acer expects to sell two million smartphones in 2011 and set an aggressive goal to more than double their smartphone shipments to four or five million in 2011.