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Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Internet Explorer

New Attack Fells Internet Explorer 202

alphadogg writes "Attack code has been identified that could be used to break into a PC running older versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The code was posted Friday to the Bugtraq mailing list by an unidentified hacker. According to security vendor Symantec, the code does not always work properly, but it could be used to install unauthorized software on a victim's computer."
First Person Shooters (Games)

John Carmack Says No Dedicated Servers For Rage 162

AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"

Comment You do NOT have a RAID controller (Score 1) 564

You don't have a hardware or integrated RAID controller.

What you have is a non-RAID SATA controller, plus software RAID support in BIOS + Windows driver.

This is easiest to see when booting Linux, whose policy it is to only export your hardware, without any fakery.

See Linux SATA RAID FAQ for a clue...

Comment Total costs? (Score 1) 1137

It is easy to look at an individual, and say that costs are lower, especially if you doctor the numbers to assume everyone lives in New York City with high parking rates.

But that is only looking at part of the picture.

A fair comparison would included taxes paid to the city and state, and would include an assessment of what would happen if a majority of individuals started using public transportation for their given locale.

One must include car parking costs for park-and-ride lots, because not everyone can walk to a train station or bus stop.

One must include additional travel time costs, because public transportation is often slower than direct travel via car.

I'm not arguing for, or against, public transportation.

I only ask for a fair comparison.

Comment Re:negative spin much? (Score 1) 355

"when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action"

This implies that the weather was... under control at some point in our history?

Our climate models are consistently wrong — either massively under-estimating or massively over-estimating climate change effects.

If we cannot even get the guesswork right, how can we ever hope to "engineer" the most complex, chaotic system in our world?

Comment Geo-engineering IS NOT ENGINEERING (Score 1) 355

Speaking as a Principal Engineer at a Fortune 500 company... geo-engineering is not engineering.

Where is the rigor?
Where is the testing?
What are the consequences of failure?
Might we make things worse?

The honest truth is that any geo-engineering is a global-scale gamble whose short and long term effects are completely unknown.

It is easy to see how geo-engineering could inflict more damage that it purports to solve — the climate is one of the most complex, chaotic systems known.

And we claim to have mastered our climate system enough to fix it??

Finally, fighting pollution with more pollution is counter-intuitive, to say the least.

The Internet

Accelerating IPv6 Adoption With Proxy Servers 341

jgarzik writes "IPv6 presents a catch-22: the most popular web sites on the Internet don't have any incentive to switch to IPv6 until a large portion of their userbase is on IPv6, and their user base does not have a large incentive to switch to IPv6 until many of the popular Internet destinations support IPv6. My proposed solution is simple: Configure a proxy server that serves IPv6 requests, passing those requests through to underlying IPv4-only servers that not have yet been transitioned to IPv6. This article describes how to configure Apache's proxy server to fill this role, and suggests a few ideas for use."

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