miquels - Slashdot User

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday November 22, 2009 @11:59AM from the take-your-pick dept.

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."

DragonFly 2.4 Released 73

Posted by kdawson on Friday September 18, 2009 @10:34AM from the four-wings dept.

electrostaticcarrot writes "DragonFly — that fourth major BSD — has had its 2.4 release. The 'most invasive change' is the addition and usage of a DevFS for /dev; building on this, drives are now also recognized by serial number (along with /etc/devtab for aliases) as listed in /dev/serno. This is also the first release with a x86-64 ISO, stable but with limited pkgsrc support. Other larger changes include a ported and feature-extended (with full hotplug and port multiplier support) AHCI driver (and SILI driver based on it) originally taken from OpenBSD, major NFS changes, and HAMMER updates. A pkgsrc GIT mirror has also been set up and put in use to make future pkgsrc updates quicker and smoother. Here are two of the mirrors."

Reports of IE Hijacking NXDOMAINs, Routing To Bing 230

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @06:01PM from the if-I-want-bing-I-will-type-bing dept.

Jaeden Stormes writes "We just started getting word of a new browser hijack from our sales force. 'Some site called Bing?' they said. Sure enough, since the patches last night, their IE6 and IE7 installations are now routing all NXDOMAINs to Bing. Try it out — put in something like www.DoNotHijackMe.com." We've had mixed results here confirming this: one report that up-to-date IE8 behaves as described. Others tried installing all offered updates to systems running IE6 and IE7 and got no hijacking.
Update: 08/11 23:24 GMT by KD : Readers are reporting that it's not Bing that comes up for a nonexistent domain, it's the user's default search engine (noting that at least one Microsoft update in the past changed the default to Bing). There may be nothing new here.

Comment Re:Well ... (Score 1) 420

by miquels on Tuesday June 16, 2009 @04:19PM (#28352879) Attached to: A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany

... let's see, If it were a child pornography site, then yes, I would agree with censorship.

Really ? I'd rather that the police just go and find the bastards that run the site, shut it down, and throw them in jail.

Blacklisting is just a "if we can't see it, it isn't there, great we're done" policy, which probably increases the very thing you're trying to prevent.

Comment Re:Casimir Force (Score 1) 136

by miquels on Friday March 06, 2009 @12:14PM (#27092277) Attached to: Scale Models Can "Compute" Casimir Forces

>could we harness this "force" and convert it into useable energy

Well, the Jovion corporation apparently has a method do do this- http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Jovion_Corporation_and_Zero_Point_Energy

Mike.

In Finland, Nokia May Get Its Own Snooping Law 284

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 01, 2009 @03:49PM from the expectation-of-privacy dept.

notany writes "Nokia may be too big a company for Finland (a country of 5 million people). It seems that Nokia's lobbyists can push an unconstitutional law through the legislature at will. After Nokia was caught red-handed, twice, snooping on its employees (first 2000-2001, second 2005), the company started a relentless lobbying and pressure campaign against politicians to push what the press has been calling 'Lex Nokia' or the 'snooping law.' This proposed law would allow employers to investigate the log data of employees' e-mails, legalizing the kind of snooping that Nokia had engaged in. Parliament's Constitutional Law Committee asked the opinions of eight legal experts, and all opined that the proposed law is unconstitutional. The committee ignored all the advice and declared the proposal constitutional." An anonymous reader adds a link to an AFP story reporting that Nokia has threatened to pull out of Finland unless the law passes.

Comment Re:Not So Radical? (Score 2, Insightful) 193

by miquels on Friday December 05, 2008 @05:37AM (#26000543) Attached to: Clarifying the Next Step in Australia's Net-Censorship Scheme

It's not going to happen. The police tried to run this scheme, and the ISPs almost fell for it. Then the minister of justice noticed what was going on, investigated it, and concluded that it was against the law (!).

Bit of a shame though. The agreement between ISPs and the police was much better then any future law will be .. which unfortunately is still just as likely as anywhere else in the world.

It had very good checks and balances built in. For example, the agreement was in the form of a contract, and it would become invalid the moment any non-child-porn site showed up on the list.

Oh well. All in all I'm happy it didn't go through. But I'm wondering what they will come up with next.

Little Hitler 5

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday August 21, 2008 @12:44PM from the from-the-baby-dictator-collection dept.

I know he's one of the worst dictators in history but just look how cute those cheeks are.

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