tim_mathews - 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."

Nanomedicine Kills Brain Cancer Cells 99

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 09, 2009 @10:02PM from the take-two-nanites-and-call-me-in-the-morning dept.

destinyland writes "Scientists from the University of Chicago and the US Department of Energy have developed the first nanoparticles that seek out and destroy GMB brain cancer cells. Nanoparticles killed up to 80% of the brain cancer cells after just five minutes of exposure to white light, showing the promise of nanomedicine — highly-specific intervention at the molecular scale. Because nanomedicine could repair brain cells or damaged nerve and muscle tissue, the NIH has established eight Nanomedicine Development Centers around the country for their Nanomedicine Roadmap Initiative. Researchers have also used gold nanospheres to search out and 'cook' skin cancer cells with light — 'It's basically like putting a cancer cell in hot water and boiling it to death,' says one researcher. And the NIH Roadmap ultimately predicts 'novel tiny sensors ... that search for, and destroy, infectious agents.'"

Comment Re:One thing I hate (Score 3, Insightful) 370

by tim_mathews on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @10:29PM (#28631505) Attached to: Small, High-Resolution LCD Monitors?

The Dell 2007FP is a 20" 4:3 1600x1200 monitor. This is pretty much the only monitor we buy at work.

Sort Linked Lists 10X Faster Than MergeSort 326

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25, 2007 @03:43PM from the out-of-sorts dept.

virusfree tells us about a new algorithm that has been developed that the author claims can sort a linked list up to 10 times faster than MergeSort. "BitFast," a member of the Hash algorithms family, is available in C and C++ under the GPL.

Submission + - DragonFly BSD to develop own filesystem

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25, 2007 @01:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: Matt Dillon has decided to develop a new filesystem from scratch to support DragonFly's clustering, rather than port an existing one. From his post: "There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."

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