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Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill 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."

Comment iPhone Games (Score 1) 268

by jamienk (#30181384) Attached to: iPhone Game Piracy "the Rule Rather Than the Exception"

My 3 year old son urges me to download games on the iPhone. I get all the free ones listed for each category and listed under "most popular." He and I agree that 99% of the games we see are some of the worst crap you can imagine. There are a few types:

* Stuff that requires a lot of downloading, rendering, entering passwords, connecting to various multiplayer networks, answering their questions, etc. It takes 5 minutes before the game starts, but by then, we've both lost patience.

* The games are obnoxiously crippled -- they offer only teases, or they constantly try to trick you into clicking to their ordering system, or their ads, or they suddenly stop in the middle of play. You feel interrupted, short-changed, and ripped off.

* The games themselves strike us as weirdly unimaginative. The graphics are retreds of crap I've been seeing since the 80s, or else they look like the standard manga stuff. They often have cliched, muzak-style "soundtracks" and have the game equivalents of a laugh-track: clapping, "awww"-ing, etc.

In sum: these games suck. How they can represent some sort of billion-dollar-industry is so baffling that I suspect a hyped bubble; I can't imagine masses of people paying for this junk. It's more fun to kill time by flipping a coin. It feels like there are no original artists in the game-making work, just "industry" hacks. Maybe one day game-making will somehow be more democratic like website creation and some will try to innovate.
Privacy

German Killers Sue Wikipedia To Remove Their Names 859

Posted by Soulskill from the aim-for-foot-and-pull-trigger dept.
Jason Levine writes "Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber killed a German actor in 1990. Now that they are out of prison, German law states that they can't be referred to by name in relation to the killings. Therefore, they have sued to get Wikipedia to remove their names from the Wikipedia article about the killings. The German edition of Wikipedia has already complied, but the English edition is citing US freedom of speech and a lack of presence in Germany as reasons why they don't need to remove the name. In a bit of irony, their lawyer e-mailed the NY Times: 'In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients' names in your article.'"

Comment Deserving (Score 0, Troll) 1006

by jamienk (#30088798) Attached to: Software Piracy At the Workplace?

When the lamb has struggled so long and hard to get food fight illness and brave the elements, don't you think it deserves to not be killed by the lion? WinZip, that succulent little lamb, will be eaten by us, the vicious software pirates, however we moralize. It is our nature.
Cellphones

AT&T's City-By-City Plan To Up Wireless Coverage 158

Posted by kdawson from the hockey-stick-gone-vertical dept.
alphadogg writes "AT&T has created different mobile calling models for every major city in America as it tries to improve a network that has come under fire for poor performance as the data-friendly iPhone has proliferated, an executive said Thursday. Other carriers just use one nationwide calling model to plan for all cities, claimed CTO John Donovan, speaking at the Open Mobile Summit conference in San Francisco. The nation's second-largest mobile operator has had a hard time planning for bandwidth needs in the rapidly changing mobile world, Donovan said. AT&T has seen rapidly growing mobile data usage — and much criticism over its 3G coverage — as the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US. 'If a network is not fully loaded, it's hard to know exactly how much demand is out there,' Donovan said. 'You put all you can in the ground, and they eat it all up, and then you put more in there, and they eat it all up.'" The story notes that mobile data at AT&T has grown 4,932% over the last 3 years.
Image

Stoned Wallabies Make Crop Circles 104

Posted by samzenpus from the trippity-hop dept.
It's the tripnaut! writes "The BBC reports that Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around 'as high as a kite', a government official has said. 'The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,' says Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania. 'Then they crash,' she added."
Spam

Lexus To Start Spamming Car Buyers In Their Cars 317

Posted by timothy from the even-as-they-sleep dept.
techmuse writes "Lexus has announced plans to send targeted messages to buyers of its cars based on the buyer's zip code and vehicle type. Unlike regular spam, these messages will be delivered directly to the buyer's vehicle, and will play to the vehicle's occupants as audio. Lexus has promised to make the messages relevant to the car buyers." Imagine the fun that some targeted malware could do — not that such a thing could happen to a Lexus.

Comment Re:Is that all? The IntarTubes have a solution! (Score 3, Insightful) 255

by jamienk (#25655267) Attached to: Obama, McCain Campaigns Both Hacked, Files Compromised

>>I am so glad we won't be hearing from her at least until 2012 or so...

Ted Stevens gets re-elected; then he resigns (or is kicked out of the Senate by 2/3rds); then there will be a special election in Alaska for Senate and Palin will most likely win. She plans this already. When she found out about Stevens she said (paraphrase) "He should leave the Senate. Even if he is re-elected, he should then resign." So we will most likely see her in the Senate for the next 4 years or so. The question is: will she be like Liddy Dole who people thought was an up-and-comer but who turned out to be a drag, or like Hillary who was a massively divisive figure but who used the Senate to grow to become liked by a broad spectrum of people.
Sci-Fi

Paul Krugman Awarded Nobel Prize For Economics 425

Posted by kdawson from the too-smart-fr-government dept.
zogger writes in his journal, "The guy who put together the concept of geographical location combined with cheap transportation leading to 'like trades with like' and the rise of superindustrial trading blocs has won the Nobel economics science prize. He's a bigtime critic of a lot of this administration's policies, and is unabashedly an FDR-economy styled fella. Here is his blog at the NYTimes." Reader yoyoq adds that Krugman's career choice was inspired by reading Asimov's Foundation series at a young age.
The Internet

Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu 215

Posted by kdawson from the all-eggs-one-basket dept.
David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"
The Almighty Buck

$700 Billion Bailout Signed Into Law 857

Posted by kdawson from the how-4-pages-becomes-400 dept.
Many readers reminded us of what no-one can have failed to hear: that the Congress passed and the President signed a $700B bailout bill in an attempt to avert the meltdown of the US economy. The bill allocates $700 billion to the Treasury Department for the purchase of so-called "toxic assets" that have been weighing down Wall Street balance sheets. This isn't particularly a tech story, though tech will be affected as will virtually all parts of the economy, and not just in the US. Among the $110B in so-called pork added to the bill to sway reluctant legislators are extensions of popular tax benefits for business R&D and alternative energy, relief for the growing pool of people subject to the alternative minimum tax, and a provision raising the FDIC's ceiling of guaranteed deposits to $250,000. Some limits were also imposed on executive compensation, though it's unclear whether they will be effective.
Privacy

Senator Proposes to Monitor All P2P Traffic for Illegal Files 626

Posted by Zonk from the kind-of-strains-the-mind-to-think-about-huh dept.
mytrip writes "Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) has proposed an ambitious plan, costing on the order of $1 billion, aimed at curtailing illegal activities via P2P networks. His plan involves utilizing new software to monitor peer-to-peer traffic on an ongoing basis. 'At an afternoon Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing about child exploitation on the Internet, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said he was under the impression it's "pretty easy to pick out the person engaged in either transmitting or downloading violent scenes of rape, molestation" simply by looking at file names. He urged use of those techniques by investigators to help nab the most egregious offenders."
Security

Serious Vulnerability In Firefox 2.0.0.12 355

Posted by kdawson from the that-was-quick dept.
Oh, Not Now writes "Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12, mere hours old, is vulnerable by default to a directory traversal trick, via the view-source mechanism. Although mitigated by the NoScript plug-in, this is quite a serious bug — the default installation is vulnerable from the get-go."
Censorship

Getting the Best Deal From Dell — Or Not 207

Posted by kdawson from the consumer-advice-or-proprietary-information dept.
Nom du Keyboard writes "When The Consumerist published 22 tips for getting the best deal from Dell Computers, according to a self-described former Dell sales manager, Dell fired back with a take-down notice. You might want to look quickly, in the event it does get taken down. The Consumerist's lawyer's initial response was to deny the takedown request."
Power

Submission + - Water from wind

Submitted by ghostcorps
ghostcorps writes: Columnist Phillip Adams writes about a new windmill design that literally extracts water from air. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867 ,21123007-12272,00.html


Usually a windmill has three blades facing into the wind. But Whisson's design has many blades, each as aerodynamic as an aircraft wing, and each employing "lift" to get the device spinning. I've watched them whirr into action in Whisson's wind tunnel at the most minimal settings. They start spinning long, long before a conventional windmill would begin to respond. I saw them come alive when a colleague opened an internal door.

And I forgot something. They don't face into the wind like a conventional windmill; they're arranged vertically, within an elegant column, and take the wind from any direction.

The secret of Max's design is how his windmills, whirring away in the merest hint of a wind, cool the air as it passes by. Like many a great idea, it couldn't be simpler — or more obvious. But nobody thought of it before.


With three or four of Max's magical machines on hills at our farm we could fill the tanks and troughs, and weather the drought. One small Whisson windmill on the roof of a suburban house could keep your taps flowing. Biggies on office buildings, whoppers on skyscrapers, could give independence from the city's water supply. And plonk a few hundred in marginal outback land — specifically to water tree-lots — and you could start to improve local rainfall.

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