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Programming

Rails and Merb Ruby Web Frameworks Merge 80

Posted by kdawson from the flattened-red-gem dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Merb and Rails Core Teams today announced a major merger; the two projects will become one, and be released some time in Q2 of 2009 as Rails 3. This is great news for lots of folks who worried about the potential community fracture, as well as great news for all the developers who will now have an all-around better option for programming Ruby. Read more about the details in Yehuda's blog post, or at the Ruby on Rails blog."
Space

Simulations May Explain Loss of Beagle 2 Mars Probe 98

Posted by timothy from the gremlins-are-everywhere dept.
chrb writes "Researchers at Queensland University have used computer simulations to calculate that the loss of the US$80 million British Beagle 2 Mars probe was due to a bad choice of spin rate during atmospheric entry, resulting in the craft burning up within seconds. The chosen spin rate was calculated by using a bridging function to estimate the transitional forces between the upper and lower atmosphere, while the new research relies on simulation models. Beagle 2 team leader Professor Colin Pillinger has responded saying that the figures are far from conclusive, while another chief Beagle engineer has said 'We still think we got it right.'"
Movies

Majel Roddenberry Dies At 76 356

Posted by timothy from the her-voice-prints-will-live-on dept.
unassimilatible writes "If there was ever a sad day for nerds, it's today, as Majel Barrett-Rodenberry has passed away. The widow of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is best remembered as the gorgeous Nurse Christine Chapel from the original series, the pesky and officious Lwaxana Troi from The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and of course the ubiquitous voice of Star Trek computers in movies, TV, and animated films (who hasn't used her voice as a system sound on their PC?). Majel also attended Star Trek conventions yearly and was a producer of Andromeda. Fortunately, Majel just finished her voice over work for the computers in J.J. Abrams' latest Trek movie. I have to admit, this made me sad, just having caught up on the entire TNG and DS9 series on DVD."

Is JavaScript Ready For Creating Quality Games? 165

Posted by Soulskill from the pac-man-thinks-so dept.
kumpetan writes "After seeing so many games built with JavaScript, and considering the applications it powers and the use of Ajax, it seems like web developers are now in the game development pot. It is getting easier and more popular with libraries like jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, etc. There are even libraries like Game JS, GameQuery or JavaScript GameLib, specifically for this purpose. So, will we start to see more ambitious game projects arise using these tools?"
Databases

Is MySQL's Community Eating the Company? 223

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-yer-drizzle-on dept.
mjasay writes "Craigslist's Jeremy Zawodny reviews the progress of MySQL as a project, and discovers that through third-party forks and enhancements like Drizzle and OurDelta 'you can get a "better" MySQL than the one Sun/MySQL gives you today. For free.' Is this a good thing? On one hand it demonstrates the strong community around MySQL, but on the other, it could make it harder for Sun to fund core development on MySQL by diverting potential revenue from the core database project. Is this the fate of successful open-source companies? To become so successful as a community that they can't eke out a return as a company? If so, could anyone blame MySQL/Sun for creating its own proprietary fork in order to afford further core development?"

Comment Try out different filesystems (Score 5, Insightful) 137

by mbyte (#25982309) Attached to: Optimizing Linux Use On a USB Flash Drive?

Try out different filesystems, NILFS seems to be optimized for FLASH usage.

Brtfs could also be worth a try.

use the "noop" IO/Scheduler with nilfs:
echo noop > /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler

Postmark benchs on an usb-stick (shameless copied from here:
ext3 (mount -o noatime,noadirtime, normale Partition, scheduler cfq): 49 Transactions/s
nilfs2 (Partition aligned 128k, scheduler noop, protection_period 10s): 588 Transactions/s
The Courts

Yoko Ono/EMI Suit Exposes Fair Use Flaw 409

Posted by samzenpus from the I-hope-someday-you'll-sue-us dept.
Ian Lamont writes "Yoko Ono and EMI Records have backed down from their suit against the makers of a documentary film who used a 15-second fragment of a John Lennon song — but only after a Stanford Law School group got involved. Even though the use of the clip was clearly Fair Use, the case exposed a huge problem with the doctrine: It's becoming too expensive for people to actually take advantage of what is supposed to be a guaranteed right. Ironically, the song in question was Imagine."
Printer

Submission + - CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc. (cups.org)

Submitted by Rick Richardson
Rick Richardson writes: CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

In February of 2007, Apple Inc. acquired ownership the CUPS source code and hired me (Michael R Sweet), the creator of CUPS.

CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple.
Software

Submission + - Intel Invests $218M in VMWare, Preparing for IPO

Submitted by RulerOf
RulerOf writes: TechNewsWorld is carrying an article, detailing that Intel has made an investment in VMWare for $218.5 million in anticipation of VMWare's imminent IPO. With an expected value of $23-25 a share, VMWare's IPO shows a value of $950 million. This investment brings Intel to an approximately 13% ownership of the EMC subsidiary, and helps to strengthen the ties between the two companies, as, according to the article, "VMware's virtualization platform runs on Intel architecture and most deployments of the tools are on systems using Intel chips."
Java

Submission + - The second edition of Hibernate in Action

Submitted by aspinei
aspinei writes: You have to know that I've tried. Honestly, I did. I hoped to be able to read each and every page of "Java persistence with Hibernate" (revised edition of "Hibernate in action"), by Christian Bauer and Gavin King. But, I gave up before reading a third of it, then I continued only reading some sections. First, because I know Hibernate, I've used Hibernate in all the Java projects I've been involved with — in the last 5 years or so. Second, because the content from the first edition is more than familiar to me. And third, because this second edition is a massive > 800 pages book (double the number of pages in the first edition). At that rate, the fourth edition will be sold together with some sort of transportation device, because a mere human will not be able to carry that amount of paper. How did this happened ?

Hibernate is the perfect example of a successful Java open-source project. Initially started as a free alternative to commercial object-relational mapping tools, it quickly became mainstream. Lots of Java developers around the world use Hibernate for the data layer inside their projects. It's very comfortable, just set some attributes or ask for a business object instance and Hibernate does all the ugly SQL for you. As a developer, you are then comfortably protected from that nasty relational database, and gently swim in a sea of nicely bound objects. Right ? No, not exactly. Each object-relationship mapping tool has its own ways of being handled efficiently, and this is where books like "Java persistence with Hibernate" come into play. This book teaches you how to work with Hibernate, with a "real-world" example: the Caveat-Emptor online auction application.

Since the first edition of the book was written, lots of things happened in the Hibernate world and you can see their impact in "Java persistence with Hibernate". Most important is the release of the 3.x version line and its different ameliorations and new features: code annotations used as mapping descriptors, package naming reorganization inside the API, but most important the standardization under the umbrella of JPA (Java Persistence API) for a smooth integration with EJB 3 inside Java EE 5 servers. And this, is a little bit funny. Yesterday, Hibernate was the main proof that it is possible to make industrial-quality projects within a "J2EE-less" environment, today Hibernate has put a suit and a tie, joined the ranks of Jboss, then Redhat, and it lures the unsuspecting Java developers towards the wonderful and (sometimes) expensive world of Java EE 5 application servers. Which is not necessarily a bad move for the Hibernate API, but it's a proof that in order to thrive as an open-source project, you need so much more than the Sourceforge account and some passion ...

Enough with that, let's take a look at the book content. Some 75% if it is in fact the content of the first edition, updated and completed. You learn what object-relational mapping is, the advantages, the quirks, the recommended way of developing with Hibernate. For a better understanding, single chapters from the initial book were expanded into 2, sometimes more, chapters. The "unit of work" is now called "a conversation" and you've got a whole new chapter (11) about conversations, which is in fact pretty good stuff about session and transaction management. Christian and Gavin done some great writing about concurrency and isolation in the relatively small 10-th chapter — which is a must read even if you're not interested in Hibernate, but you want to understand once and for all what are these concurrent transaction behaviors everyone is talking about. The entire 13th chapter is dedicated to fetching strategy and caching, which is a must read if you want performance and optimization from your application. There is also a good deal of EJB, JPA and EE 5 — related stuff scattered in multiple chapters. And finally, a solid 50-pages chapter is pimping the JSF (Java Server Faces) compliant web development framework, Jboss Seam. I have only managed to read a few pages of this final chapter, so cannot really comment. Note to self: play a little bit with that Seam thing.

To conclude, is this a fun book ? No. Is this a perfect book to convert young open-source fanatics to the wonders of Hibernate API ? Nope. Is this a book to read cover to cover during a weekend ? Not even close. Then, what is this ? First, it's the best book out there about Hibernate (and there are quite a few on the market right now), maybe even the best book about ORM in Java, in general. It has lots of references to EJB, JPA and EE, it will help you to easily sell a Hibernate project to the management. Even if the final implementation uses Spring ... And finally, it's the best Hibernate reference money can buy. When you have an issue, open the darn index and search, there are 90% chances your problem will be solved. And that's a nice accomplishment. Don't get this book because it's funny, because it's a nice read, about a new innovative open-source project. Buy it because it helps you grok ORM, write better code, deliver quality projects.

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