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Comment Sites Moved to Rails? (Score 4, Interesting) 385

by markmcb (#21625095) Attached to: Ruby on Rails 2.0 is Done
OmniNerd.com, a site I do hobby development for, is running on Rails 2.0. We switched over from PHP this fall and site maintenance has been a dream since. Our site has even survived a few Slashdottings and Diggs since the switch, which used to murder it before. (Granted, the PHP code wasn't the best.) I've heard the "doesn't scale" debate a million times, but I'm curious if there is anyone out there who has recently moved a project from one language/framework to Ruby/Rails and whether you're glad you did or if it's been a nightmare. We're a medium-to-low traffic site with big surges every few weeks and it's worked well for us.
Math

Submission + - Patterns in Lottery Numbers (omninerd.com)

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "Most everyone is familiar with the concept of the lottery, i.e., random numbers are selected and people guess what they will be for a cash prize. But how random are the numbers? Matt Vea has conducted a pattern analysis of the MegaMillions lottery, which recently offered a sum of $370M (USD) to the winner. Matt shows that the lottery isn't as random as it may seem and that there are 'better' choices than others to be made when selecting numbers. From the article, 'A single dollar in MegaMillions purchases a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of landing the jackpot ... a player stands a mildly better chance of winning a partial prize through the selection of weighted numbers.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - A Snarky Halloween History: Monsters Edition (omninerd.com)

Submitted by
uriah923
uriah923 writes: "Nick Dilmore has published the second edition in his Snarky Halloween History series, featured on Slashdot last year. This time around, he concentrates on movie monsters: vampires, werewolves and zombies. From the article, "[D]id you know the movie monsters we've all to come to know and love (in a platonic way, of course) have colorful histories stretching back to the earliest civilizations? What, you didn't think some Hollywood hack actually had enough imagination to invent vampires, werewolves, and zombies, did you? Silly, silly non-monster-trivia knowing person.""
Math

Submission + - One Way Escrowing Taxes/Insurance Can Be Good (omninerd.com)

Submitted by
uriah923
uriah923 writes: "With the recent hoop-dee-doo in the housing industry, banks are taking more steps to remove the risk from home loans. One of these is to offer a loan interest rate discount in return for the borrower guaranteeing they will escrow taxes and insurance. In this article, Brandon Hansen performed an economical analysis of whether or not accepting this offer is advisable from the borrower's perspective. If you're thinking of buying a house or are in the process somewhere, consider this an essential part of your stay-informed-so-I-don't-get-taken-to-the-cleaners activities."
Math

Submission + - Busting the MythBusters' Yawn Experiment

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "Most everyone knows and loves the MythBusters, two guys who attempt to set the story straight on so many things people just take for granted. Well, everyone except Brandon Hansen, who has offered them a taste of their own medicine as he busts the MythBusters' improper use of statistics in their experiment to show yawning is contagious. While the article maintains it is still possible yawns are contagious, the author makes it clear that he's not giving the MythBusters any credit for proving such a claim, 'not with a correlation coefficient of .045835.'"
Space

Submission + - Theoretical Physics to be Turned on its Ear?

Submitted by
Bad Labrador
Bad Labrador writes: "Slashdot readers may remember an article and a powerpoint presentation delivered by Alexander Franklin Mayer last year entitled "The Many Directions of Time". In it, he postulates a slight modification to General Relativity, actually correcting an error Einstein apparently made. According to Mayer, correcting this error accounts for a large number of "anomalies" in observations, including a small but persistent error in GPS locations, the apparent acceleration and deacceleration of the Voyager spacecraft and so on. The blockbusting part is when the change is applied to cosmology — according to Mayer, the expanding universe, the Hubble constant and the "big Bang" theory are no more. They are artefacts of his discovery — gravitational transverse red shift. The Universe is not expanding. The book is freely available for download at http://afmayer.net/index.html Happy Slashdotting."
The Courts

Submission + - The Best and Worst Intenet Laws

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "When a U.S. legislator describes the Internet as a "series of tubes" you just know that you're going to end up with some wacky laws on the books. Law professor Eric Goldman takes a look at the best and worst Internet laws in the U.S. Eric offers an analysis of the biggies such as the DMCA, but also shines a light on lesser known laws like the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Wifi Health Danger

Submitted by
Zaffle
Zaffle writes: "Britain and New Zealand's top health-protection watchdog wants the wireless networks, which emits radiation, to be full investigated because of the concern for students' health. Several European provincial governments have already taken action to ban, or limit, Wi-Fi use in the classroom.

Recent research has linked radiation from mobiles to cancer and brain damage. And many studies have found disturbing symptoms in people near masts.

Professor Olle Johansson, of Sweden's Karolinska Institute, who is concerned about the spread of Wi-Fi, says "thousands" of articles in scientific literature demonstrate "adverse health effects" from Wi-Fi.

"Do we not know enough already to say, 'stop'?"

For the past 16 months, the provincial government of Salzburg in Austria has been advising schools not to install Wi-Fi, and is considering a ban."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Screwed Via Small Print 3

Journal by gbulmash
Seems that EULA's aren't the only places companies try to screw you. A big source of consumer losses are sites that autorenew subscriptions. They get you signed up and then a month or a year later, after you've forgotten about them, the charge shows up on your credit card or PayPal account. This isn't just porn sites, but sites that seem otherwise legitimate. Some understand that the fight over the refund and the angry ex-customer aren't worth the hassle and will process the cancellation of
Privacy

Submission + - Personal data exposed! Can legislation fix it?

Submitted by
rabblerouzer
rabblerouzer writes: "Millions have had their personal information stolen because of lax security and may not even know it because of the patchwork of state laws that fail to mandate timely notification of victims. Boston-based law firm Mintz Levin is seeking feedback on what you would like to see included in draft legislation. You have a stake in this; speak up."
Software

Submission + - What is the best bug-as-a-feature?

Submitted by Bat Country
Bat Country writes: The workflow system at the department I develop for was hand-coded by my predecessor in a rather short amount of time, resulting in somewhat unreadable code with a number of interesting "features."

When I took over maintenance of the code base, I started patching bugs and cleaning up the code in preparation for a new set of features.

When I was done however, I got a pile of complaints about features which disappeared which turned out to be caused by the bugs in the code.
So that leads me to ask, what is your favorite bug that you either can't live without or makes your life easier?
Security

Submission + - Top 12 Operating Systems Vulnerability Summary

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "Have you ever wondered how vulnerable your computer is from the first bit you write to the hard drive all the way until you have a fully patched system? If so, Matthew Vea has posted a concise summary of security strengths and shortcomings for twelve of the major operating systems of 2006/2007. In his summary, Matt tests each OS with widely available tools like nmap and Nessus, and notes responses at install, pre-patch, and post-patch times for each system. After the tedious job is done, he produces results that will make both the Apple and Windows communities cringe with regards to security. From the article, 'As far as "straight-out-of-box" conditions go, both Microsoft's Windows and Apple's OS X are ripe with remotely accessible vulnerabilities. ... The UNIX and Linux variants present a much more robust exterior to the outside. Even when the pre-configured server binaries are enabled, each [Linux] system generally maintained its integrity against remote attacks.'"
Data Storage

Submission + - Open Source Highly Available Storage Solutions?

Submitted by Gunfighter
Gunfighter writes: I run a small datacenter for one of my customers, but they're constantly filling up different hard drives on different servers and then shuffling the data back and forth. At their current level of business, they can't afford to invest in a Storage Area Network of any sort, so they want to spread the load of their data storage needs across their existing servers like Google does. The only software packages I've found that do this seamlessly are Lustre and NFS. The problem with Lustre is that it has a single metadata server unless you configure failover, and NFS isn't redundant at all and can be a nightmare to manage. The only thing I've found that even comes close is Starfish. While it looks promising, I'm wondering if anyone else has found a reliable solution that is as easy to set up and manage? Eventually, they would like to be able to scale from their current storage usage levels (~2TB) to several hundred terabytes once the operation goes into full production.
The Internet

Submission + - Out-of-the-Box Solutions for the Web-Smart Friend

Submitted by
markmcb
markmcb writes: "I have a problem that I'm sure you share: I know how the Internet works, my friends don't. I love helping my friends, but all too often I simply don't have the time to help them all. I recently wrote an article for a non-techy friend who wanted to serve a site from OS X and it really highlighted the out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality of the OS X-Apache combination. I'm curious what other OOTB solutions you have found to be good answers for your non-web-savvy friends' problems that have also allowed you to save your free time."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Water logic gates built at MIT

Submitted by
ndogg
ndogg writes: "This story is all wet. Paulo Blikstein at MIT has created a water computer. The one boolean logic gate he created functions as a half-adder (i.e. both XOR and AND). He then proceeded to create a four bit adder."

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