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Comment Polls (Score 1) 763

by Cosmo-san (#37633772) Attached to: Help Shape the Future of Slashdot

(If might be my stupidity and not a /. issue someone explain it to me please)

I used to be able to bring up a list of all recent polls, in case I missed a week or two. Now I can't seem to figure out where to go. Clicking on "Slashdot Poll" above the current poll just reloads the homepage (why?). Searching just brings up articles on

Everything in general seems to load slowly. It's all text based, so if this is the shiny interface's fault I'll take an older version.

OK, fuck you. I just changed formatting and it lost the entire post. Why do you need to reload the page? Do this in Preview, it's a back end flag.
NASA

Understanding the Payoffs From Investing In Space Flight 264

Posted by Soulskill from the still-waiting-on-that-holodeck dept.
A story at MSNBC.com explains how the technological benefits reaped from investing in the US space program are numerous, but often indirect or difficult to explain. Quoting: "NASA has recorded about 1,600 new technologies or inventions each year for the past several decades, but far fewer become commercial products, said Daniel Lockney, technology transfer program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. ... 'We didn't know that by building the space shuttle main engines we'd also get a new implantable heart device,' Lockney said. 'There's also a bunch of stuff we don't know we're going to learn, which leads to serendipitous spinoffs.' ... But some innovations do not appear as a straight line drawn from NASA to commercial products. The U.S. space agency may not claim credit for computers and the digital revolution that followed, but it did create a pool of talent that perhaps contributed to that transformation of modern life. NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon. When the Apollo era ended, many of those people dispersed to private companies and to Silicon Valley."
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."

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