johnwarburton - 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."

The Twitter Book 88

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @01:15PM from the read-all-about-it dept.

stoolpigeon writes "Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well known for its periodic, and, at times, extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of Twitter and ever-increasing coverage of 'tweets' has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high-profile popularity, there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books, and quite a few are already out there about and for Twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

Researchers Critique Today's Cloud Computing 63

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday April 25, 2009 @05:15AM from the no-silver-lining dept.

Red Leader. writes "MAYA Design just released an excerpt from one of their forthcoming books as a white paper. The paper offers a different perspective on cloud computing. Their view is that cloud computing, as currently described, is not that far off from the sort of thinking that drove the economic downturn. In effect, both situations allowed radical experiments to be performed by gigantic, non-redundant entities (PDF). This is dangerous, and the paper argues that we should insist on decentralized, massively-parallel venues until we understand a domain very, very well. In the information economy, this means net equality, information liquidity, and radically distributed services (and that's pretty much the opposite of 'cloud computing' as described today). While there is still hope for computing in the cloud, it's hard not to wonder if short-term profits, a lack of architectural thinking about security and resilience, and long-term myopia aren't leading us in the wrong direction."

Submission + - students power supercomputer with bicycles (computerworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by

inkslinger77

on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @08:02PM

inkslinger77 writes: "A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedalling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC). They powered a SiCortex SC648 supercomputer with a Linux cluster of 648 CPUs and almost 1TB of main memory in a single cabinet. The system is low-powered and draws 1,200 watts without needing special power supplies or cooling..."

Comment Re:Weakness of DNS (Score 1) 93

by johnwarburton on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @11:07PM (#19331973) Attached to: DNS Complexity

The DNS system relies on 13 servers

Ahhh, maybe not. It would be better to say the "root servers" are made up of quite a number of servers implementing some level of high availability which usually requires more than one server.

For example, the F root server, operated by Mr Vixie's ISC, is 40 distributed servers around the world accessed by a Hierarchical Anycast technique

John

Journal Journal: Subliminal Rewards breed harder workers

Journal by lpq on Sunday April 15, 2007 @10:38PM

From an article in Live Science, researchers have found that subliminal stimulation can be used to stimulate people to work harder. How long before we see this in the workplace masked (or buried) in the background hum in an office?

Information Technology and Voting 128

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 07, 2006 @04:20PM from the matter-of-trust dept.

ChelleChelle writes, "In an interview in ACM Queue, Douglas W. Jones and Peter G. Neumann attempt to answer the question: Does technology help or hinder election integrity?" From the article: "Work in this area is as politically loaded as work on evolution or stem cells. Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections... One of the problems in public discussions of voting-system integrity is that the different participants tend to point to different threats. Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers. Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."

Sysadmin Toolbox Top Ten 304

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday March 24, 2006 @12:58PM from the pick-your-poison dept.

Linux.com is running a user writeup of several handy tools by an up-and-coming Linux user. It is always interesting to see how newer users are approaching system customization. What have some of the more seasoned Linux power-users and sys admins put in their "toolbox top 10", and why?

Green Geek Beer 195

Posted by Zonk on Saturday March 18, 2006 @04:28AM from the envirobeer dept.

DigiDave writes "A time honored tradition on St Patty's Day is to drink green beer. But some breweries go out of their way to make sure that the brewskies we drink are always green, by using environmentally friendly brewing methods. The makers of Fat Tire, for example, use a cogeneration process that involves anaerobic bacteria turning wastewater into methane gas for power."

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