Archive | October, 2008

Sun, IBM and Microsoft Host Workshop to Combine VM Efforts

By on October 1, 2008 in Programming

Sun recently held a 3-day workshop where technical leads and directors from IBM and Microsoft were invited to join together at the Sun campus to try and work on consolidating Virtual Machine efforts going forward; more specifically focused on developing solutions that would yield Java-like performance for Ruby, Python, PHP, and Scala on the JVM. [...]

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Netflix Releases Developer API, Surprisingly Powerful

By on October 1, 2008 in Programming

Netflix released it’s long-awaited developer API yesterday (JavaScript, REST) and to a lot of people’s surprise, was quite a bit more open-ended than expected: We’re pleased to announce the availability of the Netflix API. The team has been hard at work on this and we’re glad we can finally let people see what we’ve built. [...]

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Maps of the Real World

By on October 1, 2008 in Life & World

You may have seen these types of maps before, they are essentially maps of the world, distorted to represent a specific statistic or two. For example the image above is the increase of CO2 emissions between the years 1980 and 2000, notice how significant the US, India and China are. Now this is a map [...]

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Redneck Woman Clarified Why Obama Would be a Bad President

By on October 1, 2008 in Humor & Fun

… that title is a bit misleading, let’s try this one: Redneck woman, barely able to speak, tried to explain that Obama is an unsuitable president because of his name… because aye-rabs are cutting soldiers heads off in Iraq. It’s pretty much iron-clad, I get that, what I also appreciate is how these redneck’s accents [...]

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Call of Duty: World at War Co-Op Gameplay Blowout

By on October 1, 2008 in Video Games

We got pumped about Call of Duty: World at War (Call of Duty 5) back in June when it was announced; then we got un-pumped a bit when we saw it was Treyarch doing it (the same folks that did Call of Duty 3), then we got re-pumped when we saw they had engineered in [...]

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Please Write Your State Representa… PSYCHE! Just Kidding

By on October 1, 2008 in Life & World

With the country up in arms over the $700bn bailout vote through the house but now getting ready to be voted on in the Senate, a lot of Americans want their voices heard on the issue… and heard immediately! Fortunately for us, visiting House.gov and writing to our representative is as easy as clicking the [...]

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Using XRuby to Speed up Ruby Script Performance

By on October 1, 2008 in Programming

Do you want to squeeze the most performance out of your Ruby scripts? If so, you might be interested in a little project called XRuby. According to the website “in most benchmark tests, XRuby runs faster than Ruby 1.8.5″. Personally, I was a bit skeptical, and you may be too. So let’s explore this lofty [...]

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