Thanks to Polygon for posting the Japanese games industry's half-year console hardware and software stats on their site. They summarize: "Sales of Sony's PlayStation 2 console significantly outpaced all competitors... surprisingly, Square-Enix topped all software publishers by a large margin." As far as Japanese hardware sales go, the GameCube (8.3 percent) and especially Xbox (1.6 percent) are falling ever-further behind the Playstation 2 (58.5 percent.) Regarding software, Square Enix may not have expected Final Fantasy X-2 to sell almost 2 million copies, but it only boosted their already top-selling Japanese output. Nintendo's second place in software may be more due to their handheld output, not including (?) the separately-listed and top-selling Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire for GBA, rather than their GameCube titles (though some GC titles like Animal Crossing have been surprise hits.)

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Gamesindustry.biz article describing Nintendo's attempts to stop European retailers importing Gamecube/GBA games. According to the piece, "..cease and desist orders have been issued to a number of independent retailers by Nintendo this week, demanding that they stop selling imported Nintendo titles and supply details of their suppliers." With handheld titles such as Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire lacking regional lock-outs, and even US/Japanese Gamecube games being playable with the help of Freeloader, Nintendo are clearly worried about imported titles taking away from native European sales, but as Gamesindustry.biz points out, "..the move will prevent [consumers] from playing titles which Nintendo of Europe has failed to release in this territory, such as the highly acclaimed Animal Crossing."

DJSpray writes "I've written a review of three books about the Ruby programming language, available on my weblog here. The three books are Yukihiro Matsumoto's Ruby in a Nutshell from O'Reilly, Hal Fulton's The Ruby Way (Sams), and Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt (Addison-Wesley). Note that the third book is available online here for those who prefer that sort of thing. Executive summary: while I have found several of the other O'Reilly Nutshell series books to be excellent, this one is riddled with errors, confusing writing, and omissions, and does not live up to O'Reilly's usual standards. Fulton's book is filled with good cookbook examples and well-written explanatory material, as well as solid tutorial examples, but it is not structured as a reference. The Pragmatic Programmer's book works well as a reference and covers language features in increasing depth, but with fewer examples. Ruby beginners may find that the latter two books actually complement each other nicely, while I can't recommend this edition of the Nutshell book at all."

Makarand writes "Although slowing down a light beam is as simple as passing it through a window pane, slowing down light dramatically has always involved extremely low temperatures and rooms full of complex equipment. A new small device developed at the University of Rochester can now slow light down to 127 mph without using the room-filling mechanisms previously required. The new technique uses a laser beam to create a hole in the absorption spectrum of a common ruby at room temperatures that can allow a second laser beam, with a frequency slightly different than the first laser, to shine through that hole at a greatly reduced speed. This light slowing device might find applications in the telecommunications industry."

A reader writes:" Persistence for object-oriented systems is an incredibly cumbersome task to deal with when building many kinds of applications: mapping objects to tables, XML, flat files or use some other non-OO way to represent data destroys encapsulation completely, and is generally slow, both at development and at runtime. The Object Prevalence concept, developed by the Prevayler team, and implemented in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Delphi, can be a great a solution to this mess. The concept is pretty simple: keep all the objects in RAM and serialize the commands that change those objects, optionally saving the whole system to disk every now and then (late at night, for example). This architecture results in query speeds that many people won't believe until they see for themselves: some benchmarks point out that it's 9000 times faster than a fully-cached-in-RAM Oracle database, for example. Good thing is: they can see it for themselves. Here's an article about it, in case you want to learn more."

Mitchell writes "People from several language communities came together to create a joint year-in-review for Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl."

Ursus Maximus writes "Scripting Language City is for folks who want to learn more about the future of this increasingly important subset of the programming universe. Scripting languages are not just for odd jobs anymore ;-))). Special attention is paid to four languages in Python City, Ruby City, Perl City, and JavaScript Expert Systems which includes a Scripting Language Chooser Program as well as a Basketball Expert Ssystem and a Football Expert System that are certainly something different from the usual same old mouse-over scripts usually found on JavaScript sites. There is also a web spider program that scrapes the web daily and provides updated lists of new web articles on scripting languages, with seperates outputs for each of the featured languages. as added bonuses, there is a page of essays and resources on open source and the free software movement called Farnham's Freehold and a page called The Linux Chronicles that follows the experiences of a Linux newbie with wit and humor. Not a slick professional web site, Scripting Language City is a work of love by a paramour of everything connected with scripting languages, open source, and the programming of free software."

phyxeld writes "RubyCocoa 0.4.0 is out. From the sf.net page: 'RubyCocoa is a Mac OS X framework that allows Cocoa programming in the Object-Oriented Scripting Language Ruby. RubyCocoa allows writing a Cocoa application in Ruby. It allows creating and using a Cocoa object in a Ruby script. In Cocoa application, mixture of program written by both Ruby and Objective-C is possible.' It's always nice to see more GPL software in the Mac OS X world."

Roger Curry writes "Letters to Michael Faraday in 1856 from previously unknown victorian experimentalist Ernest Glitch have recently been discovered. The history of science may need to be revised. His letters, and accounts of his work, would appear to indicate the observation of laser action in air, a Victorian Nitrogen Laser, more than a century before Maiman first demonstrated his ruby laser. Also, in a letter dated 8th July 1856 he notes the crystallisation of the fullerene C60 some 150 years before Kroto. Amazingly, there are also accounts of a Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engine detailing the use of hypergolic propellants and deLaval nozzles, a Victorian Tesla Coil, with reference to a possible medieval Coil, and Manned Flight achieved long before the Wright Bros., using Multiple Valve-less Pulse Jets."

earnest_deyoung asks: "Twenty-five years ago Frederick Brooks laid out a vision of the future of software engineering in "No Silver Bullet." At the time he thought improvements in the process of software creation were most likely to come from object-oriented programming, of-the-shelf components, rapid prototyping, and cultivation of truly great designers. I've found postings on /. where people tout all sorts of design tools, from languages like Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk to design aids and processes like UML and eXtreme Programming. I'm in a Computer Science degree program, and I keep wondering what "improvements" over the last quarter century have actually brought progress to the key issue: more quickly and more inexpensively developing software that's more reliable?"

David Kennedy writes "This is a review of Tom DeMarco's recent Broadway title, Slack, sub-titled Getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency." Relax, and read on below to find out how good a case DeMarco makes for keeping slack.

Not only did Larry Wall answer your questions, but he said they were excellent questions. You've got to love Larry Wall, not just because he's a nice guy and created Perl, but also because he is the first Slashdot interview guest ever to send his answers preformatted in squeaky-clean HTML. We appreciate this like you wouldn't believe. They're great answers, too -- straightforward, heartfelt, and entertaining. Enjoy!

At least two LUGs with which I am involved have talked about starting community ISPs, and I'm sure many other computer user groups have had the same thought. This is why we buttonholed Carl Oppedahl of Colorado's Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative and asked him to answer your questions. (This interview and the Ruby Ranch FAQs should almost be required reading for anyone thinking about starting their own community ISP.)

The Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative (RRIC) is one of the best-known member-owned ISPs around. It provides DSL service to the Ruby Ranch neighborhood in Summit County, Colorado. Carl Oppedahl, the RRIC "main man," has agreed to answer Slashdot questions about the possibilities and pitfalls of setting up something similar in other areas. Please read the RRIC FAQs before posting a question so that you don't ask something Carl has already answered a million times. Otherwise, the usual Slashdot interview rules apply: One question per post, we'll email Carl 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

BorrisYeltsin writes "The Parrot project has just released a functional compiler for Parrot. Almost all of the previous Apocalypses have been implemented as well as some other toys, including but not limited to: Ruby and Python parsers, BASIC and Scheme interpreters and a Forth compiler, the team are now working on Perl 6 regexes. Check it out at cvs.perl.org."

wackybrit writes: "The concept of the virtual machine is one of the most important concepts in computer science today. Emulators use virtual machines, operating systems use virtual machines (Microsoft's .NET), and programming languages use virtual machines (Perl, Java)". Read on for his review of Virtual Machine Design and Implementation in C/C++, an attempt to examine and explain virtual machines and the concepts which allow them to exist.

Thrazzle Throne writes "The folks in rural Ruby Ranch got tired of lame dial-up server. They fought the phone company for use of their un-used lines and installed their own Dsl service. Very cool read."

Reader Cole Tucker writes with this review: "The Ruby Developer's Guide was written with the intent to provide an overview of Ruby tools used for developing real-world applications. The book touches on a variety of areas, from GUI development to neural networks, and discusses existing Ruby packages that developers can take advantage of. In the end, the book comes out as a Ruby version of the Perl Cookbook." To see what he means by that, read on below for the rest of Cole's assessment of this book.

philipx writes "From the ruby-talk archives here's a little interesting snippet from a post you have to check out: "Here at Google, we're about to start offering an API to our search-engine, so that people can programmatically use Google through a clean and clearly defined interface, rather than have to resort to parsing HTML." It goes on talking about SOAP and I think this is utterly cool."

Dre writes: "Today marks a special coincidence. First, Adam Treat released the initial version of Qt bindings for C#, which consists of 476 Qt classes converted to C#. The bindings work with the Mono compiler, runtime environment and class libraries, enabling a fully Open Source implementation of C# for Qt. While not yet ready for a real application, Adam has managed to write and execute a Hello World! program (screenshot). KDE bindings are on the drawing board. Shortly thereafter, Phil Thompson, Jim Bublitz and theKompany.com released KDE 2 and KDE 3 bindings for Python. Together with the Java, Objective C and C bindings in the kdebindings module, as well as the Ruby bindings, KDE is providing developers a broad gamut of application development languages."