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Wall Street broke a two-day losing streak yesterday despite poor housing and economic data that reinforced concerns of a long recession.

Advocates for the Ruby programming language on Wednesday hailed its usefulness as an enterprise application development option, especially in a down economy.The Merb framework for Ruby also was championed, during a session at the QCon conference in San Francisco. Speakers also defended Ruby and the Ruby on Rails framework against critics citing slow performance and scalability problems.Ruby serves as an alternative for companies seeking more affordable software development, said speaker Greg Pollack, CTO at Rails Envy, which offers Rails-related services.'With Ruby, I can write less code to do more things, and I can probably give them a more affordable option,' offering a smaller initial investment and less risk, Pollack said.Rails applications can be scaled via techniques such as the memcached application, Pollack said in an interview after his presentation. 'Really, the way you scale Rails is just like you scale any other Web app,' he said.Ruby reaches beyond the Web, Pollack said. I

Canadiens president fears Canadian teams could spiral back into dark economic days before lockout

Federal reserve officials slashed economic growth forecasts through 2009 and some believed even deeper interest rate cuts may be needed if growth slows further, minutes of their October policy meeting show.

Economic crisis takes its toll

Carney argues for stronger market oversight

Oil prices fell below $53 to almost a two-year low Thursday in Asia as investors, egged on by plummeting stock markets, priced in lower crude demand from a global economic downturn that's shaping up as the worst in decades. Light, sweet crude for December...

How much is spam costing your company? Google unveiled a nifty little calculator Wednesday to help you add it up.It's part of a marketing campaign for Google Message security, the online spam-filtering service based on the Postini technology Google acquired last year. "We know in these tougher economic times that companies are trying to figure out how they can save," said Adam Dawes, a Google product manager.[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]To figure out the cost of spam, you enter things like the number of workers at your company, how much you pay them, how much spam they have to deal with, and presto: Google figures out how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents. Of course it also tells you how long it would take for Google's service to pay for itself at your shop.For companies doing their spam-fighting in-house, there's also a "Total Cost of

NEW YORK (Reuters) - stocks plunged to their lowest in five-and-a-half years on Wednesday as investors girded for a lengthy economic downturn and automotive executives predicted a far-reaching calamity without a government lifeline.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal reserve officials have pared their outlook for economic growth through 2009 to minimal levels and are prepared to cut interest rates further, while concern has risen that a deflationary spiral may take hold.