World: r3wp

For those that collect programming languages;  HoltSoft the developers 
of Turing have gone out of business.  Dr Holt has moved on.  Turing 
is in wide spread use amongst Ontario High Schools.  (Sad, my home 
province pumped out an entire generation of programmers of a dead 
training language)  Anyway, they had posted it free for non-commercial 
use  on their website, which is now shutdown.   The admin of compsci.ca 
has posted it to their forum board.  This could well be a time limited 
offer.   I don't know all the details of Turing, but this version 
was commercial and proprietary before the shutdown announcement and 
posting of the free copies.   http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/

thanks.  Was it used only in Grade 14?  My fear is that UNICON could 
become a 'collectible' ( we pronounce it as in 'honey-comb' - sweet 
and well-constructed ).  No 'but the users suck big-time" jokes, 
OK?

I'm not real sure, but some of the people on the compsci forum mention 
learning it right it grade 9, some in 10, some in 11.  Again, it 
seems to be Ontario.   Let's hope UnIcon lives to a ripe old age. 
 Turing, not so sure; it was designed for teaching but as we all 
know; you're first is hard to forget and it may take on a life of 
its own, similar to the whole Pascal field.

and so I find TXL at http://www.txl.ca/

Ch v6.0 is out.  Slower than 5.5 on my Win98 machine, but they fixed 
a few bugs, probably added others.

I still get freaked out by Ch.   Mixing shell, C and C++ at a console 
feels weird
C:/ch/> char *s = `date`
C:/ch/> s
Wed Apr 16 03:33:37 Eastern Daylight Time 2008
C:/ch/> free(s)

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/04/18/commodore_lawsuits/

I read a Danish newsarticle today that said that a technology group 
that works for the Danish government suggested that all PCs would 
have to undergo periodical physical examinations in order to be usable 
on the internet, quite like we have to put our cars through examinations 
every X kilometres to make sure they are safe to ride. It's hard 
to grasp how incredibly stupid that suggestion is.

Since we now have a broken patient journal system thanks to government 
policies on how such software should be built, as predicted by 12 
year olds, I wouldn't put it out of the question that they would 
actually try to do this.

We'll know what happened when we don't hear from you any more :-)

I know what you mean. I worked in the Dutch government organisation 
that was supposed to push our electronic patient files

I'm confused, what would be an example of what would "fail" the computer?

All I can say is, if my car has an OS, and it was Windows, well....you 
all know that should not be allowed on the streets...

Interesting - Apple buys PA-Semi, producer of low voltage PPC chips 
- http://www.osnews.com/story/19672/Apple_Buys_Chip_Designer

Reichart, the problem is of course that you can't possibly tell that. 
Would my Macbook not be OK'ed, because it does not run Norton Antivirus? 
We could write a few thousand more examples like that. Perhaps a 
couple of million.

Looks like the OLPC road is getting more bumpy. I don't get however 
how this will help the Sugar UI by running WinXP underneath:

http://www.thestate.com/technology-wire/story/383365.html

If they had made the OLPC from edible components, it would have been 
more useful.

maybe the weakening USD make it so much tougher to achieve the goal.

It's another trainwreck

The weakening USD would only make it more affordable, though

My assumptions are as follows:

1. the same USD can now buy less stuffs


2. weak USD has cause oil price to go up and in turn this translate 
to higher manufacturing production cost for the components.


3. The weak USD can now import less components from the manufacturing 
countries like Korea, China etc.


It is with the above logic that I said it will be tougher to achieve 
the OLPC @ US$100 goal.

I may be wrong though.

4.  Weaker USD may also mean less "nice people" funding OLPC out 
of goodness of heart.

A weaker USD is the best way to get rid of national debt fast.

MS Mesh concept (kind of IOS NG), ironically presented by guy called 
Ori Amiga - http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=399964
(looked at the low res video)

A weaker US dollar makes US products a more attractive offer.

Yes, the design work is done in the US, so that gets cheaper to pay 
for foreign countries

Production is in Asia and it's shipped all over the world, so it 
would be silly to tunnel that through the US

The tag price in dollars may go up, but if the rate between Asian 
currencies and the currency of the buying country stays the same, 
it would compensate it

http://ejohn.org/blog/running-java-in-javascript/

Well, there you go. :-)

Ah, finally proof that the world is backwards :-)

The funny part is when you click through to the running Ruby in Javascript 
article, where they show that Ruby-in-Javascript runs 10 times faster 
than standard Ruby.

interesting

Sorry, 2.71 times improvement on Firefox 2, 5 times on Firefox 3.

I think a lot of the improvement is the Ruby 1.8.2 versus 1.9.0 improvement, 
where they made changes to the language to make it faster.

For the security minded, there is a new startup at www.Yubico.com 
with a cool new usb wafer that generates OTP (one time passwords).

It is small, light, and cheap (currently $35.00).  But the really 
neat thing about it is it can be combined with a service like www.MashedLife.com 
which can manage all of your website accounts with a secure login. 
 With OTP, keyloggers are not effective anymore.  It seems like a 
neat idea.  You can listen to Steve Gibson review at www.twit.tv/sn141. 
 If you want just the Yubico stuff, advance the audio stream to about 
3/4 the way through at about 1:15 to skip the RSA stuff before.

http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/

Adobe are opening the FLV and SWF format.

I get a feeling that's an important piece of news.  Whoa.

... and another nail in the coffin for the View ....

it would be, if we kept the focus on View being a Flash competitor. 
:-)

We should start to think, how to use various situations to ours advantage 
- e.g. - R3 implemented in JavaScript? (would be slow) R3 core being 
able to use with JavaScript? R3 Core and GUI using Flash/Silverlight? 
R3/View and output generators to Flash/Silverlight/Web (httml, css, 
js)?

Petr re nails;  I don't think so ... maybe, but not in the grand 
scheme.  I only got into flash because Oldes has a REBOL dialect. 
 I only got into REBOL, because it Rocks!   Feel sad for those that 
don't get it.  It really is a "secret weapon" for those that use 
it.


If you believe the TIOBE numbers, REBOL is still well below 0.09 
percent (the lowest they list of the top 50)  We have lots and lots 
of wiggle room.   Paul's new database, Henriks work on Forum, the 
Doc, R3; all positive moves.  I think the only thing that may give 
REBOL a 'quick explosive adoption boost' is a Free Software announcement, 
but I like and respect Carl's decision in that area.  So slow and 
steady may win the race in the long haul.   REBOL is well beyond 
the 'hype' phase and we still love it.  And every few days now, people 
like John give others yet another reason to check it out.  Long live 
R2, Longer live R3.


Once Reichart gets his empire built, that will only be another boost 
to the public face of REBOL as well.   Gabriele, BrianH, Ashley, 
 Graham, umm everybody; making large and small contributions adds 
to the fire.


Well and you doing some high level marketing can't hurt either.  
Keep it up and keep digging.  REBOL is in for the duration from what 
I can see.  And hey, I'm trying my best to drag some of the up and 
coming coders on compsci.ca to the REBOL light.  At least we know 
that REBOL is not a flash in the pan.   We do need to promote people 
like Sunanda a little more perhaps.  The base of rebol.org is terrific 
but it's mosly hidden, much like Altme.

Go rebols go!

I don't think moving to the free software change as much as btiffin 
expect. There are relatively low number of programmers able to do 
"low level" works in rebol iself, and I don't expect there would 
a number of it by the miracle of going to Freesoft. Anyway the most 
awaited change, opening the library acces already happend and nothing 
great was heard/changed.

I actually agree Pavel;  I was hinting, that it would be the "news" 
of the announcement, that would hit the services that would pique 
interest and give a quick boost to adoption (and I didn't mention 
it, but by quick, I was thinking a one or two day "news" boost). 
 And yeah, so far, the 2.7.6 release hasn't even blipped on many 
of the news services, so you've made me rethink the original statement 
as well.
 

I still believe slow and steady will win more than anything.  Back 
to the TIOBE, lower than some 0.09 percent  (magical stats) number; 
we could double the number of rebols tomorrow and still only be 20 
per 10'000 programmers.  :)   Lots and lots of wiggle room.

Wine 1.0  is close.   Release Candidate expected next week.    http://www.winehq.org

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-translate-adds-10-new-languages.html

Flash Player 10 beta version - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

post that to r3-alpha All group, please .... it is not to make us 
more nervous, but to be realistic. If the speed of View development 
is as-is, we might as well close the door soon ...

OLPC 2.0 plans - http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/20/olpc-laptop-microsoft-tech-personal-cx_ag_0520olpc.html?partner=yahootix

Quite nice AJAX widgets - http://www.componentart.com/default.aspx

RISC vs. CISC makes sense after 20 years - http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/risc-vs-cisc-mobile-era.ars

If one has to criticize NASA, it is that they aren't spending enough 
money on toilets:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24841375/

I stand corrected:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19623499/