World: r3wp

But, there is still a chance. REBOL was made for what it was made 
for - lightweight distributed apps. We are scrapping "the bad", and 
remedying situation with R3. Does web in general throws away bad 
ideas? Mostly not. Where situation will get more interesting is the 
compatibility. In the past, there was IE, then FF, and Opera. Now 
Apple and Google entered the game, with more significant browser 
market share. We will see, what headache all those new browser cause 
to developers - I mean - various incompatibilities between browsers. 
Not to mention mobile browser incarnations, which are often separate 
projects ...

Ah, so REBOL was a bad idea after all. Who wants to run a OS (REBOL) 
inside another OS?


As I see it, REBOL is a language with some OS-related parts. The 
Viewtop for example. But that never became a huge success. Maybe 
because it's not such a good idea with another desktop on top of 
the OS desktop?

Making REBOL a real OS directly on the hardware might be a good idea 
at some point.

Geomol, the Viewtop has nothing to do with it. REBOL file name conventions 
are different from those of the host OS (%/c/file instead of C:\file), 
it does not give you access to the OS functions directly, and it 
has its own graphic rendering engine that does not use hw acceleration 
of anything (faces in R2, GOBs in R3).

if it was just a language, you would be using directx, MFC, etc. 
on Windows, QT or the GTK or Linux, and Cocoa on OSX, regardless 
of whether you're writing the Viewtop or a little game.

Gabriele - wrong - Qt is not native toolkit. You consider it being 
one, just because it is cross platform and widely adopted? By naming 
Qt, you could admit, that even View is native one, whereas VID is 
not. It does not matter that View uses its own UI elements, as much 
as GTK on Windows looked in the past (when I checked) non-native 
too (dunno if they changed it or not ...)

So, what's the native toolkit on Linux?

How do you define a toolkit "native"?

I guess, one that doesn't pretend to be a toolkit :-)

this seems to be a pretty huge announcement - http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/03/05/wolframalpha-is-coming/

Reichart, does your friend at AdaptiveAI know about any of this do 
you think? Is he a friend of Stephen Wolfram by chance?

Adrian, there was an article about it that points out how it's not 
really AI, but rather a system that can compute answers. it is surely 
a breakthrough and it's going to change our lives maybe... but that 
is sort of like google, in that it is a support tool for intelligence, 
not intelligence. that is, it is a tool that intelligent beings use. 
so, AI systems will find things like Google and Wolfram Alpha extremely 
useful, because they allow independent learning (without humans having 
to teach).

I didn't mean to imply that it was AI - I don't know if what AdaptiveAI 
uses "real" AI despite their name (though it's hard to tell from 
the info on the site). I was just thinking that they might use similar 
approaches and was curious to know if Reichart's friend who works 
there was possibly an acquaintance of Stephen Wolfram's.

OK, I'll sit and wait for the revolution to happen :-)

Wolfram has to have good PR - even our main Czech news portal is 
reporting on it :-) There was even link to already existing - http://tones.wolfram.com

I wonder if this is going to be a parser similar to Inform-7 ... 
without the gaming fun.  ;)

Don't know, I'm having dinner with him soon, I'm sure it will come 
up.

Mazatech release AmanithVG 4.0, supporting OpenVG 1.1 http://www.amanithvg.com/project.html

Wouldn't this be a good library to be used in replacement/combination 
with AGG?

I tried their Tiger example. GLE crash on my system. SRE give me 
138 fps at full quality on my system.

Is it so small as AGG? Does it have good license for us? I thought 
that Amanith is indeed based upon AGG, but maybe I am wrong :-)

IIRC Cyphre had some old comparisons, and AGG was the fastest one. 
There is still some place to optimise stuff. E.g. bitmap/image node 
caching is not done in View yet ...

The GLE version does not crash here, but is 2x slower then the SRE 
(with the best quality). It really looks that the hardware acceleration 
is not the best way.. at least if you don't want to make another 
Quake like shoot-them-all clone.

Studies sponsored by NASA show that an embedded software bug introduced 
in the requirements phase is 130 times more expensive to fix during 
integration and 368 times more expensive after rollout of the embedded 
device.

Do they give examples of such bugs?

I found it on a blog, so I don't have the original article.

The wrong semicolon in the FORTRAN program that made an explorer 
miss Jupiter by 100,000 kilometers is a good candidate

I'm not sure this is "tech", but sort of....


http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/26/california-may-ban-black-cars/

http://www.google.com/ventures/

Google looking for apps to invest in ...

I'm going to put a proposal to Google.  What would one expect to 
pay for a full time top-notch REBOL programmer?  A web designer? 
 Some to do documentation?

Graham: I have a old Amiga buddy working for Google/I could ask him 
what the scale is

Alan, I was meaning market rates and I guess the only one who knows 
that is Reichart!  ( and his employees ... )

Sounds like they're following Paul Graham's VC model. 


How much people charge depends on a lot of things. Where they live, 
whether it's their main gig, and how long the contract is being important 
criteria. I've been quoted from USD$30/Hr to USD$125/Hr when I was 
looking for contractors.

It is a complex formula.... 


What hours total, length of contract, freedom to work which ever 
hours in the window, etc.

You might make $500 an hour, but you get one job a month doing this. 
 While there is an open slot to get $10 an hour, you can work when 
ever and where ever you want, and the work is stupid simple.  you 
might take both.

What's the average wage for a REBOL programmer at Qtask?

I should post this to puzzles instead!

NYTimes: I.B.M. Reportedly Will Buy Rival Sun for $7 Billion (or 
9.50 a share)


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/technology/business-computing/03blue.html?_r=1&ref=technology&pagewanted=print

Still not final announcement yet.

in 20 years from now, we will be hearing a merger from software incorporated 
and hardware incorporated.  so there will only be one company with 
all patents for anyting related to digital processing.


and they'll say that its not an antitrust issue, cause there is another 
company called objects incorporated which rivals it.


these mega mergers are portents that the end of capitalism is looming. 
just like when rome had nothing new to conquer and that made their 
system obsolete.  capitalism NEEDs real competition.  not a two way 
brawl of giants for which the only real hope is annexation or swatting. 
 every merger of any company, means a lot of jobs get lost by way 
of cutting redundant services.   one walmart might employ 200 minimum 
wage people, but they destroy at least as many administration and 
middle paying jobs.


what can all the clients of sun and IBM gain from this? only the 
loss of a viable option to leverage in dealing lower costs for their 
machines, forcing IBM and sun to stay competitive.  Yess... you'll 
say there is still other companies... but the list is growing pretty 
short.  the industry "leaders" is starting to be more of a gang than 
a group.  :-(

A while ago I posted about a2i2, they are doing adaptive A.I.  I 
got to visit them today.

They are doing some fun stuff.  One of my friends is now on their 
team.


Looks like they are just a few months away from something we can 
"talk to" :)

...and, you never know, we might might find a way to allow Qtask 
to interact with it.

I can even "talk to" stone, if I don't mind it will not reply :-) 
So actually - does their thing reply? :-)

Very well, and is even polite when you don't know what you are saying 
:)

are they going to connect that to wolfram alpha? ;)

now imagine you make a phone call, and this "something you can talk 
to" responds, and has access to google, wolfram alpha... and qtask.

Wow, maybe the combination of these two technologies can find a way 
out of the mess the financial system is in - like, "Hang the bastards 
that caused it!"

Very fun little movie made to show how magnetic waves might "look" 
(and sound).


http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/root/Magnetic_Movie/Magnetic.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jyBiECoS3Q


Cool insect bot. One can think about why it's so much easier to build 
insect robots than humanoid/biped robots.

Well said.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jyBiECoS3Q

Some good news ... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090414084627.htm