AltME groups: search

no, because I am not fluent with C :-(  .... although I bought two 
books, and I succesfully set-up Extension and try loading SQLite 
DLL in C :-) So - I should be at least ready to test ....

I have... (iPhone) and I do wish more things where gesture driven 
I'd love to do more things one handed.  with the iphone, you are 
just about forced to use it two handed-for anything... the touch 
screen is quite awkward to use with thumbs I find.


but these gestures have to be user controlable.... cause for example, 
itunes allows me to shake the phone and it randomizes to a new track... 
well when the phone is jacked into my car... hehehe, it can be *interesting* 
 ;-)

I would love to have *fewer* things to be gesture driven, and it's 
not very often that I invoke a gesture on purpose, simply because 
I'm shifting in the seat or getting up from a chair or moving around, 
because I can't see the display for sun light. There are just too 
many ways to accidentally invoke a gesture with a handheld device, 
when the state you are changing is on the device itself. This only 
works if you are changing simple states, like a pedometer, but not 
with a "complex" UI as on a phone.


You have two conflicting requirements of precision levels for performing 
adjustments to a user interface, comparable to playing chess on a 
trampoline. It doesn't work.

Say a 45% tilt, followed by a double shake, followed by a lateral 
motion, to trigger some task

 - so how I'm I supposed to remember that? what if I'm lying on the 
 couch and not standing up?

no, they have accelerometers too - with this processor it's all about 
the precision and the ability to follow relative motion to a much 
finer degree - there is quite a bit more here than just a simple 
accelerometer

actually no, because: 1. the actions are 3 dimensional and you have 
to have a 3-dimensional frame of reference to perform the motion. 
2. you have no force feedback, so you have to observe the screen 
while performing the motion. this is not like pouring a glass of 
water.

as said, it doesn't matter if the sensors can sense 1/10th degree 
and milimeter precision. it's the basic principle that fails.

and I don't have feedback on my mouse gestures either - yet I use 
them all the time

gestures can use combinations of actions - to reduce accidental triggering, 
and to be appropriate or maybe mimic abstractly the action to be 
performed

Maxim, it could probably be used, but it fails more than it should: 
I own the Mass Effect game, which allows movement of the character 
via tilting the iPod, but you need a frame of reference to do that, 
hence you must sit very still when playing the game, and you must 
perform calibration, if you change your position.

Another app is a bit more reasonable: A star chart app that I have, 
will change the field of view if I move the iPod over my head, perpendicular 
to my face, but it has limited usefulness.

One where it makes perfect sense is a sleep application, where I 
place the iPod on my bed and it passively registers motions I do 
throughout the night and then records them. Based on the motion it 
wakes me at the correct time in the morning. This requires no feedback 
to the display, so it makes good sense here.

I agree that on the current iPod (and other devices that have just 
this - like my ThinkPad), the usefulness of the accelerometer is 
debatable

well, if you keep saying that there is no difference, there's not 
much to discuss - since the whole point of the preceeding discussion 
is that the new functionality brought in by the processor and gyroscope 
is what makes a difference

a viable example is the tilting to slide a list.  


on the iphone, the tilting is VERY slow to react cause its trying 
to guess the tilt based on acceleration and must be filtered.  so 
the lag is annoying.  Full body Motion capture has the same kind 
of problems with accelerator sensors.  with a gyro, the tilt isn't 
"guessed" its actual, so you can easily make it precise.

currently (and I keep emphasizing this), you can't even measure some 
of things this will allow

I agree with yout point Henrik, but I also think that most people 
use gestures as gimicks and haven't yet understood how to use them 
efectively.


I hate having to use two hands to quickly browse through contacts 
and pics.  I'd rather just tilt my phone and shake up& down slightly, 
like if I was letting sand (or cardboard cards) trickle down on a 
flat surface.


the gestures have to mimick real life or be very obvious (like turning 
the phone upside down).

Maxim, maybe it depends on the size of your hand and possibly a thicker 
iPhone, but I can browse photos, make calendar appointments, browse 
webpages, select music and type with one hand easily on the iPod. 
No gestures needed. I'd think I have average size hands.

I have rather long fingers... I'm not saying I can't ... just that 
its awkwards to use one handed.   naturally, I'll always end up using 
it with the phone in my left hand and my right hand touching the 
surface.

thumbs don't have near the same mobility and speed as the other fingers, 
unless you only use rotation of the first knuckle. 


the momet you have to flex the thumb, it becomes slow.   which is 
why we'll naturall hold the phone laterally and browse using thumbs 
sideways... but doing so vertically isn't nearly as ergonomic.

AdrianS, and I think you're underestimating what it takes to learn 
and do these things in practice.

usually the thumb will stay put and only the index will move around, 
for example.

voice for me could be useful as a replacement for typing, but not 
much else. you again have to remember a set of commands to manipulate 
a user interface. the intelligence here is still not Star Trek level, 
and I don't think it can be useful for more than dictation generally, 
before we get to that level.

I would think that you could do some pretty accurate distance measurements 
using a combination motion tracking and camera

one or two word voice commands (i.e. a limited grammar) is not hard 
to do and would just add to the kind of gesture filtering that can 
be done

oh don't count this as done... H.264 is a better codec, and MPEG-LA 
will surely try to go to court with some patent infringement.


but hey, we've got google fighting it (which has some cash), so court 
case could be lost by MPEG-LA.

its the latest codec to be standardized, and its the basis for all 
high-quality compression on DVDs and Blue-Ray.

overall conclusion of that very detailed analysis:


VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile 
and VC-1.  It’s not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or 
High Profile.  If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can 
probably be improved.

Google has been playing around with that idea for a while, kind of 
announced it a year ago actually in the Google Wave group because 
they needed a way to allow people to make money with robots and gadgets. 
Robots and gadgets are both web apps and Chrome OS only runs web 
apps. They would be stupid not to do this, they *need* an app store 
for web apps.

Patents: I can't belieft that our high court is doing this!! Normally 
it's a very serious and responsible instituation...

Robert: Are you talking about german court and sw patents. It was 
huge (alarming) news in my sphere :/

This patent stuff really freaked me out at first but there seem to 
be ways to circumenvent it until (hopefully) the government kicks 
in and solves this mess. The BGH said software patents apply as soon 
as your software's design is influenced by the device it runs on, 
so if your software targets a virtual machine like Java it should 
be okay because then patents don't apply because no device influenced 
your software, you wrote it to run on software (the VM), not on a 
hardware device. That it runs on hardware is a mere coincidence but 
didn't influence you while writing the software. Could be the BGH 
will just revise their comment on this of course to also include 
virtual machines. Cross platform software could be okay too with 
this argumentation as long as you only write features that work on 
more than one device. So no iPhone specific stuff for example, but 
if the app runs without modification on an iPad, the iPhone and an 
iPod Touch it should be okay again, those are three completely different 
devices (computer, cell phone, music player) so you should be able 
to argue that you weren't influenced by them at all. You would argue 
instead that you were influenced by Cocoa Touch, which is software 
and not a device, so patents don't apply. This would also mean REBOL 
apps are okay, since your software is made to run in the REBOL interpreter 
and not on any specific device (unless you put some Mac specific 
calls in there but then you could argue you targeted the operating 
system which is software and not a device). If you can really get 
away with this kind of argumentation is a big question of course. 
The judge can decide on a whim if you're guilty or not, all the laws 
are open to interpretation for him.


I read one comment on this that gives me some hope. The german government 
uses a lot of Linux and they spent a lot of money to train their 
workers to use Linux. With this decision by the BGH, Linux is suddenly 
patent hell, so it's in the government's best interest to kick in. 
Sadly, they could just say "patents don't apply to the government" 
and be done with it.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/nvidia-ceo-netbooks-and-tablets-to-meld-hints-at-tegra-powered-webos-devices

Meego 1.0 core and netbook user experience released


http://meego.com/community/blogs/imad/2010/meego-v1.0-core-software-platform-netbook-user-experience-project-release

Czech server put prototype of iPhone 4G/HD under microscope, and 
found out, that the panel is not OLED, but IPS, resolution is 640x960, 
so that old apps will by probably scaled by system by using 2x2 pixels 
.... some photos here - http://iphonemania.mobilmania.cz/iPhone-HD-v-redakci-teste-se-na-fantasticky-displej

Hmm... well, than we need to watch the movie and check the scene.

{7303}{7418}And this is the year 2015?|- October 21, 2015. (subtitles)

Epic fail: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/14/france-launches-multi-lingual-tourist-website-it-goes-down-and-stays-down/

so there where 5 programers, one sysadmin, and 25 management in the 
group?   ;-)

Doc: it was much worse in Italy. costed like 2x that, when they opened 
it it was basically empty, and then they realized it was the most 
useless thing.

I looked at that, including a demo. The interface doesn't have an 
obvious way to switch between running applications or tell which 
applications are running. And it *does* have multiple running applications. 
It looks semi-pretty (with the exception of the WinXP Luna colors) 
but not very usable.

it does not seem powerful enough to replacy typing... but, it would 
be interesting to have that device on while you type / user the mouse 
and let the computer "learn" and see how much it can predict. if 
you also process what's coming from the camera and microphone maybe 
we can get something useful. probably needs much faster computers 
to do all that though.

Likely you'd do something similar to speech recognition and select 
words off the screen using the interface

and in BlindType it seems you do individual character presses

There's a local guy here named Barnaby Jack who showed on Black Hat 
how to remote break in to a cash dispensing machine ... overwrite 
the OS, and to start dispensing out cash!

Seems they allow remote login to change graphics, get reports etc, 
and this is a poorly protected vector

I don't think the UI was hard at all. My parents were able to use 
it without any problems (and they can't even rename a folder on their 
PCs), my sister had no trouble (and she's not much better than my 
parents with computers) and a friend of mine who is reeeeallly bad 
with computers (like, worst case scenario) figured everything out 
pretty much on her own (and she doesn't understand a word of english). 
I think the much bigger issues here were that people always tried 
to compare it to vastly different things (Skype, Facebook, Twitter, 
etc.) which made them completely oblivious to it's potential. It 
was also maybe hard to see the potential because third party adoption 
was really low. I think there are two reasons for the low adoption. 
For one, there was no real incentive for a developer to write an 
extension for Google because there were no real solutions to easily 
make money with Wave (an app store could have helped here, which 
Google planned to do at one point but never did). The other is something 
I don't understand at all, the API documentation. It's horrible. 
You have to look up everything in the source code because the docs 
tell you next to nothing. This hasn't improved at all over time and 
it's a shame because writing an extension for Wave is actually very, 
very easy and it allows you to do stuff that just wasn't possible 
before Wave unless yo spend a 100 times more time on it to get all 
the necessary behind the scenes stuff working.

Christoph, and I will suggest that what would have made it "magical" 
were simply a form of skin, but a little deeper in the form of a 
template.


This way, as an example, you could select a template for your "group" 
called "Soccer moms", and it would show you a calendar, a bunch of 
"starter threads", and a scratchpad, for example.
The engine was all there for this.


You could tweak your templates, and share them with others, which 
could be rated.

Well at least there are individuals and companies already saying 
that they will continue developing Wave so it isn't dead, it's only 
Google that gave up on it. One company completely integrated Wave 
into Outlook for example. I always thought it would be much nicer 
to have Wave running in a native application.

And so it's in this chart as well I guess.

bassically, it de-activates the session key.  so that a new login 
process is required.  since you may have several sessions opened 
at any time, this is very nice, and should be available for ALL on-line 
sites.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/microsoft-windows-phone-7-is-most-thoroughly-tested-mobile-platform-ever-released/9590?tag=mantle_skin;content


You'd think zdnet would grammar/spell check their blogs

Yesterday Microsoft’s new mobile platform Windows Phone 7 hit the 
RTM milestone, and in the official announcement Microsoft was keen 
to stress how mush tested had gone into this new platform.

...Huh, I skipped right over "mush" and saw that "tested" should 
be "testing"

two highlights of that "dog" are when it recuperates (in real time) 
when pushed sideways... the other is at the end... when it starts 
running and JUMPS over a 3 ft wide obstacle... look at how precisely 
its hind-legs land just beyond the obstacle... waiting for the proper 
balance to occur...

now THAT is downright scary

funny, I am currently in brazil and there is a gyrocopter producer 
here near sao paulo which I will visit next week.
will try a ride... :-))

You "really" want to learn to fly a helictoper? It takes a lot of 
study, is time consuming, very hard to get time on a machine, expensive, 
and, THEN what?

of course I really want to get the license. why not?
investing in personal abilities is always a good choice.
but in general you are right, making this license 
without the intention of some commercial usage could be 
seen as wasting time... execpting for me, at least I can 
add this to my fixed wing I made many years ago and what comes
after the THEN? well, the last time I flew is many years 
ago but hey man...it was a original refurbished tiger moth
at one of the coolest location ever.
as you can see I can use it also to brag a little bit ;-)

but ok, this is a little off topic for this channel...

why is it that those Hex error numbers got me all warm and fuzzy 
when I saw them?   :-)

Qt 4.7 is out. It sports QML, a declarative GUI definition. So far 
JAVA FX was the closest match for declarative VID. But JAVA FX is 
pretty much irrelevant. Qt is much more important otoh (my opinion) 
- now you can look at the examples - VID's no more unique - now even 
monkey can code in Qt, and get kind of cross-platform :-)

http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qdeclarativeexamples.html

OMG !!! 

As of the current version with the full CLI and internal functions, 
the operating system binary is only 16384 bytes. 


A standard "Hello, World!" example compiles to a file of only 31 
bytes.

Qt has some really nice ideas in it. Note the importance they place 
on being able to create slick GUIs, but with the note that business 
apps only need a little slickeness around the edges. And the prominence 
of a state machine engine at the core.

Qt was developed by norwegian company Trolltech starting in 1991, 
and was acquired by Nokia in 2008.

You can look at http://qt.nokia.com/downloadsand choose "Go LGPL". 
A few 100 MB, it seems. But there are many modules: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29#Modules
Maybe only a fracton is needed?

L4: Well, it's interesting and done by the university in the City 
I live in. So, no big deal, to get in contact with these guys.

I still think, that the best base, albeit commercial, is QNX - lot's 
of target embedded platforms covered ... REBOL could co-work-with, 
or replace Photon GUI ... I want View app in my car, then calling 
Cyphre and lamenting about some bug :-)

the baremetal OS uses a different approach... it launches small tasks 
on one core per process... which is how all dev should be.


all it needs is an api to have two threads to communicate and voila... 
also notice that the apps sit at the same level as the os, so they 
have much more leverage on the HW (with added responsibility)

cool,  Carl and Rebol are mentioned in this interview with Trevor 
Dickinson from A-Eon Technology.... 


he's part of the top 3 amiga people A-Eon would hire in their team 
if they had the funds.   :-)
he also mentions the porting of Rebol to Amiga 4.

mentionned at a bit after 20:00 in.


http://www.amigaz.org/2010/09/12/art-episode-47-a-sunday-with-trevor/

the only other Named ( living ) person is Dave Heynie.

hmm, and the situation with ARM family is becoming better and better 
- Marvell releases new CPU - 200mil triangles = 3D FullHD (two simultaneous 
FullHD streams) ....


http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/23/marvell-unveils-1-5ghz-triple-core-application-processor-all-cu/


We should get ourselves to ARM, it starts to be powerfull enough 
for even higher-end devices, not just cell-phones :-) And Amiga should 
finally abandon PPC too. If they fear x86 as being a general CPU, 
fearing users using Windows (totally stupid argument btw), they should 
go ARM too :-)

HP and Android? I would expect WebOS :-)

This is a pre webos product http://blog.laptopmag.com/hands-on-with-hps-photosmart-estation-printer-and-its-detachable-android-tablet-video

software monitors which files are being used frequently and shifts 
it to the SSD

Can't see it addressing those steep hills I go down to work and back.

Virus/worm crashes Virgin Blue stranding passengers in Australia 
and NZ http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/australia/4170278/Virgin-Blue-passengers-stranded


No, they don't mention it was a worm, but they did on the TV broadcast 
I was watching just now.

James Heselden, owner of the company that makes the Segway, died 
Sunday morning... by driving a Segway off a cliff and into a river.

Its probably a better device than the ipad, in all aspects.  I've 
used ribbon interfaces in some softwares and their use is very smooth. 
 

Our brain immediately uses positional memory, and even if we don't 
see things... we easily remember where they are (right of, left of).


QNX is probably the best OS out there, from the kernel point of view, 
at least. 


I can't see it being irrelevant.  If anything, the fact that they 
beat all the PC manufacturers is nice and, also, their high rating 
in the commercial area, means most business people will relate to 
it much better than the ipad.


For one thing, Black berry (at least try to) address the issues that 
businessmen need.

yes.... that is what they should have used... that is really sexy... 
but mabe all the names they wanted where already registered... its 
becoming harder and harder to get trademarks...  many posers in the 
list.

GPU rendering has been used for production since Pixar's CArs... 
I've seen real-time manipulation of one of the shots ... it was impressive... 
it had caustics, refraction, reflections, all the stuff.  was running 
at full HD.


the only noticeable artifacts, where slightly lower polygon counts, 
slight transparency artifacts (hardware depth is aproximated, never 
subpixel) and some edge alliasing.


IIRC the actual color precision of images was within 10% of actual 
rendered final passes which took several hours per frame on the CPU. 
 so the animators could actually use the reflections and general 
look of the shot right away.

all they did was add a hook for nvidia's GPU 3d lib in their current 
shaders and used renderman interactively.

though in the movie, they do add many passes and compositing (which 
is where all those hours per frame come from)

it's not like Luxology, and the other industry players, didn't wish 
for a magic bullet solution, but according to this guy and the state 
of the art he saw at Siggraph, it doesn't look like the GPU, by itself, 
is it

Yeah.. I know its strange... but it does try to use the most advanced 
lighting techniques too.  in cars they didn't have such high requirements. 
 so I guess its a question of what you are actually rendering... 
which is what he basically says.


also, pixar was embedding GPU calls within their normal software 
stack, so its possible they where using both the CPU and the GPU 
for different tasks, concurrently.  for things like moving points, 
the GPU is very fast.

I actually saw this on a screen within a visualizer, and it was amazing.

I was a bit surprised by the video, but that was due to my lack of 
knowledge on raytracing and how complex shaders can be, so this could 
mean many-core CPUs like the Larrabee could still be a valid for 
use in heavy 3D rendering.

well, maybe with the new trend of combined CPU+GPU on a chip (both 
AMD/ATI and Intel), performance should still improve significantly 
because GPU functionality will be so close to the CPU cores

take from one R3 blog reaction - it seems that Google has the power, 
to suggest Go going into GCC? Call it a power-control - so a top 
company creates language with zero usage, in beta version, and it 
goes into GCC? http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODcwOQ

Have you looked at Go? Someone at Google suggested that it go in 
GCC, but they likely agreed on the language's own merits. However, 
it is definitely too new to have a lot of usage outside of Google. 
I like that they did it this way though - most third-party languages 
that build on GCC build their own separate distros (Gun Pascal, GDC 
and GNAT come to mind). At least Google is working to get it into 
the main distro where it can be used and worked on by as many people 
as possible.

From above link:

The LSE had made the move, not because they love Linux and open-source 
software for some abstract reason, but because it makes good dollars 
and cents sense. It's cheaper, faster, and the LSE, not some outsider, 
gets to call the shots of its development.


Good points! I personally prefer FreeBSD over Linux for business 
servers.

Most websites glossed over this, but we didn't. Silverlight, once 
touted as Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash, has been retooled 
from its original purpose. Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, 
turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, 
and that's it. So... Silverlight is dead - long live Silerlight?
 - taken from osnews.com


http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-our-strategy-with-silverlight-has-shifted/7834

I been working with "HTML 5" stuff and using some frameworks for 
mobile dev...please please please I hope and wish R3 will address 
the mobile market. That stuff (HTML CSS JS) is just too annoying 
to work with.

I read on another ML that Silverlight didn't have any sessions at 
their PDC, and it was said that if you want to run everywhere, you 
need to use HTML, not Flash, not Silverlight, HTML.

There is a JIT for Squeak Smalltalk now ( from Eliot Miranda ) and 
there is a multi-core Squeak VM ( yes, Dan Ingals is still at it 
) called Roar - last night I was running Pharo on the "cog" VM named 
'croquet.exe' and things seem fine.  You see, the C++ folks used 
to mock us not just for bytecode and a VM, but for lack of  real 
>>fork  - and then Java folks mocked us about threads.  But now with 
  myBlock fork    a Smalltlak closure/context may get onto an available 
core ...  this news from http://squeak.organd http://squeakvm.org
thanks to James Robertson as jarober on YouTube and Vimeo with thanks 
to Smalltalk Television known as GandysMedicineShow on YouTube;  
see Pharo at http://code.google.com/pharoor  my eclectic-pencil 
 blog

Coming full-circle from Smalltalk to Self through JavaScript without 
stopping at Io or Ruby  - that would be http://avocado-js.appspot.com
  which is intended for demo on the Safari browser just now - and 
again with a suggestion to go back to look at work by Dan Ingals 
on Self and prototyping style and the reliance on Traits instead 
of inheritance or abstract classes (again thatnsk to jarober of cincom.com 
on YouTube

avocado-js  which spins off from http://lively-kernel.comwhich 
 is  a bit like Strongtalk and a bit like doing Java in VisualAge 
( itself a Smalltalk environment by those at IBM's 'workbench' who 
went on to write Eclipse) - in which JavaScript masquerades as Self 
in a visual programming envoronment within a browser.  Even cooler 
than Seaside morphic 'halos' for debugging live Smalltalk code in 
the browser as in Cincom's Web Velocity or Georg Heeg's "Sea Breeze".

FaceBook will NOT replace email.  That is a very odd and silly concept.
Banks are not going to ask you for your FaceBook account.

Qtask already has multiple communications method I believe, and that's 
what these guys want ... all your sms, pms and email all in one place

every few months, they try to make a hole in your privacy, hoping 
you won't notice and close it before to much damage is done, trying 
to remove apps which have access to your data is a nightmare...

the list goes on and on.

The biggest issue with Facebook is, that you don't have to visit 
the FB page, but you are still visible as more and more pages add 
the small facebook webparts like the "I like" buttons etc.  So FB 
can see what pages do you visit, what articles in newspapers do you 
read and other, for most people invisible informations. You don't 
even don't need FB accout. The only way how to avoid it is to block 
the FB's javascripts.

Taken from OSNews - AMD joins MeeGo - http://www.osnews.com/story/24034/AMD_Joins_MeeGo_Linux_Open_Source_Project


I hope Nokia wakes up and dismisses Symbian ASAP. And the EU parliament 
is so stupid, that they want to sponsor Nokia a bit, just to have 
some EU competitor to other mobile OSes.

Divide and conquer

The tracking works even you don't have FB account. They just don't 
know your name. But they have your IP and some info from cookies. 
For example :

Referer	http://domaci.ihned.cz/c1-48204850-brezina-proc-je-lepsi-dohoda-s-ods-nez-top-09-tak-vite-no-dali-nam-vyhodnejsi-nabidku

Cookie	datr=1250632065-19088ceda338e871e9ee01df712a37723a429d0d3c22849a1d7fc; 
lu=ThbkryR2mVGidAGoXhmTtO6A; presence=DJ289860316BchADhA_22106.channelH0_5dBF289860315007WMblcPBsndPBbloMbvtMctMsbPBtA_5b_5dBfAnullBuctMsA0QBblADacA9V289859900Z400K289859900QBalAD1O1171579986ADiA0QQQQ; 
cur_max_lag=20; x-referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpermalink.php%3Fstory_fbid%3D1573166021199%26id%3D1597009707%26notif_t%3Dwall%23%2Fhome.php; 
e=n; xs=2cf8155631bb0bfe623410554919f283; sid=60; sct=1289859896; 
c_user=1597009707
The FB's cookie life is 2 years.

so now we just need to add wheels to xboxes and fire thousands of 
them on Mars:)