AltME groups: search

I tried deploying a commercial tool in the brower and its very effective. 
 hehe it allows people to circumvent their sysadmins  :-)

I only wish there where a safe way to implement local file sandbox 
within plugin.  AFAIK, the write and save commands do nothing...

run a script  and show what-dir

Anyone tried this http://www.siteadvisor.com/.. plugin for firefox 
and ie that tells you about a site's safety rating in terms of spyware, 
popups etc

firefox warned me not to install,it's a McAffee product

I want one, or a whole set!

I thought a Slinky.

those Xmas decorations that are flat, and you unfold them to form 
a cylindrical decoration

ok, that was a bad pun

Have a look at http://mail.rebol.com/

Apple's iPhone has got a competition. It it in no way revolutionary. 
Eugenia from OSNews has some nice blog about it. First there was 
LG, now there is Samsung - those companies surely had such products 
in development for quite some time. Here's first look at Samsungs 
machine. And it got keyboard!


http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/en/news-13261-When+the+Korean+GOD+awake%2C+he+gives+us...+the+Samsung+Ultra+Smart+F700.html

that is a really nice toy btw.

it's ok. Calling on a phone is apparently unimportant anyway. :-)

I don't understand - it is not a pda, it is a smartphone, so why 
should not be it possible to make calls on it?

it was a joke

ah, joke not in a humour channel :-)

Taken from OSNews - so much for a "great" Apple:


Parallels recently made a definitive statement saying that the company 
won't be making it easy for users to run OS X in a virtual environment 
anytime soon. The reasoning behind this was because they don't want 
to put their users at risk of breaking the OS X EULA - unlike Windows 
Vista, there is no version of OS X that can be run under a virtual 
machine - and more importantly, they don't want to strain their (currently 
good) relationship with Apple. As a followup to that statement from 
Parallels, I was able to also get in touch with Srinivas Krishnamurti, 
VMWare's Director of Product Management and Market Development in 
order to get VMWare's official position on the matter. 

Apple does not currently allow running Mac OS X in a virtual machine," 
he said. "Apple is an important partner and VMware respects Apple's 
intellectual property."

The license restriction in question is one stating that Mac OS can 
only be run on Apple hardware. This restriction has been in their 
licenses for a long time. It should be noted that restrictions like 
this are often illegal for them to enforce in most countries that 
have consumer protection laws, such as all "Western" countries.

In contrast, Windows licensing allows you to run in virtual machines 
as long as you own a license for the OS in the VM. This is even the 
case for Vista Home, despite "reports" to the contrary. With Vista 
Ultimate, you can reuse the license of the host in VMs running in 
the same computer.

This is from the time where the Apple clones were killed, as Apple 
lost a lot of money to them, since they couldn't compete with them. 
Removing the clones and prohibiting use of MacOS on other than Apple 
hardware "solved" that problem.

I'm sure the clone manufacturers lost a lot of money too when Apple 
pulled the plug

Apple is a hardware company. They see the OS as just an enabling 
technology, whether they can legally call it that or not.

They make servers, music players, wifi hubs, displays, desktop computers 
in 3 different form factors, set top boxes, laptops, remotes, speaker 
systems, and soon they will be making phones as well.

Apple is very much a hardware company.

except they had a legal name change removing the word computer from 
their name

removing DRM would be a big plus for Apple vs MS

If an artist or label wants to sell music on iTunes with no DRM, 
Apple won't do it. There are documented cases for this, for which 
I am too lazy to provide a link.

BrianH, it might be a contractual issue. I'd bet that those contracts 
are rather hairy.

graham, since v1.5 firefox has never crashed for me, when it used 
to crash about 5 times a day beforehand.  v2 seems even better.

although I dont like MS...  this is not a just ruling !
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/23/microsoft_alcatel_patent/

it's a kind of a desktop... it claims to want to change the way one 
works with applications and documents. I haven't figured out how 
this works yet. The reason I'm interested in it is that it's GNUstep 
based.

Oldes, I have a commercial app online and its one of the most advanced 
scripts I've ever written.  it does web-service access in the bg 
doing sync of ui with a remote app (much like altme) , in the same 
time it crawls the net, does searching and allows you to download 
actual content when you ask for it... all simultaneously and using 
glayout too...

Hi,

Skype has a worm now...


http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/04/16/tech-securitymsskypewindowszonealarm-20070416.html

In case you haven't seen it yet...

Microsoft has given a go-to-market name for its cross-platform, cross-browser 
plug-in for delivering the next generation of user experiences and 
rich Internet applications for the Web. The technology formerly known 
as WPF/E is now known as Silverlight - http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2114418,00.asp

pekr, since should  be able to fix most of those ourselves (for those 
who need to address the issues for real),  then I see R3 as a bright 
beacon in my future.

it is a pity Carl does not visit altme from time to time. I miss 
blog capability of "suggest a blog topic", which was promissed a 
bit ... I would like to know, what's in the pipe for View ... will 
Desktop be enhanced? Reworked? Removed? The same goes for VID - should 
it be part of View? Or an external module? Should View contain only 
generic gfx functions? (kind of face)

its a good start point, but its not enough... just the user management 
is enough to make it almost useless in corporate places.

which is why I have been thinking much more like a manager and an 
end-user lately.

the tool accesses a web service through XML from an IIS server so 
the server's manager doesn't even see the difference  :-)

Vista is a mess, so what? :-)

It will be difficult to beat Flash novadays:


Adobe Systems plans to open-source Flex, its development framework 
for building Flash and Apollo-based applications. The company on 
Wednesday is expected to announce the move, which will start when 
it releases a beta of the next version of Flex, code-named Moxie, 
in June.

I think we'll be getting a flurry of news after DevCon.  Hoping anyway.

Anyone watch G4TechTV?


As a GNU/Linux fan, I didn't like the sounds of this particular discussion.

http://www.labwithleo.com/shownotes/episode2/notes

Which leads to

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

and at least one "response"


http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/20/windows-vista-content-protection-twenty-questions-and-answers.aspx

What the FUD is going on?

yes Vista DRM is extremely Violent... the fact that it cannot differ 
from H/W and software bugs is a big can of worms... imagine you have 
a faulty memory stick and suddenly, your monitor goes fuzzy, you 
have no clue what is going on...


now image that during a computer assisted surgery.... hum... yess... 
in this regard... Linux is starting to look more like a contender 
in strategic markets.

Yeah, but what got me is that hardware vendors are going to have 
to keep specs, secret ot risk a ban from Microsoft.  Open sourcers 
won't get a chance to write drivers.  Bodes not well, it this is 
true.

There is a lot in there, eh?  Bodes not well.  FUD fight!!!

both are FUDing... I abide by the fact that the vast majority of 
computers cannot run vista out of the box in an "entertaining" manner. 
I don't understand why running a desktop needs 1GB of ram when you 
can play a multiplayer shootem up with particles, lens flares about 
10 million more times the polygons, over the network... wigh much 
less.

mygod a destop is a flat raster with other little rasters dangling 
over... 3d just applies these rasters to poly and distorts them... 
so its not like if it where rocket science.

Maxim, MS has a knack for turning anything into rocket science.

I used to do demo at conventions... event did a few years at siggraph 
for nothing real ... before it was ransacked by apple.

That NZ security researcher seems well-informed. I read a prior, 
smaller version of the article a few weeks ago.

As far as I know (someone here told me) Open Office loads the whole 
application at start-up, while MS-stuff is more modular.

That leads to a larger footprint for OO as it loads loads of features 
unlikely to be used in any one session.
Modularity is apparently on the way, and will some difference.

it's easy to tell on OSX: it eats about 10-15 times more memory than 
MS Office. If you start it, it takes a lot of time to load, and after 
that, the memory usage is easily 150-200 MB with no documents open.

and incredibly slow... it feels like a huge Java application... does 
anyone know if it really is java?

OOo Core build is C++ (CePlusPlus) and UNO IDL.  Complete source 
package is a mere 260 Meg.

Very easy grok.  I'm not going to badmouth anymore.  I use it.  It 
keeps me out of Windo...nope, no badmouthing.

Hey, it's a suite.  :)  But...I use it when I really really need 
to send/recieve .doc files.  Not often.

The Graphic Designer here uses Draw for some stuff, but I'm leading 
her to InkScape and the GIMP.  She's a big GIMP fan now.

anyone remember the rebol office suite someone was toying with doing? 
I remember a couple of screenshots a few years back. who did it?

I would like it, but it would have to be done right. We'd need to 
make:

- A kick ass text renderer/type setter
- A kick ass spreadsheet cell renderer
- A kick ass drawing program


The rest kicks ass already, and will even more so when R3 comes out. 
When those components would be done, you build the UI around that.

Let me rephrase that: I would not focus on building an office package. 
I would focus strongly on building components suitable for rendering 
a document well on screen.

brian... in a few weeks, you'll be an drunk on elixir ;-)

I'd like Office 2007's look too, if it weren't a little over-animated 
(the mouseovers last way too long)

this IS the future:
http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6180198.html?tag=ne.video.6180335\

some cool tech MS purchased a while back, which they are starting 
to show off publicly...


I actually played with the hand manipulated stuff myself and its 
amazing... as siggraph, 2 years ago.

it's not compiled... just XML and javascript... I really don't know, 
if I would like to write rich apps in XML... but it looks it nice 
adept for a new Rebol dialect:]

the first demo of these was a collaborative dj sessions where pucks 
would represent sounds and volumes of speakers... the distance between 
the pucks would relate their weight, so if you had the left speaker 
and slid it across a few sounds, it would play them.

since they are all loops, you can interactively edit your jam and 
add sounds, just by sliding them near speakers..

the vertical glass panel you see at the end of the demo is cool since 
it works in 3d.  depth is as much an indicator of intent as position, 
so if you point at the image at a certain distance, it had different 
effects, like drawing only when your are within a foot !

source code of a game (one of them) for Silverligth http://silverlight.net/samples/1.0/Sprawl/xaml/scene.xaml
--> http://silverlight.net/samples/1.0/Sprawl/default.html

I my R3 as a plugin:]

Reichart;  You rat b#$%&@d you.  (He said with a big smile)  I promised 
the graphic

designer we'd go for a live trial run today.  I've done nothing but 
twiddle with D all

morning.  :)  To be honest, I place C++ at the bottom of my "likey" 
pile, maybe more 

from being pigheaded, than deserved merit.  (I tried to respect Bjarne's 
work.  I and

I can only assume he has a Computer IQ in the very high hundreds.) 

I expected the same from D.  Not so. You rat b@&%$#d.  (Again, with 
a nice big
friendly smile).  I have work to do today.

Office: Take a look at softmaker stuff. Small, fast and complete: 
http://www.textmaker.de

so if you want to write a document, bring up a piece of "paper" which 
uses a type setting service. if you want to print, you call a printing 
service. if you want to spell check, you call a spell checking service. 
if you want dynamic content in your document, you can call services 
which can respond to various input with an output, tied dynamically 
to the paper, such as the current date, or a customer database entry

Reichart;  We (a dev team) duked it out way back with Word for DOS. 
 It was a

complete waste of our time.  We handed management a text file with 
some fairly

complex technical information and a "beautiful" word doc, full of 
near gibberish.

Management picked the gibberish doc...it looked better, to pass up 
the line.  We

giggled, then informed him of the insider joke, and spent the day 
wrestling with

Word to make the real tech spec "look good".  Sex sells.  When we 
wanted a

faster network, the document started with "Your pipe is very small" 
 No manager
wanted a small pipe! Very effective.

I'm glad I don't have to deal with this kind of management... Brian, 
I've read stories about how network equipment purchases were based 
on how many blinking lights there were on the front panel and how 
an admin created a fake light panel to get his manager off his back, 
because the manager complained that the equipment "wasn't doing anything".


I know it can't get this simple, but management should never be a 
position you could get hired directly into... it should be a position 
one can only advance to through plain skill.

Well, to be fair.  I wouldn't really want techs running a large corporation. 
 Skill sets

are skill sets and techs are good at techie and (most) bosses are 
good at money
(and requisitioning bigger pipes).

I've been following the Silverlight and DLR developments a lot this 
week. It seems to me that this would be a good way to get REBOL in 
the browser. You could market a REBOL based on the DLR as a /Services 
integration library. Rebol Universal Services Transport, a way to 
bind all of those Iron languages to light-as-air REBOL/Services :)

I don't know something about etoile seems like its not really changing 
the actual workflow of use.  I still sense a "software" in the GUI... 
but I agree its much more pervasive.

I would like it to completely ban the use of actual apps and just 
rely on services to do everything. And then on top of that, make 
the whole damn thing scriptable. It would be a hell of a bold move, 
but I think it would work.

They are talking about banning the concept of files, and rely fully 
on persistent stores, but there is still not a solution on how to 
do that.

What's the difference between a service and an app? 

PickOS used a DB as it's file system.

Services are small. They do one single thing and they do that one 
thing very well. OSX has them and they've been there for ages, but 
the system only relies on them for manipulating things in apps, not 
to construct ad hoc apps themselves. How often have you not wanted 
a cool feature from program X in program Y and vice versa? This would 
do the trick.

The service versus app distinction is a big gray area IMO. No great 
answers here, but if you don't provide "preconfigured service bundles" 
a.k.a. applications, how does Grandma use them?

in etoile they still consider a "desktop" to be a viable and intuitive 
interface... when in fact it isn't

Gregg, compare it to how you use your real life items, like a paper, 
a pencil, eraser, etc. Grandma does not want to know that she has 
to open Word or some <weird open source name app> to write a document. 
She wants a piece of paper. A service will give her a piece of paper 
as a view port. On the technical side, you don't load a bajillion 
features into memory that you don't need, only a viewport and a text 
renderer.

hearing and seeing alan kay in the last few days has only solidified 
many of my ideas.  One capital sentence he repeats:


Adults have too many context and concepts, to be able to think simply 
and understand the most basic ideas.   kids have a "fresh" take on 
things... and they are much better at chosing simple things.

elixir, for example will seem like a bizare work environment for 
some, I guess, but its sooo simple, it needs no real learning... 
actually, the only thing people will have to learn is the panels 
which people will add to interface the internals... but at least 
we will be able to SEE the relationships and associations they have 
with the "innards"

Maxim, yes, it's because we go to school. When I went to public school 
I liked electronics and wanted to work with it. I found it fun and 
could even put together little circuits that did fun stuff. When 
I became an engineer, the fun went away and everything became immensely 
complex, so what I had learned as a kid, I lost.

 A service will give her a piece of paper as a view port.

 -- But what features does the service provide, and when does it become 
 an application? i.e. how do you save something, find something you 
 wrote before, add spell checking, print something, etc. These are 
 things that can be answered in different ways, and I think we'll 
 see a lot more big changes in software in the next 10 years.

a pencil which actually stores data on a sheet.

a real sheat.

electronic paper already exists and is being sold by sony as a small 
book reader... no back lit.  0 consumption until you edit the page.

Speaking of which: I'd love to see a way in Rebol to declare a piece 
of data persistent across sessions, so it would save automatically 
and you would not have to worry about it.

Yes, the whole "not saving" thing has been done before, but we haven't 
pushed far enough in that regard. Anyone remember Lotus Agenda? That 
was one smart app, and that's how you can auto-file things and find 
them again easily. 


The concept of a persistent image, ala Smalltalk, has also come up 
before. I think Maarten wanted to do something like that, but it's 
not a simple thing to do.

Don't people here see REBOL in line with this very thread.  I use 
REBOL for all kinds

of things, that could be an application, by why?  Use blocks.  Write 
a one-liner for the

task at hand.  That's why I was very interested that Carl may allow 
LOAD/RELAX

(although I would actually prefer a junk! or gibberish! datatype) 
in R3.  REBOL is my

non-application application.  I use this model when coding solutions 
to the

construction site bosses problems.  Use a block and write a script 
that suits the

problem.  Site managers need a button to "make it go" (the UI), but 
each

problem gets its own solution.  I'm not going to sit and try and 
write an accounting

package for a guy that just wants to invoice customers, and show 
his profit/loss.

If the user needs to export data to an actual "app", write a quick 
export etc.etc.etc. 

I don't call them Reblets per say, but it's the headspace I've been 
in for years now.

NeoOffice is all Java:  AFAIK it's a java/swing front-end on top 
of the C++ Open Office Code.

thanks. 


that's a very nice article to read ....as a lead-up to REBOL Devcon 
2007

There's a pretty strong reaction to my little video. I think we should 
focus a lot on video tutorials.

I would really like to do more videos, but it would need some scripting. 
I think we should have a video group.

I don't remember the name, but it was a Python based screen capture 
tool that generated a Flash video.

yes, but now I need a Scheme expert :-)

Intel have announced a new low-power processor and chipset architecture 
which will be designed to allow full internet use on mobile Internet 
devices. To fulfil the aims of our mission and in response to the 
technical challenges that these devices pose, we are announcing the 
Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded project.


https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2007-May/000289.html

What does everyone think about Microsoft's pursuit of Yahoo?  Desperation 
or 

sound tactical move?  I wasn't watching the tube, but it was on in 
the background,
did I hear correctly that they are banting about a number in the

$50'000'000'000 range?  I think you'd hear the yahoo! from here in 
Canada. :)

Henrick, I saw your post reply to my Macro comment on AmigaWorld.net. 
I'm trying to understand the difference, but maybe it is too early 
for me to understand it. Here is a link that describes what Common 
Lisp Macros are.  http://www.lisp.org/table/macros.htm