AltME groups: search

Have you seen the Canadian fembot?  http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=78krbfy9hh0
  I haven't looked to see if there is a vid where the inventor doesn't 
demonstrate her abilities to detect someone touching her breasts...but 
oh well.  Pretty cool nonetheless; even with the poor grammar.

It seems a short-sighted attempt at paving the cowpaths.  I appreciate 
the want to hardwire some of this stuff, but who decides and where 
does it stop?  I'd far rather xhtml was cleaned up, that there is 
one markup language that allows for a lot with a basic set of building 
blocks.

That should read 'that there is *at least* one markup language...', 
not that there is only one markup language.  One of the commenters 
suggested instead of inventing new tags for roles, why not have a 
'role' attribute that serves the same function?  That way you can 
expand the list of roles without brewing tag soup...

=> -- do most Ruby coders have a shortcut for this?

My point is, it's not exactly convenient -- and it appears key to 
Ruby's 'dialects'.  I know that Rebol is designed primarily for US 
English keyboards, and other layouts the [ ] symbols are harder to 
reach.  But => is so clumsy, seems like a design flaw.

Or simply pure symbology, without regard to a physical limitation.


Korean for example was designed to encode the phoneme in the least 
number of brush strokes, what would it have looked like had they 
not needed to use a brush?

Sometimes you have to pick your constraints.

Chris, I don't understand. Greater-than-or-equals is just >= in Ruby, 
just like in REBOL. => is used in specifying a hash constant, as 
in PERL

I know, that's why I put 'dialects' in quotes.  My understanding 
is they call groups of functions with bracketless hashes DSLs which 
we use as a synonym for Dialect.

Re: => - I wouldn't consider this sugar -- it's a awkward key combination 
for such a core piece of syntax.  I only ask as I was trying out 
IRB and it seemed weird.

You mean such a tutorial? The framework itself is not interesting 
for me. He made just a bitmap slideshow with tons of files required. 
All of this is made just in Flash IDE with some template used.

IE8 passes ACID2 tests. That's cool :-) http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx

No, just a nice "golf clap" for them joining the race...

Well, I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier. Thinksecret were known 
to have the deepest sources. Closing down was a settlement they made 
in exchange for not revealing the sources. The site became largely 
useless anyway after the first hints that Apple were going after 
Thinksecret.

An interesting website I found http://www.curehunter.com/public/showTopPage.do


Just look around, it is kind of fun little examples of tech spewed 
on a site.

Anyone checked out Links?  University of Edinburgh  http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/links/
   I'm not a real fan of AJAX but Links is being built to produce 
web frontend (Javascript), middle bit (SQL)  and backend (Java server) 
code from a single source.  I don't really care, but it may fit with 
the current Silverlight thread in REBOL Marketing.

Links looks quite clean. It has HTML interspersed in the source code, 
though. I have found that to be an unproductive approach in most 
cases because it does not allow a web designer to work on it

I could probably read a lot to get this info, but maybe someone here 
knows:

How do a company like MySQL make money? The database is open source 
and completely free, right? So do they earn by doing support? Selling 
books or what?

Hm, I haven't got much experience with open source. I'll investigate, 
if the model suit my database, NicomDB. If it does, there could be 
a database written 100% in REBOL available for REBOL developers in 
the near future.

Geomol, the business model for such a setup are mainly:


- You pay for service: Consulting, support, priority fixes, adding 
features, porting
- You pay for special versions: Pre compiled, add-ons

I just checked the size of the source. NicomDB is less than 50k of 
REBOL source. It's a little more than 7k compressed, so it's a nice 
'little' database. :)

iPhone turned into a virtual guitar: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=26829492

Geomol, when you have a lot of users, it's easy to make money (Sun 
might come and buy you for example :). OS source helps a lot at getting 
a lot of users (the reasons are not entirely rational). still, i 
don't know how much a REBOL db would be popular.

one way mysql makes money is to get Sun to fork over a billion dollars 
:)

You do need to have a sales organisation with customers to be able 
to get that much

rootkit attacks Linux with Apache servers that then later injects 
Javascript to infect Windows boxes.  http://www.linux.com/feature/125548


Rats, bad guys are using our servers to get at the poor unwashed 
masses of Windows users.  No doubt this will be ammunition in MS's 
Get the FUD campaign, further ensuring a larger mass of easily corrupted 
Windows boxes.

Luckily we also have Cheyenne.  Take that bad guys!

Actually no...I did not realize from the article that it is a desktop 
environment. The first I heard of these cool KDE developments.

Graham posted a nice one for rsp in Rebol vs Scheme.

NEC has launched a new product that will allow network administrators 
to downgrade Vista machines to XP. It takes up... 2 DVDs.

CURL has got some good press links at www.curl.com         I am hoping 
to see a CURL presentation as a possible front-end to QTASK  (ducking 
quickly) because of its off-line abilities ( OCC or occasionally-connected 
computing )  I hope the VID3 folks take a look at CURL which I find 
so natural cmpared to TCL and TK ... around Rebolrs maybe CURL should 
be renamed DUCK ...  at least REBOL has a Dummies book out there 
...

I wonder why it's not already possible... I remember there was a 
little support for font embedding in Netscape.

FSF calls for boycott of Trend Micro;  http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/boycottTrendMicro.html
 over a lawsuit involving a competitors use of ClamAV in an infringing 
way.   Umm, scanning for viruses before they get into local networks 
is a patented process it seems.

http://www.humanized.com/enso/words/<--- This seems like a good 
starting point for a full REBOL desktop. Remove Windows and base 
the input system directly on that. Nice and quick.

Yes, Enso is cool.  Aza's father was one of the designers of the 
Mac.  I talked to him a few months ago about REBOL in fact.  I have 
been running Enso for a while now.  I should use it more, since it 
really is powerful.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp


FF is at 37.2%..........yeah baby...and so man said IE would have 
a death grip...

IE7 halts every couple of hours for me. Firefox is a better choice. 
Even on my costomers PC I prefer installing FireFox

Hi Petr, that takes me back a bit!  Does look pretty cool

I couldn't find a link that wasn't plastered with on-line newspaper 
ads, but

New findings by the mission to Titan, reported on Wednesday by the 
European Space Agency (ESA), say Saturn's orange moon has hundreds 
of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural 
gas reserves on Earth.


Google Saturn Moon Oil for more deets.   YeeHaw!  I think the space 
race is on.  And all we have to do is run a 1,200,000,000 km pipeline 
and we can all drive Hummers and have diesel powered air conditioners. 
 It's gonna be sweet.

Petr, you've never heard of VB? :-) QuickBASIC, under DOS, had an 
IDE back in 1985. PowerBASIC (used to be TurboBASIC from Borland) 
is still around and has inline asm and a killer compiler. GFA BASIC 
had matrix math built in, and TrueBASIC had some very cool libraries, 
like 3D graphing, as part of the system. After VB there have been 
a lot of "BASIC-like" lanugaguges, but some of them aren't really 
BASIC.

Well then, I wonder if Sol feels small?  Will the Sun get spam from 
Pfizer offering up a little blue planet pill  so it can compete with 
Wolf 359 for dates with Proxima Centauri?    :)

So Blu-Ray won.   Toshiba just dropped it's HD-DVD business.   That 
means I should be able to pick up a player real cheap.  :)  Woohoo!

Google creates protability API for its apps - http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Google-Creates-Portability-API-for-Its-Apps/

I see that UNICON ( the language ) if yet to move to UNICODE in spite 
of its strong string handling and back-tracking features (co-routines, 
co-expressions)

There are remarkable similarities to REBOL ( ignoring its use of 
keywords such as &pos )
A recent variant is converge from Lawrence Tratt

Of course there is a big ISP named UNICON and someone has a DSL named 
UNICON

There is supposed to be a MAC version of ICON called PRO ICON ... 
I couldn't find it

My latest urban myth: that the name REBOL evolved from IDOL, the 
ICON pre-processor ( SNOBOL, ICON, IDOL, REBOL )

I was a big fan of Icon back before there was REBOL, but that goal-directed 
evaluation made Icon harder to debug than any other language in practical 
use, including assembler. That experience made it a lot easier to 
write PARSE code though :)

Looks like two Chinese dancers in black pants facing each other, 
running around with a big car-like box over their heads....which 
is cool!

In a Swedish blog someone wrote a comment that the robot looked like 
two drunk guys carrying a sofa :P Then about half the people were 
worried that Iran/Iraq would copy it and put guns on it, and the 
other half were worried that USA would but guns on it. Either way 
it would probably only bring death, misery and oppression :)

it looks like they need to work on the engine. if you are at war 
in the desert, and you hear the noise of a chainsaw in the distance, 
time to bring out the guns.

Silent gun mounted versions are only a few years away.  Welcome to 
the start of the "new warrior"

In Italy you can buy a still for distill home-brew but only if you 
leave on the label which says that it is illegal to distill spirits 
with that still ( according to en.wikipedia on moonshine)

what's the definition of a robot?

I think he refers to autonomous machines, rather than just any machine 
that resembles a human or an animal :) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/robot

Motorola loosers - http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/26/motorola-insider-tells-all-about-the-fall-of-a-technology-icon/

Gee; and posted before April 1.   Vista not gaining; surprise surprise. 
 Can we finally start to shrink a monopoly?

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/operating_systems/windows_a_monopoly_shakes.html

it would be so wonderful if they would just start from scratch with 
a new OS. just from scratch. screw compatibility. it will be a pain 
for a few years, but it will do them and us good in the end. I know 
they can do that.

Or ...  start using an OS that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and 
where the primary concern is better software (or maybe, simple "Hey 
look what I wrote ... I'm smart"), not lock in.  :)

I still hold MS directly responsible for the early demise of OS/2. 
  Well, that and Homer Simpson's Compuglobalhypermeganet

I'm not so sure, MS with its current configuration can make a good 
OS from scratch. Too many cooks.

I love Vista  and think it gets a bum rap.

I guess it burned me too many times in the less than 10 times I've 
used it.  Note;  I only diss MS due to the predatory practises of 
"suffer no other software to live".  That is just bad for everyone. 
 MS included - how can they beg, borrow and steal innovation if no 
one is around to innovate for them.  And take a close look; name 
me one innovation that has come out of MS.  One.  With 50,000 employees 
you'd think one or two original ideas would have escaped by now.

Alas REBOL may also be excluded.   OR I'm being sucked into a well 
orchestrated April Fools Joke.  Have to wait till tomorrow to see.

From the bottom of  the FAQ page ... this is realy a well done hoax/not 
hoax ... can't tell
http://www.google.com/virgle/error.html

You....can't....tell???  Brian...Brian....Brian....dude...


We feel that ensuring the survival of the human race by helping it 
colonize a new planet is both a moral good in and of itself and also 
the most likely method of ensuring the survival of our best – okay, 
fine, only -- base of web search volume and advertising inventory,” 
Page added. “So, you know, it's, like, win-win.

Lua has a module for VisualStudio ... http://www.itrango.com/vslua/
 as does Haskell ... I can't imagine it is a help to Haskell but 
it could be good for Lua.  Then again, some people might move to 
Haskell from F# for VisualStudio....  http://www.haskell.org/visualhaskell/
   and I think I saw an APress book on F#  http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/vsmode.aspx

Sigh. Why should MS or all the others create a better OS if a new 
one is already available?

Remember that it takes a decade to do such a thing

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

maybe if they had spent 30,000 USD on a hammer they could give it 
whack !

What became of those custom hammers?  (Everything may look like a 
nail, but not all nails reverberate quite the same)

Unfortunately, I've heard that the price in Denmark is going to be 
around 6000 kr for an unlocked phone, which converts to over 1200 
USD (!). I hope one day, it will be illegal to sell phones through 
such narrow channels. Telia will have a monopoly in selling iPhones 
here. I don't see how this helps Apple at all.

Another RIA platform - Apple's SproutCore. So we have Flash, Silverlight, 
Google, Curl, R3 in the future, and now Apple is entering the game 
with interesting development - 


http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/


SproutCore not only makes it easy to build real applications for 
the web using menus, toolbars, drag and drop support, and foreign 
language localization, but it also provides a full Model View Controller 
application stack like Rails (and Cocoa), with bindings, key value 
observing, and view controls. It also exposes the latent features 
of JavaScript, including late binding, closures, and lambda functions. 
Developers will also appreciate tools for code documentation generation, 
fixtures, and unit testing.

I'm not.....Google is shuffling terabytes of data with very short 
response times.

XML may be a good archive/interchange format -- a better .CSV format 
-- but it just does not scale for operational systems of the size 
Google has.

We are not surprised. Although if they'd wrapped eveyrthing in a 
<google></google> , would that have made a difference ;-)

Try CUIL.  http://cuil.comSearch REBOL.  Nice page, could almost 
be a nice rebol.com frontpage.  CUIL is a google spinoff.

I'm so tempted to just ignore IE as a developer. My latest site fails 
only in IE. If they don't want to play ball in standardization, then 
screw them. I'm just wondering if it would be so bad if all developers 
just ignored IE.

my lcd screen for my computer is dead only after 1 year of use. Syntoma 
when i turn it on the power led indication flash during 5 to 10 minutes 
before the screen lights and became stable. this pumping effect seems 
to be current in the new generation of LCD screen and seems to be 
related to the defective of chimicals condensator next to the alimentation 
block .... having to spend 130 euros  in a new screen only becaue 
two condensators of 0.60 euro are deficient that really piss me off

unfortunatly that a no brand "you are just fucked up" lcd screen 
...

well dead for dead i can affort a trip to my favorite electronics 
shop and by some condensator and remplace them

that's a pity those condensors .... the whole screen is new and working 
well apart the pump efect on starting

shadwolf, is "Syntoma" the brand of the LCD monitor ?

Having to wait 5 - 10 minutes before seeing a picture would be a 
waste of time.
Are you sure you cannot get your supplier to replace it ?

If you can fix it, that is good, but you have not earned any money. 
You will have lost both money and time.

I used to have a computer store and I quickly noticed that many products 
just look like the products they're supposed to be, but really aren't

Case in point: it may look like a display, but if it doesn't display 
a picture, it really isn't

The most interesting example were the floppy disks that were sold 
everywhere at the end of the era of floppy disks. People didn't want 
to spend anything on them any more, so you could store files on them 
and quite consistently, a month later they would be gone

Kaj, "People get what they deserve" - that seems a rather odd conclusion 
to me.

if most of the lcd monitors crafters offer a 3 year waranty that's 
because they are aware their monitor will fail from lacks of fiability 
in their components. Doing fast and lot of monney implicates they 
have to cut cost on every thing...

I could imagine the situation this way; on introduction to the market, 
floppy disk manufacturers were fewer, and prices were higher, so 
the competition was about quality. Later, more manufacturers entered 
the market and caused a price war. Consumers became confused and 
couldn't distinguish brands by quality, so they chose the cheaper 
"alternatives". I could say, then, that the manufacturers which chose 
to lower the quality of their products in order to undercut their 
competition were slowly degrading the public's idea of the quality 
of a floppy disk. Essentially lying, by taking advantage of trust 
in all the confusion.

[Disclaimer: The above is just an alternative explanation. I haven't 
studied the actual history of floppy disks at all, and I never ran 
a computer store.]

I think many manufacturers choose to lower the quality of their products, 
because they learn how to produce an almost identical product at 
a lower cost. Philips VCRs went from being innovative and high quality 
in the 80s and early 90s and slowly became of poorer and poorer quality 
over the years until they became as unreliable as the cheapest crap 
you could find. But I bet it would cost about 1/10 to produce that 
crap VCR than the old high quality one. Finetuning a production line 
down to the last dime is a science in itself and you can bet they 
take advantage of it.

Maybe you could compare it to floppies. Floppies were a dying technology 
an so the priority for producing good ones was just lowered.