AltME groups: search

The view is that HP has purchased Palm to get access to WebOS so 
that they didn't have to develop their own.  The own slate compared 
with the iPad is a dog in terms of battery life, speed and  screen 
resolution, and they had long given up on Arm devices.

thanks Reichart - I was feeling a little too relaxed - that got the 
blood boiling

the concept of software patents in the US is, in practice, basically 
the same as nuclear weapons. you have to have them as a "defense" 
against other companies. it's something you keep there, so that other 
companies will think twice before attacking you.

I'm more for the guerillia tactics: Don't care about it, just release 
the apps in a way that it's not trackable who did them and build 
an indirect consulting business around it.

yes, that tactics can work, except it is a problem if the EC succeeds 
to push the software patents down our throats too. Moreover, there 
already are some patents of this kind accepted by EPO - see e.g. 
http://eupat.ffii.org/10/03/bessen/, even though it is "against 
the letter and spirit of the written law"

Pekr, you do realize that Google's Native Client is a browser extension, 
right? And it's for use within HTML, which will usually be served 
up from a server? And that it won't run outside of a browser? Google 
has been advocating the rich client for years, but the rich client 
that it has been advocating is the web browser. This is just them 
acknowledging that Javascript sucks for some purposes - they still 
want you to use the rest of the web stuff.

For a more direct avocation of the REBOL approach, look at Silverlight 
or Adobe AIR.

Alan, we need to work more on REBOL's security model first: R3 has 
made a good start in that direction, but there is more to go.

I think that npapi plugin is the fastest way to get into the browser. 
But even then - Google and Apple are creating propaganda, that actually 
"installing" anything into the browser (plugin) is a bad thing :-)

ok, going to watch a hockey championship ....

I don't see how improved motion tracking is a bad thing, Henrik - 
yeah, some of the uses mentioned are marginal, but I can see that 
overall, the increased tracking accuracy would be really useful

any extreme action triggered by motion could be confirmed by having 
to input a password within a certain amount of time

yep since itas a gyroscope, the orientation is perfect and accessible 
in real time, much better than an accelerometer.

then you could use a combination of motion, pressure, touch points, 
camera input, mic input to invoke all kinds of complex actions with 
combination "hotkeys"

I miss one VERY practical usability. Imagine you have met some accident 
situation, and you call emergency. Now most smart phones have A-GPS 
chip. I would like to just press one button, to send my GPS location 
- so no starting of GPS related app, writing it down, and telling 
it to 911 ....

I'd like the back plate (casing) to be like apple's mighty mouse 
so you can squeeze the phone and its a different effect than just 
touching the  screen.

you just trigger of a constant motion followed by a great increase 
in acceleration

yeah, squeezing, even a slight twisting motion should be usable for 
controlling things

I guess you have to have used a device with motion sensing or accelerometer 
to see how terrible an idea this is.

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.

I think you're not giving it a chance. The trigerring can be complex 
enough that it should just go off with random movement. Say a 45% 
tilt, followed by a double shake, followed by a lateral motion, to 
trigger some task

I have already given it a chance. 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.

having more (better) sensors is never a bad thing - they can always 
be combined with other ones to achieve your intent

no, it's not - the point is that it's a memorized gesture that can 
invoke useful functionality

on the screen yes, not on the mouse. I already said this is quite 
a significant difference.

yes, your PS3 games probably work well, because the display is not 
on the controller, but a still-standing TV in your livingroom. :-)

henrik, each application has to be logical in gestures it uses.  
the "shake" gesture is almost always a bad idea.  but tilting especially 
should be used MUCH more.

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.

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

There is no difference, because it's the fundamental principle of 
requiring shake, angle or motion gestures to use such a small device 
to change a state on the device itself that is wrong. I don't care 
how accurate the measuring of gestures is.

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.

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).

one of the stupid gestures shown is using the tilt to select things... 
like a ball tilt game...   does the guy remember that ball tilting 
is quite hard in real-life?  that shoudn't be used at all.

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.

not resting on a table, I meant

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.

if they don't, they at least deserve a kick in the groin.

H.264 is a better codec
 - which criteria did you use to find this out?

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377

A comparison.

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...

Hopefully, the source can teach us a few things?

Janko, yes. This is really crazy as it was especiall hard in Germany 
to get a patent related to software things.

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.

What do you mean by "smart client"? Efika is not only a terminal. 
It can have full OS you can install. It is just that they use something 
like VNC/Citrix aproach, to get you SW you don't have installed physically 
on the machine itself ...

I presume they call it client because it is supposed to run google 
apps ...with a years subscription

I've been waiting to see this trend pick up speed, for years now 
(looks a lot like Scratch): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/technology/12google.html?scp=1&sq=googleapp inventor&st=cse

strange is a private group.

but yeah... this is very good press   especially since its a tourist 
site   :-)

Jolicloud  - netbook UI based on Ubuntu + HTML 5 .... nice looking 
design ....


http://digitizor.com/2010/07/17/jolicloud-1-0-brings-a-new-html5-interface/

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.

wow a nice XP skin for the ipad, running web applications.... 

yes I'm being ironic  ;-)

for the ipad
 - it's not very touch-friendly either; better use a mouse.

Hard to say from such a short demo, but it's very impressive ...

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

He actually bought a cash machine off the internet .. .so he could 
examine it.  When the delivery guy came to deliver it, he asked Jack 
why on earth he was buying a cash machine for his home.  Jack replied 
that he wanted to avoid paying bank fees!

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.

the summary is just a copy of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REBOL

you can logout a session running on another machine... remotely.


for example, you can lock out an iphone app which was logged on to 
your facebook account.

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.

Mush.....may be a US journalistic meme:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mush_from_the_Wimp

Dunno why it is being considered a breaking news, but OSNews.com 
seems to be happy about Broadcom open-sourcing their drivers :-)


http://www.osnews.com/story/23786/BREAKING_BROADCOM_OPEN_SOURCES_WIRELESS_DRIVERS

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

Maxim, that's the old video - there's a new, improved robot now

OMG it has a pup!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIipbi0cAVE&NR=1

IT is getting there.  With the copters, it means one day truly having 
"flying cars" because the control systems should be good enough they 
evoid "everything" but let you pick a place to "go".

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... :-))

btw, does somebody has a advice for getting a helicopter license 
in the USA? 

found many in the net but would appreciate a local advice for the 
best location.

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...

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.

I also thought the guis looked a lot like rebol.

Was this an open source development or a Nokia team that did this?

How big is the package? I do remember some talks about using Qt as 
a potential View replacement, but IIRC BrianH expressed, that integrating 
Qt with REBOL would be difficult.

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?

With host-kit I would like to see a baremetal version of R3 :-) That 
would be extremly cool.

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)

though its mission is clear... its not the basis for a gui OS... 
you can write one over it I guess.

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 :-)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_40/b4197040487856.htm


HP is giving away a free Android tablet which is also used to control 
the printer you buy to get the "freebie"

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

so, maybe there's a conflict in being able to design a very easy 
to use consumer device that also allows one to create content just 
as easily

http://www.shweeb.com/index.php?m=vision


safe cycling as a modern form of transportation ... just got over 
$1M from google ....

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.