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I find it strange that it took until now for someone to use QNX on 
a smartphone type mobile device.

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.

but the name is strange.  its like if they are trying to play both 
sides...   play pad... but its for professionals....   sounds like 
a mixed message.


i'd have called it something related to work... something like the 
  "Slave Pad"  ;-)>

black pad may sound a bit like black panther. :-)

but yeah... it would have been a nice publicity stunt.. hehe

Yes, there is a version of Rebol for Qnx

is there such a thing ?  v1 ?

The playpad may have its own conditions... though I'd say that right 
now, anyone getting a pad out will try to prevent the apple TOS errors.

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

Max, did you watch the video Henrik linked? It didn't look to me 
like the GPU did that great a job - at least it didn't look to be 
a general purpose solution to getting performance.

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

yep, nice one pekr. looks like a cool guy doing some interesting 
visualisation projects.

I remember that happening in our country - a company sued another 
one, but was bought by the opponent, who then "settled" the case.

it's a modern synthesizer using objects on a multi-touch surface

I knew the Fukuoka's method since a lot : http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC14/Fukuoka.htm

I use a lot of his thinking in sw development too

I know this is outside of Tech a bit, but in a sense, it IS tech: 
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/10/same-person-verified-billions-of.html

Be impressed, be very very impressed...

well, Apple is on the road to world domination.....  all-time record 
sales with a net profit of 4 billion$   !!

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/10/apple-grabs-20-billion-profit-with-record-iphone-mac-sales/

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.

funny... that is exactly what CGR is going to be... time to make 
a browser plugin  ;-)

http://a-mirror.video2.blip.tv/RobertBernardo-SassenrathAtAmiwestShow2010696.mp4

This might be a direct link.

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".

It's a lot more down to earth than Wave

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

Facebook guys. They call it - gmail killer, which imo is a bit of 
an exagerration :-)

I find the facebook UI a little confusing at times

that is I think it is a little buggy

It's a real dilemma .. do I spend my hours on linkedin.com or facebook.com 
...

facebook is an insane waste of time. the moment you have more than 
10 friends using it actively, it becomes a constant stream of noise, 
most of it pure trash.

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.

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.

Oldes, does the tracking work only if you have a FaceBook account?

The new Mathematica 8 allows for natural language input - pretty 
nice. Also, you can now export anything you've developed there as 
a C library, or an executable.


http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/15/the-free-form-linguistics-revolution-in-mathematica/

Stephen Wolfram's following blog post on using natural language for 
programming is a good read too.


http://blog.wolfram.com/2010/11/16/programming-with-natural-language-is-actually-going-to-work/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQgnuupBUI4&feature=player_embedded


How to use the Kinect sensor bar from the XBox 360 in a different 
way.

Looks to me that they solved a big problem in robotic vision.

Correction: The problem was solved years ago with socalled Time of 
Flight cameras. The kinect is just a much cheaper way to do the same 
thing, so now, everyone can do it.

World's worst Android device reviewed here:


http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2010/11/worst-gadget-ever-ars-reviews-a-99-android-tablet.ars

These reviewers totally missed the point.  This product shows that 
a $100 olpc is close to being feasible.

That's what they said half a decade ago. Then why isn't the OLPC 
close to $100?

13 million lines of code


Linux is on the wrong track! The same can be said about OpenOffice. 
I downloaded it the other day for my new Mac, and I just checked, 
it takes up 427 MB of my disc. It simply takes too much time to deal 
with such software, it being maintenance or just figuring out as 
a user how it works.

Minix is a micro-kernel. Most of Minix runs in user space.

And Minix only supports a single platform, at the moment.

It supports a whole platform? Cool. I thought it only supported part 
of a single platform.

Minix also doesn't have anything beyond the kernel and drivers. As 
with Linux, you have to put a userland, X11, toolkits and a desktop 
environment on top of it

Only then are you ready to add the half a gigabyte of OpenOffice 
:-)

Linux and Minix tend to run the same amount of code, when you include 
drivers. Minix just runs a lot of that code in user space instead 
of kernel space.

Linux doesn't run all 13mil lines of code on one installation. When 
you just include the drivers that it is actually using then the code 
count gets a lot smaller.

Less is more, because less code is more managable. On the upside, 
Git may never have seen the light of day, if Linux was a nice and 
small kernel.

Rebol Tutorial guy posted interesting link to programming languages 
future panel. He mentioned Crockford (JSON) mentioned REBOL there. 
What is really nice is the second guy from right, author of pleny 
JAVA libraries, describes that the main problem is rishing complexity. 
He says, that if you add functionality, it will only add-up, but 
never shrink. And also - that in future there might be a winner, 
who does it all, not like nowadays, where for web apps you need 3-4 
technologies. I think his description fits REBOL ...


http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Future-of-Programming-Languages

Kaj, describe, please? I'm making a report on Git and would like 
more viewpoints.

For techno-freaks to check-out :-) http://www.osnews.com/story/24115/Verve_A_Type_Safe_Operating_System

The video interview is 74 mins though, and I haven't had 74 uninterrupted 
mins of a working brain since I started the video.

Actually, the VLC player (free) lets you do that, but you have to 
provide it the link to the stream, whereas with MySpeed, embedded 
videos play at a speed controlled by a little tool tray UI

Same reason why a democracy elected Hitler, I guess

And curious that Russia is now the last bastion of democracy with 
Putin asking .. why ina democracy Assange is imprisoned!


Has former Soviet become a better democracy than the 'western' world? 
If so, it only took them 20 years.

the problem is also a simple buffer overflow at the right position 
could be what? unintentionally or not?

That was a very funny pun on Blowfish :)

OnLive seems to be available now in the app store. Seems to work 
quite well if you can believe this video. I had forgotten about this 
tech - it's got significant implications to the platform fragmentation 
issue. See around the 8 min mark where they're running Maya on an 
iPad.


http://video.allthingsd.com/video/dive-tech-onlive-now-more-than-just-a-game/2D385273-C40C-41D7-B01D-39A6E3B50F9F/

wrt the maya trick... its obviously a bit misleading since its  noted 
that they are using networked processing within autodesk which actually 
has nothing to do with onlive  :-)

I just played a bunch of trial games. Not bad at all.

You'd get a similar effect if you were to pipe R3 Draw definitions 
over the network

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/genspace-diy-science-laboratory/


The FBI now uses pictures of our space to show people what a [methamphetamine] 
drug lab doesn't look like,

 Grushkin said. One of the FBI contacts even showed up at the grand 
 opening last week to congratulate Grushkin.

LOL

that community lab is a really cool idea.

really? A friend of mine ran it on a low-end notebook.

There was an update a few days ago that would let me see the main 
menu, before it halted due to "Network quality" errors. Before that, 
there was just latency errors.

taken from Rebol Tutorial's blog - Ronal Ferguson admits, Websphere 
was a mistake - he calls for simplification:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11944966

But the stupidity lies in  what they think is a computer is. 
- An engine which runs windows

why don't they just tax everyone and you can get a tax rebate if 
you can prove you're deaf and blind ?

remove copyright on music .. and get musicians to get a grant from 
general taxation

In the past, everyone here had to pay for a TV license ... and we 
had these vans patrolling the streets trying to pick up unlicensed 
TV sets

Well, you must live in a very repressive state!!

We have that here too and the fee is climbing every year and is the 
same amount for students and billionaires. The rule is that as soon 
as you have a device that can receive radio or TV signals (doesn't 
matter if you can actually watch TV or hear radio), you have to pay. 
Also our internet connections are taxed this way. If you have more 
than a 256 kbit connection, you have to pay.

not a function of govt to run tv stations

I'd rather that we had to pay this as an actual tax, so no money 
would be spent on controlling whether we had a TV, but it's done 
as a separate fee that you can elect not to pay, once you prove that 
you don't have a TV, radio, internet connection or access to any 
of that from your home.

it's not a tax for internet access, but a tax for the ability to 
access webstreams of national TV.

anyone are taxed, even businesses and also if you run an internet 
connection to a bikeshed for a webcam.

Why are your cartoonists drawing pictures of Mohammed when there's 
a lot more wrong with your own country!!

Honestly I prefer to live in countries like Denmark or France instead 
of USA or England. 

You feel the difference when you lost your employment or have a big 
decease.

Mohammed drawings is really a small problem. There are some things 
we like very much, like having free hospitals. What we don't like 
so much is that the public sector is growing in the wrong way. It's 
adding personnel for doing controls, paperwork, managing silly rules 
and making sure people uphold stupid laws, rather than increasing 
productivity. If it did, it would be OK. It's really about what we 
get for our tax money, and it's not enough. Our government is trying 
to control us into the ground.

what political party would be elected on a platform to reduce the 
size of govt when everyone works for the govt?

We have lost big companies, like Vestas, which was once our pride 
leading windmill manufacturer. Now production facilities are closing 
down, because taxes are so high and wages are skyrocketing to pay 
those taxes. Last year, the interest in investing in factories in 
Denmark reached a history low. Yet taxes are still increasing.

When I see the really bad situation of employment in USA currently 
(and all that people who lost their house). I don't think we are 
in such a bad way.

Steeve, yeah, but the situation in the USA is also because of a fragile 
economic base.

I guess if you're part of the EEC, you can just move to a different 
country to live?

Sure you can, and many are leaving. Particularly the highly educated 
part of the public. Our government has also put a nice system in 
place that prevents highly educated people from settling in the country.

Oh, by the way, when you buy a new car here, you get to pay 180% 
of its value in taxes.

Many politicians is probably the case here. Making laws makes the 
appearance of things moving. It doesn't matter if it's good or bad, 
just as long as something was done, so a politician can say that 
he "took action".

Some versions of PHP hang on a specific number:


http://www.exploringbinary.com/php-hangs-on-numeric-value-2-2250738585072011e-308/

anyway - we need two things - Carl getting back to R3 coding, porting 
a library, and someone skilled doing the port. We don't have skilled 
ppl with free time and will to do so, nor the resources to sponsor 
such a non-business case  imo ...

We need a new bounty - buy Carl :-)

This partial open sourcing of R3 is a failure if the idea was to 
attract a lot more developers.  Fully open source R3 and then people 
can make their own libraries.

(For example I know a guy who is now building own house from money 
he made of some stupid 'touchpad' eye candy app he did in 20hours 
and published on Apple store)