World: r3wp

Finally, D 1.0 is released. http://www.digimars.com/d/index.html

http://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=2904&p=3<--- amazing 
OLED displays

Open Firmware was made free under the BSD/MIT license in Nov 2006. 
 http://lwn.net/Articles/209301/
Would that help a Rebol OS ?

HP claims nano-chip breakthrough - http://tech.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1247407.php/Hewlett_Packard_claims_nano-chip_breakthrough

OpenMoko - an alternative to iPhone with free-to-extend OS? - http://www.libervis.com/article/forget_iphone_hail_openmoko_the_true_revolution

He characterized HP's results as 'amazing' and said it had the potential 
to extend indefinitely the reach of Moore's Law which posits that 
the power of microchips will double every 18 months.

uh...............no....

just the number of transisters ...

Yahoo Messenger for Vista! - http://messenger.yahoo.com/windowsvista.php

looks like they used Cyphre or Gabriele's background generator ;-)

is that a good or a bad thing?

I want B/W GUI so more CPU cycles can be used for something useful 
:)

Henrik: I think, it was a joke

oldes, I know. :-)

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/

if true that would make my day

hum... someone in the comments explains and rebuffs the patent and 
describes that the idea actually cannot really deliver more than 
1% of the theoretical numbers claimed by the patent...  which would 
bring it at about the same levels as current top of the line batteries.

so the 10x power for .5 the price... well actually makes it double 
the price if the 1% is exact

another person also explains how the batterie's reaction to thermal 
changes might be rather high (50% power fluctuation between cold 
and hot temps)

but all agree to being glad if  proven wrong.

US answer to global warming: smoke and giant space mirrors http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1999968,00.html

sounds like a joke.  How do they want to stop the warming with that 
? it can only make things worst

Gee... if the mirror gets stuck in place .. we enter a new ice age 
instead.

Looks like the US answer is all smoke and mirrors

yes ... very preoccupating.  I hope REAL scientists will do something

Adobe Systems today announced that it has released the full PDF (Portable 
Document Format) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Association for Information 
and Image Management. AIIM, in turn, will start working on making 
PDF an ISO standard.

that is very good news

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2782821882.html

The Hat Box PC - nice design :-) http://www.mini-itx.com/

http://getfirebug.com/<--- a little more help is now available if 
you are doing traditional web development

it's interesting, but seems to be a little bit buggy as my firefox 
now hav some problems with scrolling even when I disabled the firebug

(when I use wheel)

I use firebug since more than a year, and we all use it heavily in 
the qtask team. it's really great. oldes: maybe it has problems with 
some other extension you have installed?

I have onlu AdBlock and NoScript. But don't have such a problem. 
I disabled the firebug now as I don't need it and when I will need 
it in the future I can enable it again and live with my mouse wheel 
blocked a little bit for a while:)

New interesting blog ob bbrv - PA Semi about to deliver power efficient 
processors? I love those low power things :-) http://bbrv.blogspot.com/

Marketing Ideas to lawyers
AN ARTICLE FROM SUNDAY'S NEW YORK TIMES WE SHOULD READ CAREFULLY.


Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software

By JASON PONTIN
Published: January 28, 2007

BJARNE STROUSTRUP, the designer of C++, the most influential programming 
language of the last 25 years, has said that “our technological civilization 
depends on software.” True, but most software isn’t much good. Too 
many programs are ugly: inelegant, unreliable and not very useful. 
Software that satisfies and delights is as rare as a phoenix.

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Charles Simonyi, chief executive of Intentional Software, in training 
for his trip to the International Space Station, scheduled for April.

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All this does more than frustrate computer users. Bad software is 
terrible for business and the economy. Software failures cost $59.5 
billion a year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology 
concluded in a 2002 study, and fully 25 percent of commercial software 
projects are abandoned before completion. Of projects that are finished, 
75 percent ship late or over budget.


The reasons aren’t hard to divine. Programmers don’t know what a 
computer user wants because they spend their days interacting with 
machines. They hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines 
of code in esoteric programming languages, like medieval monks laboring 
over illustrated manuscripts.


Worse, programs today contain millions of lines of code, and programmers 
are fallible like all other humans: there are, on average, 100 to 
150 bugs per 1,000 lines of code, according to a 1994 study by the 
Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. No 
wonder so much software is so bad: programmers are drowning in ignorance, 
complexity and error.


Charles Simonyi, the chief executive of Intentional Software, a start-up 
in Bellevue, Wash., believes that there is another way. He wants 
to overthrow conventional coding for something he calls “intentional 
programming,” in which programmers would talk to machines as little 
as possible. Instead, they would concentrate on capturing the intentions 
of computer users.


Mr. Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft, is arguably 
the most successful pure programmer in the world, with a personal 
fortune that Forbes magazine estimates at $1 billion. There may be 
richer programmer-billionaires — Bill Gates of Microsoft and Larry 
Page of Google come to mind — but they became rich by founding and 
managing technology ventures; Mr. Simonyi rose mainly by writing 
code.


He designed Microsoft’s most successful applications, Word and Excel, 
and he devised the programming method that the company’s software 
developers have used for the last quarter-century. Mr. Simonyi, 58, 
was important before he joined Microsoft in 1981, too. He belongs 
to the fabled generation of supergeeks who invented personal computing 
at Xerox PARC in the 1970s: there, he wrote the first modern application, 
a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen 
as it would appear when printed on page.


Even at leisure, Mr. Simonyi, who was born in Hungary and taught 
himself programming by punching machine code on Russian mainframes, 
is a restless, expansive personality. In April, he will become the 
fifth space tourist, paying $20 million to board a Russian Soyuz 
rocket and visit the International Space Station.


Mr. Simonyi says he is not disgusted with big, bloated, buggy programs 
like Word and Excel. But he acknowledges that he is disappointed 
that we have been unable to use “our incredible computational ability” 
to address efficiently “our practical computational problems.”


“Software is truly the bottleneck in the high-tech horn of plenty,” 
he said.


Mr. Simonyi began thinking about a new method for creating software 
in the mid-1990s, while he was still at Microsoft. But his ideas 
were so at odds with .Net, the software environment that Microsoft 
was building then, that he left the company in 2002 to found Intentional 
Software.


“It was impractical, when Microsoft was making tremendous strides 
with .Net, to send somebody out from the same organization who says, 
‘What if you did things in this other, more disruptive way?’ ” he 
said in the January issue of Technology Review.


For once, that overfavored word — “disruptive” — is apt; intentional 
programming is disruptive. It would automate much of software development.


The method begins with the intentions of the people inside an organization 
who know what a program should do. Mr. Simonyi calls these people 
“domain experts,” and he expects them to work with programmers to 
list all the concepts the software must possess.


The concepts are then translated into a higher-level representation 
of the software’s functions called the domain code, using a tool 
called the domain workbench.


At two conferences last fall, Intentional Software amazed software 
developers by demonstrating how the workbench could project the intentions 
of domain experts into a wonderful variety of forms. Using the workbench, 
domain experts and programmers can imagine the program however they 
want: as something akin to a PowerPoint presentation, as a flow chart, 
as a sketch of what they want the actual user screen to look like, 
or in the formal logic that computer scientists love.


Thus, programmers and domain experts can fiddle with whatever projections 
they prefer, editing and re-editing until both parties are happy. 
Only then is the resulting domain code fed to another program called 
a generator that manufactures the actual target code that a computer 
can compile and run. If the software still doesn’t do what its users 
want, the programmers can blithely discard the target code and resume 
working on the domain workbench with the domain experts.


As an idea, intentional programming is similar to the word processor 
that Mr. Simonyi developed at PARC. In the jargon of programming, 
Bravo was Wysiwyg — an acronym, pronounced WIZ-e-wig, for “what you 
see is what you get.” Intentional programming also allows computer 
users to see and change what they are getting.


“Programming is very complicated,” Mr. Simonyi said. “Computer languages 
are really computer-oriented. But we can make it possible for domain 
experts to provide domain information in their own terms which then 
directly contributes to the production of the software.”


Intentional programming has three great advantages: The people who 
design a program are the ones who understand the task that needs 
to be automated; that design can be manipulated simply and directly, 
rather than by rewriting arcane computer code; and human programmers 
do not generate the final software code, thus reducing bugs and other 
errors.


NOT everyone believes in the promise of intentional programming. 
There are three common objections.


The first is theoretical: it is based on the belief that human intention 
cannot, in principle, be captured (or, less metaphysically, that 
computer users don’t know what people want).


The second is practical: to programmers, the intentional method constitutes 
an “abstraction” of the underlying target code. But most programmers 
believe that abstractions “leak” — that is, they fail to perfectly 
represent the thing they are meant to be abstracting, which means 
software developers must sink their hands into the code anyway.


The final objection is cynical: Mr. Simonyi has been working on intentional 
programming for many years; only two companies, bound to silence 
by nondisclosure agreements, acknowledge experimenting with the domain 
workbench and generator. Thus, no one knows if intentional programming 
works.


Sheltered by Mr. Simonyi’s wealth, Intentional Software seems in 
no hurry to release an imperfect product. But it is addressing real 
and pressing problems, and Mr. Simonyi’s approach is thrillingly 
innovative.


If intentional programming does what its inventor says, we may have 
something we have seldom enjoyed as computer users: software that 
makes us glad.


Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, 
a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: [pontin-:-nytimes-:-com].

A friend of mine headed the intentional programming project at MS..................he 
currently works at a Jamba Juice (this is not a Joke).

what's intentional programming?

oops .. had my cache set to 10000 so I can see some old messages 
...and that made scrolling somewhat problematic

Intentional programming reminds me of the hype around the "The Last 
One" program generator a generation or so ago. (So called as it was 
the last program you'd ever need to buy -- it could write all the 
others for you)....I remember chuckling at the time at how seriously 
some people took it in the few months it took to drop completely 
out of sight:
http://www.presshere.com/html/wf8104.htm

So if there is intentional programming, there is unintentional programming?

I know of something called creative programming! ;-)

Reichart, I read the article, and my opinion is, that you will always 
need good programmers, no matter what abstraction you make to the 
problem.

A good programmer (or more general: developer) can something, a typical 
user can't. The developer can - based on logic - see the consequences 
of different rules within the software. When users are alloud to 
decide, how the software should work, you always end up with something, 
which will break logically, when some situation occur. A good developer 
can think of that beforehand and make sure, the whole system of rules 
makes sense and do the right thing, whatever will happen. The user 
may be happy for a while, if she "designed" the software, but a little 
later it'll break down logically, and she'll loose money and time 
again.

It's the ability to make something consistent, that make a good programmer. 
It's my experience, that very few people are really good at that.

alloud = allowed

Spending  years to learn correct spelling, but spending no time to 
learn correct logic - are'nt users silly ;)

not correct logic, computer logic.

Ah, you can't spell either ;-)

You catched me. :-)

you will always need good programmers


We strongly disagree, in fact the time of no need for programmers 
is probably closer than we (programmers) want. 


AI will one day be good enough to solve domain problems.  The architecture 
of computer systems will be self correcting, responsive, and self 
writing one day.


Software will fix itself in response to millions if not billions 
of people reacting to using it, and it will slowly and systematically 
correct itself, improve itself, and even offer new features simply 
for test.  In other words, software will eventually self evolve.

Consider nothing more than a routine that studies what options people 
select for themselves.  I reset my Word (and anything else I have 
control over) to *always* use Helvetica.  I *always* set my WinAmp 
to be "Always on top".  When I walk up to an ATM, I *never* select 
"Spanish".  When I get in my car I *never* want the radio "ON"


What if people's settings were simply gathered in a central database. 
 Categorized, etc.  What if every button on software had a unique 
ID, and a genus, and like senses or never endings created stronger 
connection in the database by how often they were pressed… 

The species of button called "Play | Pause" would be very strong.
It's brother "FF | RW" would be pretty well connected as well.