World: r3wp

Pekr, I posted this news a week ago :)

Hmm, maybe it was me? :-) I got to that site, well, not actually 
that, via Bill Buck's blog, but it does not matter :-)

yuck, what a mess of XML files

Interesting that they think a virtual colossus on Pentium II laptop 
( are there such things still? ) would run at the same speed as the 
original at Bletchley Park http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7094881.stm

I remember when Pentiums were the new Black, it was said the Colossus 
emulator (in C under windows, I guess) was far slower than the real 
thing (specialist hardware designed for the task on a war economy 
budget).

Looks like better languages, more modern hardware and (crucially) 
more recent algorithms means the Colossus can be finally retired:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/16/german_code_breaker_defeats_colossus/

Reichart won't like this one... 
http://www.papervision3d.org/

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.

FireFox 3.0 Beta - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b1/releasenotes/
- many new enhancements, Gecko 1.9 based, rewritten engine, more 
standard compiant ....

NASA plans to land on Mars in 2031. Something tells me that they 
may not be the first to land there.

and who is going to?

China?

Richard Branson?

Preview of HTML 5 - http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

isn't it funny? Before thay said, that we have to use <div align=center> 
instead of tag <center> and now we will be allowed to use tags like 
<article> <footer> ... :-)

<center>, <b>, <i> is for perception - and <article>, <footer> is 
for meaning. It makes sense for me.

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.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/urls.shtml- this article 
was going well 'til they actually revealed their urls.  Try reading 
the music centre urls over the phone...

I thougth the trend is to make the urls human friendly

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...

<div role="section"> <ul role="navigation"> -- much more adaptable.

Though I admit, I've never liked the word 'div'.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 released - http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done

Sigh .....

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

You mean hash syntax?

Yep, or do they type out 'equals' 'less-than' each time?

(sorry, greater-than - d'oh!)

It's just >=

Basically the only thing different from REBOL is != for the more 
traditional <>

And == because = is taken for assignment

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

Ruby doesn't really have dialects, only some syntax sugar

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.

R: => does look good in examples, indeed Ruby (in examples, if not 
slightly deeper into source) looks better than most languages.  imo 
Rebol, at least when you get used to the types upon which the language 
is built, just feels right.

I hope we will create visual apps like following for R3 plug-in one 
day - http://www.gaiaflashframework.com/

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.

ah, looked like visual thing to me ...

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

oh no. does that mean we have to root for IE now?

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

Apple pushes Think Secret to close the site - so much for your beloved 
Mac ... that sounds worse than MS ....

I'm not in defense on Apple here, but they do have really strict 
contractual obligations on what you can say to anyone when working 
for them. Apple employees are not allowed to talk to the press, family 
members, friends and even other Apple employees. If they do, they 
are fired immediately. The way Thinksecret obtained information was 
through breach of contract by Apple employees, similarly to how industrial 
espionage can be conducted. Because of this, they can prosecute.

The secrecy around products is very strong, because Steve Jobs just 
doesn't want products disclosed before time. That's how they do things, 
it's their business strategy and that's what Apple users must accept.

Well, so they should solve it themselves inside their structures, 
that goes against the free speach.

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.

I wonder why they didn't try to undermine the site by seeding false 
information?

http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2007/12/19/3419292.html

Chris, I believe the Asteroid product that caused them to sue was 
either fake or was pulled from development after being revealed on 
Thinksecret.