World: r3wp

Then Amiga went thru Escom to Gateway to Amino, to Amiga Inc. (2 
incarnation of Amiga Inc.'s actually - Delaware and Washington). 
Then there was also a community split - some guys started to create 
MorphOS, a competing product.


But maybe what had Gabriele in mind is, that Amiga is almost dead 
due-to incompetence of parent company. The company does not communicate, 
it made some wrong decision (Amiga Anywhere product vs most ppl wanting 
official AmigaOS to evolve). AmigaOS was made second level product, 
and its development was subcontracted to Haage&Partner (OS 3.5, OS 
3.9). Then there was conflict between the companies and H&P refused 
to give away sources. So Hyperion stepped in, and was subcontracted 
to do OS4. The same situation - last month court granted Hyperion 
right to use AmigaOS trademark, and Amiga Inc. can't use it.

But - in Amiga case, you CAN'T see any single activity, any vision, 
any leadership. Amiga means many things to many ppl. In such a situation, 
it would be probably better, if some time back in 2K, the AOS sources 
were open-sources. It would probably stop clonning efforts (MorphOS, 
AROS, Anubis), and community would not fight for which one is better, 
there would be no split ...

I wonder if an adequate history has been written. Amiga users generally 
agree that Amiga was innovative and was ahead of its time. However, 
assessing which elements made it innovative and how to resurrect 
it, at least in spirit has long been an emotive issue, particularly 
with those invested in remnants of its legacy.

thanks both..  so there is a couple of novels material  there ...

As for me - the situation with REBOL is completly different. Big 
YES - in 2000 - 200x?, we faced similar thing - REBOL/View update 
in 18 month, difficult to communicate with RT, some ppl left, as 
things were not fixed.

(I just realized I was at some retro amiga event few years back, 
so I have seen it)

Janko, I liken the Amiga situation to flying the world's most advanced 
airplane into the ground and surviving passengers fighting on the 
ground over the twisted unsalvagable pieces, refusing to leave the 
accident site.

Commodore management was so spectacularly bad in the end, that it 
could have been on purpose.

that's illustrative

I guess Gabriele's alluding to that they all missed the bigger trends 
and faded to irrelevence.

In fact, what Geomol and some other ppl claim is - that we wait very 
long, at that it would be nice to have some other option available. 
They are right in following aspects - we can't still help much with 
R3 development. So far it is still done by Carl.


But, that is not 100% true, just some 90% - we can help writing VID, 
networking protocols ... yet noone did it.


I can understand Geomol - when R3 was announced, it was supposed 
to be out in few months, whereas we are something like finishg fourth 
year of its development. It was promissed long time ago, that there 
will be most of the R3 to be open-sourced. It did not happened yet, 
and some ppl might question, if it will ever happen.


The other group, properly and daily following R3 development, asks 
for patience, as we are really close. Latest Twitter message as well 
as month update shows, that Carl is working on Host code, in order 
to be released to few developers. Carl also reported succesfull separation 
of kernel and host two days ago.

So ... make up your own conclusion :-)

Chris - yes, we missed probably many oportunities - no apache module, 
'call and 'dll not being in free versions of R2 for so long time, 
slow development, bad deployment to other infrastructures, no open-source, 
bugs ...

IMHO things have the highest chance of missing the trends by being 
locked / guarded too much / self contained and not "out there"

R3 architecture tries to adress all of those issues. It is a new 
start. There is no REBOL (many ppl out there never heard of it) out 
there, so we might have some impact. The thing is, that there is 
many open-source maniacs, who will dismiss the product just because 
it is not open-sourced. I have some friends, who cry for open-sourced 
solutions, yet they are not able to fix C code ... fanatics ...

Petr, there are still plenty of opportunities to be missed.

such people are still not in majority .. Java was free but not opensourced 
and people were using it, built other languages on top of JVM ..etc

there must be a practical openess IMHO and that is very important, 
but exact licence of the kernell does not worry me

Chris - what do you mean?

If I were in te youg days when I did many things for the sake of 
it I would love to help with peripherials  R3, play with it etc .. 
but I am strictly coding to make something in this period and so 
so far R2 is the only R I can be interested in for now

I know we need some Marketing plan, new website, etc. Carl is deeply 
thinking about those issues. The trouble is - how to make development 
any faster? Extensions will help. Would fully open-sourcing R3 magically 
bring many new developers? I doubt it. So what to do? A killer app? 
Which one?


We are "fighting" almost lost battle - Flash, Silverlight - even 
those will fight with AJAX and web stuff.

The best thing would probably be to "use them" to our advantage. 
Web plugin is imo still strategic product, that will lower the barrier 
to give REBOL apps a try. Then we can see, if we can make some VID 
to web compiler ....

the biggest general opurtunity these days for language is good concurrency 
/ multicore stuff .  GUI is moving to browser, but REBOL can do a 
lot (or more) on the server side / logic / bots ... etc

Petr, you can fix all the things that we did not do right in the 
past and that will be good. The question is, are we anticipating 
the next wave or still trying to catch the last one?

Which wave? General technological one?

in the long run .. the flash / silverlight and other plugins might 
not survive.. it seems consensus is now to put video / canvas / even 
GL in the browser.. so "out of browser" experience will have less 
and less relevance in the browser.

Why not let Boron go its way instead of castigating it's existence, 
see if it opens doors that we do not expect.  Who's to say what is 
driving it forward...

Anyone is free to do what he wants, I am supporting only the official 
distro. In current situation it is the only thing which makes sense. 
There was several cloning attempts in the past, some of them raised 
some expectations, and they failed to be finished/released. I don't 
know why I should waste my time with another clone. I mean - each 
of us have our own jobs, and if I have some free time, I am going 
to devote it to official distro ...

Janko - I am not sure users do care nor distinguish, if some things 
runs as a plugin or as a JS app :-) It is just agenda of web developers, 
who try to kill stuff as Flash, Silverlight. R3's GUI might not be 
competition to web development, but it might have its place in some 
rich-apps development, embedded sphere, etc. I would not dismiss 
such potential ...

I have oppinion the winning "webapps" will be the ones that give 
the best in browser experience. Try using a whole website in flash 
/ silverlight and tell me if youwon't go mad.. riht click doesn't 
work , scroll buttons work strangely, open in new tab doesn't work, 
things don't float etc... it's not only about what's the best it's 
also about what behaves as people are used too (in the browser at 
least) . So IMHO inthis regard a REBOL to javascript compiler would 
be better :)

and if everything will mo to browser, even the webGL and stuff I 
surelly hope there will be some jitting bytecode standard to which 
javascript and other languages for browser could compile to

Janko, I agree - the web as a platform has endured all pretenders 
and is slowly and cumbersomely taking us forward. Flash for the most 
part is used as filler - for video containers, for 'interactivity' 
that is slowly being subsumed by html/css/js - but has always been 
an uncomfortable fit. HTML5 is, rightly or wrongly, the direction 
the web appears to be headed in.

yes, I agree, I am also not sure if it's good that html must do all 
+ video + canvas + gl but this is where it's moving

btw .. firefox js engine and webkit (safari) has intermediate "bytecode" 
representation (each their own) to which language can compile too.. 
it's bad that Google chrome doesn't follow this but jits directly 
from JS to native assembler.

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Nanojit/LIR

In saying that, MS is still in the mix. So long as IE has a large 
corporate presence, and developers rely on their APIs, they are still 
going to have some directional influence. I think they've been an 
anchor that the web platform has been dragging along.

yes, IE is heavilly in the mix :) and these are no signs that this 
stardardised bytecode will happen anytime soon

That might be a good thing though - a tempering influence, not letting 
others go down a wrong path too quickly (a la Netscape).

biodiversity  is the sign of a thriving ecosystem.

Petr, no, what I meant is people arguing about what the "real Amiga" 
is, and accusing each other of wasting precious effort.

'A Costly Lesson' - interesting article about Birmingham's (Alabama) 
decision to buy XO laptops for all school children grades 1 through 
5 (originally 8) - I believe the first municipality in the developed 
world to attempt such a project:


http://www.bwcitypaper.com/Articles-i-2009-11-26-232786.113121_A_Costly_Lesson.html


It's hard to overstate the personalities involved in this story - 
the mayor involved was convicted only this month for taking bribes.

It seems incredible that they would go ahead and purchase all the 
machines without even a thought for how they'd be used, yet as they 
have been distributed, there does appear to be great potential in 
utilising them as educational tools...

Sure there is. Just watch any Alan Kay video demoing the XO and see 
how well they can be used and how clever the software really is. 
They are just so different from your average laptop, there may be 
a strong requirement of retraining of teachers.

Yes, and arguably the most difficult part is done, the distribution...

I was part of the school board for the elementary school where I 
live in and this kind of project would have been refused at the school. 
 its wrong in every respect.  every school is missing some amount 
of money, and when 5 million in cash is spent in such a random manner, 
unfortunately, kids loose in every way.  


this kind of drastic change  requires a top-down revisit of policy, 
structure, curriculum, teachers professionals, etc.   people don't 
realized that individual schools often have to pay for a lot of details 
which school boards don't readily acknowledge.


who pays for the (usually costly) full/part time technician at every 
school.  what happens in class when some laptops die, etc, etc.  


One (rich) school in montreal did something similar by purchasing 
a (real) laptop for every 5th and 6th grader.  Although the computers 
where school property.  


By the time they arrived, they where integrated into every aspect 
of the school's daily operations.  paper for all assignments was 
made illegal, educational games where pre-installed, and complemented 
the curriculum, every student was given training on some word editor, 
email, how to get, send assignments, and IIRC there was a school 
portal for the program, where kids could get/provide all they needed.

the best aspect of the programs for the schools probably was that 
every school was forced to have its network infrastructure upgraded, 
which would not have happened otherwise.

I guess if you are going to drop in equipment like this, the XO is 
a good choice as you can still get benefits without a structure. 
 Another possible advantage is that as there was no technological 
agenda (ie. not some tech company pushing), it allows some level 
of experimentation, allowing the best use for these machines to emerge 
- from the kids and teachers - instead of it being imposed.

But yes, the core point of retrofitting a semblence of structure 
contains a lot of painful hidden costs.

any sane person would have implemented the idea progressively.  

There are hundreds of way this progression can be tailored.  but 
just massively dumbing little noisy plastic boxes  at schools without 
any real plan... well, is just dumb  :-)

but by chance they where XO .... cause at least the kids had fun 
using them even if the adults around them had no clue how to use 
them  ;-)

There was a large scale test project in France for  8 years.

Every pupil in the Department Landes got a laptop. The costs were 
around 45Mio. €.

The project is regarded as failed, as the pupils used the laptop 
only for gaming.
At least some newspapers wrote that.