The fall of MS Bob :The Bob Chronicles. What’s the most efficient way to deride a technology product as a stinker and/or a flop? Easy: Compare it to Microsoft Bob. Bring up the infamous Windows 3.1 front-end for computing newbies–officially released fifteen years ago this week, on March 31st, 1995–and you need say no more. Everything from OS X to Twitter to Google Wave to (inevitably) Windows Vista has gotten the treatment. Bob’s pervasiveness as an insult long ago transcended its brief period of prominence as a product. By now, it’s unlikely that the vast majority of people who use it as shorthand for “embarrassing tech failure” ever actually used it–any more than the average person who cracks jokes about the Ford Edsel has spent time behind the wheel of one.
But Bob didn’t start out as one of technology’s most reliable laugh lines. In its own odd way, Bob is ripe for rediscovery. (Thanks to Dan Rose, Rogers Cadenhead, and David Worthington for their help with our Bobfest.) The Birth of Bob A Bob patent drawing Bob Revealed. Firesheep In Wolves’ Clothing: Extension Lets You Hack Into Twitter, Facebook Accounts Easily. It seems like every time Facebook amends its privacy policy, the web is up in arms. The truth is, Facebook’s well publicized privacy fight is nothing compared to the vulnerability of all unsecured HTTP sites — that includes Facebook, Twitter and many of the web’s most popular destinations.
Developer Eric Butler has exposed the soft underbelly of the web with his new Firefox extension, Firesheep, which will let you essentially eavesdrop on any open Wi-Fi network and capture users’ cookies. As Butler explains in his post, “As soon as anyone on the network visits an insecure website known to Firesheep, their name and photo will be displayed” in the window. All you have to do is double click on their name and open sesame, you will be able to log into that user’s site with their credentials. One word: wow. It’s not hard to comprehend the far-reaching ramifications of this tool. This is how it works. Thanks to Bensign, aka Ben Schaechter (former TechCrunch developer) for the tip. Try Arc. Brainfuck. Brainfuck is an esoteric programming language noted for its extreme minimalism. The language consists of only eight simple commands and an instruction pointer. Nevertheless, it was shown to be Turing-complete. It is designed to challenge and amuse programmers, and was not made to be suitable for practical use.
It was created in 1993 by Urban Müller. History[edit] In 1992, Urban Müller, a Swiss physics student, took over a small online archive for Amiga software.[1] The archive grew more popular, and was soon mirrored around the world. As Aminet grew, the compiler became popular among the Amiga community, and in time it was implemented for other platforms. Language design[edit] Commands[edit] The eight language commands, each consisting of a single character: (Alternatively, the ] command may instead be translated as an unconditional jump to the corresponding [ command, or vice versa; programs will behave the same but will run more slowly, due to unnecessary double searching.)
Examples[edit] Befunge. A worthy companion to INTERCAL; a computer language family which escapes the quotidian limitation of linear control flow and embraces program counters flying through multiple dimensions with exotic topologies.— Jargon File[2] History[edit] The language was originally created by Chris Pressey[3] in 1993 as an attempt to devise a language which is as hard to compile as possible — note that the p command allows for self-modifying code. Nevertheless, a number of compilers have subsequently been written.
A number of extensions to the original "Befunge-93" specification also exist, most notably Funge-98, which extends the concept to an arbitrary number of dimensions and can be multithreaded, with multiple instruction pointers operating simultaneously on the same space. Befunge-extensions and variants are called Fungeoids or just Funges. The Befunge-93 specification restricts each valid program to a grid of 80 instructions horizontally by 25 instructions vertically. Compilation[edit] >25*"! FALSE. FALSE is notably more tractable than most esoteric programming languages. The fundamental operations that it provides are reasonably sensible, and there is no gratuitous complexity. In these respects it stands in strong contrast to the behemoths Intercal and Malbolge.
The difficulty of programming in FALSE comes mostly from the low-level nature of the language, which has the feel of a Forth-like assembly language. The remainder of the language's awkwardness comes from the concise punctuation-based syntax, which many people find more difficult than a more conventional word-based syntax. The stack[edit] Everything in the language is defined by how it operates on the stack. 1 : pushes the integer 1 onto the stack 3 : pushes the integer 3 onto the stack _ : pops 3 from the stack, negates it, and pushes -3 + : pops 1 and -3 from the stack and pushes their sum, -2. Data types[edit] Basic operators[edit] Stack operators are (with examples of form example input → resulting stack): Variables[edit] .
Impact for iOS. I know you're waiting for the release of the Impact Game Engine, and I promise you, it's coming. I just get distracted too easily. So here's my game Biolab Disaster running on the iPhone 3GS with 60 frames per second: The game is running in its own process and is not using the iPhone's browser at all. Instead, it's just using the JavaScriptCore Framework to run the game.
All the necessary calls to the Canvas API have been reimplemented with OpenGL-ES and the touch input is passed over to JavaScript to be evaluated by the engine. The JavaScriptCore Framework is still private on iOS. An Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation. Robert Able & Associates produces the 1st computer generated 30 second commercial used for Super Bowl (Brilliance) Wavefront Technologies is the first commercially available 3D software package (founded by Mark Sylvester, Larry Barels and Bill Kovacs ) Thomson Digital Image (TDI) founded Jim Clark receives the 1984 ACM SIGGRAPH CG Achievement Award International Resource Development report predicts the extinction of the keyboard in the next decade A-buffer (or alpha-buffer) introduced by Carpenter of Lucasfilm Distributed ray tracing introduced by Lucasfilm (Ref: Cook, Robert L., Thomas Porter and Loren Carpenter.
Cook shading model (Lucasfilm) (Ref: Cook, Robert L. 14.5 minute computer generated IMAX film (The Magic Egg) shown at SIGGRAPH 84 - 18 teams; 20 segments Universal Studios opens CG department First Macintosh computer is sold; introduced with Clio award winning commercial 1984 during Super Bowl McDonnel Douglas introduces the Polhemus 3Space digitizer and body Tracker Motorola 68020. CodePlex - Open Source Project Hosting. Mozilla premieres its Open Web Concept Phone - Online Best Latest Mozilla premieres its Open Web Concept Phone Price Reviews | Features in India.
Mozilla Labs launched the Concept Series a couple of years ago with an open call for participation, and according to them, thousands of people have joined since, and we believe them. The concepts were to be driven around “Firefox, the Mozilla projects and the Open Web as a whole,” and Billy May went ahead and designed the concept of an “Open Web Concept Phone” back in early 2009. Now, after sharing ideas and taking feedback from the Concept Series community, he has published a truly beautiful take on what an Open Web phone might look like, calling the concept “Seabird.” Before we go any further, just take a look at a video of the concept phone below, to understand how it stands out from all other current generation phones: According to Billy May, this is what the Seabird is: The Mozilla Seabird, part of the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series, is an experiment in how users might interact with their mobile content as devices and technology advances.