doublec

It's a pity ATS doesn't get more attention in the "Systems programming language" field. It can call into C, be called from C, provides a powerful type system, and can be used to write very low level code. I've written a few posts about how ATS can interact with C on my weblog here: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/tags/ats/

Do you have any code examples of where this is used that I can look at?

Like nullc my interest is in the area of types being used to enforce contracts and safetly (hence my interest in the ATS language).

Typesafe was my initial interest in Rust and I'd love to see examples of how this is being approached in Rust as it is now.

Support for HTML's playbackRate API was landed a few weeks back. See bug 495040 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495040

This means that sites that control playback speed using the HTML media API should work.

They will be enabled by default as they are working. We already have the issue of some platforms having it and others not. Some Android devices have it with Firefox for Android and some don't for example. Linux distro's could enable the GStreamer backend and gain it while others don't as another.

For detection sites should use the API "canPlayType" and similar functionality to detect if the browser supports playback.

We are implementing support on desktop using OS frameworks where we can. So far we have:

- support for Linux via GStreamer landed but not built by default. It needs a bit more work.

- support for Windows 7 and above which the OP post is about

- Mac OS X is not yet underway but is planned.

- Hardware H.264 decoding on Android phones via libstagefright. Some phones supported and enabled by default. Some supported but disabled at the moment. Some unsupported.

- Hardware H.264 decoding on Firefox OS/B2G enabled by default, implemented via libstagefright. Phone vendors provide the binary blobs to do the decoding.

Firefox on Linux has GStreamer but it's turned off at build time. Developers can build with it to test it. At some point it'll be enabled by default, or distros can enable it for their builds, to get H.264 support.

GStreamer isn't used on Firefox OS. We use libstagefright and vendor supplied binaries for decoding.

Firefox OS already has hardware H.264 decoding support. We use the Android libstagefright library and the phone vendor provides the hardware decoders.

Inferno and Plan 9 make it easy to share resources (cpu, disk, etc) and make them appear as if they were local. For example, sharing resources on a phone running inferno: http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2012/11/07/sharing-computer-and...

Possibly the MediaSource api, which allows writing to media elements: http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/media-source/m...

Inferno [1] can run hosted and gives a lot of the Plan 9 feel. You might find it useful if you're wanting to try it out. It might even run on your phone [2].

[1] http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/ [2] http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2012/06/11/building-inferno-os-...

One such discussion in the mailing list: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2012-July/002094...

An example github issue discussing problems encountered: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/1105

I believe Pure uses LLVM JIT https://code.google.com/p/pure-lang/

There are plenty of forks running already. There's "litecoin", a fork that changes the proof of work algorithm to scrypt in an attempt to make GPU's less useful for mining.

There's "PPCoin", a fork that adds "Proof of Stake" alongside "Proof of Work" in an attempt to reduce the energy consumption of the mining process.

There's others as well. Some bitcoin proponents consider these "scam" coins as they have limited use other than speculation, others consider them experiments in different approaches. But they do show that forking bitcoin is fairly easy.

I first learnt about google from this post in tasty bits from the technology front: http://tbtf.com/archive/1998-05-11.html#s08

Hard to believe they only had 25 million documents indexed then.

The submission title was originally a question, it's been changed since the comment you are replying to was posted.

I've used ATS a fair bit in real programs. The back end of my bitcoin mining pool is written in ATS and handles a reasonable load. I've also used ATS in other projects and am happy to answer questions you might have. Contact details at the bottom of the website linked in my profile.

It's like a teacher telling a class "Pick a number between 1 and 1000". If they pick the same number as the teacher, they win. If more than one picks the winning number, the first person to get it to the teacher wins.

There's no "many sums to calculate" contributing towards a result. It's more a lottery - did my one calculation produce the right number.

Any blocks that client produced would not match the expectations of the other clients. The difficulty being different would mean a successful hash that solves the block may not be seen as solving it by the other clients. They would reject it and your cheating client would be on its own fork.

If you could convince others to run your client then your network would get bigger. If it got >50% of the entire network then your blockchain would effectively be the main chain.

There is no such central server. The difficulty is adjusted using an algorithm that all the bitcoin clients implement. This looks at the generation times of the last 2,016 blocks and works out from that if difficulty needs to be higher or lower.

Since all clients implement the same algorithm, they all get the same difficulty value.

Metasploit runs on other phones too. The Nokia N900 for example. The PwnPhone (http://pwnieexpress.com/products/pwnphone) is a commercial supported version of packaged tools for the N900 but the tools can be installed separately.

There are extensions to "Namecoin", a bitcoin alternate chain, that does things like this. For example: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2273

How will they handle console twitter apps (ttyter and bitlbee for example) where formatting can't happen to match their requirements?

Software decoding using libstagefright: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759945

Metabug for Android decoding support: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755364

Hardware decoding support using libstagefright on B2G: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759506

I'm not aware of an actual decision being made with regard to desktop support yet but I think it is inevitable.

Initial support for libstagefright decoding (giving H.264, etc) on Android landed in "mozilla-inbound" today too. These should go in mozilla-central soon and be available in Firefox Mobile nightly builds. It's turned off by default (enabled via a pref in about:config) while bugs and performance are worked on.

Gonk has the libstagefright libraries which expect to be able to dynamically load shared libraries provided by the carrier or phone maker which contain the decoders. They are expected to have all the relevant licenses.

In the case of desktop Mozilla could take the same approach (use system libraries, expect OS supplier to provide licensed decoders) but some platforms would miss out on support if the OS supplier doesn't provide the decoders.

How about Pitcairn Island? You can't get much more remote. Two months fits in fairly well with the supply ship coming and going for transport to/from the island. 12 people would increase the local population by almost 25%!

Not all browsers do this. At least one compiles directly to native machine code. Chrome's V8 does this according to http://stackoverflow.com/a/8819921

Ogg is a container format. The Opus support in Firefox is Opus inside the Ogg container. You probably mean "why isn't Vorbis good enough". Even the article has this error when it says that Opus compression is better than Ogg. They mean Vorbis there presumably.