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Looks like Adobe is creating a scripting language based on C that will have hooks into flash, so good bye actionscript, and hello C!!! :)

From Slashdot here:

mad.frog writes to tell us that in a recent talk by Adobe's Scott Petersen he demonstrated a new toolchain that he has been working on (and soon to be open-sourced) that allows C code to be run by the Tamarin virtual machine. "The toolchain includes lots of other details, such as a custom POSIX system call API and a C multimedia library that provides access to Flash. And there's some things that Petersen had to add to Tamarin, such as a native byte array that maps directly to RAM, thereby allowing the VM's "emulation" of memory to have only a minor overhead over the real thing. The end result is the ability to run a wide variety of existing C code in Flash at acceptable speeds. Petersen demonstrated a version of Quake running in a Flash app, as well as a C-based Nintendo emulator running Zelda; both were eminently playable, and included sound effects and music."

Several years ago, AOL decided that internet downloaded pictures (JPGs, GIFs, ...) were taking a huge chunk of the AOL bandwidth, so they implemented a caching proxy that was transparent to their users, so any queries to the internet for an image first checks the cache. That way no internet bandwidth is wasted on repetitive fetches of the same data. This is done with a lot of ISPs for images and is a fairly common practice nowadays.

Now, the ISPs are complaining about basically the same thing, but with bittorrent traffic. In my mind, they should just do the same thing that they did with images and use it for caching bittorrent traffic. The ISPs bandwidth to the internet is expensive, but the ISP's bandwidth to their customers is free (they own the infrastructure). So, if they could cache the bittorrent traffic, it would take a *huge* chunk of traffic out of their upstream bandwidth usage and also provide faster bittorrent downloads for their customers. Win-win! The ISPs wouldn't have to throttle the bandwidth and they wouldn't look like the bad guy anymore. I believe that bittorrent supports the Cache Discovery Protocol - the ISPs just have to implement it and we're golden!

I've got comcast service at home and I occsionally will pull down a TV show that I like to watch it in HDTV on my PS3 since I don't have an HDTV Tivo yet via bittorrent, and I upload tons of (legal, non-bittorrent) data that I generate by myself to the internet (which is slow as a dog under comcast's basic plan (like 300kbit/sec or something like that). If they could free-up the bittorrent traffic, they might allow for giving customers fatter pipes for transferring non-fileshring data just as a normal service upgrade!!! :)

Just a thought.

- Steve

So, if you're reading this, you probably are aware of Pixar and the WALL-E movie. We were jonesing to go see a movie after running a garage sale all day on Friday and discovered that WALL-E was opening that day (yesterday). We had to talk my 4 year old into it by playing the trailer on my PS3 and convincing him that it wouldn't be scary.

We ended up going to the 8:15pm show and about 1/2 way through my kid started getting scared. He's gotten scared in many movies before and I've had to leave without seeing the end of many of them (still haven't seen the ending to Ratitoulli). I managed to keep him on my lap and we saw the end of the movie just fine. My 6 month old slept through the whole thing.

SPOILER ALERT: Anyway, it was a great movie. Standard sci-fi with a few political statements about waste and some pokes at the technology-addicted and overweight people. The plot goes like this. The human race leaves the planet because of the huge garbage problem and leaves in a huge space ship to wait out the clean-up which is done my hundreds of trash-compactor robots (WALL-E model). Every now and then the space ship sends a probe to earth to see if the soil can support life. WALL-E falls in love with the probe robot (EVE) just as she discovers that life has returned to earth. WALL-E follows her back to the space ship and teams up with a bunch of misfit robots to save the space ship and help it return back to earth. The plot is not great, but the animation and special effects are great. There are a few chuckles and some great characters, but kind of a kids movie more than for adults. Obviously made to merchandise well, there are 1000 different robots and I'm sure the shelves will be full with WALL-E toys in just a few weeks.

All-in-all a very good movie and a great experience for the kids and parents.

TechTV used to be a great network. When Leo Laporte was hosting the screen savers TV show that was only available on DirecTV, it was full of interesting and useful computer-related information. It was great. I used to leave it on for hours on end and enjoy it quite a lot. TechTV is no more, but before it was demolished, the network wasl called the G4 network and was sort of a kids-only version of its previous life. They concentrated on getting rating and pandoring to the lowest common denominator instead of focusing on the viewers who used to watch the old TechTV. Leo Laporte was no longer hosting the show and a kid named Kevin Rose took over as the host. Kevin had done some "dark tipper' spots on the previous show showing how to "hack" stuff - which was really just Slashdot posts that he acted out. He made a few videos about his hacking excapades, threw in some cool audio and people started to believe that since he could sniff-out an open wifi signal or mod his xbox that he was really something special.

When G4 was no more, he went into limbo and was bouncing around from gig to gig when he wanted to try a social experiment which turned out to be digg.com (what he's currently known for). Kevin's digg.com idea was a good idea, but was nothing more than a voting mechanism on top of a social news site like Slashdot and many others at the time. The real fact is that digg.com would've been not that great if it were not for his name getting mentioned to all of the previous TechTV fans that were still in the loop with Leo and the gang, traffic to digg.com would have been a trickle compared to what it was (a huge hit). Digg.com is one of the top-50 websites (probably top-20) nowadays and he has noone to thank for it but the old TechTV fanbase and Leo and gang. Kevin is supposedly worth millions with his ownership in Digg.com, but not really worth anything until Digg.com is sold, which will be when its value is much less than it is right now.