Slashdot Mirror

This is "normal operation."

The US government is designed to be a plodding, ineffective beast.

It is harder for a governmnet that can't get out of its own way to trample the rights of the people.

Before you flame me, note the use of the work "harder."

-Peter


Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

But I never read the agreement!

There's some discussion in the P3P spec about the need for a "Safe Zone" to solve just this problem.

link

&#60A HREF="http://www.cartoonbank.com/cartoon_closeup.a sp?pf%5Fid=43772&dept%5Fid=1001&mscssid= 0S62FEUN74SR2MLW00GPBQXDMEU10602."&#62link&#60/A&# 62

The W3C has a nice page that'll tell you everything you need to know (to post on slashdot) in about 5 minutes.

link

&#60A HREF="http://www.cartoonbank.com/cartoon_closeup.a sp?pf%5Fid=43772&dept%5Fid=1001&mscssid= 0S62FEUN74SR2MLW00GPBQXDMEU10602."&#62link&#60/A&# 62

The W3C has a nice page that'll tell you everything you need to know (to post on slashdot) in about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately very true. At least there are some people who care, and are trying to do the right thing and follow the w3 html specifications.

My suggestion to all web developers is to pick a DTD, stick with it, and validate your work.

someone might kinda sorta get ready to start considering how to start thinking about looking at ext3 by 2.7 or so;

Well, some people seem to be doing ok with it, most notably rufus.w3.org, aka rpmfind.net.

The HTML 4.0 specification at the W3C has a sub-section on accessibility of the web for those with physical disabilities. (sorry to hark on but lack of support for disabled access to the web is a pet hate with me)

The HTML 4.0 specification at the W3C has a sub-section on accessibility of the web for those with physical disabilities. (sorry to hark on but lack of support for disabled access to the web is a pet hate with me)

Well, something that might be relevant, that I have posted before: TimBL has a page called Link and Law, which is worth a read.

ask the one whose data you want to use. It's clear, it's simple, and it's fair

It's fair, but it's far from simple. Current state of the art can barely pose the question (This is what APPEL addresses) and it certainly can't offer P3P-enabled products to people building sites today.

If I browse to a site that claims to request data for one purpose (that I accept) and then does something unacceptable with it, then I have little redress under the current DPA. The DPA simply doesn't account for the situation where I might make a per-visit choice about how much information I want to offer, and the purposes for which I understood it would be used. The DPA just sees "data" and doesn't distinguish much between purposes. Claiming that I'd only offered my data on the basis of a particular offer (we'll use it for X, but not sell it on for Y) gets into per-issue contract law and outside the DPA remit.

ask the one whose data you want to use. It's clear, it's simple, and it's fair

It's fair, but it's far from simple. Current state of the art can barely pose the question (This is what APPEL addresses) and it certainly can't offer P3P-enabled products to people building sites today.

If I browse to a site that claims to request data for one purpose (that I accept) and then does something unacceptable with it, then I have little redress under the current DPA. The DPA simply doesn't account for the situation where I might make a per-visit choice about how much information I want to offer, and the purposes for which I understood it would be used. The DPA just sees "data" and doesn't distinguish much between purposes. Claiming that I'd only offered my data on the basis of a particular offer (we'll use it for X, but not sell it on for Y) gets into per-issue contract law and outside the DPA remit.

Maybe I have high standards, but for me, you can't say you "know HTML" unless your code passes the validator.

There are far, far too many sites with shoddy coding. Like eBay, for instance.

Paul

I've been trying to read a bit about WAP at the WAP forum and the W3C but the whole thing strikes me as semi-interim and only half heartedly standard and open.

My basic complaint is the premise. On the one hand we see a whole new type of device with legions of people trying to figure out how to make efficient GUIs while conserving either display space, or storage, or whatnot with WAP ...and on the other hand we have multi-zillion dollar companies building infrastructure and vastly powerful processors, that will render the need for "efficiency" as irrelevant as my 2gb hard drive.

My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")

All the discussion about prior art made me curious ao I decided to see what I could dig up. Found this hidden in the history files of W3.org. This looks to me to originate 1989-90 and documents the "birth" of the web from my point of view.

Their's still prior art on this from before 1992. BIND + nslookup should be a good start on it.

The patent is very detailed, and I haven't read it all, but my read on it is it's for a client-server setup where the client talks to a server, which then gets the data from a seporit service. Some of the nslookup/BIND queries are handled this way. IE: nslookup asks the local name server (BIND) to lookup something, BIND then queries another name server to retreive the information and pass it back to nslookup. Now there is another part to this. The pattent mentions the server passing user interface component data to the client. This is the only part that I can see as being "unique" in this situation. It is detailed out in very specific terms that this is part of the process pattented. I don't know directly if GET, POST and web forms predate 1992. I do belive the CERNVM "FIND" gateway may provide the needed prior art. It dates from 1991. I don't think this guy has much to stand on.

Refference History of the WWW at W3.org.

Their's still prior art on this from before 1992. BIND + nslookup should be a good start on it.

The patent is very detailed, and I haven't read it all, but my read on it is it's for a client-server setup where the client talks to a server, which then gets the data from a seporit service. Some of the nslookup/BIND queries are handled this way. IE: nslookup asks the local name server (BIND) to lookup something, BIND then queries another name server to retreive the information and pass it back to nslookup. Now there is another part to this. The pattent mentions the server passing user interface component data to the client. This is the only part that I can see as being "unique" in this situation. It is detailed out in very specific terms that this is part of the process pattented. I don't know directly if GET, POST and web forms predate 1992. I do belive the CERNVM "FIND" gateway may provide the needed prior art. It dates from 1991. I don't think this guy has much to stand on.

Refference History of the WWW at W3.org.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Despite having a reputation for being very unintuitive, I recommend GVIM as the editor to use. It is a wonderful piece of software, and if the beginner hasn't developed bad habits by using another editor it should be easy to learn.

The beginner should write HTML that complies 100% with a DTD, and use validator.w3.org to verify compliance. The best document type to start out with is probably HTML 4.0 Strict.

Only once a beginner has learned how to use a text editor, and can code clean HTML should they learn to program.

My primary suggested language for beginners: I'd suggest Python as many others have.

My second suggestion: Learn how to use Microsoft Access and VBA. Yes, this are many problems with MS Access and VBA, but it is also fairly easy to use and the GUI environment provides immediate feedback. This is also (currently) a more marketable skill than python. Of course, in a few years I expect Python to be in heavy demand.

More important than choice of language, is a goal to meet.

I personally learn much faster when I have a specific goal in mind. For example, one of my long term goals is to learn Java. This has been a goal for some time, but I didn't make much progress until a more specific goal came about. In this case, I needed a java applet for a web page. I couldn't find one available that met my needs, so one weekend I taught myself enough java to be able to program the applet.

Instead of setting the goal of teaching someone how to program, I suggest inventing a project that would interest them. Then get them to make finishing that project their goal. For kids, a good project might be building a database of their whatever junk they like collection, or write a game with their favorite pop culture icon.

Personally, I like the ease of use of Visual Studio

I used to like Visual Studio too. I work in the suit-based Microsoft world, so it's the best editor I have any reasonable hope of getting on-site.

The downside of "smart" environments is when they get out of date. If the "intelligence" it knows about HTML turns out to no longer be true, then it becomes counter-productive. As an example, I no longer write HTML, but always XHTML. The InterDev HTML editor fights you all the way with that ! It doesn't understand closing the tag on an empty element, and it doesn't know about quoting attributes. If you insert an without the size, then when you next look at the source InterDev will have gone in there and mangled it, "helpfully" putting width and height attributes onto it. Unfortunately:
<img src="foo.jpg" / WIDTH=120 HEIGHT=240>
isn't even valid HTML (the / that ought to stay at the end), let alone XHTML.

The intention in the design of the web was that normal links should simply be references, with no implied meaning.

I'm using this on my website to tell people "please don't ask me about links, just link the site if you like it" :-),

BTW, I couldn't connect to feedmag.com, did it go down (responds to ping)?

Impressive, but why the hell did the navigation panel on the left side use IMAGES instead of plain text ? I know that have an ALT thingies, but, hey, these images weren't really necessary. And users have more control of font size and readability than on images.

And, just for fun, try to validate this GNOME site. I may be a poor web designer, but MY HTML is always valid!

Impressive, but why the hell did the navigation panel on the left side use IMAGES instead of plain text ? I know that have an ALT thingies, but, hey, these images weren't really necessary. And users have more control of font size and readability than on images.

And, just for fun, try to validate this GNOME site. I may be a poor web designer, but MY HTML is always valid!

I have worked with NT "clusters" that do just this. From what I have seen they create more downtime with there complexity than they prevent.

How about this:

2 single port NICs in each sys with a crossover.

Write some (simple) program to do a heartbeat over this connection.

If the "standby" system loses the heartbeat it pings the "live" system with it's other NIC which is configured with a different IP than the "live" system. If the ping fails, a little script runs that takes that if down and brings it back up with the "live" IP.

Have the "standby" system periodically mirror the data on teh "live" system (maybe over the private NIC to keep traffic on the main connection down.

I know that this is not perfect, but it illustrates that there can be a simple solution. It could work quite well in an env where there is a fair amount of tolerance. (IE where it is okay to say "transaction failed, please retry.")

-Peter


Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

KFM is KDE1's file manager and browser. Konqueror is a major rewrite faster and enhanced for KDE2. AFAIK, Amaya (see w3.org for info on that. Opera is available for Linux, or will be soon. 'Never heard of iCab and WebThing. This only prove that the C¦Net article, saying "Corel Linux has Netscape, whereas MacOS 9 has both Netscape and IE" was too much restrictive and approximative.

I hadn't said Mac weren't secure, I just said the argument "because each virtuel desktop is protected by a password" is surprising. If I understand it correctly, that means that the multi user things is made by virtual desktops, whereas on Linux you can have multiple users with each multiple v-desk. That doesn't make Linux less secure, since switching user (with su or such) does requires password. On the technical security side (getting root, exploiting, etc) I don't know MacOS enough to have an opinion. I just think, though, getting root don't require to use a CLI, particularly on a system without CLI. Maybe some kind of BackOrifice tools for Mac are possible, though I never heard of one.

Using the Win32 version of M16 found at the ftp site on the box at work, and the PNG alpha test site found here, I got these results. Not quite what I had hoped for. I will test both the Win32 and Linux builds on my personal box when I get home today.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder

By creating content as XML, you can now create XSLT scripts to transform [...] XML content into XHTML or into WAP.

Dream on 8-(

Like everyone and their dog (well, everyone who's dog is an XML/XSL geek), I too thought this was the way to go. Bitter experience shows that although it's technically possible, the sheer broken-ness of WML makes it almost useless. There are two big problems you need to work around; neither of which is conducive to an easy solution in XSL alone.

• The WML deck size limit. WML is pared down to fit onto phones, where 'phones' are devices so small that they're barely comparable to PDAs. WML simply doesn't have the 'grunt' to deliver useful content volumes to something even as small as a Palm.
• The clunkiness of WML navigation. You can't make a usable WML nav interface by simply taking the graphics off the same old menubar that works your desktop web pages. The transformation needs to be at a much deeper level, one that's beyond simple mechanical XSL.

What this means in practice is that your presentation-free XML content needs to be heavily marked up with "WML deck - Cut here" markers, so that when you slice it into decks, then you break it across somewhat functional boundaries. Break it in the middle of (e.g.) a news story and the phone has to go and deal with both decks, just as the user scrolls to read it. More traffic, more delay as the phone leaps around from deck to deck, generally a pretty nasty way of mis-using WAP.

For interface building, I managed to make it work with XSL transforms of my common XML. It still sucked - what I'd built turned out to be a standard interface hard-coded in XSL, with a bit of templating based on the content of the XML. For the one example I was looking at (a newsfeed service, to re-invent the cliche), this worked OK, but my XSL was entirely dependent on the purpose of this content. There's no way I could even have re-used it for a weather forecast or traffic service, without entirely re-coding the XSL.

The more I see of WAP, the less I like it. I now see the point of 4K Associates and their "WAP considered harmful" piece of last year. XHTML-Basic is a much better thought out protocol, and it doesn't have this problem of being squeezed so thin that it's no longer big enough to support palmtops.

I'm not convinced of the commercial future of WAP. Wireless wil be mega-, mega-huge, but I don't think it's going to be built out of WAP. You still have sourcing difficulties for handsets (in the UK) and if the handsets aren't out there, then there's not the same drive to build content. Any new tech in this market only gets one short slot at the championship, and I think WAP might miss it in favour of the Next New Thing.

Roll on Bluetooth.

One of my favorite test pages for PNGs is this page (over at w3.org). Unfortunately, the page itself is so weirdly designed, that I can't really determine if Mozilla renders it correctly or not. I even emailed the page's author once, since I suspect there's something wrong with the correct/incorrect demo pictures, but that didn't make me smarter... Is it only me who has problems parsing a red check mark and a green cross into "correct"/"incorrect"? It just makes my brain hurt.

I'm not intimately familiar with the P3P spec. But according to the P3P guiding principles user agents are supposed to:

• Provide mechanisms for displaying a service's information practices to users.
• Provide users an option that allows them to easily preview and agree to or reject each transfer of personal information that the user agent facilitates.
• Not be configured by default to transfer personal information to a service provider without the user's consent.
• Inform users about the privacy-related options offered by the user agent.

On the surface, at least, that looks pretty reasonable. It certainly doesn't sound like the description given above. What am I missing?

i quite like them and the super portability of animated gifs makes them an atractive format

with the bounding box nature of them they are quite compact too.

Lame homepages will always be lame but good homepages use the available technologies to enhance the experience, animated gif's being part of that.

Flash is good but proprietry and requires plugins.

Animated gifs display in image browsers.

We need unencumbered and supported animated file formats just as we need unecumbered static formats.

The work being done on SVG looks good as it supports vector graphics with animation and createable with xml, can't get much more portable than that!

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8

or here


.oO0Oo.

Who can't run the executable unzipper anyways? If I download files that end in EXE, my first reaction is "file $file" followed by "unzip $file" or whatever. I would never have known about the license agreement in the first place, and as I could not read it anyways (well, not true, I could pull the strings out, but whatever) how could I 'circumvent' it. Or are MS Windoze users only allowed to download it?

Go to the download page. It says that "Document is in Adobe Acrobat format," which is a lie, it is a pdf file after extraction (hey, we should get Adobe to sue M$ :-)), so the next part goes "and can be extracted onto any Windows platform." So, if you're not using Windows, you're out of luck. Guess that's a part of their tactics.

Anyway, downloading is not a problem, you can do that. Then, you have to unzip it. Is long as you use the programs you normally use to unzip, I can't imagine they can call it "circumventing". I haven't successfully unzipped it on my Digital UNIX box, but I hear others have done it with unrar.

Then, you should have a file you can read. I can't see that you can possibly have done anything wrong by doing this, and it is certainly a freedom of speech issue if you can't critize what you read. Nevertheless, I think the document shouldn't be on /., M$ can claim copyright for it. I agree entirely with the summary made by Art Tatum. That being said, I think we need new laws that requires things like these "extentions" to be open.

BTW, on linking: Isn't it so that M$ won a case about deeplinking? M$ had deep linked a company, that sued M$, and M$ won...? And, while we're on the topic, have you seen what Tim Berners-Lee has to say on links and laws? /. should get TimBL to witness if they won't let the links stay.

As for the second part, most HTTP responses are compressed if the client handles gzip and the server handles gzip, which most do. There are ISAPI filters that enable this on IIS, and apache modules that do this same thing too.

the sinister mister earache.

What then of Google and it's locally cached copies?

Web sites give or deny permission to cache via the facilities provided by various headers returned on HTTP requests. See RFC 2068: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

The last time AI was la mode, which was about 15-20 years ago, one of the computational walls AI hit was in computer vision. So, 10 Moore's Law cycles later, ...

If a Web page knew you had a camera pointed at yourself, could it watch? As in, see what you're looking at, where you point (forget those mouses!), what you spend time reading?

So instead of "Big Brother is watching you!" we'd have Tim Berners-Lee is watching you!"

Look at the money going into streaming media. A large segment of the business world still sees the internet as just another medium for TV or radio broadcasting. By it's very nature broadcasting is not interconnected, it's passive and linear.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his book, Weaving the Web that the main obstacle to the web being a true information web of shared knowledge is that content is controlled by too few. He was upset that browsers were developed which could not edit web pages like his original browser/editor.

The silver lining to this, IMHO, is the "weblog" phenomenon, including sites like Slashdot, where ordinary users can contribute their ideas, especially in html format so that they can contribute links. I really believe that some day soon the conventional media sites will be forced to give this kind of capability to their readers, or else risk losing all those eyeballs to Slash-like sites.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

Look at the money going into streaming media. A large segment of the business world still sees the internet as just another medium for TV or radio broadcasting. By it's very nature broadcasting is not interconnected, it's passive and linear.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his book, Weaving the Web that the main obstacle to the web being a true information web of shared knowledge is that content is controlled by too few. He was upset that browsers were developed which could not edit web pages like his original browser/editor.

The silver lining to this, IMHO, is the "weblog" phenomenon, including sites like Slashdot, where ordinary users can contribute their ideas, especially in html format so that they can contribute links. I really believe that some day soon the conventional media sites will be forced to give this kind of capability to their readers, or else risk losing all those eyeballs to Slash-like sites.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

Look at the money going into streaming media. A large segment of the business world still sees the internet as just another medium for TV or radio broadcasting. By it's very nature broadcasting is not interconnected, it's passive and linear.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote in his book, Weaving the Web that the main obstacle to the web being a true information web of shared knowledge is that content is controlled by too few. He was upset that browsers were developed which could not edit web pages like his original browser/editor.

The silver lining to this, IMHO, is the "weblog" phenomenon, including sites like Slashdot, where ordinary users can contribute their ideas, especially in html format so that they can contribute links. I really believe that some day soon the conventional media sites will be forced to give this kind of capability to their readers, or else risk losing all those eyeballs to Slash-like sites.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

I'm a web developer. I've always loved the potential of the web until recently. Now I don't like working with it. I can't stand developing for 3 different browsers on 4 different platforms, 12 screen resolutions, 3 color depths, and design templates that came from a print artist who thinks that the web is one big brochure.

The web is broke. We're not using it properly, there are too many poorly done corporate sites, contributing to insecurity, poor usability and incompatibility.

Many clients we work with are dead set against sending anyone away from their site. I don't think they realize that links are what the web is made of. This contributes to the unreachable part of the bowtie. These corporate folk are afraid that by linking away from the site, they will lose a viewer, and that use won't find their way back. They don't realize that the web is a pull technology, and the if the user was looking for certain information, the user will come back if it is the best source of such info. The back button is one of the browsers most used features.

We need more of these research projects to help us figure out what needs to be changed. The W3C is a start, but it's expensive to join and it's rare that you find a website that conforms to the standards. In fact, I've run into web developers who have never HEARD of the w3c.

The web is a new, completely different medium. It's not a CDROM, it's not a brochure, it's not TV. We can't keep treating it like these other media.

neutrino

Dear Mr. Future of the Web:

Do standards mean nothing to you?

thank you.

You're soaking in it.

It is called the World Wide Web.

-Peter


Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

Aphr0 said:
Ok. Wonderful. The system files can't be touched. However, all of the user's files could be erased. All the presentations, pictures, documents, spreadsheets, personal items, etc. System files can be fixed with a reinstall of the application/os; user files cannot. You either lose whatever work you did since the last backup or you lose everything if you don't back up your files.

It would seem that you neglected to read the thread before posting. My comments (which were on the topic of the thread) were in reference to an email attachment potentially deleting system files.

Let me modify my admonition to: Read the thread and think before posting.

-Peter


Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

First I would like to say that myc is absolutly correct.

Second, do you mean to suggest that wreaking havoc with system and data files is somehow better than protecting system files?

What would you propose? Not allowing users to delete their own files?

Next time you get the urge to post, think first.

-Peter


Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

>Well if you leave yourself logged in, I can easily edit your login file with this line:
alias ls 'rm -R *'

Let me explain why this is not the same.

1. This will not effect system files. (unless "I" walk away from a root login, in which case, you own the system anyway, and "I" am just an idiot.)

2. If you do something to break the system under my login, then, from an OS design point of view, it is ME DOING IT.

NO SYSTEM CAN PROTECT AGAINST A PRIVILEGED USER WITH MALICIOUS INTENT!

So the question is WHY SHOULD EMAIL ATTACHMENTS RUN PRIVILEGED BY DEFAULT.

The answer is that they shouldn't, and that allowing it is piss-poor design.

-Peter



Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

>If you hide file extensions, then the item shows up with the vbs icon, not the text icon

>Doesn't matter. The WRONG icon showed up, and any user should recognize that.

So you and YU Nicks are saying that ICONS ARE A SECURITY FEATURE!?!?!?! You can't be serious.

I did write my original post with the assumption that I (or you) am (are) not running email attachments a root. I can't help it that some people are that stupid.

-Peter



Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

Not the same deal.

1. A "malicious" bash script can not make itself run as root.

2. I believe (may be wrong on this) that the thing "looks" like a text file if you have "known extensions hidden" as per default.

-Peter



Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

MS is very much responsible.

Is someone else responsible for their piss-poor OS design?

Ask yourself this, what constructive purpose can there be for an email client that can change system files? Why should an email client be caused to generate messages by another message?

Maybe you can come up with some contrived "use" for this, but it is clearly not worth it.

Who is responsible for this "functionality"? Microsoft. No one else.


Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.

>Digital copies of the Guide legally have to be bought

Read the subject. The discussion is about the possibility of Adams deciding to waive his copyrights.

The discussion has gone full circle.

-Peter

PS: The Louve is at http://www.louvre.fr/. Mona is at http://www.louvre.fr/fra ncais/magazine/joconde/jocon_f.htm


Slashdot cries out for open standards, then breaks them.