Slashdot Mirror
Xanadu Software Released After 54 Years In the Making
redletterdave writes: "'Project Xanadu,' designed by hypertext inventor Ted Nelson to let users build documents that automatically embed the sources they're linking back to and show the visible connections between parallel webpages, was released in late April at a Chapman University event. Thing is, development on Xanadu began in 1960 — that's 54 years ago — making it the most delayed software in history. 'At its simplest, Xanadu lets users build documents that seamlessly embed the sources which they are linking back to, creating, in Nelson's words, "an entire form of literature where links do not break as versions change; where documents may be closely compared side by side and closely annotated; where it is possible to see the origins of every quotation; and in which there is a valid copyright system - a literary, legal and business arrangement - for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount." The version released on the internet, named OpenXanadu, is a simple document created using quoted sections from eight other works, including the King James Bible and the Wikipedia page on Steady State Theory.'"
"a simple document created using quoted sections from eight other work"
Sounds like an elaborate version of ask.com or some other copy-cat filling site.
Is it time to move on perhaps? Or did I miss something?
I'll hold out for version 2.0 when they work the bugs out.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
anyone would beat the Duke Nukem Forever record
Alternately titled "Project Xanadu Forever".
Dark Reflection
I would have thought nothing would come out later than initially intended after duke nukem but it looks like we have a new record!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Anyone see the actual document before it was /.ed?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Was John Romero working on this project too?
People it is a treasure! I think people should go through the documentation of this project carefully. It predates the entire internet, but talks about links between documents, references, referees etc. I think we can find prior art by the tons here. We might be able to invalidate many many trivial patents on the internet and web pages here.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I meant Get some PRIORITIES!
Hurd?
If 29 years wasn't enough, I doubt another 25 is going to make a huge difference.
There is a problem that Xanadu really solves which is when you want to cite someone else's text verbatim... its a direct and visual link back to the source.. so it's clear whose words are being used, where they come from and there is an easy Color coded and visual LINK to see them in full context.. HMTL named hyperlinks can accomplish much of the same however... the interface for Xanadu is much more fluid...
i would enjoy writing with Xanadu...
http://www.hawknest.com/
The Bible. Why do people keep dragging that drivel through history? Let's say this Xanadu thing takes off; now the Bible is forever baked into its history.
It predates the entire internet, but talks about links between documents, references, referees etc.
Talk is not the same thing as a workable solution. Particularly when applied to systems that do not yet exist.
If 1 year wasn't enough, another 53 years would make a heck of a difference.
http://slashdot.org/story/99/0...
Come on guys, get it together.
"...If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year, do you suppose..."
I would have a sig but I am too busy updating programs and restarting my computer
Everybody always expects the Xanadu.
I don't see the connection between the two... can you explain it using a car analogy?
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Doesn't this just make you want to roller skate? I mean, just look at all those colors...
I really hope the irony in your post title is intentional :)
They should have done like our never to be released xanadu and renamed it first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream_Meadowlands
Congrates! That should also leave a record in Guinness Book of World Records
Well, I guess hail to the queen, baby!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The issue of tracking entities that quote your resource is not really the size of a problem that demands this much answer.
IIRC, the original design included a large number of other features that became nonsensical as modern conventions for information arrived:
- We do not require licensing or micropayment for quoting text or speech. The www follows free-speech by default, and tools must be built on top to restrict things. (Among many reasons why not: There is no permanent trust-able entity for enforcement)
- There is a vastly larger usage of linking than quote usage (links jump but also embed)
- Commercial licensing of text, images and video is still required but the infrastructure to enforce it has to constantly differentiate by usage and intent (satire, education), not mere presence or absence. (YouTube's big review process...)
- There is no permanent barrier to building a free side-channel for information that would otherwise be licensed. (P2P File Sharing, etc)
.
kinda make this obsolete
You are a fucking Yugo.
Table-ized A.I.
Oh come on, I think you're being over harsh there... He didn't say that his analogy exploded into pieces on impact whilst shunting the main weight of the argument into the body cavity of the oncoming traffic.
Moore's law is not a law. Theory, yes; Predictable trend, certainly; Law, no.
See "The Skills of Xanadu", as text: http://books.google.com/books?...
and as audio: https://archive.org/details/pr...
Around 2001 or 2002, while working at at IBM Research I went to a talk by Ted Nelson there, and I asked him about the story given the similar name. He said that the story had inspired him (at least partially) to do his work, and thanked me for telling him the name of the story, saying he had been looking for that story for a long time. While I did not say so, his reply about looking for the story surprised me given that there are probably not many stories with Xanadu in the title so a library search would have found it I would think.. Ted Nelson records everything around him on a tape recorder (or at least did then), so that interaction should be on one of his tapes...
The 1956 story by Theodore Sturgeon is am amazing work that features a world networked by wireless mobile wearable computing supporting freely shared knowledge and skills through a sort of global internet-like concept. Some of that knowledge was about advanced nanotech-based manufacturing. The system powered an economy reflecting ideas like Bob Black writes about in "The Abolition of Work", where much work had become play coordinated through this global network. The story has inspired other people as well, both me from when I read it (and forgot it mostly for a long time, except for the surprise ending), and also a Master Inventor at IBM I worked with who got inspired by the nanotech aspects of that story when he was young. Even almost sixty years later, that story still has things we can learn from about a vision of a new type of society (including with enhanced intrinsic&mutual security) made possible through advanced computing.
A core theme is an interplay between meshwork and hierarchy, reminiscent of Manuel De Landa's writings:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/man...
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for."
See also, for other "old" ideas we could still benefit from thinking about:
"The Web That Wasn't"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Google Tech Talks October, 23 2007
For most of us who work on the
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Several of my friends were early Xanadudes. At one point there was a serious risk that they might actually ship a product, and Ted would lose his Golden Vaporware Awards, but somehow it never quite happened.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Will it work on the computer it was designed for, from 54 years ago?
Couldn't you implement Xanadu today in a few weeks using XInclude and some social conventions?
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-...
The content could be, by convention, kept in place and merely added to in an XML library, and the documents themselves could be implemented by an XML document populated with nothing but XIncludes. Links could be represented by XML fragments using XIncludes as well.
A so sad, too bad story of genius... it reminds me of some of the tales told in the Cosmos and Connections series (Sagan, Tyson and Burke) of astronomical and physics visionaries, folks glimpsed truths that became essential building blocks of our modern understanding of the world, and yet in their own time this information was of little or no practical use.
I've been down some of the rabbit holes of Xanadu in my own algorithmic doodles which centered around 'compressing' information by changing tokens into references to tokens down to the rudiments of language, which is going too far because you lose useful context, and have witnessed some of the grandest experiments in whole encapsulation -- such as the replication versioning disaster that was Microsoft OLE (object linking and embedding), where burned-in OS paths to data (on my computer, not necessarily yours) create a fragile web of things on disk and things inside other things that is easily broken, leaving us with data cobwebs flapping in the wind.
Sadly, and with utmost sympathy -- it's a beautiful dream-- but I believe that many of these concepts are dangerous and should be abandoned.
These are extremes. Make lots of copies, knowing some will evolve and diverge... and try to smarten the analysis so after the fact you can reconcile diffs, but it's a separate process and you're screwed if non-trivial transformations occur. Or centralize and impose a System (as Xanadu attempts) with a battery of willing monkeys feeding knowledge into the system, correctly applying transclusion down to some atomic level, and on the seventh day He looked down upon it and saw that it was Good...
But you're screwed with Xanadu. You're screwed as a species because you have distilled a knowledge base into a few high-tech points of failure. Where knowledge survives over history through massive and often wasteful replication, oops there goes the Library of Alexandria, oops there goes another rubber tree, you're putting all your intellectual eggs a few baskets. Baskets held in Xanadu servers that are so pointer and reference rich that a raw dump of the damned thing wouldn't make any sense at all.
Xanadu screws you as a person because we assimilate knowledge via a narrative process. Books render completely and we read. We need lectures to learn, great lectures that illuminate and inspire. Good lecturers are those whose minds unroll knowledge into talking-streams. They cannot and will not (instead) engage in some process of hashing out every sentence they utter, completely researching and correctly embedding the underlying link to the utterance of the person who said it last to first, and did not necessarily say it better. When faced with the task of applying tranny-links to their work they would likely just fall silent.
Because (since we are each alone in the mind) there is no one way to say anything, and no distilled 'true' method of thinking. Not even in German. It's treatises, sermons and pulpits all the way down.
If you are excited by the Xanadu concept and think fewer points of failure are better, please take a moment to view this exquisite and amazing visit with Computer Zero. It is from the 1975 movie Rollerball, and what the hell is it doing there, it is true genius and is creepy as hell.
Zero was a 'memory pool', an actual Xanadu Server! It had all the books, all the knowledge, all the connections, and yet -- it was absent-minded and going insane, losing things, mumbling. If there had been a sequel to Rollerball world 100 years hence, it would surely have been a medieval society.
Make a zillion copies of everything. Re-tell in your own words. There's no time for linking or data trans-substantiation, just replicate data like rabbits and we'll fix it in the mix. Or let the kids sort it out.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I knew the people who worked on Xanadu though not quite back to the earliest days.
The design was largely completed by the time Autodesk got out of funding it. For a while the project continued under Memex (later Filoli over trademark issues). Memex had funding problems, the core group quit, and when Memex was funded again Roger Gregory (one of the original team members) and I were brought in to try to make sense of what they had. My experience was long out of date FORTRAN and more recent assembly. The majority of the code had been written in Smalltalk and auto translated to C++ as part of the compiling process. Memory was (by current standards) insanely limited. The clever part of the code was to pack and unpack a multi dimensional tree off disk. Fan out ran to around a thousand link pointers per 8k disk block meaning three disk reads could take you to a billion unique objects. The famous log N property.
The performance critically depended on a high performance system to reclaim abandoned parts of the tree in memory and that part was not finished. (It had been designed as an Ungar-Sather moving type garbage collector and partly written but not tested.) We got it going and it ran the regression test suite. One of the last tasks was to upgrade it from the Sun compiler. The most critical inner parts of the code depended on switching tree elements around to keep the tree balanced. It used the classic c=a, a =b and a=c where a and b were links. Bjarne Stroustrup had changed the definition of overriding equal between the two compilers making this a hard bug to find. I finally found it single stepping through the assembly language representation of the code. The tools are much better now, nobody would think of writing a garbage collector from scratch. It was only 20 years ago, but it feels like a lifetime.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
That Gary Wolf hit piece about Xanadu is one of the worst things written on the subject... he apparently figured he could get away with empty vapid sneering on some logic like "if he's so smart why isn't he rich?". Be sure to look at the comments published at wired, including the second one by Nelson himself http://archive.wired.com/wired... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What has been released so far is a tease. It demonstrates nicely the transclusion and transcopyright concepts. For it to be truly useful it needs the ability to make your own documents with the ability to charge micropayments. Even then it will take awhile before people start to use it, but once it hits critical mass, it will be a solid alternative for publishing. Much better than the web. A global publishing system based on transclusions and micropayments would even things out -- and put serious but smaller scale publishing in the hands of ordinary people. The power would not be concentrated among the worlds most popular web sites and our culture would be less subverted by the need to advertise to pay the bills.
What hasn't been shone in the docs well is what the authoring tools will be like. The better the authoring tools, the better the adoption of this software. Ted Nelson wants something called "real cut and paste". This is simply slicing and dicing a document into pieces and rearranging them. Astonishing that no software today can do this. So software today will even allow you to draw sentences around. Freeplane, a mind-mapping program, comes to doing real cut-and-paste. Rearranging text like you rearrange text in a mind-mapping program would be best accomplished on a 4K monitor, although dual HD monitors would do. Cut-and-paste as it is today is more like hide-and-plug -- the text is temporarily taken off the screen and put into a new place.
Give the Xanadu project its due. It is still relevant today and needed. And while the Xanadu project is Ted's big idea ... he has others as well. I particularly like his Floating World(tm) spec. I myself have been working towards creating part of this Floating World idea in my spare time (development has been slow, oh well). Though I want to get the photo organizer and checklist software parts done first. If the programmers on this latest attempt at Xanadu succeed they may beat me to getting around to the Floating World ideas (although of course not quite as laid out in the old design). If so, I am OK with that.
The more I read about Ted Nelson and the story behind it, there's much to learn. Firstly, what an extreme example of becoming too enmeshed with ideas (worse, ideas about ideas). His drive to index everything seems to be driven from his extreme case of ADD. But not every thread of thought needs to be catalogued and indexed, something that is harder to remember in the days of social media.
But mercilessly tracing connections between ideas can truly be a madman's folly. The crux of scholarship is not obsessively tracking down references and sources, but steadfastly ignoring side roads and making your point. It's not jumping from source to source endlessly in the search of absolute truth.
While these ideas sounds awesome to the ADD side in myself, in the end it is a distraction. Attention is a necessity, because it allows us to selectively ignore things versus having to slavishly follow the random whims in our heads.
Seriously, this story seems like something straight out of a Umberto Eco novel. And it's sad, because it is really way too late for this to matter.