Here in the UK, where we have DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), Pure Digital have made a DAB radio called The Bug which allows you to pause and rewind 'live radio' (sound familiar Tivo fans?) as well as record shows for later enjoyment.
Nobody's lawyers' seem to be jumping up and down about this over here - I guess it just fits in with 'fair use' rights of broadcast content we tend to enjoy here in the UK!
To paraphrase: "I don't think Cringely was talking about the semantic web, which...business doesn't care about"
I disagree strongly. In most large businesses today the issues of managing internally produced content and documents is of huge importance, and goes under the heading of 'knowledge management' (sorry, buzzword detector has just gone off).
The technologies of the semantic web are going to prove essential in helping businesses organise their content, just as html has proved essential for distributing them through their Intranets.
To say that business does not care about the Semantic Web is to either misunderstand business or the Semantic Web. Or both. Probably.
Here's a definition:
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila
I agree! It does seem ridiculous that journals should cream off such a large profit from redistibuting other peoples work. However, the review function that they perform is invaluable.
I subscribe to many IEEE journals and I'm happy to pay so that I don't have to waste huge amounts of my own time wading through poorly written/researched/inaccurate articles. Therefore, in the absence of the editorial input of the journals there is a need for good internet based peer review systems until such time that we have automated agents to do the job for us. Check out CiteSeer to see a step in the right direction.
I'm intrigued to know what 'killer apps' are going to emerge for wireless devices. I know that the role out of WAP here in the UK has been something of a failure as no one could really see the 'benefit' of wireless web surfing which is slower as not as usable as doing it from your home PC. The truly useful applications will use the GPS location of your phone to give you location dependent services. What's the traffic like 1 mile up the road? Where's the nearest pub that serves Wadworth's 6X? Where's the nearest record store?
"I did take...A fire extinguisher...i just took it because no one was using it" Yeah. Right. I think they are commonly used in the case of a fire, i.e. not often - be sure to take the life jackets next time you're on a ferry, and remove the air-bag from your friend's car, as they are probably 'not in use either'.
I remember in the Gulf War that here in the UK 'Massive Attack' changed their name to simply 'Massive' to avoid being black-listed on UK radio stations. I think I also remember that 'Bomb the Bass' changed their name to 'Tim Sinemon' or something. to avoid similar treatment. Pretty soon after the war was over, the banned (sorry) names all changed back to their original. I think it may be an issue of taste and sensitivity, rather than one of censorship, although the ClearChannel list does appear to be a little too comprehensive!
I assume that when talking about MPEG-4, we're talking about the whole standard, and not just the MPEG-4 Video codec.
I can really see the MPEG-4 Video codec taking off, as it offers superior video quality for low-bandwidth connections, but the MPEG-4 standard as a whole...hmmm I don't know
Admitedly, I've stopped following the developments of the MPEG-4 standard closely, but the last I saw it was quite a bloated standard that incorporated the video codec, much of VRML and some Java scripting. All these parts of the standard are necessary for things like scene graph rendering of video objects (turing off backgrounds in video etc.), and interactivity.
Unless a subset of this functionality (profile) is decided on for internet use, I can't see the whole standard taking off. However, I think that the video codec on its own has a lot of potential.
I think the analogy between P2P systems such as Napster stands, as the artcle talks about how ant colonies display intelligence that isn't obvious to the individual, and is only evident at a higher level.
This is certainly true with P2P file sharing systems; here popular files are shared more frequently, automatically building in more redundancy, thus improving performance, and old and less popular files are copied less frequently, or are deletd. These are a 'natural' phenomena of P2P file sharing and not an 'engineered' mechanism.
I'm sure that just like the ants, most P2P users are unaware that they are actually an 'agent' in a sophisticated distributed database.
My company has similar kinds of problems, in that we're results driven and not quality driven. To a lot of managers the additional overhead of a software process seems unneccessary, and are satisfied with quality being 'good enough'.
The solution we found was to use eXtreme Programming (XP) - a small overhead at the start of its use in setting up test harnesses, was more than repaid a little later, as the extensive testing meant that we could code faster and quality was higher.
Faster coding kept the managers happy and higher quality kept us happy!
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the UK, where we have DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), Pure Digital have made a DAB radio called The Bug which allows you to pause and rewind 'live radio' (sound familiar Tivo fans?) as well as record shows for later enjoyment.
Nobody's lawyers' seem to be jumping up and down about this over here - I guess it just fits in with 'fair use' rights of broadcast content we tend to enjoy here in the UK!
I disagree strongly. In most large businesses today the issues of managing internally produced content and documents is of huge importance, and goes under the heading of 'knowledge management' (sorry, buzzword detector has just gone off).
The technologies of the semantic web are going to prove essential in helping businesses organise their content, just as html has proved essential for distributing them through their Intranets.
To say that business does not care about the Semantic Web is to either misunderstand business or the Semantic Web. Or both. Probably.
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila
Much more information can be found at W3C's Semantic Web page.
I agree! It does seem ridiculous that journals should cream off such a large profit from redistibuting other peoples work. However, the review function that they perform is invaluable.
I subscribe to many IEEE journals and I'm happy to pay so that I don't have to waste huge amounts of my own time wading through poorly written/researched/inaccurate articles.
Therefore, in the absence of the editorial input of the journals there is a need for good internet based peer review systems until such time that we have automated agents to do the job for us.
Check out CiteSeer to see a step in the right direction.
I'm intrigued to know what 'killer apps' are going to emerge for wireless devices. I know that the role out of WAP here in the UK has been something of a failure as no one could really see the 'benefit' of wireless web surfing which is slower as not as usable as doing it from your home PC.
The truly useful applications will use the GPS location of your phone to give you location dependent services. What's the traffic like 1 mile up the road? Where's the nearest pub that serves Wadworth's 6X? Where's the nearest record store?
Perhaps the Yellow Pages is the killer app.
"I did take...A fire extinguisher...i just took it because no one was using it"
Yeah. Right. I think they are commonly used in the case of a fire, i.e. not often - be sure to take the life jackets next time you're on a ferry, and remove the air-bag from your friend's car, as they are probably 'not in use either'.
I remember in the Gulf War that here in the UK 'Massive Attack' changed their name to simply 'Massive' to avoid being black-listed on UK radio stations. I think I also remember that 'Bomb the Bass' changed their name to 'Tim Sinemon' or something. to avoid similar treatment.
Pretty soon after the war was over, the banned (sorry) names all changed back to their original. I think it may be an issue of taste and sensitivity, rather than one of censorship, although the ClearChannel list does appear to be a little too comprehensive!
I assume that when talking about MPEG-4, we're talking about the whole standard, and not just the MPEG-4 Video codec.
I can really see the MPEG-4 Video codec taking off, as it offers superior video quality for low-bandwidth connections, but the MPEG-4 standard as a whole...hmmm I don't know
Admitedly, I've stopped following the developments of the MPEG-4 standard closely, but the last I saw it was quite a bloated standard that incorporated the video codec, much of VRML and some Java scripting. All these parts of the standard are necessary for things like scene graph rendering of video objects (turing off backgrounds in video etc.), and interactivity.
Unless a subset of this functionality (profile) is decided on for internet use, I can't see the whole standard taking off. However, I think that the video codec on its own has a lot of potential.
I think the analogy between P2P systems such as Napster stands, as the artcle talks about how ant colonies display intelligence that isn't obvious to the individual, and is only evident at a higher level.
This is certainly true with P2P file sharing systems; here popular files are shared more frequently, automatically building in more redundancy, thus improving performance, and old and less popular files are copied less frequently, or are deletd. These are a 'natural' phenomena of P2P file sharing and not an 'engineered' mechanism.
I'm sure that just like the ants, most P2P users are unaware that they are actually an 'agent' in a sophisticated distributed database.
How long before one of these guys gets entered for Robot Wars/Battle Bots? I believe those shows use evolutionary principles...
As a sidenote, shouldn't there be a way for the ground control to override the controls of a hijacked plane?
Surely this presents a greater danger as hijackers need only take over ground control in order to terrorise planes by remote control!
The solution we found was to use eXtreme Programming (XP) - a small overhead at the start of its use in setting up test harnesses, was more than repaid a little later, as the extensive testing meant that we could code faster and quality was higher.
Faster coding kept the managers happy and higher quality kept us happy!