I think that we will see something like the semantic web, but it will likely develop from grass-roots efforts rather than top-down driven standards.
That said, I have a chapter on the SW in my latest book (hopefully about to be printed in a few weeks) and my next book project will be about the commercial AllegroGraph SW kit.
Good open source and commercial tools exist for RDF repositories, SPARQL queries and inference, etc. The problem is that the current round of applications don't really excite me (yet).
The really big win for RDF/RDFS is the ability to use multiple sources of information without any explicit data conversion: that is (at least partially) what RDFS is for.
I have always enjoyed releasing my projects open source (usually LGPL, sometimes GPL) but the economy has convinced me that I need to make what used to be give-away projects be at least partially revenue generating.
I am starting to wrap new software projects with free PDF web books and the code is free for any non-commercial use. If readers buy a for-fee PDF or a print on demand book, then they get a commercial use license for the project code. (Current project: Java AI; next AllegroGraph based book on Semantic Web; after that Semantic Web with Java (Sesame, Jena, OWL-API, etc.)
I don't like doing this, but I think that the economy is going to get very bad and stay that way for a long time and I feel like I need to make my non-consulting time also be revenue generating even if it is fairly small change.
I bought "Mastering Dojo" and although I have not finished it yet, I like it. I got into using Dojo a few years ago when I was experimenting with Common Lisp back end code with a REST architectural style - and a rich client Dojo web interface. Dojo is very cool. I have also used Dojo in a Rails web app and tried it with a JSP based web app (just a test, not a real project).
The other related book I bought recently is "Javascript, The Good Parts" that has made me appreciate the language more.
There is a JSR to address this on the JVM but I am not convinced that interop between languages on a single VM will be transparent. I mix Java libraries with JRuby and I often end up writing thin facade classes to make interop better.
I had a similar experience in 1978: I had written a neat but slow chess program in Basic for the Apple II. The guy who organized the first West Coast Computer Fair chess tournament encouraged me to enter, and I did not fair so well against the programs nicely crafted in assembler language. Still, since I was handing out free copies of my program, and people liked that, it was a fun experience.
I actually did a little chess programming last week. I am finishing up the 3rd edition of my Java AI book (self plug: a PDF version will always be available on my web site) and since I have generally "caught the Java generics" disease, I re-coded the chess alpha-beta search example using the new collection classes and generics - it ran so much slower than the old native data type + array version that I archived and tossed the new version:-)
I think that the tax law changes started way back in the Clinton administration. If I remember correctly that Congress passed legislation to make it very difficult for people to move to lower tax rate jurisdictions and keep their money and at the same time made it easy for corporations to do so. This process of giving more rights and flexibility to corporations than to individuals continued full speed ahead during W. Bush's term.
I don't think that there can be much doubt (especially after this corporate giveaway bailout being voted on today) that most governments (including mine, the USA) have been totally subverted to corporate interests. The question is, I think, given this environment, how can we as individuals thrive most effectively? I have been blogging a lot about this lately, but I won't bore anyone here with links to that:-)
When I worked at the SAIC Virtual Reality Systems Group, I had the opportunity to buy and try several 3D video products and a couple of 3d audio (head related transfer function stuff).
3D video and audio helps "suspend disbelief", making it easier to draw people into virtual environments.
I just use a MacBook now, but if Nvidia sells 3D viewing glasses compatible with the Mac, they have a customer:-)
BTW, a little off topic, but inexpensive 3D glasses with drivers compatible with the Squeak Croquet system would be great!
Data warehousing (here I mean databases stored in column order for faster queries, etc.) may get a lift from using map reduce over server clusters. This would get away from using relational databases for massive data stores for problems where you need to sweep through a lot of data, collecting specific results.
I think that it is interesting, useful, and cool that Yahoo is supporting the open source Nutch system, that implements map reduce APIs for a few languages - makes it easier to experiment with map reduce on a budget.
Seriously, funding for work in statistical NLP has often come from governments and intel agencies (an example is, I think, is Clear Forest before it was purchased).
Entity extraction and correlation between documents is difficult to do well so it is not surprising that funding comes from governments and large corporations (yeah, not much difference between the two anymore).
Interesting about the 9 stone handicap though. In the 1970s I played the women's world champion and she gave me a 9 stone handicap. Even though I am not a very strong player, I was still amazed that she beat me by a small margin. Hopefully I have improved at least a little since then:-)
Don't get me wrong: this is a great advance for Computer Go (I wrote the first commercial Go Program 'Honinbo Warrior' in the 1970s, and marketed/sold it for several years).
Still, Go on a 9x9 board is largely tactical - strategy is much more important on a 19x19 board.
There is the usual problem of developers actually making living working on open source projects, but it can work. I have been working on a project that I will probably release as free for non-commercial use, pay a license fee for commercial use, and release the source code. I would like to use the AGPL, but I do need some income from my project and (A)GPL with alternative license options may not do this for me.
I really like the ideas of "zero-knowledge web apps" and I thin that I will convert my little kbdocs.com demo to use the "zero-knowledge" ideas - if for a learning exercise.
Sure, Simon Phipps's quote makes a good headline, but between OpenOffice.org, Netbeans, Glassfish, slowly but surely Java, etc. I would personally give Sun a good grade.
Open Source can be good for business, huge, large, and small. A bit off topic, but: while I earn most of my living consulting on (unfortunately) closed source projects, I almost always try to initially talk my customers into at least considering Open Sourcing all or parts of development projects. I believe that software development should be done in the least expensive and highest quality way possible: better for almost everyone to drive down the cost of software development; I argue that the less expensive that useful projects are, then more projects get funded. Also, about an hour ago, I received a small grant from someone in Europe to convert one of my LGPL projects from Java to Pascal/Delphi:-)
I did some testing on an off line server, and then pushed these patches.
I am concerned about "Ruby the Platform". I have dealt with deployment and scaling issues for a few years on a customer project written in Rails + Common Lisp, and as much as I *love* coding in Ruby and Lisp, this experience has also made me appreciate "Java the platform":-)
I read Penrose's and Gardner's "The Emporer's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics" a long time ago - at the time I did not agree with him, but now I mostly do think that non-quantum digital computers "lack something" required for consciousness and Real AI(tm)
I will look at "The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind" - I just added it to my Amazon shopping cart - thanks for the recommendation.
The discussion of souls, should shards, etc. was not what I expected but I enjoyed this material anyway, and I enjoyed the entire book.
I like and more or less agree with Hofstadter's general take on AI also: I have been very interested in AI since the mid-1970s when I read "Mind Inside Matter", but I also appreciate the spiritual side of human life and I still look at human consciousness as a mystery although attending one of the "human consciousness and quantum mechanics" conferences sort of has me thinking that quantum effects may be part of the mystery.
Things will probably be similar to the time period right after the dot-com-bust.
Some money will still be spent on new development but projects will be chosen carefully.
I would hope that more companies will turn to open source software. As a consultant, I sometimes find it frustrating when customers are so concerned about protecting their IP instead of their profitability.
A bit obvious, but it is difficult to make money from commonly available data and services.
After the dot-com-bust, I found myself getting a lot more business from companies and individuals overseas (I live in the USA) - good for keeping busy, but I earned less money.
It is obvious that our economy (in the USA) is in a steep decline. Our government tries hard to 'fake the numbers' on inflation (they stopped publishing M3 figures several years ago!) and unemployment. The entire fiat money system looks to be in trouble.
I find it ironic that Iran, one of the few countries that is not in debt to the world "print money as fast as they can" banking system, looks like they may be attacked soon, and I wonder if there is a connection. I tend to believe that money, and the strong desire of the super rich to acquire more, is at the center of most international activities.
I think that we in the USA will unfortunately see a difficult time economically ahead (except for "Bush's base" - the super rich). That said, I hope that the economies in developing countries do OK since worst problems will occur if the economy of the whole world tanks.
The world has become a much more tightly coupled place - except for the super rich who profit from McCain + Bush style "small wars, forever" policies, the rest of us just want peace, and deal with doing business.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that we will see something like the semantic web, but it will likely develop from grass-roots efforts rather than top-down driven standards.
That said, I have a chapter on the SW in my latest book (hopefully about to be printed in a few weeks) and my next book project will be about the commercial AllegroGraph SW kit.
Good open source and commercial tools exist for RDF repositories, SPARQL queries and inference, etc. The problem is that the current round of applications don't really excite me (yet).
The really big win for RDF/RDFS is the ability to use multiple sources of information without any explicit data conversion: that is (at least partially) what RDFS is for.
I have always enjoyed releasing my projects open source (usually LGPL, sometimes GPL) but the economy has convinced me that I need to make what used to be give-away projects be at least partially revenue generating.
I am starting to wrap new software projects with free PDF web books and the code is free for any non-commercial use. If readers buy a for-fee PDF or a print on demand book, then they get a commercial use license for the project code. (Current project: Java AI; next AllegroGraph based book on Semantic Web; after that Semantic Web with Java (Sesame, Jena, OWL-API, etc.)
I don't like doing this, but I think that the economy is going to get very bad and stay that way for a long time and I feel like I need to make my non-consulting time also be revenue generating even if it is fairly small change.
I bought "Mastering Dojo" and although I have not finished it yet, I like it. I got into using Dojo a few years ago when I was experimenting with Common Lisp back end code with a REST architectural style - and a rich client Dojo web interface. Dojo is very cool. I have also used Dojo in a Rails web app and tried it with a JSP based web app (just a test, not a real project).
The other related book I bought recently is "Javascript, The Good Parts" that has made me appreciate the language more.
There is a JSR to address this on the JVM but I am not convinced that interop between languages on a single VM will be transparent. I mix Java libraries with JRuby and I often end up writing thin facade classes to make interop better.
Thanks for the correction Matt! My memory is updated :-)
I had a similar experience in 1978: I had written a neat but slow chess program in Basic for the Apple II. The guy who organized the first West Coast Computer Fair chess tournament encouraged me to enter, and I did not fair so well against the programs nicely crafted in assembler language. Still, since I was handing out free copies of my program, and people liked that, it was a fun experience.
I actually did a little chess programming last week. I am finishing up the 3rd edition of my Java AI book (self plug: a PDF version will always be available on my web site) and since I have generally "caught the Java generics" disease, I re-coded the chess alpha-beta search example using the new collection classes and generics - it ran so much slower than the old native data type + array version that I archived and tossed the new version :-)
I think that the tax law changes started way back in the Clinton administration. If I remember correctly that Congress passed legislation to make it very difficult for people to move to lower tax rate jurisdictions and keep their money and at the same time made it easy for corporations to do so. This process of giving more rights and flexibility to corporations than to individuals continued full speed ahead during W. Bush's term.
I don't think that there can be much doubt (especially after this corporate giveaway bailout being voted on today) that most governments (including mine, the USA) have been totally subverted to corporate interests. The question is, I think, given this environment, how can we as individuals thrive most effectively? I have been blogging a lot about this lately, but I won't bore anyone here with links to that :-)
When I worked at the SAIC Virtual Reality Systems Group, I had the opportunity to buy and try several 3D video products and a couple of 3d audio (head related transfer function stuff).
3D video and audio helps "suspend disbelief", making it easier to draw people into virtual environments.
I just use a MacBook now, but if Nvidia sells 3D viewing glasses compatible with the Mac, they have a customer :-)
BTW, a little off topic, but inexpensive 3D glasses with drivers compatible with the Squeak Croquet system would be great!
Cool!! And thanks for the correction.
Data warehousing (here I mean databases stored in column order for faster queries, etc.) may get a lift from using map reduce over server clusters. This would get away from using relational databases for massive data stores for problems where you need to sweep through a lot of data, collecting specific results.
I think that it is interesting, useful, and cool that Yahoo is supporting the open source Nutch system, that implements map reduce APIs for a few languages - makes it easier to experiment with map reduce on a budget.
:-)
Seriously, funding for work in statistical NLP has often come from governments and intel agencies (an example is, I think, is Clear Forest before it was purchased).
Entity extraction and correlation between documents is difficult to do well so it is not surprising that funding comes from governments and large corporations (yeah, not much difference between the two anymore).
Thanks for the correction!
Must clean my glasses :-)
Interesting about the 9 stone handicap though. In the 1970s I played the women's world champion and she gave me a 9 stone handicap. Even though I am not a very strong player, I was still amazed that she beat me by a small margin. Hopefully I have improved at least a little since then :-)
Don't get me wrong: this is a great advance for Computer Go (I wrote the first commercial Go Program 'Honinbo Warrior' in the 1970s, and marketed/sold it for several years).
Still, Go on a 9x9 board is largely tactical - strategy is much more important on a 19x19 board.
There is the usual problem of developers actually making living working on open source projects, but it can work. I have been working on a project that I will probably release as free for non-commercial use, pay a license fee for commercial use, and release the source code. I would like to use the AGPL, but I do need some income from my project and (A)GPL with alternative license options may not do this for me.
I really like the ideas of "zero-knowledge web apps" and I thin that I will convert my little kbdocs.com demo to use the "zero-knowledge" ideas - if for a learning exercise.
Screen is a great utility. I wrote about it here: http://markwatson.com/blog/2007/04/cant-believe-i-missed-this-unix-utility.html and will not repeat myself.
I thought that Sun paid a lot of money for StarOffice, and then Sun open sourced it.
Isn't this right?
Sure, Simon Phipps's quote makes a good headline, but between OpenOffice.org, Netbeans, Glassfish, slowly but surely Java, etc. I would personally give Sun a good grade.
Open Source can be good for business, huge, large, and small. A bit off topic, but: while I earn most of my living consulting on (unfortunately) closed source projects, I almost always try to initially talk my customers into at least considering Open Sourcing all or parts of development projects. I believe that software development should be done in the least expensive and highest quality way possible: better for almost everyone to drive down the cost of software development; I argue that the less expensive that useful projects are, then more projects get funded. Also, about an hour ago, I received a small grant from someone in Europe to convert one of my LGPL projects from Java to Pascal/Delphi :-)
I have not yet looked at modrails, but I just looked at the site that you linked - looks very interesting - thanks!
That said, I am fairly happy with nginx + memcached + mongrel cluster
I did some testing on an off line server, and then pushed these patches.
I am concerned about "Ruby the Platform". I have dealt with deployment and scaling issues for a few years on a customer project written in Rails + Common Lisp, and as much as I *love* coding in Ruby and Lisp, this experience has also made me appreciate "Java the platform" :-)
I read Penrose's and Gardner's "The Emporer's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics" a long time ago - at the time I did not agree with him, but now I mostly do think that non-quantum digital computers "lack something" required for consciousness and Real AI(tm)
I will look at "The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind" - I just added it to my Amazon shopping cart - thanks for the recommendation.
The discussion of souls, should shards, etc. was not what I expected but I enjoyed this material anyway, and I enjoyed the entire book.
I like and more or less agree with Hofstadter's general take on AI also: I have been very interested in AI since the mid-1970s when I read "Mind Inside Matter", but I also appreciate the spiritual side of human life and I still look at human consciousness as a mystery although attending one of the "human consciousness and quantum mechanics" conferences sort of has me thinking that quantum effects may be part of the mystery.
Things will probably be similar to the time period right after the dot-com-bust.
Some money will still be spent on new development but projects will be chosen carefully.
I would hope that more companies will turn to open source software. As a consultant, I sometimes find it frustrating when customers are so concerned about protecting their IP instead of their profitability.
A bit obvious, but it is difficult to make money from commonly available data and services.
After the dot-com-bust, I found myself getting a lot more business from companies and individuals overseas (I live in the USA) - good for keeping busy, but I earned less money.
It is obvious that our economy (in the USA) is in a steep decline. Our government tries hard to 'fake the numbers' on inflation (they stopped publishing M3 figures several years ago!) and unemployment. The entire fiat money system looks to be in trouble.
I find it ironic that Iran, one of the few countries that is not in debt to the world "print money as fast as they can" banking system, looks like they may be attacked soon, and I wonder if there is a connection. I tend to believe that money, and the strong desire of the super rich to acquire more, is at the center of most international activities.
I think that we in the USA will unfortunately see a difficult time economically ahead (except for "Bush's base" - the super rich). That said, I hope that the economies in developing countries do OK since worst problems will occur if the economy of the whole world tanks.
The world has become a much more tightly coupled place - except for the super rich who profit from McCain + Bush style "small wars, forever" policies, the rest of us just want peace, and deal with doing business.
I just joined, but have not entered any data - it runs using HTTPS, not HTTP
I have written about this twice in the last couple of years (http://markwatson.com/blog/2007/10/it-is-important-to-check-web-sites-and.html and http://markwatson.com/blog/2007/03/being-good-web-citizen.html).
Using lynx (a text only browser) is useful to check text-only navigation. Lynx also makes me nostalgic for the web as it was back in 1991.
I think that any strongly typed language with lots of compile time and link time checks would be about as good (e.g., Java).
That said, it has been a very long time since I used Ada, so I might have forgot what extra things that Ada does for you.