Yes the Wiki concept is just a logical evolution of something very simple, "HTML editing for dummies", yet, it's incredibly slick, useful and democratic. It's a perfect application of Einstein saying "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler", it's also a very nice application of KISS (Keep it Simple and Stupid), in that way it can be called an optimal technolgy.
I think, for all this reasons, it will make a lot of Knowledge Management Systems like Lotus and the like obsolete; so it deserves very to qualify as disruptive technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
If I had to choose, I'd probably say that extending MediaWiki would result in the best option. MediaWiki is clean, easy to use, and (always important) extremely feature rich
I second that, I have been a very happy TWiki user till I discovered Wikipedia. I have promoted it a lot here in Slashdot and among my friends. TWiki has an incredible set of functionalities, a lot of useful plugs-ins and a very active and helping community BUT one killer feature in MediaWiki I absolutly love is the way it helps you to organize your data in categeories and sub-categories which you can add on the fly; this is very useful for me to retrieve the incredible number of things I have put in it. yes TWiki has templates but they are cumersome to add and static, so I don't use them that much. I have been puting nearly all my private knowledge base in TWiki but I am now having a hard time organizing it and retrieving what I want; the other thing is I want to adopt a Wikipedia style of organizing my knowledge, as I use Wikipedia a lot and I am acquainted to it, I will even probably use Wikipedia cotegories.
My ultimate goal is to use Wikipedia for all the public knowledge I have (open source projects, documentation FAQ, definitions, etc) with links from my private wiki, and keep my private Wiki for my private knowledge.
The only problem I am going to have, is, I'll have to write a script to importe all my TWiki data into MediaWiki, I don't know if such a beast exist. One other thing I use a lot, that MediaWiki don't seem to have (after a quick check) is topic renaming.
I might be wrong, but I believe the USPTO don't even require any working prototype to patent a software anymore; you just need to say "I have invented (in fact imagined) a software, or a business method, which does, this and that" to have-it patented and leave it to court to decide if it's really valid or not !!
Developing world - 3d world, it's just a politicaly correct way to say it. Don't confuse Developing countries and "emerging countries" like China, Malaysia, India, Brasil, Corea etc
In fact, ESR applied for it but failed !! hence the "OSI Certified" label which the OSI gives now for licences they think is compatible with theu guidelines
I think what Sun is really worried about is trademark dilution. If that is the case, why not just specifiy that any derivative works must be named something other than Java? The only practical effect this would have is to make the licence GPL incompatible, since most people will rename a fork anyway. However, it does preserve Sun's trademark.
Yes I think this is the best solution !! if you still want to call your derived work Java, you need to pass the JCP tests. This has already been done, this is how J2EE works anyway !!
The real future of open source is not geeks, but institutions and big organizations who find it a viable business model.
The bulk of Linux developers already work for Redhat, Suse, IBM, HP, OSDL and so on.
If drug developement is ever to become a sustainable model it will be done by paid searchers in phamaceutic labs, because they will feel it's economically sound
the USPTO has neither the competence nor the will or the means to do prior art search. In practice they grants every patent provided you can PAY the fees for that.
The USPTO get it's funding from the fees you pay to have you patent granted. In practice they procrastinate the patent validation to the court. This is why free software and small businesses are screwed and why big business push and are very happy withe the patent system in the US and in EU.
There is a growing open source community in Morocco, there is even a Moroccan Linux distribution, we have also have a local Lug and we organize install fests and some compagnies are begining to specialize in open source support and installation, specific Moroccan programs are begining to appear, although they are still few and far between.
Oh and by the way I am surfing on a DSL connection, we have DSL since the begining of 2004. 128 kbs/s costs 30$ without any in volume limitation
Alas Microsoft is very very strong here, and 99% of the people still believe that Bill Gates invented the Internet. MS is very strong in goverenement too and they have recently offered bargain prices to install Linux in schools.
But overall things are not that bad, and I see a very bright future for Linux and open source here, as MS Office price nearly equals a middle wage here.
In fact "du jour" refers to "menu du jour", which means the main food the restaurant has cooked today. It's often writen in a small blackboard in France.
So, I thought I could mention that Farsi (written from right to left in a modifed Arabic script) is an Indoeuropean language
This is correct
with no relation whatsover to Arabic
This is incorrect
In fact Farsi has adopted many arabic words, I think nearly half of the vocabulary is arabic, I am a native arabic speaker and I can understand many Farsi sentences (when reading them) or at least guess what they could mean although I have never learned Farsi
You summed it very well and I totaly agree with you, there are so much things waiting to be done in Morocco, rather than build such a herculean and stupid thing, whic has no economic justification.
This idea surfaces one in a while, and I think this is just political speak, there have been some troubles between Morocco and Spain about the perijil island, but the relationships is warming up again after Spanish prime minister visit to Morocco last week. So this is I believe just a political signal to say that.
Being Arab or Berber (Imazighen : free people, as they like to call themselves) in Morocco is much more a culture than an ethnicity, as most arabic people in Morocco are in fact berbers which have been arabized in the past.
There are black arabs and black berbers, black people in Morocco between one 1 or 2% (gut feeling, not counting lots of metis) see themselves much more as arabs or berbers than black, as there is no black identity per see in Morocco as the one you will see in the US for example; although you will see a lot of African influence in music (gnawi) for example.
French bureaucrats in Casablanca, Spaniards in Tangiers,
There are nearly 20 000 french leaving in Morocco but they are hardly bureaucrats, many of them work in the industry or services. There are also some spaniards left.
I leave in Morocco and this idea is as stupid as it can be. This idea surfaces every ten years and will not have an economic justification before at least one century. There are so much things waiting to be done in Morocco beforre undertaking such herculean task, which will only used by a few thousands people crossing the Gibraltar strait every year (not counting illegal immigrants of course).
The channel between France and England is hardly an economic success while goods exchanges and people traveling are an order of magnitude higher.
There are now ferries that cross the strait in 30 minutes, so nothing can justify this "Elephant blanc" !
This limits the damages that SCO can claim, since it is very clear that the infringement is not only not willful, it is involuntary. The only reason why the infringement is continuing is because SCO refuses to release that information.
Actually SCO can't claim any damage !!
This has not been publicised very much, but a clause in the sale contract between Novell and SCO gives Novell the ability to waive SCO'S right to claim any damages for the violation of it's rights, which Novell did on it's behalf.
In fact this is the case for eveybody. Everyone likes free trade when he buys shoes or garnement made in low wages countries, but want a protection for the industry where he works.
In fact this is all what H1B Visas is all about ! if these visas didn't exist, wages in the US IT sector would have grown even more during the Dot com boom, leading to inflation and then to recession in that Market.
Yes it's very hard to have free trade (ability for services and goods to flow from one country to another) without letting people move in the same way and this is why the EU (European Union) Thanks to the Maastrich treaty is different from the NAFTA. In the EU the job Market in one country is open to all the citizens of other EU countries, which tend to level or at leat limit distorsion in wages.
This is a very intersting analysis, the only thing I am not sure about is this :
As for people like Andy Grove, he has definite interests in the issue, since his company is based in the US. There are dozens of other Andy Groves around the world who will make better chips if we allow capital to flow to them, where it may be most efficiently used.
I am not sure that many people in the world are able to create Intel like chips because of Intellectual propriety and America knows this. This is the reason why it has inserted such drastic clauses in International treaties and this is why the patent issue is very important too.
Thanks ! very interesting read, it clearly shows that things are not really black or white, many politicians are indeed very aware of the problems software patentability brings. This has chaged my view about this directive which in clarify things, and will (at least I hope) avoid many abuse which results from the lack of legislation which prevails now.
Not always true, I think KDE is a notable exception to this, and this is because the project has been very open from the beginning and has always welcomed new comers. There is a lot of FAQ, developer documentation to help people contribute. Conversely a lot of projects don't necessarily welcome outside contributions and MySql is one of them, I believe this is mainly for political reasons, MySQL AB wants probably to control all what goes into their code. Many projects didn't manage to get many contributors for technical reasons, and Mozilla is among them, because of the very steep the learning.
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Yes the Wiki concept is just a logical evolution of something very simple, "HTML editing for dummies", yet, it's incredibly slick, useful and democratic. It's a perfect application of Einstein saying "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler", it's also a very nice application of KISS (Keep it Simple and Stupid), in that way it can be called an optimal technolgy.
y
I think, for all this reasons, it will make a lot of Knowledge Management Systems like Lotus and the like obsolete; so it deserves very to qualify as disruptive technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technolog
If I had to choose, I'd probably say that extending MediaWiki would result in the best option. MediaWiki is clean, easy to use, and (always important) extremely feature rich
I second that, I have been a very happy TWiki user till I discovered Wikipedia. I have promoted it a lot here in Slashdot and among my friends. TWiki has an incredible set of functionalities, a lot of useful plugs-ins and a very active and helping community BUT one killer feature in MediaWiki I absolutly love is the way it helps you to organize your data in categeories and sub-categories which you can add on the fly; this is very useful for me to retrieve the incredible number of things I have put in it. yes TWiki has templates but they are cumersome to add and static, so I don't use them that much. I have been puting nearly all my private knowledge base in TWiki but I am now having a hard time organizing it and retrieving what I want; the other thing is I want to adopt a Wikipedia style of organizing my knowledge, as I use Wikipedia a lot and I am acquainted to it, I will even probably use Wikipedia cotegories.
My ultimate goal is to use Wikipedia for all the public knowledge I have (open source projects, documentation FAQ, definitions, etc) with links from my private wiki, and keep my private Wiki for my private knowledge.
The only problem I am going to have, is, I'll have to write a script to importe all my TWiki data into MediaWiki, I don't know if such a beast exist. One other thing I use a lot, that MediaWiki don't seem to have (after a quick check) is topic renaming.
I might be wrong, but I believe the USPTO don't even require any working prototype to patent a software anymore; you just need to say "I have invented (in fact imagined) a software, or a business method, which does, this and that" to have-it patented and leave it to court to decide if it's really valid or not !!
scary !!
Developing world - 3d world, it's just a politicaly correct way to say it. Don't confuse Developing countries and "emerging countries" like China, Malaysia, India, Brasil, Corea etc
No he didin't !!
In fact, ESR applied for it but failed !! hence the "OSI Certified" label which the OSI gives now for licences they think is compatible with theu guidelines
I think what Sun is really worried about is trademark dilution. If that is the case, why not just specifiy that any derivative works must be named something other than Java? The only practical effect this would have is to make the licence GPL incompatible, since most people will rename a fork anyway. However, it does preserve Sun's trademark.
Yes I think this is the best solution !! if you still want to call your derived work Java, you need to pass the JCP tests. This has already been done, this is how J2EE works anyway !!
Google already take care of the "near" but in a celver way that Altavista does, for instance if you search for : foo bar
"foo bla bar" will rank better than "foo blah blah bar" as in the first sentence foo is more "near" bar than in the second !
The real future of open source is not geeks, but institutions and big organizations who find it a viable business model.
The bulk of Linux developers already work for Redhat, Suse, IBM, HP, OSDL and so on.
If drug developement is ever to become a sustainable model it will be done by paid searchers in phamaceutic labs, because they will feel it's economically sound
the USPTO has neither the competence nor the will or the means to do prior art search. In practice they grants every patent provided you can PAY the fees for that.
The USPTO get it's funding from the fees you pay to have you patent granted. In practice they procrastinate the patent validation to the court. This is why free software and small businesses are screwed and why big business push and are very happy withe the patent system in the US and in EU.
This is how it works.
they have recently offered bargain prices to install Linux in schools
I reply to myslef sorry ! of course, read to install Windows in schools
There is a growing open source community in Morocco, there is even a Moroccan Linux distribution, we have also have a local Lug and we organize install fests and some compagnies are begining to specialize in open source support and installation, specific Moroccan programs are begining to appear, although they are still few and far between.
Oh and by the way I am surfing on a DSL connection, we have DSL since the begining of 2004. 128 kbs/s costs 30$ without any in volume limitation
Alas Microsoft is very very strong here, and 99% of the people still believe that Bill Gates invented the Internet. MS is very strong in goverenement too and they have recently offered bargain prices to install Linux in schools.
But overall things are not that bad, and I see a very bright future for Linux and open source here, as MS Office price nearly equals a middle wage here.
I taught it was an April fool ! is this fo real ?
>Du jour menas "of the day" (Think de hour)
In fact "du jour" refers to "menu du jour", which means the main food the restaurant has cooked today. It's often writen in a small blackboard in France.
So, I thought I could mention that Farsi (written from right to left in a modifed Arabic script) is an Indoeuropean language
This is correct
with no relation whatsover to Arabic
This is incorrect
In fact Farsi has adopted many arabic words, I think nearly half of the vocabulary is arabic, I am a native arabic speaker and I can understand many Farsi sentences (when reading them) or at least guess what they could mean although I have never learned Farsi
You summed it very well and I totaly agree with you, there are so much things waiting to be done in Morocco, rather than build such a herculean and stupid thing, whic has no economic justification.
This idea surfaces one in a while, and I think this is just political speak, there have been some troubles between Morocco and Spain about the perijil island, but the relationships is warming up again after Spanish prime minister visit to Morocco last week. So this is I believe just a political signal to say that.
Morocco has a wide mixture of cultures
indeed
Semitic Arabs, black Berbers
Being Arab or Berber (Imazighen : free people, as they like to call themselves) in Morocco is much more a culture than an ethnicity, as most arabic people in Morocco are in fact berbers which have been arabized in the past.
There are black arabs and black berbers, black people in Morocco between one 1 or 2% (gut feeling, not counting lots of metis) see themselves much more as arabs or berbers than black, as there is no black identity per see in Morocco as the one you will see in the US for example; although you will see a lot of African influence in music (gnawi) for example.
French bureaucrats in Casablanca, Spaniards in Tangiers,
There are nearly 20 000 french leaving in Morocco but they are hardly bureaucrats, many of them work in the industry or services. There are also some spaniards left.
I leave in Morocco and this idea is as stupid as it can be. This idea surfaces every ten years and will not have an economic justification before at least one century. There are so much things waiting to be done in Morocco beforre undertaking such herculean task, which will only used by a few thousands people crossing the Gibraltar strait every year (not counting illegal immigrants of course).
The channel between France and England is hardly an economic success while goods exchanges and people traveling are an order of magnitude higher.
There are now ferries that cross the strait in 30 minutes, so nothing can justify this "Elephant blanc" !
This limits the damages that SCO can claim, since it is very clear that the infringement is not only not willful, it is involuntary. The only reason why the infringement is continuing is because SCO refuses to release that information.
Actually SCO can't claim any damage !!
This has not been publicised very much, but a clause in the sale contract between Novell and SCO gives Novell the ability to waive SCO'S right to claim any damages for the violation of it's rights, which Novell did on it's behalf.
In fact this is the case for eveybody. Everyone likes free trade when he buys shoes or garnement made in low wages countries, but want a protection for the industry where he works.
In fact this is all what H1B Visas is all about ! if these visas didn't exist, wages in the US IT sector would have grown even more during the Dot com boom, leading to inflation and then to recession in that Market.
Yes it's very hard to have free trade (ability for services and goods to flow from one country to another) without letting people move in the same way and this is why the EU (European Union) Thanks to the Maastrich treaty is different from the NAFTA. In the EU the job Market in one country is open to all the citizens of other EU countries, which tend to level or at leat limit distorsion in wages.
This is a very intersting analysis, the only thing I am not sure about is this :
As for people like Andy Grove, he has definite interests in the issue, since his company is based in the US. There are dozens of other Andy Groves around the world who will make better chips if we allow capital to flow to them, where it may be most efficiently used.
I am not sure that many people in the world are able to create Intel like chips because of Intellectual propriety and America knows this. This is the reason why it has inserted such drastic clauses in International treaties and this is why the patent issue is very important too.
Sun Java Desktop System doesn't have much with Java, this is just "branding", Sun is trying to decline the Java brand in as many fields as they can.
Indeed here the press release for T-Linux
http://www.mvista.com/news/2003/t-engine.html
Thanks ! very interesting read, it clearly shows that things are not really black or white, many politicians are indeed very aware of the problems software patentability brings. This has chaged my view about this directive which in clarify things, and will (at least I hope) avoid many abuse which results from the lack of legislation which prevails now.
Not always true, I think KDE is a notable exception to this, and this is because the project has been very open from the beginning and has always welcomed new comers. There is a lot of FAQ, developer documentation to help people contribute. Conversely a lot of projects don't necessarily welcome outside contributions and MySql is one of them, I believe this is mainly for political reasons, MySQL AB wants probably to control all what goes into their code. Many projects didn't manage to get many contributors for technical reasons, and Mozilla is among them, because of the very steep the learning.