In addition, most US weapons use a "dial-a-yield" system that injects various amounts of tritium as a booster. Changing the amount of tritium injected changes the weapon yield. The problem there is that, like the polonium initiators, the gaseous tritium decays over time and must be refreshed.
Little-known but scary fact: at any given time, there are a number of warheads in transit between places like Kings Bay, Great Falls, and Bangor (where they're attached to launchers) and the Pantex plant in Amarillo, where the DoE runs a body-and-fender shop for US nukes.
In fact, a number of Big Corps already have their own internal, informal search portals for exactly the reasons you mention: people need to be able to find stuff to get their jobs done. KPMG, Microsoft, Andersen, IBM, Merck, Pfizer, and probably others have started to use all kinds of tools that/.ers would recognize: listservers, threaded discussions, and so on.
Nothing to see here; move along.
Write your own DLL that recognizes whatever terms you want to use. You can look up terms in a database, from a local XML file, or whatever else you're smart enough to code
Use the built-in smart tag list functionality. That's all the IE6 smart tags are: a bunch of XML in the file that says "if you see term X, offer a link to http://somewhere/?x". You can edit this to your heart's content.
I'm disappointed to see so much uninformed paranoia; it's obvious from all the discussion about "oh, Lordy, MS is going to change my links" that most of the posters here have no idea how the technology actually works. Read the SDK.
Here's a real-world example. Merck (the pharmaceutical company) is using a smart tag that can look up compound names. See, before a new drug hits the shelf as Pepcid, or Vioxx, or whatever, it has a bunch of internal names, like L12345 or MK4527. Researchers can't memorize the internal names for every compound; there are tens of thousands of them. We wrote a smart tag for them that uses an existing Oracle database containing compound names. When you type in an MK or L number, the smart tag recognizes it and offers actions to show the other names (e.g. L12345 = MK4527 = MKL9222 = Vioxx) and take you to a variety of interesting pages for that drug (www.drugname.com, Intranet pages on physical & chemical properties, etc.)
It doesn't have anything to do with control; it has to do with leveraging the terabytes of data they already have without wasting their valuable research time.
The right way to do this -- of course -- would be to offer a spec for creating your own list of word-link associtations, or even for pulling these from the net.
But that's what they did! If you check out the SDK you'll see that they provide a way to associate a static or dynamic list with a tag, to look up terms in a database and tag them when they appear, or to fetch terms from the net.
You're right that they're not doing it themselves, because it's not to their advantage to do so. Duh. However, anyone else who wants to can do so, easily. I'll even start you off with some sample code to get you started.
Insert a Stock Symbol into an Excel spreadsheet, it'll offer to get you a live quote to MSN Finance.
Or to Yahoo! Finance (they've got a tag in development). Or to BRIDGE's info feeds. Or to Reuters. Or to... well, you get the idea.
MS is providing some tags in the box that link to particular content, but anyone who cares to do so can overload those schemas and link to wherever they want.
I'll probably get modded too, but what's been missing here is a clear discussion about how smart tags actually *work*. (wooo-- technical details ahead!)
In Office XP, Word and Excel can load smart tag DLLs (SDK here).These DLLs implement two COM classes: ISmartTagRecognizer and ISmartTagAction. The recognizer scans text for patterns specified by the developer. For example, I wrote one that recognizes FedEx package tracking numbers. You can write a recognizer to recognize anything you can code, using pattern matching, database lookup, or whatever kind of heuristic you like.
When your smart tag recognizer recognizes something, it calls the CommitSmartTag method. All that does is stamp some XML into the source document, indicating the schema name for the smart tag type you just recognized. When you save the document, the XML gets saved with it.
Actions specify which XML schemas they're interested in. If a recognizer tags something with schemas-smarttagworld-com/zip#zip, then any action that wants to offer actions for that data type (like "look up this zip code", "find FedEx boxes in this zip code", etc) can do so. That means that anyone can write an action that overloads the smart tag types that MS supports in Office.
So, what about IE? Remember the XML? You can tag pages yourself by including the XML in the page (see this article and and actions, without any whiff of Office XP nearby. He missed some key points, though:
Smart tags are marked by a dotted purple line (example). When you hover over the link, you get a little icon that expands into a pulldown. There's no automatic linking or redirection, period.
There's no content substitution. You can write smart tags whose actions change content in a Word or Excel document, but the actions have to be triggered by the user. So, don't worry about MS making a tag that does s/Linux/Windows/.
Anyone who can figure out VB or VC++ (and probably C#, but who cares) can write smart tags. UPS, OAG, and a bunch of other companies are already doing so (partial list). Everyone's invited to the party.
Users have to turn on smart tags. They're off by default so that MS doesn't get inundated with millions of calls asking what that little purple line is for.
There's a META tag that turns off the recognizer/action combo in IE6, so you can add that tag to your pages so that no smart tags will be active therein. Perfect for paranoid penguins.
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In addition, most US weapons use a "dial-a-yield" system that injects various amounts of tritium as a booster. Changing the amount of tritium injected changes the weapon yield. The problem there is that, like the polonium initiators, the gaseous tritium decays over time and must be refreshed. Little-known but scary fact: at any given time, there are a number of warheads in transit between places like Kings Bay, Great Falls, and Bangor (where they're attached to launchers) and the Pantex plant in Amarillo, where the DoE runs a body-and-fender shop for US nukes.
In fact, a number of Big Corps already have their own internal, informal search portals for exactly the reasons you mention: people need to be able to find stuff to get their jobs done. KPMG, Microsoft, Andersen, IBM, Merck, Pfizer, and probably others have started to use all kinds of tools that /.ers would recognize: listservers, threaded discussions, and so on.
Nothing to see here; move along.
- Embed them yourself (here's how).
- Write your own DLL that recognizes whatever terms you want to use. You can look up terms in a database, from a local XML file, or whatever else you're smart enough to code
- Use the built-in smart tag list functionality. That's all the IE6 smart tags are: a bunch of XML in the file that says "if you see term X, offer a link to http://somewhere/?x". You can edit this to your heart's content.
I'm disappointed to see so much uninformed paranoia; it's obvious from all the discussion about "oh, Lordy, MS is going to change my links" that most of the posters here have no idea how the technology actually works. Read the SDK.It doesn't have anything to do with control; it has to do with leveraging the terabytes of data they already have without wasting their valuable research time.
MS is providing some tags in the box that link to particular content, but anyone who cares to do so can overload those schemas and link to wherever they want.
In Office XP, Word and Excel can load smart tag DLLs (SDK here).These DLLs implement two COM classes: ISmartTagRecognizer and ISmartTagAction. The recognizer scans text for patterns specified by the developer. For example, I wrote one that recognizes FedEx package tracking numbers. You can write a recognizer to recognize anything you can code, using pattern matching, database lookup, or whatever kind of heuristic you like.
When your smart tag recognizer recognizes something, it calls the CommitSmartTag method. All that does is stamp some XML into the source document, indicating the schema name for the smart tag type you just recognized. When you save the document, the XML gets saved with it.
Actions specify which XML schemas they're interested in. If a recognizer tags something with schemas-smarttagworld-com/zip#zip, then any action that wants to offer actions for that data type (like "look up this zip code", "find FedEx boxes in this zip code", etc) can do so. That means that anyone can write an action that overloads the smart tag types that MS supports in Office.
So, what about IE? Remember the XML? You can tag pages yourself by including the XML in the page (see this article and and actions, without any whiff of Office XP nearby. He missed some key points, though:
- Smart tags are marked by a dotted purple line (example). When you hover over the link, you get a little icon that expands into a pulldown. There's no automatic linking or redirection, period.
- There's no content substitution. You can write smart tags whose actions change content in a Word or Excel document, but the actions have to be triggered by the user. So, don't worry about MS making a tag that does s/Linux/Windows/.
- Anyone who can figure out VB or VC++ (and probably C#, but who cares) can write smart tags. UPS, OAG, and a bunch of other companies are already doing so (partial list). Everyone's invited to the party.
- Users have to turn on smart tags. They're off by default so that MS doesn't get inundated with millions of calls asking what that little purple line is for.
- There's a META tag that turns off the recognizer/action combo in IE6, so you can add that tag to your pages so that no smart tags will be active therein. Perfect for paranoid penguins.
HTH.