Well, I did say I was only including most of the Semantic Web. RSS is useful, for instance. On the other hand, RSS is not much to show for 7 year's work, especially when the actual 'semantic web' aspects of it tend not to be used -- 'author' as a string name rather than a reference to an author record, etc.
The W3C may be well-defined but the trouble is that they are a standards-creating group and that's exactly what their activity consists of. If they could restrict themselves to creating _one_ standard for a given thing, _with_ a reference implementation, then they would be adding value. Creating dozens of competing standards without even a nod in the direction of whether it is useful/possible to implement them at all (and I'm looking particularly at SVG here, but it's a general problem) is not very useful.
Every medium/large institution has a team somewhere whose mission is to create the Great Amazing Knowledge Sharing XML Driven Generic Information Infrastructure that will enable everyone to find stuff by magic. It's a team that never gets eliminated, because it's hard to stand up and say that that's a bad idea, but also never produces anything except proof-of-concept sites that would work if only all the documents were suitably annotated. I think the threshold size is about 70-100 IT staff; above that, there _will_ be someone whose job is to create the Shiny XML Collaborative Ontological Search Wiki or whatever.
It's just part of the inefficiency that large structure tend to accumulate. I tend to lump that kind of inefficiency in with the 'Web 2.0' kind, although admittedly there are many differences; what they have in common is that they are driven by the fact that some things, once suggested, are hard to ignore or dismiss, even though they actually offer little value, and therefore tend to chug along quietly in the background generating buzzwords like 'mashup'.
Okay, I award this article 8 out of 10 on the 'Web 2.0 buzzword bingo waste of my precious time scale', which I just invented for that express purpose.
However, there is scope for something interesting here. The 'Web 2.0' thing, and I'm including most of the 'semantic web' in that, is the first example of a groupthink disaster growing and evolving from nothing in the web age. I know there were a few silly ideas (set-top boxes and the like) before, but Web 2.0 has grown in a truly organic grass-roots fashion and could provide valuable insights into why sensible people collectively influence each other to make mistakes.
I'm not volunteering to read through the history of Web 2.0 articles to do that, though, I must admit.
The Republicans, ie the Mercantilist faction, were protecting their revenues, i.e. tariffs levied on the Southern states which they used to pay for pork projects in the North. Lincoln was backed by the railway lobby for this specific purpose. The abolition of slavery was a convenient way for the Mercantilists to get the public and the reformists buy into a war whose main benefit was to contractors (sound familiar?)
"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it"
--Lincoln (letter to Horace Greeley, I think)...but he couldn't do it, because despite the vast powers he assumed (which really gave 'big federal government' its current shape) he needed to bring at least some of the rank-and-file on board.
Notice, if you will, how very very very little has changed.
'Schadenfreude' is a good example of a word so useful -- and more than that, so compelling -- that it gets borrowed from language to language even though it's really hard to spell. Interestingly, this oft-discussed word sometimes retains its German capitalization even when used in English.
I'd hazard a guess that the second half of the word is from proto-Germanic 'fro', 'happiness'. The first half, I believe, is related to English 'scathed' (usually found in 'unscathed') via Middle German 'schade'.
A wonderful word and a much needed label for something we all, at times, are tempted to indulge in. Let's hear it for the word 'schadenfreude'!
You're used to the US system. It might surprise you to learn that in the UK, if 10 12-year-olds get together to trash a nearby shop because they're bored, there is nothing anyone can do about it. If they decide to throw a brick through your car window in (of all places) King's Road, Chelsea, there is nothing anyone can do about it. If they have a corner where they go to hang out so they can yank passing female cyclists off their bicycles, there's nothing anyone can do about it. I am merely giving examples from my own direct experience of 5 years in the UK.
Obviously, a criminal justice system exists on paper. You have to appreciate that knowing that something " is a genuine criminal act and already covered by criminal law" DOES NOT HELP when it happens to Y-O-U.
Hence, ASBOS. Yes, they are there to work around the original justice system. Cry me a fucking river. *You* are sitting in a country that has effective law enforcement (of street-level crime, at least). *I* am sitting in a country where if you ride a bicycle through a town at midnight on a Friday you're liable to get glassed, and if you do, everyone will consider it to be really your fault for not cowering at home blaming Society and The Establishment the way real English people do.
I wish every whiner who's never been outside the US and is posting to this thread with 'Oh NoEs!! teH Police STate pwnz teh English!!!one' had to live in England for a couple of years like me and the grandparent poster -- I reckon we'd soon see a dramatic shift toward the Right in the specific area of criminal law enforcement.
Gosh, you're right, everything should be left up to large companies to decide! I'm sure they'll make a decision that's in our best interests!
Seriously, you convinced me. A body whose mandate is to make profit quarter by quarter is bound to act more in the public interest than a body whose mandate (however theoretical it may sometimes appear) is to serve the public!
You know what would be cool? If there were _no_ regulations and _nothing_ to stop whichever corporations are best able to exploit the planet and the people on it! That would rock.....IN BIZARRO LIBERTARIAN WORLD!
This is yet further evidence of how MS have forgotten and broken their business model. They rose to prominence on cheap commodity hardware -- they empowered users and manufacturers alike to use whatever they wanted to get the job done, at a time when NeXT, SGI, Apple and Sun were competing to lock customers in to shiny, proprietary, non-serviceable hardware.
Hard to believe that even the most fundamental lessons from MS's years of success can have been forgotten -- but there it is.
...and part of my day job involves keeping track of how surprisingly successful Brazil has been at doing exactly what the parent says can't be done. How a real grown-up energy analyst like the parent can have failed to notice, I'm not sure:)
Brazil's success, of course, is due to the fact that they had vast swathes of sugar cane and the political will to make large-scale changes in energy sourcing. The US has neither of those things (at the moment) but a much bigger problem is the corn lobby. A mini version of the energy switch actually played out previously:
US: World, you must use high-fructose corn syrup in your soda, because although it doesn't taste as nice and it causes diabetes and obesity, it's all we can make from corn at the moment and a vast proportion of the US is covered in cornfields and there's a powerful lobby and corn isn't all that useful. Brazil: Hm, no, as sucrose is better and equally available, we'll use sucrose. US: (forgets about Brazil and goes off the bully the EU instead) Brazil: (takes a sip of Coke)
In general, though, the corn lobby is a US-specific problem that affects all biological energy within the US, not just fuel ethanol. In other countries, conversion occurs if/when the local economics are right -- which in Saudi Arabia is 'never', but in equatorial countries with miles and miles of sugarcane is 'already'.
To expand on the above a bit, the point is that the Reg has little ability or interest in the area of gathering news. It makes up for this by publishing vague rumors and sticking arresting headlines on what turn out to be bland articles. This is why NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND READS IT -- except people who like reading generic bland studenty stuff while idly waiting for their beans on toast to cool, which is quite a large demographic.
The perceived cultural insensitivity of Americans is not a factor:)
Normally, I post long informative helpful comments on slashdot (well, kinda). Not as long and helpful as the other guy that replied to you, but still, I like to think they're at least average, that they add a bit, that they occasionally entertain or inform.
Reading the above, though, I pretty much have to break my general habit. Here is my response:
You, son, are fucked up! Not just a bit weird. Not just kinda kooky. Not even Anne Coulter level. You have serious problems. If people really do keep trying to kill you, maybe you should just consider that, you know, a hint.
Ok, that sounded mean. But on the other hand, (up until you started on the steel guitars and gang killings) you came across as a psychotic, sadistic sociopath with a strong sideline in extreme right wing hate-politics and a side of racism. So, you know:)
Heh heh. Why else do you think the company is secretly called 'Arafat Must Die'? Of course, if some idiot ever made that fact public, I wouldn't give two pins for his life -- he'd be hunted down and aosn23 9f8lretn@#@@
Absolutely. As soon as OO implements a large enough subset of Office features, I'll be all over that.
Until then, as long as there's a need to embed documents, to use a powerful macro language that communicates with the OS and other software, to have data update in real time, to interop with business logic that depends on DDE or XLLs, or to do any of the million other essential things that Excel (in particular) does and OO does not, it's "Hello, Clippy!"
Actually, though, I do have some questions for those who might take a more optimistic view than me:
1 -- maths formulae created in OO don't seem to work in Word. Is that OO's fault or Word's? 2 -- Bloomberg's DDE system seems not to work with OO (not that it's particularly efficient in Excel either). Is that OO's fault or Bloomberg's?
Not all bytes have 8 bits. A lot of older mainframes have 7 -- that's why octal was popular once, and why UTF-7 is still widely used. A few had 9, although that wasn't widespread. Some specialized computing devices have anywhere from 5 to 10. So pointing out that it's 8, in the context of a whole new specialized chip, isn't redundant.
Yes... how often I sadly recall our crushing defeat in Korea. First, we were driven completely from the peninsula. Then, we failed hopelessly to counterattack at Incheon. To add insult to injury, we in no way succeeded in driving the shattered remains of the NK army almost all the way to China.
Faced with the might of the Red Army, we then surrendered practically without a fight at the Imjin River(*). Heavily outnumbered, we in no way stabilized the situation at the 38th parallel and we then failed completely to eventually broker a ceasefire -- and in the process, we were utterly unable to protect Seoul from falling under communist control.
I only hope we can learn from this terrible mistake. In other news, you're an idiot in various ways:)
(*) it was a British unit that actually bore the brunt of the Chinese attack, but whatever.
You're quite right, it's Micro$oft's responsibility to make all your games run on at least one other OS -- otherwise they have an EVIL EVIL WICKED MONOPOLY! It's also MS's responsibility to make your applications run on other OSes, and to prevent people from making websites that only work with Windows! Microsoft should also guarantee that all your hardware will work on the non-MS operating system of your choice! Also, Microsoft should buy you a pony and fix you a big bowl of ice cream with sprinkles on! But not the blue sprinkles, just the other colors. Only THEN will Microsoft not be a monopoly.
Of course, MS is guilty of various monopolistic practises, but that doesn't move you into the non-idiot category:)
First thing - this technology has never actually worked in a carefully controlled test,
It's been used for years -- it's already generated billions in funding. It's designed to be deployable to regional cost-centers such as airports, where it can obtain funding that bigger, 'strategic' systems like Star Wars can't easily get.
The main threat to this system is from things like the giant air-to-air iodine laser, which has proved amazingly effective at intercepting money before it can reach ground-based programmes.
Worse still, in Linux, the command to change to a new directory is called something needlessly cryptic ('cd'!?!) instead of the more useful 'change directory'. And Linux has been supporting filenames longer than 2 characters for HOW long??
Hint: Suppose the name of 'cd' or 'iexplore.exe' really did change. What would happen to your company's scripts, that were written in 1993 by a student who later died in a freak gardening accident?
Only on Slashdot would the above need pointing out, I swear!
Irrespective of what he presided over and did, he was a human being.
Well, arguably. That was a joke.
no matter what sins he committed in life, we should show some respect
Why? That was serious. I suppose showing respect to him now would be a good way to piss on the people he defrauded and the society he helped make a little more unjust -- but I guess I don't see why you'd want to that.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean... they're DIGITAL RIGHTS TERRORISTS?!
Or DiRT for short.
WHY do these terrorists specifically hate those of us who are scared of flying??
Well, I did say I was only including most of the Semantic Web. RSS is useful, for instance. On the other hand, RSS is not much to show for 7 year's work, especially when the actual 'semantic web' aspects of it tend not to be used -- 'author' as a string name rather than a reference to an author record, etc.
The W3C may be well-defined but the trouble is that they are a standards-creating group and that's exactly what their activity consists of. If they could restrict themselves to creating _one_ standard for a given thing, _with_ a reference implementation, then they would be adding value. Creating dozens of competing standards without even a nod in the direction of whether it is useful/possible to implement them at all (and I'm looking particularly at SVG here, but it's a general problem) is not very useful.
Every medium/large institution has a team somewhere whose mission is to create the Great Amazing Knowledge Sharing XML Driven Generic Information Infrastructure that will enable everyone to find stuff by magic. It's a team that never gets eliminated, because it's hard to stand up and say that that's a bad idea, but also never produces anything except proof-of-concept sites that would work if only all the documents were suitably annotated. I think the threshold size is about 70-100 IT staff; above that, there _will_ be someone whose job is to create the Shiny XML Collaborative Ontological Search Wiki or whatever.
It's just part of the inefficiency that large structure tend to accumulate. I tend to lump that kind of inefficiency in with the 'Web 2.0' kind, although admittedly there are many differences; what they have in common is that they are driven by the fact that some things, once suggested, are hard to ignore or dismiss, even though they actually offer little value, and therefore tend to chug along quietly in the background generating buzzwords like 'mashup'.
Okay, I award this article 8 out of 10 on the 'Web 2.0 buzzword bingo waste of my precious time scale', which I just invented for that express purpose.
However, there is scope for something interesting here. The 'Web 2.0' thing, and I'm including most of the 'semantic web' in that, is the first example of a groupthink disaster growing and evolving from nothing in the web age. I know there were a few silly ideas (set-top boxes and the like) before, but Web 2.0 has grown in a truly organic grass-roots fashion and could provide valuable insights into why sensible people collectively influence each other to make mistakes.
I'm not volunteering to read through the history of Web 2.0 articles to do that, though, I must admit.
The point of this post is in the subject, but I have to write a message body. Thus the following:
Gigantic baboons
Cereal spoons
Philosopher kings
The moon in June
Disney cartoons
The morning sun
Jeff Koons
The Republicans, ie the Mercantilist faction, were protecting their revenues, i.e. tariffs levied on the Southern states which they used to pay for pork projects in the North. Lincoln was backed by the railway lobby for this specific purpose. The abolition of slavery was a convenient way for the Mercantilists to get the public and the reformists buy into a war whose main benefit was to contractors (sound familiar?)
...but he couldn't do it, because despite the vast powers he assumed (which really gave 'big federal government' its current shape) he needed to bring at least some of the rank-and-file on board.
"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it"
--Lincoln (letter to Horace Greeley, I think)
Notice, if you will, how very very very little has changed.
'Schadenfreude' is a good example of a word so useful -- and more than that, so compelling -- that it gets borrowed from language to language even though it's really hard to spell. Interestingly, this oft-discussed word sometimes retains its German capitalization even when used in English.
I'd hazard a guess that the second half of the word is from proto-Germanic 'fro', 'happiness'. The first half, I believe, is related to English 'scathed' (usually found in 'unscathed') via Middle German 'schade'.
A wonderful word and a much needed label for something we all, at times, are tempted to indulge in. Let's hear it for the word 'schadenfreude'!
I am absolutely baffled by that statement.
Here, let me help you.
You're used to the US system. It might surprise you to learn that in the UK, if 10 12-year-olds get together to trash a nearby shop because they're bored, there is nothing anyone can do about it. If they decide to throw a brick through your car window in (of all places) King's Road, Chelsea, there is nothing anyone can do about it. If they have a corner where they go to hang out so they can yank passing female cyclists off their bicycles, there's nothing anyone can do about it. I am merely giving examples from my own direct experience of 5 years in the UK.
Obviously, a criminal justice system exists on paper. You have to appreciate that knowing that something " is a genuine criminal act and already covered by criminal law" DOES NOT HELP when it happens to Y-O-U.
Hence, ASBOS. Yes, they are there to work around the original justice system. Cry me a fucking river. *You* are sitting in a country that has effective law enforcement (of street-level crime, at least). *I* am sitting in a country where if you ride a bicycle through a town at midnight on a Friday you're liable to get glassed, and if you do, everyone will consider it to be really your fault for not cowering at home blaming Society and The Establishment the way real English people do.
I wish every whiner who's never been outside the US and is posting to this thread with 'Oh NoEs!! teH Police STate pwnz teh English!!!one' had to live in England for a couple of years like me and the grandparent poster -- I reckon we'd soon see a dramatic shift toward the Right in the specific area of criminal law enforcement.
Gosh, you're right, everything should be left up to large companies to decide! I'm sure they'll make a decision that's in our best interests!
Seriously, you convinced me. A body whose mandate is to make profit quarter by quarter is bound to act more in the public interest than a body whose mandate (however theoretical it may sometimes appear) is to serve the public!
You know what would be cool? If there were _no_ regulations and _nothing_ to stop whichever corporations are best able to exploit the planet and the people on it! That would rock...
This is yet further evidence of how MS have forgotten and broken their business model. They rose to prominence on cheap commodity hardware -- they empowered users and manufacturers alike to use whatever they wanted to get the job done, at a time when NeXT, SGI, Apple and Sun were competing to lock customers in to shiny, proprietary, non-serviceable hardware.
Hard to believe that even the most fundamental lessons from MS's years of success can have been forgotten -- but there it is.
...and part of my day job involves keeping track of how surprisingly successful Brazil has been at doing exactly what the parent says can't be done. How a real grown-up energy analyst like the parent can have failed to notice, I'm not sure :)
Brazil's success, of course, is due to the fact that they had vast swathes of sugar cane and the political will to make large-scale changes in energy sourcing. The US has neither of those things (at the moment) but a much bigger problem is the corn lobby. A mini version of the energy switch actually played out previously:
US: World, you must use high-fructose corn syrup in your soda, because although it doesn't taste as nice and it causes diabetes and obesity, it's all we can make from corn at the moment and a vast proportion of the US is covered in cornfields and there's a powerful lobby and corn isn't all that useful.
Brazil: Hm, no, as sucrose is better and equally available, we'll use sucrose.
US: (forgets about Brazil and goes off the bully the EU instead)
Brazil: (takes a sip of Coke)
In general, though, the corn lobby is a US-specific problem that affects all biological energy within the US, not just fuel ethanol. In other countries, conversion occurs if/when the local economics are right -- which in Saudi Arabia is 'never', but in equatorial countries with miles and miles of sugarcane is 'already'.
To expand on the above a bit, the point is that the Reg has little ability or interest in the area of gathering news. It makes up for this by publishing vague rumors and sticking arresting headlines on what turn out to be bland articles. This is why NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND READS IT -- except people who like reading generic bland studenty stuff while idly waiting for their beans on toast to cool, which is quite a large demographic.
The perceived cultural insensitivity of Americans is not a factor
Normally, I post long informative helpful comments on slashdot (well, kinda). Not as long and helpful as the other guy that replied to you, but still, I like to think they're at least average, that they add a bit, that they occasionally entertain or inform.
Reading the above, though, I pretty much have to break my general habit. Here is my response:
You, son, are fucked up! Not just a bit weird. Not just kinda kooky. Not even Anne Coulter level. You have serious problems. If people really do keep trying to kill you, maybe you should just consider that, you know, a hint.
Ok, that sounded mean. But on the other hand, (up until you started on the steel guitars and gang killings) you came across as a psychotic, sadistic sociopath with a strong sideline in extreme right wing hate-politics and a side of racism. So, you know
Heh heh. Why else do you think the company is secretly called 'Arafat Must Die'? Of course, if some idiot ever made that fact public, I wouldn't give two pins for his life -- he'd be hunted down and aosn23 9f8lretn@#@@
Absolutely. As soon as OO implements a large enough subset of Office features, I'll be all over that.
Until then, as long as there's a need to embed documents, to use a powerful macro language that communicates with the OS and other software, to have data update in real time, to interop with business logic that depends on DDE or XLLs, or to do any of the million other essential things that Excel (in particular) does and OO does not, it's "Hello, Clippy!"
Actually, though, I do have some questions for those who might take a more optimistic view than me:
1 -- maths formulae created in OO don't seem to work in Word. Is that OO's fault or Word's?
2 -- Bloomberg's DDE system seems not to work with OO (not that it's particularly efficient in Excel either). Is that OO's fault or Bloomberg's?
Oh, the citizenry disarmed themselves.
Not all bytes have 8 bits. A lot of older mainframes have 7 -- that's why octal was popular once, and why UTF-7 is still widely used. A few had 9, although that wasn't widespread. Some specialized computing devices have anywhere from 5 to 10. So pointing out that it's 8, in the context of a whole new specialized chip, isn't redundant.
Yes... how often I sadly recall our crushing defeat in Korea. First, we were driven completely from the peninsula. Then, we failed hopelessly to counterattack at Incheon. To add insult to injury, we in no way succeeded in driving the shattered remains of the NK army almost all the way to China.
Faced with the might of the Red Army, we then surrendered practically without a fight at the Imjin River(*). Heavily outnumbered, we in no way stabilized the situation at the 38th parallel and we then failed completely to eventually broker a ceasefire -- and in the process, we were utterly unable to protect Seoul from falling under communist control.
I only hope we can learn from this terrible mistake. In other news, you're an idiot in various ways
(*) it was a British unit that actually bore the brunt of the Chinese attack, but whatever.
Not so, I'm afraid -- he will never leave Eurasia alive.
You're quite right, it's Micro$oft's responsibility to make all your games run on at least one other OS -- otherwise they have an EVIL EVIL WICKED MONOPOLY! It's also MS's responsibility to make your applications run on other OSes, and to prevent people from making websites that only work with Windows! Microsoft should also guarantee that all your hardware will work on the non-MS operating system of your choice! Also, Microsoft should buy you a pony and fix you a big bowl of ice cream with sprinkles on! But not the blue sprinkles, just the other colors. Only THEN will Microsoft not be a monopoly.
Of course, MS is guilty of various monopolistic practises, but that doesn't move you into the non-idiot category
First thing - this technology has never actually worked in a carefully controlled test,
It's been used for years -- it's already generated billions in funding. It's designed to be deployable to regional cost-centers such as airports, where it can obtain funding that bigger, 'strategic' systems like Star Wars can't easily get.
The main threat to this system is from things like the giant air-to-air iodine laser, which has proved amazingly effective at intercepting money before it can reach ground-based programmes.
That's how you use the PATRIOT act. You'll agree that from the point of view of the user, it's very efficient.
Worse still, in Linux, the command to change to a new directory is called something needlessly cryptic ('cd'!?!) instead of the more useful 'change directory'. And Linux has been supporting filenames longer than 2 characters for HOW long??
Hint: Suppose the name of 'cd' or 'iexplore.exe' really did change. What would happen to your company's scripts, that were written in 1993 by a student who later died in a freak gardening accident?
Only on Slashdot would the above need pointing out, I swear!
Irrespective of what he presided over and did, he was a human being.
Well, arguably.
That was a joke.
no matter what sins he committed in life, we should show some respect
Why?
That was serious.
I suppose showing respect to him now would be a good way to piss on the people he defrauded and the society he helped make a little more unjust -- but I guess I don't see why you'd want to that.