Ok, you seem to be of the belief that I'm still talking about search.. in the classical "give me a web page about" sense. I'm not.. and the Semantic Web people are not. "next" has a meaning.. everyone knows what it is. "shuttle launch" has an almost unique meaning.. although some concept of our culture and common sense is needed to disambiguate it. Asking when the next shuttle launch is has a unique answer: a date and a statement of the confidence in that date. For example "March 12, depending on weather and other things that might scrub the launch." I don't expect this to be "webpages that are kept up-to-date with information specific to the next shuttle launch"... I expect the answer to my question to be synthesized in real time from a dynamic pool of knowledge which is obtained from reading the web. I want a brain in a jar that is at my beck and call to answer every little question like this that I have through-out the day.. on everything from spacecraft launches to what the soup of the day is at the five closest restaurants to my office. There doesn't need to be some web page that is updated daily by some guy who works near me and enjoys soup.. there just needs to be information on soup and location posted by restaurants in my area.
So am I talking about search? Well, yes, but its an algorithm that uses search to answer my questions.. instead of me having to do it.
Think about that soup question.. how would you do it now? I'd go to Google maps.. enter the location of my office, search businesses for restaurants, click on one of the top 5 to see if they have a daily updated menu, note the soup of the day, go back to Google maps, click on the next one, etc, until I had the answer I wanted. That's a pretty simple algorithm.. it's something a machine learning system could come up with.
This is the second hit.. ah hah! The next launch is on Feb 7.. wait a minute, it's Feb 10! Was it delayed or something? Oh, I see, it says "Launched".. great, when's the next one.. March 11 +.. hmm.. wtf does + mean? Apparently I need to read this and hmm.. nothing there about what the + means.. I guess it means it might get delayed, they do that.
See all that reasoning I had to do? See how long that took me? That's what the Semantic Web is for.
Writing AI that can read English (and all the other languages) and figure out the meaning is just, well, taking too long. But let's say it wasn't.. what would be the point? Would you say there was no point? Or would you say it was freakin' awesome and look forward to the day when you can actually ask a question and get a sensible answer from a machine?
Well, if we are very forgiving we can get this kind of thing happening with current technology, we just have to supply all the "content" in a form that our primitive algorithms can handle. The Semantic Web is that. Maybe around the 3rd generation of these algorithms we might be ready to do the translation to machine form automatically.. maybe not.. but at least the Semantic Web people are again talking about translation.. was a time when they all said it was a fruitless path and the best way was to just supply applications for creating machine readable content easily.
Yeah, it won't matter until Google starts getting in on the act. When you can search for "a website where I can get free kittens and other pets" and get exactly that, instead of just sites that have those keywords in it (like this message in a day or so), then it will be valuable for people to RDF their site and maybe even look at the mess that the translator makes and clean it up.
Yeah, this is an example of one of the millions of Linux kernel holes there are out there. Every now and then, a blackhat gets a job and wants to impress his employer so he pulls out some of his old code and polishes it up. You can tell when it happens because they are so childish that they make the exploit trivial to demonstrate and distribute it far and wide. And you just know that every blackhat who had a variant of this exploit in their personal collection are like "well thanks asshole, now I've got one less Linux kernel exploit.. bastard."
And what has made Linux so easy to switch to in recent years is graphical package managers.. when you can select what software you want to install, for free, from a list of thousands and thousands of apps, you don't need proprietary software.
Quicktime comes with Firefox these days.. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Quicktime crash Firefox.. every time I think "I bet that is exploitable", but, ya know, I'm too lazy to bother looking.
Heh, I caught the Chunnel to France shortly after 9/11. They took two pocket knives and a box of matches off me in London. I'm thinking "what am I going to do, hijack the train?" Then, to make things more confusing, half-way through the trip they came through the cabin and gave everyone their stuff back.
But he's still going to switch to it, because he can just disable those features which are not free.. as opposed to his Thinkbook, where the thing that isn't free enough for him (the BIOS) is something he needs. As you can see, the message isn't about RMS, the message is about what RMS believes.. and we care what RMS believes because he's got such a freaky world view that, like a car accident on the side of the road, we can't look away.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, you seem to be of the belief that I'm still talking about search.. in the classical "give me a web page about" sense. I'm not.. and the Semantic Web people are not. "next" has a meaning.. everyone knows what it is. "shuttle launch" has an almost unique meaning.. although some concept of our culture and common sense is needed to disambiguate it. Asking when the next shuttle launch is has a unique answer: a date and a statement of the confidence in that date. For example "March 12, depending on weather and other things that might scrub the launch." I don't expect this to be "webpages that are kept up-to-date with information specific to the next shuttle launch"... I expect the answer to my question to be synthesized in real time from a dynamic pool of knowledge which is obtained from reading the web. I want a brain in a jar that is at my beck and call to answer every little question like this that I have through-out the day.. on everything from spacecraft launches to what the soup of the day is at the five closest restaurants to my office. There doesn't need to be some web page that is updated daily by some guy who works near me and enjoys soup.. there just needs to be information on soup and location posted by restaurants in my area.
So am I talking about search? Well, yes, but its an algorithm that uses search to answer my questions.. instead of me having to do it.
Think about that soup question.. how would you do it now? I'd go to Google maps.. enter the location of my office, search businesses for restaurants, click on one of the top 5 to see if they have a daily updated menu, note the soup of the day, go back to Google maps, click on the next one, etc, until I had the answer I wanted. That's a pretty simple algorithm.. it's something a machine learning system could come up with.
How exactly are they threatening damage?
So ask in a formal language.. point is, we can't even ask questions now.
We can't even ask questions about systems which are designed to be machine readable. Look at software debuggers.
How about just "proprietary knowledge".. ya know, like the source code of Real Player?
How do *you* know when information is bullshit?
How does Google's pagerank algorithm?
Uh huh.
When is the next shuttle launch?
This is the first hit, not shuttle launch info.
This is the second hit.. ah hah! The next launch is on Feb 7.. wait a minute, it's Feb 10! Was it delayed or something? Oh, I see, it says "Launched".. great, when's the next one.. March 11 +.. hmm.. wtf does + mean? Apparently I need to read this and hmm.. nothing there about what the + means.. I guess it means it might get delayed, they do that.
See all that reasoning I had to do? See how long that took me? That's what the Semantic Web is for.
blah, search is great and all, but that shouldn't really be the ultimate purpose of the Semantic Web.
Asking a question and getting a sensible answer, that's the killer app.
Writing AI that can read English (and all the other languages) and figure out the meaning is just, well, taking too long. But let's say it wasn't.. what would be the point? Would you say there was no point? Or would you say it was freakin' awesome and look forward to the day when you can actually ask a question and get a sensible answer from a machine?
Well, if we are very forgiving we can get this kind of thing happening with current technology, we just have to supply all the "content" in a form that our primitive algorithms can handle. The Semantic Web is that. Maybe around the 3rd generation of these algorithms we might be ready to do the translation to machine form automatically.. maybe not.. but at least the Semantic Web people are again talking about translation.. was a time when they all said it was a fruitless path and the best way was to just supply applications for creating machine readable content easily.
Yeah, it won't matter until Google starts getting in on the act. When you can search for "a website where I can get free kittens and other pets" and get exactly that, instead of just sites that have those keywords in it (like this message in a day or so), then it will be valuable for people to RDF their site and maybe even look at the mess that the translator makes and clean it up.
A remote "nobody" Apache exploit that web admins fail to patch because, hey, it only gets you "nobody" access right?
Yeah, this is an example of one of the millions of Linux kernel holes there are out there. Every now and then, a blackhat gets a job and wants to impress his employer so he pulls out some of his old code and polishes it up. You can tell when it happens because they are so childish that they make the exploit trivial to demonstrate and distribute it far and wide. And you just know that every blackhat who had a variant of this exploit in their personal collection are like "well thanks asshole, now I've got one less Linux kernel exploit.. bastard."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Feenberg
"Feenberg" that's a funny name.
He's talking about Open Source, not open source.
And what has made Linux so easy to switch to in recent years is graphical package managers.. when you can select what software you want to install, for free, from a list of thousands and thousands of apps, you don't need proprietary software.
Why don't you just change providers?
Oh, you don't have a choice of providers? Why don't you start your own? Seems there's a market.
I just think if you're going to dis, get your material right.
The catch phase is:
Where do you want to go today?
Dickhead.
NAH NAH NAH NAH I can't hear you NAN NAN NAN NAN
Quicktime comes with Firefox these days .. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Quicktime crash Firefox.. every time I think "I bet that is exploitable", but, ya know, I'm too lazy to bother looking.
No-one gives a shit about desktop security, let alone Mac-OS desktop security. Businesses pay for security analysis.. of server apps.
Heh, I caught the Chunnel to France shortly after 9/11. They took two pocket knives and a box of matches off me in London. I'm thinking "what am I going to do, hijack the train?" Then, to make things more confusing, half-way through the trip they came through the cabin and gave everyone their stuff back.
No, dude, it is just that you are expected to know what RMS believes if you are reading this site. It's expected common knowledge.
But he's still going to switch to it, because he can just disable those features which are not free.. as opposed to his Thinkbook, where the thing that isn't free enough for him (the BIOS) is something he needs. As you can see, the message isn't about RMS, the message is about what RMS believes.. and we care what RMS believes because he's got such a freaky world view that, like a car accident on the side of the road, we can't look away.
The message is: XO free enough for RMS.. I figured that was obvious to everyone.