The alternative is to turn to other products without protections to rip-off. I'd say the GPL was ensuring 1) the community's welfare and 2) resistance against permanent forking (I've mentioned elsewhere that forking by nature is a good thing for software evolution and longevity, but permanent forking and subsequent closure of code is a bad thing for the community).
Again, Free software is a non-rivalous resource of which unlimited copies can be made. It can't be "ripped-off." In fact, the 30 year history of Free software would suggest that there are some strong constraints against perminant forking other than the GPL.
Without registration, copyright is not proveable. For all practical purposes the work belongs in the public domain as it is often near impossible to prove in court who did what and when (of course there's the old postal trick).
Nonsense. Registration can be a formality filed just before the lawsuit and registration prior to publication is not necessary to prove a copyright claim in court. (Although it does help.) In addition, an inability to prove who did what when does not mean that the work falls into the public domain. Because the natural state of copyright is ownership by the creator, the court must sort out the mess and assign copyright.
Actually, what you may be referring to by "current state" are the recent copyright extensioning and strengthening laws. These are aberrations that fly against the intent and original laws as defined by the founding fathers.
Well, the duration may be out of line with the intent of the founding fathers, but I don't think the claim to temporary ownership of works is.
There are proprietary versions of Apache which outperform the original in different applications, and are sold without code. This is a loss for the community who originally wrote it.
How is that a loss? Has any of the code produced by the Apache community dissapeared? Has development of Apache and related modules stopped? As much as the "loss" claim has been advanced, GPL zealots can point to no single case where the community has actually lost something (other that access to the fruit of other people's labor.)
The differences between the licenses go quite deep. The BSD license comes from an academic tradition that software is a form of human knowledge. You do the work, write the peer-reviewed papers, pocket your grant-funded salary, talk about it in lecture and move on to the next project. Why worry about who uses it. It's knowledge! Spread it around! Share it! Endless supply!
It contrast, GPL-folk tend to think of things in terms of products competing for mindshare. From this perspective the worst thing that can happen is competing against yourself. As such they want to be altruistic, but they don't want to be so altruistic that their work is placed at a disadvantage. Horrors! Big Blue might steal my work!
Um, except for that logical flaw in that software and ideas are non-rivalous resources (unlike the dodo and the bald eagle btw.) No matter how much an idea is exploited, you can never run out of it. There is no need to "defend" something that is limitless.
The BSD license has an onerous stipulation and cannot be used as a license for works that are mandated by law to be placed in the public domain.
Actually, it's not a problem. For example, if I want to build something out of vi. I could simply annotate the BSD portions and the public domain portions. However copyleft requires that any contributions must be GPL (and place a number of burdens on the creator that may or may not be unreasonable depending on context.)
This is why there is something called the public domain which is already considered in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, you might say that the public domain is the natural condition of any work in the United States unless the author makes effort to claim copyright, temporarily taking the work away for a limited time before being returned to the public domain.
Whoah nelly! This is such a whopping misconception of the current state of copyright law. The natural state of any work in the United States is ownership by the creator for a limited time as established by congress. Copyright registration is a technical formality.
Somehow you've mistakenly equated GPL with proprietary patents. The entire philosophy behind the GPL is that patents are bad for the community. The GPL is a legal solution against proprietary patents/licenses within the context of laws that uphold proprietary patents and licenses.
However, the problem is that GPL software is not truly "free." The GPL says, "I own this, and you can't use this except on MY terms." I don't have the freedom to, for example, incorporate GPL software into an anonymous work for example. (Anonymous works are by definition, public domain.)
By placing all of the reference works for HTML, and HTTP into the public domain (rather than under a GPL copyright) the web exploded and we have forums like Slashdot. (Accessible through both proprietary and non-proprietary software.) Had Mr. Berners-Lee used the GPL, I have doubts as to whether we would have widespread adoption of the web.
I don't think free software is an issue of concern with GPL zealots. However, Free Software certainly is. But, it may be too subtle a point for BSD zealots to understand.
No, the subtle point not being understood here is the difference between Free software (free as in speech) and Copyleft software. This is a distinction made by the holy prophet of software freedom himself. There is such a thing as non-GPL Free software, and even more, the modified BSD license is considered to be a Free software license compatible with the GPL.
BSD cannot lay claim to being more of a community builder than the GPL. If anything, BSD has been responsible for the rise of various proprietary Unix systems, completely splintering the market, allowing other inferior proprietary systems to enter and dominate. A fork in GPL code could never be truly splintered as improvements are guaranteed to be made available for all to profit from.
Well, this is one of the big mistakes that GPL-only advocates make. Software should be free because it is ideas and ideas are non-rivalous resources. But at the same time, software should be protected from "theft" and "splintering", something that just can't happen with a non-rivalous resource.
Perhaps I don't see the problems produced by Unix that you do, being an old unix hand myself. The common set of tools with a predictable interface meant that I could do work on any system, no matter if it was Linux, Sun, NeXT, IRIX or AIX.
But I think that you don't really know your history here. The Free BSDs developed about the same time as GNU/Linux in response to a primarily proprietary Unix market. If anyone is responsible for the rise of proprietary Unix, it was Bell Labs and AT&T during the 1970s! (See this history for more details.) Since the Open Source BSDs were stalled due to a lawsuit from 1992-1994 (the same period when Linux started gaining mindshare) it is rather difficult to blame operating systems released under a BSD license for a market that existed before their development.
It is really not clear as to whether the GPL actually inhibits splintering, or why splintering should be such a great fear. For example, while vi has spawned off numerous clones and expansions, this has not caused major problems. One would think that apache, as a hugely successful program that does not benefit from copyleft, would be a prime candidate for appropriation and splitting. And yet its very success appears to elevate it to the level that Stallman argues free software should be, a commodity item.
The nice thing about commodities and non-rivalous resources is that it doesn't matter if a company chooses to make a trade secret from a derivative product. Kellog's corn flakes didn't stop people from making grits for breakfast. The fact that you could buy flour and baking soda mixed in a box as bisquick did not stop people from making biscuits the old-fashioned way. Which is what the BSD philosophy is all about, software as a commodity. So what if a company makes money by adding value to a bushel of corn, or a standard tcp/ip stack? I have just as much access to the base commodities as Kellog or Gates.
Well, a bit of a history lesson for you. Once upon a time, a young reseacher at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee invented a nifty system for developing technical reports. HTML and HTTP was not all that brilliant. What was brilliant was the decision to release the protocols and the first barely mature reference implementations into the public domain.
Why was this brilliant? Because within a few years, dozens of folks were tripping over each other to produce better implementations based on the house that Tim built. Meanwhile, protocols that had languished under various copyright restrictions faded away and vanished. Without that intense competition to build better implementations of an open protocol (including proprietary implementations like MSIE and Opera) we might still be a fragmented internet community with some people stranded in vax notes, some people doing gopher, and some doing Lotus Notes.
It is interesting that GPL zealots have a far more limited view of what constitutes free software than either RMS or the FSF. To quote from the definition of free software:
In the GNU project, we use ``copyleft'' to protect these freedoms legally for everyone. But non-copylefted free software also exists. We believe there are important reasons why it is better to use copyleft, but if your program is non-copylefted free software, we can still use it.
See Categories of Free Software (18k characters) for a description of how ``free software,'' ``copylefted software'' and other categories of software relate to each other.
The BSD license doesn't the take the community into consideration, and so the community ignores it or derides it. That's the community's right.
No. The BSD license considers that the community includes, for example, government organizations that have a mandate to release works into the public domain, and people who don't wish to take on the legal responsibility of enforcing good behavior on other people.
I also don't see the community deriding non-GPL free software or non-copyleft free software licenses. Except for a handful of wingnuts who argue that the GPL is necessary to prevent theft because they don't understand that you can't steal from an IP commons.
Read your messages and research. I still think that you are underestimating the power of personalization. One of the things I've noticed about the performance of my spam filter is that the common "strong core" of ham has a really trivial impact on the spam/ham decision. The tokens that have the greatest impact on the spam/ham decision are things that the spammer has the least control over in the header of the message. The spam filter becomes something of a trusted whitelist. If I forward spam to myself, through one of my work accounts, it is marked as ham regardless of how "spammy" the body content may be. The route is that powerful in determining hamminess. Perhaps my email is unusual, but I really don't see much of a common "strong core" of hamminess in my statistics.
I'm also not coming out of left field here on this. I have actually written my own filter. I also have done enough reseach in discouse analysis to know that statistical techniques are very powerful for not only determining differences between spam and non-spam, but also differences between linguistic groups that are quite a bit more subtle than spam/ham.
But playing devil's advocate here. Lets say that spammers manage to create a message that looks like ham, smells like ham, and talks like ham. Wouldn't this be exactly the kind of message that I would want to read and review for myself?
From this non-developer's perspective, proprietary software will always live in conflict with OSS - SCO as another example - and the BSD license gives companies the means to do BSD harm. They take without giving.
This is one of the big flaws I find with GPL logic. Information should be free because it is an endlessly renewable resource. However we can't just let the information be out there without a license because some evil company might do it harm!
Lost in Translation is my pick with Bill Murray as the best male actor performance of the year. One of the best defining scenes has Murray as the aging unknown actor with the brief 70s moment of glory doing a photo shoot to hawk whiskey. The photographer fires off a series of thickly accented names, "Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Roger Moore" and with each name Murray with just a subtle shift in position, a slight change in the angle of his eyes and his body becomes a characature of Sinatra, Connery and Moore. The scene is both funny and pathetic at the same time. Murray's character riffs on all of these icons, softly cracking one-liners at the expense of his audience of very professional Japanese advertising photographers, while the eyes reveal that this is a washed-up over-the-hill actor who is being paid a million dollars to sit in a chair with a glass of ice tea and pretend to be Sinatra hawking whiskey.
And while Murray is pulling off the acting job of his career, Sophia Coppola earns a name for herself as a director by keeping the entire thing hanging together, and delivering an astonishing romance without sentiment. Johannsen does an excellent job paired with Murray. Of the movies I've seen this year, this one sticks with me the most.
I didn't get that impression from the article that he was considering XML as data storage. I saw the point as being that we don't know how much XML a search system will have to process. If your data consists of a large number of OpenOffice, DocBook, XHTML or Framemaker documents, then it might just be easier to keep things in XML rather than to split the data apart into a bunch of atomic chunks.
I love using RDBMS but for some applications, creating a normalized database is a pain in the rear. Bibliographic information for example requires three tables for author-article relationships. (And this is not getting into the fact that journal articles usually have a volume number while articles do not, inheritance of publisher's information from anthologies to individual book chapters, and the tricky difference between newspaper and academic citations.) I don't see RDBMS systems as a natural choice for structured documents that may have an arbitrary structure.
True, the problem is that HTML became such a beast mixing semantic markup with visual markup that it is really hard to find well-marked up documents.
Still, while it is possible to convert any form of data into a relational database, does that mean that the relational database is the best fit for all types of data?. One of the things that XML does well but relational databases don't do well (without a lot of violent shuffling around) is arbitrary parent-child relationships. So for example, a typical paper might have:
Why go through the problem of chopping this up and normalizing the data if you don't have to? Especially if you give the people who are producing the content a template and schema that produces well-formed semantic XML or can process existing texts with some assumptions?
Hrm, I actually think that both you and the previous poster are perhaps being just a bit too paranoid in terms of defining where cryptography should be used. Basically, every professional who is responsible for keeping confidential data should be using some form of cryptography to protect that data. This includes teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and perhaps a dozen other professions.
Write novels that read like they were novelizations of screenplays?
A good argument as to why this can't happen is that we have had self-assembling critters around for a few billions of years. And yet, basic constraints of chemistry and physics have prevented the development of a "green goo".
Personally, I suspect that the potentials for this technology are ovehyped. There are some pretty good reasons why it would be very difficult to make a copy of a car molecule by molecule that would still favor macro-scale production.
To start with, there is the pesky problem of oxygen. It takes a pretty large quantity of energy to keep most metal ions from reacting. With traditional metalurgy and fabrication you gain the advantage that oxidation occurs at the surface. Working with individual atoms would make it difficult to construct a metalic object.
In the end, it may just be cheaper (in terms of energy and time) to use macro-level fabrication techniques for anything bigger than a breadbox.
OpenSource is supposed to be a place where this shouldnt happen, everyone should work together to make one single product better. In essance, if OpenSource really really worked, there would only be one Browser that really kicked ass rather than 6 or seven that all basically do the same and yet somehow feel unfinished.
I was not aware that the point of OpenSource was the creation of a monoculture. I always thought OpenSource is about choice and flexibility. The reason why we have different web browsers (I'd disagree with you that any of them feel "unfinished") is because they are optimized for different applications.
It is interesting that although Mr. Kalbach (the author of the article you link to) quibbles about the magic number, he goes on to advocate exactly the same design strategies as the 7+/-2 folks: clustering, grouping, and visualization of complex structures.
Interesting, but it really does not say that much about the basic conclusion of the 7+/-2 rule. Critics of the 7+/-2 rule are arguing about that specific quantity, not about the principle that large quantities of information need to be chunked to make it better understood.
Then the system uses a rewrite rule to HTTP Redirect each page in the old URL-scheme to a page in the new URL-scheme. What's so hard about that? Cool URIs don't change.
In theory, no problem. In practice, quite a bit of problems. You are assuming that the developers had the foresight to start with "Cool URIs" to begin with. In practice I've not seen many cases where this has actually happened.
But I still believe that a constatntly changing, volatile, and adapting internet is an order of magnitude improvement over a static never self regulating research library.
Well, that is the mistake right there in assuming that the modern research library is both static and not self-regulating. To start with, the publication of a paper is the endpoint of a complex regulatory practice in which the article in question runs a gauntlent of expert reviews. And of course it is not as if the state of the art stays static. Studies are reviewed, re-reviewed, presented at conferences, critiqued, modified, and argued with before, during and after publication.
You write better than I do. You may even be right about this issue. But if you ever chased a wild goose through google, I think your skills are at fault. I get a bit passionate on this but I think Google, and more importantly groups.google, is a greater cultural acheivment than the genome project.
Ok, lets assume that after 10 years of experience using internet search engines and 20 years of experience navigating through information of various types, that my skills are at fault. That raises an interesting question what good is a internet utility where an early adopter who has been using google and similar seach utilities for 10 years becomes frustrated? (And this is ignoring some of the central problems of the web which is that content can dissapear.)
I'm not dismissing google as an important utility. What I am pointing out is that google is very well designed for seaching some kinds of information, and very poorly desinged for seaching different kinds of information. There is utility embedded within the peer-review publishing process (not the least of which is filtering out crap.) There is utility in producing a static report that can be available immediately or within 48 hours at any research library. Google may add onto this, but it is not going to replace this in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
The alternative is to turn to other products without protections to rip-off. I'd say the GPL was ensuring 1) the community's welfare and 2) resistance against permanent forking (I've mentioned elsewhere that forking by nature is a good thing for software evolution and longevity, but permanent forking and subsequent closure of code is a bad thing for the community).
Again, Free software is a non-rivalous resource of which unlimited copies can be made. It can't be "ripped-off." In fact, the 30 year history of Free software would suggest that there are some strong constraints against perminant forking other than the GPL.
Without registration, copyright is not proveable. For all practical purposes the work belongs in the public domain as it is often near impossible to prove in court who did what and when (of course there's the old postal trick).
Nonsense. Registration can be a formality filed just before the lawsuit and registration prior to publication is not necessary to prove a copyright claim in court. (Although it does help.) In addition, an inability to prove who did what when does not mean that the work falls into the public domain. Because the natural state of copyright is ownership by the creator, the court must sort out the mess and assign copyright.
Actually, what you may be referring to by "current state" are the recent copyright extensioning and strengthening laws. These are aberrations that fly against the intent and original laws as defined by the founding fathers.
Well, the duration may be out of line with the intent of the founding fathers, but I don't think the claim to temporary ownership of works is.
Had Mr. Berners-Lee used the GPL, I have doubts as to whether we would have widespread adoption of the web.
There's no reason to assume that. Your doubts are unfounded.
Actually, quite a bit of work done over the years has found that standards are assisted by placing the fewest restrictions on the standards.
There are proprietary versions of Apache which outperform the original in different applications, and are sold without code. This is a loss for the community who originally wrote it.
How is that a loss? Has any of the code produced by the Apache community dissapeared? Has development of Apache and related modules stopped? As much as the "loss" claim has been advanced, GPL zealots can point to no single case where the community has actually lost something (other that access to the fruit of other people's labor.)
The differences between the licenses go quite deep. The BSD license comes from an academic tradition that software is a form of human knowledge. You do the work, write the peer-reviewed papers, pocket your grant-funded salary, talk about it in lecture and move on to the next project. Why worry about who uses it. It's knowledge! Spread it around! Share it! Endless supply!
It contrast, GPL-folk tend to think of things in terms of products competing for mindshare. From this perspective the worst thing that can happen is competing against yourself. As such they want to be altruistic, but they don't want to be so altruistic that their work is placed at a disadvantage. Horrors! Big Blue might steal my work!
Um, except for that logical flaw in that software and ideas are non-rivalous resources (unlike the dodo and the bald eagle btw.) No matter how much an idea is exploited, you can never run out of it. There is no need to "defend" something that is limitless.
The BSD license has an onerous stipulation and cannot be used as a license for works that are mandated by law to be placed in the public domain.
Actually, it's not a problem. For example, if I want to build something out of vi. I could simply annotate the BSD portions and the public domain portions. However copyleft requires that any contributions must be GPL (and place a number of burdens on the creator that may or may not be unreasonable depending on context.)
This is why there is something called the public domain which is already considered in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, you might say that the public domain is the natural condition of any work in the United States unless the author makes effort to claim copyright, temporarily taking the work away for a limited time before being returned to the public domain.
Whoah nelly! This is such a whopping misconception of the current state of copyright law. The natural state of any work in the United States is ownership by the creator for a limited time as established by congress. Copyright registration is a technical formality.
Not much of a lesson, but I appreciate the effort. However, it does underscore your lack of understanding when it comes to Free Software.
Which includes BSD-licensed software by definition.
Somehow you've mistakenly equated GPL with proprietary patents. The entire philosophy behind the GPL is that patents are bad for the community. The GPL is a legal solution against proprietary patents/licenses within the context of laws that uphold proprietary patents and licenses.
However, the problem is that GPL software is not truly "free." The GPL says, "I own this, and you can't use this except on MY terms." I don't have the freedom to, for example, incorporate GPL software into an anonymous work for example. (Anonymous works are by definition, public domain.)
By placing all of the reference works for HTML, and HTTP into the public domain (rather than under a GPL copyright) the web exploded and we have forums like Slashdot. (Accessible through both proprietary and non-proprietary software.) Had Mr. Berners-Lee used the GPL, I have doubts as to whether we would have widespread adoption of the web.
I don't think free software is an issue of concern with GPL zealots. However, Free Software certainly is. But, it may be too subtle a point for BSD zealots to understand.
No, the subtle point not being understood here is the difference between Free software (free as in speech) and Copyleft software. This is a distinction made by the holy prophet of software freedom himself. There is such a thing as non-GPL Free software, and even more, the modified BSD license is considered to be a Free software license compatible with the GPL.
BSD cannot lay claim to being more of a community builder than the GPL. If anything, BSD has been responsible for the rise of various proprietary Unix systems, completely splintering the market, allowing other inferior proprietary systems to enter and dominate. A fork in GPL code could never be truly splintered as improvements are guaranteed to be made available for all to profit from.
Well, this is one of the big mistakes that GPL-only advocates make. Software should be free because it is ideas and ideas are non-rivalous resources. But at the same time, software should be protected from "theft" and "splintering", something that just can't happen with a non-rivalous resource.
Perhaps I don't see the problems produced by Unix that you do, being an old unix hand myself. The common set of tools with a predictable interface meant that I could do work on any system, no matter if it was Linux, Sun, NeXT, IRIX or AIX.
But I think that you don't really know your history here. The Free BSDs developed about the same time as GNU/Linux in response to a primarily proprietary Unix market. If anyone is responsible for the rise of proprietary Unix, it was Bell Labs and AT&T during the 1970s! (See this history for more details.) Since the Open Source BSDs were stalled due to a lawsuit from 1992-1994 (the same period when Linux started gaining mindshare) it is rather difficult to blame operating systems released under a BSD license for a market that existed before their development.
It is really not clear as to whether the GPL actually inhibits splintering, or why splintering should be such a great fear. For example, while vi has spawned off numerous clones and expansions, this has not caused major problems. One would think that apache, as a hugely successful program that does not benefit from copyleft, would be a prime candidate for appropriation and splitting. And yet its very success appears to elevate it to the level that Stallman argues free software should be, a commodity item.
The nice thing about commodities and non-rivalous resources is that it doesn't matter if a company chooses to make a trade secret from a derivative product. Kellog's corn flakes didn't stop people from making grits for breakfast. The fact that you could buy flour and baking soda mixed in a box as bisquick did not stop people from making biscuits the old-fashioned way. Which is what the BSD philosophy is all about, software as a commodity. So what if a company makes money by adding value to a bushel of corn, or a standard tcp/ip stack? I have just as much access to the base commodities as Kellog or Gates.
Apple released Darwin under an open-source license which they could have just as easily done if they chose Linux.
Actually, going with BSD-licensed code enables them to develop their own license for darwin. If they used Linux, they would be forced into GPL.
Well, a bit of a history lesson for you. Once upon a time, a young reseacher at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee invented a nifty system for developing technical reports. HTML and HTTP was not all that brilliant. What was brilliant was the decision to release the protocols and the first barely mature reference implementations into the public domain.
Why was this brilliant? Because within a few years, dozens of folks were tripping over each other to produce better implementations based on the house that Tim built. Meanwhile, protocols that had languished under various copyright restrictions faded away and vanished. Without that intense competition to build better implementations of an open protocol (including proprietary implementations like MSIE and Opera) we might still be a fragmented internet community with some people stranded in vax notes, some people doing gopher, and some doing Lotus Notes.
Actually, anything non-GPL is not Free Software.
It is interesting that GPL zealots have a far more limited view of what constitutes free software than either RMS or the FSF. To quote from the definition of free software:
The BSD license doesn't the take the community into consideration, and so the community ignores it or derides it. That's the community's right.
No. The BSD license considers that the community includes, for example, government organizations that have a mandate to release works into the public domain, and people who don't wish to take on the legal responsibility of enforcing good behavior on other people.
I also don't see the community deriding non-GPL free software or non-copyleft free software licenses. Except for a handful of wingnuts who argue that the GPL is necessary to prevent theft because they don't understand that you can't steal from an IP commons.
Read your messages and research. I still think that you are underestimating the power of personalization. One of the things I've noticed about the performance of my spam filter is that the common "strong core" of ham has a really trivial impact on the spam/ham decision. The tokens that have the greatest impact on the spam/ham decision are things that the spammer has the least control over in the header of the message. The spam filter becomes something of a trusted whitelist. If I forward spam to myself, through one of my work accounts, it is marked as ham regardless of how "spammy" the body content may be. The route is that powerful in determining hamminess. Perhaps my email is unusual, but I really don't see much of a common "strong core" of hamminess in my statistics.
I'm also not coming out of left field here on this. I have actually written my own filter. I also have done enough reseach in discouse analysis to know that statistical techniques are very powerful for not only determining differences between spam and non-spam, but also differences between linguistic groups that are quite a bit more subtle than spam/ham.
But playing devil's advocate here. Lets say that spammers manage to create a message that looks like ham, smells like ham, and talks like ham. Wouldn't this be exactly the kind of message that I would want to read and review for myself?
From this non-developer's perspective, proprietary software will always live in conflict with OSS - SCO as another example - and the BSD license gives companies the means to do BSD harm. They take without giving.
This is one of the big flaws I find with GPL logic. Information should be free because it is an endlessly renewable resource. However we can't just let the information be out there without a license because some evil company might do it harm!
Lost in Translation is my pick with Bill Murray as the best male actor performance of the year. One of the best defining scenes has Murray as the aging unknown actor with the brief 70s moment of glory doing a photo shoot to hawk whiskey. The photographer fires off a series of thickly accented names, "Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Roger Moore" and with each name Murray with just a subtle shift in position, a slight change in the angle of his eyes and his body becomes a characature of Sinatra, Connery and Moore. The scene is both funny and pathetic at the same time. Murray's character riffs on all of these icons, softly cracking one-liners at the expense of his audience of very professional Japanese advertising photographers, while the eyes reveal that this is a washed-up over-the-hill actor who is being paid a million dollars to sit in a chair with a glass of ice tea and pretend to be Sinatra hawking whiskey.
And while Murray is pulling off the acting job of his career, Sophia Coppola earns a name for herself as a director by keeping the entire thing hanging together, and delivering an astonishing romance without sentiment. Johannsen does an excellent job paired with Murray. Of the movies I've seen this year, this one sticks with me the most.
I didn't get that impression from the article that he was considering XML as data storage. I saw the point as being that we don't know how much XML a search system will have to process. If your data consists of a large number of OpenOffice, DocBook, XHTML or Framemaker documents, then it might just be easier to keep things in XML rather than to split the data apart into a bunch of atomic chunks.
I love using RDBMS but for some applications, creating a normalized database is a pain in the rear. Bibliographic information for example requires three tables for author-article relationships. (And this is not getting into the fact that journal articles usually have a volume number while articles do not, inheritance of publisher's information from anthologies to individual book chapters, and the tricky difference between newspaper and academic citations.) I don't see RDBMS systems as a natural choice for structured documents that may have an arbitrary structure.
True, the problem is that HTML became such a beast mixing semantic markup with visual markup that it is really hard to find well-marked up documents.
r agraph]- [caption]
Still, while it is possible to convert any form of data into a relational database, does that mean that the relational database is the best fit for all types of data?. One of the things that XML does well but relational databases don't do well (without a lot of violent shuffling around) is arbitrary parent-child relationships. So for example, a typical paper might have:
[frontmatter]
-[title]
-[author]
-[contact info]
-[abstract]
[section]
-[paragraph]
-[pa
-[blockquote]
-[paragraph]
-[image]
-
etc. etc..
Why go through the problem of chopping this up and normalizing the data if you don't have to? Especially if you give the people who are producing the content a template and schema that produces well-formed semantic XML or can process existing texts with some assumptions?
Hrm, I actually think that both you and the previous poster are perhaps being just a bit too paranoid in terms of defining where cryptography should be used. Basically, every professional who is responsible for keeping confidential data should be using some form of cryptography to protect that data. This includes teachers, professors, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and perhaps a dozen other professions.
Yes, learn from Michael Crichton...
Write novels that read like they were novelizations of screenplays?
A good argument as to why this can't happen is that we have had self-assembling critters around for a few billions of years. And yet, basic constraints of chemistry and physics have prevented the development of a "green goo".
Personally, I suspect that the potentials for this technology are ovehyped. There are some pretty good reasons why it would be very difficult to make a copy of a car molecule by molecule that would still favor macro-scale production.
To start with, there is the pesky problem of oxygen. It takes a pretty large quantity of energy to keep most metal ions from reacting. With traditional metalurgy and fabrication you gain the advantage that oxidation occurs at the surface. Working with individual atoms would make it difficult to construct a metalic object.
In the end, it may just be cheaper (in terms of energy and time) to use macro-level fabrication techniques for anything bigger than a breadbox.
OpenSource is supposed to be a place where this shouldnt happen, everyone should work together to make one single product better. In essance, if OpenSource really really worked, there would only be one Browser that really kicked ass rather than 6 or seven that all basically do the same and yet somehow feel unfinished.
I was not aware that the point of OpenSource was the creation of a monoculture. I always thought OpenSource is about choice and flexibility. The reason why we have different web browsers (I'd disagree with you that any of them feel "unfinished") is because they are optimized for different applications.
It is interesting that although Mr. Kalbach (the author of the article you link to) quibbles about the magic number, he goes on to advocate exactly the same design strategies as the 7+/-2 folks: clustering, grouping, and visualization of complex structures.
Interesting, but it really does not say that much about the basic conclusion of the 7+/-2 rule. Critics of the 7+/-2 rule are arguing about that specific quantity, not about the principle that large quantities of information need to be chunked to make it better understood.
Well, it looks like the trolls have had their desired response. After all, there are more posts about the trolls than about the party.
Then the system uses a rewrite rule to HTTP Redirect each page in the old URL-scheme to a page in the new URL-scheme. What's so hard about that? Cool URIs don't change.
In theory, no problem. In practice, quite a bit of problems. You are assuming that the developers had the foresight to start with "Cool URIs" to begin with. In practice I've not seen many cases where this has actually happened.
But I still believe that a constatntly changing, volatile, and adapting internet is an order of magnitude improvement over a static never self regulating research library.
Well, that is the mistake right there in assuming that the modern research library is both static and not self-regulating. To start with, the publication of a paper is the endpoint of a complex regulatory practice in which the article in question runs a gauntlent of expert reviews. And of course it is not as if the state of the art stays static. Studies are reviewed, re-reviewed, presented at conferences, critiqued, modified, and argued with before, during and after publication.
You write better than I do. You may even be right about this issue. But if you ever chased a wild goose through google, I think your skills are at fault. I get a bit passionate on this but I think Google, and more importantly groups.google, is a greater cultural acheivment than the genome project.
Ok, lets assume that after 10 years of experience using internet search engines and 20 years of experience navigating through information of various types, that my skills are at fault. That raises an interesting question what good is a internet utility where an early adopter who has been using google and similar seach utilities for 10 years becomes frustrated? (And this is ignoring some of the central problems of the web which is that content can dissapear.)
I'm not dismissing google as an important utility. What I am pointing out is that google is very well designed for seaching some kinds of information, and very poorly desinged for seaching different kinds of information. There is utility embedded within the peer-review publishing process (not the least of which is filtering out crap.) There is utility in producing a static report that can be available immediately or within 48 hours at any research library. Google may add onto this, but it is not going to replace this in the near future.