Isn't it funny how if PayPal was using Windows servers, everyone would be bashing Microsoft right now, blaming it on Windows? (similar to one recently publicized outage)
Hmmm, I wonder what hardware/software they use, and I wonder why no one's bashing it.
Does this mean that computers that are purchased with OpenOffice are then "upgraded" with pirated copies of Microsoft Office 2004?
If so, no wonder why Microsoft claims that Open Source stifles innovation and is more expensive to support than commercial software!
This post is intended to be insightful. Moderate as such.
Please help encourage this company to stop wasting taxpayer's money and encourage innovation instead of preventing it."
Last time I checked, it was easier to make money by stifling innovation rather than encouraging it. Therefore, anyone with a self interest in money is unlikely to encourage innovation.
Innovation is great for helping a whole group of entities share the "wealth by-products" of technology. Patents, on the other hand, help single entities, by taking advantage of the primary factor of economics, the "maximum productive output of limited resources." Patents help companies limit the resource in question so that the marketplace has to maximize through them.
er, which is exactly his point. unless the entire web is rewritten in formal language, it can't work.
I doubt that anyone would be able to make a semantic web out of the current WWW, unless the translation were limited to pages that change fairly infrequently.
but it will be weak close to the point of uselessness
Tell that to the scientists who could benefit from it. My friend does DNA genome analysis using Perl and HUGE samples of data. You wouldn't believe some of the tools that he and other scientists use to collaborate.
impossible to create, and impossible to maintain even if it were, in some minute way, created.
You give our technology leaders too little credit. Who thought that a geek could write an operating system to compete with Microsoft?
I don't really find value in Clay Shirky's arguments against syllogisms, which serve as the basis of value within a semantic web.
In order to prove that syllogisms are flawed, Clay presents examples of common English statements, and attempts to arrive at flawed deductions. Such flaws only work for Shirky due to the ambiguity of the English language.
In reality, a semantic web would neither store nor organize data according to the loose ambiguities of English. Rather, such information would need to be highly structured, using a formal system, in order for the accuracy of syllogisms to work.
As an example, let me examine a sentence that appears within a technical specification of a project I'm working on:
A financial institution may offer customers the ability to download account statements from its web site.
If this sentence were to be placed on the semantic web, it would be useless, given the ambiguity of several words and contexts. Instead, the meaning of each phrase, clause, and word would need to be made fully explicit using a formal semantic representation. Such a representation might be based on a hierarchical data structure such as XML.
If the above sentence were to be fully clarified, it would appear as:
From amongst the entire set of financial institutions actual or theoretical, a set of one or more such financial institutions may exist that offers each customer, from a set of one or more of the financial institution's actual customers if the financial institution is actual, or theoretical customers if the financial institution is theoretical or the financial institution is actual and may theoretically have customers, the ability for the customer to download each account statement from a set of one or more of the customer's actual account statements if the customer is actual, or theoretical account statements if the customer is theoretical or the customer is actual and may theoretically have account statements, from the web site owned and administered by the financial institution.
Obviously this structure is much larger, but it contains all of the information necessary to resolve the sentence's ambiguities.
The above structure could also be expressed simply in XML. To examine a fragment of the above structure:
From amongst the entire set of financial institutions actual or theoretical
This would most likely appear using a structured representation such as:
The Slashot "comments" field is extremely broken, so I've been forced to use parentheses and omit indentation.
Isn't it funny how the english sentence fragment is so much easier for humans to understand, even though both representations contain the same information? It's amazing what our brains do "automatically" by operating under certain contexts. Similarly, a machine will have much greater ease in understanding and processing the formalized structure, in cases where it wouldn't even be able to guess at the corresponding english fragment (Well, it would be able to guess, but with hilarious results. What's that, a piece of toast rules over Utah?)
No doubt, translating normal human english sentences into a semantic web will be a lengthy and complicated process. But some mitigating factors:
As "prefab" semantic units are constructed, such units could be reused without reconstructing them.
The resuse of units will allow the full value of the unit to be achieved, without introducing unecessary and confusing variance between instances of identical units.
Units may be constructed in such a way to semantically avoid the ambiguities of every language, not just english. Such a conversion p
There's also a nice swipe ('...spectacularly stupid decision') at JVC's for allowing only (copy-protected) Firewire input to the one HDTV tape recorder on the market.
I couldn't find this wording ('...spectacularly stupid decision') anywhere in the article. In fact, I did a 'find' for 'stupid' and came up with nothing (please don't make puns.)
Deciding if marketing-speak is BS based on buzzword matching/frequency counting is just sinking to their level.
Not necessarily. Marketing departments often use marketing speak to compensate for a lack of advertisable quality metrics.
For example, which of the following webservers would you buy?
Our webserver utilizes object-oriented artificial intelligence to serve web pages more intelligently than competing products. Our best-of-breed solution ensures that your corporation will maximize ROI and customer retention while minimizing operational expenses.
Our webserver is utilized by over 98% of websites that receive 2 million or more hits per day. Of those websites, the average unplanned system downtime is 3 seconds per month. Deploying a website with 3,000 pages takes just 4 minutes using our automated admin console.
Companies feel the need to exaggerate their product features when numbers can't speak for themselves.
After all, there's always a marketing/engineering disconnect, so this will likely tell you zilch about the technology.
What marketing DOES understand is value proposition - does the product meet a legitimate business need? A technologically superior product that fails to meet business needs is harder for the marketing department to understand, and thus advertise. Which product would you rather sell?
The bloopenator can archive changes made to your system's swapfile on an hourly basis.
The maximator can emulator two network interface cards with just one physical network interface card, allowing system administrators to configure and troubleshoot complicated network configurations with less equipment and time.
If you want to evaluate a technology, evaluate the technology -- ignore all of the marketing. Be empirical. Actually play with the technology. If they won't let you get your hands on it, then be suspicious.
If I have to evaluate five competing products, all of which cost $300,000 or more and require expensive infrastructure planning, a "hands on" test drive may be impossible.
Access to the software is simplified, but sometimes there are few pointers what to do next.
Like how to install the software and actually get it running.
Golden's model is supposed to help IT managers distinguish high-quality open source projects from 0.0.1 version, so widely available on SourceForge.
Good god, if you need a book to help you do that, you've already lost the game.
The book's primary market is business professionals and IT managers who would probably benefit from having a formal evaluation model instead of relying on pure gut feeling.
It's also for developers who are fans of Open Source, who need a scientific-sounding rationale to convince management to adopt Open Source.
Something I think the author would have done well to include is a collection of in-depth case studies on open source implementations.
I'm guessing the author doesn't have access to such studies, which calls into question the credibility of his authority.
The last chapter or the first appendix is where I would expect to find information on solid open-source products suitable for corporate deployment. I mean, if the evaluation model is introduced, why not list the most prominent projects out there for quick reference?
Those figures change with each software version, and the metrics the author would arrive at might be different or less valid than those arrived at by a formal research team.
Logically, the next question is if ZFS' 128 bits is enough. According to Bonwick, it has to be. "Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans."
Is it just me, or is the post surprisingly bereft of unique details?
It's just you. From Sun's website:
ZFS, the dynamic new file system in Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), will make you forget everything you thought you knew about file systems.
I built a router once that's specifically designed to work with quantum networks. However, the router wasn't allowed to look at the IP address of the sender or the receiver, so in effect it never knew where to send the quantum data.
As far as I know, the quantum network was never hacked.
Everyone is familiar with the concept of running applications within a "sandbox" to prevent vulnerabilities from "leaking out" into the operating system and causing havoc.
Might it be time for architects to design "component sandboxes", within which components such as image viewers would execute?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, I wonder what hardware/software they use, and I wonder why no one's bashing it.
AOL must want a browser with all of the latest security holes, without the work.
That's right, this is Amercia. America is all about sticking it to the consumers so that large corporations can get rich.
Does this mean that computers that are purchased with OpenOffice are then "upgraded" with pirated copies of Microsoft Office 2004?
If so, no wonder why Microsoft claims that Open Source stifles innovation and is more expensive to support than commercial software! This post is intended to be insightful. Moderate as such.
Innovation is great for helping a whole group of entities share the "wealth by-products" of technology. Patents, on the other hand, help single entities, by taking advantage of the primary factor of economics, the "maximum productive output of limited resources." Patents help companies limit the resource in question so that the marketplace has to maximize through them.
All I see is this:
In order to prove that syllogisms are flawed, Clay presents examples of common English statements, and attempts to arrive at flawed deductions. Such flaws only work for Shirky due to the ambiguity of the English language.
In reality, a semantic web would neither store nor organize data according to the loose ambiguities of English. Rather, such information would need to be highly structured, using a formal system, in order for the accuracy of syllogisms to work.
As an example, let me examine a sentence that appears within a technical specification of a project I'm working on:
If this sentence were to be placed on the semantic web, it would be useless, given the ambiguity of several words and contexts. Instead, the meaning of each phrase, clause, and word would need to be made fully explicit using a formal semantic representation. Such a representation might be based on a hierarchical data structure such as XML.
If the above sentence were to be fully clarified, it would appear as:
Obviously this structure is much larger, but it contains all of the information necessary to resolve the sentence's ambiguities.
The above structure could also be expressed simply in XML. To examine a fragment of the above structure:
This would most likely appear using a structured representation such as:
(target)
(set)
(scope)entire(/scope)
(members)
(membertype)financial institution(/membertype)
(instancetypes)
(type)actual(/type)
(type)theoretical(/type)
(/instancetypes)
(/members)
(/set)
(/target)
The Slashot "comments" field is extremely broken, so I've been forced to use parentheses and omit indentation.
Isn't it funny how the english sentence fragment is so much easier for humans to understand, even though both representations contain the same information? It's amazing what our brains do "automatically" by operating under certain contexts. Similarly, a machine will have much greater ease in understanding and processing the formalized structure, in cases where it wouldn't even be able to guess at the corresponding english fragment (Well, it would be able to guess, but with hilarious results. What's that, a piece of toast rules over Utah?)
No doubt, translating normal human english sentences into a semantic web will be a lengthy and complicated process. But some mitigating factors:
A topic I posted a few years ago is perfectly relevant to this submission: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=92504&cid=7953 441
Very fast!
This looks like a good idea to ensure that player you're hooking up with in EverQuest really is a 19-year old girl.
Isn't a -1 Flamebait a bit extreme for an honest mistake?
Did the editors censor this comment?
- Our webserver utilizes object-oriented artificial intelligence to serve web pages more intelligently than competing products. Our best-of-breed solution ensures that your corporation will maximize ROI and customer retention while minimizing operational expenses.
- Our webserver is utilized by over 98% of websites that receive 2 million or more hits per day. Of those websites, the average unplanned system downtime is 3 seconds per month. Deploying a website with 3,000 pages takes just 4 minutes using our automated admin console.
Companies feel the need to exaggerate their product features when numbers can't speak for themselves. What marketing DOES understand is value proposition - does the product meet a legitimate business need? A technologically superior product that fails to meet business needs is harder for the marketing department to understand, and thus advertise. Which product would you rather sell?- The bloopenator can archive changes made to your system's swapfile on an hourly basis.
- The maximator can emulator two network interface cards with just one physical network interface card, allowing system administrators to configure and troubleshoot complicated network configurations with less equipment and time.
If I have to evaluate five competing products, all of which cost $300,000 or more and require expensive infrastructure planning, a "hands on" test drive may be impossible.You can find an excellent description of the differences between green screen and blue screen here.
- 08% interesting, adds a new perspective
- 17% argues with above
- 22% psuedo-scientific/legal anlaysis of the article
- 11% asks question that are answered in the article
- 19% answers question that have already been answered by other readers
- 10% spin-off topic that establishes new thread
- 42% follow ups to spin-off topics
- 12% the subject being described sucks, here's why
- 04% response only intelligible to poster
- 06% this subject proves that Linux is better than Windows
- 02% this subject proves that any browser is better than IE
- 02% this subject proves that any language is better than Java
- 01% spam
- 01% first post humor
These numbers exceed 100% because the percentages overlap.This is an attempt to be funny. Moderate as such.
unless...
she doesn't really care and is just nodding her head to keep you happy.
Let's just hope that "People for the Ethical Treatment of Vegetables" doesn't find out.
I mean, that's pretty damn strong details.
It is sure to be a hot topic! Thanks for the commentary.
I built a router once that's specifically designed to work with quantum networks. However, the router wasn't allowed to look at the IP address of the sender or the receiver, so in effect it never knew where to send the quantum data.
As far as I know, the quantum network was never hacked.
Might it be time for architects to design "component sandboxes", within which components such as image viewers would execute?