I say, kudos to the designers! They couldn't have done a better job. As seen in the video, they have inserted the Squeak environment! This is a Smalltalk powered system.
if this is going to kids who have never owned a high tech portable equipment they must be quite durable.
And these constraints have also software requirements; given that this project is aimed to *children* and around the *whole world*, IMHO this decision is much better than including a UNIX terminal. An environment designed to be connected to Internet 100% of time won't do.
A computer that begins with a 'sandbox' operative system is great for beginners who must self-teach themselves (try learning a desktop without mouth-to-mouth training!). But this computer is not dumbed-down at all: in has a complete object-oriented development environment just one click away. Children can experiment and learn the basics of computing, without requiring access to online forums (which may not be available to them). Try learning to master the CLI without a LUG! With Smalltalk and the included games, they can tweak and experiment and build their own simulations.
I know that this environment works, because it's how learned computers myself. My old ZX-Spectrum fits into this kind of computer. In the early 80s there weren't available BBS at Europe, and the only way to learn computing was through monthly magazines, and programming our own games. I'm sure when this children grow up they will have the same fond memories of their OLPC laptop, as many of us have of our first micro computers.
Once you learn it, you achieve the zen of programming - lisp is the closest possible language to the mathematical definition of computing. Have you read The Little Lisper? (republished later as The Little Schemer). You can read it in a few evenings, learning some deep programming paradigms and the basics of several complex applications, including compilers.
End-user programming has already had one big success in its history: the Spreadsheet. Programmers of visual languages consider that spreadsheets are the most versatile (and most widespread) modelling language to date; problems of many different domains can be expressed with cells and functions, and non-programmers can use it efficiently to that end.
This flexibility is grounded on the same principles as Lisp: a simple syntax without special cases, which can be used to build any grammar on it. Mi goal is to find a similar language wich can model automatic tasks the same way as the spreadsheet can model data. I'm still in a phase where I accept suggestions:-)
I'm afraid you misunderstand the point you're trying to argue against. Those of us who hold relativist positions do not believe that reality is imprecise or ambiguous, but that human knowledge is. You are able to make simple statements, but you must be always aware that those statements will never be the whole picture.
I am reacting to the general notion that there is no such thing as a clear-cut, objectively held, and reason-powered take on anything.
You can use reason to make clear cuts, but then other people can also use reason starting at different postulates and reach absolutely different (even opposite) clear cuts; that's the shame and glory of logical reason. That's why there have been so many philosophical systems through western history. This very debate we're holding between absolute reality vs relative viewpoints was already held in the ancient Greece, and the only basic fact is that humans will play this game forever without a final agreement - that's in our nature. Mathematics won't help you in that because, as any physicist will tell you, mathematical models are used to simulate or approximate reality, not to fully describe it with absolute precision.
People who think that gravity is just God pushing things together because he loves us (and from there, they derive their loopy voting decisions) are, basically, loons.
Now is when I feel that you must be trolling. How do you arrive from God creating gravity to people voting decisions?
What would you say of people who think that gravity was designed by God in the form of the relativistic behaviour of the universe, with a Big Bang and all, and He did it because he loves us? Or who think that evolution, as described by biologists, is God's plan to build the intelligent and privileged race of human beings? How would you disprove that using basic facts about reality?
Better yet: would you say that gravity works as Newton described it? (then you would be wrong! How is that about an absolute fact about nature?). Sure reality is what it is, but can you know what it is?
It's the more rational people who take on just a bit of that stuff (these are the people with mixed premises) because it allows them to cling to some childhood warm-and-fuzzy that they felt when hearing some myth - they're really the dangerous ones. Funny, I find that the really dangerous people are those who believe that a simple collection of undeniable facts can precisely describe reality, and that anyone who don't agree to those undeniable facts are loons or incapable of proper rational thinking.
People who say that reality depends on how you look at it are just making excuses, or feeling a little lazy. Our knowledge about reality depends on how you look at it. I never knew anyone who said that reality actually changes depending on how you look at it, that argument is just a strawman made up by absolutists to attack relativism.
But somewhere deep inside they know exactly what's going on, and building their daily lives around non-reality means they have to say that it's all relative, lest they have to call it what it actually is More trolling... Do you know what other people exactly know, and do you know it from bare reasoning?
Speaking of myself, deep inside know that I can't say what reality actually is, given the simple fact that I'm not omniscient. Some would call it humility; Socrates would say that it's the way to wisdom, and I agree. I can make educated guesses on what reality is, but I wouldn't call names on someone who arrive to different conclusions from other different educated guesses. You would say, that is moral relativism? Then I can't find anything wrong with moral relativism.
I will do whatever I can to hold my positions, but I won't call the other one evil. I recognise that the other ones can only be wrong if their conclusions don't match their premises, not when their premises don't match mines.
I'm trying to solve that very problem as my PhD. My solution would involve using "semantic web" formats (which are kind of superior forms of XML, or restricted forms of logic) to represent data, and tags (a la del.icio.us) allowing users to build meaningful data collections without programming a backend.
The yet unsolved part is how to give users the power to automate common tasks. I plan to use end-user programming techniques for this.
You've expressed the problem in a very concise way. There are already systems trying to bring the Unix philosophy to the User environment, like Archy and the Haystack project, which use different but related approaches.
There is hardware published under open licenses. But GPL V3 is not about hardware licenses but DRM encription (and thus algorithms i.e. software), so how is your conclusion related to the grandparent's post?
Thus, all other competitive factors being equal, the adaptable one will tend to win. If two species are equally fit in a certain environment, but one of them is also fit to survive in another environment, the odds are in favor of the more versatile, adaptable, opportunistic one. That logic is reversible. All other competitive factors being equal, if two species are equally adaptable, but one of them is also best fit in their current environment, the odds are in favor of the more adapted. So your preference for opportunism is a perception bias, not a logical postulate.
If we were all observational super-geniuses who could each individually discern the laws of physics as we know them today within less than a lifetime's observations, but weren't clever enough to realize how to take practical advantage of such knowledge to our advantage, then our intellect would be of no use to us. "Take practical advantage of such knowledge to our advantage" as species, or as individuals? Our intelect could be to great advantage to us as single people, even if it didn't allow as to propagate as species. In that case I would still thougt of us as superior, not because of our raw numbers but for our complexity.
But then, I'm just having these reflections for the sake of argument.
The first thing we do is look and see if anyone has already solved the problem, and if so if we can use it; if we find something and it's GPLed, we can't use it. Correct. Exactly as intendet.
If that fails, we end up writing our own code, which now is by default non-free. Not exactly. You could release your new code under a free license of your own, if you wanted.
While I'm not disputing the quantity of GPLed software out there, I know that many of these projects are giving up help just because of the license. That's long term planning of the GPL. It loses a short-term benefit in order to avoid the risk of being tied to non-free code, just for the convenience of getting some needed function quickly.
It's always seemed to me that there *is* an objective criterion for superiority in a species. Since we're judging superiority as fitness or the ability for a certain pattern (the genome) to continue propagating, then the superior species would be that one most able to overcome a greater variety of possible roadblocks to it's survival.
Not necessarily. You can be the best at adapting to a new environment, and then being eaten by a highly specialiced predator (that can only live at that environment, but it doesn't matter after you're dead).
And since highly adaptable species are more fit to survive over longer periods of time That's a red herring. A species that evolves into a different one is equally fit even if it doesn't "survive over long periods". Also a highly adaptable species will soon diverge into several specialiced ones tailored to particular environments (so which one is better, the adaptable original or the tailored one?).
Being good at adapting (also called oportunistic) is just a survival strategy among others, but it's only superior when it makes you survive better than a specialist - i.e. when the environment goes through steep changing.
This is what has made homo sapiens the dominant large animal species on the planet What makes you think that we are dominant? Certainly there are other species with more presence in the planet than us, either in number of individuals or in total living mass. Plankton comes to mind, and several insects. By your criteria of ability to propagate, these species are much more successful!
I think we are indeed superior (though I might be a bit biased), but I don't think it's because our numbers, but because of our reasoning capabilities. This would be true even if our presence in the planet was smaller and limited to just certain environments.
All this, of course, IMHO.
Re:Turning the computer inside out
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
I suggest to read about Archy (formerly known as The Humane Interface). It's a proof-of-concept OS which has everything you ask for, and some more. It currently has an alpha implementation.
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
Have you heard of End User Development? It's the middle ground between "dynamically hiding menu items" and a C compiler. Its intent is to put users in control of computer objects without them to learn the physical and logical details of computing.
No. If you're gonna program a computer, learn how to program. I agree. But system builders have to arrive at a commitment: if you require your users to program, build a programming environment that suits their needs, don't throw them into a general-purpose programming language (which requires a CS degree to be mastered).
making something "user friendly" means making the front-end more simple No, it means making a back-end that matches the user expectations of what the system should be, and a front-end that put the user in control of that backend. Current OSs are too many times in care of controlling the user actions, when it should be the other way around.
But this complexity always eventually compounds and compounds until the end user can't understand what's happening and gets confused. Not really. This only happens when the designer is building a system with the wrong complexity, instead of first learning which complex tools the user needs for her work - and then building just those. File managers? windows? those are just eyecandy for computer objects that should only be relevant to engineers - namely inodes and processes. BTW, those are also metaphors - they represent the movement of electric signals over silicon chip.
If the system was built around objects in the user's domain, users would manage as much complexity as they'd require. The desktop metaphor was an early application of this principle, intended for office workers. Unfortunately it has been abused into a general depiction for all computing, and that's why it fails nowadays. We need new metaphors for the new tasks, not just throwing the low-level "OS-from-the-70s" metaphor in front of current users.
Now I'm curious. How do you differentiate the positive from the negative forms of freedom? By my understanding of positive freedom it requires an active action, so your "Supporting the right of people not to be MADE to bother" would qualify as a POSITIVE! (since that right needs to be defended by other people's support in order to be effective).
Actually there's a point where the distinction of both kinds of freedoms begins to blur, specially if you use double negatives. The only criteria I've found is whether a given right is fulfilled through action or inaction of others. What's your criteria to claim that No Interference is not Negative Freedom?
Being a software person, I don't see Open Source being about machine control as much as it is about the logic behind controlling my information. If I use a system, I want to be able to audit everything done to my data.
That's why I don't feel that GPL should depend on "technical details" like the software architecture being centraliced in a machine or distributed over a network. Sure, the typical example was of Stallman being unable to modify the drivers of his printer - but since then software has evolved into a product on its own.
(And of course if a software system is built with the collaborate effort and knowledge of hundreds of people under GPL, I prefer the system sources to be available when the system is open for public use, so that the cummulative knowledge remains available to the public). Which kind of freedom do you usually support, BTW? Negative (no interference) or positive (protection to pursue your life goals)?
If you're going to measure freedom by enumerating tokens, you should take into account that BSD license provides for Negative freedom, so it should be:
BSD=-7 freedom points, GPL=-3 freedom points.
(Also your 4th and 5th points aren't appliable to GPL software, since the "after source closing" bit is undefined, so both scales are not comparable).
Taking into account that GPL provides for the Positive freedom ot the user to have access to the source code of every distributed version of the software, that gives a new scale of:
At GPLv2 there weren't clear definitions of "modified version", "interaction", or "source code", for that matter.
And I can't see why the technical detail of using the software through a network, instead that in the same machine, should vary the intent of the GPL - which is to allow the users of a program, in any form, the freedom to tailor it to their needs and execute it in their own.
Encapsulating the program in a remote server in effectively a way to circunvect the freedom protected by GPL. Why should it be allowed by the license? How does preventing this loophole become a "stretching" of the original intent?
Do you understand the difference between |-separated configuration files and XML configuration files? Both are equivalent in that they provide constants for a program; but XML files can be processed by a generic parser, while "pipe" files need an ad-hoc parser.
RDF and the layers on top of it (OWL, DAML...) try to achieve the same for other tasks. Instead of having to build separate applications to achieve the same task again and again for every website, you can reuse a generic code by having all the meanings of the application explicit in the RDF.
The OWL and RDFs are not for the people using the system, no more than HTML and CSS.
The semantic layer could be used to automatically generate goal-oriented workflows, instead of relying on the predefined ones, without making the user think.
On the other hand, it's really easy to release a million monkeys and let the create what they will... and that's how Semantic Web is supposed to work.
The SemaWeb is all about human-provided content represented in a common format, just like Web 1.0 was! HTML was the format for hyperlinked generic information chunks ("pages"), RDF is the format for hyperlinked metadata-anotated chunks.
The main difference is that HTML was, at the beginning, a very simple common format (that's not true nowadays, though). Machine-readable semantic is a complex beast, but still it's supposed to be simpler than the current HTML + CSS + Javascript + XMLRequest + EJBs mixture.
Fellow moderators, parent is the most Insightful comment I've seen in this thread; the Semantic Web is all about human-provided content represented in a common format, just like Web 1.0 was!
Did it ever occur to you that you have different genetics than your parents? (This fact, repeated over generations, is what evolutionists call evolution).
How do you distinguish evolution from adaptation, how YOU define each one?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm trying to do my best, but they haven't figured it yet.
I say, kudos to the designers! They couldn't have done a better job. As seen in the video, they have inserted the Squeak environment! This is a Smalltalk powered system.
if this is going to kids who have never owned a high tech portable equipment they must be quite durable.
And these constraints have also software requirements; given that this project is aimed to *children* and around the *whole world*, IMHO this decision is much better than including a UNIX terminal. An environment designed to be connected to Internet 100% of time won't do.
A computer that begins with a 'sandbox' operative system is great for beginners who must self-teach themselves (try learning a desktop without mouth-to-mouth training!). But this computer is not dumbed-down at all: in has a complete object-oriented development environment just one click away. Children can experiment and learn the basics of computing, without requiring access to online forums (which may not be available to them). Try learning to master the CLI without a LUG! With Smalltalk and the included games, they can tweak and experiment and build their own simulations.
I know that this environment works, because it's how learned computers myself. My old ZX-Spectrum fits into this kind of computer. In the early 80s there weren't available BBS at Europe, and the only way to learn computing was through monthly magazines, and programming our own games. I'm sure when this children grow up they will have the same fond memories of their OLPC laptop, as many of us have of our first micro computers.
Or, you can press CTRL+L in GNOME file dialog and type in the directory location.
Lisp is the mother of all languages :-)
:-)
Once you learn it, you achieve the zen of programming - lisp is the closest possible language to the mathematical definition of computing. Have you read The Little Lisper? (republished later as The Little Schemer). You can read it in a few evenings, learning some deep programming paradigms and the basics of several complex applications, including compilers.
End-user programming has already had one big success in its history: the Spreadsheet. Programmers of visual languages consider that spreadsheets are the most versatile (and most widespread) modelling language to date; problems of many different domains can be expressed with cells and functions, and non-programmers can use it efficiently to that end.
This flexibility is grounded on the same principles as Lisp: a simple syntax without special cases, which can be used to build any grammar on it. Mi goal is to find a similar language wich can model automatic tasks the same way as the spreadsheet can model data. I'm still in a phase where I accept suggestions
I'm afraid you misunderstand the point you're trying to argue against. Those of us who hold relativist positions do not believe that reality is imprecise or ambiguous, but that human knowledge is. You are able to make simple statements, but you must be always aware that those statements will never be the whole picture.
I am reacting to the general notion that there is no such thing as a clear-cut, objectively held, and reason-powered take on anything.
You can use reason to make clear cuts, but then other people can also use reason starting at different postulates and reach absolutely different (even opposite) clear cuts; that's the shame and glory of logical reason. That's why there have been so many philosophical systems through western history. This very debate we're holding between absolute reality vs relative viewpoints was already held in the ancient Greece, and the only basic fact is that humans will play this game forever without a final agreement - that's in our nature. Mathematics won't help you in that because, as any physicist will tell you, mathematical models are used to simulate or approximate reality, not to fully describe it with absolute precision.
People who think that gravity is just God pushing things together because he loves us (and from there, they derive their loopy voting decisions) are, basically, loons.
Now is when I feel that you must be trolling. How do you arrive from God creating gravity to people voting decisions?
What would you say of people who think that gravity was designed by God in the form of the relativistic behaviour of the universe, with a Big Bang and all, and He did it because he loves us? Or who think that evolution, as described by biologists, is God's plan to build the intelligent and privileged race of human beings? How would you disprove that using basic facts about reality?
Better yet: would you say that gravity works as Newton described it? (then you would be wrong! How is that about an absolute fact about nature?). Sure reality is what it is, but can you know what it is?
It's the more rational people who take on just a bit of that stuff (these are the people with mixed premises) because it allows them to cling to some childhood warm-and-fuzzy that they felt when hearing some myth - they're really the dangerous ones.
Funny, I find that the really dangerous people are those who believe that a simple collection of undeniable facts can precisely describe reality, and that anyone who don't agree to those undeniable facts are loons or incapable of proper rational thinking.
People who say that reality depends on how you look at it are just making excuses, or feeling a little lazy.
Our knowledge about reality depends on how you look at it. I never knew anyone who said that reality actually changes depending on how you look at it, that argument is just a strawman made up by absolutists to attack relativism.
But somewhere deep inside they know exactly what's going on, and building their daily lives around non-reality means they have to say that it's all relative, lest they have to call it what it actually is
More trolling... Do you know what other people exactly know, and do you know it from bare reasoning?
Speaking of myself, deep inside know that I can't say what reality actually is, given the simple fact that I'm not omniscient. Some would call it humility; Socrates would say that it's the way to wisdom, and I agree. I can make educated guesses on what reality is, but I wouldn't call names on someone who arrive to different conclusions from other different educated guesses. You would say, that is moral relativism? Then I can't find anything wrong with moral relativism.
I will do whatever I can to hold my positions, but I won't call the other one evil. I recognise that the other ones can only be wrong if their conclusions don't match their premises, not when their premises don't match mines.
A more subtle form of
I'm trying to solve that very problem as my PhD. My solution would involve using "semantic web" formats (which are kind of superior forms of XML, or restricted forms of logic) to represent data, and tags (a la del.icio.us) allowing users to build meaningful data collections without programming a backend.
The yet unsolved part is how to give users the power to automate common tasks. I plan to use end-user programming techniques for this.
You've expressed the problem in a very concise way. There are already systems trying to bring the Unix philosophy to the User environment, like Archy and the Haystack project, which use different but related approaches.
There is hardware published under open licenses. But GPL V3 is not about hardware licenses but DRM encription (and thus algorithms i.e. software), so how is your conclusion related to the grandparent's post?
So you don't make use of context aware menus, which gives acces to context-related commands?
//I'm sure there are many slashdot readers (judging from the kind of posts I see here) who believe we are currently in a nascent "civil war"//
Oh, but they are right!
Thus, all other competitive factors being equal, the adaptable one will tend to win. If two species are equally fit in a certain environment, but one of them is also fit to survive in another environment, the odds are in favor of the more versatile, adaptable, opportunistic one.
That logic is reversible. All other competitive factors being equal, if two species are equally adaptable, but one of them is also best fit in their current environment, the odds are in favor of the more adapted. So your preference for opportunism is a perception bias, not a logical postulate.
If we were all observational super-geniuses who could each individually discern the laws of physics as we know them today within less than a lifetime's observations, but weren't clever enough to realize how to take practical advantage of such knowledge to our advantage, then our intellect would be of no use to us.
"Take practical advantage of such knowledge to our advantage" as species, or as individuals? Our intelect could be to great advantage to us as single people, even if it didn't allow as to propagate as species. In that case I would still thougt of us as superior, not because of our raw numbers but for our complexity.
But then, I'm just having these reflections for the sake of argument.
The first thing we do is look and see if anyone has already solved the problem, and if so if we can use it; if we find something and it's GPLed, we can't use it.
Correct. Exactly as intendet.
If that fails, we end up writing our own code, which now is by default non-free.
Not exactly. You could release your new code under a free license of your own, if you wanted.
While I'm not disputing the quantity of GPLed software out there, I know that many of these projects are giving up help just because of the license.
That's long term planning of the GPL. It loses a short-term benefit in order to avoid the risk of being tied to non-free code, just for the convenience of getting some needed function quickly.
It's always seemed to me that there *is* an objective criterion for superiority in a species. Since we're judging superiority as fitness or the ability for a certain pattern (the genome) to continue propagating, then the superior species would be that one most able to overcome a greater variety of possible roadblocks to it's survival.
Not necessarily. You can be the best at adapting to a new environment, and then being eaten by a highly specialiced predator (that can only live at that environment, but it doesn't matter after you're dead).
And since highly adaptable species are more fit to survive over longer periods of time
That's a red herring. A species that evolves into a different one is equally fit even if it doesn't "survive over long periods". Also a highly adaptable species will soon diverge into several specialiced ones tailored to particular environments (so which one is better, the adaptable original or the tailored one?).
Being good at adapting (also called oportunistic) is just a survival strategy among others, but it's only superior when it makes you survive better than a specialist - i.e. when the environment goes through steep changing.
This is what has made homo sapiens the dominant large animal species on the planet
What makes you think that we are dominant? Certainly there are other species with more presence in the planet than us, either in number of individuals or in total living mass. Plankton comes to mind, and several insects. By your criteria of ability to propagate, these species are much more successful!
I think we are indeed superior (though I might be a bit biased), but I don't think it's because our numbers, but because of our reasoning capabilities. This would be true even if our presence in the planet was smaller and limited to just certain environments.
All this, of course, IMHO.
I suggest to read about Archy (formerly known as The Humane Interface). It's a proof-of-concept OS which has everything you ask for, and some more. It currently has an alpha implementation.
Have you heard of End User Development? It's the middle ground between "dynamically hiding menu items" and a C compiler. Its intent is to put users in control of computer objects without them to learn the physical and logical details of computing.
No. If you're gonna program a computer, learn how to program.
I agree. But system builders have to arrive at a commitment: if you require your users to program, build a programming environment that suits their needs, don't throw them into a general-purpose programming language (which requires a CS degree to be mastered).
making something "user friendly" means making the front-end more simple
No, it means making a back-end that matches the user expectations of what the system should be, and a front-end that put the user in control of that backend. Current OSs are too many times in care of controlling the user actions, when it should be the other way around.
But this complexity always eventually compounds and compounds until the end user can't understand what's happening and gets confused.
Not really. This only happens when the designer is building a system with the wrong complexity, instead of first learning which complex tools the user needs for her work - and then building just those. File managers? windows? those are just eyecandy for computer objects that should only be relevant to engineers - namely inodes and processes. BTW, those are also metaphors - they represent the movement of electric signals over silicon chip.
If the system was built around objects in the user's domain, users would manage as much complexity as they'd require. The desktop metaphor was an early application of this principle, intended for office workers. Unfortunately it has been abused into a general depiction for all computing, and that's why it fails nowadays. We need new metaphors for the new tasks, not just throwing the low-level "OS-from-the-70s" metaphor in front of current users.
Now I'm curious. How do you differentiate the positive from the negative forms of freedom? By my understanding of positive freedom it requires an active action, so your "Supporting the right of people not to be MADE to bother" would qualify as a POSITIVE! (since that right needs to be defended by other people's support in order to be effective).
Actually there's a point where the distinction of both kinds of freedoms begins to blur, specially if you use double negatives. The only criteria I've found is whether a given right is fulfilled through action or inaction of others. What's your criteria to claim that No Interference is not Negative Freedom?
Being a software person, I don't see Open Source being about machine control as much as it is about the logic behind controlling my information. If I use a system, I want to be able to audit everything done to my data.
That's why I don't feel that GPL should depend on "technical details" like the software architecture being centraliced in a machine or distributed over a network. Sure, the typical example was of Stallman being unable to modify the drivers of his printer - but since then software has evolved into a product on its own.
(And of course if a software system is built with the collaborate effort and knowledge of hundreds of people under GPL, I prefer the system sources to be available when the system is open for public use, so that the cummulative knowledge remains available to the public). Which kind of freedom do you usually support, BTW? Negative (no interference) or positive (protection to pursue your life goals)?
But calling it the GPL License is.
If you're going to measure freedom by enumerating tokens, you should take into account that BSD license provides for Negative freedom, so it should be:
BSD=-7 freedom points,
GPL=-3 freedom points.
(Also your 4th and 5th points aren't appliable to GPL software, since the "after source closing" bit is undefined, so both scales are not comparable).
Taking into account that GPL provides for the Positive freedom ot the user to have access to the source code of every distributed version of the software, that gives a new scale of:
BSD=0 positive freedoms,
GPL=1 positive freedom.
Yes I know IHBT, but that was fun!
At GPLv2 there weren't clear definitions of "modified version", "interaction", or "source code", for that matter.
And I can't see why the technical detail of using the software through a network, instead that in the same machine, should vary the intent of the GPL - which is to allow the users of a program, in any form, the freedom to tailor it to their needs and execute it in their own.
Encapsulating the program in a remote server in effectively a way to circunvect the freedom protected by GPL. Why should it be allowed by the license? How does preventing this loophole become a "stretching" of the original intent?
Do you understand the difference between |-separated configuration files and XML configuration files? Both are equivalent in that they provide constants for a program; but XML files can be processed by a generic parser, while "pipe" files need an ad-hoc parser.
RDF and the layers on top of it (OWL, DAML...) try to achieve the same for other tasks. Instead of having to build separate applications to achieve the same task again and again for every website, you can reuse a generic code by having all the meanings of the application explicit in the RDF.
The OWL and RDFs are not for the people using the system, no more than HTML and CSS.
The semantic layer could be used to automatically generate goal-oriented workflows, instead of relying on the predefined ones, without making the user think.
On the other hand, it's really easy to release a million monkeys and let the create what they will ... and that's how Semantic Web is supposed to work.
The SemaWeb is all about human-provided content represented in a common format, just like Web 1.0 was! HTML was the format for hyperlinked generic information chunks ("pages"), RDF is the format for hyperlinked metadata-anotated chunks.
The main difference is that HTML was, at the beginning, a very simple common format (that's not true nowadays, though). Machine-readable semantic is a complex beast, but still it's supposed to be simpler than the current HTML + CSS + Javascript + XMLRequest + EJBs mixture.
Fellow moderators, parent is the most Insightful comment I've seen in this thread; the Semantic Web is all about human-provided content represented in a common format, just like Web 1.0 was!
Someone with points please mod it up!
Problems began when my Spanish girlfriend said, 'no se te Levanta'.
Did it ever occur to you that you have different genetics than your parents? (This fact, repeated over generations, is what evolutionists call evolution).
How do you distinguish evolution from adaptation, how YOU define each one?