Have you heard of "lowercase semantic web"? Things like del.icio.us, Flicker, Xhtml Friends Network and other open API lightweight services will be the first tools that will spread the idea of easy-to-use, always-available semantic services.
Yes, the Semantic Web goals are exactly the idea stated in the article.
Regular Slashdot crew don't get it because of the overly complicated status of the current S.W. standards, but in the future some lightweight implementation of the Semantic Web idea will take off and we will have search engines that somehow "answer questions" instead of just "finding words".
I already knew that, thank you very much. That still doesn't make it great design for a small app to depend on the libraries of its own desktop environment.
I wish there had been a "warty point five" release where they kept the old (and reasonably well performing) X system and the old fam (which, ironically, had finally been fixed to pretty robust operation just weeks before warty came out using the newfangled and terribly misbehaving gam) and updated nautilus and firefox and gaim and gimp.
You have backports, maybe that could do the trick for you.
Why is my screen stuck at 640x480? Why is there no sound? Why is the sound out of sync in all my videos? Why can't I unmount my encrypted hard drive space? Why can't I rename files in nautilus?
These are the sort of very simple problems few had with warty and everyone seems to have with hoary
Funny, my experience with Warty and Hoary has been the opposite.
I couldn't find any reference to the licensing terms, but the main page has this at the bottom: All Content Copyright 2002 Dark Engineering Guild. Well the content be further redistributable or usable in other projects?
Did you miss the post I was replying to, which said about the current screen shots, presumably the same ones I was looking at, "Wow. That's so beautiful, it brought a tear to my eye."? 'Cause that's what I'm responding to, not some future version of the project.
I didn't. My "this project is Alpha 3" was targeted at your "funny how it misses its own advice -- the Laws of Inteface Design".
Have you seen the mockups of their intended final design? Actually I find their design really good - their overall Desktop solution is better than anything Windows, OS X or previous Linux had to offer. It definitely avoids clutter. Bright graphics and colors is mostly a matter of taste as long as they don't make the interface parts distracting or difficult to see.
Symphony is in alpha state, so it's too soon to say how it will evolve. The desktop UI *will* span into applications thanks to the underlying Opera environment (which leverages the Mozilla XUL architecture toghether with Perl scripting).
The Symphony staff have proven that they have a clue both on technical and UI design grounds. I hope that this distro will evolve into the definite User Friendly Linux if they manage to get it done.
You realize that this interface will be themeable, right? So you can install your preferred dark, gothic theme if that's how you like it. Funny to mention that those are mockups, not the really final decision of the interface (current implementation has a dark blue & black wallpaper).
It's also kinda funny how it misses its own advice -- the "Laws of Inteface Design" on the site says "3.Scrolling sucks. A good user interface will minimize scrolling, and encourage the user to create volumes of information that do not promote scrolling." -- yet the first screenshot shows a browser window with both a vertical and the dreaded horizontal scrollbar.
Did you missed the version number that says this project is "Alpha 3"? The current applications used are not part of the interface, which is currently limited to the desktop & helper launcher pages. *Those* are scroll-less, submenu-less designs.
I suppose it's a natural trend in (somewhat) free societies that the outcasts tend to group and with their peers. (In a non-free society, being that different would be persecuted and banned).
This is astoundingly similar to self-formed gay "ghettos". When you feel uncomfortable with how the general public sees your tastes and/or customs, you'll gravitate towards your equals and create a micro-culture. I think the SW Episode III lines are the geek equivalent to the Gay Parade;-)
Do you have any evidence for this? It seems a little implausible to me to argue that the airlines would say, "Gosh, maintenance on our planes isn't so important; it's ok if a few crash now and then."
You could think the same about the electrical companies...
I suppose it all hinges on the definition of "life" Yes it does, and that was the whole point of this discussion. You were limitting yourself to self-replicating carbon structures.
To me, whoever designed the molecular underpinnings of life did an astounding engineering job. My stand is that those aren't "designed", they are evolved (and adapt to the medium in which they developed). And they could evolve on a different medium and scale. Maybe the basic building block of alien life wouldn't be a 10 micrometers DNA-replicated cell, but a 10mm carbon cristal. Or a 10-meters-long soap which makes copies of itself every 10 centuries. Or any other possible chemical process. If these processes exist anywhere and are as complex as the DNA ones, wouldn't you call them life?
Think again of the Solaris example (yes it's fiction, but also a valid working hypothesis) - a world-wide ecology that adapts to its environment by constantly reconfiguring itself (this is related to the Gaia theory). With a slight generalization of your definition of life, you *might* find other kinds of life in the universe.
And you're saying that when whe are on the verge of building self-replicating computers (maybe using nanotechnology)?
The laws of physics at most precludes the formation of not carbon-based DNA molecules, but that doesn't prove that *any* form of something that could be called life could exist (to do that, you should first define *all* possibles forms of life). Only if you define "life" as "DNA molecules" is your possition valid. The original argument was that life might have different forms, and I agree.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you heard of "lowercase semantic web"? Things like del.icio.us, Flicker, Xhtml Friends Network and other open API lightweight services will be the first tools that will spread the idea of easy-to-use, always-available semantic services.
Yes, the Semantic Web goals are exactly the idea stated in the article.
Regular Slashdot crew don't get it because of the overly complicated status of the current S.W. standards, but in the future some lightweight implementation of the Semantic Web idea will take off and we will have search engines that somehow "answer questions" instead of just "finding words".
Funny, neither cat nor dog returned with the stick.
I'll post the rest of my results later.
When your cat and dog return?
I already knew that, thank you very much. That still doesn't make it great design for a small app to depend on the libraries of its own desktop environment.
I'm not native English speaker, you insensitive clod!
So you discovered that KDE applications are not meant to be run from Gnome?
Congratulations!
Did you notice that KDE developers are not the same people than kernel developers?
I wish there had been a "warty point five" release where they kept the old (and reasonably well performing) X system and the old fam (which, ironically, had finally been fixed to pretty robust operation just weeks before warty came out using the newfangled and terribly misbehaving gam) and updated nautilus and firefox and gaim and gimp.
You have backports, maybe that could do the trick for you.
Why is my screen stuck at 640x480?
Why is there no sound?
Why is the sound out of sync in all my videos?
Why can't I unmount my encrypted hard drive space?
Why can't I rename files in nautilus?
These are the sort of very simple problems few had with warty and everyone seems to have with hoary
Funny, my experience with Warty and Hoary has been the opposite.
And when you can't remember in which folder did you put it?
Have you tried Hit-a-hint? It highlights all accesible targets and assigns a number to each of them for direct keyboard access.
Ah, Firefox extensibility...
Wrong. Try again.
Someone deletes all your thoughts as soon as you get them?
I couldn't find any reference to the licensing terms, but the main page has this at the bottom:
All Content Copyright 2002 Dark Engineering Guild. Well the content be further redistributable or usable in other projects?
(Oh, and first post).
Did you miss the post I was replying to, which said about the current screen shots, presumably the same ones I was looking at, "Wow. That's so beautiful, it brought a tear to my eye."? 'Cause that's what I'm responding to, not some future version of the project.
I didn't. My "this project is Alpha 3" was targeted at your "funny how it misses its own advice -- the Laws of Inteface Design".
Have you seen the mockups of their intended final design?
Actually I find their design really good - their overall Desktop solution is better than anything Windows, OS X or previous Linux had to offer. It definitely avoids clutter. Bright graphics and colors is mostly a matter of taste as long as they don't make the interface parts distracting or difficult to see.
Sorry, the name of the underlying XUL/Perl environment is Orchestra, not Opera.
Symphony is in alpha state, so it's too soon to say how it will evolve. The desktop UI *will* span into applications thanks to the underlying Opera environment (which leverages the Mozilla XUL architecture toghether with Perl scripting).
The Symphony staff have proven that they have a clue both on technical and UI design grounds. I hope that this distro will evolve into the definite User Friendly Linux if they manage to get it done.
but whatever, I'll bite.
You realize that this interface will be themeable, right? So you can install your preferred dark, gothic theme if that's how you like it. Funny to mention that those are mockups, not the really final decision of the interface (current implementation has a dark blue & black wallpaper).
It's also kinda funny how it misses its own advice -- the "Laws of Inteface Design" on the site says "3.Scrolling sucks. A good user interface will minimize scrolling, and encourage the user to create volumes of information that do not promote scrolling." -- yet the first screenshot shows a browser window with both a vertical and the dreaded horizontal scrollbar.
Did you missed the version number that says this project is "Alpha 3"? The current applications used are not part of the interface, which is currently limited to the desktop & helper launcher pages. *Those* are scroll-less, submenu-less designs.
I suppose it's a natural trend in (somewhat) free societies that the outcasts tend to group and with their peers. (In a non-free society, being that different would be persecuted and banned).
;-)
This is astoundingly similar to self-formed gay "ghettos". When you feel uncomfortable with how the general public sees your tastes and/or customs, you'll gravitate towards your equals and create a micro-culture. I think the SW Episode III lines are the geek equivalent to the Gay Parade
it was a one-liner?
And the next thing you know will be Google launching specs on web design and then content.
As long as everyone can freely and voluntarily use these specs without having to pay anything, how is this a bad thing?
Do you have any evidence for this? It seems a little implausible to me to argue that the airlines would say, "Gosh, maintenance on our planes isn't so important; it's ok if a few crash now and then."
You could think the same about the electrical companies...
I suppose it all hinges on the definition of "life"
Yes it does, and that was the whole point of this discussion. You were limitting yourself to self-replicating carbon structures.
To me, whoever designed the molecular underpinnings of life did an astounding engineering job.
My stand is that those aren't "designed", they are evolved (and adapt to the medium in which they developed). And they could evolve on a different medium and scale. Maybe the basic building block of alien life wouldn't be a 10 micrometers DNA-replicated cell, but a 10mm carbon cristal. Or a 10-meters-long soap which makes copies of itself every 10 centuries. Or any other possible chemical process. If these processes exist anywhere and are as complex as the DNA ones, wouldn't you call them life?
Think again of the Solaris example (yes it's fiction, but also a valid working hypothesis) - a world-wide ecology that adapts to its environment by constantly reconfiguring itself (this is related to the Gaia theory). With a slight generalization of your definition of life, you *might* find other kinds of life in the universe.
If the device does not generate too much heat while it's active, have it always active.
Now that I thought, the ammount of heat generated while it's active should be the same ammount generated while it's sitting dormant, isn't it?
And you're saying that when whe are on the verge of building self-replicating computers (maybe using nanotechnology)?
The laws of physics at most precludes the formation of not carbon-based DNA molecules, but that doesn't prove that *any* form of something that could be called life could exist (to do that, you should first define *all* possibles forms of life). Only if you define "life" as "DNA molecules" is your possition valid. The original argument was that life might have different forms, and I agree.
I did not state that God exists by definition. By that definition, the question, "What created God?" makes no sense.
Ok. But then the Aquinas argument also doesn't make sense: "the origin of all physical things exists because all physical things have an origin".