In addition to the geat novels others have mentioned here, be sure to check out All You Zombies, a (short!) short story that's one of the tightest time-travel tales you'll ever read. Originally published in 1959, you can find it in The Fantasies of Robert A Heinlein, a short-story collection. There's also a full copy online somewhere, posted by an English prof. for his class but accessible to anyone.
According to the lawsuit, recording industry investigators tracked the file-sharing activities of a Kazaa user with the moniker Heath7 and found the unique numeric identifier, known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address, that was assigned to the user by the Internet service provider
at the time.(emphasis mine)
The recording industry then issued a subpoena to Comcast, the user's Internet service provider, demanding the name, address, and e-mail address of the person behind the IP address.
Evan Cox, a partner with Covington & Burling in San Francisco who is not involved with the case, said the error most likely happened in one of two ways: Either Comcast matched the wrong customer with the IP address, or the recording industry requested information about the wrong IP address, which is usually more than nine digits.
"If any of those [IP address] numbers are wrong or transposed, you're going to get the wrong person," Cohn said.
OR, the IP address Comcast's DHCP server gave out to a Kazaa user was recycled by the time RIAA's lawyers subpoena'd the info, and Granny got Junior's IP addy.
Hardly anyone I know can be reliably traced to an IP address over a period of several weeks. How often does your DSL or cable modem get rebooted?
I tend to agree with you that the book excerpt's discussion on reuse is useless -- it doesn't *begin* to address the complexities and nuances of real-world authoring, editing and publishing processes.
However, to your example of finding meaningful information in documents stored in file hierarchies: While you're correct that we're left with precious little information, and much of it relies on shared conventions, there's another technology that can (and is) brought to bear to help solve this (dunno if the book in question covers it): modern full-text search engines.
In addition to the predictive ways of navigating a hierarchy or constructing queries on metadata like creation date or category from a controlled vocabulary, FT searches can help find data not encoded in metadata. The classic newspaper example is a baseball story that never once mentions the word "baseball" (and whose reporter or editor also neglects to add the word as a keyword). Advanced search engines can automatically create inferences and topic groups, and so "know" the story's subject even tho the word is never mentioned.
This is NOT a panacea -- there are plenty of cases it doesn't address, like to content of images, or the stale content in your C/PM example -- but it's a big help. For example, your C/PM tome might contain info that's still useful, in addition to the completely outdated stuff (*I* remember C/PM!)
Many CMSs have included this capacity for yers -- e.g see OpenText's LiveLink engine. Again, I agree that information entropy exists -- I'm not suggesting a cure for what ails you, just a way to make retrieval incrementally (and perhaps by very large increments) better than otherwise.
Interestingly, because of the problems you cite with structured content storage and retrieval, there are schools of thought that say we should give up on the structure altogether, and rely entirely on inferential techniques like full-text search, relevance ranking, etc.
I tend to think the specifics are domain- and case-dependent -- some domains and cases may be easily adaptible to highly structured repositories, and others may be impossible to categorize effectively. Most cases are probably somewhere in between.
(Pantheism pits the gods against each other. Monotheism pits men against each other. The latter is proving to be even more destructive than the former. Do away with both and you'll be happier. They ALL suck. Doesn't matter which. They start with a suspension of disbelief and slide down from there.)
ooooh, that's one of the sweetest formulations I've come across in a long time! I hope you don't mind if I paraphrase you!
Slashdot Mirror
I think you might be talking about "Comet"
In addition to the geat novels others have mentioned here, be sure to check out All You Zombies, a (short!) short story that's one of the tightest time-travel tales you'll ever read. Originally published in 1959, you can find it in The Fantasies of Robert A Heinlein, a short-story collection. There's also a full copy online somewhere, posted by an English prof. for his class but accessible to anyone.
So it's kind've like painting goat's blood over your door...
erm, sorry to pick nits, but this is /. after all. It was lamb's blood, not goat's....
VERY cool -- kudos!
yeah, what he said. and your English is good enough!
... or does this picture of original Bob on nickjr.com look like a storyboard for a pr0n video?
dang -- won't work here with our Aeron chairs :-(
I tend to agree with you that the book excerpt's discussion on reuse is useless -- it doesn't *begin* to address the complexities and nuances of real-world authoring, editing and publishing processes.
However, to your example of finding meaningful information in documents stored in file hierarchies:
While you're correct that we're left with precious little information, and much of it relies on shared conventions, there's another technology that can (and is) brought to bear to help solve this (dunno if the book in question covers it): modern full-text search engines.
In addition to the predictive ways of navigating a hierarchy or constructing queries on metadata like creation date or category from a controlled vocabulary, FT searches can help find data not encoded in metadata. The classic newspaper example is a baseball story that never once mentions the word "baseball" (and whose reporter or editor also neglects to add the word as a keyword). Advanced search engines can automatically create inferences and topic groups, and so "know" the story's subject even tho the word is never mentioned.
This is NOT a panacea -- there are plenty of cases it doesn't address, like to content of images, or the stale content in your C/PM example -- but it's a big help. For example, your C/PM tome might contain info that's still useful, in addition to the completely outdated stuff (*I* remember C/PM!)
Many CMSs have included this capacity for yers -- e.g see OpenText's LiveLink engine. Again, I agree that information entropy exists -- I'm not suggesting a cure for what ails you, just a way to make retrieval incrementally (and perhaps by very large increments) better than otherwise.
Interestingly, because of the problems you cite with structured content storage and retrieval, there are schools of thought that say we should give up on the structure altogether, and rely entirely on inferential techniques like full-text search, relevance ranking, etc.
I tend to think the specifics are domain- and case-dependent -- some domains and cases may be easily adaptible to highly structured repositories, and others may be impossible to categorize effectively. Most cases are probably somewhere in between.
ooooh, that's one of the sweetest formulations I've come across in a long time! I hope you don't mind if I paraphrase you!
and, yes, I remember The Politics of Dancing...