You are correct in that big images would slow down the page.. unless Google knows your bandwidth of course.
However AFP has nothing to lose. They do not make money on button clicks. They are already known as some of the highest quality / penetration provider in the world.
I think you are missing one point. A small image is not a "replica", which has no meaning digitally. It is a low-res copy. It think they should be allowed, and they are required for visual-type search engines. However the main argument against this by photo agencies (and believe me I spent years trying to convince a big one to go digital) is that even tiny sized images are sold. For example a travel magazine I know (ABRoad) usees 1cm sized images - but tons of them. It is the minimum useable size which is why google uses them. They are not "replicas" which are not useful.
As for blacklisting, that is exactly 1) what AFP wants, in terms of unpaid useage, and 2) probably illegal and not what AFP wants, in terms of no longer letting people find the AFP website. However given a choice they would prefer blacklisting.
Anyway, Google is not the hand that feeds AFP. It is most likely the hand that chokes AFP in the future.
caveat I'm develop search engines and also worked in a photo agency for some years like AFP.
Bottom line: AFP is right but Google's lack of ads or even full stories on the page should save them.
I just looked at Google News and noticed there is a photo that goes to a story, but there is no photo on the page it links to. The photo must have come from some other news source and the caption "Boston Globe" got pasted below it as a link.
This is maybe good for layout but is contrary to what a photographer would be used to seeing. It probably got them pissed off.
I doubt Google is knowingly copying from AFP. I think they grab any photos they can find. But they will probably find a lot of quality AFP photos. The problem is you don't know who they got it from. And the lack of attribution. That is how AFP makes their money: Copyright control. And guess what? Google uses the work of AFP photographers to make a more visually interesting page for a service that is both free and worth enough money to make an IPO.
Well, this was bound to happen. AFP can probably prove it was an AFP photo, but cannot prove Google copied it from them (and Google likely didn't). It would be useful to include metadata in the photos as to proper credit, url, and policy.
Probably AFP contacted Google, got rebuffed, and then AFP realized that if they don't fight it they will lose control over their online future. Which is true.
But this is really a search engine - you can't actually read the articles there but need to surf elsewhere - and there are no ads, so it can be said that this is a free service.
Anyway it walks a fine line between a search engine and a publication, and the best thing would be if Google could actually sign a contract with Reuters and AFP say, and show large, high quality photos on their site. They could also pay photographers and writers directly which is of course the next step, when Google really goes for the throat. For now it is just a search engine, and Google should be free to make a dynamic layout any way they want, except that it should show accreditation (if in the photo file itself) at least as a mouseover popup label.
I'm not going to guess the outcome, but hope AFP loses badly, otherwise it will be chilling. They ought to be able to demand that Google not index a photo that has an AFP byline embedded in it, but that too is an interpretation we'll have to wait and see about.
One possible way: lifetime rights to virtual dvds
on
Broadband to Kill Off DVD?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I first thought "No" but how about this idea.
A lifetime liscense to a virtual DVD, backed by the right to make personal copies and make unlimited downloads with copyright fees waived.
You can have your DVD and buy it in a brick and mortar store if you want to drive there and pay for their overhead. You can get a physical DVD like now but you are also paying for pressing, color printing, distribution and inventory costs.
You can download to your hard disk but don't have to worry about burning it at home, though you would be able to do so for all content with open source tools, nor do you have to worry about renting a data center or keeping a RAID jukebox in the basement.
Your purchase would give you a transferable, resaleable, unlimited right to the product, for all resolutions/file sizes up to that of the purchased product, though you might have to pay a one-time encoding fee if the format you desire is not on the publisher's server.
You could likewise easily order rights to various printed materials, audio interviews, bromides, "making of shows", television versions, etc. linked to it, whether by the same publisher/distributor or not (thanks to automated searching over google, blog listings, or other mechanisms). Some people may opt to only purchase time-limited liscenses but smart people will go for a "lifetime" or better yet perpetual liscense, and no company except maybe the biggest mega studio will begrudge it, considering that if they have higher quality masters they can remaster for even better than DVD quality.
To me this is far superior to what is currently available. The current problem is you do not know when the DVD you buy will deteriorate, and publishers similarly have ticking time bombs. I don't happen to use DVDs but I do buy the same books over again.. just like I rent the same VHS tapes many times, and know I can do so again for a few bucks even if my player eats one (happened before), I have bought the same (scifi) books many times over the years as I move around and am unable to carry them all with me. So I would definitely pay for a lifetime right to a work, plus the guarantee of durability.
Such a system would also allow us to show dvds to friends or trade with them at no charge. In fact I believe it would be cheaper to have no copy protection at all, and simply guarantee that a given customer id would always be able to get a fresh copy of a work, even if issued by someone else. We would all win.
I envision studios making a deal with insurance companies to put digital masters in escrow, and one day these will all end up in one place and accessible freely to the public (when copyright expires) minus perhaps distribution fees (if indeed the fee is not negligible by then). When you consider that even TV is going or has gone digital, but there is just too much of it to archive or it has been too hard to do so, you can easily envision the same system being applied to TV and other media. Also considering the costs that broadcasters will have to pay to go digital, this is a good way to finance it (better than the hostile takeover being financed by U.S. a securities company that is being played out in Japan this past week).
I have been waiting an awfully long time to be able to access past years of TV shows and if I can easily "bookmark" a scene I am watching on live TV instead of rushing to hit the record button and missing bits of it, that would be worthwhile. Then a whole genre of websites would spring up to index the shows and scenes that could be accessed, and we would be bathed in a real digital ocean of our shared cultural history, which would be as broad as the entire world and as deep as the earliest decades for which the media have survived.
In this vision, broadband access to the Internet could indeed be said to have beaten the dvd, itself an evanescent instantiation of a physical specification, since broadband will ensure that the physical item you purchase and treasure will remain with you for the years to come.
Well you can use wxwidgets and build with gtk but I guess they are just going straight to gtk. Is that for speed or memory savings? I'd like to know why.
Also the FAQ still says they use wx.
P.S. Azureus is cool but a memory hog whereas screen ctorrent is mighty nice.
The journals are well known to run a needed service but also a racket. Certainly they do have to hire people to do the editing and verification necessary to protect their names.
Ironically I am aware of a situation in which people (researchers, companies and governments) are currently having trouble figuring out how to safely publish openly and online - nanotechnology and genomics. PLoS is cited in some papers and talks so that looks promising but the question many have is how to share intellectual property - that is, scientific research that is also important to a nation strategically - while ensuring it isn't "stolen", in other words reciprocally fair sharing.
Not to sound unfair, but the cowboy attitudes in China and possibly some bigotry lend Japanese to worry about genomic research being "stolen" by China (in quotes because they would be giving it away). They don't seem to get it, they aren't worried about publication costs at all the question is what if it all goes only one way? Money is definitely not a problem at this level.
There is a push to translate and put online many Japanese research papers so that more people around the world can find them and initiate collaborations. Also money is not the problem at least in the initial stage. I have no idea if they have a system in course to maintain quality which is what the peer journals say they are selling.
So here is how I see it. Certainly if all grants contained publication fees that would be a nice gravy train for the journals, though slanted against developing countries and students perhaps. However at a certain level, not only does everyone gain by open publication, also the country that publishes more wins more. The IEEE provides global level services that are strategically valuable to countries and they should pay.
Another alternative is to ask Japan to pay. Money isn't a problem. Just sign an agreement that limits publication in English to starting one month after a Japanese translation is published, and allow the Japanese version to be limited to certain organizations if Japan so wishes. It would work. Of course Korea might go for that too.. Well this is only partly tongue in cheek, it would work, though there would be an outcry I expect.
Anyway, it is eminently feasible to publish like arxiv the problem is how to pay for quality controls and reviews. Of course nobody would accept a one-sided transaction. I am thinking this might be an interesting issue to raise at the next STS Forum which I was involved in last year. Small companies like mine can't afford to pay for all kinds of journals, but want to see information. If small venture entrepreneurs are going to be important drivers of the future (as Japan and probably some other companies believe) they should be supported too. This means that however money works out, the end user fee should be far lower or best of course, free, and that reproduction rights should similarly be free as in freedom. I think it is time for the journals to cut their fat (and paper publications) and focus on their core service (arbiter of quality), improve that and get paid in perpetuity by governments.
Readership, publication volume, and reviews by leading universities in respective fields can suffice to grade the journals and see which should be paid most. This will open the way for a new market to be created that rewards quality, efficiency and freedom.
Considering that the information being seen would become their property once the physical document arrived, and since they probably would have to wait another month before responding to another school or business opportunity, and that a large amount of debt or income might be swung by that timely knowledge, it can be argued that the acts were not only ethical, they also were reasonable and in the spirit of whatever Harvard is supposed to be teaching them. Of course they were alerting Harvard to their access apparently by id hash so they weren't all that smart, but the temptation to get news that is personally relevant only to your own future is so great that it is difficult to imagine people staying away from it.
Note that Harvard Business School uses a neat web-based intranet through which you get all the important information. Which I played with once as a family member went there. Maybe they have similar vulnerabilities in that system too? Also note that unless you win the lottery it is quite possible apparently that you will not get the ethernet in your dorm room that makes it so useful but hey..
The key to this issue is how will those out of the 119 who viewed positive acceptance letters (maybe 20?) contact each other to launch a class action suit in true HBS style to demand not only admission but also damages for Harvard's own unethical behavior in not only posting private information on public servers, but also then publicly punishing prospective applicants.
Finally let me say that I thank my stars that instead of going to Harvard for undergrad in 1985 I went to Cornell instead. I had a Nobel Prize Winner as my freshman chemistry teacher, unlike the grad students they foist on you at Harvard (or did then). The good things about HBS is they teach you how to eat lobster correctly (I don't know how), and they teach you how to go for the kill, and there is a lot of money connected to it. However Harvard has never even once struck me as a particularly ethical institution, and this (and the recent flap about female scientists from its president) just continues to add data points to the graph that says the world needs Harvard less than it needs the world. The days are past when people would freak out if you said you went there.
Having tried to use OOo for all my work for a while (and breathing a hurricane-size sigh of relief with 2.0bc!!) and submitting some UI bugs, I think reality is a good thing to have in OSS. Caveat I have pushed it a bit, doing a lot of Word and Powerpoint imports with mixed Japanese and English, and I run it on a way underpowered system (by OSS standards), a 450MHz Celeron (Dell Inspiron 7.5K) running RH9.
OOo 1.1 sucked pretty badly unless you were doing absolutely minimal stuff.
OOo 2.0bc is really nice and much faster and smoother. Still a few niggling UI bugs that I don't think it is ready to be called 2.0 yet but hey, it is light years ahead of just a few months ago.
Bloatware. I am in the position of recommending software for third world companies this week. But to be honest OOo is not really safe as far as I can see with only 128MB so I don't think I can recommend it for use on old computers. Still if it gets polished a bit more it should be very nice.
The niggling things are probably low memory artifacts, insufficient testing, and inadequate (not 100%) import/export compatibility with Office (with windows fonts installed). And a broken autocomplete system. I think also that OOo should add some simple, useful functions that Office does not have, so people can say "gee I wish Office had this!" and keep them from going back.
I think I'm going to recommend a new feature I had on my Apple II and have never seen since then though I have dreamed of it.
Spin the clock back to 1980. I am using Apple PIE, by David Gordon at Programma International. This was a programmer's editor with keystrokes that would make emac users' eyes gleam. It is relevant to the thread because this was probably the first consumer word processor (and written in 6502 Assembler! Hah hah!) and inspired Appleworks which was the forerunner of what OpenOffice.org and MS Office do.
The function I want in OOo is where you hit the 0 key on the numeric keypad and it jumps your cursor back to the last position you were at when you saved the cursor position. You could save at least a few positions and cycle through them with the 0 key. I'd like that (and also the white block cursor too!) with the ability to pick a different key combination, and maybe also save those positions for footnotes or something.
If anybody has PIE please let me know. Should run on Catakig the emulator I think. Or if you have a manual, even better!
Links: retro.html Apple II History (but I think mistakenly says Lissner made PIE), and google for ((( "Apple PIE" "word processor" "Apple II" ))).
Technically it may be moot since luckily a swap of the calibration files will make the data come up clean.
Public Relations-wise it may be dumb since it is a mission that has already been amazingly successful and beyond its lifetime.
But the reality is that this datapoint gives us a very good picture of the state of the art of engineering and the limits of humans' ability to
manage complex systems.
I noticed this recently as I had the opportunity to translate to English the investigations of nuclear reactor incidents in Japan.
They are really very subtle things, and if the person off the street read them they would sound a lot like this. But they include some things this does not: 1) a full report of who did what with results of interviews, 2) identification of financial motives entering the management process, and 3) identification of changes to make sure this will never happen again. Of course it is very scary for even a single "moot" incident to occur if the lives of local residents are on the line. With robotic roveres there is nobody to get killed.
If the public was educated from a young age to enjoy engineering challenges, then it would be safe to provide technical details of errors and it would be a positive thing. In the U.S. it is not clear whether it would be an argument for or against funding.
So it may be good to minimize this incident from a PR standpoint, and scientifically it is a "resolved issue", but management-wise you could say NASA and Squires (of whom I am immensely proud and that's my alma mater!) dodged a bullet, or "lucked out".
I too wondered "why didn't they stick a label on it?" but of course you can't stick a label on a file, and it costs money, and every physical characteristic of the label could affect something, etc. Some things may be "unlabelable" invisible differences.
The point is not that these guys are not like the cartoon characters some lame ass mentioned. They are among the finest scientists in their field on our planet. The problem with U.S. journalism is a cancer of the entire U.S. culture that is a dumbing down, "thuggification" and reign of stupidity that indicates something is terribly wrong.
No, the point here is that some engineering systems, like nuclear reactors and interplanetary probes, are so immensely complicated and difficult to manage, while being so expensive, in other words they push the envelope so much, that miniscule incidents creep in which can snowball to have terrible consequences.
I happen also to have translate a long lawsuit about a big airplane crash. Basically a massive failure in a well engineered and tested system usually seems to be due to a collection of things all going wrong (or being dangerously designed in a subtle way that blows up) at once.
We need more advanced automated management systems, or we need simpler systems, or we need to scale back our ambitions. I do not think the last is a valid choice. The first two indicate a need for more advanced technology.
It is also possible to try to improve the environment in which these efforts are made to reduce stress and potentially damaging factors such as
having a financial sword hanging over your head (Squires did say it was a very stressful time), scheduling more buffer time, and reducing public relations and other factors that could increase the emotional cost of failure.
If it doesn't exist already, it might also be useful to have professional psychologists on board as investigators who would provide input to a computer system to include the general health and mental status of all individuals involved and provide a running estimate of a human risk level, to suggest the instantaneous probability of human error.
Perhaps something like this does exist, for example such a staff psychologist did work in the short story by Robert Heinlein, "Blowups Happen" about the stress of nuclear engineers forced to run a power plant very close to the point of chain r
This sounds pretty cool. Recently I've been using wxperl and thinking that it would be quite cool to use the wxwidgets.org XRC (XML based cross-platform gui resources) with an engine that would allow you to specify their actual layout and operation with simple text-like commands. Maybe that is sort of what they have done. Could be amazing! So we need some perl bindings, asap..
At the risk of being called a troll, I'd like to say that trying to do all my work on a 128MB linux laptop really sucks. I love firefox, vim, xemacs, I program in perl too. Since I'm installing the latest openoffice too this might be useful but I would just like to say that unless you have one of the latest machines don't even think of linux and productivity in the same breath if you are talking about interoperability with your colleagues who are on windows. My machines crashes so many times it isn't funny, and this was trying to make Powerpoint slides, or export to Word doesn't work right, anyway these were using OpenOffice 1.6.92 which is now obsolete. Anyway 128MB is not enough to even run KDE without constantly waiting, so I use windowmaker now. I would love to get a new fast machine but I have to say that when I sat down yesterday in front of a Windows 98 machine with 128MB and Office on it I shuddered to realize that I was exhaling a breath of thanks. This from a Mac and Linux lover and hater of Microsoft! Office may suck but it works and is the only reason to use Windows. If this latest OpenOffice cuts it (and I can close the bug reports I've submitted) then I will be a much happier camper. But most new things for linux seem to imagine that you have a machine that a few years ago would have broken the bank.
It was probably an illusion or a bug. But the idea that the reply "random means random" was made and believed means the engineers don't know shit about randomness or think little about the manager asking the quesion; the manager in fact knows shit about randomness; and of course that with a closed source system like this nobody can prove it either way. (Unless you actually happened to make a list of what it picks and analyze that but nobody seems to have done that either).
However another poster mentioned the black box experiment that supposedly has discovered our entangled global consciousness. iPods would be great for that! They could be another proof for mind over matter, and if you wirelessly network iPods given to a bunch of people around the world, you might get more volunteers to help precog earthquakes, missile strikes, etc.
The only problem is that marketing and secrecy are still causing way too much noise for us to be able yet to hear our heartbeats so to say, and tune in to the global mind.
That Polydeuces must be covered with dust and crap that got stuck in the Trojan point no? I mean you've got a big mass *and* a gravitational well strolling through this area full of dust and ice particles, maybe it's like the way they thought our moon might be - covered with dust so thick you could sink right into it! Maybe the whole thing's electrically charged? You could fuel a whole lot of science fiction with this, but I'd like to find out more of the real side of the moon before the sf authors have time to dream anything up.
mplayer couldn't read it, and the url has an asterisk in it, anyway it wants realplayer.
Well I tried my old copy of Helix Player 0.4.0 and it gave an error (can't handle type x-pn-imagemap), so I updated the rpm to the latest 1.0.2 Gold. That didn't work, it said it was available only in RealPlayer not HelixPlayer. Okay, I buckle under and install the linux RealPlayer rpm 10.0.2 Gold. Same problem! I google and it seems that they have been waiting since October for Real to give them some information which is why they didn't get it into the code, and it has now been postponed?!?!
So nobody involved in the website or production uses linux, and no slashdot people have viewed it on linux? Or is there a secret I don't know about (hope so).
I would really like to view it as an open format file as I neither wish to use pay to use windows in a cafe, nor view it with what I perceive as a lossy protocol over an international connection. This is the broadband age, and bittorrent or a fiber (like I finally got) beats rtsp! Just give me the file! In the end we are done in by a clickable menu? Sheesh!
Can somebody record it to a file and post it?
Love Baxter, hated Coalescent
on
Exultant
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not sure if I should read the book or not, though undoubtedly I will end up doing so because there aren't that many talented sf writers broadly published, and because the review said it was in the Xeelee universe full of invention.
Coalescent was an extremely frustrating book to read for someone who loves hard sf, speculative and "Golden Years of SF" style philosophical versions like Heinlein, Van Vogt, etc.
After a long time of waiting for the other shoe to drop in Coalescent and the "real" sf story to start, I gave up being bored to tears and worked hard at getting into what was the only "historical" (well historical fantasy) novel I have read since maybe A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
I ended up liking the history part but found the ages long saga interminable and stifling . Sure the hive idea was cool but it could have made a series of short stories or a hard sf novel on its own, I thought. Hear's hoping that that is exactly what the new book is. Sounds a bit like Riddick though!
I was feeling that exhilirating whoosh of wind going through your stomach and out your back that you get when you are flying downwards in a roller coaster. Another poster said it, I miss being surprisable.
But on the other hand now it is easy to understand why people in other countries talk about a decaying American empire.
At first reading the thread I thought "Well, maybe if you are thieving the Bad Guys then you are a hero". Then I revised that, and imagined a post saying "The world will be saved by a keylogger built into tetris (or minesweeper, or solitaire) that you keep on the screen all the time".
But now I think it has come full circle and I think I "get it".
This is the government the American people asked for. The system is built so that the guy with the biggest moneybags wins the election, and when you go about as far as you can go up the slope with that metaphor, you get a demagogue like George Bush.
(I never met him, but I just don't trust his smile, even if he is sincere sometimes and playing a ruthless game like lots of politicians. Nothing against republicans or even rich guys, or Bush personally, he's very successful in terms of surviving and winning evolutionarily speaking, but it just seems like a bad example.)
You see, with Bush at the top and people he likes set up around him, with "team players" rewarded regardless of merit, this general nudge-nudge wink-wink cronyism idea must percolate down the ranks progressively. Their staff hires people according to the same concept. You can read more:
"This is Bush's America, the Peter Principle writ large: not so much an avoidance as a hatred of competence -- a culture and a national economy of meritopathy..." quoted from skimble in 2003. Search google for "Peter Principle" and "cronyism".
I think this is where the tire hits the road, so to speak, and anyone who cares about reality is roadkill. The reality seems to be that there is no defense against funded jihadists or bioweapons, and the purpose of gaining power is to make tons of money and dish out tasty PR. This is the government the American people wanted.
The voting majority currently is a bit more numerous than those who think like typical slashdot posters. Whether they have been fooled, fooled themselves, just love the best looking smile, or honestly think they need a guy who goes for the jugular regardless of what it may cost (I think this last one is a biggie in post-9/11), this is how the dice fell and the system has been well engineered to be frictionless for whomever is currently in power.
I'm not sure it will be easy to fix although conceivably this could be a cyclic thing, but it is just as likely that the buck will stop here, Asian economies will stop buying U.S. debt, China and India will get richer, and the general U.S. populace will wait like mute cows to be fed more pap whether it is by the corporate media machine directed by their own elected representatives or the one purchased by those to whom they sold out. I keep imagining good old American can-do will win out when nanotech really takes off but you know what? Other countries learn real fast and the only thing going for the U.S. is a relatively good-sized population.. more Nobel laureates and Olympic medals that way. But my stomach is telling me the roller coaster is still accelerating.
Actually I get notified about a dupe by others before wasting too much time on it, thanks to NOT paying for a subscription! Some subscribers might like to try that strategy out.
How about someone posting a list of good alternates to/. every time there is a dupe? We can all add to the continually growing alt list, the virtual scimitar hanging over/. editors' necks (if they have any, har-dee-har-har). Ever read any Edgar Allen Poe?
What I resent is not so much the dupe as the wasted cycles if there is in fact an interesting thread - since nobody will read it except whoever comes later by accident.
You can read my
post and
followup story suggestions if/. could hire a real journalist.
On another note, I believe the Japanese police did arrest or force out of business (same thing here really) someone who was selling a linux box for consumers that could be plugged in to a broadband line so that it would forward Japanese tv shows to you when you were travelling to another country. They also arrested the writer of a file sharing app who showed a user (cop) how to upload the hash of a movie to the net. There's a real chance that a real decision would help the Japanese government rewrite their rules on IP which would be really helpful for the broadband industry here.
This guy is scanning on his own maybe but who goes to the Gallica who are not already reading lots of things in France? Google already searches in French.
They should pay Google to scan French books for them and offer them to the world faster and more easily, and offer google books they scan in France themselves. Perhaps they could get Google to provide a link to their site so if you read a French book on Google you can jump to more information (bibliography, related topics, etc) hosted by the Gallica or whomever.
Also France could translate popular texts into French, or host sites with books in English as well as French, or do any number of other things on a global scale.
Hope this guy gets some ears in France, the more online texts the better. Though it might be easier to produce French translations of English texts already being scanned and provided for free on the net by Google and no doubt MIT will follow through on their open courseware project. I am thinking about French-speaking countries like some in Africa.
I am an American working with Europeans (French, Belgians and others) in Japan and am working to improve my French because I want to ensure better communication, friendship and business opportunities. But if France is serious about making French play a serious role on the Internet, it should work to increase the number of French speakers on the Net and make it easier for French speakers to access work in French.
They can't have it both ways. If the French want to promote French they have to promote multiculturalism. If they want to reduce the number of languages in use, then the winner seems for now to be English (though perhaps Chinese will be right up there, in its own world).
Anyway this is the old way of thinking. Europe now seems to be promoting a mixture of cultures that somehow stay separate (as opposed to the American "melting pot" we always used to be fond of saying, until people stopped wanting to melt together so much).
This is what is happening with agriculture, where the EU wants to maintain provenance of products while the U.S. wants to guarantee homogeneity regardless of origin.
To promote this on the Net, if they are serious the appropriate DG of the European Union should launch a massive program to digitize text (not just Voltaire but also dictionaries, encylopedias, trade journals, engineering texts, newspapers, television shows) into all of the languages of all the member countries. This would provide some useful content to solve the chicken and egg problem with broadband in the EU (that was solved by Korea apparently).
This is a very pretty demo and I am looking forward to digesting the linked papers. At first glance it seems not so interesting since the functionality provided by the demo would seem to be reproduceable with a simple sql engine.
What I still am not so sure about (and is why I want to read the articles and the code I downloaded - THANKS!) is the following perceptions I had (possibly erroneous) on first glance:
- It is not clear how an semantic web ontology is being used, presumably there is rdf with some rules about e.g. what period is baroque and then some other semantic rules are used as a guide on how to organize the interface (or I suppose you would say along which dimensions to slice the whole n-dimensional mishmash and in what order).
- Having been quite interested in faceted metadata search/navigation engines, I pounce upon seeming drawback of this presentation, in that it forces a hierarchy and browsing direction on a user, whereas it is difficult to discover information laterally starting from a leaf node (basically it feels like you are viewing yahoo a few levels in advance). And also that you don't know how many items are available in a set until you click, though I suppose the "mouse hover and wait" function is supposed to solve that, but it doesn't.
- wrecked keyboard-based advancement of slashdot thread using space bar after viewing in firefox, but could just be some memory flakiness on my machine I suppose.
- why not use perl and a js-based dhtml module instead of php? (since I like perl and also because it would be nice to have programmatic access to your semantically informed rdf browser, maybe)
- relationship of this philosophically and scientifically to faceted metadata browsers such as flamenco (to become OSS we are told) and the work of companies like Endeca, Siderean, etc.
- Why is the user not told about the semantic rules being used? Wouldn't that help inform exploration of a subject?
Otherwise it is an interesting project and I wish you luck.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct in that big images would slow down the page.. unless Google knows your bandwidth of course.
However AFP has nothing to lose. They do not make money on button clicks. They are already known as some of the highest quality / penetration provider in the world.
I think you are missing one point. A small image is not a "replica", which has no meaning digitally. It is a low-res copy. It think they should be allowed, and they are required for visual-type search engines. However the main argument against this by photo agencies (and believe me I spent years trying to convince a big one to go digital) is that even tiny sized images are sold. For example a travel magazine I know (ABRoad) usees 1cm sized images - but tons of them. It is the minimum useable size which is why google uses them. They are not "replicas" which are not useful.
As for blacklisting, that is exactly 1) what AFP wants, in terms of unpaid useage, and 2) probably illegal and not what AFP wants, in terms of no longer letting people find the AFP website. However given a choice they would prefer blacklisting.
Anyway, Google is not the hand that feeds AFP. It is most likely the hand that chokes AFP in the future.
caveat I'm develop search engines and also worked in a photo agency for some years like AFP.
Bottom line: AFP is right but Google's lack of ads or even full stories on the page should save them.
I just looked at Google News and noticed there is a photo that goes to a story, but there is no photo on the page it links to. The photo must have come from some other news source and the caption "Boston Globe" got pasted below it as a link.
This is maybe good for layout but is contrary to what a photographer would be used to seeing. It probably got them pissed off.
I doubt Google is knowingly copying from AFP. I think they grab any photos they can find. But they will probably find a lot of quality AFP photos. The problem is you don't know who they got it from. And the lack of attribution. That is how AFP makes their money: Copyright control. And guess what? Google uses the work of AFP photographers to make a more visually interesting page for a service that is both free and worth enough money to make an IPO.
Well, this was bound to happen. AFP can probably prove it was an AFP photo, but cannot prove Google copied it from them (and Google likely didn't). It would be useful to include metadata in the photos as to proper credit, url, and policy.
Probably AFP contacted Google, got rebuffed, and then AFP realized that if they don't fight it they will lose control over their online future. Which is true.
But this is really a search engine - you can't actually read the articles there but need to surf elsewhere - and there are no ads, so it can be said that this is a free service.
Anyway it walks a fine line between a search engine and a publication, and the best thing would be if Google could actually sign a contract with Reuters and AFP say, and show large, high quality photos on their site. They could also pay photographers and writers directly which is of course the next step, when Google really goes for the throat. For now it is just a search engine, and Google should be free to make a dynamic layout any way they want, except that it should show accreditation (if in the photo file itself) at least as a mouseover popup label.
I'm not going to guess the outcome, but hope AFP loses badly, otherwise it will be chilling. They ought to be able to demand that Google not index a photo that has an AFP byline embedded in it, but that too is an interpretation we'll have to wait and see about.
I first thought "No" but how about this idea.
A lifetime liscense to a virtual DVD, backed by the right to make personal copies and make unlimited downloads with copyright fees waived.
You can have your DVD and buy it in a brick and mortar store if you want to drive there and pay for their overhead. You can get a physical DVD like now but you are also paying for pressing, color printing, distribution and inventory costs.
You can download to your hard disk but don't have to worry about burning it at home, though you would be able to do so for all content with open source tools, nor do you have to worry about renting a data center or keeping a RAID jukebox in the basement.
Your purchase would give you a transferable, resaleable, unlimited right to the product, for all resolutions/file sizes up to that of the purchased product, though you might have to pay a one-time encoding fee if the format you desire is not on the publisher's server.
You could likewise easily order rights to various printed materials, audio interviews, bromides, "making of shows", television versions, etc. linked to it, whether by the same publisher/distributor or not (thanks to automated searching over google, blog listings, or other mechanisms). Some people may opt to only purchase time-limited liscenses but smart people will go for a "lifetime" or better yet perpetual liscense, and no company except maybe the biggest mega studio will begrudge it, considering that if they have higher quality masters they can remaster for even better than DVD quality.
To me this is far superior to what is currently available. The current problem is you do not know when the DVD you buy will deteriorate, and publishers similarly have ticking time bombs. I don't happen to use DVDs but I do buy the same books over again.. just like I rent the same VHS tapes many times, and know I can do so again for a few bucks even if my player eats one (happened before), I have bought the same (scifi) books many times over the years as I move around and am unable to carry them all with me. So I would definitely pay for a lifetime right to a work, plus the guarantee of durability.
Such a system would also allow us to show dvds to friends or trade with them at no charge. In fact I believe it would be cheaper to have no copy protection at all, and simply guarantee that a given customer id would always be able to get a fresh copy of a work, even if issued by someone else. We would all win.
I envision studios making a deal with insurance companies to put digital masters in escrow, and one day these will all end up in one place and accessible freely to the public (when copyright expires) minus perhaps distribution fees (if indeed the fee is not negligible by then). When you consider that even TV is going or has gone digital, but there is just too much of it to archive or it has been too hard to do so, you can easily envision the same system being applied to TV and other media. Also considering the costs that broadcasters will have to pay to go digital, this is a good way to finance it (better than the hostile takeover being financed by U.S. a securities company that is being played out in Japan this past week).
I have been waiting an awfully long time to be able to access past years of TV shows and if I can easily "bookmark" a scene I am watching on live TV instead of rushing to hit the record button and missing bits of it, that would be worthwhile. Then a whole genre of websites would spring up to index the shows and scenes that could be accessed, and we would be bathed in a real digital ocean of our shared cultural history, which would be as broad as the entire world and as deep as the earliest decades for which the media have survived.
In this vision, broadband access to the Internet could indeed be said to have beaten the dvd, itself an evanescent instantiation of a physical specification, since broadband will ensure that the physical item you purchase and treasure will remain with you for the years to come.
Changelog: using GTK not wxwindows (wxwidgets).
Well you can use wxwidgets and build with gtk but I guess they are just going straight to gtk. Is that for speed or memory savings? I'd like to know why.
Also the FAQ still says they use wx.
P.S. Azureus is cool but a memory hog whereas screen ctorrent is mighty nice.
The journals are well known to run a needed service but also a racket. Certainly they do have to hire people to do the editing and verification necessary to protect their names.
Ironically I am aware of a situation in which people (researchers, companies and governments) are currently having trouble figuring out how to safely publish openly and online - nanotechnology and genomics. PLoS is cited in some papers and talks so that looks promising but the question many have is how to share intellectual property - that is, scientific research that is also important to a nation strategically - while ensuring it isn't "stolen", in other words reciprocally fair sharing.
Not to sound unfair, but the cowboy attitudes in China and possibly some bigotry lend Japanese to worry about genomic research being "stolen" by China (in quotes because they would be giving it away). They don't seem to get it, they aren't worried about publication costs at all the question is what if it all goes only one way? Money is definitely not a problem at this level.
There is a push to translate and put online many Japanese research papers so that more people around the world can find them and initiate collaborations. Also money is not the problem at least in the initial stage. I have no idea if they have a system in course to maintain quality which is what the peer journals say they are selling.
So here is how I see it. Certainly if all grants contained publication fees that would be a nice gravy train for the journals, though slanted against developing countries and students perhaps. However at a certain level, not only does everyone gain by open publication, also the country that publishes more wins more. The IEEE provides global level services that are strategically valuable to countries and they should pay.
Another alternative is to ask Japan to pay. Money isn't a problem. Just sign an agreement that limits publication in English to starting one month after a Japanese translation is published, and allow the Japanese version to be limited to certain organizations if Japan so wishes. It would work. Of course Korea might go for that too.. Well this is only partly tongue in cheek, it would work, though there would be an outcry I expect.
Anyway, it is eminently feasible to publish like arxiv the problem is how to pay for quality controls and reviews. Of course nobody would accept a one-sided transaction. I am thinking this might be an interesting issue to raise at the next STS Forum which I was involved in last year. Small companies like mine can't afford to pay for all kinds of journals, but want to see information. If small venture entrepreneurs are going to be important drivers of the future (as Japan and probably some other companies believe) they should be supported too. This means that however money works out, the end user fee should be far lower or best of course, free, and that reproduction rights should similarly be free as in freedom. I think it is time for the journals to cut their fat (and paper publications) and focus on their core service (arbiter of quality), improve that and get paid in perpetuity by governments.
Readership, publication volume, and reviews by leading universities in respective fields can suffice to grade the journals and see which should be paid most. This will open the way for a new market to be created that rewards quality, efficiency and freedom.
Considering that the information being seen would become their property once the physical document arrived, and since they probably would have to wait another month before responding to another school or business opportunity, and that a large amount of debt or income might be swung by that timely knowledge, it can be argued that the acts were not only ethical, they also were reasonable and in the spirit of whatever Harvard is supposed to be teaching them. Of course they were alerting Harvard to their access apparently by id hash so they weren't all that smart, but the temptation to get news that is personally relevant only to your own future is so great that it is difficult to imagine people staying away from it.
Note that Harvard Business School uses a neat web-based intranet through which you get all the important information. Which I played with once as a family member went there. Maybe they have similar vulnerabilities in that system too? Also note that unless you win the lottery it is quite possible apparently that you will not get the ethernet in your dorm room that makes it so useful but hey..
The key to this issue is how will those out of the 119 who viewed positive acceptance letters (maybe 20?) contact each other to launch a class action suit in true HBS style to demand not only admission but also damages for Harvard's own unethical behavior in not only posting private information on public servers, but also then publicly punishing prospective applicants.
Finally let me say that I thank my stars that instead of going to Harvard for undergrad in 1985 I went to Cornell instead. I had a Nobel Prize Winner as my freshman chemistry teacher, unlike the grad students they foist on you at Harvard (or did then). The good things about HBS is they teach you how to eat lobster correctly (I don't know how), and they teach you how to go for the kill, and there is a lot of money connected to it. However Harvard has never even once struck me as a particularly ethical institution, and this (and the recent flap about female scientists from its president) just continues to add data points to the graph that says the world needs Harvard less than it needs the world. The days are past when people would freak out if you said you went there.
"You are 0wnX0red!!"
Photo caption: "Four people who are perfectly happy with 64 KB of memory, a 1 MHz processor, and 16-color graphics"
Says it all right there! Now how do I run catakig on my i686?
Having tried to use OOo for all my work for a while (and breathing a hurricane-size sigh of relief with 2.0bc!!) and submitting some UI bugs, I think reality is a good thing to have in OSS. Caveat I have pushed it a bit, doing a lot of Word and Powerpoint imports with mixed Japanese and English, and I run it on a way underpowered system (by OSS standards), a 450MHz Celeron (Dell Inspiron 7.5K) running RH9.
OOo 1.1 sucked pretty badly unless you were doing absolutely minimal stuff.
OOo 2.0bc is really nice and much faster and smoother. Still a few niggling UI bugs that I don't think it is ready to be called 2.0 yet but hey, it is light years ahead of just a few months ago.
Bloatware. I am in the position of recommending software for third world companies this week. But to be honest OOo is not really safe as far as I can see with only 128MB so I don't think I can recommend it for use on old computers. Still if it gets polished a bit more it should be very nice.
The niggling things are probably low memory artifacts, insufficient testing, and inadequate (not 100%) import/export compatibility with Office (with windows fonts installed). And a broken autocomplete system. I think also that OOo should add some simple, useful functions that Office does not have, so people can say "gee I wish Office had this!" and keep them from going back.
I think I'm going to recommend a new feature I had on my Apple II and have never seen since then though I have dreamed of it.
Spin the clock back to 1980. I am using Apple PIE, by David Gordon at Programma International. This was a programmer's editor with keystrokes that would make emac users' eyes gleam. It is relevant to the thread because this was probably the first consumer word processor (and written in 6502 Assembler! Hah hah!) and inspired Appleworks which was the forerunner of what OpenOffice.org and MS Office do.
The function I want in OOo is where you hit the 0 key on the numeric keypad and it jumps your cursor back to the last position you were at when you saved the cursor position. You could save at least a few positions and cycle through them with the 0 key. I'd like that (and also the white block cursor too!) with the ability to pick a different key combination, and maybe also save those positions for footnotes or something.
If anybody has PIE please let me know. Should run on Catakig the emulator I think. Or if you have a manual, even better!
Links: retro.html
Apple II History (but I think mistakenly says Lissner made PIE), and google for ((( "Apple PIE" "word processor" "Apple II" ))).
Technically it may be moot since luckily a swap of the calibration files will make the data come up clean.
Public Relations-wise it may be dumb since it is a mission that has already been amazingly successful and beyond its lifetime.
But the reality is that this datapoint gives us a very good picture of the state of the art of engineering and the limits of humans' ability to
manage complex systems.
I noticed this recently as I had the opportunity to translate to English the investigations of nuclear reactor incidents in Japan.
They are really very subtle things, and if the person off the street read them they would sound a lot like this. But they include some things
this does not: 1) a full report of who did what with results of interviews, 2) identification of financial motives entering the management process, and 3) identification of changes to make sure this will never happen again.
Of course it is very scary for even a single "moot" incident to occur if the lives of local residents are on the line. With robotic roveres there is nobody to get killed.
If the public was educated from a young age to enjoy engineering challenges, then it would be safe to provide technical details of errors and it would be a positive thing. In the U.S. it is not clear whether it would be an argument for or against funding.
So it may be good to minimize this incident from a PR standpoint, and scientifically it is a "resolved issue", but management-wise you could say NASA and Squires (of whom I am immensely proud and that's my alma mater!) dodged a bullet, or "lucked out".
I too wondered "why didn't they stick a label on it?" but of course you can't stick a label on a file, and it costs money, and every physical characteristic of the label could affect something, etc. Some things may be "unlabelable" invisible differences.
The point is not that these guys are not like the cartoon characters some lame ass mentioned. They are among the finest scientists in their field on our planet. The problem with U.S. journalism is a cancer of the entire U.S. culture that is a dumbing down, "thuggification" and reign
of stupidity that indicates something is terribly wrong.
No, the point here is that some engineering systems, like nuclear reactors and interplanetary probes, are so immensely complicated and difficult to manage, while being so expensive, in other words they push the envelope so much, that miniscule incidents creep in which can snowball to have terrible consequences.
I happen also to have translate a long lawsuit about a big airplane crash. Basically a massive failure in a well engineered and tested system
usually seems to be due to a collection of things all going wrong (or being dangerously designed in a subtle way that blows up) at once.
We need more advanced automated management systems, or we need simpler systems, or we need to scale back our ambitions. I do not think the last is a valid choice. The first two indicate a need for more advanced technology.
It is also possible to try to improve the environment in which these efforts are made to reduce stress and potentially damaging factors such as
having a financial sword hanging over your head (Squires did say it was a very stressful time), scheduling more buffer time, and reducing public relations and other factors that could increase the emotional cost of failure.
If it doesn't exist already, it might also be useful to have professional psychologists on board as investigators who would provide input to a
computer system to include the general health and mental status of all individuals involved and provide a running estimate of a human risk level, to suggest the instantaneous probability of human error.
Perhaps something like this does exist, for example such a staff psychologist did work in the short story by Robert Heinlein, "Blowups Happen"
about the stress of nuclear engineers forced to run a power plant very close to the point of chain r
This sounds pretty cool. Recently I've been using wxperl and thinking that it would be quite cool to use the wxwidgets.org XRC (XML based cross-platform gui resources) with an engine that would allow you to specify their actual layout and operation with simple text-like commands. Maybe that is sort of what they have done. Could be amazing! So we need some perl bindings, asap..
At the risk of being called a troll, I'd like to say that trying to do all my work on a 128MB linux laptop really sucks. I love firefox, vim, xemacs, I program in perl too. Since I'm installing the latest openoffice too this might be useful but I would just like to say that unless you have one of the latest machines don't even think of linux and productivity in the same breath if you are talking about interoperability with your colleagues who are on windows. My machines crashes so many times it isn't funny, and this was trying to make Powerpoint slides, or export to Word doesn't work right, anyway these were using OpenOffice 1.6.92 which is now obsolete. Anyway 128MB is not enough to even run KDE without constantly waiting, so I use windowmaker now. I would love to get a new fast machine but I have to say that when I sat down yesterday in front of a Windows 98 machine with 128MB and Office on it I shuddered to realize that I was exhaling a breath of thanks. This from a Mac and Linux lover and hater of Microsoft! Office may suck but it works and is the only reason to use Windows. If this latest OpenOffice cuts it (and I can close the bug reports I've submitted) then I will be a much happier camper. But most new things for linux seem to imagine that you have a machine that a few years ago would have broken the bank.
Thank you! You are very cool.
Regards from Japan!
Matt
It was probably an illusion or a bug. But the idea that the reply "random means random" was made and believed means the engineers don't know shit about randomness or think little about the manager asking the quesion; the manager in fact knows shit about randomness; and of course that with a closed source system like this nobody can prove it either way. (Unless you actually happened to make a list of what it picks and analyze that but nobody seems to have done that either).
However another poster mentioned the black box experiment that supposedly has discovered our entangled global consciousness. iPods would be great for that! They could be another proof for mind over matter, and if you wirelessly network iPods given to a bunch of people around the world, you might get more volunteers to help precog earthquakes, missile strikes, etc.
The only problem is that marketing and secrecy are still causing way too much noise for us to be able yet to hear our heartbeats so to say, and tune in to the global mind.
That Polydeuces must be covered with dust and crap that got stuck in the Trojan point no? I mean you've got a big mass *and* a gravitational well strolling through this area full of dust and ice particles, maybe it's like the way they thought our moon might be - covered with dust so thick you could sink right into it! Maybe the whole thing's electrically charged? You could fuel a whole lot of science fiction with this, but I'd like to find out more of the real side of the moon before the sf authors have time to dream anything up.
mplayer couldn't read it, and the url has an asterisk in it, anyway it wants realplayer.
Well I tried my old copy of Helix Player 0.4.0 and it gave an error (can't handle type x-pn-imagemap), so I updated the rpm to the latest 1.0.2 Gold. That didn't work, it said it was available only in RealPlayer not HelixPlayer. Okay, I buckle under and install the linux RealPlayer rpm 10.0.2 Gold. Same problem! I google and it seems that they have been waiting since October for Real to give them some information which is why they didn't get it into the code, and it has now been postponed?!?!
So nobody involved in the website or production uses linux, and no slashdot people have viewed it on linux? Or is there a secret I don't know about (hope so).
I would really like to view it as an open format file as I neither wish to use pay to use windows in a cafe, nor view it with what I perceive as a lossy protocol over an international connection. This is the broadband age, and bittorrent or a fiber (like I finally got) beats rtsp! Just give me the file! In the end we are done in by a clickable menu? Sheesh!
Can somebody record it to a file and post it?
Not sure if I should read the book or not, though undoubtedly I will end up doing so because there aren't that many talented sf writers broadly published, and because the review said it was in the Xeelee universe full of invention.
Coalescent was an extremely frustrating book to read for someone who loves hard sf, speculative and "Golden Years of SF" style philosophical versions like Heinlein, Van Vogt, etc.
After a long time of waiting for the other shoe to drop in Coalescent and the "real" sf story to start, I gave up being bored to tears and worked hard at getting into what was the only "historical" (well historical fantasy) novel I have read since maybe A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
I ended up liking the history part but found the ages long saga interminable and stifling . Sure the hive idea was cool but it could have made a series of short stories or a hard sf novel on its own, I thought. Hear's hoping that that is exactly what the new book is. Sounds a bit like Riddick though!
Matt R.
I was feeling that exhilirating whoosh of wind going through your stomach and out your back that you get when you are flying downwards in a roller coaster. Another poster said it, I miss being surprisable.
But on the other hand now it is easy to understand why people in other countries talk about a decaying American empire.
At first reading the thread I thought "Well, maybe if you are thieving the Bad Guys then you are a hero". Then I revised that, and imagined a post saying "The world will be saved by a keylogger built into tetris (or minesweeper, or solitaire) that you keep on the screen all the time".
But now I think it has come full circle and I think I "get it".
This is the government the American people asked for. The system is built so that the guy with the biggest moneybags wins the election, and when you go about as far as you can go up the slope with that metaphor, you get a demagogue like George Bush.
(I never met him, but I just don't trust his smile, even if he is sincere sometimes and playing a ruthless game like lots of politicians. Nothing against republicans or even rich guys, or Bush personally, he's very successful in terms of surviving and winning evolutionarily speaking, but it just seems like a bad example.)
Flash back to 2003, when the "Signs of the Times" were clear.
You see, with Bush at the top and people he likes set up around him, with "team players" rewarded regardless of merit, this general nudge-nudge wink-wink cronyism idea must percolate down the ranks progressively. Their staff hires people according to the same concept. You can read more:
"This is Bush's America, the Peter Principle writ large: not so much an avoidance as a hatred of competence -- a culture and a national economy of meritopathy..." quoted from skimble in 2003. Search google for "Peter Principle" and "cronyism".
I think this is where the tire hits the road, so to speak, and anyone who cares about reality is roadkill. The reality seems to be that there is no defense against funded jihadists or bioweapons, and the purpose of gaining power is to make tons of money and dish out tasty PR. This is the government the American people wanted.
The voting majority currently is a bit more numerous than those who think like typical slashdot posters. Whether they have been fooled, fooled themselves, just love the best looking smile, or honestly think they need a guy who goes for the jugular regardless of what it may cost (I think this last one is a biggie in post-9/11), this is how the dice fell and the system has been well engineered to be frictionless for whomever is currently in power.
I'm not sure it will be easy to fix although conceivably this could be a cyclic thing, but it is just as likely that the buck will stop here, Asian economies will stop buying U.S. debt, China and India will get richer, and the general U.S. populace will wait like mute cows to be fed more pap whether it is by the corporate media machine directed by their own elected representatives or the one purchased by those to whom they sold out. I keep imagining good old American can-do will win out when nanotech really takes off but you know what? Other countries learn real fast and the only thing going for the U.S. is a relatively good-sized population.. more Nobel laureates and Olympic medals that way. But my stomach is telling me the roller coaster is still accelerating.
How about someone posting a list of good alternates to /. every time there is a dupe? We can all add to the continually growing alt list, the virtual scimitar hanging over /. editors' necks (if they have any, har-dee-har-har). Ever read any Edgar Allen Poe?
What I resent is not so much the dupe as the wasted cycles if there is in fact an interesting thread - since nobody will read it except whoever comes later by accident.
You can read my post and followup story suggestions if /. could hire a real journalist.
On another note, I believe the Japanese police did arrest or force out of business (same thing here really) someone who was selling a linux box for consumers that could be plugged in to a broadband line so that it would forward Japanese tv shows to you when you were travelling to another country. They also arrested the writer of a file sharing app who showed a user (cop) how to upload the hash of a movie to the net. There's a real chance that a real decision would help the Japanese government rewrite their rules on IP which would be really helpful for the broadband industry here.
This guy is scanning on his own maybe but who goes to the Gallica who are not already reading lots of things in France? Google already searches in French.
They should pay Google to scan French books for them and offer them to the world faster and more easily, and offer google books they scan in France themselves. Perhaps they could get Google to provide a link to their site so if you read a French book on Google you can jump to more information (bibliography, related topics, etc) hosted by the Gallica or whomever.
Also France could translate popular texts into French, or host sites with books in English as well as French, or do any number of other things on a global scale.
Hope this guy gets some ears in France, the more online texts the better. Though it might be easier to produce French translations of English texts already being scanned and provided for free on the net by Google and no doubt MIT will follow through on their open courseware project. I am thinking about French-speaking countries like some in Africa.
I am an American working with Europeans (French, Belgians and others) in Japan and am working to improve my French because I want to ensure better communication, friendship and business opportunities. But if France is serious about making French play a serious role on the Internet, it should work to increase the number of French speakers on the Net and make it easier for French speakers to access work in French.
They can't have it both ways. If the French want to promote French they have to promote multiculturalism. If they want to reduce the number of languages in use, then the winner seems for now to be English (though perhaps Chinese will be right up there, in its own world).
Anyway this is the old way of thinking. Europe now seems to be promoting a mixture of cultures that somehow stay separate (as opposed to the American "melting pot" we always used to be fond of saying, until people stopped wanting to melt together so much).
This is what is happening with agriculture, where the EU wants to maintain provenance of products while the U.S. wants to guarantee homogeneity regardless of origin.
To promote this on the Net, if they are serious the appropriate DG of the European Union should launch a massive program to digitize text (not just Voltaire but also dictionaries, encylopedias, trade journals, engineering texts, newspapers, television shows) into all of the languages of all the member countries. This would provide some useful content to solve the chicken and egg problem with broadband in the EU (that was solved by Korea apparently).
Error, not for top page but for the user's own page 3:06 am at GMT+9 (Japan)
Sounds like Korean teachers make more than U.S. teachers. Which is why it is cheaper in Korea..
I found some here and here
Get a faster line and go into the nospam mail service provider business.
You can make it a profit center!
This is a very pretty demo and I am looking forward to digesting the linked papers. At first glance it seems not so interesting since the functionality provided by the demo would seem to be reproduceable with a simple sql engine.
What I still am not so sure about (and is why I want to read the articles and the code I downloaded - THANKS!) is the following perceptions I had (possibly erroneous) on first glance:
- It is not clear how an semantic web ontology is being used, presumably there is rdf with some rules about e.g. what period is baroque and then some other semantic rules are used as a guide on how to organize the interface (or I suppose you would say along which dimensions to slice the whole n-dimensional mishmash and in what order).
- Having been quite interested in faceted metadata search/navigation engines, I pounce upon seeming drawback of this presentation, in that it forces a hierarchy and browsing direction on a user, whereas it is difficult to discover information laterally starting from a leaf node (basically it feels like you are viewing yahoo a few levels in advance). And also that you don't know how many items are available in a set until you click, though I suppose the "mouse hover and wait" function is supposed to solve that, but it doesn't.
- wrecked keyboard-based advancement of slashdot thread using space bar after viewing in firefox, but could just be some memory flakiness on my machine I suppose.
- why not use perl and a js-based dhtml module instead of php? (since I like perl and also because it would be nice to have programmatic access to your semantically informed rdf browser, maybe)
- relationship of this philosophically and scientifically to faceted metadata browsers such as flamenco (to become OSS we are told) and the work of companies like Endeca, Siderean, etc.
- Why is the user not told about the semantic rules being used? Wouldn't that help inform exploration of a subject?
Otherwise it is an interesting project and I wish you luck.
Matt Rosin