"Main Entry: Pandora's box
Function: noun
Etymology: from the box, sent by the gods to Pandora, which she was forbidden to open and which loosed a swarm of evils upon mankind when she opened it out of curiosity
Date: 1579
: a prolific source of troubles"
And this is how their own "Director of worldwide marketing" describes it.
Jeez, that's like saying that a human can't keep track of 20,000 messages at a time so computers can't either.
However, Stallman refers to "check-in agents" in the plural. And a group of many people (e.g. the employees of the post office) are capable of keeping track of 20,000 messages, just likea computer.
The analogy is odd, of course, since both computer and human face recognition will require something to check against, and the hijackers were not known in advance.
Which is presumably the point, but I think Stallman would loose this argument ultimately (on the basis that if we did know who the criminals were, the coputers would have spotted them).
IIRC, Altavista once sold "personal AltaVista" and "workgroup Altavista" products, but I believe they were unsuccessful and are no longer available...
The personal version (MyAltaVista? I forget.) was briefly available for pay-no-money free. AltaVista cancelled it because it brought in no money and maintaining it was expensive - or so I was told for a friend who used to have a job maintaining it.
If you're going to use an existing standard (and really, you should) then Dublin Core is the standard to use. Despite what the previous poster said, it is not particularly confusing, and it has fields that are appropriate to software (e.g. Creator, Contributor, Version, Rights).
ibiblio is also working on something they call the Opensource Metadata Framework which seems to be based on or even a subset of Dublin Core. I don't know why they didn't just use Dublin Core. See http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/ldpcore/ldp_elements for the spec.
Frankly, you're getting into the area of librarianship, so you should ask a librarian. (IANAL.) You might do this at lisnews.com or at oss4lib.com; particulary the latter. By the way, it's my experience that programmers are bad librarians - even digital library programmers like myself - who think they are good librarians (we invented search engines, didn't we?) so take everything you read in this forum with a grain of salt.
Actually, I've written such a parser; it was a hack, and very limited (recorded AppleScript only) but it worked.
Having done this, I discovered people much smarter than me (Henry Lieberman at MIT, for one) had done it properly: they fed a grammer into one of those compiler-parser-write-program things and it worked.
There is a lot more stucture to AppleScript than might be immediately apparent. AppleScript is just one representation of the "Open Scripting Architecure", which lets you represent "AppleScript programs" in pretty much any language you care to define. See the C-like Frontier UserTalk for an example of somethig that looks a little easier to parse.
The Greenstone Digital Library software
distributed by the New Zealand Digital
Library project may suit your needs.
see http://www.nzdl.org
though it may be down - power cut.
In short, it works. You feed it input text and
a configuration file; it builds you collections
that you can serve on-line or on CDROM. If you
have specialised docment formats, you can write
plug-ins (in perl) to handle them. You get all
sortsof extra functionality for free.
Disclaimer: I work there.
Recommended book: StartUp by Jerry Kaplan
on
Saga Of TriStrata
·
· Score: 2
If you think this is funny (it is) then you should read Start Up, a book by Jerry Kaplan.
In short, Kaplan and the founder Lotus had a brilliant insight one day: that pen-based computing was the way of the future. Kaplan started GO corporation; attracted millions of dollars in venture capital; employed hundreds of people; produced a product; got crushed by Microsoft, IBM, and their own business partners; got taken over by AT and then the product got shelved and everyone got fired. The end.
It's not the best writing in the world, and I doubt the authenticity of the reconstructed conversations, but it's worth a hundred Microserfs. You should read it.
Hyperion is an excellent book, possibly my favourite SF novel (or second favourite, after Gene Wolfe's "Fifth head of Cerebus").
Its main drawback are the string of sequels. Fall of Hyperion is a good novel in its own right, but not nearly as good as Hyperion and taints the original by association.
The thrid and fourth books are just plain bad.
You might argue that Hyperion would be incomplete without the explanation in the sequels, but frankly, the mystery it engenders is what makes this novel so good. Sadly, everyone I loan Hyperion insists on making up their own mind about this, and reading the sequels.
We have made web-sites, and created CD-ROMs, for collections like the United Nations University documents and the Humanity Development Library (both available at the URL above), and some ongoing work for the FAO. They like our "Greenstone" software because it is GPLed (and excellant, fun-to-hack software, but that's another story).
The GPL means Greenstone is free in both senses: it is available at no cost and can be passed on to people who can't afford to license commercial solutions; and it is free-speech free, which is consistent with the aims of organisations like UNESCO.
Someone mentioned that it is pointless giving software to developing nations, because they have no computers. The real headache is that many people are slightly better off than this - they have computers, but they're lousy 286s running windows 3.0, and your software has to work with *every* version of windows from then on (we develop on Linux, and run on all-sorts). And it's network software - a lot of people lost a lot of sleep over that, let me tell you, before they finally rewrote the early Windows networking... but i digress.
Disclaimer: I work on the NZDL project, but have done little for this software.
There was a breif piece on the (New Zealand) news last night about the police force in Australia (I think) getting the same sort of technology.
As near as I could tell, all the gear, including a little camera, was built into the hat--it looked like a cross between a blueberry imac and an old-fashioned policeman's helmet.
> i think i'll start sewing them on the left > breast of all my shirts, just like laverne. > i'm gonna be *stylin*
Or better still, draw up your/. design in a Windows-friendly format, pop it on a floppy disk, and take it (and your most fashionable shirt) into a Bernina shop.
Ask the good folks there to open it, copy it into Bernina Artista, download it onto one of their high-end embroidery-capable machines, and then watch as it plays the seamstress.
It's almost as much fun as a plotter! And you can do ray-traced spheres too! (But don't expect millions of colours.)
I think there's the beginnings of a good idea in here, but not as you've described it. "Source futures" sound like an excellent way to renegotiate bounty-type contracts after they have been made.
I can imagine it working like this: sponsor X is willing to issue 1000 shares (I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not familiar with trading terminology) for the completion of project X, and promises to pay $10 per share when it is done. A group of programmers apply, and the company, after negotiation, agrees to give some of these programmers various amounts of shares. They may assign specific roles to each programmer. All programmers will be paid out on their shares when the project is complete.
As I understand it, this is not far from how sourceXchane and coSource and so on work now. It's not incompatbale with ideas of partial payment at milestones. The beauty of using a "share" or "futures" arrangement though is that the original programmers can use their shares to sub-contract other programmers to complete parts of the product.
For example: a programmer offering X shares to another to build a component; one person given all the shares and asked to manage the entire CVS tree at her discretion, and subcontract off parts of the program; a programmer offer a patch in exchange for X shares; a programmer might even advertise for sub-contractors though sourceXchange or coSource. Sponsors could encourage development by increasing the payout of the shares, offerig bonuses for early completion, or issueing more shares. New sponsors could offer to increase the price of the shares if the project appeared to be floundering. You could imagine paying someone a fee to get the shares and take over a partially completed project.
This is simple, in the sense that everyone is familiar with the share-market metaphor, and programmers are motivated to keep their source open and to encourage contributions. The most obvious problem is free-rider behaviour; there's nothing to stop a poor programmer obtaining shares and doing nothing, then being rewarded at the end. I guess reputation is the only solution to this problem.
There are two problems I think any system like coSource and sourcExchange will encounter: administration overhead, and resentment from programmers who did not get selected for a project or who have a solution for the project but do not want to release it because it will immediately financially benefit somebody else.
It will be interesting to see what happens to both sourcExchange and coSource. On a philosophical level, I don't know that I want them to succeed--open source is doing fine without many dollars changing hands, and the love of money is the root of all evil, as others before I have observed. On a practical level, I can imagine trying to make a living as an open source programmer myself one day.
I'd prefer that every post had a score based on merit, but that can't really happen with this comment format. (For example, late posts to a thread are less likely to have the score changed, or to be read.)
I tentatively suggest that the reason for having a "default" rating for a poster is so that each article enters the discussion with an approximation of the "appropriate" score. Wouldn't it be simpler to use a simpler algorithm for calculating it. For example, average the posters last 5 scores, or something like that.
While I'm here, I'd like to request a Slashbox with links to the last two or three days worth of "5" posts in it.
Slashdot Mirror
From Webster's dictionary (www.m-w.com):
"Main Entry: Pandora's box
Function: noun
Etymology: from the box, sent by the gods to Pandora, which she was forbidden to open and which loosed a swarm of evils upon mankind when she opened it out of curiosity
Date: 1579
: a prolific source of troubles"
And this is how their own "Director of worldwide marketing" describes it.
However, Stallman refers to "check-in agents" in the plural. And a group of many people (e.g. the employees of the post office) are capable of keeping track of 20,000 messages, just likea computer.
The analogy is odd, of course, since both computer and human face recognition will require something to check against, and the hijackers were not known in advance. Which is presumably the point, but I think Stallman would loose this argument ultimately (on the basis that if we did know who the criminals were, the coputers would have spotted them).
I imagine they use them to play softball (except in Irving Welsh novels).
IIRC, Altavista once sold "personal AltaVista" and "workgroup Altavista" products, but I believe they were unsuccessful and are no longer available ...
The personal version (MyAltaVista? I forget.) was briefly available for pay-no-money free. AltaVista cancelled it because it brought in no money and maintaining it was expensive - or so I was told for a friend who used to have a job maintaining it.
If you're going to use an existing standard (and really, you should) then Dublin Core is the standard to use. Despite what the previous poster said, it is not particularly confusing, and it has fields that are appropriate to software (e.g. Creator, Contributor, Version, Rights).
ibiblio is also working on something they call the Opensource Metadata Framework which seems to be based on or even a subset of Dublin Core. I don't know why they didn't just use Dublin Core. See http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/ldpcore/ldp_elements for the spec.
Frankly, you're getting into the area of librarianship, so you should ask a librarian. (IANAL.) You might do this at lisnews.com or at oss4lib.com; particulary the latter. By the way, it's my experience that programmers are bad librarians - even digital library programmers like myself - who think they are good librarians (we invented search engines, didn't we?) so take everything you read in this forum with a grain of salt.
Actually, I've written such a parser; it was a hack, and very limited (recorded AppleScript only) but it worked.
Having done this, I discovered people much smarter than me (Henry Lieberman at MIT, for one) had done it properly: they fed a grammer into one of those compiler-parser-write-program things and it worked.
There is a lot more stucture to AppleScript than might be immediately apparent. AppleScript is just one representation of the "Open Scripting Architecure", which lets you represent "AppleScript programs" in pretty much any language you care to define. See the C-like Frontier UserTalk for an example of somethig that looks a little easier to parse.
Does that make it a conspiracy theorem?
The Greenstone Digital Library software
distributed by the New Zealand Digital
Library project may suit your needs.
see http://www.nzdl.org
though it may be down - power cut.
In short, it works. You feed it input text and
a configuration file; it builds you collections
that you can serve on-line or on CDROM. If you
have specialised docment formats, you can write
plug-ins (in perl) to handle them. You get all
sortsof extra functionality for free.
Disclaimer: I work there.
If you think this is funny (it is) then you should read Start Up, a book by Jerry Kaplan.
In short, Kaplan and the founder Lotus had a brilliant insight one day: that pen-based computing was the way of the future. Kaplan started GO corporation; attracted millions of dollars in venture capital; employed hundreds of people; produced a product; got crushed by Microsoft, IBM, and their own business partners; got taken over by AT and then the product got shelved and everyone got fired. The end.
It's not the best writing in the world, and I doubt the authenticity of the reconstructed conversations, but it's worth a hundred Microserfs. You should read it.
This is true, assuming "everyone" is everyone who has a legitimate a binary, and "God" is Richard Stallman.
Hyperion is an excellent book, possibly my favourite SF novel (or second favourite, after Gene Wolfe's "Fifth head of Cerebus").
Its main drawback are the string of sequels. Fall of Hyperion is a good novel in its own right, but not nearly as good as Hyperion and taints the original by association.
The thrid and fourth books are just plain bad.
You might argue that Hyperion would be incomplete without the explanation in the sequels, but frankly, the mystery it engenders is what makes this novel so good. Sadly, everyone I loan Hyperion insists on making up their own mind about this, and reading the sequels.
YMMV, MHO, etc
The New Zealand Digital Library project has been involved in similar projects, for similar reasons.
We have made web-sites, and created CD-ROMs, for collections like the United Nations University documents and the Humanity Development Library (both available at the URL above), and some ongoing work for the FAO. They like our "Greenstone" software because it is GPLed (and excellant, fun-to-hack software, but that's another story).
The GPL means Greenstone is free in both senses: it is available at no cost and can be passed on to people who can't afford to license commercial solutions; and it is free-speech free, which is consistent with the aims of organisations like UNESCO.
Someone mentioned that it is pointless giving software to developing nations, because they have no computers. The real headache is that many people are slightly better off than this - they have computers, but they're lousy 286s running windows 3.0, and your software has to work with *every* version of windows from then on (we develop on Linux, and run on all-sorts). And it's network software - a lot of people lost a lot of sleep over that, let me tell you, before they finally rewrote the early Windows networking... but i digress.
Disclaimer: I work on the NZDL project, but have done little for this software.
There was a breif piece on the (New Zealand) news last night about the police force in Australia (I think) getting the same sort of technology.
As near as I could tell, all the gear, including a little camera, was built into the hat--it looked like a cross between a blueberry imac and an old-fashioned policeman's helmet.
> i think i'll start sewing them on the left
/. design in a
> breast of all my shirts, just like laverne.
> i'm gonna be *stylin*
Or better still, draw up your
Windows-friendly format, pop it on a floppy disk,
and take it (and your most fashionable shirt)
into a Bernina shop.
Ask the good folks there to open it, copy it
into Bernina Artista, download it onto one of
their high-end embroidery-capable machines,
and then watch as it plays the seamstress.
It's almost as much fun as a plotter!
And you can do ray-traced spheres too!
(But don't expect millions of colours.)
I think there's the beginnings of a good idea in here, but not as you've described it. "Source futures" sound like an excellent way to renegotiate bounty-type contracts after they have been made.
I can imagine it working like this: sponsor X is willing to issue 1000 shares (I hope you'll excuse me if I'm not familiar with trading terminology) for the completion of project X, and promises to pay $10 per share when it is done. A group of programmers apply, and the company, after negotiation, agrees to give some of these programmers various amounts of shares. They may assign specific roles to each programmer. All programmers will be paid out on their shares when the project is complete.
As I understand it, this is not far from how sourceXchane and coSource and so on work now. It's not incompatbale with ideas of partial payment at milestones. The beauty of using a "share" or "futures" arrangement though is that the original programmers can use their shares to sub-contract other programmers to complete parts of the product.
For example: a programmer offering X shares to another to build a component; one person given all the shares and asked to manage the entire CVS tree at her discretion, and subcontract off parts of the program; a programmer offer a patch in exchange for X shares; a programmer might even advertise for sub-contractors though sourceXchange or coSource. Sponsors could encourage development by increasing the payout of the shares, offerig bonuses for early completion, or issueing more shares. New sponsors could offer to increase the price of the shares if the project appeared to be floundering. You could imagine paying someone a fee to get the shares and take over a partially completed project.
This is simple, in the sense that everyone is familiar with the share-market metaphor, and programmers are motivated to keep their source open and to encourage contributions. The most obvious problem is free-rider behaviour; there's nothing to stop a poor programmer obtaining shares and doing nothing, then being rewarded at the end. I guess reputation is the only solution to this problem.
There are two problems I think any system like coSource and sourcExchange will encounter: administration overhead, and resentment from programmers who did not get selected for a project or who have a solution for the project but do not want to release it because it will immediately financially benefit somebody else.
It will be interesting to see what happens to both sourcExchange and coSource. On a philosophical level, I don't know that I want them to succeed--open source is doing fine without many dollars changing hands, and the love of money is the root of all evil, as others before I have observed. On a practical level, I can imagine trying to make a living as an open source programmer myself one day.
I agree. Lets not go too far.
I'd prefer that every post had a score based on merit, but that can't really happen with this comment format. (For example, late posts to a thread are less likely to have the score changed, or to be read.)
I tentatively suggest that the reason for having a "default" rating for a poster is so that each article enters the discussion with an approximation of the "appropriate" score. Wouldn't it be simpler to use a simpler algorithm for calculating it. For example, average the posters last 5 scores, or something like that.
While I'm here, I'd like to request a Slashbox with links to the last two or three days worth of "5" posts in it.