I came to the same conclusions when studying the possibility of "open sourcing" a data standard. Software + forking = good (or OK). Standards + forking = bad. Forking a standard, without careful control, inevitably kills it.
While I consider myself to be a pretty darned good technical writer, now that my eyesight is going, I find I enjoy at least some information in the form of video or audio. Now GOOD video or audio has been scripted, and is thus FAR more difficult to create than written text alone. And writing for audio or video is a different skill from writing for reading, so there is yet another factor of difficulty.
On the other hand, if someone just turns on the camera and starts babbling, as do many of the supposedly media-literate generation, then I won't watch it because it is a waste of my time.
We are just going back to the way things were before the industrial revolution drug everyone in from the country to work in factories.
My grandfather worked three jobs. His father worked at least six, and his father probably worked a million. We were all "freelancers" and "gig workers" in the past.
Just think of all this as a slow death of the oligarchy. You just need to stop letting intermediaries, like Uber, squeeze in as middlemen, taking a cut of YOUR money. The internet was supposed to bring The Great Disintermediation. This is Slashdot for Crissakes! Disintermediate already!
I have lived through several iterations of what was originally called "time sharing" and is now called "the cloud." my biggest complaint is that vendors want the primary location of all my data to be on their site. We only get to look at it, or maybe download an archive of it. I have always believed in the opposite model: My data exists and is used and manipulated on my local system. The cloud should only be there as a replication service to facilitate merging that data to my other devices (and only if I don't feel like actually connecting those devices directly). Kind of like a universal, automatic GIT for all file types.
So, if being even potentially, peripherally, responsible for the actions of terrorists is a hanging offense, then this guy should take a number and get in line at the gallows.
This just Apple trashing Windows 10 for having app-ish features. In two - three years Apple will do exactly what he is trashing now and pretend they invented the whole concept.
He's not making his argument BY calling names. He is making an argument, and THEN calling names.
There is a huge difference. The former is born out of ignorance. The latter is born out of the frustration from needing to make said argument yet again.
In my view, conflating the two is a sure sign of the former which will likely prompt others to more of the latter.
Java is perceived to be more vulnerable for the same reason it is more popular... More comes "in the box."
The Java language comes pre-packaged with a huge set of libraries. C and C++ are really nothing more than concepts. You install a compiler that implements the concept. So, if the compiler has a vulnerability or bug, people blame it on the compiler. Libraries, toolkits, and frameworks are available for C and C++. However, they too are perceived as separate from the languages. So, if said "accessories' have bugs, people blame it on the accessories rather than the language.
C and C++, by definition, cannot have bugs because the are merely concepts. "Java," by its definition as a concept as well as an entire ecosystem of actual code is bound to have infinitely more bugs than C or C++.
When people blame the Java concept and ecosystem as a whole for bugs that exist in one or two of said "accessories," it just shows me they haven't learned how to use that wet, squishy thing just below their hair-product display area.
I really like where this conversation is going lately. Coders are not engineers any more that carpenters are architects. There already exists a specific field called "Software Engineering." Not many universities offer it as a degree program. And there should be board accredited certification tests just as are required for all other professional careers. The fact that we do not have said certifications leads to this confusing grey area where some programmers get paid the big bucks because they really ARE performing the role of architect or engineer, and others think they should get the big bucks merely because they call themselves architects or engineers.
Most programmers/coders and other IT people need to face the fact that we are really just the welders, pipefitters, and crane operators of the computer world.
...the manufacturer of some worthless yet insanely expensive anti-drone system which is soon to be implemented in all prisons as mandated by a law sponsored by the senators for whatever state said manufacturer calls home.
I'm not saying this is the way to go for all needs. Personally, I hate to use web apps for everything. But, for complete security when crossing borders, your info should just stay home.
After sitting through a jury selection process, I have figured out that even this, supposedly fair process, is deeply broken in favor of the prosecution. If you are honest and don't agree with an overly harsh mandatory sentencing law, or don't trust cops implicitly, or are willing to accept that you may have one of many biases, which research shows we ALL have; then you will be disqualified.
Sitting there, observing the people who quickly figured out the exact right things to say to NOT be disqualified, especially after hearing how those same people talked while we were waiting outside of the courtroom, I can't help but believe those are the people who are eager to vote "guilty." I met several others who came to this same conclusion.
So, once a cop has decided to arrest you, large parts of the system seem to have been "gerrymandered" in a way to drastically increase the probability of conviction. I call it, "The law of secretly intended consequences."
I grew up making plastic models of all things Apollo. I would not have known "exactly" what it was. However, if there were lots of one-off, precision machined components, made out of unusual alloys, AND I lived near a NASA facility, then I would have at least had my suspicions and looked into it.
I'm about as liberal as they come. However, my rights do not end at the point where some idiot may misinterpret them and use them unwisely, or even unsafely. Classic example: We have the right to free speech. Some idiots thought that applied to shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater. The courts ruled against that. By your logic, the courts should have ruled that we no longer have free speech because some idiots could use it unwisely and someone could get hurt.
While I don't like a lot of the decisions made by courts, we still need them to make judgements based on more information than is found in a/. summary.
Knee-jerk rights-taking is a tool of the elite. Don't fall victim to that mentality.
We are ALL cows. The climate change deniers, stupidly repeating rhetoric and falacious logic. The ecologists, hoping beyond hope that regulations and social programs can save us. The technologists, egotistically believing their brainpower will find a fix powerful enough to overcome all the natural processes that are already in progress, and that fix will actually get implemented. The oligarchs, selfishly believing their manshions, safe rooms, private armies (which we euphemistically call police departments), and even their compounds in the southern hemisphere will protect them. ALL are cows, wandering blindly toward the slaughter. A slaughter of our own mutual creation.
Because we, as a species, did not have the wherewithal to collectively say, "Fuck That Shit!" when those with a little bit more power and bigger sticks told us to fight others to get more stuff for ourselves, unknowingly giving even more power to the top stick-haver... Because we let someone convince us that we even needed or wanted that stuff in the first place... we have facilitated the social and technological machinery that has inexorably brought us to where we are now: in a bizzarre, collective mix of all four stages of death at the same time.
But that death will come, regardless of what any of us want or believe or try. I hate to say it, but the only way out would be if 90% of the world population just died off. And we all know that isn't going to happen. So, the only thing left to do is to, as contentedly as we can muster, given the circumstances,...
The collective heads of the entire population of Topeka Kansas would simultaneously explode if a bunch of Google hipsters moved in. I know. I lived there. But at least that would rid us of the entire Westboro Baptist Church clan.
My problem is that I frikin' love MS OneNote on a convertible laptop/tablet with a real stylus. I've been hooked since about 2003. Nothing comparable is available with Linux.
OK, next question: Is it absolutely required that the data be embedded in, and tagged within, your documents which are stored in the wiki?
RDFa is RDF in attributes. It is a standard for embedding tags within html documents to indicate RDF triples. It is assumed that the snippet in the document is the subject. That is wrapped in an html tag. Then attributes in that html tag are used to indicate the predicate and object via IRIs. I actually worked with the REFa working group for a short while. My problem with RDFa, and RDF in general, is the dogged insistence that everything be stored only in triples. There is no way to add metadata ABOUT the triple. Who created it? When was it created? Etcetera.
In addition, all of the RDF triples have to be mined out of the html documents and stored in a database before they can be queried. ALL of the discussion within the working group assumed that the tags would remain relatively static and, once they had been mined out of documents all over the internet, then the real work would be in querying the database. But those of us in the real world know that is unrealistic. In your case, your system would have to grind through your entire document store every night, mining out a fresh RDF database for you to query the next day.
On top of all that: There really are no tools to make inserting those RDFa tags easy. I was brought into the working group as a technical writer, tasked with the chore of explaining RDFa to web content writers so they could understand it well enough to be able to insert the tags by hand. Except RDFa is insanely convoluted. It would be like writing an entire interactive web site without using a framework or any existing libraries. Just hand coding every function. NOT GONNA HAPPEN.
Earlier, you said you figured other people would have wanted to do this before. Of course they have. It's called "The Semantic Web," and Tim Berners-Law has been championing it for decades now. But it has never been widely accepted due to the dogged insistence that everything be done using the all-powerful, magic triple. You would not believe the insanely complex data structures necessary to build real, usable databases with only triples. It would be as if everything in the world were built with Lego because that was all engineers had learned to use.
So, I think you would be far better off with a separate database to contain your information. The records in that database could include citations pointing to your documents, in case someone wanted to drill down to the true source of the info.
Your information is structured but the structure varies enough that you might need to use quite a bit of creativity to use a standard relational database. But it should be possible. Or you could design an XML schema to define and "contain" the structure of your information. There are existing XML database engines and query languages. Either way, you are going to need to custom-build your solution.
The last option is to just shop for an existing software solution for tracking network data. Look for one that has a Notes field that allows hyperlinks. Then you can insert links to your documents. In the end, this may be the most realistic solution. Network tracking and documentation software is a very mature field. There will be lots of features available that you would have be able to build on your own. You can still incorporate your documentation library, but from the other way around. Instead of storing your information IN your documents and mining it out, you store your information in a purpose-built SYSTEM and then refer to your documents as supporting evidence.
Well, I gotta eat breakfast and go to jury duty. Let me know what you think.
But what kind of "projects" do YOU work on? Is it just code (or code-ish things like XML), or do you mean documentation, or databases, or graphics files? Each different thing works best with a different form of "version control."
I once tried to hack together a way to use Git to track updates to my FrameMaker files. It "worked" but was a nightmare to use and took up just as much disk space as simply keeping every version of the file and assigning different filenames.
First we need to take a step back and figure out what you are actually doing. You have pulled up with a "software version control" bandwagon and everyone just jumped on without looking to see if it would take you where you wanted to go.
Are you wanting to keep track of the versions of your code or the reports generated by that code or the data that the code used to generate the reports? Each type of information is best suited for a different kind of versioning system. Are the reports generated only by the code or are they written by humans? Trying to use a code versioning system to keep track of modifications to reports or data is a loosing game. Don't make the mistake of thinking every problem is a nail just because you have a hammer.
Slashdot Mirror
I came to the same conclusions when studying the possibility of "open sourcing" a data standard. Software + forking = good (or OK). Standards + forking = bad. Forking a standard, without careful control, inevitably kills it.
While I consider myself to be a pretty darned good technical writer, now that my eyesight is going, I find I enjoy at least some information in the form of video or audio. Now GOOD video or audio has been scripted, and is thus FAR more difficult to create than written text alone. And writing for audio or video is a different skill from writing for reading, so there is yet another factor of difficulty.
On the other hand, if someone just turns on the camera and starts babbling, as do many of the supposedly media-literate generation, then I won't watch it because it is a waste of my time.
We are just going back to the way things were before the industrial revolution drug everyone in from the country to work in factories.
My grandfather worked three jobs. His father worked at least six, and his father probably worked a million. We were all "freelancers" and "gig workers" in the past.
Just think of all this as a slow death of the oligarchy. You just need to stop letting intermediaries, like Uber, squeeze in as middlemen, taking a cut of YOUR money. The internet was supposed to bring The Great Disintermediation. This is Slashdot for Crissakes! Disintermediate already!
I have lived through several iterations of what was originally called "time sharing" and is now called "the cloud." my biggest complaint is that vendors want the primary location of all my data to be on their site. We only get to look at it, or maybe download an archive of it. I have always believed in the opposite model: My data exists and is used and manipulated on my local system. The cloud should only be there as a replication service to facilitate merging that data to my other devices (and only if I don't feel like actually connecting those devices directly). Kind of like a universal, automatic GIT for all file types.
So, if being even potentially, peripherally, responsible for the actions of terrorists is a hanging offense, then this guy should take a number and get in line at the gallows.
This just Apple trashing Windows 10 for having app-ish features. In two - three years Apple will do exactly what he is trashing now and pretend they invented the whole concept.
This is not news.
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky.
(Yes, it's actually relevant. Google it.)
He's not making his argument BY calling names. He is making an argument, and THEN calling names.
There is a huge difference. The former is born out of ignorance. The latter is born out of the frustration from needing to make said argument yet again.
In my view, conflating the two is a sure sign of the former which will likely prompt others to more of the latter.
... only if said eradication involves governments committing to buying huge quantities of drugs from companies owned by said billionaire.
This! Plus:
Java is perceived to be more vulnerable for the same reason it is more popular ... More comes "in the box."
The Java language comes pre-packaged with a huge set of libraries. C and C++ are really nothing more than concepts. You install a compiler that implements the concept. So, if the compiler has a vulnerability or bug, people blame it on the compiler. Libraries, toolkits, and frameworks are available for C and C++. However, they too are perceived as separate from the languages. So, if said "accessories' have bugs, people blame it on the accessories rather than the language.
C and C++, by definition, cannot have bugs because the are merely concepts. "Java," by its definition as a concept as well as an entire ecosystem of actual code is bound to have infinitely more bugs than C or C++.
When people blame the Java concept and ecosystem as a whole for bugs that exist in one or two of said "accessories," it just shows me they haven't learned how to use that wet, squishy thing just below their hair-product display area.
I really like where this conversation is going lately. Coders are not engineers any more that carpenters are architects. There already exists a specific field called "Software Engineering." Not many universities offer it as a degree program. And there should be board accredited certification tests just as are required for all other professional careers. The fact that we do not have said certifications leads to this confusing grey area where some programmers get paid the big bucks because they really ARE performing the role of architect or engineer, and others think they should get the big bucks merely because they call themselves architects or engineers.
Most programmers/coders and other IT people need to face the fact that we are really just the welders, pipefitters, and crane operators of the computer world.
...the manufacturer of some worthless yet insanely expensive anti-drone system which is soon to be implemented in all prisons as mandated by a law sponsored by the senators for whatever state said manufacturer calls home.
This!
I'm not saying this is the way to go for all needs. Personally, I hate to use web apps for everything. But, for complete security when crossing borders, your info should just stay home.
After sitting through a jury selection process, I have figured out that even this, supposedly fair process, is deeply broken in favor of the prosecution. If you are honest and don't agree with an overly harsh mandatory sentencing law, or don't trust cops implicitly, or are willing to accept that you may have one of many biases, which research shows we ALL have; then you will be disqualified.
Sitting there, observing the people who quickly figured out the exact right things to say to NOT be disqualified, especially after hearing how those same people talked while we were waiting outside of the courtroom, I can't help but believe those are the people who are eager to vote "guilty." I met several others who came to this same conclusion.
So, once a cop has decided to arrest you, large parts of the system seem to have been "gerrymandered" in a way to drastically increase the probability of conviction. I call it, "The law of secretly intended consequences."
I grew up making plastic models of all things Apollo. I would not have known "exactly" what it was. However, if there were lots of one-off, precision machined components, made out of unusual alloys, AND I lived near a NASA facility, then I would have at least had my suspicions and looked into it.
I'm about as liberal as they come. However, my rights do not end at the point where some idiot may misinterpret them and use them unwisely, or even unsafely. Classic example: We have the right to free speech. Some idiots thought that applied to shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater. The courts ruled against that. By your logic, the courts should have ruled that we no longer have free speech because some idiots could use it unwisely and someone could get hurt.
While I don't like a lot of the decisions made by courts, we still need them to make judgements based on more information than is found in a /. summary.
Knee-jerk rights-taking is a tool of the elite. Don't fall victim to that mentality.
"You can literally feel your worries melting away"
FTFY
We are doomed because we are all cows.
Say, "Moo," cows. Moooooo...
We are ALL cows. The climate change deniers, stupidly repeating rhetoric and falacious logic. The ecologists, hoping beyond hope that regulations and social programs can save us. The technologists, egotistically believing their brainpower will find a fix powerful enough to overcome all the natural processes that are already in progress, and that fix will actually get implemented. The oligarchs, selfishly believing their manshions, safe rooms, private armies (which we euphemistically call police departments), and even their compounds in the southern hemisphere will protect them. ALL are cows, wandering blindly toward the slaughter. A slaughter of our own mutual creation.
Because we, as a species, did not have the wherewithal to collectively say, "Fuck That Shit!" when those with a little bit more power and bigger sticks told us to fight others to get more stuff for ourselves, unknowingly giving even more power to the top stick-haver... Because we let someone convince us that we even needed or wanted that stuff in the first place... we have facilitated the social and technological machinery that has inexorably brought us to where we are now: in a bizzarre, collective mix of all four stages of death at the same time.
But that death will come, regardless of what any of us want or believe or try. I hate to say it, but the only way out would be if 90% of the world population just died off. And we all know that isn't going to happen. So, the only thing left to do is to, as contentedly as we can muster, given the circumstances,...
Say, "Moooooo."
The collective heads of the entire population of Topeka Kansas would simultaneously explode if a bunch of Google hipsters moved in. I know. I lived there. But at least that would rid us of the entire Westboro Baptist Church clan.
My problem is that I frikin' love MS OneNote on a convertible laptop/tablet with a real stylus. I've been hooked since about 2003. Nothing comparable is available with Linux.
Just google the word "ideationizing" and my name.
OK, well I will just leave you there. Part of what I want to do in my Ph.D. work is to tackle this problem. But I got a ways to go first.
OK, next question:
Is it absolutely required that the data be embedded in, and tagged within, your documents which are stored in the wiki?
RDFa is RDF in attributes. It is a standard for embedding tags within html documents to indicate RDF triples. It is assumed that the snippet in the document is the subject. That is wrapped in an html tag. Then attributes in that html tag are used to indicate the predicate and object via IRIs. I actually worked with the REFa working group for a short while. My problem with RDFa, and RDF in general, is the dogged insistence that everything be stored only in triples. There is no way to add metadata ABOUT the triple. Who created it? When was it created? Etcetera.
In addition, all of the RDF triples have to be mined out of the html documents and stored in a database before they can be queried. ALL of the discussion within the working group assumed that the tags would remain relatively static and, once they had been mined out of documents all over the internet, then the real work would be in querying the database. But those of us in the real world know that is unrealistic. In your case, your system would have to grind through your entire document store every night, mining out a fresh RDF database for you to query the next day.
On top of all that: There really are no tools to make inserting those RDFa tags easy. I was brought into the working group as a technical writer, tasked with the chore of explaining RDFa to web content writers so they could understand it well enough to be able to insert the tags by hand. Except RDFa is insanely convoluted. It would be like writing an entire interactive web site without using a framework or any existing libraries. Just hand coding every function. NOT GONNA HAPPEN.
Earlier, you said you figured other people would have wanted to do this before. Of course they have. It's called "The Semantic Web," and Tim Berners-Law has been championing it for decades now. But it has never been widely accepted due to the dogged insistence that everything be done using the all-powerful, magic triple. You would not believe the insanely complex data structures necessary to build real, usable databases with only triples. It would be as if everything in the world were built with Lego because that was all engineers had learned to use.
So, I think you would be far better off with a separate database to contain your information. The records in that database could include citations pointing to your documents, in case someone wanted to drill down to the true source of the info.
Your information is structured but the structure varies enough that you might need to use quite a bit of creativity to use a standard relational database. But it should be possible. Or you could design an XML schema to define and "contain" the structure of your information. There are existing XML database engines and query languages. Either way, you are going to need to custom-build your solution.
The last option is to just shop for an existing software solution for tracking network data. Look for one that has a Notes field that allows hyperlinks. Then you can insert links to your documents. In the end, this may be the most realistic solution. Network tracking and documentation software is a very mature field. There will be lots of features available that you would have be able to build on your own. You can still incorporate your documentation library, but from the other way around. Instead of storing your information IN your documents and mining it out, you store your information in a purpose-built SYSTEM and then refer to your documents as supporting evidence.
Well, I gotta eat breakfast and go to jury duty. Let me know what you think.
But what kind of "projects" do YOU work on? Is it just code (or code-ish things like XML), or do you mean documentation, or databases, or graphics files? Each different thing works best with a different form of "version control."
I once tried to hack together a way to use Git to track updates to my FrameMaker files. It "worked" but was a nightmare to use and took up just as much disk space as simply keeping every version of the file and assigning different filenames.
First we need to take a step back and figure out what you are actually doing. You have pulled up with a "software version control" bandwagon and everyone just jumped on without looking to see if it would take you where you wanted to go.
Are you wanting to keep track of the versions of your code or the reports generated by that code or the data that the code used to generate the reports? Each type of information is best suited for a different kind of versioning system. Are the reports generated only by the code or are they written by humans? Trying to use a code versioning system to keep track of modifications to reports or data is a loosing game. Don't make the mistake of thinking every problem is a nail just because you have a hammer.