He's smart. Smart isn't a consumable, so he still has plenty left, even after the web.
People rarely invent one good idea. Most invent zero. Of those that invent one, they're generally good for a few more too.
It's an inherently good idea. Lots of equally smart people want to do it too.
Being the famous smart guru behind the web meant that he could give up his day job in McD's (or wherever it was that he worked) and spend the surplus time just thinking about Clever Stuff. He probably does a lot fewer project status review meetings than the rest of us.
Being smart is fun. Having other people realise this is even more fun. He can walk into any research lab in the world, and a queue of their smartest people will form, just to talk to him. This encourages invention.
He smells better than some other gurus I could mention 8-)
Originally, HTML was supposed to be about content,
HTML has never been about "content". At one point it was supposed to be about "content of web-like infosystem pages", but it never quite happened (thanks to <BLINK> et al.). If HTML really was "just about content", then it would have looked a lot more like DocBook.
Even that's not enough. You can't have a generic content language unless you have a structural schema to define what today's content needs to be describing. You can do this in SGML, or you can do it in a simplified manner in XML, but you can;t do it with the fixed set of tags for any dialect of HTML.
Why is it that everyone these days is ranting about how XML will change the world, when SGML, despite being around for god-knows-how-long, has quietly done its job yet not attracted any of the hoopla it's XML cousin has,
Because SGML blew it. The SGML experts wanted to stay as experts, so they developed a priesthood cult around it. Go and talk to them in comp.infosystems.w.a.h - they still have their heads firmly up their backsides. XML threw a simple toolset at everyone, and followed the bits that seemed to stick, dumping those that didn't. Slashdoterati should love this - it's Open Source triumphing over suitware.
XML doesn't specify anything useful, as opposed to HTML which (mostly) specifies the meaning of it's tags.
DTDs are dead - please use XML Schema instead, you'll have a much happier time.
Secondly, RDF is a data model, not a serialisation against a DTD. It's about how to share a toolset for working with distributed graphs of data, not about a single file format. If you want to really grok RDF, think about its data model, not its XML serialisation.
.NET isn't the Semantic Web. It's the same difference as watching the Discovery Channel, compared to researching in a good library. M$oft aren't trying to share the same (somewhat) P2P principles as the SW, they're just seeing it as a way to sell server and terminal based services. Home computers are dead, and they know they need to move their business into the future appliance and service-based world. The SW isn;t about this, it's about opening things up, not re-selling pre-packaged pap on a monthly subscription agreement.
M$oft are also a long way behind on their understanding and their involvement with the researcher / developer communities for this work.
Yes, it is RDF. There are many areas of the SW work where it's not clear what the final technology will be (notably the schema expression tools, such as RDF Schema vs. OIL or DAML or DAML+OIL), but RDF itself seems almost certain to be used - there's just nothing else offering itself as a competitor in that niche.
Some clarifications: XML isn't RDF, and RDF isn't XML. RDF is fundamentally a data model, whereas XML is just a serialisation of a much simpler infoset model. As RDF doesn't have its own serialisation (how you write it down), then the convention has been that it's done in XML. You could serialise RDF into anything you like, but I've yet to see a non-XML one.
XML Schema isn't the same as most other schema languages in this field. XML Schema is concerned about structure and operational matters, not about expressing semantics. XML Schema would be a very bad choice for expressing the semantics of the SW. It works OK for Ariba and XrML, because they're quite limited applications of discussion (an invoice is an invoice is an invoice). Even with MPEG-7, XML Schema has run out of steam and the MPEG group have had to invent their own schema expression language. Using XML Schema for bureaux like BizTalk is extremely limiting, and a bad move long-term.
DTD are dead. Use XML Schema instead.
RSS (the site-summary format used for Moreover newsfeeds and to make the Slashboxen work) isn't RDF. It's expressed in RDF and defined in RDF Schema, but it's just one RDF application out of many.
Please print the article out on a 9-pin dot printer and try reading it again. This isn't an article about presentation, despite SciAm's unusually horrid typography. I don't know why they did that, but it's nothing to do with the SW.
How about Solresol (Except that it sounds like a Hawkwind album) as an Interlingua ?
Last week I heard an interesting talk on ontological transforms (I work in a Semantic Web research lab), comparing the views of the Platonic Interlingua approach and a neo-Wittgensteinian transform-based approach, presented by a chap who's PhD back in the days before The AI Winter had been on machine translations of languages.
Put simply, the Platonists assume the existence of a "Language of Heaven" (probably Welsh), and if you transform the source language into that, then there's another transformation into the destination language. All possible translations for n languages can be done with a mere 2n pre-existing transforms.
The transform-based approach says there is no single common conceptual root. You can regress by transformations (maybe transforming Southern Redneck into English, then translating to French and thus transforming to Creole), but there's always a point at which you must translate between ultimate distinct roots.
So maybe in the future, those agents will be everywhere, but first the "impedance mismatch" between the real world and its representation in the virtual world must be reduced..
"Impedance Mismatch" is just what the SW is all about. SW tools are antenna tuners. They can't stop things having different impedances, but they know how to adjust the baluns to allow communication.
If you want an easier life, and your modest needs are typical, then just go down to Semantic Electrode Hut and buy 50 BNC connectors off the shelf.
Do you know anything about the SW, and M$oft's strategies ?
M$oft are nowhere in the SW initiatives. They are taking a stand that is almost completely opposed to it. Their new Hailstorm strategy is centralist and schema-based. Rather than build a Semantic Web where anything can talk to anything, M$oft are trying the BizTalk approach; where they license your own rigid schema back to you, so that you can pay to access a centralised server and receive data in their prescribed formats. Stalin would have been envious.
.NET has no relation to the Semantic Web. M$oft don't understand the first thing about it.
We don't need standards for defining the information (that's EDI, or even XML), what we need instead are standards for how the information will be defined. It's much more useful (in a broad sense) to have a language for expressing semantics and ontologies than it is to have a published standard for "invoices" and "patient records".
The idea of having this type of service is cool. Yes, we all like convenience.
The implementation of it's pretty dire. M$oft ? Do you trust them to get Son-of-Passport right ? Have M$oft ever produced a crypto-complex product without making a complete disaster of it ?
Secondly, the whole myFoo idea is the wrong approach. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but good ideas for improving personal privacy don't usually start by placing the whole lot on a great big server, owned by the antichrist and operated by the people who brought you Hotmail.
I predict that the most interesting exploits won't be ripping the lid off directly, but instead by buying the SDK and spoofing the B2C services. Why steal your medical history when I can claim to be Dr Viagra's Clinic and have you give it to me ?
The most disappointing part of HailStorm is how technically backward it is. Big server-based things and single point validation ? Get real guys. I'd much rather have the sorts of proof-based selective disclosure that smarter and more innovative companies are working on (OK, so I work for HP and so I'm biased). Why should Anne & Chris communicate their trust of each other for one small fact, by being forced to tell all their secrets to Bill first ? (esp. when Bill is the blabbermouthed village idiot) It's a much better approach if they communicate directly, and we already know how to do this. Where are M$oft on topics like anonymous verification, or an anonymous ePerson ? For as long as they persist with this notion that every minor disclosure to an on-line business requires me to make a full and traceable disclosure to them, then I won't touch it.
--
Always trust content from Microsoft Corporation ?
I was thinking about this last night. Considering the old OSI layered model of networking, we've seen each layer transform from asymmetric to P2P operation, crawling gradually up the protocol stack. Is P2P the obvious evolutionary goal of all networking ?
Back in Olden Days, the physical layer knew where the DTE and the DCE where. Ten years ago, we used transport and session protocols that knew where the Netware server was. Now an asymmetry in a new presentation layer would certainly raise eyebrows.
Is peer-to-peer symmetry just an inevitable consequence of evolution ? Will everything in the future turn into a mesh of edge-serving boxes; indistinguishable from each other, but all speaking common semantics ?
If your corporate mail server is slack in the evening, why not rent its capacity to an Akamai-alike, on the chargeable distributed.net model ? It's not just processor cycles that could be traded on this distributed marketplace, but how about storage, bandwidth or even favourable topology ?
Consider the security issues with that. Consider the security issues if you don't have that [invariant logical-to-physical mapping] . . . : Is it trust then verify, or verify then trust?
So what's the problem here ? Everyone and their dog appears to be working in this problem space (maybe that's just because I work in a P2P research lab) and there are many, many crypto-based solutions to this. There are already ePerson demonstrators out there that offer verifiable, trustworthy, but still anonymous, identification of community members.
In simple terms, you own some sort of valuable token, and you can communicate it to your PC, your phone, and your TV. With it, they can buy services from service vendors (large or small) such that the vendors get paid, but you don't get trailed through your consumption history.
Your EDI reference is interesting, because practical EDI isn't P2P. It's supposed to be; the protocols themselves are basically so. The trouble is that EDI sucks, like Bill G's vacuum cleaner, and that to work around the minefield of incompatibilities in it, an EDI structure has developed where nearly everyone talks to a VAN as a translating intermediary, rather than directly to the end-points.
EDI ought to be P2P, but can't be, and one of the drivers for the many XML-based EDI replacements is regaining P2P.
Sadly, if you talk to the wrong bunch of over-priced consult-o-suits, they'll sell you VAN-based XML solutions, because VANs are what they know best.
So defeat by the British during the Opium Wars was the fault of the Manchu ? I don't really see that somehow - and look at a calendar if you need a bigger clue.
they certainly don't see themselves as Chinese,
Granted
even moreso during WWII when they sided with their Japanese masters, forming Manchuko as a puppet state).
"Sided with" is an interesting choice of phrase here. It's a little unfair (although common) to describe Siam as "siding with" Japan, but describing Manchuria in this way is ridiculous. They were invaded and militarily defeated by the Japanese, in a particularly comprehensive and brutal fashion. It's hardly "siding with", unless you'd also refer to Poland and the Ukraine in the same way.
What use is a firewall against a mail client that can't wait to sink its teeth into anything remotely executable ?
At home I do lots of news, I get loads of Spam, and I have a decent mailer. At work I use minimal external email, never publish my address anywhere likely to be scraped into a list, and I'm pretty much forced to use Outlook. If these two environments were ever to merge, then truly my ass would be owned and all my bases would belong to someone else.
We don't need security patches. We need a mailer that doesn't have the trusting "I just want to be loved" behaviour of a lonely spaniel trying desperately to please. If M$oft saw email a bit more as being an Internet protocol, and less as something that's only used within a large corporate, then they might understand why this is such a dumb attitude.
I'm sure Co.Co.Co. is quivering in its $1000 mink-lined snake-skin boots.
That's not the point. I'm just Joe Blow - nothing I do will affect Monsanto. I hardly buy any Roundup, and the hardware store no longer carries Napalm.
OTOH, Coca Cola are an important customer for Monsanto. If I can get them worried about consumer preferences, then it can have an effect.
Aspartame all tastes like sucking busbars anyway -- it's no great loss.
Your product uses Nutrasweet, a product of Monsanto. I don't like Monsanto, and I don't like their persecution of a Canadian farmer. As a result, I will not buy any products (including your own fine company's fine products) that include any product from Monsanto.
Today I keep getting fed ActiveXs in the Doubleclick banner too. What is it with you guys ? You claim to be a mouthpiece for the anti-corporate libertarian code-free-or-die brigade, yet you spew banners and spamware like a $2 pr0n site.
you can see that they use one of TI's DSPs to run the unit
I think you're reading too much into a mere coincidence. TI are big in DSP's, and they've just happened to buy from the same vendor who used to also make a similar product.
Slashdot Mirror
TBL should be listened to for many reasons:
Originally, HTML was supposed to be about content,
HTML has never been about "content". At one point it was supposed to be about "content of web-like infosystem pages", but it never quite happened (thanks to <BLINK> et al.). If HTML really was "just about content", then it would have looked a lot more like DocBook.
Even that's not enough. You can't have a generic content language unless you have a structural schema to define what today's content needs to be describing. You can do this in SGML, or you can do it in a simplified manner in XML, but you can;t do it with the fixed set of tags for any dialect of HTML.
No. Bigstyle.
Pay attention at the back.
Why is it that everyone these days is ranting about how XML will change the world, when SGML, despite being around for god-knows-how-long, has quietly done its job yet not attracted any of the hoopla it's XML cousin has,
Because SGML blew it. The SGML experts wanted to stay as experts, so they developed a priesthood cult around it. Go and talk to them in comp.infosystems.w.a.h - they still have their heads firmly up their backsides. XML threw a simple toolset at everyone, and followed the bits that seemed to stick, dumping those that didn't. Slashdoterati should love this - it's Open Source triumphing over suitware.
XML doesn't specify anything useful, as opposed to HTML which (mostly) specifies the meaning of it's tags.
You need a better clue.
It has an architecture. What are you blathering about ?
No, it isn't.
DTDs are dead - please use XML Schema instead, you'll have a much happier time.
Secondly, RDF is a data model, not a serialisation against a DTD. It's about how to share a toolset for working with distributed graphs of data, not about a single file format. If you want to really grok RDF, think about its data model, not its XML serialisation.
.NET isn't the Semantic Web. It's the same difference as watching the Discovery Channel, compared to researching in a good library. M$oft aren't trying to share the same (somewhat) P2P principles as the SW, they're just seeing it as a way to sell server and terminal based services. Home computers are dead, and they know they need to move their business into the future appliance and service-based world. The SW isn;t about this, it's about opening things up, not re-selling pre-packaged pap on a monthly subscription agreement.
M$oft are also a long way behind on their understanding and their involvement with the researcher / developer communities for this work.
Yes, it is RDF. There are many areas of the SW work where it's not clear what the final technology will be (notably the schema expression tools, such as RDF Schema vs. OIL or DAML or DAML+OIL), but RDF itself seems almost certain to be used - there's just nothing else offering itself as a competitor in that niche.
Some clarifications: XML isn't RDF, and RDF isn't XML. RDF is fundamentally a data model, whereas XML is just a serialisation of a much simpler infoset model. As RDF doesn't have its own serialisation (how you write it down), then the convention has been that it's done in XML. You could serialise RDF into anything you like, but I've yet to see a non-XML one.
XML Schema isn't the same as most other schema languages in this field. XML Schema is concerned about structure and operational matters, not about expressing semantics. XML Schema would be a very bad choice for expressing the semantics of the SW. It works OK for Ariba and XrML, because they're quite limited applications of discussion (an invoice is an invoice is an invoice). Even with MPEG-7, XML Schema has run out of steam and the MPEG group have had to invent their own schema expression language. Using XML Schema for bureaux like BizTalk is extremely limiting, and a bad move long-term.
DTD are dead. Use XML Schema instead.
RSS (the site-summary format used for Moreover newsfeeds and to make the Slashboxen work) isn't RDF. It's expressed in RDF and defined in RDF Schema, but it's just one RDF application out of many.
The internet has drifted away from being an information source
No it hasn't, it's just hiding behind the flashing lights of the high profile sites and the banner ads.
Even Las Vegas has a library somewhere.
Please print the article out on a 9-pin dot printer and try reading it again. This isn't an article about presentation, despite SciAm's unusually horrid typography. I don't know why they did that, but it's nothing to do with the SW.
How about Solresol (Except that it sounds like a Hawkwind album) as an Interlingua ?
Last week I heard an interesting talk on ontological transforms (I work in a Semantic Web research lab), comparing the views of the Platonic Interlingua approach and a neo-Wittgensteinian transform-based approach, presented by a chap who's PhD back in the days before The AI Winter had been on machine translations of languages.
Put simply, the Platonists assume the existence of a "Language of Heaven" (probably Welsh), and if you transform the source language into that, then there's another transformation into the destination language. All possible translations for n languages can be done with a mere 2n pre-existing transforms.
The transform-based approach says there is no single common conceptual root. You can regress by transformations (maybe transforming Southern Redneck into English, then translating to French and thus transforming to Creole), but there's always a point at which you must translate between ultimate distinct roots.
So maybe in the future, those agents will be everywhere, but first the "impedance mismatch" between the real world and its representation in the virtual world must be reduced..
"Impedance Mismatch" is just what the SW is all about. SW tools are antenna tuners. They can't stop things having different impedances, but they know how to adjust the baluns to allow communication.
If you want an easier life, and your modest needs are typical, then just go down to Semantic Electrode Hut and buy 50 BNC connectors off the shelf.
Ooh yes, H4XX the 0nt010g135 D00D ! All your semantic concept are belong to us.
Nice idea 8-)
What .NET is about.
Did you read the article ?
Do you know anything about the SW, and M$oft's strategies ?
M$oft are nowhere in the SW initiatives. They are taking a stand that is almost completely opposed to it. Their new Hailstorm strategy is centralist and schema-based. Rather than build a Semantic Web where anything can talk to anything, M$oft are trying the BizTalk approach; where they license your own rigid schema back to you, so that you can pay to access a centralised server and receive data in their prescribed formats. Stalin would have been envious.
.NET has no relation to the Semantic Web. M$oft don't understand the first thing about it.
We don't need standards for defining the information (that's EDI, or even XML), what we need instead are standards for how the information will be defined. It's much more useful (in a broad sense) to have a language for expressing semantics and ontologies than it is to have a published standard for "invoices" and "patient records".
Take a look at DAML for more.
The idea of having this type of service is cool. Yes, we all like convenience.
The implementation of it's pretty dire. M$oft ? Do you trust them to get Son-of-Passport right ? Have M$oft ever produced a crypto-complex product without making a complete disaster of it ?
Secondly, the whole myFoo idea is the wrong approach. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but good ideas for improving personal privacy don't usually start by placing the whole lot on a great big server, owned by the antichrist and operated by the people who brought you Hotmail.
I predict that the most interesting exploits won't be ripping the lid off directly, but instead by buying the SDK and spoofing the B2C services. Why steal your medical history when I can claim to be Dr Viagra's Clinic and have you give it to me ?
The most disappointing part of HailStorm is how technically backward it is. Big server-based things and single point validation ? Get real guys. I'd much rather have the sorts of proof-based selective disclosure that smarter and more innovative companies are working on (OK, so I work for HP and so I'm biased). Why should Anne & Chris communicate their trust of each other for one small fact, by being forced to tell all their secrets to Bill first ? (esp. when Bill is the blabbermouthed village idiot) It's a much better approach if they communicate directly, and we already know how to do this. Where are M$oft on topics like anonymous verification, or an anonymous ePerson ? For as long as they persist with this notion that every minor disclosure to an on-line business requires me to make a full and traceable disclosure to them, then I won't touch it.
--
Always trust content from Microsoft Corporation ?
I was thinking about this last night. Considering the old OSI layered model of networking, we've seen each layer transform from asymmetric to P2P operation, crawling gradually up the protocol stack. Is P2P the obvious evolutionary goal of all networking ?
Back in Olden Days, the physical layer knew where the DTE and the DCE where. Ten years ago, we used transport and session protocols that knew where the Netware server was. Now an asymmetry in a new presentation layer would certainly raise eyebrows.
Is peer-to-peer symmetry just an inevitable consequence of evolution ? Will everything in the future turn into a mesh of edge-serving boxes; indistinguishable from each other, but all speaking common semantics ?
If your corporate mail server is slack in the evening, why not rent its capacity to an Akamai-alike, on the chargeable distributed.net model ? It's not just processor cycles that could be traded on this distributed marketplace, but how about storage, bandwidth or even favourable topology ?
Consider the security issues with that. Consider the security issues if you don't have that [invariant logical-to-physical mapping] . . . : Is it trust then verify, or verify then trust?
So what's the problem here ? Everyone and their dog appears to be working in this problem space (maybe that's just because I work in a P2P research lab) and there are many, many crypto-based solutions to this. There are already ePerson demonstrators out there that offer verifiable, trustworthy, but still anonymous, identification of community members.
In simple terms, you own some sort of valuable token, and you can communicate it to your PC, your phone, and your TV. With it, they can buy services from service vendors (large or small) such that the vendors get paid, but you don't get trailed through your consumption history.
PS - Liked your DHCP analogy.
Your EDI reference is interesting, because practical EDI isn't P2P. It's supposed to be; the protocols themselves are basically so. The trouble is that EDI sucks, like Bill G's vacuum cleaner, and that to work around the minefield of incompatibilities in it, an EDI structure has developed where nearly everyone talks to a VAN as a translating intermediary, rather than directly to the end-points.
EDI ought to be P2P, but can't be, and one of the drivers for the many XML-based EDI replacements is regaining P2P.
Sadly, if you talk to the wrong bunch of over-priced consult-o-suits, they'll sell you VAN-based XML solutions, because VANs are what they know best.
It was the Manchus who dropped the ball
So defeat by the British during the Opium Wars was the fault of the Manchu ? I don't really see that somehow - and look at a calendar if you need a bigger clue.
they certainly don't see themselves as Chinese,
Granted
even moreso during WWII when they sided with their Japanese masters, forming Manchuko as a puppet state).
"Sided with" is an interesting choice of phrase here. It's a little unfair (although common) to describe Siam as "siding with" Japan, but describing Manchuria in this way is ridiculous. They were invaded and militarily defeated by the Japanese, in a particularly comprehensive and brutal fashion. It's hardly "siding with", unless you'd also refer to Poland and the Ukraine in the same way.
What use is a firewall against a mail client that can't wait to sink its teeth into anything remotely executable ?
At home I do lots of news, I get loads of Spam, and I have a decent mailer. At work I use minimal external email, never publish my address anywhere likely to be scraped into a list, and I'm pretty much forced to use Outlook. If these two environments were ever to merge, then truly my ass would be owned and all my bases would belong to someone else.
We don't need security patches. We need a mailer that doesn't have the trusting "I just want to be loved" behaviour of a lonely spaniel trying desperately to please. If M$oft saw email a bit more as being an Internet protocol, and less as something that's only used within a large corporate, then they might understand why this is such a dumb attitude.
Mailers just shouldn't trust incoming email.
The Guardian ran a similar story recently
I'm sure Co.Co.Co. is quivering in its $1000 mink-lined snake-skin boots.
That's not the point. I'm just Joe Blow - nothing I do will affect Monsanto. I hardly buy any Roundup, and the hardware store no longer carries Napalm.
OTOH, Coca Cola are an important customer for Monsanto. If I can get them worried about consumer preferences, then it can have an effect.
Aspartame all tastes like sucking busbars anyway -- it's no great loss.
Your product uses Nutrasweet, a product of Monsanto. I don't like Monsanto, and I don't like their persecution of a Canadian farmer. As a result, I will not buy any products (including your own fine company's fine products) that include any product from Monsanto.
Yours,
etc.
Today I keep getting fed ActiveXs in the Doubleclick banner too. What is it with you guys ? You claim to be a mouthpiece for the anti-corporate libertarian code-free-or-die brigade, yet you spew banners and spamware like a $2 pr0n site.
you can see that they use one of TI's DSPs to run the unit
I think you're reading too much into a mere coincidence. TI are big in DSP's, and they've just happened to buy from the same vendor who used to also make a similar product.