Plasma Active Three released
Okular Active is Plasma Active's new Ebook Reader. Okular Active is built on the technology which also drives the desktop version of the popular Document Viewer, and is optimized for reading documents on a touch device."
For more information, see this
post from Aaron Seigo. "Unlike traditional file managers, Files
doesn't directly expose the file system. We see that as an implementation
detail like 'which kernel drivers are loaded.' Yes, it's needed for the
device to function, but the person using the device shouldn't have to
care. Instead, Files promotes meaning and content. On starting Files, you
select what you wish to view such as documents, images, music, videos,
etc..
"
Posted Oct 15, 2012 22:51 UTC (Mon)
by ingwa (guest, #71149)
[Link] (5 responses)
This release means that there is now a way to use tablets while keeping control of your own data. And they managed to make it beautiful and even come up with a new paradigm (activities) in the process. Kudos!
Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:16 UTC (Wed)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Oct 19, 2012 0:18 UTC (Fri)
by pynm0001 (guest, #18379)
[Link] (2 responses)
Either way, my very limited understanding of the Android SDK when I reviewed it some months ago was that an activity was an implementation detail for a software developer, not a user-visible term in the Android UI.
Posted Oct 19, 2012 7:42 UTC (Fri)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (1 responses)
So I understand that activities in KDE are an element of the UI, thanks. Intriguing. dtlin's post below and the link posted are a very good source.
Posted Oct 19, 2012 23:05 UTC (Fri)
by pynm0001 (guest, #18379)
[Link]
I'm too lazy to dig up links (and besides, doesn't really matter). Feels like the OpenHandsetAlliance was so long ago though, amazing how much has changed just in 4 years...
Posted Oct 19, 2012 3:09 UTC (Fri)
by dtlin (subscriber, #36537)
[Link]
They're not alike at all.
Plasma activities are like super-virtual desktops: they are a collection of desktop state, configuration, and windows.
Android is easier to explain by analogy. The whole system is a web browser and an activity is a specific web page. One program may have many activities, just as one host may have many web pages, but while you can navigate between them freely, you can only see one at once.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 1:24 UTC (Tue)
by Tara_Li (guest, #26706)
[Link] (28 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 2:42 UTC (Tue)
by nickbp (guest, #63605)
[Link]
Posted Oct 16, 2012 5:07 UTC (Tue)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (21 responses)
So on linux I navigate manually to the directory I want and play it (usually on the command line). On Android I'm still looking for my ideal "folder player", but there are several that are "good enough" for me. But there's no way I can manage my music collection on an OS that doesn't "expose the filesystem".
I'm fairly sure that many people will say the same of books, photos, etc -- they would prefer to organise them hierarchically themselves, rather than rely on tagging!
Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:01 UTC (Tue)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
If the solution is to automatically recognize the music, look at the filename/directory, or anything like that: why care? As long as you can easily select the music you want to listen to.
E.g. I'd care more about something which automatically gives me a happy song if I have a crap day.. or maybe something with a lot of energy.
Something which exposes folders to me: not interested.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:26 UTC (Tue)
by intgr (subscriber, #39733)
[Link] (11 responses)
You should check out MusicBrainz Picard (http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Picard), a tagger application that looks up metadata from the MusicBrainz database and allows you to tag, rename, move etc your files based on that information.
> Plus, I haven't seen a working tag "hierarchy" in any player
Agreed, but that's mostly a reflection of the real world -- music is not hierarchical. You have various artist albums, then albums where two artists collaborate and both are primary authors, albums that feature multiple artists but with one primary artist and one-artist albums. And I'm sure classical music has its own complexities too. Even if the players supported all that, most users' tag are such a mess that it wouldn't work anyway. So the easiest approach is to just allow free-form search.
However, after the major NGS schema change, MusicBrainz itself is actually reasonably good at reflecting real life, and allows you to write rather flexible file naming scripts using that data.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:44 UTC (Tue)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (10 responses)
If there is an error-free automated way to tag them all, great. If I have to "curate" the results, it would take forever.
And even then, I'll need the folder structure to maintain a sane organisation. I don't want classical, jazz, rock, world, Indian all mixed up together. I haven't found working genre-based filtering (but maybe I haven't looked too hard, since most of my music doesn't have a correct genre tag.)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:54 UTC (Tue)
by intgr (subscriber, #39733)
[Link] (3 responses)
Picard has built-in acoustic fingerprinting, which is mostly error-free, but they don't have fingerprints of all the tracks.
For the rest, yeah, Picard assumes it can find *some* information from the tags. If it doesn't, I guess it'll be lots of manual work. Maybe someone has written a plugin to parse filenames, I don't know.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:15 UTC (Tue)
by jnareb (subscriber, #46500)
[Link] (1 responses)
EasyTag has a feature to generate tags from pathname
Posted Oct 20, 2012 4:52 UTC (Sat)
by dirtyepic (guest, #30178)
[Link]
An example workflow: I like to clear any existing tags and fill in the fields by hand (you can use musicbrainz here but I'm anal about how my tracks get named). Then I just save and hit Rename and all my files are renamed based on the tags and my format string and sorted directly into my collection. If it could fetch album cover art from Amazon and lyrics from LyricWiki it'd be perfect.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:47 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
[1]I much prefer cover.png files instead.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:42 UTC (Tue)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link] (5 responses)
It's some work maintain, but so long as music players don't insist on automatically moving files everything functions. Everything is easily findable by simple file name search in the big directory, or by drilling down the hierarchies.
It would be nice if it were easier, and if more meta data were supported than I can cram in to the file name, but nothing else I've tried approaches this for usability. I wish I had better news.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 14:36 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (4 responses)
If you have "halfway" tags, I'd recommend using picard to tag your music. Most of the work is in "yeah, that looks good" before applying tags fetched from musicbrainz. If there aren't enough tags filled in, picard can fail to auto-match with the database, at which point it's a fairly manual job[1].
[1]Add a "tport=8000" (at least, port 8000 is the default) query parameter to your musicbrainz URL when picard is running. It will then add links to insert release data straight into picard.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:32 UTC (Wed)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link] (3 responses)
> If you have "halfway" tags, I'd recommend using picard to tag your music.
tl;dr auto tagging is broken, manual tagging is necessary for correctness
I find that tag-guessing and batch tagging are dangerous. Such services will happily write incorrect tags, possibly overwriting my manually-chosen correct tags.
Consider this scenario: I have a track ripped from a Gilbert & Sullivan "highlights" disc, but I have manually tagged it to indicate which operetta it was from and in what year it was originally produced. An auto tagger may:
(1) Detect that it is from the album I ripped it from and re-tag it with the name of who compiled it, giving it a title based on how the album named it (e.g. "Pirates of Penzance Major General's Song" instead of the correct "I am the very model of a modern major general"), and setting the year to when the CD was released, or setting the genre to "Comedy" instead of "Light Opera"
(2) Identify the album from which the track *originally* came, copying the metadata from that album instead.
(3) Detect that it is a performance of the song, but incorrectly identify the source album as another performance by other persons, copying the incorrect metadata from that album instead.
The result is that I can't sort G&S songs by operetta, year, etc., and in all probability the artist is now listed as whoever produced the recording only, or a haphazard concatenation of original artists with performing artists, possibly without distinction. In my experience the metadata available from common databases tends to be either inaccurate, excessively verbose or organized according to an unpalatable scheme.
This is when it finds my music at all, which in my experience is not common! In the end it becomes a manual process as I feel obliged to manually verify each choice made by the tagger.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:52 UTC (Wed)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
Though picard isn't an "auto tagger" (anymore at least) since it won't write tags without an explicit Ctrl-S to save the (selected) files. Newer picard versions show a diff of the tags in the bottom where you can manually fix things (it's not a full tag editor, so adding new tags isn't possible with it AFAICT), so detecting "picard did it wrong" should be fairly easy with it.
[1]I would expect that simiar issues arise with things such as opera (as you point out), theater, broadway, national anthems, and so on. I guess "performance" pieces is a better name for this type of thing?
Posted Oct 17, 2012 17:32 UTC (Wed)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link]
Posted Oct 17, 2012 16:52 UTC (Wed)
by intgr (subscriber, #39733)
[Link]
Well, ideally, you would enter all relevant information into a global database and simply configure your tagger to store the tags based on your preferences; that way you don't have to do redundant manual work and benefit from data that others have entered.
> I have manually tagged it to indicate which operetta it was from and in what year it was originally produced
Of course people have a different understanding of "correctness". The MusicBrainz schema is fairly flexible, there are three levels of detail:
Sounds like what you want is to actually store the attributes (title and date) of the work (#3) in your tags, not the track list (#1). Now, Picard itself doesn't support this, but my point is that MusicBrainz isn't like the CDDB databases that only knew about track lists. MusicBrainz a first-class music database and the community actually cares about correctness. With some additional code it would be possible to fetch all the relevant details you care about.
Not all editors enter information at this detail -- and earlier versions didn't have all these capabilities. But that's a small matter of going in and entering/fixing the data, which you already have to do when building your directory structure anyway.
> or setting the genre to "Comedy" instead of "Light Opera"
MusicBrainz doesn't support genres as such because (as you point out) people often have wildly different understanding of genres. But it does provide a "folksonomy tags" feature. Picard can be configured to only accept genres that you personally have entered, or set a threshold on how popular the tag has to be to be applied.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:21 UTC (Wed)
by lambda (subscriber, #40735)
[Link] (5 responses)
Have you ever used iTunes or an iPod? They each handle the use cases you mention.
In iTunes, I have 4 main columns on my screen. The first is for playlists, which are how you organize ad-hoc lists of songs. Folders are a pretty bad way of managing that use case, unless you use folders full of symlinks and add a number to the beginning of each name to get the sorting right. Trying to set up such a system on a touchscreen device using a generic filesystem explorer seems like it would be a usability nightmare.
The remaining columns form the tag hierarchy. The first is Genres, the next Artists, and then there is a list of songs grouped by Album, then sorted by number within the album. Each of the first two columns has an "All" at the top, and you can select multiple within them. So, for instance, since I have genres that were taken from CDDB, they aren't always consistent; I have both "Alternative & Punk" and "Alternative Rock", but I can select both of those, and I see in the Artists column only those artists who have songs tagged "Alternative & Punk" or "Alternative Rock". I can then narrow the songs down even further by selecting one or more artists, and only see the songs that those artists have done.
If I have any more complex needs than that, I can create a saved search (called "Smart Playlist"), which selects on any attributes that I want. And if I want to find a specific song by name, I just type it into the search box and it filters live down to that song.
This provides a lot more flexibility than a generic hierarchical filesystem browser, and take a lot less work for me to maintain. For the most part, everything is organized automatically by tags that I get from CDDB; all I do is build my playlists, and otherwise I browse or search for songs.
This is one of the many small things that keeps me using Mac OS X as my main OS, even though I refuse to buy anything new from Apple (I bought this laptop around the introduction of the original iPhone; the iPhone was the tipping point that convinced me that Apple was enough of a threat to my freedom that I will no longer support them). I am glad that some people are trying to attack this problem; trying to provide interfaces that are just as easy to use. Since it's free software, there will always be ways to access the underlying filesystem, so people will be able to create more traditional filesystem browsers. But for many of my use cases, I really don't want to bother with trying to sort files into a hierarchy and come up with naming schemes that cause them to sort properly and link them together with symlinks, I want to just be able to search and sort files based on their inherent attributes.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 22:35 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Oct 18, 2012 6:28 UTC (Thu)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 18, 2012 8:33 UTC (Thu)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
Posted Oct 18, 2012 8:38 UTC (Thu)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
What I've ended up doing is a composer directory; inside that, a performance/piece directory; inside that, track files whose filenames describe only the piece and movement, not composer/performer. It mostly works, but some multi-composer discs require other treatment.
Posted Oct 18, 2012 3:51 UTC (Thu)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
Plus, itunes doesn't do ogg vorbis files.
Posted Oct 18, 2012 8:14 UTC (Thu)
by smcv (subscriber, #53363)
[Link]
One of my pet hates in MeeGo/Maemo Harmattan is that the media player copes poorly with "Various Artists" compilations. I can either navigate by album (which sorts alphabetically by album, so e.g. the Nine Inch Nails albums aren't grouped together) or by artist, which really means artist/album (treating a 10-track compilation as if it was 10 1-track albums by different artists).
What makes that particularly annoying is that the directory hierarchy on the actual filesystem follows the Musicbrainz Picard defaults - "AlbumArtist/Album/01. Artist - Track.ogg" - so if I was able to navigate according to the filesystem, all the compilations would be under "Various Artists" where I expect to find them.
I'm not sure whether the bug here is "media player doesn't let me navigate the filesystem" or "media player doesn't understand ALBUMARTIST tags" or both...
Posted Oct 18, 2012 16:24 UTC (Thu)
by Tara_Li (guest, #26706)
[Link]
There's this database - and it holds information on 20,000 pictures. Pretty fair chance, in fact, that even holds the pictures themselves, the way things are going. This whole huge database gets searched for just a few pictures, that I tend to keep together anyway. I don't need half of my RAM holding indexes for all of this metadata crap.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:50 UTC (Tue)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link] (4 responses)
However, most use cases on tablets don't have that use pattern at all. More common is slapping in the SD card from a camera and viewing pictures, perhaps organizing them as you go. Downloading files (e.g. books) from the network is also common and this also leaves you without structure by default. These are the common use cases on mobile device which "organize it yourself in the file system" as an idea really sucks for. Semantic organization turns out to be far more powerful there.
But that's the use case for devices. In Plasma Desktop we have these same features (it's the same code under the hood, after all) but we still present a file system centered view by default because the Desktop use scenarios are different from mobile, and often follow the kind of thing you noted.
In future, I really do want to be able to go in both directions, however: sort your pictures by tags and then be able to sync to, say, owncloud with pictures sorted into folders by tag sets so that you can load them on any desktop / laptop PC with your structure intact; or go from a file system sorted file set and be able to identify those as tags that co-exist with metadata.
Anyways, key here is to keep in mind the use case of the target devices. They differ because of how we (humans) work in different contexts, and we tend to choose different device form factors for different contexts. (Tablets being frustrating to use at a desk at work, while it's inconvenient to drag your laptop with you to the park just so you can see a map of how to get there.)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 12:36 UTC (Tue)
by Priscus (guest, #72409)
[Link]
I did it a few years back for a personnal project (bookmarks management, but I had finished making it a generic library by the time real life caught up to me).
One of the lessons it taught me was how much my directory organisation sucked.
The tagged result suffers from these directory-based approximations.
For exampl, you may not have needed an implicit tag/directory level in some places of your directory tree, but if it does exist elsewhere, it will also be present in your tags. Elements where this information was implicit will not have it explicitly, which can be a bother.
To avoid this, you have to either rebalance your directories or create some rules to deal with "implicit" information, which opens up another can of worm.
If you are interested, feel free to contact me: I still have the code (some bit-rot) and I remember most of my reasoning and useful optimisations strategies.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:26 UTC (Tue)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link] (1 responses)
I think this came about when Google moved away from a hierarchy-based view of local files, toward a semantic-based view.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:40 UTC (Tue)
by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
[Link]
Posted Oct 19, 2012 7:23 UTC (Fri)
by steveriley (guest, #83540)
[Link]
An stupendously obvious position that so many other UI designers appear to be completely, astonishingly ignorant of. Aaron, thank you. I look forward to installing Plasma Active Three on my Samsung 700t (yeah, the one that came with Windows 8 from //build/) this weekend.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 3:21 UTC (Tue)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (11 responses)
You could say that the Dewey decimal system is no better for organizing a library than the ISBN, because either one would locate your book, but that would be false. Arguably any real book ought to appear under a dozen different Dewey numbers, and an encyclopedia under all of them, but somehow that doesn't reduce the practical usefulness of the system.
It would show more insight to demonstrate an understanding of why such artificial, arbitrary systems are so useful, and so improbably usable.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 4:23 UTC (Tue)
by Tara_Li (guest, #26706)
[Link] (2 responses)
Ultimately, you spend insane amounts of time putting information about the pics, that you hardly get time to share them with friends.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:38 UTC (Tue)
by renox (guest, #23785)
[Link]
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:52 UTC (Tue)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link]
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:57 UTC (Tue)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link] (7 responses)
Instead of dragging things into specific folders, drag them into specific tags. Same deal.
And then within each tag (you can view all files that have a specific tag, or set of tags; this is what the UI makes dead simple and fast to do) we can sort however we want.
The functional distinction between a folder name and a tag is really non-existent, except that tags have a lot of additional potential features such as: files can be in multiple tags; tag sets can be used to related data; tags can be applied to non-file data (e.g. people, or rather their contact / identity information), etc.
You mention the Dewey decimal system. You could apply such a system to your files using tags .. in fact, that's precisly what the Dewey system does: it's a simple tagging where everything goes in precisely one tag. This is completely doable with the system presented in Plasma Active .. you just aren't confined to it.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 13:39 UTC (Tue)
by renox (guest, #23785)
[Link] (5 responses)
This isn't a very good example as with links files can be in multiple directories.
>[cut]tags can be applied to non-file data (e.g. people, or rather their contact / identity information), etc.
In a "Plan9" like organisation, everything is a file so the difference between tags and directory&links would be smaller..
I'm nitpicking, but anyway kudos for using tags! I think that this is a bold move which can be great for the users and I hope that it will succeed, I'm only a bit worried about the performance cost of using tags instead of directories (directories have already a big cost when using HDD as they "hide" the block's position on the disk: http://simula.no/research/nd/publications/Simula.ND.399/s... )
Posted Oct 16, 2012 19:31 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (4 responses)
Tags are better here. Given a file with multiple links, asking "what other paths point to this inode?" is harder than "what other tags does this file have?".
Posted Oct 16, 2012 20:42 UTC (Tue)
by renox (guest, #23785)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:21 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 10:32 UTC (Wed)
by etienne (guest, #25256)
[Link]
Maybe also most files in the filesystem could be tagged with the name of the rpm/deb package it comes from...
Posted Oct 18, 2012 7:16 UTC (Thu)
by spaetz (guest, #32870)
[Link]
Yes, tags might be better and fulfil all needs that filepaths can do, but most tagging systems I know work only within the application you use.
Switch from f-spot to shotwell (or digikam), boom all information is lost. While if it's in the folder 2012/07/Boston/ I have at least some information to reconstruct where the picture was taken. This is why I don't want to give up file hierarchy based locations even if I like tagging.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 20:26 UTC (Tue)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link]
You write about sorting within a tag, or set of tags. That's not a total ordering, that's a local ordering, and not a stable ordering. Yes, you could model the Dewey system as tags, but such a model would miss most of its value, and anyway would be way too much work for an already otherwise-busy person.
A total ordering is necessarily arbitrary, but it has the virtue of repeatability. A human-animal brain can map its native geographical skills to a repeated presentation, providing an effortless organization that tagging cannot approach. "It was somewhere around here" might mean "perhaps in a folder next to" a known one. What I'm looking for doesn't have tag X; it just showed up in the list a little before something that had tag X.
If tags had natural, and optionally imposed, relationships, that could provide a stable total order. That would correspond, organizationally, to putting folders in other folders. If almost everything that was X was also Y, then those that are X but not Y could automatically be grouped without my asking for "X but not Y".
I would feel a lot more confident about your approach if I saw evidence that you were thinking along these lines. What I'm getting, instead, is that these concepts are totally foreign. Are you old enough to remember when Artificial Intelligence based on Formal Logic was right around the corner? When the Japanese national initiative in support of Logic Programming would rocket Japan ahead of us shlubs? When teaching set theory to pre-schoolers would make arithmetic and algebra, when encountered, intuitively obvious to them all?
Posted Oct 16, 2012 5:26 UTC (Tue)
by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)
[Link] (1 responses)
Personally, I'd rather have virtual directories constructed from metadata, than metadata extracted from my directories.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:00 UTC (Tue)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link]
You can also use the built-in (and automatically generated) timeline if the data is meaningfully distributed through time.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 5:55 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (26 responses)
So it's true. KDE has finally gone off the deep end into total 'semanticey-dekstopy' crap.
They should have learned from the Windows Vista design failures. Semantic filesystems seem look nice in theory but in practice they are pretty much useless. It's hard to create even ONE hierarchy in most cases, never mind several of them to justify the use of complex semantic tags.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:42 UTC (Tue)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link] (25 responses)
This is just for the device interface. It turns out that using a tablet (or other mobile devices) is a LOT different than using a big (in terms of storage and processing power) laptop with a keyboard and mouse.
I'd die of frustration without Dolphin on my laptop, as I'm sure many would. :) But Dolphin on my tablet makes a lot less sense.
How to balance these two different needs? Simple! Make two different interfaces over the same underlying system, tuned to the different use cases.
This way we keep the functional desktop and get a functional touch UI.
If I could ask just one thing it would be this: please don't jump to such scathing conclusions based on lack of knowledge. We aren't stupid and we are working very hard on making things that are great to use. Making the sort of blunder you seem to think we have would go against both those things. :)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 12:53 UTC (Tue)
by jackb (guest, #41909)
[Link] (23 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 13:21 UTC (Tue)
by njwhite (guest, #51848)
[Link] (19 responses)
Really? I haven't used semantic stuff much, but like the idea. I know KDE jumped on it for KDE4, but haven't heard complaints about it. What projects have caused this lack of good will?
Posted Oct 16, 2012 17:49 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (14 responses)
I'm not sure I can think of an area of computing that has seen such reliable, abject failure. KDE4 is the only project I know of that has seen some success but nobody I know uses those features.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:04 UTC (Tue)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:16 UTC (Tue)
by jackb (guest, #41909)
[Link] (1 responses)
When they don't even appear to notice those previous problems it creates the impression that they'll end up in the same place as those other projects.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 13:46 UTC (Wed)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link]
It's human nature, I guess.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 17:44 UTC (Wed)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 18:49 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
I used to work on the Agent Development Kit when I was with Tryllian around 2000... Intelligent, mobile agents with shared ontologies! And a total turnover for the 100+ company until it went broke of 10k euros. Tryllian even bought its own 4-floor office building before the ex-xerox salesperson had ever sold a single license. Every year those licenses got more expensive, to cover the development investment. But I really learned a lot about coding at Tryllian.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:23 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (6 responses)
Neural networks are widely used in things like text and speech recognition (they are not all that they were hyped up to be, but they are still useful).
Ontologies are dead - they're semantic computing thingy, duh.
Expert systems, fuzzy logic and AI are used more and more: just check those Kinect sensors or Google's self-driving cars.
I'm sure, we can find even more dismal areas than semantic computing, but it's not an easy task :)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:31 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:34 UTC (Wed)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:41 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:50 UTC (Wed)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (2 responses)
Compare with the Turing test: impersonating a real human in a conversation. I don't think Wolfram Alpha qualifies, even though I have had many conversations more boring than a single search in the Alpha engine.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:14 UTC (Wed)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link]
Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:15 UTC (Wed)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link]
Yes.
Google's self driving cars are programmed with a mix of clever algorithms, classical AI algorithms and new machine learning techniques. All put together leads to some surprising results on the tests.
I had the opportunity to take Thrun and Norvig's course on AI (www.ai-class.com), and I can say that the field has advanced more in the latest 5 years alone than in the previous 30. It's well worth the effort:
Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:54 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
> Intelligent agents (supposed to bid for you on eBay)?
They exist (not smart, but they exist), so I guess it depends on your definition of 'Intelligent'. Some definitions make this part of the AI question.
still being promised and worked on. showing up more commonly in movies and TV shows (especially the high-tech crime dramas). probably going to arrive relatively soon for a small subset of things to move apps between mobile devices and more powerful permanent devices.
Once you get the ability to run Android apps on Linux desktop systems you have all the pieces in place. The apps checkpoint themselves so that they can be stopped and restarted, so stopping an app on a mobile device and restarting it on a desktop device should be straightforward
> Neural networks?
Very common, just not highly visible.
> e-Learning?
Very common, just not in schools (it's how a lot of technical training takes place nowdays
> Meta-programming (programs that programmed other programs?
it exists, but as a niche
> Expert systems? Fuzzy logic?
both of these are extremely common, you probably just don't recognize them when you bump into them.
Expert systems dominate tech support systems for example.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:03 UTC (Wed)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
I meant to say that most of the things you are talking about are acutlaly fairly common, you just don't know what's happening under the covers.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 19:34 UTC (Tue)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (3 responses)
This is the first line of the anthem of the semanticalists. Not many people know the second verse.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 12:17 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link] (2 responses)
:-D
I am still constructing a way to apply semantiks to other document types (oh, my audio/e-books, my .od[ts], my .pdfs...) but I think we are fairly close. And my carefully-thought directory hierarchies DO crumble from time to time under their own weight.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:12 UTC (Wed)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 22:40 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link]
Translation: I will ignore all you wrote because confirmation bias, that's why.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 18:31 UTC (Tue)
by njs (subscriber, #40338)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 2:20 UTC (Wed)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
It can't be tragic when a software project fails for not understanding users' needs, or life itself would be tragic. Projects fail all the time. They might even fail more often than not. It's just wasteful. When the failure drags down other projects that had otherwise been grand successes, that's worse. Good planning would ensure that the total failure of this sub-project would leave the project as a whole intact -- that it could be pitched over the side ("kludge!") with no loss but time. So the second line of inquiry is into whether the project would survive such a failure. Again, a coherent plan would reassure, scorn does not.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:52 UTC (Wed)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link]
Why do FHS reformers never get anywhere? It's because they only worry about the problems they want to fix, not solutions they're throwing out. Why are UI redesigners met with fear? It's because they're only worried about making the new UI do X, not explaining how it meets or fails to meet existing needs.
This is also why backwards compatibility is so important: It means that the things you don't do right can at least still be done. On that note, why throw away file paths and not just tag each file with its "real" path and in the UI make it appear as if folders and a strict hierarchy still exist? It doesn't make things less semantic and it doesn't break anyone's head.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 3:24 UTC (Wed)
by Tara_Li (guest, #26706)
[Link]
Posted Oct 16, 2012 6:48 UTC (Tue)
by jpfrancois (subscriber, #65948)
[Link]
Tags have a meaning ? Great ! File type can be used to group items ? Terrific. Access date help me find content ? Wonderful. News flash : File path is not only an 'implementation detail' it is also a piece of information.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 7:27 UTC (Tue)
by callegar (guest, #16148)
[Link] (5 responses)
Furthermore, taking the reasoning as an extreme, unless there is a status symbol factor like for ios, to most having plasma or win8 as the tablet OS is probably just an implementation detail that should be completely hidden. All these 'plasma', 'active', 'okular', 'kontact', 'mer', 'calligra', 'maliit' keywords are things that the person using the device shouldn't have to care, they are confusing and to most they do not bring meaning nor content. Maybe software announcements should be passed through an indirection layer to hide them :-)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:36 UTC (Tue)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link] (4 responses)
This is true for most of the applications shipped as part of Plasma Active, because as you noted, those names just aren't critical to the use experience.
I know you were probably be facetious, but .. well .. you were right all the same ;)
Posted Oct 18, 2012 10:22 UTC (Thu)
by callegar (guest, #16148)
[Link] (3 responses)
The reason why I am suspicious of the tag approach and the reason why I have so far systematically disabled nepomuk on all my systems (in spite of being a long time kde user), it that I really feel that this approach is 'imprisoning' some of my data, taking control of it away from me.
1) This tag approach appears to be completely unstandardized and unportable between desktop environments. If I spend time tagging my stuff and one day later I decide that I like gnome/ubuntu/xfce better than kde, all this effort is lost.
2) Looks like there is no possibility to sanely export or share this metadata. If I have a bunch of photos and I organize it by means of sensible path names (e.g. Photos/2011/Summer), and I decide to share them with a friend, simply zipping the folder and sharing the zip file will give to the receiver not just the content, but also the organization. If I put all my photos in Photos and I rely on tags for the organization, there is not tool capable of making a container file (zip like) with both the content and the organization.
3) Looks like there is no possibility to rapidly control what gets tagged and how, particularly if one relies on automatic tools to generate the tags, like indexers. For instance, if some password file of mine gets indexed by nepomuk, I would like to assure that such data is immediately removed from the indexes, but there is no way to do it.
4) There is almost no control on the amount of resources that is used for the tagging, particularly when the tags rely on automatic tools like indexing for their generation. With nepomuk, if I disable automatic indexing for a directory, I do not see the space taken by the database immediately decrease. The database seems to only augment in space over time, which is even more worrying for tablet like devices.
5) There is no way to automate operations on tags. Say that I have a bunch of photos, and that I have organized them by paths. Say "Photos/2011/Summer". Then I realize that this is wrong, and that they should have been "Photos/2010/Summer". Fixing this is as simple as a directory rename. How do I tell a tag based system something like "Please select all Photos that have the "Summer" tag as well as the "2011" tag and change the "2011" tag into "2010"? I have the same problem with gmail labels. Not that the thing cannot be done, but is extremely more demanding in terms of time than a directory rename.
Posted Oct 18, 2012 15:25 UTC (Thu)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link] (2 responses)
2) problem solved with [1a/1b] above.
3) I use nepomuk; excluding some file or directory from the index excludes its tags from the index... I couldn't see the problem.
4) Never looked at it; will study this better.
5) Works OK for me in Digikam, doing [1a] above...
Posted Oct 18, 2012 15:27 UTC (Thu)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link]
5/Gmail comment) Select all mail in a label, re-label them, remove the old label; trivial.
Posted Oct 21, 2012 11:13 UTC (Sun)
by callegar (guest, #16148)
[Link]
2) Maybe just for photos and music if you do not use nepomuk approach to tagging which puts stuff in its own db.
3) Apart from the fact that using nepomuk your 1b does not appear all that natural, my point is this. Say that you use nepomuk and automatic indexing and that you index all your home. Say that (by mistake, during a file transfer, whatever) for 5 minutes a text file full of very secrete passwords enters your home dir. Can you guarantee me that after you erase that file, your secret passwords are not captured for an arbitrarily long time in some index file?
4) When I was administering machines, this was a nightmare. Having users ending up their quotas all the time.
5) Ok, now try to rescale all those images to 800x600. Or say that you messed a few years, so that for every year you want to do year=year+1. The fact is that if you go tags currently you loose scripting and automation. Furthermore, if the tags are in the files (like for photos, music), rewriting tags currently means rewriting an arbitrary large number of huge files to update the tags.
So, I am not saying that tags are necessarily bad. I am saying that they are extremely immature and that trying to /force/ people to use something that is immature (or even giving it as a default) often backfires. Like the gmail labels that no-one I know uses (google is anyway quite good at searching inside messages) or the crazy management of photos on android phones, where everything is shown together even if it comes from 4 different cameras and is copied in 4 different dirs.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 8:00 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (45 responses)
Good grief, people do love to whine these days, don't they?
I'm convinced that nobody here has actually tried Plasma Active on a tablet, yet they all know it's a horrible idea that will never fly. I guess it gives people satisfaction when they slag something, makes them feel superior to the people who actually created something, somehow.
I haven't tried it either, but I'll be putting it on an old exopc tonight and give it to my daughters to play with. They loved the previous incarnations, actually, and liked it much better than Android on those tablets.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 8:22 UTC (Tue)
by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:54 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
People should keep an open mind and welcome experiment. Give it a try, have some out-of-the-way fun some time. Stop posting "observations" that basically say "will never work, how could they be so stupid to do that".
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:31 UTC (Tue)
by efraim (guest, #65977)
[Link] (41 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:54 UTC (Tue)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (28 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:24 UTC (Tue)
by efraim (guest, #65977)
[Link] (24 responses)
I don't use "loads of people" argument. I use "loads of people found it useful" argument. Though this argument will probably fall on deaf ears, try to consider why different operating system came to the same hierarchical storage method - historically there is nothing linking FS implementation in DOS, UNIX and Mac OS classic yet they all have arrived to the "file system" idea. So maybe, just maybe, it's not an implementation detail, what's with all those systems implementing it without sharing a single line of source code.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 13:31 UTC (Tue)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (22 responses)
Not to argue the merits or lack thereof of UI theorists and their, er, highly fertilizing output, but... You are spouting BS. DOS has introduced hierarchical filesystems in 2.0, which was essentially a v7 lookalike welded on top of CP/M clone. It *was* a Unix clone, wrt file-related interfaces. I suggest you to look at the file-related APIs in DOS 1.0 - those are copied from CP/M. FCB junk. 2.0 and later had normal file descriptors, chdir(), pathnames, etc. FS layout had been different (and v7 filesystem would be very painful on floppies with not enough RAM to cache the metadata), but the idea itself had not been independently created - it had been an explicit copy. I'm not familiar with the history of MacOS interfaces, but I very much doubt that it had been independent development there. Hell, it wasn't independent on Unix either, but there it was more that the whole thing started around the work by the core Multics filesystem developers after Bell Labs had pulled out of Multics project.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:00 UTC (Tue)
by efraim (guest, #65977)
[Link] (21 responses)
Anyways, nice chat, see you.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 17:20 UTC (Tue)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (4 responses)
So no, I don't think they bothered to nick actual v7 source. But that definitely had been a (trivial) reimplementation of existing interface.
It's about a man-month of work to implement and such reimplementations had been done quite a few times. Including initial debugging, enough to make it mostly usable, if not quite safe. In their case I'd expect the most PITA to have come from making it play nice with the preexisting pile of garbage (FCB syscalls).
If your point was that hierarchical filesystems had turned out to be useful enough for a lot of systems to reimplement them - sure, that's true, but what the hell does that have to do with independent anything? If we are talking about bitty-box parodies on OS, might as well bring Amiga - at least there it really seems that influence might have been not entirely from Unix (I don't know the TRIPOS history well enough to tell, but at least in that case a direct influence from Multics is plausible).
Since late 60s it had been fairly common. And it's simple enough to describe and implement by such description, at least in the basic forms[1]. More to the point, a lot of software depends on having that available, so not implementing a hierarchical fs means serious self-inflicted PITA in porting and redesigning user interfaces. The tricky part is maintaining a sane directory tree layout, but "let's not bother with that" is a lousy answer - all attempts so far seem to have been sucky. FWIW, I'm very sceptical about the tags-based approaches - the problem is real, but I don't think it's solvable that way...
[1] Once you have to deal with the UCB bad trips (cross-directory renames, handling of dangling symlinks, etc.) the things get more hairy, of course, but that's a separate story.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 19:37 UTC (Tue)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (1 responses)
Even the Apple II had a hierarchical file system with an OS that was not an obvious Unix knockoff. It is reasonable to say that in the early 1980s, hierarchical file systems were simply an idea whose time had come.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:01 UTC (Tue)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link]
I would be, if you replaced the date with mid to late 60s.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:06 UTC (Tue)
by rmini (subscriber, #4991)
[Link]
Posted Oct 21, 2012 23:06 UTC (Sun)
by efraim (guest, #65977)
[Link]
If those systems were UNIX-derived, it would not say much - after all they'd inherit the implementation together with source code or at least API design.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 22:51 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (15 responses)
Heck, some of the code even emulated Xenix interfaces to some degree. It was explicitly Unix-inspired.
Posted Oct 18, 2012 22:56 UTC (Thu)
by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
[Link] (14 responses)
MS-DOS 2.0 and some later releases supported changing the option character, typically to '-', resulting in a more Unix-like behaviour. However, command line parsing was left to each program and there was no widely used getopt() function, so this was never universally supported. There was also no convention of a special argument like '--' that would disable option parsing in subsequent arguments
Posted Oct 20, 2012 8:46 UTC (Sat)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Oct 20, 2012 14:35 UTC (Sat)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (12 responses)
I don't know if that would have been a better world but I'd like to think so. At least it would have saved the world years of aggravation dealing with win/dos instability.
Posted Oct 20, 2012 16:26 UTC (Sat)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (11 responses)
* MacOS had not been thrown out and replaced by a Unix derivative until very late in the game.
Posted Oct 20, 2012 19:43 UTC (Sat)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (10 responses)
That may be, this is speculative history fiction after all.
The seeds for MacOS were planted when NeXT was founded and successfully created its successor. Apple might have turned out very differently in the late 80's and 90's has NeXT been done in-house. Lets just change one thing for speculation purposes though.
I can see how 286 protected-mode could have thrown a monkey wrench into the design but Xenix was ported to the 386 and available at the time a switch over could have been made from DOS. Compatibility could have been maintained with Merge for example or some other DOSBox-like technology created. Windows could have been designed for Xenix instead of DOS.
The rest of the systems turned out to be small fry or have fundamental flaws either technically or in the management of the companies supporting them. I don't think the winners and losers of the 80s-90s would have turned out differently but there was an opportunity that was missed.
Posted Oct 20, 2012 21:54 UTC (Sat)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (9 responses)
As for 286, I really wonder what would an OS Intel had in mind for that beast look like. Some kind of Ada environment, perhaps? Definitely not something resembling Unix...
Posted Oct 21, 2012 15:47 UTC (Sun)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Oct 21, 2012 18:43 UTC (Sun)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Oct 22, 2012 5:13 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (4 responses)
Of course the rest of this is high speculation as it wasn't what happened.
Posted Oct 22, 2012 15:21 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Oct 22, 2012 17:12 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 24, 2012 15:49 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 24, 2012 16:27 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Posted Oct 21, 2012 19:07 UTC (Sun)
by viro (subscriber, #7872)
[Link] (1 responses)
AFAICS, there were two critical points in the making of that mess; one in mid-70s, when CP/M had been designed and spread, with resulting traditions of software that assumed it had essentially solitary control of bare hardware and another in the end of 70s, when internal politics in Intel has lead to 80286 design picked. Hell knows what happened in there - at the same time they had an even worse disaster going on (iAPX432) and chances of iAPX286 design to get accepted had to depend on how much could it be internally sold as aligned with iAPX432 one, but details are probably impossible to reconstruct by now.
Posted Oct 22, 2012 5:17 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Posted Oct 16, 2012 14:07 UTC (Tue)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
At the moment directories are being done away with in very restricted devices (tablet is no pc). Seems to working out.
I don't see the relation to a tablet and productivity applications. I'd assume you'd do more data entry in something like that, which is pretty annoying if you have to do that with an on screen keyboard.
In any case, you mention "deaf ears", while at the same time calling things "toy" without (it seems) having tried it. I find it a little bit ironic.
When the iPad was introduced, the presentation made clear that it was made for only a few use cases. It (iPad) is not a big smartphone, nor is it meant to replace a laptop or a pc. So don't expect things to be the same, at least in the iPad that was not the intention (I guess that is also the reason that iPad is selling better than Android tablets.. though never used a iPad/Android/Plasma tablet).
Posted Oct 16, 2012 14:01 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (1 responses)
And the result of this is that the Play store contains a wide variety of extremely popular applications that provide a real file manager, because in practice not having one is completely hobbling.
Possibly - even probably - this is in large part because existing implementations of the idea suck, but that certainly gives rise to a reasonable doubt that some new implementation is going to solve all of the problems.
Does anyone know if there's a desktop build of the Files application that we can try? I found this: http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Active/Installation#Insta..., but there's a plethora of confusing options and it's not clear what images (if any) have been updated for PA3.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 11:35 UTC (Wed)
by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
[Link]
And still, I only use file managers (on Android) when I have to transfer files between apps that are (buggily IMHO) not prepared to transfer them back and forth (in the last months, the audiobook player and dropbox)...
Posted Oct 16, 2012 23:53 UTC (Tue)
by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
[Link]
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.metago....
(android file manager app)
exists, is pretty popular, and even *sells*.
The use case that made it necessary for me was the gmail client's long refusal to let me "save" attachments. I knew it had to be downloading them somewhere to open them in whatever preview app used (Adobe, etc), it just refused to show you where it put them, and make sure you could save them for later (esp useful if you have spotty data reception).
That said, I don't reject Aaron's ideas out of hand - I'm really looking forward to the KDE tablet, put the problem is usually apps that decide "the user doesn't need this, they have the cloud" or something dumb, and the only way to get to stuff is via the good ol' filesystem.
Assuming KDE let's you find everything, and let's you open files in programs you're not "supposed to" (e.g. binary files in gVim or some other "why would you do that" type of thing that I occasionally do have to do!), then I'm good..
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:58 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 10:28 UTC (Tue)
by efraim (guest, #65977)
[Link] (1 responses)
I probably assume too much about others' motivations, but I think this casual dismissal is the reason for so negative a reaction.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:50 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
I mean, when you get down to it, what's the difference? I need to navigate to /home/boud/doc/rpg/current_campaigns/ysella_and_moyri/2nd_year/ to save a file called 03.txt because it's the 3rd write-up of the campaign where the players are using the Moyri and Ysella character sheets in our regular role-playing game which is something I write, not something I code (code goes in /home/boud/src -- with a similar hierarchy -- no wait, code I write goes into /home/boud/prj, src is for the source of other projects.)
That's just the same thing as tagging, when you get down to it.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 19:58 UTC (Tue)
by flack (guest, #87247)
[Link] (7 responses)
You know,this line of reasoning has puzzled me ever since KDE4 came out: How exactly is it that the number of files on someone's desktop is somehow an indication of whether a) the desktop is useful or b) the user knows how to use filesystems?
I mean, I code for a living and manage a number of repos with thousands or tens of thousands of files in them, and the are organized in a sane and useful way. But that doesn't mean that my desktop (on Win, on Mac OS, and on KDE) isn't full of random crap. Attachments from emails, downloads, funny pictures I found somewhere, links to programs (on Win at least), it's all in there and for anybody but me it looks like random chaos, but it's not.
And from what I've seen in the usage patterns of the less computer-savvy, it's basically the same: desktop is for random crap that doesn't fit anywhere else, frequently used documents/programs, or urgent stuff. Just because it looks messy to you, that doesn't mean that the desktop's owner doesn't know what he's doing.
I'm not saying taking away file system access is wrong in all cases, but the perceived disorder of desktops is not a very solid justification for doing so.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:54 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (6 responses)
Maybe yet another sign is the manual for my very first PC (Spring Circle Super Turbo XT with _eight_ Mhz!). I kept the manuals because they are so cute: they explain file systems the unix way, including the /dev /bin/ /usr /tmp etc. division. It had nothing to do with the way MS-DOS worked, except, as Viro said earlier, that it showed where the dos file system was a copy from, without the manual writer showing any understanding what directories were for.
Way back, 27 years ago I took /bin to be the location for deleted files, and moved everything I didn't need there.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 15:56 UTC (Wed)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link] (5 responses)
And I always thought people doing that was an urban legend! :)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 16:23 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 16:36 UTC (Wed)
by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 18:42 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:07 UTC (Wed)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link] (1 responses)
Who is asked to write the manual: The one who understands how things
Posted Oct 17, 2012 22:56 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Oct 16, 2012 14:06 UTC (Tue)
by kugel (subscriber, #70540)
[Link]
Using a device which doesn't support this and requires me to make up tags for all my files sounds very unappealing to me.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 14:10 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted Oct 16, 2012 11:06 UTC (Tue)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
I would probably hate this (which may be why I've never found tablets useful.) However, the KDE team are wise enough to realize that tablets and desktops are different. So far, they haven't pushed a unified tabletdesktop interface on their users, and for that I commend them.
Posted Oct 17, 2012 3:35 UTC (Wed)
by Tara_Li (guest, #26706)
[Link]
One of the most important releases in a long time
Honest question: how is the new paradigm of "activities" different from e.g. Android "activities" (which even have the same name)?
Activities?
Activities?
I am no expert, but the Wikipedia says that Google published their Android platform on November 2007. The SDK was available then even if the first phones would not come out for almost a year. (Remember the "OpenHandsetAlliance" that appeared as a response to Apple's iPhone?)
Activities?
Activities?
Activities?
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(and reverse: rename file based on tags).
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You'd be surprised what "popular" players will do, but note that I include in this players with built in tag editors of highly dubious quality.
I'll give it another look (it's been a while since I tried one of these), but...
Plasma Active Three released
> In the end it becomes a manual process as I feel obliged to manually verify each choice made by the tagger.
Plasma Active Three released
id3v2 does specify fields for composer, lyricist, original release year, etc.., but many of these are ignored or silently discarded (!) by taggers/players. Ogg comments are just unsuitable for this level of detail, because there's little agreement on what fields can be expected to exist beyond a very basic, limited set.
Plasma Active Three released
> giving it a title based on how the album named it (e.g. "Pirates of Penzance Major General's Song" instead of the correct "I am the very model of a modern major general"), and setting the year to when the CD was released
1. Track as labeled on an album track list
2. Recording, which links all different releases/tracks of the same recording
3. Optionally, there's "work", which collects together recordings of a single work, but can also relate to other works such as the opera.
Plasma Active Three released
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The remaining columns form the tag hierarchy. The first is Genres, the next Artists, and then there is a list of songs grouped by Album, then sorted by number within the album.
As an aside, it is hard to imagine just how worthless this is for classical music. With the exception of iPods old enough to run Rockbox on, the whole line of players is simply useless for classical music. Let's see, I have three recordings of the Goldberg Variations, the two by Gould and one other -- and what does the iPod's cruddy built-in non-free software do? It lumps them all into one, if I'm very lucky, or gives them all the same name and does not differentiate between recordings, otherwise: last I saw it didn't even provide a way to distinguish between composer and performer, let alone multiple performances of the same work. If I'm *very* lucky it keeps the variations within each performance in the right order, otherwise they get jumbled up as well. How helpful. (And as for including things like the opus number(s) of the works, just forget it.)
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It worked forwards _and_ backwards (I was mostly interested in the backwards part, actually).
Besides the homonyms and synonyms, the structure was unequally precise, depending on how many elements I had to organise. Sometimes, the same information was implicit, and sometimes explicit.
Plasma Active Three released
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Plasma Active Three released
Implementation detail
This is not the usual way to do it, but I don't see a special difficulty in having the 'link' commands registering the source in an attribute of the destination, in which case you can answer 'what other tags does this file have?' quite easily.
Another way to do it would be to have a separated database which would register such things.
A find command would work too, even if the answer would be much slower.
Implementation detail
Implementation detail
Plasma Active Three released
Aaron, I'm afraid you have so totally missed the point as to have shot off your own foot. I hope it was a result of haste, and not a failure of insight. I was inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt because as you note, you-all are very far from stupid. Tags have proven really useful in organizing photos and e-mail. It's reasonable to speculate that they might serve as well as an overall organizing method for files of all kinds. It's perfectly sensible to knock up a proof-of-concept organizer based on the idea, and publish it so people can try it out.
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Plasma Active Three released
If I could ask just one thing it would be this: please don't jump to such scathing conclusions based on lack of knowledge. We aren't stupid and we are working very hard on making things that are great to use. Making the sort of blunder you seem to think we have would go against both those things. :)
I think people have been burned so many time by semantic features in other project that the well has been poisoned.
Plasma Active Three released
Plasma Active Three released
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Plasma Active Three released
Computing fails
I'm not sure I can think of an area of computing that has seen such reliable, abject failure.
Come on, try a bit harder. Intelligent agents (supposed to bid for you on eBay)? Mobile agents (supposed to migrate from one machine to the next)? Neural networks? Ontologies? e-Learning? Meta-programming (programs that programmed other programs? Expert systems? Fuzzy logic? The whole artificial intelligence thing? Quantum computing? The semantic web isn't even the worst offender IMHO... although it has been pretty long-lived by now.
Computing fails
Computing fails
Computing fails
Well, there is one thing mobile agents can do much better than RPC: expose your machine to potentially malicious code and perhaps even infect it.
Computing fails
Computing fails
I don't think a self-driving car would qualify as "Artificial Intelligence" as it was understood 20 or 30 years ago. Sure, there are very clever algorithms involved, but there is no learning involved by the part of the machine. Do you think the robot will adapt to driving in e.g. snowy roads unless the algorithms have been programmed to deal with it? It is just that we (meaning Google engineers) have got much better at developing adaptive algorithms.
Computing fails
I expect a self-driving car would have indeed been seen as AI, just like chess playing was. Remember one of the central tenets of AI, as I learned in my AI courses so many years ago: once we get something working and understand how to solve the problem, it's not AI anymore...
Computing fails
Computing fails
Computing fails
> Mobile agents (supposed to migrate from one machine to the next)?
Computing fails
"I haven't used semantic stuff much, but like the idea."
Plasma Active Three released
Plasma Active Three released
"And I use it a lot everyday and integrated it into my workflow"
"Everytime you use amarok and digikam, or evil iTunes and Picasa, and you don't have time to organize precisely in a careful directory hierarchy your files, semantic tags come to rescue"
"SickBeard tags my movies and tv shows, so I don't have to know the file names or what DIMENSION-mSD-LOL-etc is... and XBMC show them happily on my TV and fetches subtitles when the kids need it..."
"I don't have to categorize my email anymore, and when I did I couldn't for the love of me find any old message anyway..."
Plasma Active Three released
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1b) OR put the tags in a plaintext file along the file (the .nfo approach). Works well for videos.
Plasma Active Three released
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That's why it's important to mention those system whose codebase was very different. Like DOS (BTW, as already mentioned, DOS DID have minimal support for FS usage from TSR - the very hairy idea of InDOS flag)
Plasma Active Three released
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Plasma Active Three released
* there had been AmigaOS, which was also not a Unix by any stretch of imagination. Might or might not have died off; hell knows.
* IBM mistake of using Intel's design failure (286 protected mode architecture) would still have happened. Results wouldn't have been any prettier than in real history. By the time Intel has fixed the worst of that it was too late - OS/2 interfaces had been deeply affected by that horror and it was too late to fix them.
* Gary Kildall and his pile of garbage. That's the guy you have to thank for the mess, far more than Gates&co. A lot of bitty-box software had been out there and it had been cheerfully ignoring the nearly inexistent kernel. Porting _that_ to anything resembling an operating system would have been slow and painful.
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Plasma Active Three released
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That's why this:
Plasma Active Three released
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Plasma Active Three released
Way back, 27 years ago I took /bin to be the location for deleted files, and moved everything I didn't need there.
Plasma Active Three released
I will do you a favor and add a bit of context to that story.
Plasma Active Three released
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Plasma Active Three released
are supposed to work, and makes them work, or the one who doesn't, and
mostly gets in the way? No points for guessing right.
Plasma Active Three released
Plasma Active Three released
Plasma Active Three released
I rely on file system heirarchy
I rely on file system heirarchy