Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 5:55 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
Parent article: Plasma Active Three released

>Unlike traditional file managers, Files doesn't directly expose the file system.

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.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:42 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] (25 responses)

Nope. In Plasma Desktop, we still have the fully featured "exposes the file system a lot" file manager Dolphin.

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. :)

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 12:53 UTC (Tue) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (23 responses)

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

Posted Oct 16, 2012 13:21 UTC (Tue) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (19 responses)

> I think people have been burned so many time by semantic features in other project that the well has been poisoned.

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?

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 17:49 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (14 responses)

Beagle, Tracker, Dashboard, BeFS, Longhorn, Vista, the new Nautilus (we'll see...), the 10,000 projects and startups for the semantic web, ...

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.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:04 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (2 responses)

Let's say we have find another way that does not work, then. That will not impede that people enamored with the concept keep trying it.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:16 UTC (Tue) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (1 responses)

If the KDE project openly acknowledged the previous attempts in this field that fell short of their intentions, analyzed why those projects did not achieve what they intended, and explained how they will avoid those pitfalls then, speaking for myself, I'd be more optimistic about their chances of success.

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.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 13:46 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Unfortunately this is very common. And I say unfortunately because in software development, like in science, negative results are as important as positive ones. It's my impression that projects that openly admit and discuss where they suck are the ones that get fixed sooner.

It's human nature, I guess.

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 17:44 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (10 responses)

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

Posted Oct 17, 2012 18:49 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

"Intelligent agents (supposed to bid for you on eBay)? Mobile agents (supposed to migrate from one machine to the next)? Ontologies?"

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.

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:23 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Mobile agents are not yet there.

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 :)

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:31 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

I've worked on mobile agents for five or six years and I learned two things: to code really well and that mobile agents are snake oil. There's nothing a mobile agent can do that rpc can't do.

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:34 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

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

Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:41 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Yeah... That's one thing that made it a tough sell to one of the larger Dutch banks who needed a kind of remote monitoring system for basel-N compliance.

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 19:50 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

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.

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.

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:14 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

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

Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:15 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

> Do you think the robot will adapt to driving in e.g. snowy roads unless the algorithms have been programmed to deal with it?

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:

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:54 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

Most of these things

> 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.

> Mobile agents (supposed to migrate from one machine to the next)?

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.

Computing fails

Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:03 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

oops published too quickly.

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.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 19:34 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

"I haven't used semantic stuff much, but like the idea."

This is the first line of the anthem of the semanticalists. Not many people know the second verse.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 12:17 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] (2 responses)

The next verses go like this:
"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..."

:-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.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 20:12 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

Trick question. There is no second verse.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 22:40 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

> Trick question. There is no second verse.

Translation: I will ignore all you wrote because confirmation bias, that's why.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 18:31 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

I think people just like jumping to scathing conclusions...

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 2:20 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

No, people are probing for some hint that the developers have any awareness of what, aside from hierarchy, traditional file systems provide. When it appears there is no such awareness, it worries people: how can you make something better when you don't understand what is good about the old thing? So they probe further, and instead of revelation find scorn. They hoped to find, perhaps, a tiresomely exhaustive list of ways that traditional file systems have been useful and, for each, how the new approach meets that need. Such a list would serve as proof that the problem space was thought about carefully. Scorn makes a poor substitute.

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.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 21:52 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

A virtual +1, Insightful to you, sir.

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.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 17, 2012 3:24 UTC (Wed) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link]

Could I get the Dolphin file manager on my Android tablet? Because for me - I look into my file system quite a bit on my tablet, and use it to manage storing stuff.