On Tuesday 14 April 2009 19:09:38 Paul Hartman wrote: > On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Volker Armin Hemmann > > <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > On Dienstag 14 April 2009, Paul Hartman wrote: > >> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 9:30 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> > > > > wrote: > >> > There's a few keywords to start a search with - nepomuk, sematic > >> > desktop > >> > >> Maybe I just don't "get it" but all of the descriptions of this stuff > >> flies way over my head. Admittedly, as soon as I see the word "social" > >> being applied to my personal files, the red alerts go off and my brain > >> shuts down. :) > >> > >> The idea of the things on my "desktop" being tied to the internet > >> sounds very Microsoft-y and DRM-y and anti-privacy. > > > > it has nothing to do with all the three. > > OK, so I don't understand it at all then (as I suspected). :) The > website presumes the reader knows what is meant by "social" and > "semantic" (and "sesktop", really) mean and apparently I don't know > what they mean by these terms.
The first crowd that really "got" this was Sun. Remember their catch line "the network is the computer"? By that they meant that the machine was simply a part of a greater whole, the network, and the machine existed only to get onto the network and "do stuff" "social" in the context of a desktop is fuzzy feel-good marketing. Almost by definition this will not go down well with gentoo users :-) Facebook, myspace, et al, started this social networking thing as a way for users to interact in new ways. Now we have "tweets" and other assorted rubbish, but that's what those users want. "semantic desktop" - all it means is simply that an indexing engine is smart enough to figure out what your personal data means. It does this by looking at other data and finding patterns that make sense. Much like what Google does, on a smaller scale. Traditionally to use a desktop *you* had to understand your data and draw your own connections in your head, and know which apps did what. It's easier to explain by dropping down one level to the shell: You are trying to remember something about a song, and you think it is related to "November". You can look for files with that name so you use locate or locate -i, or maybe even find. To look inside files you use grep, but if it's a Word document you likely have to start word and try Ctrl-F. The idea is that this is useless crap that machines do well, and you should concentrate on dreaming up cool new ideas instead. So you ask a semantic desktop about "songs regarding November" and it finds the email you sent last year to your sister where you pasted the lyrics, so the desktop tells you "It's November Rain by Guns n' Roses, you have a FLAC and an mp3 copy plus lyrics so shall I 1) play the track 2) attach it to a mail 3) burn it to CD or 4) something else? [and by the way you have a typo in the lyrics - the word "cool" should be "cold"] That's a contrived example that I made up but you get the idea. No-one knows what users are going to want their computers to do in the future, just like IBM had no idea in the 50s that the internet, google and facebook were coming down the line. The semantic desktop is one man's idea of giving users something generically very useful that they can dream up uses for, and nepomuk is an implementation of an indexing engine. > >> To me, and I say this as a KDE4 user, the KDE devs have blatantly > >> plagiarized the Vista desktop and the Mac OS X control panel and put > >> it all together on top of Qt4. :) > > > > if you ignore the fact that kde4 came before vista and osx itself is > > nothing but a bad copy. > > Well, KDE 4.0 was released 2008. Vista final was released in 2006. > Even if you go back to the first technical previews of KDE4 it was > around the time when Vista look and feel was already made. And KDE > didn't look the same back then as it does now. In my opinion KDE has > looked more like Vista with 4.2 than previous versions. I don't think > it's a bad thing -- I like the look of KDE 4.2 better than previous > versions. I'm only saying that to me it looks like they copy Vista :) > > I don't use Mac at all (not since the black & white monitor days), but > when I recently saw OS X, the control panel looked and worked just > like the KDE 4 control panel. I don't know how long ago Mac had this > design. If you say Apple copied KDE then I'll believe you. More likely KDE-4, Vista and Mac are blatantly ripping off each other's good ideas. This happened with the Xerox Star, Windows 2 and the earliest Macintoshes. Then it happened again with Windows3/98, KDE-1/2 and later Apples, was taken to the extreme with KDE-3, XP and MacOS-9. Users want shiny bling, transparent 3D clocks look cool and suddenly lots of users want it, so it gets developed. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
