On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 2:01 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
Okay, but I still don't understand what it has to do with my "desktop" (which seems to really be "computer"). > "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. Okay, that makes sense and if it were able to gather all of that metadata without me having to enter it maybe it could even be useful... as long as it never queries the internet for that metadata. I don't want to leave breadcrumbs of my activities for evil ISP or big brother to snoop on. Look at a site like Last.fm which logs the music you listen to in order to show you historican listening habits, make recommendations, etc. It could also be used as a tool by a band whose album was pirated on the internet before its release to find out who has downloaded the illegal copy and prosecute them. > 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. Of course I used the term "plagiarized" tongue-in-cheek, I don't really think anyone is trying to create a counterfeit version of Vista, and there are only so many ways to show things on a computer screen. Generally KDE<4 looked like Windows 95, KDE4 looks like Vista, Gnome looks like Mac OS < X, XFCE (before latest version) looked like Mac OS X, etc. and I understand that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. :)
