I agree with Stephen, if you are into e-Learning, and you listen to one talk this year, listen to this one. He begins his talk with “if you are using a computer or a cell phone right now, please continue.” As he says these words, you initially assume he is about to ask you to turn off your computer and your cell phone. No. Stephen wants you to feel connected. Stephen Downes is no ordinary man.

Larray Seltzer points out that Java lost to Flash and AJAX:

Mostly, in the end, it appears that Java on the client lost out to Flash of all things! (…) It couldn’t even be competitive in the most inessential of tasks.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. You can have the nicest framework in the world, you can have the best arguments in the world, but if you are not providing immediate value to your users, you are dead in the water.

The DOLAP 2006 preliminary technical program is out. Rokia Missaoui and Omar Boussaid have a paper in called “Enhanced Mining of Association Rules from Data Cubes”. There is one paper on wavelets and range sum queries. At this point, we do not even have the abstracts so I will wait before commenting further on the papers.

Fred responded to my recent anti-Semantic Web post by saying that the “Semantic Web landscape is changing.”

I really like Fred’s post. Here is where he agrees with me:

The proof that both RDF and web ontologies are useful is yet to be done.

Here is where we disagree:

Everything is changing, and everything should explode… soon!

I honestly do not see the Semantic Web being about to take off. As Bob DuCharme pointed out, people are doing “ontologies for the sake of ontologies”. This will get old very quickly. If 8 years and millions of dollars was not enough to produce a single remotely useful application, what will it take?

Are semantic web researchers becoming semantic web implementers? I do not see this happening. The papers are every bit as theoretical and as disconnected from real-world problems as they ever were.

Here are some common myths:

• Google is getting worse every day. Only the Semantic Web can save us. (False: Google is not getting worse, it is constantly improving and at an alarming rate at that.)
• Inference engines and ontologies are more sophisticated or somehow more intelligent than current database solutions such as relational databases, data mining algorithms, and so on. (False: Current database technology is highly sophisticated and built on lots and lots of theory.)

Kamel was reviewing some code I wrote and through a question he asked, I realized that some code I wrote would not compile under Visual C++. Further investigations showed that the following is valid under GCC, but not under Visual C++:


#include
using std::cout;
using std::endl;
int main(int argv, char ** args)
{
int a = 7;
int b = 3;
cout << (a and b) << endl;
cout << (a or b) << endl;
cout << (a xor b) << endl;
return 0
}


Can anyone help us out? Is this correct code?

Update: It looks like you can get this result under Visual C++ by including “iso646.h”. It includes the following definitions:

#define and &&
#define and_eq &=
#define bitand &
#define bitor |
#define compl ~
#define not !
#define not_eq !=
#define or ||
#define or_eq |=
#define xor ^
#define xor_eq ^=