Cheers,
Tim

Many thanks for taking the time to write and providing some fascinating linked resources. I couldn’t agree more that computers are at their best when they aren’t constrained to linear processing and I hope the tiny bit I pulled out of a lengthy and inspiring conversation doesn’t lead people to think page animations were all you talked about!

I find Ted Nelson’s work fascinating, at the very least for his four maxims: “most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong”. Although the first and last aren’t great motivation for keeping a blog!

Thanks,
Tim

What I was actually trying to get at (which I probably could have expressed more thoroughly) is that a computer isn’t constrained to the linear format of a book. I mention that conventional prose carries a significant overhead of material which is ancillary to the actual message. This includes things such as defining terms and illustrating concepts that familiar readers have to incur the energy to process. At the same time the piece might also refer to terms and concepts which a reader might be unaccustomed to, causing them to go in search for a definition or skip the message entirely.

I posit instead that we might be better served in taking advantage of the unique properties of computers when we create works of text for them. By this I specifically mean hypertext. Not hypertext as de facto defined by the Web but as originally defined by the coiner of the term, Ted Nelson. He, Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and their numerous followers are my collective inspiration for this idea.

There are particular patterns and technologies that are peculiar to consuming text on computers have yet to be deployed en masse. These include transclusion, stretchtext, bidirectional links, multiple links emanating from the same source and the ability to preserve trails pertaining to specific lines of inquiry. There is also an overarching idea of reducing the size of a given resource in favour of maximizing the number of links between small semantic units (PDF, ironically).

The Semantic Web and Linked Data movements are a step in the right direction for this objective, and those are where I am concentrating the bulk of my attention.

Cheers!

I think I’m right in saying – if you keep your existing contract, you keep your unlimited data – so O2 doesn’t need to get in touch with existing customers.

The end of unlimited data tariffs is for new contracts – i.e. all those of us who went out to get the iPhone 4. I expect it will affect all new data-heavy contracts though.

Cheers,
Tim

As a long-term O2 customer, I was surprised to find this article! They’ve not sent out any literature either by post, email or sms to this effect.

Saying, that, will this affect all mobile tariffs or only iPhone specific ones? I ask only because I am a Bl**kbe**y lover!

I think also, their ‘fair use’ policy is very vague with no literature easily discoverable as to what constitutes ‘fair use’, the rumour is about 500Mb/month.

Cheers

George

Thanks for your comment.

You’ll have to give me a little more detail – what application are you referring to exactly?

Thanks,
Tim

Also, does it work with SQL Server on the back end?

Regards,
Rizmar