This is quite possibly both the funniest and most insightful comment *ever*. Kudos to you joss.

p2p on government networks eh, who would have thought it ? before you know it they'll be insisting on airgaps between the LAN and t'internet..

I suppose we could call this 'speaker net'.

belly lol.. me too ;o)

You've done TheCarp's wife and you get modded insightful ? Only on slashdot ;o)

That's ok, I'm working on AMOT (Ain't a MOisture Trap) right now :o)

Writing mock lobster objects.

Ever had a super nerdy girlfriend ? eh ?

Assembler ! Why aren't you setting the bits with a magnet !

I have some sympathy with your plight, but, a persistent object does not necessarily equate to a file. For example, a persistent object can be stored in a database table. Equally, a persistent object can be stored as multiple files. A persistent object can be stored in non-volatile memory.

Only a persistent object which is wholly stored as a single entity within a traditional filesystem can possibly be equated to a file. Even then, it's fairly tenuous, as the file representation of the object can be manipulated via the filesystem API, whilst the object itself cannot.

I expect Babbage came up against the same attitude. Good job it didn't put him off, eh ! Not to compare this guy with Babbage, but really, does lack-of-user-appeal really mean that it's not worthwhile ? I think this is very interesting indeed. If you consider something like a database application, which needs to persist state changes to disk pronto, then why not let the OS handle this for you ? It needs to be done either way. I just wonder how a generalised object persistance layer can can handle specialised cases such as text storage (where you might want compression to save space at the expense of some speed) and video storage (where the object data is already compressed and you don't want to re-compress it). Actually thinking about video is interesting - what would the equivalent of seeking through a huge video file be if it was stored as an object ? Would the whole video object be loaded into RAM ? Some *very* interesting programming challenges here, which for some people makes it all worthwhile, even if it is ultimately a dead-end commercially, it *can* advance the field.

1) Download DRM-free song from iTunes
2) Open in Notepad, Find and replace email address, Save
3) Share on p2p network of choice
4) ???
5) Profit !!!

The author of the Daniweb article fundamentally misunderstands semantic search, stating that "Search certainly has a key role in helping us sift through the mountains of information and semantic search, where the search engine has a sense of the meaning and context of our search, which is essentially what Mayer refers to when she cites personalization, could be the key to helping us access the data that's most relevant to us."

Actually semantic search is not really about personalisation at all. Personalisation could enhance semantic search, but they are two separate disciplines. I posted on what semantic search really means a while back, but I'll re-iterate here.

say a guitarist wants to search for a guitar amp speaker cabinet that would handle the 100w (that's RMS watts) output of his Marshall amp, and fit in the boot/trunk of his car - let's say it's a Ford whatever... anyhow, the point is that the semantic search app would need to discover the dimensions of the car's boot/trunk from Ford, then it could search for speaker cabs that would fit in the boot/trunk that could handle 100w (that's RMS remember) so, if the dimensions of the boot/trunk are expressed in inches by Ford and the dimensions of the cab are expressed in cm by Marshall/Mesa Boogie/Fender et al, then of course there needs to be a standard scheme to express units of size, and then the conversions are easy. Don't forget, that's 100w RMS...

Today you would need to run multiple searches, holding information (the size of the cabinet v.s. size of the boot/trunk) in your head to complete the task. With semantic search, the computer would do it all for you.