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KDE's Nepomuk Doesn't Seem To Have A Future

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  • Originally posted by liam View Post
    I worded my responses carefully so as to avoid people inferring just what you did.
    In large metro areas trains are still heavily used (well, in the northeast at any rate) but pretty much everywhere else cars have just utterly supplanted trains as the primary people mover.
    In the U.S. Not so much in Europe, where the train system is much more developed.

    Comment


    • Originally posted by russofris View Post
      Quite the opposite. I'm saying it was defined in the 80s, and hasn't changed. Again, my analogies are perfect, and you continue to reinforce them. Trains, planes, and automobiles. Three distinct modes of transportation that will never replace each other. Each with it's own use, purpose, and user interface. If MS were to make a train or aircraft, it would have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, turn signal, and break pedal, and release it under the guise of UI convergence. Pilots and engineers would be infuriated and bewildered in the same manner as Metro Desktop users.

      We're in the 'post rail' era, yet trains aren't going anywhere and continue to evolve independently of the other options. We're in the 'Post Automobile' era because we have taken flight, yet automobiles continue to evolve independently of aircraft. We're in the 'post PC' era, but that doesn't mean that the PC is done, and that there needs to be some convergence for the sake of convergence.

      I'm loving the trolling BTW. Pretty awesome. I love how you argue my point for me, feign ignorance, and pretend to not know what a PC is. That's pretty cool. Alternatively, you might just be a UI developer at MS/Canonical and have imbibed from the kool-aid fountain of incompetence.
      Since you're refusing to provide me with a definition I'll provide my own: a PC is a computing device that has at least two input methods. So, a tablet, and potentially a phone, both meet the criteria.
      The fact that you keep calling your analogies perfect is... odd. Analogies are, by their nature, decidedly not perfect. They work over some subset of characteristics in which similarity exists. If they are perfect they are no longer analogies and their referents are identical. I don't think you're trying to say that a PC is a train.
      Also, you said helicopter not plane. Helicopters and "planes" (assuming planes as they exist now) DO serve different purposes (the big difference occurring with takeoff/landing). ALSO, you continue to use the word "never"n which is really what struck me to begin with. I simply don't know how you can make such absolute pronouncements when the truth is far from clear. What is certain is that the use of trains has become more specialized in certain areas. It used to be primarily a people mover now it is mostly used for transporting goods (afaict). Planes themselves have also been repurposed as goods transporters in addition to moving people. Things adapt despite their original uses. That is exactly what's happening with mobile devices. Right now, IMHO, they aren't quite powerful enough but they are amazingly close (a more highly clocked a7 might be powerful enough). I'm not trolling. I think you are wrong.

      Comment


      • Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
        In the U.S. Not so much in Europe, where the train system is much more developed.
        Again, that's why I said in certain places. Trains make perfect sense in small, very densely populated areas (like the northeastern us) but everywhere else cars/aircraft are the answer.

        Comment


        • Originally posted by liam View Post
          Again, that's why I said in certain places. Trains make perfect sense in small, very densely populated areas (like the northeastern us) but everywhere else cars/aircraft are the answer.
          Or for medium distances when flight "overhead" (security, boarding, disembarcation, baggage claim) are a significant part of the travel time.
          E.g. a train connecting two major cities at a distance of 200km can do the trip in an hour and even less. A flight would not be faster but considerably less convenient.

          Cheers,
          _

          Comment


          • Originally posted by anda_skoa View Post
            Or for medium distances when flight "overhead" (security, boarding, disembarcation, baggage claim) are a significant part of the travel time.
            E.g. a train connecting two major cities at a distance of 200km can do the trip in an hour and even less. A flight would not be faster but considerably less convenient.

            Cheers,
            _
            When I was in Europe with my family I recall flights actually being cheaper than trains (between Italy and Belgium for instance). I've been really disappointed in how expensive trains are in general. I'm still a fan of high speed rail between major cities b/c they are so efficient.

            Comment


            • I use Nepomuk and think the ability to add comments, tags, and ratings to arbitrary file that's quickily and "easily" searchable quite useful, especially since you can move the files around without breaking any of the associated metadata.

              Two problems I see with nepomuk. The first is that Dolphin doesn't provide an easy way to search via tags or comments or ratings. You have to figure out some baroque code query to punch into the address bar to use this feature. The ability to save "smart searches" would be awesome (or is this available and I don't know it?)

              The second is that more software needs to make good use of nepomuk. A plugin for Amarok was recently developed but it's far from ideal and I wouldn't use it. Bangarang is no longer being developed it appears, and what else is there? Gwenview is the only core piece of KDE software making decent use of Nepomuk.

              Content searching, eg of pdfs, using nepomuk is about a million times less useful than using Recoll, which I'm using and love. If there were a better "advanced search" mode in Dolphin it might be useful but just getting a pile of results totally unfiltered for relevance or anyhing is pretty useless.

              The idea behind the semantic desktop is brilliant and I hope something like nepomuk stays around in kde for the indefinite future.

              Comment


              • Better than spending 6 Months tagging gigabytes of files...

                Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
                Yeah, I am sure most users would love to spend an hour waiting for grep to scan through gigabytes of files. And how, exactly, do you expect to use grep on a binary word processor document or image metadata? The point of modern search programs is that they use a index so you don't need to scan each file line-by-line one-at-a-time.
                Code:
                for i in $(find -iregex '.*\.jpe?g'); do exiftool $i | grep 'D200'; done
                Of course, that is kind of a silly example. However, when you have maybe 100,000 images from several photographers, some from digital cameras, like the Nikon D200 in the example, some from scanned prints, some from scanned slides/negatives, etc. programmatic (sp?) searching using exiftool, dcraw, imagemagick, and bash/zsh are very useful, though not self-evident by any means. While finding a copyright line in exif data is simple, finding pictures of racoons in trees by looking for images with an average color balance within a tolerance of a known sample image is far from exact.

                However, until I am able to go through all the images and delete the garbage and tag the rest, there is no way for Nepomuk/Baloo/whatever to index anything that I cannot find other ways. Add to that the inability to effectively and simply share tags and do automated, iteratively corrected tagging of various image and text based files; and it seems to be quite limited.

                As far as "binary" documents, the various and sundry variants of grep make life easier:
                • bzgrep
                • deepgrep
                • egrep
                • fgrep
                • grep
                • lzegrep
                • lzfgrep
                • lzgrep
                • msggrep
                • orc-bugreport
                • pcregrep
                • pgrep
                • plugreport
                • wcgrep
                • xzegrep
                • xzfgrep
                • xzgrep
                • zegrep
                • zfgrep
                • zgrep
                • zipgrep

                since most binary formats are simply zip/gzip compressed text (dtf, xml, json, yaml, ini, csv, tsv, etc.) based files.

                Further, there are almost countless other uncommon but significant file formats that Nepomuk has no knowledge of and cannot index. For those into cartography, grep can tell me which ESRI shapefile(s) might have info about Grenada, CA. nepomuksearch cannot.

                Code:
                [Wed 14/02/19 08:51 UTC][pts/3][x86_64/linux-gnu/3.12.9-2-ARCH][5.0.5]
                <justin@justin-14z:~/downloads/osm_CA>
                zsh/2 1160 % grep "Grenada" *
                Binary file places.dbf matches
                Binary file points.dbf matches
                Binary file roads.dbf matches
                [Wed 14/02/19 08:52 UTC][pts/3][x86_64/linux-gnu/3.12.9-2-ARCH][5.0.5]
                <justin@justin-14z:~/downloads/osm_CA>
                zsh/2 1161 % nepomuksearch "Grenada"
                (Note final blank line.)

                Though it might be possible to use data gleaned from files to generate "fingerprints" and search a global dataset to determine likely tags; this has obvious privacy implications. All told, it seems that while the functionality provided by Nepomuk/Baloo is probably quite useful for many users; it seems to be something that is optional to a basic desktop environment. The KDESDK apps are not core; neither should search be.

                Oh, and as far as waiting for find/grep to do their thing... That is what multitasking is all about... multiple konsole tabs, multiple firefox tabs, kmail, akregator, kpat...
                Last edited by justinzane; 19 February 2014, 05:05 AM. Reason: clarification

                Comment


                • Originally posted by liam View Post
                  I worded my responses carefully so as to avoid people inferring just what you did.
                  In large metro areas trains are still heavily used (well, in the northeast at any rate) but pretty much everywhere else cars have just utterly supplanted trains as the primary people mover.
                  Yes exactly: in some places, for some uses (transporting people), in terms of market share, far from disappearing.
                  Hey, even in the US, freight transportation by rail is increasing in volume and market share right now.
                  Hence, train not disappearing.
                  I'm not even sure about the supplanted. Were people traveling as much before the car? I don't think so. The car has increased the transportation market, enabling new uses. In such case, it is not supplantation, but independent growth in the same market.
                  Do people take the car more than the train: yes. Do people take the train less than they took the train before the car? Much less so.

                  And the analogy seems to match pretty well what is happening to PCs (laptops and desktops).

                  Comment


                  • OCR? Really?

                    Originally posted by molecule-eye View Post
                    Content searching, eg of pdfs,
                    For "proper" PDFs, those that are generated by document editing/creation apps from libreoffice.org Writer to Adobe FrameMaker, absolutely. Unfortunately, I have seen **way** too many "fake" PDFs that are noting more than scanned images in a PDF wrapper. I've struggled to get unpaper/tesseract/gocr/ocropus/etc. to work effectively on documents that I have carefully scanned. I would make me most surprised, and quite thrilled, to find that Nepomuk was able to effectively OCR "bogus" PDFs.

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by justinzane View Post
                      Oh, and as far as waiting for find/grep to do their thing... That is what multitasking is all about... multiple konsole tabs, multiple firefox tabs, kmail, akregator, kpat...
                      Multitasking has nothing to do with it. Multitasking lets you do other things while you wait, but it does not reduce the wait in any way.

                      Caching reduces wait. Just like firefox maintains a copious ram and disk cache, and kmail stores local copies of imap mails, and akregator stores local copies of RSS data.

                      For searching purposes, it is called indexing.

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