RE: [zzdev] :zz: Purpose of ZZ, since you asked

[Joshua Allen <joshuaa@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Also today's software traps us in Application Hell,
>  worlds that someone else controls, whereas (eg) Unix
>  has no Applications.  I want to make that freedom
>  available to everybody.

Ted, in today's "application hell", I have no
problem finding the win32 patch, articles written by
you, even your HTML transclusion docs.  All of these
seem strangely unavailable to you, in your "free"
world.

As your sig indicates, you don't lend much attention
to what is going on in the world around you.  I think
that this very attitude is what has helped you to
think so far outside of the box and to come up with
some astonishingly creative ideas.  Just a tip, though,
when you criticize the existing way of doing things,
then admit in the same letter that you don't even know what
a DBA is, I think it negates the credibility of your
criticism.

Given that, please do not think that I am slamming zigzag.
It has been along time coming, it is beautiful, and hopefully
it will change the world for the better.  In my opinion,
we'll one day look back and see zigzag as an inflection
point in man's ability to manage information.  And I doubt
you'll run out of ideas anytime soon.


> >because he is the one who makes me provide data in every 
> viewpoint under
> >the sun.  

Matthew, until someone gets around to writing the next
killer app version of zigzag (or maybe incorporating
transclusion into HTML), there are other things that
you can do with real-world tools.  (Ted, you can skip
this part since it might pollute your idea-space :-) )

OLAP is a good way to slice and dice information
in multiple viewpoints.  OLAP cubes provide
information multidimensionally.  Several vendors provide
data-mining tools that allow you to find trends
and patterns in large amounts of data.  These
tools are very powerful and relatively inexpensive,
having increased by leaps and bounds in functionality
in just the past year or so.  Most OLAP and data-mining
tools are only good for database/relational types of
data.  For freetext, documents, snippets of information,
there are collaboration servers such as exchange or notes.
Most of this info is hierarchical, though, and taking
this to a multidimensional level (ala zigzag) is
interesting conceptually.  Still, you can do a heck of alot
with the currently available hierarchical stores.
And of course you have html.  Both of the major document
store vendors (notes and exchange) offer ways to integrate
web with the message stores.  Still primarily hierarchical,
though.  Finally, for ways to handle multidimensional
data in different viewpoints, stay tuned to what is happening
with XML.  XML is just a way to represent data in an
open and easily-interpreted format, but it makes it easy
to represent linkages and relationships, too.  There are
currently tools available from almost every large software
vendor to do information management with XML.  Things happen
really fast, so don't be surprised when people start using
XML to do some zig-zag like things.

-Joshua

All opinions are mine and not Microsoft's.