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Old 12-01-2012, 03:23 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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Join Date: 11-02-2010
Posts: 151
II

And armsys says there, ""Order" appears 6 times in your above manifesto. IMHO, on the contrary, UR never promotes order per se. UR is an unstructured database, save some basic attributes."
Wrong again. In fact, outliners have been invented to overcome the unstructured db paradigm (= technical realization of piles of paper), promoted e.g. by askSam (but which introduced virtual trees built up on-the-fly, from 6.0 or 6.1 on, and if development had been continued from there, AS would be THE ONE THING today, besides which everything else would pale), and where there is some sort of "order", by the sequence of the sheets of paper = records in the db, but where it's virtually impossible to get some benefit of this order (but where it's extremely hard work to even maintain that order to get even that minute advantage from it, hence "searching" instead of even bothering with the records' / sheets' order.

Outlining, on the other hand - and I've said all this in another forum or even here -, is the electronic way of a) making lists of your sheets, to help you to order them, of b) providing separator sheets (with lists of which sheets lay under the respective separator sheet, and, thanks to the comp power, these lists don't have to be maintained by hand!) in order to make big groups, in order to make these groups manageable, i.e. it cuts up your list of 10,000 items into 100 lists of 100 items, and c) of multiplying this separator sheets into such of several levels - all this has been done, for centuries, with sheets of paper and separator sheets of several color (or paper vs. cardboard, broad paper slips vs. more narrow ones, etc.), or with paper tabs / slips (positioned in more-or-less index-positions, with notes further indexing, etc. - the paper indexes in those lever files some of us always use, are nothing more than a further development of paper slips of all sorts in order to make 10,000 sheets of paper "manageable" even in those pre-comp and pre-lever-files worlds; don't forget, also, cabinet cupboards, with different compartments there being the first level of sorting, and then the paper slips, i.e. the separator sheets, etc. - all these were in use for centuries, and then only came index cards and indexed lever files (where the splitting up into different lever files and the positioning of these onto different shelves are also higher-level groupings / ordering.

Today, with the pc, all this handling and updating has been extremely simplified, also with the pc-generated possibility of duplicating (ok, Xerox was first, but before photocopying, there was hand-written or no copying (if you permit that I leave out the intermediate carbon paper stage) but only SOME of these progs offer cloning, the next step in doc M since it's automatted updating of the copied items.

Now, to advocate that "UR never promotes order per se" is ridiculous, since if you were right, UR today would appear just like AS 1990, when in fact, the CORE idea behind sw of this kind is to put a GROUPING interface upon a flat db (or upon a monster text file), in order to make things accessible NOT only by search (= the db paradigm), but BY CONTEXT (= by ONE of perhaps several possible contexts, i.e., to begin with, and then only come possibly cloning, attributes / tags, or tree-building on-the-fly as in current AS).

So there is a "db" paradigm, and many different db's all compete with their respective sophisticating of search-based functionality; whereas very specialized db's like AS (from 6 on) or UR (from start on) introduce a whole new paradigm: their db's are the data repository only, whereas

IT'S ALL IN THE TREE

and its respective sophistication (seen this way, even AS today is a hybrid, but UR belongs clearly to the it's-all-in-the-tree kind).

Sideline: There has been a discussion spreading from a famous article "outlines might be harmful" or something like that (and pretending that outline use promotes bad, hierarchical thinking, whereas the real thing, the democratic thing, would be wikis (hahaha, written probably by one of those CT advocates that plaster all possible places these last months)). That's rubbish since it supposes the dumbest possible use of outlines, where the user didn't grasp the idea that outlining is far less for subordination and far more for grouping, and then, for grouping of the groupings. Ok, this appears to be "hierarchical" organisation, but it's all about

holding siblings and nephews together,

and disposing of a technical quick-access overlay that holds it all together - why would I always promote, "hold it all as flat as it gets! And when in doubt, use separator lines, instead of another level down there"?
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