Slashdot Mirror

I like the idea behind Instagram, but not the proprietary nature of it. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I don't like giving up my rights to work I create. I dislike, as Nicholas Carr termed it, "digital sharecropping" And, of course, now the ads have finally started on Instagram, solidifying my discomfort with it.

But, recently, there's a new program, Pressgram, that's a free iPhone app (with an Android app coming soon, hopefully), which allows an Instagram-like experience, but uploads the photos to my WordPress blog. You can upload them to your WordPress.com blog, or, as I do, to my self-hosted WordPress blog.

So, in my mind, it has all the "good stuff" in Instagram without the stuff I find objectionable.
Worth checking out, if you're bent that way.

Perhaps we are looking this from opposite angles? My concern is that someone will be unable to change their identity, because the biometrics will track them down -- I think you see that as a situation where the biometrics will give "false" information, whereas I see the problem being that a person will be forced to carry old identities with them for the rest of their life. My argument is similar to this blog post about Facebook:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/facebooks_ident.php

Carr has railed about this problem before, and he's still just as wrong as he ever was.

Here's his analysis of Murdoch's first pronouncements on the topic back in April. And here's why he's just as wrong now as he was then.

(I later turned that post into a newspaper column in the country where I live. It's longer and slightly more polished, but more focused on our particular issues, which aren't necessarily germane to the larger debate.)

Here's a link to his blog.

Found using Google, of course.

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/01/the_cassandra_m.php

Nick Carr actually cites that idiot Jeremy Reimer as some authority on his blog page. He won't take comments about it either anymore, once he saw this:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=41095&cpage=216#feedbackAnchor

There's his "expert" in Jeremy Reimer, in action, avoiding any questions that dealt in the material in question, in memory mgt. & more.

(With Reimer being off topic the entire time, and libelling + impersonating others on his webpage & getting in trouble with his ISP and hosting providers for it, threatening others with his forums friends, email harassing them & being caught in it alongside his pal Jay Little from arstehnica, PLUS lying about his abilities (or rather, lack thereof, in avoiding technical question material & others as well)).

So much for Nicolas Carr - another "stir up controversy" know-nothing about a particular field, citing other know-nothings, & trying to pass them off as experts.

See, it all works out because they make it up from the interest on the money that they don't have to pay out to adwords accounts that aren't over $100. Kinda like how a bank makes money.

Actually there was some other article I read recently about how much Google probably makes off of that, but I can't find it now.

What the authors have done is to define the "fair-use economy" so broadly that it encompasses any business with even the most tangential relationship to the free use of copyrighted materials. Here's an example of the tortured logic by which they force-fit vast, multifaceted industries into the "fair use" category: Because "recent advances in processing speed and software functionality are being used to take advantage of the richer multi-media experience now available from the web," then the entire "computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing industry" qualifies as a "fair-use industry."

The numbers aren't pulled out of thin air, but the methodology to arrive at their numbers is ridiculous. To include all broadcast media, computer hardware and software, telecommunications, and even manufacturers of WIRE in this list shows how far they will reach to come up with this fantastic number. It's Fair Use fanboi-ism to an extreme.

Nick Carr's blog, outlines how ridiculous their numbers are.

Abuse on wikipedia is systemic and ridiculous. The number of people who have been through it are numerous. The number of reliable, credentialed academics who've been abused, voluminous. The number of times they have covered up their abuses, the number of sheer scandals. (note that they've deleted all of the Essjay material, to cover up and try to hide what he pulled; a long-running scam to abuse and mistreat and demean Catholics).

Wikipedia administrators regularly abuse their power - in any way possible. The caste system of wikipedia is set up this way; gather thousands of mindless edits (and they keep pushing the boundary upwards, for fear that someone might get in and try to fix the system from within). Decry anyone who rightly points out that the system is broken and needs fixing as a "troll."

Abuse and attack; ban and call them a "troll" later; lie about the results of "CheckUser", lie about what a user said and what a metric really means, attack attack and do your best to smear anyone who says anything at all.

This is the method by which wikipedia administrators exist; this is the methodology by which the caste system is enforced. It used to be, way back when, that users were encouraged to seek out another administrator if one was giving them grief for redress: now the policy is against "wheel warring", and no administrator is allowed to undo the action of another for fear of being accused of such, and administrative policies have been changed to enforce this.

In the Wikipedia system, the administrators are the pigs of animal farm - "more equal than others."

Jason Scott put it very well indeed.
So did Jerry Holkins: "a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information."

However, the core of it is worse than that. Wikipedia is not merely controlled by "consensus": it is actively controlled by cliques whose goal is to bias the hell out of articles and keep them in their biased mode. They operate by getting their friends, members of their clique, elevated to admin status and then patrolling these articles, ostensibly for "trolls" but really for anyone who might try to un-bias them. They abuse these newcomers, make false accusations against them, hurl insults and then have their friend ban the newcomer for fighting back. They abuse the prohibitions on "multiple reversions" like a game; instead of a real consensus, all you have to have is one more guy than the opposing viewpoint and you completely control the damn article - and since you have a sympathetic admin on your side, you can have them block the new user for "edit warring", which comes in real handy when you have your buddy bring them to the drumhead trial system called "Arbcom" and say "see he should be banned he's got X blocks already."

Wikipedia is beyond broken - at its best, it is a worthless pile of crap with some whipped cream sprayed on top to try to make it look presentable. At its worst it is a classic case of letting the inmates run the asylum, of the Lord of the Flies syndrome; the worst abusers of the system are those who are "highly-ranked" and "respected" administrators, who operate by fiat, who can and regularly do abuse anyone else without mercy.

The caste system is mercilessly enforced by the admins - without it, they would not have nearly so much power. The whole point of being an administrator of wikipedia is not to make the encyclopedia better but rather to protect your friends, protect your clique, rise in

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/04/open_sou rce_and.php

"Ultimately, that means that open-source software developers are subsidizing the big solution providers at their own expense. Writes Riehle: "If it were up to the system integrators, all software would be free (unless they had a major stake in a particular component). Then, all software license revenue would become services revenue."

i believe programmer should get pay for writing software like book writer. do book author get pay when they do a signing tour(service) and no money on the book they wrote which they spend a lot of time on. OSS will only benefit firm like IBM. IBM love it. It won't matter if IBM sell AIX or Linux, IBM win .

Not all may have been well with Google's Carolinas operation. Take a look at what Nick Carr wrote a couple of months ago about some alleged strong-arming tactics the company used. He actually did multiple posts on this subject, which are all linked to from the bottom of the post. I don't know how to answer BusinessWeek's question, "Is Google too powerful?", but by the looks of it the company allegedly acted like it is.

"Apple and Microsoft had the power. They had the power to give both AA's the finger and work directly with the artists."

If it comes to that, the so-called "content producers" - i.e., record labels and so forth - could cut Apple and Microsoft out and sell direct to the public from their sites. You think they wouldn't like to do that? They can't, because they are so obsessed with the notion that there might any content exchanged anywhere that they wouldn't get value on that they insist on DRM - as if illegal copying were not going on anyway. They haven't yet twigged that DRM isn't working and won't work, because, to use Gutmann's formulation, of the laws of physics. And because they've convinced themselves that they must have DRM, they are forced to look to tech companies to implement it for them, because it's not their area of expertise.

EMI half-realizes this and is dabbling - no more than dabbling - with releasing unprotected content as MP3s.

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/curtains _for_mu.php

If you read to the end of Gutmann's article, you'll find that Microsoft's behavior begins to make sense, once you realize that it's likely that the beast of Redmond only appears to be giving the "content providers" what they want to draw them in. Once they've been drawn in, then - snap! - Microsoft springs the trap. It's then the only conduit for supply of content and can dictate terms to the "content providers".

Your formulation turns it round the wrong way. WTF have Apple and Microsoft got to do with content distribution?

If it comes to that I'd sooner not go to EMI or whomever _either_. I'd like to go direct to the artist. Modern computers bring down the cost of recording and producing and make it possible for people to do it for themselves. Artists can simply distribute their own content from their own websites in unprotected form - so long as they trust their public. A few do. I hope that's a trend that continues.

"What Gilder calls 'petascale computing' is anything but free. The marginal cost of supplying a dose of processing power or a chunk of storage may be infinitesimal, but the fixed costs of petascale computing are very, very high. Led by web-computing giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Ask.com, companies are dumping billions of dollars of capital into constructing utility-class computing centers. And keeping those centers running requires, as Gilder himself notes, the "awesome consumption" of electricity"

As I noted in our commentary at Data Center Knowledge, the power issues with high-density blade server computing has been understood for years. Back in 2002, Liebert and APC and other equipment vendors were developing products that could address huge heat loads. They saw it coming, and sensed a market opportunity. So where were the chip makers? Even as cooling vendors prepared for the results of the huge power and heat loads, little was done to address their source.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched an assault on IBM using a very similar message. Microsoft, said CEO Steve Ballmer, offers "people-ready" computing. "Our innovations facilitate the power of people," he went on, drawing a direct comparison with IBM: "Their pitch is to let IBM help your company with its innovation. Ours is to empower your people to innovate. The two approaches are striking in their contrast." IBM is The Man - the hidden power behind the hegemony of the centralized, spirit-crushing Corporate IT Department - and Microsoft, like Apple before it, is going to help you stick it to him. "People, people, people," boomed Ballmer, in case anyone missed the point.

This happens alot with writing by committees, and isn't unique to Wikipedia. It just gets worse as it gets older. Wikipedia has collected more facts over time, but it reads worse.

There's no cure for this except getting experts and real editors with good language skills, and they're hard to find as anyone who's tried to staff a tech docs team knows. But this runs counter to the "anyone can do it" philosophy.

So no amount of tweaking the processes helps - you simply need skillful people. The ex-Britannica guy (McHenry?) had a good line, which is that Wikipedia can get better, or Wikipedia can keep the utopians - but it can't do both.

I'll only laugh at one of their clever witticisms here: an Encyclopedia should be judged on its worst entries, not its best.

Erm, that wasn't a Register "witticism," it was a quote from the comments to a considerably better-written and much more thought-provoking critique of the grand "Web 2.0" hype:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amor ality_o.php

And, sure, you're right--if you look for the most egregious articles, that's a bad comparison point. But the thing is, if you pick a series of random articles to get a sense of what the median is, do you really think you're going to get stuff which is, on average, written to a higher standard than Britannica? I'm not. Even as a fairly regular Wikipedia user who's impressed by both its scope and depth, I'm not blind to its problems.

I think there's a fundamental misconception in "everyone can be a publisher" philosophy: the belief that editors are superfluous. When readers have the time and subject matter expertise to sort through all the choices that the internet presents to them, that's great, but most readers really don't have that time. They're going to read--and often trust--a limited number of sources. Wikipedia. The Drudge Report. Or the first page of Google results on the search they've entered. (If they used a good search term, that can be better than anything else on the net, but if they didn't...)

For all of the pithy dismissals people have of biased elitists, you would be, and this is not too strong a phrase, utterly batshit to favor a Wikipedia entry or an eloquent rant from the blogosphere over an article on military hardware written by an editor at Jane's or a biography of a president written by a Pulitzer-winning historian.

I'd really like it if Wikipedia did have some kind of "standards with teeth" for product, not just process. An editorial board that could mark articles as having been reviewed. We're not talking about censorship here, but something that embraced the premise that being an expert on a subject matters.

Wikipedia isn't quite 'open source.' Any open source project has a core group of engineers who have the final say. Think Linus for Linux, etc. So there is some final decision making going on, typically by quality engineers. Wikipedia has no quality control at all. As a result much of Wikipedia is wrong, poorly written and inaccurate. The Register article isn't nearly as good as the blog post that inspired it Nicholas Carr writes about the Wikipedia's shortcomings here

*STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO ANDREW ORLOWSKI!*

Okay, that was six words. The point still stands. This "journalist" has never once had anything not-gratuitously-insulting to say about Wikipedia.

Don't give him any page hits. Just go straight to the two articles he's analyzing. The first of the two is the article that the main story probably should have linked to, even though it lacks Orlowski's choice, insulting quotes (and therefore makes it less important, as measured in page hits). The second seems to take Orlowski's "amateurs suck" mentality, but is a good deal more polite about it.

It's clearly benefited Slashdot. The story quality and lack of dupes proves it.

Slashdot editors may be paid, but in no other sense of the word are they professionals (well, technically they are...but you know what I mean). The drivel that is selected for posting here, and the blatant errors and oversights. It really boggles the mind. A random selection mechanism would work just as good.

Anyways, an very intriguing article by Nicholas Carr caught my eye the other day - The amorality of Web 2.0. Agree with it or not (in particular the section The Cult of the Amateur), it's thought provoking and worth a read.

A couple of days ago, Nick Carr posted a fascinating blog entry, titled The Amorality of Web 2.0 that included a fairly devastating assessment of Wikipedia's quality and reliability. Carr's broader point is that free, user-created sites like Wikipedia make it uneconomical to maintain for-fee alternatives, and that we end up getting stuck with amateurish stuff as a result. Here's a brief quote (it's a long piece): "The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die . . . Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening."