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Ok, let me see if I understand this.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that can't have proofs or in depth reference materials, because more detail is out of scope for really no reason.

But, they can somehow try and turn wiki into another google or a facebook.

I tried it briefly and didn't like it at all. It's still light-years behind Google.

This morning, I was talking to a friend about engines, and he told me about the Wankel engine. I looked for "wenkel engine" (I couldn't spell it better than that) in Wikia and it gave me one result only, which wasn't related at all. I went to Google, and the first thing: "Did you mean wankel engine?". Google is always my friend whenever I want to know how to spell something.

Ok, then I searched for "wankel engine" in Wikia and Google. In Google, the first result was the Wikipedia article for the Wankel engine, which in at least 50% of what I search is what I want. The fifth result (still visible without scrolling) was a Wikipedia article about the Mazda Wankel engine, which is the main commercial implementation of this engine, it's "the engine that made Mazda famous" (according to Wikipedia page). Not to mention that Google showed me also two drawings and one picture of the engine before the URL results. Very useful.

Now, enter Wikia. I scroll through the first page of results with 10 URLs, and none of them is Wikipedia! And this considering that Wikia is from the creators of Wikipedia and it's advertised as such! If I wanted lots of irrelevant results I could just go back to Altavista...

And what the hell is "people matching wankel engine" with some pictures of some random people. Why would I want that if I'm not looking for people? At least show me a picture of Felix Wankel (thanks again Google for that).

Unless they improve it drastically, I don't think anyone will use it over Google.

... before blasting the effort like the top level story poster.

BTW, last night I looked at their technical information site: http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia

Some interesting stuff that I did not know about in their "Semantic lab".

Anyway, it is at least an interesting idea - time will tell how it works out for users, and as a business.

Why the big changes with D&D history?

I contribute to the Named Demon Project. Since the Abyss is the major change in the planes, are all the humanoid demon's going to become unique devils? What can we salvage from the Abyss?

I know I can add pieces back into the system for my home brew games, but paraphrasing a samurai quote 'treat little things with great importance'...I know the designer knows his stuff when he tosses in little details referencing the history of the game, eg easter eggs. Erik Mona and James Jacobs did a great job with "Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss". They combed the entire history of D&D and fixed the inconsistencies for the Abyss. I think their work has been tossed out the window for these new 4e changes.

It's Miss Saigon , not Miss Peking.

Any chance we can swap them both out for Miss Piggy?

But seriously, wasn't it almost exactly 100 years ago that humanity learned an important lesson about mixing helium and airships?

Doesn't helium have the unfortunate property of being, oh I don't know... extremely flammable?

How did you write all that and not link WikiFur once? Admittedly, we don't tend to store the fan fiction, just reference it.

How did you write all that and not link WikiFur once? Admittedly, we don't tend to store the fan fiction, just reference it.

I was wondering when we'd come up. Of course, we give all our money to charity.

Where are the commercial game ports for Linux? No one wants to make them, obviously, save for the FPS crowd (and there's only an Unreal Tournament for Linux because Epic passes the buck to Icculus to get the job done, not because they have the in-house talent to do it themselves). There are a few commercial games for Linux, yes, but only a few, and there's very little variety between them. In the open source world we have a few good games (the majority of them being FPS's, what a surprise), Battle for Wesnoth if you like strategy games (turn based ones, that is). Then we have the unfortunate, ugly ripoffs like "Secret Maryo Chronicles," and other games that look like they were developed for a C64. Plenty of selection, not a lot of quality.

The following publishers develop comemrcial linux games:

http://www.pompomgames.com/
http://www.garagegames.com/
http://www.introversion.co.uk/
http://frictionalgames.com/
http://sillysoft.net/
http://www.basiliskgames.com/
http://www.guildsoftware.com/
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/
http://www.rune-soft.com/
http://grubbygames.com/
http://www.caravelgames.com/
http://www.planewalkergames.com/
http://www.graalonline.com/

There are also the high profile ones such as neverwinter nights, the doom and quake series, unreal, etc.

There are many high quality independant titles such as neverball, you mentioned wesnoth, crimson fields, flight gear, torcs, the spring project, total annihilation 3d, tecnoballZ, powermanga, tile racer, pingus, clonk, freeciv, ultimate stunts, planeshift, scorched3d, VDrift, silvertree (not complete, but being created by the wesnoth guys so likely will not be vapor), ufo: alien invasion, scourge, etc.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://torcs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.flightgear.org/
https://icculus.org/neverball/
http://ta3d.darkstars.co.uk/
http://linux.tlk.fr/games/
http://tileracer.model-view.com/
http://pingus.seul.org/
http://www.clonk.de/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/
http://www.planeshift.it/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://vdrift.net/
http://www.silvertreerpg.org/
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
http://scourge.sourceforge.net/

Many of these are very impressive independently made free games. Perhaps they lack the multi million dollar marketing budget and won't make your geofrce 8800 gtxz 45 x super elite ultra melt, but theya re *fun* games, and they are numerous. Also keep in mind this publisher and free game list is only what I could find in 1 hour of searching.

Then there are freed older commercial games such as warzone 2100, homeworld, descent 1 and 2, doom, quake, etc.

Lets not stop t

Wikia has been something of a dud. What Wikia really does is monetize fancruft. Their big wikis are for Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], Everquest, Marvel comics, Yu-Gi-Oh, and similar subjects. They're the resting place for fan articles thrown out of Wikipedia.

Wikia's search engine, based on the user demographic they have now, is going to have great coverage of furry fan fiction.

There's already a good manually-updated search engine. It's called Open Directory. It's quite useful as a data source for answering the question "what is this web site about"? It tends to run months behind changes to the web, since it's manually updated. While not many people query DMOZ manually, it's used by Yahoo, Google, etc. to get some basic information about a web site.

As an example of how great Wikia search is going to be, Wales suggested searching for "Tampa hotels". The major search engines return too many bottom-feeder reseller and directory sites for searches like that. As I point out occasionally, we've already solved that problem over at SiteTruth, which looks for business legitimacy. Type in "Tampa hotels" there and watch it push the marginal sites to the bottom of the search results. We have that one handled.

Wikipedia works because people are willing to do substantial work for free for a non-profit organization. That doesn't work for a commercial business. You can get people to write about themselves (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) but beyond that, "crowdsourcing" doesn't go very far.

Wikia has been something of a dud. What Wikia really does is monetize fancruft. Their big wikis are for Star [Trek|Wars|Gate|Craft], Everquest, Marvel comics, Yu-Gi-Oh, and similar subjects. They're the resting place for fan articles thrown out of Wikipedia.

Wikia's search engine, based on the user demographic they have now, is going to have great coverage of furry fan fiction.

There's already a good manually-updated search engine. It's called Open Directory. It's quite useful as a data source for answering the question "what is this web site about"? It tends to run months behind changes to the web, since it's manually updated. While not many people query DMOZ manually, it's used by Yahoo, Google, etc. to get some basic information about a web site.

As an example of how great Wikia search is going to be, Wales suggested searching for "Tampa hotels". The major search engines return too many bottom-feeder reseller and directory sites for searches like that. As I point out occasionally, we've already solved that problem over at SiteTruth, which looks for business legitimacy. Type in "Tampa hotels" there and watch it push the marginal sites to the bottom of the search results. We have that one handled.

Wikipedia works because people are willing to do substantial work for free for a non-profit organization. That doesn't work for a commercial business. You can get people to write about themselves (Myspace, Facebook, etc.) but beyond that, "crowdsourcing" doesn't go very far.

There's a site that hosts Wikis called Wikia as well. (Yes, it's owned by Jimmy Wales, as well).

So what's going to happen to those Wikis now that Wikia is turning from a MediaWiki host site to a search site?

One of the first lines of defense in the early days will be use of a community (wiki) generated whitelist of sites to crawl. We will want to work outward from there, but basically the first thing is for us to assess "look, what are the most important must-have sites on the net" and crawl them. One thing that the mainstream media never seems to report very well, mostly because I think they don't get why it is important, is that we are doing everything here under free licenses. The software GPL, the data we generate under free licenses, etc. The aim here is not just to create a good search engine, but to create it and *give it all away* in a way that I think has a chance to restructure the entire search industry. Well, maybe not, maybe so, but what the hell, it'll be fun to see. :-)

I know that last part of the story was meant as a joke, but... http://virtualbus.info/

(some English info at http://vbus.wikia.com/ , and the Subversion repository is at svn://prv.ilan.pl/virtualbus )

If the Canon A570IS ran a GPLd OS, that would be awesome to modify that so that I can do things that Canon hadn't thought of or doesn't want users to be able to do, like time-lapse, recording RAW, changing the menu system, etc...

I think you're looking for this: CHDK

If the Canon A570IS ran a GPLd OS, that would be awesome to modify that so that I can do things that Canon hadn't thought of or doesn't want users to be able to do, like time-lapse, recording RAW, changing the menu system, etc...

Not GPL, but the CHDK alternative firmware (for the A570 and most other mid/high-end "prosumer" Canon cameras such as the S3) that enable RAW mode and other enhancements for these cameras.

To me it seems like a Fallout veneer instead of actual "Fallout." Like they have these rudimentary ideas of what Fallout is and are trying their best approximation of them.
For example, the BoS. They have repeatedly referred to the BoS as "knights of the wasteland," as if they run around saving humans from evil. The original BoS were nothing like that. From the Fallout wiki: Unlike the chivalrous knights of old, members of the Brotherhood are not interested in justice for the obviously weaker and less fortunate around them, but instead in keeping their secrecy and preserving and developing technology. Their motives are often unclear, and Brotherhood members are not people to be trifled with. It is safe to say, however, that if a group of Brotherhood knights appears to be helping some less fortunate people, their motives are not altruistic. I think people get confused by their ranks as Paladins and assume that's how they operate.

I don't really like how they have incorporated humor, either. Fallout was more irony, a darker sense of humor (e.g., save the vault - get kicked out because you were outside too much. world torn apart by nuke war - save the world by detonating a nuke). What we've seen so far from Bethesda is more slapstick-type humor. Of course that was present a little bit before, but it wasn't the prevailing type.

I think they have really, really missed the boat with their characterization of nuke technology as being sort of just scattered around. Cars did not all run on fusion cells in the FO universe - that one in FO2 was specially modified. So, shooting cars in their nuke fuel cell to make them explode and kill enemies is, well, I don't know what that is besides dumb on a lot of levels. I also think the nuclear catapult is a joke - really, this nuke device can be launched as a weapon at an enemy that's about 10 yards away and the user WON'T get fried, too?

The original 2 FO games were fantastic for presenting the player with tough choices, the consequences of which weren't always clear. That is, you didn't always know which was the "good" choice and which was the "bad" choice. You could easily choose what you thought was a "good" response and have half a town want to shoot you on sight. Bethesda has said many times they do not want to follow this path. There will always be a "good guy" choice/response and a "bad guy" choice/response and both will be easily distinguished from the other. That dumbs-down a bit of the game, IMO.

All of that is to say nothing of the cosmetic stuff that I don't like, either. a) The movement away from turn-based, isometric to 1st person, real-time (TB & iso was a deliberate choice back in '97, not a limitation of technology. That similarity to tabletop RPGs is part of what makes Fallout Fallout.). b) The re-skinning of the supermutants (which are gonna need a hell of a story to even exist in Washington D.C. and "oh, there was another lab" ain't cutting it). c) V.A.T.S. - pointless, as it doesn't actually affect your chance to hit- its an excuse for a "cool" bullet-time animation of your enemy getting blown apart. There are other things I have issues with, but these come to mind.

HOWEVER, this doesn't mean it will be some horrible, non-fun game. Truthfully, it will probably be somewhere along the lines of Oblivion - highly popular, some people swearing by it, others at it. If it was just some generic RPG in a post-apoc setting that uses a tweaked-up version of the Oblivion engine, it would probably be fine. I just don't think it will be a great Fallout game.

JMO, of course. Also, I realize the game isn't out yet, but we are kinda far along in the development cycle for Beth to do a 180 on most of these issues.

Peter is the President of Petoria.

Sun Crusher

I find this quite relevant at this time:
FUUUUUUUUCK! BEEEEEEEEEEEEES!

There is a Mathematics Wiki that seems to accepting proofs, but doesn't have many articles created yet.

If Wikipedia doesn't accept proofs, why not just put them in one dedicated to Math?

CompUSA is shutting down, Best Buy has gone insane ... from now on I'll do my shopping at Buy More.

I think it's a shame that updates to existing subscription games always get left out of these lists.

I play City of Heroes/Villains myself, and this year saw three HUGE updates to the game. In Issue 9, we had a new villain zone released, as well as a new invention system that provides a ton of end-game stuff to do, and an in-game auction house. In Issue 10, we got a major world event and a new hero/villain cooperative zone. In Issue 11 (just released a couple of weeks ago), we have another zone, Ouroboros, that allows heros and villains to complete "flashback" mission for even more end-game action, two new power sets, and a ton of new costume options. And those are just the main features, there have been lots of other little tweaks and new surprises.

The game is a LOT better today than it was when it was released around three and half years ago, and it was really a lot of fun back then. The best part of it is that unlike most other games, all of those expansions were released for no addition cost to the regular subscription fee, and the developers under the new NCsoft banner are busy working as I write this on the next expansion, Issue 12, probably to be released around the end of March or so.

Sorry if I sound like an ad, but they've really done a bang-up job on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Halo 3 and playing with the Wii, but those tend to be merely diversions from the game I've been going back to for years now. It may not be the uber-hyped behemoth that other "Games of the Year" are, but personally, I'd rather stick with one that's been consistently interesting and good year after year.

Maybe it will make the list of "Games of the Decade."

I think it's a shame that updates to existing subscription games always get left out of these lists.

I play City of Heroes/Villains myself, and this year saw three HUGE updates to the game. In Issue 9, we had a new villain zone released, as well as a new invention system that provides a ton of end-game stuff to do, and an in-game auction house. In Issue 10, we got a major world event and a new hero/villain cooperative zone. In Issue 11 (just released a couple of weeks ago), we have another zone, Ouroboros, that allows heros and villains to complete "flashback" mission for even more end-game action, two new power sets, and a ton of new costume options. And those are just the main features, there have been lots of other little tweaks and new surprises.

The game is a LOT better today than it was when it was released around three and half years ago, and it was really a lot of fun back then. The best part of it is that unlike most other games, all of those expansions were released for no addition cost to the regular subscription fee, and the developers under the new NCsoft banner are busy working as I write this on the next expansion, Issue 12, probably to be released around the end of March or so.

Sorry if I sound like an ad, but they've really done a bang-up job on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Halo 3 and playing with the Wii, but those tend to be merely diversions from the game I've been going back to for years now. It may not be the uber-hyped behemoth that other "Games of the Year" are, but personally, I'd rather stick with one that's been consistently interesting and good year after year.

Maybe it will make the list of "Games of the Decade."

I think it's a shame that updates to existing subscription games always get left out of these lists.

I play City of Heroes/Villains myself, and this year saw three HUGE updates to the game. In Issue 9, we had a new villain zone released, as well as a new invention system that provides a ton of end-game stuff to do, and an in-game auction house. In Issue 10, we got a major world event and a new hero/villain cooperative zone. In Issue 11 (just released a couple of weeks ago), we have another zone, Ouroboros, that allows heros and villains to complete "flashback" mission for even more end-game action, two new power sets, and a ton of new costume options. And those are just the main features, there have been lots of other little tweaks and new surprises.

The game is a LOT better today than it was when it was released around three and half years ago, and it was really a lot of fun back then. The best part of it is that unlike most other games, all of those expansions were released for no addition cost to the regular subscription fee, and the developers under the new NCsoft banner are busy working as I write this on the next expansion, Issue 12, probably to be released around the end of March or so.

Sorry if I sound like an ad, but they've really done a bang-up job on the game. Don't get me wrong, I love Halo 3 and playing with the Wii, but those tend to be merely diversions from the game I've been going back to for years now. It may not be the uber-hyped behemoth that other "Games of the Year" are, but personally, I'd rather stick with one that's been consistently interesting and good year after year.

Maybe it will make the list of "Games of the Decade."

And one step closer to dating robots

It's a bool that returns true if the person has their personal genome fully decoded:

isVentor() // http://www.jcvi.org/ // Spelled wrong, I know... Maybe this:

isVentor() // is relatively unknown geriatric Jedi http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Halagad_Ventor

I'd do a mass sign-up of the secret list:

http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wpcyberstalking

(as posted in another post, but up here, it'll get more coverage... here goes my karma, watch it slide!)

From TFA. Here it is.

Its likely that a someone held out the white flag and called truce within a few minutes of it being confirmed that the Big Round Thing II was indeed blown up and that the Emperor and Vader were presumed dead.

According to those bits of the Official Continuity that actually make sense (mostly written by Timothy Zahn), what actually happened was that the Imperial forces, demoralised but not yet losing (Star Destroyers are pretty powerful), withdrew in good order. However, without the Emperor's influence, the various leaders started bickering and the fleet quickly fragmented. Some surrendered, some regrouped around various prestigious leaders (especially Thrawn). The Battle of Endor was not the end of the war, which ground on for years, but it was the turning point. Coruscant, the imperial capital, was liberated a couple of years later, and the New Republic was founded five years after the battle. The Imperial Remnant eventually signed a peace treaty with the New Republic about fifteen years later.

Yes, I'm aware I'm far too interested in this stuff.

Look here if you want to know more, but be warned that the Star Wars Expanded Universe is full of crap. They've tried to combine every ghastly third-rate novel and comic book that played but-what-really-happened-was-this and the result is almost incoherent. Palpatine was brought back to life and killed off about a dozen times. The Empire came back and blew up Coruscant. Alien invaders came along and blew up Coruscant. The Empire came back again, and blew up Coruscant. (If you ever find yourself living in the Star Wars universe, don't live on Coruscant.) The Death Star II was operated in secret by the Droid Rebellion... with Star Wars canon, you have to be very firm about where you draw the line; I do so when I stop being entertained by it.

Threepio and Artoo were intended to be the witnesses to the entire saga from the very beginning. As 'droids, they are basically immortal, so long as someone keeps replacing worn out parts. So, who else to take notes?

The Whills, the mysterious entities whose journal is the "source document" for the Star Wars saga, get the story from Artoo, according to some accounts of Lucas' original ideas.

They were inspired by the two bickering peasants in The Hidden Fortress, the Kurosawa chambara movie which inspired the original Star Wars movie.

Threepio and Artoo were intended to be the witnesses to the entire saga from the very beginning. As 'droids, they are basically immortal, so long as someone keeps replacing worn out parts. So, who else to take notes?

The Whills, the mysterious entities whose journal is the "source document" for the Star Wars saga, get the story from Artoo, according to some accounts of Lucas' original ideas.

They were inspired by the two bickering peasants in The Hidden Fortress, the Kurosawa chambara movie which inspired the original Star Wars movie.

Aha! Fallout had it right for once! Now all we need is to find a two-headed cow and then the legend of the Vault Dweller will have no doubters ever again!

the imperials use metric anyway, http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_measurement_units

vending machine gives face to you!

I think this CNET article is irresponsible for giving credit to some un-pictured mythical switch on Data's leg while not acknowledging the tractor-beam shutdown switch Obi-Wan Kenobi flipped. That sucker filled his whole palm and was mounted on a ledge with a 1000' drop-off. Here's a photo.

Seth

Checking on Wikihack, you can only eat rings when you are polymorphed into either a rock mole, a rust monster or xorn.

So, if they DID eat a ring of teleportation as you say, the only remaining question would be, did Microsoft zap them with the wand of polymorph?

I can't believe I just said that...

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game; raise armies and fight battles. Play solo campaigns where you can advance your troops' skills, or play short battles against other players online. http://www.wesnoth.org/

Freeciv is a Civilization clone, also single player or multiplayer online. http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

And if you're willing to go really old-school, nethack is always available; the annual tournament is ongoing in the month of November. Current standings at http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/scoreboard.shtml or enter for free at http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/howitworks.shtml ; you can always telnet to nethack.alt.org to play or download from http://www.nethack.org/

There are all kinds of trophies for smaller achievements, so first-time players can hope to get something but it's still competitive for experienced players--I pulled off 6 ascensions in a row at the June tournament and didn't make the top 3 for most consecutive, so the level of play is quite high.

• subject specific wikis (protein biology, Asian travel, etc) are much more vibrant (where vibrancy is measured as the ratio of updates to total pages)
  
• fictional universe wikis are insanely popular - Memory Alpha (The Star Trek wiki) beats all but a handful of the european language wikipediae, and the battlesar galactica wiki is even bigger.
  
• wikis are the new bulletin boards - TV shows are using them for all the complex character backfill. Have you lost track in "24" or "Lost"? Try the wiki, it's aaaalll in there.
  

Don't worry, the EFF rebels will mobilize their T-47 Snowspeeders with a couple of opensource tow-cables and those AT&ATs will be toasted... old school.

A wiki just for the 2008 US Congressional elections? Maybe this is a silly question, but what was wrong with the Campaigns Wiki?

At last the species-dysmorphic among us will have some way of making things right. Plus it would be neat for those of us who like the idea of anthropomorphic animals.

It is "strong as steel" so clearly it is transparisteel!

I prefer transparasteel.

Sorta-right, sorta-wrong. The wings are there because they're S-foils, a term which crops up mostly in the video games (most notably in X-Wing, where you had to press a button to open or close them for combat or hyperspace travel respectively). Since the wings were there, it made sense to mount the weaponry in a distributed setup.

As a furry, I'm not really sure.

Nobody seems to agree on what exactly it means. It seems to include from people who just like to happen anthro art or cartoons, to people completely obsessed with the subject.

I would say "furry" is a very fuzzy (no pun intended) term, like "geek" for instance. It has certain connotations, hints at certain things, points at a range of likely interests, but is so unspecific that it doesn't really say all that much about the person it's applied to.

You could try checking the definition on WikiFur to see what kind of things may be involved.

In http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Splinter_of_the_Mind's_Eye/ Luke adjusts the size of his light sabres' blade down to a credit-card thinness to use it to cut a door lock without creating destruction that would be obvious to folks walking past once he went inside.

Haven't read the book in like 15 years, but I've got a good memory.