Slashdot Mirror

Actually, if you look at the Xerox Star Desktop and the original Macintosh Desktop, they don't look much alike. No menu bar, window borders look a lot different, scrollbars look different, etc.

I would much rather program in dfdl.vhdl. Unfortunately, it's doesn't exist. It's a language that I designed only because Verilog and VHDL both suck so much. I felt compelled to show how to make a hardware description language that doesn't suck. So I did. And here's a sample of what the code looks like: circuit parallel_multiply( bit in1, bit in2; bit out) { in1*in2 | partial_products; partial_products | reduce(wallace_stage,3) | reduce(wallace_leaf,2) | ripple_adder | out; } circuit reduce( bit in; bit out; circuit reducer, int reduce_to) { bit stage; in | stage; while( max(stage.count)) > reduce_to) stage | reducer | stage'; stage | out; } circuit wallace_stage( bit in; bit out) { bit vertical, carry, sum; in,vertical | compressorn_nm2 | carry,sum,vertical; sum | out; carry | out; } circuit compressorn_nm2( bit in, bit down; bit carry, bit out, bit up) { while( a.count > 3) in-,in-,in-,in-,down-('0') | compressor4_2 | carry+,out+,up+; in | out; down | out; } That could be difficult to read, esp. if you don't know the syntax. But one could just as easily write clearer (if longer) code than this -- this was just to show the power and flexibility of the language. The equivalent in either VHDL or Verilog would be at least twice as long. I would LOVE to be able to program hardware in this language, instead of having to choose between two languages that were written back in the stone age.

I would much rather program in dfdl.vhdl. Unfortunately, it's doesn't exist. It's a language that I designed only because Verilog and VHDL both suck so much. I felt compelled to show how to make a hardware description language that doesn't suck. So I did. And here's a sample of what the code looks like: circuit parallel_multiply( bit in1, bit in2; bit out) { in1*in2 | partial_products; partial_products | reduce(wallace_stage,3) | reduce(wallace_leaf,2) | ripple_adder | out; } circuit reduce( bit in; bit out; circuit reducer, int reduce_to) { bit stage; in | stage; while( max(stage.count)) > reduce_to) stage | reducer | stage'; stage | out; } circuit wallace_stage( bit in; bit out) { bit vertical, carry, sum; in,vertical | compressorn_nm2 | carry,sum,vertical; sum | out; carry | out; } circuit compressorn_nm2( bit in, bit down; bit carry, bit out, bit up) { while( a.count > 3) in-,in-,in-,in-,down-('0') | compressor4_2 | carry+,out+,up+; in | out; down | out; } That could be difficult to read, esp. if you don't know the syntax. But one could just as easily write clearer (if longer) code than this -- this was just to show the power and flexibility of the language. The equivalent in either VHDL or Verilog would be at least twice as long. I would LOVE to be able to program hardware in this language, instead of having to choose between two languages that were written back in the stone age.

Here's a simplified Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment
http://tonic.physics.sunysb.edu/~dteaney/F07_modern/lectures/mlab1_michelson.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment
http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Michelson-Morley_experiment

How about building your own Radio Telescope
http://www.radiotelescopebuilder.com/

For that matter you could get them to build their own Dobsonian although the physics there isn't too hard (basic optics), especially if you don't hand figure the mirror. There's also a large metalwork or woodwork component that might not be considered relevant.

Here are some really good astronomy tutorials (though the prac work is done with simulated software). You might be able to modify them to something more practical
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html

Some of the topics covered by the above
Radio Astronomy of Pulsars
Astrometry of Asteroids
The Revolution of the Moons of Jupiter
The Rotation of Mercury by The Doppler Effect
Photoelectric Photometry of the Pleiades
Spectral Classification of Stars
The Hubble RedShift-Distance Relation
The Flow of Energy Out of the Sun
The Quest for Object X
Jupiter's Moons and the Speed of Light: The Classic Roemer Experiment

There are books and web pages out there....many tend to be geared to highschool, then there are some that would require you to up your insurance...so you'll have to sift through them

http://physics.about.com/od/physicsexperiments/tp/experimentbooks.htm
http://www.educypedia.be/education/physicsexperiments.htm

Do you mean like forks like Wikinfo, or unrelated, but similar, sites like Everything2, h2g2 and Knol?

What you're after is http://wikinfo.org/ .

Neutral point of view ideology just won't work in politics. NPOV is about moderating out extreme opinions and leaving only what can be stated in some mutually agreed terms. There's no way a political debate could work that way, you need contrast and dialectic tension between the extreme positions.

Accordingly a Multiple Point of View (MPOV) convention like metaweb.com or openpolitics.ca or some of the pages at dkosopedia.com use, is required. There can be a neutral issue statement but after that everything is a "position" that can be stated the way its supporters want it stated.

A political party needs a sympathetic point of view convention something like wikinfo.org uses.

NPOV is made into a religion by some of the Wikipedia cultists, who refer to Jimmy Wales as their "GodKing". It sounds like they're joking, but they are not. NPOV always tends to a dictatorship of the most powerful administrator.

Wikipedia itself has several language versions. They're not translations; they're separate systems, run by different people. The German version already runs under somewhat stricter rules than the English version. Often, articles are translated from one language fork to another, but that's for new article creation. An update to one won't be translated and propagated to the others. So they're forks.

Then there's Wikinfo, a true Wikipedia fork branched off in 2003. It's not very popular.

And, of course, there are all the copies of Wikipedia that add advertising, like answers.com. But they aren't really forks.

It's called Wikinfo. It hasn't been very successful.

There are wikis that try this, e.g. WikInfo, which is a friendly fork of Wikipedia. The trouble is that it makes point-of-view-pushing editors happy at the expense of the article quality and the readers. Neutral point of view means that an article should contain all significant points of view on a subject, relative to their significance. (Thus, Wikipedia is a secondary or tertiary source.) This is a high ideal and difficult to reach in practice, but it does give us a reliable compass to work to. There's a tutorial as well.

I'm not talking about a "stable" and "development" branch. I'm talking about multiple concurrent versions. That way no side of the debate feels left out. Each side presents their case in the way they see fit. Currently what we have is contention for *the* single article. Well, there are a lot of subjects that a lot of people aren't going to agree upon.

This is the idea behind Wikinfo. Wikinfo isn't very successful, but that probably doesn't have much to do with the fact it uses this idea.

Personally I don't think it's such a great idea for Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias don't work this way. I think it'd be a good idea for a peer-to-peer content system, but then again, we could just call that content system "the Internet".

Actually, they're going straight back to the model of Nupedia. It didn't surprise me at all that Larry Sanger was involved in this. Nupedia's problem is that they couldn't convince enough experts to join. I don't think Digital Universe will fare much better. Part of the attraction of Wikipedia is that if you make a change, it occurs immediately. If we wanted our changes to take effect later, we'd all be submitting information to Encarta's editors.

Moreover, Wikipedia has a network effect slash brand recognition: I remember Fred Bauder's Internet-Encyclopedia (now called Wikinfo). It was a great idea, but people were using Wikipedia already, so meh, why bother? The original premise was to make the main article sympathetic-POV, and allow other POVs and other authorships in parallel articles. Nothing wrong with the idea, but he couldn't convince people to switch from Wikipedia.

I don't think Digital Universe will attract many seasoned Wikipedia contributors, and its design seems to make it worthless without a good public user base (since we know from Nupedia's story that experts-only contribution won't work).

I suspect that you are right, hundreds of slashdotters notwithstanding.

Someone objected and said that courts have been supposed to be neutral for a long time. But I am not sure about that. It appears to me that judges historically were supposed to be righteous and to judge according to the law. But if a judge knows something about someone that suggests their side of a case is the right one, then historically I don't think people would have a problem with the judge taking that into account.

It still isn't a problem -I say, let all viewpoints be recorded, at least all well written and well sourced viewpoints. I think it is fairer to the reader if a point of view is out in the open rather than hidden behind claimed netrality. ... We are much better served by varying viewpoints.

If you don't know about it already, you may want to take a look at Wikinfo, which is trying to take Wikipedia-style content in a direction you might approve of.

So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia, Dkosopedia and Anarchopedia, and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo, and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.

One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.

I see the larger problem with Wikipedia in that it is run by a millionaire, Jimbo Wales, who has said he manages it according to the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises. And the powers-that-be who have a hand in shaping rules, what content gets in, which users get banned, follow on some level from this.

While anyone can contribute, in a democratic fashion, there is a counter-force to this, in the same manner that the US is a democratic republic, with a counterforce of an authoritarian financial hierarchy, with landlords and tenants, moneylenders and debtors, company owners and workers. In the same manner, while anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, the "cabal" as they themselves mockingly call it, headed by Jimbo Wales, and with his various lieutenants in Arbcom (the Arbitration Committee), on the Mediation Committee, as bureaucrats, as admins, exercises a great deal of change over things, and points in the direction things will go.

There is a project on Wikipedia whose premise is that the English Wikipedia users are mostly from England and its former colonies and they have a certain view of the world. Plus demographically the users are generally people like me, white male professionals from the US and whatnot. Wikipedia says it is "neutral point of view" on topics like Palestine and Israel, the US vs. the USSR and that sort of thing, but that's BS. But anyhow the "counetring systematic bias" project mainly works on things by spending time writing articles about stuff most white male professionals from the US don't spend much time thinking about, like culture in Burundi and stuff like that.

Wikipedia does very well in it's top categories of mathematics and science, because most everyone is on the same page about these things. Wikipedia completely falls apart in terms of neutrality with things like the John Kerry and George W. Bush pages. They are not neutral. And it has not gotten better, and I am not Panglossian about the worsening situation, unlike the Wikipedia core group. It is obvious to me that the main categories that experience massive edit wars and fights like history and society, will eventually break off into different wikis. The most hardcore John Kerry people will go to one of the wikis, the most hardcore Bush people will go to another wiki. Then these groups might draw more people. This has already happened to some extent. And I tell people - don't bang your head against a brick wall. See how these things will not work out for you on Wikipedia, then go check out a wiki encyclopedia run by either a conservative (wikinfo) or by liberals (dkosopedia or Demopedia). And if all you're interested in is looking up articles on Wikipedia in quantum mechanics - well then, you'll probably be happy with Wikipedia. And I'm sure all the non-political people would love to see all the fanatic Air America listeners and Fox News watchers leave (actually that's being mild, communists and fascists are the real ends of the extremes that exist on Wikipedia).

Wikipedia's is owned by a millionaire who is a big fan of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and so forth. This should begin to give you an idea of where it's head is at. He has appointed people to positions of power like admin, bureaucrat, arbitrator, and mediator, more often of a like mind then not. One of these people is part of the far-right Moonie cult.

Then we have the natural bias of an English-speaking audience of people mostly from England and its former and current colonies (the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia etc.) On top of this, the editors tend to be male, white, professional and whatnot. That this bias exists is recognized at a high level. But what is done about it? Most editors who are of more of a say world-view than US/UK-centric view, left than right and so forth are persecuted. Most left-wing admins have been persecuted - Secretlondon (sent a nasty e-mail by Jimbo Wales), 172, and Everyking. There are a few more who are more moderate, some have privately told me more recently that Wikipedia is going bonkers in this respect, that the inmates are taking over the asylum.

I believe wikis can survive only with cooperation. A wiki, like Slashdot, can survive mostly good users and a few vandals. But when say 30% of Wikipedia is left-wing, with 70% being right-wing or what in the US would be called centrist, you have a problem that is not going away. It just gets worse, really.

My prediction is that since wikis need cooperation, the controversial categories (history, society, life) will break off into separate wikis - right-leaning ones like Wikinfo and left-leaning ones like Dkosopedia or the even further left Red Wiki.

This is inevitable. The edit wars over the Israel/Palestine pages mimics the actual war going on. The arbitrators are just becoming more and more overburdened over time, and these sections are becoming more and more chaotic and sectarian. On the other hand, articles about scientific and mathematic concepts like quantum mechanics are doing just fine. I think eventually, Wikipedia itself will see the wisdom of the Kahanists and jihadis leaving for their own respective wikis. It will be better for everyone.

It exists:

Wikinfo
Wikinfo, formerly known as Internet-Encyclopedia (renamed in January 2004), is a fork of Wikipedia initiated by Fred Bauder in July 2003. It is hosted by ibiblio. Wikinfo makes no attempt to be multilingual, although existing links to Wikipedia articles in other languages are retained in the case of articles copied from Wikipedia.

Wikinfo's policy on point of view is different from Wikipedia: rather than adopting a neutral point of view, the set of articles about a particular topic are split into a number of articles with a specified point of view--thus it tries to have several points of view on each topic. The main article is written from a sympathetic point of view which is described as "a way of encouraging a pluralism of content, rather than limiting content to an unattainable encyclopedic goal."

Main Page

Wikipedia is a decent resource for information on Quantum Mechanics or other scientific information, but as far as political and historical information, forget it. Actually, the mainstream press even wrote about this during the 2004 US election. People should face up to it - there needs to be more than one wiki page out there for controversial people like Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and whatnot. The idea that there can be one supposedly "neutral" page has not worked out in practice. If you are of a conservative bent, I suggest a wiki like Wikinfo, if you are more left wing, I suggest somewhere like Infoshop's Open Wiki.

I find the Wikipedia's cabal commissar role over such things disturbing, and this sort of thing makes me feel even more so. Democratic Underground is testing a wiki, and perhaps Free Republic will follow. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

As far as pages pertaining to say Israel and Palestine, I think quality control is hopeless. I am perfectly happy to get into flame (or revert) wars on Wikipedia, but even I'm scared to go into that section. Different people have very different views on certain historical and political issues. I do not mind the idea of some kind of peer review for scientific articles, but I would be very suspicious of such a process related to say the Israel and Palestine pages, or the Northern Ireland pages, or the George W. Bush and John Kerry pages and so forth. Wikipedia already have administrators who are ideological fanatics. I'm thinking of four of them right now - two are hard-core right-wingers, one is a social democrat (Americans would say liberal) who is nonetheless fanatically anti-communist, and the other is far-left.

I don't believe objectivity exists in historical and political matters. Wikipedia incorporates the now public domain 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and some of the material in there would appear biased, racist, sexist and so forth to our modern eyes. English Wikipedia is mostly comprised of citizens of England and its former colonies, including the US. Relative to the half of the world living on less than $2 a day and whom have never made a phone call, these are relatively privileged people, and Wikipedia is a subset of even these people since Internet users and Wikipedians are more likely to be college-educated than from some ghetto or even a blue-collar household. This alone makes for a very elitist and skewed view of the world. For example, in the 1950's, there were lots of accusations in the US that the Bandung Conference was some kind of communist ploy, which in my opinion is far removed from reality. A person from India or some other third world country would have had a more realistic view of this I think. Then again, the rest of the world has some odd ideas about the US, perhaps they watch Baywatch, Friends, and shows like that and think that is what life in the US is really like.

The link in the article to Wikinfo is a fork of Wikipedia, one run by a right-wing Wikipedia user who thinks Wikipedia is too left-wing. There are forks by left-wing people who think Wikipedia is too right-wing by left-wing users as well - the "liberal Democrat" DKosopedia and the anarchist English Anarchopedia and Infoshop's OpenWiki. Wikipedia articles are GFDL so forks are easy.

Wikipedia should be able to handle science articles on biology and so forth, although speciality forks might appear by people who realize the Man's conspiracy to cover up the reality of orgone energy (please consult Robert A. Wilson). More likely, people will realize Wikipedia pages on the Israel/Palestine conflict will always be in flux depending on the time of day, and will go off and start wikis pertaining to primarily politics and history and other social science types topics. But outside of what touches upon the social world, Wikipedia should be able to handle it.

Slashdot reporting on a k5 story? What a circle-jerk.

Larry Sanger is having a multi-year case of severe sour grapes. He helped to create Wikipedia, then found that it didn't conform to his world view. He hasn't worked on Wikipedia, not even fixing typos or categorizing stubs or anything, in more than two years, nearly three now, I think. And yet he professes to be an expert on it.

There are, in fact, experts working on Wikipedia; there are PhDs. Their heads, however, are not quite as inflated as Larry's. He does make some valid points, about the culture of openness and taking every crapflooder seriously. But the main thrust of this, and of the other articles about Wikipedia he's authored, have amounted to little more than "WAAAH NO ONE RESPECTS ME WAAAH".

An article validation system would benefit Wikipedia greatly, if it could be implemented as a sort of trust metric, like the provably correct one that Advogato uses. (More research is needed here.) To make some users more equal than others, capable of making decisions from on high, is the wrong fucking idea.

Article validation does not require Larry to be placed at the top of some sort of hierarchy.

And besides, Larry can threaten to fork all he wants. He can go join WikInfo in their, ah, stunning success.

By what goddamn right does Larry Sanger have such a loud voice? He's an obvious crank, and he hasn't worked on, much less led, Wikipedia in years.

Get a life, Larry!

--grendel drago

The problem is more general, it is not only limited to emails.

As digital storage becomes more popular, someday we will lose valuable historical data and information because we will be unable to read the digital code of some device.

If a very big asteroid hits Earth and civilisation returns to its 19th century state, for example, and after some time the future archaelogists try to discover the pre-asteroid history of civilisation, they will have no idea what these chips and CDs and memories are! they will be unable to even think that these things contain information written by humans.

There is a period in human history called "dark ages" (before the middle ages) because the historians know very little about it and we have found nearly no writings from that era. see: http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Dark_Ages

1. Problem: How to identify emergency calls
2. Technology: Use this thing
3. Problem solved
4. ???
5. Profit!!!

As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia.

For example, the entry for "East Germany" (before a friendly editor came across it) opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.

It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the CIA Factbook, the US State Department, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the "History of Colombia" article. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in.

Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wikis out there such as Infoshop Open Wiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wikis like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.

I think this is just something we learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of Wikinfo, Disinfopedia, dKosopedia, Infoshop Open Wiki, and other alternative GFDL corpus access providers.

• .."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
• .."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
• "the neutral point of view doesn't work"
• "it's just an encyclopedia .."

Please read this:

Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.

Article review

Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.

These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.

We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.

There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.

Neutrality

The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.

There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.

We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.

It's more than an encyclopedia

The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip

Also, there are a few big fat disclaimer notices which tend to get put up on certain pages: Wikipedia is not a source for medical advice, legal advice, et cetera. :)

First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.

Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website

Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.
Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!

If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet, and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.isprime.com as one of the EFNet servers.
If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here.



If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.
By moderating this post as "Underrated", you cannot be Meta-Moderated! Please consider this.

________________________________________________
| ______________________________________._a,____ |
| _______a_._______a_______aj#0s_____aWY!400.___ |
| __ad#7!!*P____a.d#0a____#!-_#0i___.#!__W#0#___ |
| _j#'_.00#,___4#dP_"#,__j#,__0#Wi___*00P!_"#L,_ |
| _"#ga#9!01___"#01__40,_"4Lj#!_4#g_________"01_ |
| ________"#,___*@`__-N#____`___-!^_____________ |
| _________#1__________?________________________ |
| _________j1___________________________________ |
| ____a,___jk_GAY_NIGGER_ASSOCIATION_OF_AMERICA_ |
| ____!4yaa#l___________________________________ |
| ______-"!^____________________________________ |
` _______________________________________________'