Slashdot Mirror
Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge?
serutan asks: "How much do you rely on the Internet for information? Since getting online 7 or 8 years ago, I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information, to the point where they've pretty much disappeared from my life. I'm a geek, but at age 49 not exactly a child of the Information Age. I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life. I still read fiction in book form, but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject."
For news, and timely information certainly the internet is the place I turn. The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information. Besides, I don't really know exactly what I get out of keeping up with how many people were murdered or died in fires in the tri-state NY metro area (there is a LOT of that on the news). So, I've just stopped watching. I was never much of a newspaper reader, but of course there is always the New York Times and many other newspapers that bring the information to you with a nice bow on it so you don't have to go scouring elsewhere. But if scouring is your style and you are a real information junky, the scouring certainly isn't that hard.
But if I am going to learn anything in-depth certainly books -dead tree media- is the way to be. My upper limit of reading an article on the crt is about 10 pages. Your mileage will vary there, of course it's highly individual. But maybe that's why places where the information is in digested for you allowing you to scan many stories at once and sample them all, because lengthy readings on a computer monitor are more tedious than kicking back and reading a book.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Pr0n! Like you I was surrounded by dead tree info but now my pr0n needs are delivered almost exclusively by the Internet. Seriously though you can definitely find stuff on the 'net that would be hard in a meatspace format especially fetish type stuff. Excellent news for small town folk who can't buy these things where they live. "The Internet's Hottest Nude Mujahudeen Amputees"? No problem.
Heh the first thing I thought to do when I saw that is 'hmm I'll google that!' :(
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
I'm sorry, but everything worth knowing has already been digitized. If you think it hasn't, why aren't you working on putting it online.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
But I'm always wrong.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Heck, if I can't find it on Google in a couple minutes, it doesn't exist.
www.code-fix.com
encyclopedias.....great reference...or hey, remember your local library???
Google says: Your search - "is the internet my source of knowledge?" - did not match any documents.
All I know about w0m3n comes from the Internet.
I neither give nor receive information through the internet.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
hellyes
If you have a few brain cells, the Internet is a great place to get all your information. The brain cells are needed because there are 10000s of sites filled with bullshit out there.
I find it easier to goto google then run to a library to look something up or learn how to do something. The internet is what it is, a great big network of knowledge sharing, p2p, and porn!
how many of us could replace the word "Internet" in this posting with "Google"?
great website for information
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
I use the internet for a lot of fact lookups. i.e. how do I setup so and so. Also for news headlines its a handy resources but I'm carful about opinion.s IMHO ( :) ) one of the strenghts + weakness of the internet is that anyone can put up information about anything. How do you check they are right?
This is why I still find resources such as paper encylopidias or the digtal counterparts a better resource. Also for some things such as book it is better to have paperback as you can sit out in the sun and enjoy life rather than being stuck in front of a computer screen
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Arguably the sum of all human knowledge resides at our collective fingertips. The key is to be learned enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is becoming increasingly difficult. One must find a reputable site or groups of sites that time and again provide unbiased, veridical information and stick with them.
I use the internet for everything. I read books in pdf, and i use the internet as a source for most of my homework. I even deliver my homework via E-mail. The internet really is the greatest thing since women. :D
Politicians are all the same, they promise to build a bridge even when there is no river.
I am 31 and have spent most of my life on computers. I use the internet as almost my sole source of information. I haven't been to a library in years...
But I also find the internet to be a better source of information. I can read multiple opinions, thoughts, and comments on most any topic. This gives me a better grasp of the situation then reading one book at a time.
I am not worried about this fact, I just see it as a newer way of gathering information.
-R
--Still waiting for that awsome sig to just leap out at me..--
There are other sources?
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
What can't we find on the net? I download the tvshows from the net instead of worrying when they are scheduled to broadcast ... have gotten a few girlfriends from the net ... if a tree falls in the forest and it doesn't appear on /. does it make a sound?
... addictively entertaining
Two words in the end
We refer to it as "the source of all Truth and Knowledge." (I am not making this up.)
We never use the phone book... We never call anyone to make travel arrangements... We never write checks and mail them to pay bills...
I often wonder how anybody did anything prior to the advent of "the source of all Truth and Knowledge."
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
I get calls all the time from newspapers asking for delivery. I can't rationalize the 5 bucks a week/20 a month to have a bunch of papers, half of it filled with ads/classifieds for stuff I don't want when all that stuff, classfieds and all, are posted online anyway. Granted, some of the newspaper websites (columbusdispatch.com, for example) require some sort of paid account to view, but between CNN and Fark.com, there isn't much that I usually miss. Occasionally I watch the national news, but I don't waste my time with the local crap.
Yes, definitely. I just started college, and my roommate brought a dictionary with him. I stopped and realized that I'd never even considered bringing a dictionary or thesaurus with me because I've got M-W.com and even a second opinion with Dictionary.com, and then some non-words that should be at PseudoDictionary.com. It simply never occurred to me to bring a hard copy of a dictionary, because I've grown so dependent on those websites.
As far as encyclopedias go, Google has basically redefined the concept of an encyclopedia for me. With a little query-practice one can find a huge number of resources for just about anything imaginable. Google's almost like an encyclopedia to a library of encyclopedias.
Later,
Patrick
sitting on the table between the couches next to the phone, the little imac makes a great phonebook, notepad, internet research, music player..hibrinates instantly on and off with a push of that lit white button. ya it's nice. google has certainly made my dictionary and encyclopedia obsolete and with a web browser on my phone, i've got constant access to all the information in the world.
If I want deep historical data, the internet isnt the place I look for it. If I want a "google" on something I'm unfamiliar with, then yeah, the internet is all I need.
I think the real issue here should be "Why are we trying to sum up all the knowledge of a subject in one or two webpages?"
My last report came from 2 books and a video. No, I didn't have to use non-internet sources. But yeah, I chose to get concrete, in depth stuff that I could use.
hmmm.. to post anon or not to post anon.. oh well I dont care.
| - | - |
I only read printed material when it's necessary, i.e. I don't have access to a computer. It's pretty sad, really, because I'd like to read fiction, but it can't hold my attention. I think it's because the internet has such a high throughput to your brain.
Damn AOL for getting me started. Yeah. It's the big corporation's fault.
I'm not even 20 yet, and we adopted the internet fairly early, so I've definitely grown up using it as an information source.
/. and Fark are where I get my information about the world. Because of this, I never hear information about local happenings, but I live in a pretty boring city, so it's all good. Well, at least I think it's a boring city.. I don't really know...
I was too young to be interested in watching the news or reading the paper when we got the internet, so when I finally became interested in news, the internet was right there.
News on TV, and in the paper especially, is just far too slow and outdated for me. Google News,
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
I rely on the Net to provide me with a great amount of information, but I don't rely on it exclusively for any matters more important than just satisfying my curiosity.
As with other media, some Internet sources of information may be biased. Different websites may still rely on the same, possibly flawed, information. Others may intentionally attempt to spread false information.
And even when I can get accurate information, I may not be able to get all the data I need....or even if I can, I may not know exactly what to do with that information (think WebMD).
In short, the Net is a great tool for research but it is far from being a one-stop source of information. Thorough research will still require access to offline data in the form of subject matter experts and publications not available in electronic form.
If google can't find, it's likely that it doesn't exist. ;)
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
I am an organic chemist and most of the research journals are online, search engines (specialised engines) are online and if i remember, some of the journals have abandoned paper and ink. Whole insitiutions are connected (domain allowance) to the servers hosting these journals and it turns out that we can get all the pornography we want at a fraction of the cost that we would spend if they were in paperbacks or hard - cover.
I sincerely feel that the internet has helped me a lot in my research.
In Googlis non est, ergo non est.
I think someone may have that in a sig, if so sorry.
G
I wish there was a fscking blue pill
The poster (and others) might find this interesting: http://www.internetisshit.org/print.html
can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent
... whatever.
I did a quick google search to see if other slashdot readers had also become this dependent, but I couldn't find anything, so
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
period. the internet is not a replacement for in-depth books.
i have often wondered about this very same thing. for instance, i'll be in my kitchen, very close to the phone book, but will go into my den (read: room full of computers and books) and look up a phone number or address online. my judgement of a businesses character, if i've never been there before, is almost always made while online. personally, i agree with the parent post, in that i find the varied and aggregated sources of information that i find online to be better than reading the corporate trash found in most newspapers, the tv, radio, etc. no, i don't think that "if it's on the internet, it must be true!", however, enough sources from a varied background, and i'm more apt to belive it there than another source. for non-tech hefty subjects that deserve a sit-down-and-read... i still prefer paper. which is why i just bought yet *another* damn bookshelf... it's like the wayback machine of my brain, never toss out a book!
Well I ma a programer, and to be honest I do rather have a dead tree version of books for when I am coding. And I still like to read a paper, or watch the newse. But you are right, Sice I got connected, I have been using the net for almost every bit of research. Why Well wy leave my house, go to a libary, when alsmot everything is online someware.
let me google it.
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
For general news, the internet beats everything hands down.
I also use it to get general information on most subjects, but...
For in-depth information on most topics, particularly non-technical subjects, you have to get the books (or journals, or whatever). Of course, you can look up information about these books online.
Best Windows Freeware
Slashdot is my sole source of knowledge.
the only time i've been to the library in the last ~10 years is a few months ago when my motherboard fried and i needed to check some email using their computers during the 2 days it took for the replacement to be shipped.
I'm 40, and use Internet services for much of my daily news fix (along with public radio). I don't have a television.
But I still mostly use real paper books for most "reference" queries. I've got the two-volume Shorter Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I utterly love to browse. And I also use atlases (Rand-McNally), almanacs, and the New York Times Desk Reference.
Part of the reason I cling to these and other works is the immediacy of seeking out answers to new questions that spring to mind as I probe the work. One never looks up a single word in the OED without browsing at least the other entries that are nearby on the page. And even with high-speed Internet access, it's hard to approach the data bandwidth between a high-quality atlas and your eyeballs.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
with online devices such as the "Sidekick", http://danger.com
I have found google, and www.refdesk.com to be my only sources of info when I am not at home, or work... why have anything else when you can have a dictionary, encyclopedia, mapping (mapquest.com), and google news, blogger, email, picture taker, IM, claendar, etc, etc, etc... all from one small device that is connected to the internet 24/7 (well, if you have cell sites available..)
The more we have small devices like this, the less dead tree type books us working adults will read...
I have to say, that when I leave my house without it... I now feel 'Vulnerable', and extremely inconvenienced when I have to call 411, or ask directions, or not being able to browse news at a moments notice...
I'm just an Infojunkie now... Damn!!
-Sig ? nah not today
It's always been a major pain in the tuchux to have to key down some new-to-you flora or fauna that you've happened upon.
If the organism is previously undiscovered, or out of its normal range, you're going to spend ludicrous amounts of time poring through dusty tomes, because you will look in local guides first, then gradually move up to the really comprehensive stuff only found in research institutes and specialist libraries.
But one of my co-workers found a Black Witch Butterfly in the parking lot the other day, about 3000 miles outside its normal range (previously unknown in this area) and I keyed it down in about five minutes using the Internet.
... I have Google and the Internet wired directly into my brain, and I can have the answers to all my questions at my finger.. err.. brain tips.
Online, I can get the news quicker than waiting for the news or the morning paper -- and better yet, I can compare it from several different sources (thanks, Google News). I can find discussions which sometimes point me to additional sources. I can search for terms that I'm not familiar with. Plus, I'm on the computer eight hours every weekday, and the latest news is just a few keystrokes away.
On the other hand, the Internet is not so good at covering local news; I get that in my morning paper, which is actually easier to read than that same paper's website. (I live in Peoria, Illinois -- a city, but not a metropolis -- so the online news is only updated when the morning edition comes out.) It's also a little lacking when you're looking for non-contemporary topics -- the kind of thing that a good paper encyclopedia or the shelf at your local library gives you more thoroughly, because that kind of research costs money and most of the Internet is still free. More importantly, information online is often generalized and condensed, so if you're looking for in-depth facts on a particular topic, you usually need a book on just that one topic.
In short, information on the Internet is quick and broad, but rarely very deep or complete. A good trade-off in many cases, but certainly not all of them.
Man, that guy knows everything.
He changed my life. Now I really know how to please my wife.. Err I mean girlfriend... Okay, okay my dog! Dammit!
I have a large collection of reference books, but of course they aren't the best source for up to date information. When I was younger, I used to prefer a nice non-fiction book over a new pair of shoes, but I find that I'm buying more fiction books now. Any reference material is bound to be more current online, compared to a book written two years ago.
... and by that I do not mean "profound," though occasionally they are that as well. What I mean is *heavy* and bulky and physical.
... it's hard to part with them, sometimes, even when there's just one good article in a particular one.
... they look cool on a shelf, have a lot of eye candy, so they're hard to get rid of.
Besides which, magazines love to just keep sending (and billing for) magazines you might no longer be fond of. I liked having a subscription to "Thrasher," but my one-year subscription kept coming for more than 2 years. Which is fine, except when it comes time to move, and that little stack of magazines has grown and grown
Wired is a good example -- wisely designed, graphically appealing, consistent (and square) spines
Bah! Bulk! Weight! Heft!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I use the Internet as an information source for quick fix type of information (news, entertainment, troubleshooting, short articles, comparison shopping, etc.) and reference (API docs, dictionaries, etc.) type of information.
For anything more substantial I prefer books. For some reason I can not adequately concentrate on front of a monitor and absorb the data properly when it's more than 2 pages long. When I'm reading a book I can concetrate better and it just works better that way.
It has probably more to do with the environment I'm using computers and reading books on. When reading books, the environment is usually a very comfortable bed or chair with no a little distractions. With computers there's the Email, IM and usually a busy work environment that distracts me constantly.
So, for longer stuff, books all the way.
For things that don't need concentration, Internet all the way.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill coworkers with loud telephone voices
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Not that the internet is always right ... but the cost/speed/24-7 accessibility/accuracy balance can't be beat. This morning I needed to find out the name of the landlord of the house at a given property because my girlfriend couldn't get in touch with her sister and was worried that something had happened.
... but the give/get ratio can't be beat.
Within about 5 minutes I had the landlord's name, her phone number, and if I'd have been willing to pay more, I could've gotten more info on the property. While some might look at this as scary, it's an incredibly powerful way to access public information that previously would've required a plunge into warehouses of public records.
The internet is a tremendous tool. Like any tool, it can be abused
I guess I'm young enough that if I can't find something on the web, I blow it off without even realising that there are other places to look.
I'm a scientist, but I haven't been to a library in over 5 years. If a researcher doesn't have information online, or at least available via an online journal, I don't take them seriously.
The sooner all the worlds existing books get put online the better.
I don't purchase paper books if I can avoid it these days either (Safari & eBooks) - so if the web goes down at our work place, I basically might as well just go home and relax - there is almost no work I can do.
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
Yes. I have done this as well. I'm bored by the morning newspaper now. I already have read all the stories the day before on various news Web pages. We use the Internet as our TV guide and don't even bother saving it from the Sunday paper anymore. Stock quotes? Why does the newspaper even bother. And I'm all caught up on sports the night before I get the paper as well.
I am seriously considering cancelling the newspaper, except it is really the only good source of very local news. I find that a few casual minutes of browsing every couple of hours keeps me infinitely more informed than most.
I feel out of touch when I do not have decent Internet access. I get frustrated when I see people sitting around debating some fact (news, gossip, celebrities, sports...) and just want to drop some Cat5 wherever I am so we can hook up and resolve the issue immediately.
The weird thing is that I think I have good intuition about reliability of sources, etc. And I have proven this to be true over time. However, I notice that many, many people are not very good at this skill and end up getting hood-winked pretty easy by junk they read on the Internet.
The inherent naivete of the masses is the Achilles heal of the Internet becoming THE source of all info.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
The technological revolution feeds itself. Machines are built with machines, computers designed with computers, etc.
Naturally, this leads to an exponential, rather than a linear, pattern of change -- technological compound interest, in other words. Moore's Law and the rest are not accidents or the result of technological planning -- they are the result of technology being applied to improve technology.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that the world of online hypertext and search engines has so rapidly eclipsed the world of print. Change is happening faster and faster.
What I find curious is that people really have so little sense of what the continuation of the exponential curves means to us.
Nanotechnology, machines capable of not just equalling but exceeding biological humans in mental capability, etc., are all likely to show up in coming decades. Everything leads one to the conclusion that there is likely to be more change experienced in the next century than we have experienced in the last million years or longer.
And still, in spite of all of this, people spend their time assuming the future will look something like the present, but perhaps with different fashions and slightly better televisions.
The internet is good for gaining quick information on a topic to help you look at a library, but that's about all.
If I need to know how tall a mountain is, or how many lines of code are in FreeBSD, then the internet would be my source.
But when writing a research paper, libraries still remain king, especially at universities where they subscribe to many very expensive (too expensive, IMO) journals that contain publications that aren't necessarily on the web.
The Internet is my primary source of information these days, but it's not the only one. I still frequent my local public library, for instance, and even though all the programming information I could want for the languages I use is out there on the Web someplace, there's still nothing like having a book in front of you.
And of course there is some information you just can't find on the World Wide Web. Things like "Mom, what's your secret for making apple pies?" (At least if your mom is anything like mine.)
Someone you trust is one of us.
...And makes me damn glad I put my name and number on there while I had the chance.
The internet, while a good source of information, is also a great source of bullshit.
I use it almost exclusively for technical information, mostly computer related. But it's so full of hoaxes, FUD, and rantings from the lunatic fringe, that that's about the extent to which I trust it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Google is good.
Google is great.
Let us thank you for our food.
By your hands we all are fed,
thank you Google for my daily thread.
Amen.
m.
It's my entire source of knowledge at this point, as well as my means of living.
My groceries, videogames, car, real books that haven't yet been digitized, appliances, my fiance (who is just like me in this regard), most of my current friends - all of them came from the Internet. My family wouldn't be able to keep in touch with me (no phone) were it not for the Internet.
Everything - literally every single aspect of my life depends on online connectivity. The few times I've experienced downtime in the past five years I've just played with the pets a bit more than usual and read books while waiting for the cable modem light to turn green again.
While most people would say this is pathetic - and I can see their point - for some reason it feels 'good' to me that my life is this way. Not because I measure myself in terms of progress, but more that I measure myself in detachment from an increasingly suboptimal world.
--Ryv
The Internet is my primary source of knowledge, and has been since I was in high school. The school never ended up teaching much that was relevant to.. oh.. anything, and the Internet had tons of freely available knowledge to eat up.
I still rely on the Internet, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to do so as Google is the best search engine, and has become barely useful any more due to the search engine spammers.
I do think that a good search engine is key to extracting information from the Internet, and I look forward to a day when we once again have a good search engine.
I say sadly, because I wish television wasn't so dumbed down. It really saddens me to think that 99 % (number pulled out of my ass) of other people rely on the evening news as their primary, reliable news source.
TV news could be so good. It has some advantages over the Web still. Instead it is so truly fucked up. In Denmark, at least, and I suspect other contries too.
I get most all of my news and quite a bit of the rest of my general information from the internet, but I've also learned that a good university library is comparably the best source of information for those hard to fin tidbits of random info.
I was just musing this morning that there is a wealth of knowledge in book form that I hardly ever go back to anymore but which is simply not available online. It occured to me that in my university's rather modest library there were reference books that had very in depth information on specific subjects. Example: translations and commentary for early music of, say, the trouveres. Can you find articles about them online? Sure, but the material is spotty. You can't find as many scholarly opinions on the matter or get at really useful information.
The problem is that the content that is readily available online never has the sustained depth that a book on the subject seems to. It's more likely that a scholar setting out with a purpose to explain a lot about a subject publish in book form even now. Unless the book has already been put online you won't find information of that depth...but I'm sure that the majority of books still aren't available online, no?
Information comes in 3 ways. The internet, books, and word of mouth. If it didn't come that way, we would not see it before it was gone. Also, the Internet is where all information is kept. If i want to buy a poodle, i can go to pets.com. If i want to buy a computer, i go to packardbell.com.
These days I only keep the Britannica "Great Books" series in my home and assorted DVDROM encyclopedias. I rarely use the DVDs though.
:-)
I used to buy the newspaper for movies. The telephone book for numbers. The TV Guide (in the Sunday paper) for TV shows. Now all of that is taken care of in Apple's Sherlock or Watson. I don't even mail anything these days...I use email. I do mail stuff for half.com sales and netflix.com....but even my bills are starting to be handled through an online bill pay service.
I am starting to get a lot of my news from the internet too. Soon, I will only watch TV for news commentary and shows...on Tivo, of course!
I find the following is true for different subjects.
For science, and in particular, mathematics, I use books and library sources. Unless it news about science and technology which I read exclusively online.
For leisure reading I always buy used or new. I want to be able to hold it and feel it.
For news I purchased an online subscription to a major newpaper. I do not want all that wasted paper. I also view a few other free news sources, like slashdot, or listen to npr.
I noticed that I pay a lot more attention to stupid hollywood gossip now because there is a bounty of information available. I used to never read entertainment weekly, us, or magazines of the like but now I routinely stumble across stupid gossip stories and read them. I use imdb quite a bit for trivia and if I can not find the answer there i look no further.
Also, for general trivia, I almost exclusively use the net now. THe only exception being if it a really interesting question and I can not find the answer online. If it is a dull question and I can not find it online I will look no further.
For work, unix sys admin, I use both frequently. Lists are a huge wealth of troubleshooting info, but for general skills, like programming, I will read from books.
Mileage will probably vary hugely depending on the person and their reading habits. I am a fairly enthusiastic leisure reader so I doubt that my fondness for honest to god, hold it in my hand and read on the toilet print books will never abate.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
The Internet (well, the web in particular) is a fine tool for quick research, and has supplanted dead-tree media for me in that regard. No longer do I have to go down to the local library to look up a quick fact, or have a huge pile of reference books next to me with well worn indices. The true strength of the web lies in search engines, which provide an index to essentially every written work on it.
/random-access/ media yet developed, but is lacking for long serial accesses.
Similarly, it's supplanted making phone calls or poring through paper records to get service from another party. There are no more hold times for customer service reps or having to wait for business hours to get information. The computer is there, 24 hours a day.
The one thing that it hasn't supplanted, and I doubt that it will for a while, are long writings. If I want to read a book, rather than use it as a reference, far better to have it in print form where I can carry it with me anywhere and read it on something other than a computer screen. In short, the Internet is probably the best
I like to think of myself as old school when it comes to research. I can find most anything I want at the library and find exactly what I need. I find the Internet to be rather time-consuming at times and sometimes a big crap shoot.
However...the Internet is my main source of info because I don't have an encyclopedia lying around the house. I seemed to have lost my dictionary and thesaurus on my last move too. Hence...the net is where I go. Given the fact you can search for info at home or work, it makes it convenient. Plus you can always ask your friends to search the Internet too and send you the results. I still like encyclopedias though...they're cool.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
When 12 hours of straight time in front of a CRT causes my eyeballs to yearn to roll out of their sockets, i'll lay on the couch in front of the TV and watch the news.
I stopped taking newspapers/magazines to the toilet.
I never kept up with sports, so it's an odd issue when people bring it up.
Most of my political views are biased based on what I read here, and other "Geek" sites. So naturally I follow canidates that are in line with my slashdot/open source influenced thinking.
Most of what I read in paper and see on telivision convinces me that those media houses do not cater to my specific needs. Their agenda's vector is not parallel with mine so I just stopped paying attention to them. I have a choice in who I want to listen too, and I don't want my news/entertainment to be be influenced too much by their advertisers. A banner ad is much less obtrusive than a 1/4 page print ad or a 30 second commercial. I think this also has something to do with the fact that electronic publishing is much cheaper than traditional means, so online editors are more likely to stand up for their journalistic integrity unlike the print and TV broadcast outfits, which so blatenly use product placement.
No, I don't really use traditional news anymore.
I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life. I still read fiction in book form, but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look.
This has nothing to do with the internet. You're just getting lazy.
I know it can take longer to find something on the net than on my bookshelf, so the dead trees still get plenty of mileage in my house. But even then, why should you expect to always be able to find something in a few minutes, before blowing it off? Some things take time and always did. That's what research is all about.
I'd never consider getting rid of my O'Reilly collection and just trawling through HOWTOs or newsgroups for the same information.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I don't subscribe to the local paper. Their "news" is just so wrong. Every time I saw a story about something I was involved with, I couldn't believe how much they got wrong. Even the fundamental nature of the events weren't reported right. I stopped watching the local news for the same reason. On the rare occasion that I need info about a local story, I can search their websites. The only newspaper I still read is the local free weekly and I usually put it back on the rack when I'm done.
I get my national and world news from cnn, foxnews, cbsnews, abcnews, slashdot, linkfilter, metafilter, etc. That's enough news for me.
for nerds. Or for stuff that matters.
Why would you ask such a question here?
RC
the interne tis my #1 source of info. however, i still find newspapers like usa today(when traveling) and nytimes to be a good read. Also, i cant read time magazine online. I find i miss out on information, except im not sure what.
But otherwise, i pretty much rely on all research, and all up-to-date news, to be done online.
"Humanize war? You might as talk about humanizing hell!" -- British Admiral Jacky Fisher
I consider myself an oddity because I will look up everything and anything online, but when it comes to computer manuals and the like, I will also go for a printed document. I've got numerous books on Linux, PHP and more, simply because I can never find what I want online as easily as I can in a book.
If I'm searching for something obscure though, I'll be straight to Google.
Absolutely. I think that everyone is seeing the distribution of free knowledge as beneficial to all mankind. Case in point: the decision lately of the New York Times to stop charging for access to their main news services and MITs recent course material offerings: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/30/173522 9&mode=thread&tid=146&tid=99. I just wish that our local paper would follow suit. (http://www.canadaeast.com/apps/pbcs.dll/loginprom pt?Category=TPNEWS16&AboType=SUBSCRIBE).
Only problem: It _is_ possible now for government agencies and others to monitor what you are researching and when, if we are on the internet. If one goes to the library and does research without checking out materials, we remain relatively anonymous. Not so with online searches.
I used to read the local paper in the morning. i'd read a national paper at work. i'd watch local news at home in the evening. i'd maybe browse one or two of my wife's magazine on the weekend. i myself had a few magazine subscriptions.
all of this has changed because of the internet. i don't watch much tv, hardly any news. I don't have any subscriptions to newspapers or magazines anymore. I don't even buy a morning paper on the way to work. the internet has become, for the most part, my one stop shop for news, reviews, and entertainment. and i haven't been to a library for quite some time.
At our house we call it "The source of all knowledge." Amazing! But I feel guilty not teaching my two daughters (9 and 12) what research the old fashioned way means. Only a small fraction of what has been written is online, and a lot of what is online is absolute crap. I'm not talking about pr0n, just unfiltered blathering by whoever. On the other hand, the difference in effort between typing a couple words into Google and going to the library is huge.
For example, I remember my high school AP English teacher telling us that we could not use the internet as a research source for our final term paper. I didn't get it. There's so much information on the internet. Yes -- I realize that a lot of it is not valuable and tends to be very opinionated, but so is many other pieces of information in the world (including: BOOKS).
I guess I feel that instead of shutting out the internet as something that it full of garbage, teachers should teach their students to be able to filter out the crap from the real information.
Just a thought.
Why would anyone need anything other than Slashdot? SCO is about the only thing in the news these days!
The internet is a great wonderful thing....
I use it for the following:
- Yellow Pages
- Map to locations
- News
- Local Weather
- Learning new technology
One thing I've come across is that not all subjects are available in equal formats... meaning that I can find a pleuthra of info on programming in almost any particular language, but I find some difficult in finding that same kind of info about plants of woodworking. The more technical and closely related to computers the subject, the more I find. But as I go from away from computers, the less I find, and less consistant the quality.
It will still be some time to before we have wonderful resources for major subjects online.
I get all my knowledge from reading Slashdot.
I've found that very often I can't find any Good information on a given subject using the internet. Strangely enough it seems to be the less obscure subjects i have the most trouble finding info on. On the other side, I still love books. i recently bought a copy of The Prince because i couldn't stand to read the whole thing on the computer screen. Plus it's fun to go to the library. All that info tha isn't sorted by links, thats how i find my most interesting things, on the internet I always seem to end up in the same areas when i look for stuff.
A blog about stuff.
There are other places to look?
Arguably, being able to quickly form a useful google search (googling?) is pivotal in answering this question. A well formed search (returning less than 20 or so hits) can make the volumes of data surrounding a particular question into something manageable.
In contrast, a poorly formed search is likely to return so much irrelevant data and false hits that you might inadvertently give up before tracing all the links.
Tim
For the average non-reader of slashdot the internet means the web (and email). Although many have heard of Google how many have clicked on that Groups button? Not many.
I know people who subscribe to consumer reports magazines and when I point them to usenet to read the comments and experiences of other consumers (amongst other things) they are amazed. When the hordes discover usenet then the transition away from paper and other traditional learning methods will really start to take off.
while sco {
wget -O
}
I don't have internet access ... oh .. never mind.
When it comes to really in-depth, reliable info though (especially about pretty involved topics...like in college stuff like advanced biological issues), dead-trees were still the route to go. Sometimes it's hard to beat well-know academic journals. Plus with top journals, you're guarenteed to know that the information is *RELIABLE*, which is imperative. Any Joe off the street can throw up a website and make it sound like it's a reliable source of correct information. Many times when reading article on the web, I have to constantly ask myself, "how much credibility does this author have?" Granted, that issue still exists in the dead-tree world, but it's much harder to get nationally published than it is to throw up a Geocities website.
Both the 'net and traditional printer material have their place. It's just knowing when to use the right tool.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
if it ain't on da inter net then it ain't worth know'n
I recall a conversation with a telemarketer for my local newspaper back in 1996, asking me why I don't subscribe to their rag. When I responded that I can get the news instantly while online and that waiting for the morning edition was unnecessary, their only response was "Oh...hmm. Well...." Besides, newspapers are really only big advertising vehicles anymore -- "news" (not the fluff in Section D about knitting or pet daycare providers and similar garbage^Wfiller) probably makes up less than 25% of available space.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Basing all of your worldly knowledge on what has been learned in the past 7 years online, is foolish.
It is also slower to look up the spelling of a word on the Internet, since there is no promise that the spelling you find is correct. Just grab a nice dictionary that is on the shelf by your computer. It is tricky if you have used that dictionary to prop up your Monitor another 5 centimeters.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I'm stockpiling books against the day when the Internet grinds to a halt under ever-increasing spam, viruses, and lawsuits ;-)
I'd have to agree. At this point, almost all of my information comes from the internet. The only other contender in my life (other than word of mouth) is the radio since I listen to NPR and a few other stations to and from work each day. At home, I don't have cable or satellite, nor do I want them. So TV isn't a big source of information for me. Yet despite this, I find myself generally as well informed if not more so than most of the people I interact with daily.
The internet just happens to be an incredibly efficient source of information. That's not to say you'll always find the most accurate data online, but that you can find lots of information very quickly. Searching for information in even a library, as well organized as it is, cannot beat a decent google search in terms of speed. Moreover, the amount of information at your fingertips is simply astounding.
Given all that, I have found a few drawbacks. One is that I tend to be a little more ignorant of local news than national or international. Secondly, I have found though that I tend to visit only a few select sites. When I can't find what I'm looking for on Google, I sometimes forget that there are other search engines. If the online mailing list archives don't have the answer to my programming question, I sometimes forget to look in the newsgroups. I think this is a danger, though not necessarily one specific to the internet. Just because you have millions of sites, or hundreds of channels, doesn't mean you'll actually take the time to listen to more than one voice.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
"but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off" -pffff,anything taking more than a couple of minutes isn't worth doing
"My shit always works sometimes!"
i use the internet for just about all knowledge i require... except the internet. i still buy books for language development and the such, but those are more for referance than anything else. plus, i detest reading books fron a computer screen, but maybe eInk will solve my problems.
As far as news goes, the main advantage of the internet is that regional news is globally accessible. If I want to know what's going on Country X, (as many people with friends/family scattered around the globe often do) I check an online news source maintained in Country X itself.
In many cases, CNN (and other news giants) will be prone to inaccuracy. I can't tell you how many times people I know have seen reports of hurricanes in their home towns on cable/satellite news and looked out their windows to see sunshine.
The internet acts as my second memory, second hearing, and second sight.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
I grew up in libraries, historical archives, and research centers. Still, I look up almost everything on the internet and never gave other sources a second thought until the past few months. Now I get to re-discover these places and it feels like I'm a kid again.
Your mileage may vary.
Back in the day, at least.
The rumors of a thousand ill-informed people do not add up to the knowledge of a single well-informed person. So be careful to verify what you read before accepting it as Truth.
And never, never trust MapQuest.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
The internet will never replace speaking with a live person, and retrieving information that way.
We are born depending upon live human beings for training and information dissemination. (Thanks Mom and Dad for sharing all that knowledge!) To a certain extent, we never outgrow this need for direct human intervention to learn.
Ask a live person a question, and they can sometimes answer the question you're asking with your body language. They go on tangents. They are focussed 100% on your interaction, and if they're not, you can take them to task.
Talk to your neighbours. They tell you information you never knew you needed to know. They are also interacting with the same environment at the same time, which is invaluable contextual information to know when answering a question.
Need information about what is wrong with your body? Get a doctor to touch and poke at it. Human interaction is required.
The internet is a great information resource, but it's limited. It can't touch you and it isn't in your environment.
I tried searching for "The Internet's Hottest Nude Mujahudeen Amputees" on google.
I found nothing!
Do you know something I don't?
Please tell me!
...on second thought, don't
You feel that the only source of information in your life is the Internet, so you ask people on the Internet about it. :)
If it makes you feel better, I use the Internet as my primary source of information. Other forms of info seem too one-sided... I'm not talking conservative vs. liberal, but rather how it is dominated by rich people.
There are numerous sources on the Net that are run by a variety of people with different backgrounds. I prefer to make my decisions based on facts that I can read about rather than having my decisions made for me by the elite media, even if my conclusions are incorrect.
At 40, I'm a child of the computer age (started programming at 17 and was on the Internet when that meant using FTP or UUCP in the 80-ties.). Nevertheless, I read fiction and non-fiction in book form (as can be seen on the reviews on my homepage, a hobby of mine), but every time I need some quick info, I too google, msn, etc, for the information I need (I love google, but they don't have all information). Why do I still read non-fiction books? As I'm interested in Management (and has an MBA), I can tell you that very little of the information that you need to learn to become a manager (or MBA) can be found on the Internet. You need to find the books or journals and read them. If I need to understand how PHP parses regexp as compared to PERL or how the object classes of OCCAM is built compared to C++, I can find it on the Internet. More specialised, non-computer related subjects, is still best found on paper (I would love if it wasn't so, but that is my experience). For News on the other hand, I nearly always use the Internet, as it has the latest news, as it breaks and allows me to get different opinions (like the American, Canadian, French, Swedish, Israeli, Arab, etc opinions on the Iraqi question). TV, Radio and Newspapers are too focused on what they believe to be politically correct and it is hard to get an overview of opinions if I don't use the Internet. Also, the ensuing discussions, with experts, so-called-experts, crackpots and lay(wo)men is what I love about the Internet. The Internet today, is a wonderful complement to hard sources of information, but it is far from replacing them. Regards Roland Buresund
-- Roland Buresund MBA, MCMI, CISSP
Until you asked, it hadn't occurred to me, but for the most part it turns out that yes, I do rely on it rather too heavily. In fact, at times I find myself automatically Googling for something when someone asks a question even if, with a minute or two's thought, I could have answered it myself. It's pretty much replaced my brain entirely... To paraphrase Desi, "Tim Berners Lee, you got som splainin to doooo!"
This sentence no verb.
I gave up buying a whole class of tech books for the most part a few years ago. These are the specific books like "Configure Sendmail" or "Perl Reference." I mean they're great books for the purposes, but Google and Google's interface on the Usenet archives have the most current information easily available. I still buy books like Stevens' "Unix Network Programming" because they're more big picture explanations than function references.
Usually, when I have a tech problem, I can either figure it out on my own, or I have to research it. When it comes to obscure error messages, books are usually not very helpful. Usenet archives, however, are usually great. Type the text of the message into Google Groups, and at least 30% of the time, you'll get a direct hit on something that answers your question. And 70% of the time, you'll get a hint that steers you in the right direction, or helps you figure out what you *should* be searching for.
So yesterday, the network connection at our facility was down for four hours. I didn't have a single command reference available. I found myself sitting around twiddling my thumbs. I actually did things like organize old email, and clean up old cruft from my hard drive. It was painful.
Now I think I may want to at least keep reference caches on my local machine...
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
... to news blogs like the Agonist made me very aware of how late the established news media picks up stories - if they pick them up at all.
Internet is the way to go if you want to stay well informed.
Although I use Internet as my primary source for knowledge, specially regarding new technologies, books are still the best alternative when you want to have a complete picture and master the basic concepts about one specific subject. They are not as discardable as a web page, and the best authors mean to make them last, putting a lot of work on them (a memorable book is the one thing that it is gonna make his writer immortal).
Since getting on the Internet back in like, 1996, I started watching less and less TV. When I eventually moved out to live on my own, I didn't bother getting cable hooked up at my place. I get all the content I need from the Internet, and without commercials and Jerry Springer.
So yeah, I use the Internet as my main source of information.
I asked Jeeves and got:
Refine Your Search
How do I cite references from the Internet?
Search for "Is the internet my source of knowledge?" on other sites:
sponsored by SMARTpages.com
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Tubgirl
Goatse
Among many others that I wouldn't have ever known about without the internet.
Hooray for the information age!
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
For information, yes there is the superhighway. But it seems to me knowledge is more; it requires intelligence. So far humans are apparently the only vessels with knowledge. However, cleverly-written software can persuade us to believe machines have knowledge, as the Darwin Awards infer that several humans don't.
Anybody want a peanut?
I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information,
Paper newspapers and magazines we read before didn't disappear, they mapped onto the internet with you.
The interface between you and the information has changed, but much of the professional sources - be they journalists or scientists - are still at the other end.
The medium is not the message. Not wholly.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
I think overreliance on the Internet for information is why so many tech stocks bubbled and why so many techies are so insensitive to the effects of technology on people, as well as a sort of social darwinist ideology that the free market correlates perfectly with ability (even at the same time as M$ is bashed albeit often for anti-free market principles) or with public taste. If you don't see it on the screen, it doesn't happen.
That and getting information from games like SimCity (software is the cleanest and highest value of all industries) and Civilization (limited liability is an important moment of progress). The general conclusion is that corporate expansion and economic growth means greater efficiency, which is the way that all people become better off. This seems so self evident based on most of the information you get from the Internet that as soon as I write it I realize that the mere questioning of it will seem absurd to most people. The fact that the vast majority of people in human history did not believe this to be true is something you would have very little indication of from the informatoin available from the Internet. That is to say that the Internet is suffused with a Taylorist, efficiency based ideology.
I won't describe what else happens during that time, other than to say I have another definition of the "Slashdot Effect".
I think it's coming to the point that, online, knowledge is more or less irrelivent. It's more about how resourceful you are. How potently you use your favourite search engine and how well your instincts navigate you between the junk and into the holy grail. :D
:D
People think I'm smart, but really it's just that I've learned how to find what I'm looking for. Smarts has little to do with it, as I have little of it.
- shazow
the net is the largest library of human knowledge since there has been human knowledge. that said, it is still a microcosm of meatspace. you can't believe everything you read. but the net makes it _much_ easier to seek out many opposing views, and form your own opinion about what is real, or right, or whatever. the information to research something is surely on paper somewhere in the world, but i can't look it up on a whim. and i can't do it while drinking beer, and sitting around in my underwear.
I get a lot of information of varying quality from the internet. However, I still take in information much better from a high-density medium like paper. So I still end up printing most interesting stuff out, after skimming it on screen.
Perhaps one day, when cheap computer screens have 600dpi+ resolution, with reflective color and comparable contrast to paper, I'll stop.
My current monitor runs at 100dpi, 1024x768. Really not enough. At one stage, at a job, I had 2 1600x1200 monitors at 100dpi. It was beginning to get bearable, but I still printed out longer documents.
Although Slate and Salon are pretty good, no online site approaches the quality of a well edited weekly or daily such as: the Economist or the Christian Science Monitor. While their names may be misleading, they have the MOST in depth and minimally biased coverage of international issues bar none. (and they don't pretend to be fair and balanced either)
I like Google better :-)
Still, the web is just a good second start: I still have not lost faith in the Semantic Web.
That said, I was fairly much shocked yesterday when I went through the little exercise of converting my main web page to XHTML. The problem was that there is no standard way (yet) to embed RDF in XHTML and still have a page be a legal XML document. Strange but true. I ended up placing comment tags around my RDF - yuck.
-Mark
I'm saving for a wearable computer.... Then will never have to leave google again ;)
---
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
You only use the internet as a source of knowledge? Bah! I have an IV tube sticking out of my ethernet adapter connecting to my arm... The internet is my life support.
In the days before the internet, knowledge wasn't as easy to get hold of without having to contact someone or go somewhere... I remember in the early days when people claimed the internet was a fad that was just going to fade out, fad indeed... I myself would not be as interested in SEEKING information as having it come to me if not for the internet. Because of its existence, it has made me go out and do things with myself, martial arts for starters (Blue belt, Shotokan Karate)... I know that the internet to some extent can turn you into a modified version of a couch potato, but atleast it turns you into a SMART couch potato...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
This is a bit of a rehashing of (or at least related to) this subject:
Is Google God?
# Erik
i've been using my palm-os based pda for everything from news to resetting Diagnostic Trouble Codes of vehicles, to fictional reading. as far as i'm concerned the only reason that i still get a sunday paper is for coupons and local advertising, as by the time that i get the sunday paper, i've already read the "breaking news" either online or on my pda. from what i can see, that is, from the people around me, this is definatly a fast growing trend, and if the physical news print-based companies can't keep up with the "light-speed" based companies who publish instantly to the entire globe, (except china, and now india, the poor fools) then i fear the print based media may go the way of the telegraph, not so much dissapeared, but replaced with faster, more reliable, technology.
alltheweb.com is a pretty good Google alternative. They even have an FTP search tab.
I've found that by and large whenever I want to know something (at least a basic level) I turn to e2. Want to make gnocchi? E2. Double check some info on Pallas Athena? E2. Find out more about a comic series I've heard good things about? E2. Rapidly it's becoming my source for almost all information: music, movies, dictionary, encyclopedia, almanac, cookbook, etc. Sure I still use more specialized resources for more in-depth info (IMDb, AMG) but if I want to know it fast and basic it has me covered for a quick search much faster than going to the library to look up something trivial.
This, I think, is at the source of this. More people are getting more information period by getting it online. If it required actual research you probably wouldn't be bothered to look into it, but a few minutes online will immediately fill you in.
...contrary to the popular belief that you can find anything what you fancy to know in the Internet is wrong was one of the most important (and, not amazingly, most astonishing) discoveries I've made in my life. (It was like your GF saying to you, "I'm pregnant." :> )
...I find that, usually, my only source of news is just what I read on slashdot- Eeeek! I know that's bad, but I usually have my laptop open to it and just hit refresh throughout the day. I come home and my wife tells me about stuff she read in the paper. I reply with gripes about the latest SCO story. Sad but true.
They still make books?
I was just talking about this yesterday with a co-worker... Sometimes real books are just better, but when I see that a set of encyclopedias is $1,395, I think I'm sticking to the online method.
It makes me wonder what people's libraries will look like 50 years from now...
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
I realized this recently, too, but mainly as it refers to my business. I'm a techie at heart (hell, I'm reading slashdot at work), but I work in finance. Everything in my business is done on computers and almost all data is stored in electronic format. I often think, "how the hell did people do business without _____" (insert computers, telephones, electricity, trains, cars, etc).
However, I begin to realize that there are still tons of technologies out there waiting to be discovered. How did people live without the internet? well, how is it that you are able to live without the _____ (insert future blockbuster product here). Imagine the day when you don't check the internet for information because you have something better. It may never happen, but no one expected to see the printing press before it was introduced.
Books can't even compare to the flexibility of the internet, especially in areas like Computer Science which are rapidly changing every day.
But the internet is much more than that, its my source of news, shopping and reviews for just about anything. I can compare various weather reports, check out the radar images or click onto a web-cam anywhere in the world to see for myself.
The parent post brings up the issue of realiability. Now, while I will admit that there is a large ammount of usless, misleading and just plain false information out there, I have to remind you that this is because ANYONE can post ANYTHING THEY WANT on the web. This means that if you look around and compare sources, the internet will provide you with exponentially more viewpoints than any book or newspaper ever could. Just look at what's happened with the SCO thing on Slashdot.
I can't even count the number of times I've seen stuff on the news and said "Oh yeah, I remember reading about that on Slashdot a WEEK ago!".
...for instance, the phone book. Yahoo! Yellow Pages (and SmartPages.com, and all that sort of stuff) are great for looking something up provided you want a specific name, or just want the closest businesses of a given category (Italian restaurants, etc. -- and the distance-based sorting is something the paper books could never hope to help you with; add maps and directions to the mix and it's no contest). However, if you are trying to decide which business among many to choose, you might want to see something the paper yellow pages give you that, ironically, the 'net doesn't: ads. That's right, ads. I have yet to see an online yellow pages that has any ads for the companies listed. Seems like a glaring oversight, given the pervasion of ads on the 'net anymore.
Travel arrangements...well, I suppose it depends on the kind of trip you're taking. When I went overseas last year, it was far better and easier (and cheaper) going through an agency. For domestic stuff, though, I don't doubt that you could go 'net-style all the way.
Checks, well, I'm kinda with you on that one. Online bill-pay is great. Only drawback: time frame. If you want to send someone a check RIGHT NOW, you'd better do it yourself, using paper and stamps and the whole shebang. Otherwise (i.e., a few days from now is fine), online is the way to go.
Another invaluable reference I'd like to mention is IMDb. Before that, if I wanted to find out something movie/TV/actor-related, I was more often than not simply out of luck. Which reminds me: movie times and locations. No comparison to sifting through newspaper ads. Oh, and classifieds. And dictionary/thesaurus resources. And...and...and...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
To liken Google to the Internet is a big mistake. Google is your tool, and the Internet is your resource. When we start linking our ACCESS to our resource to the ABILITY of our tools, we introduce selective barriers into our environment... barriers which are very dificult to tear down. Ever try to find something without Google? If you can't, you are setting yourself up for trouble (too much reliance on a single tool). If everyone does that, we get this social helplessness that effectively makes excuses for in-action based on laziness... Google was down so I couldn't find it. Does this remind anyone of the Microsoft Windows monopoly and information security? If the majority doesn't bother to patch Windows, then is it acceptable (albeit sub-optimal) to leave systems vulnerable?
...I'll take the 'net any day.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying info on the 'net is always accurate. Books and periodicals have an advantage of better (but NOT perfect) fact checking/editing. However, the 'net can be more timely than another medium.
I have a fairly rare eye condition (pars planitis) and there is no way I would've found treatment information through an eye doc (most are unfamiliar with how to treat this condition). After ten years of searching, I finally found an opthamologist that can help treat this condition. He researched pars planitis..his opinion of books: they're good, but as soon as they're published the information is out of date by roughly two years.
The dead tree route is a good repository, but it does not provide timely information.
I was going through school right as the internet was being used on a daily basis more and more. Half my wonderful years of education were spent looking through books, newspapers, microfiche, microfilm, and the sort for information as it was the only source. I guess I got lucky were I was able to use the internet later on to do research papers that would have normally taken weeks to research only took hours, in some cases minutes before class. :) Knowing how I went through this, I somewhat pity the younger generations of this era as they have not nor will not be exposed to late hours of looking through books for info. or making that mad dash to the public library for a book that was just checked the night before you have to turn in a paper. Sad to say that some technology has very much helped to lazy up society at least in the United States. I will admit that having the internet to do research on was a massive time saver in my school career, but the knowledge of going to a book to look something up is something we all need to know how to do. Since the internet has gotten bigger and bigger I think the last time I was in a library was about 7 years ago. I guess times are changing weather we like it or not.
I also rely a lot on Internet for information, entertainment, and technical knowledge. Of course for the last 5 years I have been using it more and more (also thanks to Google), but my "non-digital media" consumption is stable, or even increasing because of internet (thanks to Amazon). A good technical book is in my opinion better than surfing, basically because it can stay on the desk, be read in transports and is usually more detailed and better organized than a list of links, articles, good/bad advices... Concerning fiction, I won't switch to digital, because there is a relation between me and the book (the object) I can't find with a screen. Nevertheless, most of the books I read have been bought or discovered on Internet. For the news, I haven't been watching TV for years and I don't trust Internet more than TV on the field of objectivity/accuracy. My newspapers consumption (both general and tech news) has even increased during the recent years basically because I find information more focused and better organized than on Internet. But when I'm interested in more details, I use Internet to search on the subject for details.
ClaudeBBG
I switch on the tele, all the news stations state the same things. Newspapers, magazines, etc are all tabloids or similar now, as stated by a most excellent first post.
The only difference between the internet and your basic tabloid big-4 owned media of choice is that internet sources are usually smaller and more needy of advertising, and many get their information from other sources instead of doing their own journalism or they'll publish someone elses journalism (hyperlinking is a form of publishing). Many websites won't post things that their advertisers don't like and this is true for newspapers and tv, but many websites can make a living and keep running without the need for big end corperate sponsorship, they get their funding from smaller companies. Heck, I'v seen microsoft advertising on theregister.co.uk several times, and they still throw up anti-microsoft stuff (for which the advertising is pulled for a few weeks, then it's back, then it's gone, same for hardocp). Many websites only use advertising to pay the bandwidth costs and the reporters have dayjobs. That's another huge difference.
Plus, you're seeing a lot of 3rd party news sources (such as the one in my sig, www.rantradio.com llamas) pop up where crazy people decide they hate the news, scounge and scour, read the e-mail their fans send and make a news show out of it. As jello biafra says, "don't hate the media, become the media". I personally prefer sean kennedys ranting or the phreaking antics of RFA more than friends or some other show. You don't laugh at the telepromted time, you laugh with them becuase it is funny.
For me, it isn't that the news isn't important, it's that all the other sources accept the internet are the same thing; sports, fud, fud, fud, bush's colon, traffic, weather, fud fud fud, commercial, and mabye a breaking story on something unimportant. Essentially, bullshit. You never see slashdot stories about celeberties every single day comprising much of the news, plus with slashdot I can go ahead and bitch all I want here and I can get more opinions and information.
Other people get the news off of the internet becuase they're lazy or cheap; it's cheaper to get cnn off of the internet or goto x websites a day and get news that way than to buy newspapers and watch TV. Then again, who doesn't mind replacing an hour or two of reading magazines with 30 mins of surfing?
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Now if only technology could some how re-direct pharmaceutical r&d into actually curing diseases (when was the last time that happened, like 50 years ago?), especially deadly ones and those found in third world countries, instead of just finding new pills for heartburn and impotence. Actually what you really want is a computer that is not a sleep deprived resident or a narcissist who is only concerned with buying their next Porsche.
I tend to use the web for things I wouldn't have bothered with before. For example, about a year ago I recall reading an article about Chernobyl, and out of morbid curiosity I started researching the hell out of it. I never would have bothered before having the Internet; the novelty would have worn off long before I got to the library.
Similarly, if I'm watching a movie, often I want to know the name of a song, or I can't remember what other movie some actor was in... so I hit AllMusic.com or IMDB.com. Before the web I'd have just given up for lack of wanting to expend the effort.
On the other hand, I do use the web for news, pricing information, and other things for which there are/were alternatives. It does make it much easier to see who has the Maxtor 80 GB drives for the least money this week than it would be to actually (physically) shop around. When it comes to news, I can research a topic/event as much or as little as I like, in my own time.
So, I use the web for things I used to do in other ways, and I use it for new things I'd have not bothered with before. I wouldn't go as far as to say how did I live without it, because obviously I did -- but I would say that I'm so used to it now, I can't see going back to not having the web available.
World... fingertips... and all that jazz...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
For quick answers to simple questions, I use the web almost exclusively. For example, a friend of mine called and wanted to know about some file that Windows said was "missing and/or corrupt" on bootup. A quick google search on the filename, and I found a resolution ON THE VERY FIRST LINK.
For indepth learning of a new topic - for instance, when I decided to learn PHP, there's nothing better than knowledge in dead tree form.
But, once I'm comfortable with the topic, I tend to go back and use the web as a quick reference. Again, using PHP as the example, I almost always will consult the php doc pages on the php website for syntax reference and things like that.
i am an addict of meta news sites like slashdot, kuro5hin, fark, etc.
i also listen to the bbc over internet radio all day at work- as a us resident, it's nice to have a non-stupidly patriotic news outlet like fox, etc, as the source of my information that shapes my opinions.
i do read/ buy books, because the form factor of the book: cheap, lightweight, no energy source needed, etc., just really cannot be beaten by the internet (until, of course, they perfect those electronic paper gadgets whispered about recently here on slashdot and elsewhere). but of course, i buy them online from amazon! lol
i have a bookcase of crumbling college days textbooks, picture books, etc., but it's more of a decoration piece than a reference i use anymore.
all my music is downloaded from the net as well. no more tapes, cds.
but, a big but:
the tv is always on in the background. hard for that to be replaced just yet by the net.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For longer projects, I hate to stare at a screen. I'm a linguist geek, and for most language reference materials I"ll always buy dictionaries rather than rely on online sources...
Apart from the medium, it is usually the case that any one reference work or internet source I have isn't enough, and I either have to cobble together several different references or GATHER MY OWN.
Arabic, for example, has 35 dialects and *almost NONE* of the sources you'll find on the market or on the net specifies which one it's using... in this case, human knowledge has been stored in the environment - where language is spoken. Now THAT's old school (a method circa 200,000 years old, probably.)
I use the internet (Google, generally) to search for information. It's usually easy to get some theories/etc, but it gets harder when you go more "mainstream" (i.e words that has a double meaning, or a product you need information about).
Let us use the product "Flash linker". First of all, "Flash" is a popular internet media format, and "linker" can refer to linkers in compilers/etc. Therefore, a search for the product can quickly become too huge and filled with dirt.
The first thing that I do is usually to type "-buy" to lock out shops. If the product is something that spammers will give you "for free" then add "-free" too, and it'll quickly shorten all the spam. Also, putting the product name in goose-eyes is a good idea for 2-word products/etc.
Also, be specific about what you want ("Flash linker" review) or (information "Flash linker"), etc.
that's my 2 cents of knowledge.
the Grid has been my primary source of info for quite some time.
I have found that I only go to the main stream news when directed from some other site.
What I would like to ask is the follow up question:
How many of you all rely on blogs and other news consolidation services (Slashdot, Google News) for info rather than previous main stream news (NYT, BBC, etc) sources for news?
>I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information.
What do you mean by that? What "other sources of news and information"? I do have a 36" television, but I thought it could only be used to watch DVDs and play console games.
As for "printed information", I do receive printed ads for various stores every week-end. Not much of a "news and information" source if you ask me.
I work as a researcher as a university, and while the internet is good for quick searches (say, what is the boiling point of such and such fluid) it lacks in-depth information which I often need. And then there are random things that I was simply unable to find on the internet, for whatever reason, like what SSP meant when referring to silicon wafers. I do use the university library website to find papers which I then usually download via the internet to read up on the more in-depth stuff. I'm not sure if this counts as using the internet to find information, or using scientific journals. For me, it's just faster then walking down to the library and photocopying (plus saves copying fee) although I still do that every once in a while for journals who don't post their articles online, or for older articles.
I've done the same thing -- and I too grew up with books (and magazines).
Part of it for me is a desire to be on the bleeding edge -- I like knowing that what I'm getting is the most up-to-date. But I have to admit that most of it is purely a matter of convenience. It is quite a lot easier to search Google than to make time to go to the library and search the card catalog or peruse the periodicals.
Last but not least, I'm an information addict. The Internet satisfies my craving delightfully.
-Thomas
For everything else I have shifted to nearly entirely online sources. But one reason for this is that I'm no longer close to well-stocked university libraries that stay open late. As an undergrad or grad student, I'd often go get a stack of books on whatever subject I was interested in, whether or not it was my actual field of study or not. But now, away from academia, the public libraries hardly compare, and I can't check books out from any of the university libraries that are around here. So I'm usually too lazy to try anything but the web.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
The wonderful strip Cat and Girl covered this phenomenon.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
For news.
I get more news out of my daily copy of the Los Angeles Times. The L.A. Times web site has a mere fraction of what shows up in their daily copy. The same applies to the New York Times. I noticed that the print copy has magnitudes way more information than their web site has. I suspect the same applies to the Wall Street Journal.
The internet is good for obtaining technical information but for real world news, it's the major daily papers that have it.
What my source of knowledge was, typically. Good thing I found this article - I went to the internet immediately to find out, of course.
I read the electronic versions of daily and weekly paper productions. Heck, I just moved so I can still read the paper back home and keep up to date on events 300 miles away. I can start reading before I go to work, continue there, and pick up where I left off in the evening. Lugging around four editions of news doesn't compare to that convenience. Of course the electronic versions only exist because of the advertising and subscriptions to the dead tree ones...
The other big area of e-convenience is in conference journals: expensive, clunky, hard to parse through. But luckily my company has subscriptions to most major IEEE and ACM publications. So I just open up our library frontend and tap away.
I still watch a lot of TV for news (Frontline and The News Hour) and read a bit (Esquire for more feature/editorial stuff, etc).
I guess the Internet has made interfacing with dead-tree material exponentially easier but has only cloned the sources.
What is music when you despise all sound?
My commute is one hour each way, so it's Morning Edition on the way to work, then a mix of sports talk and All Things Considered on the way home.
Once at home, yep, it's the Net, with Google playing a big role. No TV news, no newspapers. That's really no significant change from before the Net, though. I might watch the Newshour on PBS once every two weeks instead of once a week; never have read a newspaper for anything except the comics and sports.
There is much knowledge that cannot yet be represented in words, or at the very worst, in improbably long circumlocutions whose essence is somehow lost if you try to reduce it to object oriented format...
Same here, man. I only have a paper because my wife likes it and I only have cable because my wife likes it. I have reference books out the ying-yang, but they don't get used much.
The internet is great for finding quick facts and information for curiosity, work, or to settle a bet (done that more than once!)
The internet is probobly my primary source of information, but far from my only one. The skill of knowing WHERE to look for something is the most valuable. Using the internet to find deadtree to read is very useful, and even for finding places to get obscure books is a huge resource.
I just shudder to think about how much knowledge will be lost when future generations don't know of anywhere else but the internet to go for information.
Where are we going, and why are we in this hand cart?
Are you talking about the Web?
The Web cannot be beat for current events. It's also a great source for directory information: phone numbers, locations, maps, and the like. But it falls flat on its face for in-depth information, unless you're looking for computer and related geekery in all 31 flavors.
Are you talking about USENET?
Great place to find an expert. On anything. This expert may even take the time to talk to you. Since the advent of Google archiving, it's become easier to search newsgroups for back posts--and there is a *lot* of good data passing through USENET.
Are you talking about P2P?
Right now, it's all pr0n and thr33z. I'm not sure this is what you're talking about when you say "information."
Are you talking about subscription-based database and index services, like LEXIS-NEXIS, CompendexWeb, PUBMED, and WorldCat?
These are where the professional and research quality information is on the Internet. They are useful, but expensive, and chances are you don't have access unless you are at a university or a company that pays for a subscription.
Are you talking about intranets?
These can be a source of good information in large companies and organizations. NASA has an excellent one, some of which they mirror to the Web where it's available to all, but the really spiffy stuff is only available to employees.
So to answer your question, I use the Web to follow the news, USENET for hobby interests, P2P for pretty much nothing, databases and intranets for some professional work.
But nothing beats dead trees for in-depth information--if you can find where it's been published. I went to my thesis advisor to tell him I couldn't find a paper that had been published only in conference proceedings from the 80's (it's notoriously hard to get your hands on conference proceedings), only to have him root through a file cabinet and hand them to me. This was in 2002. Professors are scary.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
f it is not on the Internet, it doesn't exist
I've been using the Internet since early '96. I find that the Internet makes for a good immediate source to find the answer to a question I may have. Mainly because I'm a poor college student who doesn't have access to volumes of books and making a trip to the school/local library for a measly tidbit of information is pointless. Even when writing papers, unless I can't use the Net, I do a google search first because it is so easy. If that doesn't work I don't discredit ye ole books for the information.
It does make for an up-to-date news source that covers a wider variety of subjects than any single newspaper can. I'm not one that totally trusts any and all news sources, but willing to believe news agencies along my own belief system, because everyone is biased to their own agendas (Liberal, Conservative, or otherwise), but it helps to remain informed in the ever-changing dynamic world that we live in.
"Hard work never killed anyone." -- Some Dead Guy
For CompSci terms and other more general information I look it up on www.everything2.com
It's got GREAT explanations of even the most intricate topics.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Yes, gradually Internet becomes for me one of the top information mediums. But don't call it "source". I didn't buy a paper book in quite a while, but I read more books than ever. I download them from the net. But they are still the same books as the ones written on paper. I connect to university sites and read papers online. But these are the same papers I would read in their library. I read news on newspapers' pages. The news are brought by the same reporters as to the paper.
So, what is the source? The universities? The authors? The redactions? Or the Internet? Did the Internet write the books, the papers? Was Internet present by most famous events? Are power lines the source of electricity, or is it the power plant?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
As someone who occasionally needs information a bit more technical and detailed than is available on foxnews.com or cnn.com, I find that the internet is of mixed usefulness in discovering information. A rule of thumb: if it's free, that's about what it's worth.
A Google search often turns up some useful information, but the real stuff comes from journals, trade magazines, and books. You can't expect someone to devote the same amount of effort when they aren't getting anything out of it. Community projects (if organized) are different though, because what you get out of your time is access to the whole project. Usenet is also good because you can contribute information when you have it, and get some insight when you need it.
...
1) Information on the 'net is a mile wide and an inch deep. The internet is dominated by infobytes (cough bad pun) - short blurbs attending a short attention span. Certainly, for reference, I'm all about the internet. What's playing at the theatres? How many grams in an ounce? What does the flag of SmallLandlockedNation look like, and where the hell is that country, so we can bomb it?
However, for more in-depth content, print media still seems to be the way to go. I think this partially due to the fact that CRT reading just isnt as comfortable as good ole print.
Also, the medium of the web is well suited to tangential jumps; read a blurb here, read a blurb there, go freestyle-surfin-on-a-link-safari kind of thing. But print is far more linear. Longer, more developed lines of thought seem more natural for print.
One disclaimer for my argument is the context of the information in question. Since geeks have been the early adapters of the 'net as a general information source, and geeks are still the most prominent audience of heavy net use, geek content is often the best realized. Need info on how to dualboot an OS? Perhaps you're looking for a syntax reference on some obscure language? I might be wrong here, but I think one of the first major uses of email/usergroups was to exchange cough cough trek jokes.
2) A very significant change is the increased availability of always-on broadband. If your 'pooter is always connected to the internet, it's not an obstacle to google whatever temporary random question you had. Typically, I'll be watching television, or talking on the phone, or even reading, and a little silly question will enter my silly little head, and a couple of clicks, and I have the answer.
I'm sure \.ers will find this a quaint memory of times-long-ago when the primary access to the 'net was dialup. Turn on computer, dial in to ISP (I fondly remember endless busy signals when using a budget ISP, or my University free dialup), listen to the symphony of the handshake, and you're in the net. Then, it's just a matter of.... minutes.... before you could successfully navigate to the page that contained that critical bit of info you were looking for.
However, by this time, you've long forgotten _why_ you even were interested in that piece of info in the first place.
So, to summarize: Geek content = good, Broadband = good, and stupid small amounts of info = good.
The Internet includes just about every book, quote or fact that has ever been printed...and then some. Now that the Internet has matured, reference books and libraries are just a subset of the collective nature of the Internet. Shoot, I can't even remember the last time I saw the inside of a library since '94. Books and physical references are now simply for leisure or ease of reading.
SUMMERY: The Internet has done something that has never been available--good or bad, anyone can now be a publisher.
"To the Internet!"
That's pretty much sums up my views on the issue.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
I use it for product research for work, learning about new subjects, reading the news and research stories for more indepth info (!= /. :), online dictionary, encyclopedia, some entertainment though not much. I still find the local yellow pages better than the online versions (i like Apple's sherlock for this becuase of the maps but it just won't find everything I need). Looking up local movie, concert schedules. And, listening to online radio stations as well.
uh, I use it alot. Then again I don't receive a newspaper, and don't own an idiot box.
-k
Your mind moves quicker than a nun's first curry. - A. Rimmer
I find that the faster the delievery of information, the less accurate it is. Also, just because you have access to the world's newspapers and news media online, doesn't mean that you are getting the right information. For instance, news.ru is saying that the magnitude of the earthquake that struck southwestern Siberia last night was a 9.5 (Yeah right). But on neic.usgs.gov's site they are listing it as a 6.7.
That's right, ads. I have yet to see an online yellow pages that has any ads for the companies listed.
:) but it's not too bad.
the yellow pages I use for my region have 'sponsored' businesses that get their results on top (in a separate box) -and- have links to their website: it can still use some work (not that many plumbers with a website
The only advantage of the paper yellow pages is that you can see how much the business paid for the ad (by its size) while online they're all exactly the same (but you can see how much they paid for their website by its quality)
-- the cake is a lie
An example: Back in the early 80s I had an 8080 based computer system built by a company called "Ontel". This all was before the 'net's "Event Horizon", so there is very little, if anything, out there about it.
Another thing that concerns me is the loss of redundancy. University libraries make up a huge, redundant storehouse of accumulated human knowledge. Each journal is sent to hundreds of libraries each month, so if one or two burn down, there are still plenty of copies of, say, the July, 1982 edition of "The American Journal of Archaeology". If everything is on the net, a disk crash or two can wipe things out.
-- ac at work
I love books. Books are great. Books are a condensed source of highly portable knowledge that do not require batteries and will work even if I throw them around a lot, use them to prop up a couch, or get cheeto stains on the corners of their pages.
With that in mind, consider the annoyance of taking a laptop into the restroom, where something like 98% of all human knowledge is obtained. Don't laugh - my office recently installed MAGAZINE RACKS in every stall. Bathrooms aren't just for TV Guide anymore, oh no; we have Discover Magazine, Network Security, and Micro Warehouse in ours.
But I digress.
Books provide answers to questions you don't even know how to ask. For instance, I am teaching myself ASP. I have two books, and I use the internet for free tutorials. Without these books I would use the wrong words in my searches, ask poorly phrased questions and receive irrelevant answers. Internet resources are necessarily compact and specific, usually comprising less than 5 or 6 pages. Compare this with any book ever written on ASP.NET.
I love the internet, and I use it every day. I would be lost without it. But I ain't throwing out my library anytime soon.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
I commute 52 miles to work, which in Seattle traffic takes anywhere from 1 to 2 hours each way (3 if an oil tanker explodes on the interstate or something). I started listening to my local NPR station (KPLU, which I knew about because it is based out of the college I went to) because the other radio stations around here suck, except for KEXP (KEXP, which is out of range for most of my commute (but ironically, I can listen to an uncompressed stream of it, you guessed it, over the Internet!). I'm pretty much addicted to my NPR during the commute now-- so I end up listening to it 2-3 hours per day. I feel that even if I don't get a chance to surf the net that day, that it keeps me pretty well up-to-date on current local and world affairs. But to respond to the question, yes, other than NPR, the Internet is, in almost all cases, my only source of information.
The Internet is a great place for finding certain kinds of information. If you want something up-to-the-minute, you're obviously not going to find it as ink on paper.
But if you want to research a topic in depth, and the topic is not something bleeding edge, the library is a great place to be. You can go grab reference books off the shelves, pile them around you, and really dig in. For example, if you want to know about the Pullman strike, you will find a lot of very nice one-page summaries on the Internet, but if you want to study it in depth, you have to go to the library.
At the Library, you don't get the quick link traversal of the Internet, and you have to know how to find stuff (the card catalog is the library's equivalent of Google, and it takes some work to learn how to operate it effectively).
I think that right now, probably the best way to do research is in a library with your laptop and an internet connection, so that you can use the Internet to kickstart your search, and the card catalog to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, very little of what is in the library is yet available in digital form, so if you just use the Internet for research, you're really handicapping yourself, although I think if you eliminate the Internet you're doing the same thing.
A lot of people complain that you can't trust what you read on the net. This might be true, but I have no problem using my common sense to draw my own conclusions from possibly disparate info.
All in all, a godsend.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Ever since I started college, about five years ago, I have been wondering how people used to study computer science _without_ the Internet. I cannot imagine getting any serious programming job done without Google. Manual pages are usually no adequate source of information when using new or unfamiliar technologies.
Those grass roots examples people post on the web have actually saved my butt so many times I can't remember. While a good book is very valuable, a simple non-academic text is often very helpful in taking that first step. With a lot of OSS packages (I'm specifically thinking of the hideously undocumented OpenSSL library) example code is simply the only way to go. Other things I learned from the web include the BerkeleyDB embedded database library, Haskell, SQL, HTML/CSS, Perl and more recently Flex/Bison.
Always-on internet access is fantastic. No sitting through horrendous voice menus at 444-FILM (amctheatres.com) Can't remember what other movies that guy was in? (imdb.com) Many many many other uses.
But we aren't there yet. I needed a carpenter at one point in time. Am I only going to pick one if I can find them on the internet? Nope. I live in a relatively small community on the outskirts of a big city. I picked up the very thin local phone book for that. Oddly enough, I scoured the local phone books and asked around for lawn maintenance recommendations, and couldn't find anything. A Google search didn't turn up much for my area, but then I noticed a sponsored link. That is who we ended up using. (I think that was the first time I ever used a sponsored link). Got a personal recommendation for a vet in the area. I still subscribe to Scientific American and Skeptical Inquirer, because online publications just don't do it for me yet in some respects. Books are still king. Nothing like sitting in Borders or Barnes and Noble for a few hours browsing. You could never put things like the Louvre on the internet and capture the experience.
Right now it is a combination for me, with the Internet offering a lot. A lot of times it is the first place I go for info, in the areas where it has a clear advantage (mass searching, access to specific information). I still rely on recommendations and word of mouth for a lot of info, even though they may come to me via the Internet (email to friends). I don't see it taking over more traditional means of information, but it is a damn fine supplement to it.
As an example, our dog drank some hot cocoa the other night. Chocolate can be deadly to dogs, and he is a 4lb Chihuahua, so we were worried. I did a quick search on the net for info while my wife looked up the number of the local 24hr animal hospital. Even though what I found said that hot cocoa probably wasn't deadly because of the low chocolate content, we still called the vet. Some things require validation from multiple sources. (and the dog was fine.)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The internet just happens to be the most efficient way to research and gather information. You can gather information quickly with minimal effort. Just stop reading liberal websites like Slashdot,
The only way to fix the deficit is to tax sunlight.
I use the Internet to research commonly known facts, find conversion calculators for metric to Imperial Std., look up info on error messages, new media, shopping, and so on.
Sometimes, though, it doesn't help, like when trying to get info on replacing your spark plugs on a 1996 Sunfire w/ DOHC. Not only did I have to go meatspace for it, but had to wait a couple of weeks for the library's copy to be turned in before I could get it.
In my current hobby, 1970's-1990's video arcade game collecting/repair, I have to rely almost exclusively on USENET and Google to find information critical to me. Everything from old board identification, pictures, history of games, dip switch settings, schematic drawings, wiring diagrams, "how-to" articles, is on-line. What happens when one of the major repositories of those files goes under? We got to find out earlier this year. SPIES.COM shut down their arcade reference archives because of an automated "cease and desist" message - they didn't want to bother fighting it, so they caved and remove all arcade-related info from their site. This resulted in such a mad rush of people trying to mirror the only remaining site, its owner was forced to shut down that site as well. Until someone stepped forward with a password-protected, access-by-request-only site, there was next to no reference material available for most topics I was interested in.
There are some dangers inherent in relying on the Internet as your sole source for information on a given subject, not the least of which is the prospect of having all such info go away someday.
I recall a time a friend was going to come visit me. I spoke to him on the phone, and started to give him directions from the main highway. It went thusly:
....
Me: Ok, take the HWY eastbound until you cross the toll bridge, then take the first exit and...
Him: No I looked it up on MapQuest.
Me: MapQuest has our area all screwed up, just write this down, take the first exit, go straight, take the second right and...
Him: nah, I already printed the maps out on mapquest
So, the day comes when he's coming over. I get a call..
Him: Hey, I can't find your house.
Me: Where are you?
Him: I'm at a WalMart
Me: WalMart? What city are you in?
Him: [name of city and closest street sign]
Me: Dude, you passed my street about 75 miles ago. Turn around, go back, take the last exit before the bridge and..
Him: No, that's wrong, MapQuest says..
Me: I FUCKING KNOW WHERE I LIVE!
Him: But but mapquest!
Though, as long as you stick to the more travelled areas, and get directions to businesses, MapQuest more or less comes through. It's just the rural and residential streets it sucks at...
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not only is the Internet pretty much my sole source of info (I do keep a small forest of dead tree reference manuals for various computer/network/electronics info on hand), if Google can't find it, I pretty much assume the subject matter to be without enough merit to warrant further investigation.
-This sig intentionally left blank
At 44, I know what you are feeling. It does seem strange, and I wonder what I am teaching my young children; anytime there is a question in family discussions, about anything, we all jump on the computer, hit Google, and wade through the listing. It works every time.
Thank heavens they love books or else I would really be nervous. Actually, we find book reading to be more enjoyable because of the additional background and information that can be found on the Internet. Obscure religious issues, people, battles, laws, or the histories of countries mentioned in books are easily investigated.
I see no problem with it. I see more problem with computer games, but that's another topic.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
For stuff of currency (news, specific tech info, mail lists) then it's the web. But for in-depth coverage that requires thought (such as foreign policy analysis, political analysis, layman's overview of current scientific thinking in various subjects, technical subjects on languages, tools, and architectures), it's going to be periodicals or books.
In other words, if requires heavy thought I want it printed. That may reflect that I need to reread and ponder weightier stuff, and that it's harder for a guy over 40 to stare at text on a monitor for lengthy periods of time. It's also harder to bring a monitor into the toilet with you.
If you post it, they will read.
...if you can't find what you need after 10 minutes of Googling, you didn't really need to know what it was you were looking for.
Also, the answer to this question for most AOL users is an emphatic NO!... the chat rooms are full of retards who, despite being connected to the greatest information repository in human history, come into the chat rooms to ask their fellow retards extremely Google-worthy queries.
Personally, I think people who can't be bothered to look something up on their own when it means a few keystrokes and a couple mouseclicks, should be killed, and the nutrients extracted from their ignorant corpses to benefit the more intelligent.
While I have a large collection of cookbooks (and a "cache" of frequently used cookbooks), I have been aware that I'm hitting google for recipes that involve either a specific ingredient or a specific recipe name. In either case I get several versions of the recipes and print them out. This is like when I look in several books for the same recipe: Determine the essential elements of the recipe and adapt it to whatever I have on hand.
Writing stories for computers and humans since 1979
If I need a piece of information, I'm online, and I'm too lazy to go fumble through a box of books, I'll Google to find the tidbit. I'll also go and cross-reference with two or three other sites to make sure I have the right info.
As far as online computer help and tech support, a good 10-15 minutes, either through the web or through Usenet, will save me a learning curve of hours trying to track down a problem.
So, it's a matter of "at your fingertips". Will that replace the books in our library? Has Bunny Watson been replaced in 2003?
Hell, no.
The 'Net supplements my informational needs; it will never replace it.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I done be mostly usin slashdots an that googly web site thing. It done gone n helped me figur out the timing on my 73 pinto's chevy injun. All I do is aks it fer a pinto wid a chevy injun, and it wend an told me all bout it!
I also founds me a nise lil' lady to be gettin muh cowboy on wid. She's gunna be outta prison in 2005, I kin hardlee wait.
I supose thad muh superior edukashun mite just be a lil bit showy, but u kin be as smard as me 2. its ez, jus go n use the googly n the slashydots.
No, the Internet provides no knowledge for me.
(for the irony-impared, consider that I'm posting this to Slashdot, in response to an article posted to Slashdot)
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Newspaper is much better. You can use it as TP if you forgot to check the roll before sitting down. It doesn't matter if you drop it or it gets dirty. And if you're lucky there may even be some soft pr0n in the lingerie ads.
Honestly I only use the internet for most of my information gathering. I read the online news sites, my local paper has an online site, I use google for looking up questions, and if I need an excyclopedia there's always the britannica online to help me there too. I almost see print media loosing out in the long run to electronic and web based formats.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
I tend to use the internet more for reading quick articles, and research on a smaller scale. I find it at this point to be a great resource for getting information in areas such as .NET Remoting, the proper grip for a baseball change-up pitch, articles on "news" sites, etc. Basically its a great place for small to medium research/reading/leisure type activities.
.NET cert. If for no other reason, it's softer on the eyes for prolonged exposure, not to mention book authors for the most part still put more time and care into books than web authors do into on-line articles (with a few exceptions obviously).
;-)
I still use dead trees however for "hard core" research, like when I studied for my Java cert, Oracle Cert, and now my
Of course, the soft core = web and hard core = books philosophy is reversed for porn
My wife is a technophobe.
We were looking for something to do for the saturday night.
As an almost automatical reflex, I started googling to find sites that would list local events. Half an hour later, struggling with 404s and months old pages, I just had a listing of locally playing movies and museums.
Meanwhile, my wife had just gone through the week-end supplement of our local newspaper and had tons of relevant and uptodate suggestions.
Needless to say that I was shocked to realize that the dead-tree support could still be more efficient than the electronic one !
How often do you check on the 'net prior to making a purchase these days? I do almost every time and it likely saved me from several potential poor investments on anything from automobiles, pet care, health products, lawn care - you name it.
Without a doubt, my computer (and thus the internet as a whole) is the de facto source for nearly all of my information needs. For instance, it provides:
- instant information in lieu of other media forms (TV, magazines, radio, newspapers) without the hassle of paper or waiting for a specific broadcast
- access to information that would be otherwise unavailable (for instance, press from foreign countries)
- instant access to financial info, transaction history, credit card statements, ordering information
- instant reference materials while in the workplace, from jdk api info to php functions, I can usually find my answers much faster by computer than I can with a reference book
- no need for phone books, conventional postage to pay my bills
- simplifies shopping (well, some of it), handling customer service issues, providing questions or feedback for a company, updating billing info, changing account details, etc.
I did most of my schooling in the 1980s. During those pre-web days, if you had a question in mind then all you could do, other than ask someone in your family or friends, is go to devote half an afternoon to go to the local library, think what topic it might be under, and then hope that they'd have some books about it that were less than 2 decades old, that the books would be on the shelf where they're supposed to be, and that they'd actually contain something useful. Often it didn't help.
Nowadays it's crazy. Almost anything you wanna find out about is online.
Lately i've been abandoning books too. I've been using the latest version of adobe acrobat reader which has an autoscroll function that's just way too comfrtable especially when using a notebook with a good LCD display. Otherwise there's a version of acrobat for Palm and for Pocket PC. Ebooks are everywhere. It's been a while since i bought a dead-trees book, and when i last did i wasn't too impressed with the amount of info in it.
when it comes to programming knowledge. Books are ok, but they are extremely expensive.
When it comes to many other subjects, I tend to turn elsewhere, like books. (or I would prefer to). Wikipedia provides some good knowledge, but I generally can't find enough in depth information on some subjects on the web. The web is good for quickly finding information, but you can't allways be sure of it's reliablity and accuracy. Many students are not allowed to use or cite web pages as references, it's accepted that the inforamation is not as reliable as say, the New England Journal of Medicine. If you read the journal online however....
TallGreen CMS hosting
I read several newspapers online and do plenty of research but I have found that there are a lot of errors in online information. The fact that you don't have to jump through hoops to get something published seems to mean many people put up stuff they don't both checking.
I used to send friendly emails correcting egregious factual errors but I've given up. Google turns up this stuff and people rely on it but it's wrong.
Poor grammar, rotten spelling, factual errors... the Internet is a dangerous place to rely on.
It's all explained right here... http://yudkowsky.net/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Mine means my own, but how can this be if I owe for it?
The Matrix is the summation in a networked computer system of all human knowledge. The rest is legacy.
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Gonna have to say "depends where you live". I recently got mapquest directions to a road that wasn't even paved. I live in NJ and have never had a serious mapquest problem.
.01 miles each.
Part of this may come from my diligence in ensuring that I know where I'm going. I don't just put it into mapquest and print it out. I review the directions it gives me, and follow them on the maps to ensure that it has given me a logical route. Since there are 1,001 ways to get from point A to point B in New Jersey, mapquest will sometimes dump you onto a highway you don't really want to be on (but will still get you where you are going!). Also, there can be some tricky intersections, and with the way mapquest divides roads up, it is usually easier to look at the map then try and decipher 5 legs of
In short, like most tools, Mapquest works great when you know how to use it.
Just as one example: The Internet has a large number of journal databases (as in academic journals). I have been able to use these almost exlusively for all my university research, only having to go to the physical library once for a journal too old to be in the online archives.
:)
The advantages are numerous of course. I can search a wide array of journals easily. You can do that at the library now too whatwith the electronic card catalogue, but the searches can be full text on the Internet. I can tehn easily access and look at lots of articles, since it is just a simple click rather than roaming through floors of shelves. Of course the most important thing, I can do it at home in bed
It depends on what you're looking for. I use the internet for most of my news, supplemented by NPR and local / international radio. IMHO television news is mostly worthless. I find the net is really good if you want to get a quick idea concerning a given subject or for getting up to the minute news.
But for anything in-depth, or for knowledge, I resort to libraries. There is something about doing library research that is very rewarding. I like being in the presence of so many books. This may change someday when and if the internet becomes a vast open universal library / campus. But I hope not. I've found many interesting things by simply wandering about the stacks. Computer searches are very fast and quite convenient. But they currently lack the kind of serendipity and depth a library can provide.
Usenet is a good source for news. Especially a ClariNet feed. ClariNet news is way above the CNN/Yahoo par: incredibly timely, accurate, and well written first-hand news from many international sources available in a convienent format (your fav. usenet client). For reasearch, if you can't find it on google, LexisNexis, or one of the hundreds of thousands of paper publications freely available online, you might as well give up looking for it in my opinion. Personally, the only hard copy texts I use for research are either old college textbooks or the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Unfortunately, most people don't have easy access to Clari or Lexis. Honestly... who would pay for a Clari feed and/or Lexis account for personal usage?
LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious. A. Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
This is just as true for my work, as a research scientist, as for general information and news. There has always been one large university library or another within two minutes walk of my office but over the last five years I could count the number of times I have been in it on my hands. Most of the time if I can't download a paper off the web I will just give up and decide it isn't worth reading. After all in the half hour it would take to walk over to the library, search through the journals, read the paper and walk back I could download, print out and skim through a dozen other papers.
It isn't just speed of access either. If I want a copy of a paper journal article I have to muck around with photocopying etc. where as for an electronic article I can download a pdf in seconds and if I want a hard copy I can print it any time I want. Of course there is always the odd really annoying case where there is some data I must have but its only in a table in a 20 year old paper in an obscure hardcopy only journal. That is when you have to resort to scanners and crappy OCR software but again it isn't actually of any use until it is in electronic form.
However on a more serious note there is such a vast amount of stuff, like catalogues of 100's of millions of objects that was just impossible before computers and only really useful using the internet. In some way it is making people lazy but the advantages are just so huge that they out weigh any disadvantages. We have so much data now that there are huge advances to be made just by finding better ways to sort and correlate it (data mining etc.).
On the news front the effect of the internet is just as profound. Not so much in speed as in variety of topics and points of view. Potentially everyone can be a journalist and contribute. Where things are lacking are in the searching and filtering aspects? The infomation may be there but even with Google it can be hard to find. Sites such as Slashdot in a way try to fill this niche but obviously there is only so much news they can cover.
What is really needed is some sort of distributed and semi(or fully)-automated system where good sources that individuals find can be distributed to everyone who whats them. It would be best implimented as some sort of web of trust where you would select a number of individuals whose opinions you trust and base on their recommendations and those of people they trust etc. new sources would be suggested to you which you can then rate etc.
News Most TV or printed news has web outlet. Often updated instantaneously and allows user feedback. e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.sfgate.com/
Books I still read and buy books. But instead of wandering in huge bookstore, I rely heavily on recommendation from the web. I often check out reviews on amazon.com before I made a decision.
Information Weather, movie schedule, stock price, personal finance, business directory, I get up to the minute information online. Who wants staled information?
Maps Mostly I use http://maps.yahoo.com/ for street map. Though I still like to collect maps it is not important for navigation anymore.
Travel Most of time Travelocity and Orbitz would give the best deal. For lodging even small hotels & B&B would have a web site and gives you information and pictures (e.g. http://www.vrbo.com/). Nowadays I know lot more about the destination before I go. I still love Lonely Planet but the truth is I am getting more detail information online.
General Knowledge Obviously Google is master directory of the world. Everything from legal, health, shopping, you'll learn something from the web. But it is more than search and click. The important thing is finding quality information in the right context. Google pagerank works very well. You should also check on the author of information. Is it from authority or reputable publisher? Many times there are also very knowledgable individual sharing what they know on the web. On the other hand you have to weed out pointless ranting, vendors just touting their products, etc. More difficult is to find a balanced view and don't get over influenced by passionated zealots. Nevertheless the web provides a tremedeous depth of knowledge. You just have to lean to use it effectively.
Finally information on the web is built by human. Internet is a very effect tool to improve, but not replace human connections.
I have come across many students who have never heard of the "Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature" and were incapable of finding a book in the stacks after pulling up the computerized catalog listing. I get the impression that if they can't cut and paste, they aren't interested in the source.
I think I saw some study that confirmed this somewhere, but I couldn't remember where I saw it. I did a google search or two and then just ...Oh look a birdie!
isn't on the Internet, maybe 1/1,000,000 of all human knowledge is. Out of the 200 books on the bookcase next to me, 5 are on the net (and half of them are computer/IT/communications texts!)
I get most of my knowledge the time honored way, perched upon our porcelain reading chair. The one-hole library is stocked mostly with magazines, but occasionally a good paperback or the rare hardbound will find its way in. I am seldom interrupted, thanks to a cacophony of disgusting sound effects.
No Internet, but I find the whole experience thoroughly satisfying.
News - Updated more frequently online than on TV, and it's easy to look up more details of the story, rather then what the local TV personalities decide to give you. I don't do newspapers because they tend to stay dormant on my doorstep.
Random questions - 10 minutes ago, I realized I wasn't sure how underwater tunnels were built. After a Google search, I found my answer. How would I have done this before? I could've asked around, and probably gotten a good answer. But I'd rather get a response from a tunnel-builder's article than a friend who a) has never built a tunnel, and b) would probably not be sure, or will wonder why I'm asking in the first place.
TV/Sports/Movie/Event schedules - Easy to find on the net, and is less time consuming than waiting to hear about it from TV/friends.
'How-to' items - Like random questions... you can find a lot of resources on the net you don't have casual access to anywhere. Sure, you can ride 20 minutes to a book store and spend $15 on a book, but it's not really needed anymore
So, for just about everything, I turn to the net. Even for my engineering work-related questions, I use the net more than the textbooks I have access to at work. Unless I need something immersive and/or complicated, the quick answers on the net usually suffice.
It must be true, I read it on the internet!
There are several things, such as IMDB, that I don't think we'd get that information any other way. Typically, we don't care enough to have such a reference around the house, nor to go to a library to find out.
There is a certain understanding of when to take it from a grain of salt, or recognize there may be limitations (direction-sites are notorious for that). Likewise, for in-depth knowledge, we can't rely exclusively on that, instead needing a book or an expert.
Typically, if a web search doesn't yeild a result and we give up, it is a sign that we really don't care that much about the answer. On the other hand, the threshold to find the right answer is lower. Turning to the computer to query IMDB, a dictionary, or something else happens quite readily.
SoAK on Tele, Bio, Nano, ... Technology, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Mathmatics, ... local, cultural, social, global ... events, .... About 99.9% of the times I require information, I acquire information, I expand associations/distributions of information, I confirm (to a significant extent) veracity-validity of sources and information. Everything requires knowledge developed from experience ... sometimes I must rely on the experience of others.
....
I recommend products to the folks I work for that range from connectors & cables to microscopy & lithography to whatever is required by others to do what they are doing. The only source of information I use other than the internet resources are the people directly working in the specialty field and their references.
Luckily, I specialize in nothing, and have many years of hands-on troubleshooting work experience with computers (depth), telecommunications (depth), programming (as required FORTRAN & COBOL years ago and a few UNIX, CP/M, and DOS drivers years ago),
I cannot work without access!
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
What are these "books" of which you speak?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
I do like to think of the internet as an extension, and not just through junk mail and porn. Constant access to such a mass of information is a paradigm shift in many ways (duh), but particularly in terms of how one can view human intelligence. I believe a clever philosopher wrote a book about it. I like the notion of the constant access expanding our mental capacities by orders of magnitude. Something like google news, just by virtue of displaying thousands of sources, gives us modern types a capacity for world-knowledge that could barely even be imagined pre-information age. The question is, then, what will all this access allow us (and our minds) to become? A global brain? (Fringe) Academia looks like its finally becoming pertinent again. Through the web, no less, which I do believe is a potential source for so-called "deep knowledge", simply by allowing such little things as hypertext writing to be instantly accessible, or multi-faceted real or near-real time discussion (such as this one). So what's next? It's a bother that my glasses are still so clear...
Sig Applied For
The amazing thing is that I (like most of us) can usually find information on just about anything on the Internet quickly, cheaply, and without much effort. I either find the specific answers I need or get pointed in the proper direction (either on or off of the 'net.)
At age 37, I have had my share of writing letters, visiting libraries, and actually having to seek people out to find specific answers. Having acquired my first 'net access just over 10 years ago, I admit that I now take for granted the ease of the current technology. Yes, I could still find most of the same information by visiting a library, etc. but the sheer convenience of the Internet's searching facilities truely can't be beat.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
So I did a google search on "robo". Of course, no luck . Then, "robot cartoon", and finally "saturday morning". Guess what?
The Mighty Orbots.
Now how else would you find this information?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I usually do quickie searches on the web, and compare as many citations as I can find (to build consensus). However, I take everything I see on the web with a huge grain of salt. If I'm really interested in something, I find a university library that's open to the public and I research my topic.
Having said this, the very best possible place to do research is in one of your state's Federal Repositories.
Every state in the Union designates at least a couple of its largest state university libraries as Federal Repositories. These contain verbatim copies of the library of congress. The idea behind them is that if the library of congress were ever to be destroyed, it could be reproduced in short order from one of the hundred or so Federal Repositories scattered all over the nation.
Because the repositories are generally in the largest, most fully stocked research libraries in a given state, they're a great place to get the best info available on most subjects. And, as far as I know, they are available to the public because they're part of a public institution (i.e. the research university they're a part of).
I learned about them a number of years ago, when I attended a college that had an enormous repository -- Arizona State University in Phoenix. Later, I spent a few months in Carbondale, Illinois, and checked out their repository. Nice!
Anyway, for research, you can't beat it. And, the facilities are usually top-notch.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
That pretty much sums it up for me. There's a lot of stuff out there on the web but there's not enough. I frequently end up looking for things which no one has posted. Which leads to a question. If I can go to the library and check out a book for free why then can't I check it out electronically and read it on my computer?
I work at a newspaper and I get lots of emails from people wanting articles from any time from yesterday to the late 1800s. Many times I have to tell them that we did not start electronic archiving until 1995, and that if they want earlier stories they have to go to the library and look through micofilm.
There is a lot of historical information that might not interest the slashdot crowd -- but is of interest to folks trying to get an idea of how their grandfathers lived or fill out dry geneology information with articles about the people (or the people they lived around).
Many times I felt really bad for these folks -- who can't always visit our local library -- but I haven't seen a cost effective way to digitize microfilm.
Sure, for technical issues, trivia, current events, advocacy issues, sports and 'pr0n' the Internet is great. But there are vasts amounts of low-level historical information that will probably never be on the Internet. Maybe there is no way to correct this, and maybe this stuff isn't really all that important. But the information is there, even if people can't find it on the Internet.
The important thing to remember is that just because something isn't on the Internet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
I'm a little slow to have finally caught on with the RSS & news aggregator bandwagons, but now that I have, my sources of information has easily increased by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. While Google is great, seeking out personal opinions through blogs and independent news is an incredible resource.
If you haven't already, get yourself a laser printer, preferably the kind that prints on both sides. I agree and myself rarely read more than 10 pages online, but I have no problem finding 20, 50, 100, 300, 1000 page manuals (huzzah for .pdf, I don't know why people poo-poo it so much) and printing them out. Then I close the notebook, curl up in my favorite reading chair, and spend hours of time offline.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
I am 35 and I feel the same. Infact the only reasoon I hold on to my old dictionary is that it has words that you cant find any where else. Otherwise I am all about the internet and carry my laptop in the car for those free WANs and map look ups.
the bible and the stuff the ancients wrote is on the internet. that's all you needed to read to get an education up until the past hundred or so years. of course it's probably easy to think that the world is a million times better and more different when you are sheltered from it by a couple bookcases full of "how to learn computers in 21 days" books.
ono he said the bible! mod down!
My fiancee's mom is currently studying for her masters degree in Library Sciences, and we had a similar discussion just last week. She seemed offended that I had not been in a library for god-knows-how-long and instead relied, for the most part, solely on the internet for my research. True, the internet lacks some of a libraries "old timey" charm, but it also lacks the musty book smell, lines, the dewey decimal system and late fees. Plus with my good friends Google and Yahoo! pretty much any information I want, from a homeopathic cure for eczema to "why does Brian (the chubby guy) from 'the Joe Schmo Show' have a mosaic across his nipples when he's not wearing a shirt on camera [can you not show man-boobs on TV?]" is acessible from my couch in a matter of seconds. There are certain things I still kill trees for, like computer reference manuals, my programming books and the occasional novel or magazine, but for the most part I feel libraries are slowly becoming obsolete.
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.
as long as you stick to the more travelled areas
Not neccessarily. On my first trip to Pittsburg, Mapquest had me take "Tower Rd" out of the airport and get on a road that went right to my hotel. The only problem was Tower Rd was no longer there. I could see where it used to be, but I couldn't get there from where I was. I had to drive around and ask for directions.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
After using this Internet thing for a while (I sent my first email in the mid-'70's) I've decided it adds, at best, just one more place to look for information. If you rely on it as your only source, odds are you're missing something. I increasingly find myself using it to locate more traditional sources of information.
The Internet is just technology. It's the words that count, whether someone uses a pen, a typewriter, a word processor, or a blog to create them.
Putting aside the news sites, much of the information available via the net seems shallow. I.e., you may find any number of websites that purport to tell you "How To Make Widgets", but the total word count of all content on all 3 sites might be surprisingly low. A visit to a good library might turn up several books on widget building, at several hundred pages each.
Now, it is possible to digitize those books and put them on the net, but how many people can comfortably wade through thousands of pages of online text?
The net still has issues with integrity and trust. In some circles, much, mostly unwarranted, criticism is heaped on the mainstream press simply because most of it is corporate-owned. Well, if you don't trust your local TV station or your local newspapers because they've incorporated themselves, why would you trust some unknown individual posting stories to the web? With a corporation, at least, you can do a bit of research and chase down some facts about their finances, etc. On the other hand, you can't do that with some blooger. Typically, all you've got to go by is what the guy's blog says about himself. And why should you be willing to take that at face value?
Apart from blogs posing as news site and bloggers posing as journalists, many sites purporting to deliver news are openly biased, often in an obvious attempt to curry favor, pageviews and ad revenue from their target audience. E.g., would you really expect unbiased and impartial reporting about Microsoft, Linux, and SCO on any OSDN site? No, because that's not what they're really in business to do.
The truth is that all forms of media and everyone writing for publication is subject to influence, biases and pressure. It is the responsibility of anyone reading the news published by any source to make an effort to understand the influences that source is subject to, and to take that into account.
For example, if you know that the Ajax Press Service is 80 percent owned by, say, Shell Oil, then you might reasonably examine their oil reporting with a critical eye. If you eventually determine that they're "evil" and slant their reporting toward Shell Oil, that doesn't make them hopelessly corrupt and useless. Rather, using what you now know you can use Ajax's oil reporting to draw inferences about Shell Oil policy.
Likewise, in the international arena, much of the world's media remains under the direct ownership and control of governments, and many media outlets that aren't owned outright voluntarily slant their reporting in order to keep the regime from putting them out of business. Hence, following the press can be an excellent way of tracking what a closed regime is doing and thinking.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Yep, I know a lot now. I know that UFO's not only crashed at Roswell but are now living among us thanks to a giant governemnt conspiracy. I know now that the world is cube shaped thanks to the flat earth socieity. I believe in bat boy and that E=MC^Hammer. I also learned that whenever I hear cheap eighties music, it means ppl are having sex. I also learned never to eat at any table ever again cause of the things that go on on them while I am not around. Finally, I know that all your base are belong to us.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Few years back I had to wait months, read through many books or hear from many people, before I found what I wanted. These days, finding
out about anything that tickles my brain is only a www.google.com away. However, I use the net only as a source to gain the most basic info about what I want (except when it is a topic like Linux etc.). If I feel more interested after wetting my feet, I usually head to www.amazon.com to find a suitable book. So, for quick references => Yes. For in-depth => No
The internet is a source of good info. It has timely news that in addition to quick availablity is also searchable, so I get only the news I want. However the amount of BAD info on the net is enormous. Anyone who has any doubt about this just check the validity of the last batch of internet factoids some friend spammed them with. Now subscription journals aside (remember the subject line) you are pretty much trusting that whoever posted info has a clue as to what they are talking about, and though there are a great many that do, unfortunately there are even more that don't. Books were submitted by and author, and the publisher decided that it was worthy of print. The editor decided how it was written was acceptable. If the book is in a library a librarian decided it was worthy of the shelf. So counting the author that makes at the very least 4 people that looked at the work. In reality that number is far larger. On the net the number is a total of 1. So libraries and pay services will always be generally better than the net itself.
"A wise man learns to understand and live with nature. Therefor all innovation shall come from unwise men." Abba Eben
They're verbatim copies of the Library of Congress? If that were true how would the Library of Congress still be the largest library? The depository libraries are deposits for federal government publications. That's it. More info is here.
Most people will probably agree that in-depth stuff isn't available on the internet (or is, but for $$). E.g. it's pretty easy to find information on using malloc() with examples and endless discussions, but try to find something about "Origins of Bysantine Notation" and you will only see superflous information while on paper there are volumes written on the subject.
This is particularly visible with older publications - people who rely on the Internet exclusively (as many here have claimed) - have no access whatsoever to any printed material published before late 1990's, and it wouldn't be fair to say that there isn't a lot of it.
If your trade is computers, then the Internet is probably a good source of info. But if you're a historian, an archeologist, a musician or a doctor, or most any other profession requiring access to a lot of info, the Internet can provide only small pointers, and the books and printed magazines are it. And my prediction is that it will stay this way for a while.
grisha.org
The Internet is my only source of everything nowadays. It's there I get my social part of my life, it's there I meet people with similair intrest (vegans for instance), it's the place there I share my thoughts and discuss stuff which intrests me (training, health, ... oh, and computers of course).
It's the place I read news, thought not much real world news since the media websites doesn't intrests me that much.
It's the place there I get my software, the place I go shopping stuff which you can't eat. And so on.
So, is it my only source for news? No, it's so much more.
It's gotten better. It used to only give directions to my county, then go haywire.
I find it best for long trips, where you spend most of your time on the same highway. Nothing beats directions from an intelligent local for inner-city stuff, though.
It's not as bad as my wife though: "OK take the road up until you see the McDonalds but then don't turn at McDonalds, keep going until you see Applebees, which used to be a bar called McForkins but I heard the guy who owned it got sent to jail or something and now its an Applebees, so then once you see Applebees keep going until you see a blue mailbox and then turn left and then go around the loopy thing until you see a really ugly house thats like blue and purple and they never mow the lawn and then make a u turn and go back to the...."
The 'Net has saved my ass when it came to research or papers I had to do. I usually did topics that would not be found in any encyclopedia, yet I'd find many fan pages with accurate histories and/or info on my subject. And if I want to find out about a word, I just use dictionary.com
I find myself worrying that just as the invention of the pocket calculator robbed my generation of the ability to do anything more that simple math in our heads, Google will do the same for general knowledge. It's very tempting to reach for Google when you don't know the answer to a simple question, and as wireless devices get more prevalent it seems like that might become more and more of an issue. I don't really have an answer here, but it's interesting to think about.
~jeff
The evening "News" is so corporate owned and supported that I don't really consider it a reliable source for information.
Agreed. Here is an interesting experiment to try. Find a major news story, preferably on Iraq or Afganistan. (It can be something else, but Iraq and Afganistan will yield more results.)
Check the story first on CNN
Then check the subtle changes in perception on the same story from these sites:
BBC NEWS
Globe and Mail
Then note the radically different opinions on:
Aljazeera
Antiwar
Note, I am not asking you to agree with any of the above opinions, or websites. Just begin to notice the different perceptions you can gain insight to on news stories on the net. This kind of insight cannot be gathered by watching local news, like NBC, CBS, or even the "most trusted" views of CNN.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I agree with the poster. I find myself telling my friends when they want to know something that they should "Look it up on google, that is why god created the internet". Of course I am joking about the genesis of the internet but, I too have fallen into the ease and speed of the 'net over newspapers.
Greetings Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League...
I must say, this will be my favorite quote for today.
I have found over the last two years that I rely heavily on google.ca, and slashdot for all my information needs. I'll look up a movie on the net and read reviews before going to the theatre. One little accident (ARPANET) and now it has become part of our lives, as much as a TV, or a telephone.
"The same thing we do every night, try to take over the world" -The Brain (Pinky&the Brian)
I rely almost exclusively on the Internet for information. In general, the Internet provides the same level and the same quality of information as regular physical media like newspapers. The difference is that the Internet is more easily accessed due to search-engines like AltaVista.
Before the Internet, when I discuss with my colleagues (at the American political institute with which I am affiliated) important issues, I often have a difficulty time in locating key references on which I based my analyses. Locating references took an enormous amount of time and entailed driving to the university library, looking up data in the microfiche, and finding the key news article.
After the Internet, I just need to go on-line and search for what I want. For example, using Internet references, I created the compelling web page about Taiwanwithin only about 3 days. I was able to quickly locate the news articles that I had previously read. No more driving to the library. Everything is on-line.
Of course, we still must be careful to discern rubbish information and valid information. There are many "National Enquirer" types of news sources of the web. We must be careful to stick to the best sources: "Washington Post", "The Economist", "Amnesty International", etc.
I too have abandoned most other forms of information. I don't find it to be a bad thing though. I probably would be about 50 iq points dumber if not for the internet. I think it's a beautiful thing. so much information, so little time.
I'm 40-something myself, and I've pretty much given up on the boob-tube and replaced it with the internet. I'm just not sure I've replaced one or two corporate controlled news sources with a hojillion ill informed news sources :)) (sorry, /.)
On a positive note, I find I'm much more productive with the internet. It *is* my reference library, for better or worse.
On the whole, I would rather have the internet. Now all we have to do is put our resources into open source (and openly funded) search engines :(
stirring the pot since nineteen mumblty mumble...
I open to my open in tabs in phoneix and have these pages load:n dly.org http://www.schlockmercenary.com. com
http://www.sluggy.com
http://www.userfrie
http://www.wired
http://www.news.com
http://www.slashdot.com
http://www.cnn.com/tech for that one different story
http://rantburg.com/ to see how bad the rest of the world is doing
Apparently the moderators think so.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Just FYI, mapquest doesn't seem to take neighborhoods into account when plotting direction. It always says to take a freeway.
Yahoo Maps, on the other hand, are a lot better.
Oh for sure :) Sure I could go to the library and get information on some subjects but why bother. The internet has it already and I don't have to leave home to get it. It also has some types of information you would never find elsewhere. For example, the lyrics to a song where the lyrics weren't included as part of the cd/cd cover the song was originally on. Learning how to install windows is another. Before you'd probably have to buy a book but if you look on the net, then you'll find it easily and for free. I'm sure there are more examples like that. Tons more for sure. The net just turned into a big convergence of information if you know how to look for it. Way better then any other medium I find.
It is perhaps amusing, then, that in an election these thousand ill-informed people can completely swamp a judgement made by the single well-informed person. But that's the way the system works; you can be the most clueless gink imaginable, and your vote is worth just as much as the person who's made the study of that particular issue their life's work.
Honestly, if it weren't for the Internet, I probably would have suffered from lack of education. Here's my story.
The high school I went to was crap. It didn't focus so much on education as it did it's flagship program, Football. To the administration and school board, that was their "public relations" project. The better the football team looked, the better the school looked. Therefore, the players were placed in the higher academic brackets, while the rest of us were sequestered to the lower end.
In all reality, though, the jocks were probably getting graded on a severe curve. Text books were old and outdated. World history books ended with the first launching of the Space Shuttle. Geography still looked at Germany as two seperate nations, the Soviet Union was still a world power, and computers were still clunky-looking boxes with monochrome screens.
And teachers didn't really care about what they taught. Well, a handfull did, but most didn't. One particular math teacher would spend his time during class drawing up football plays (he is the head coach). English teachers drilled the same concepts over and over when it was clear that we all had a good grasp on the language. Science teachers cared more for learning from the outdated texts than they did giving us a hands-on approach to learning about the world around us. Hell, my Biology teacher was the stereotypical Polish idiot who did things backwards, no lie.
I looked at that place and decided that there was no way it could give me the education I needed to continue in society. So I made my mother, against her wishes, get me an connection to the Internet. And thank the maker I did.
Whatever I wanted to know, I just hit the search engines (Google wasn't yet a verb) and downloaded to my heart's content. Soon, in math class, I was using mathematical functions the head coach hadn't taught us yet to solve the problems he gave us. And the funny part was, I was the only one doing this. I distinctly remember one such conversation:
Mr. Camberg: And how did you get that conclusion, Eric?
Me: Well, if you would have taught us this method, it would have made things a hell of alot easier.
Mr. Camberg: So what you're saying, Mr. Jacobson, is that you're criticizing my teaching methods?
Me: Yes I am.
Mr. Camberg: And just how did you learn about this method, seeing as how it isn't covered in the book?
Me: Well, because the book is over a decade old, I can't trust it. So, I went looking for it on the Internet.
After that, I was sure that the Internet would save me from Rural Public School hell, and it did. Thanks to what I learned online, I was able to graduate with honors despite being in a lower academic track, and move on to college where I furthered my education with the very things that saved it: computers.
My little cousins have since moved to this area and are attending the same school I did. And I tell them to make sure they keep the Internet handy, because they're going to get a sub-standard education. They know it, I know it. And hopefully, telling them to trust in the 'Net when school fails them will be enough to help them learn for themselves that, in fact, they need to learn for themselves...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
On a related note, what do you all think about students starting to use the web as a primary source? I work primarily with children and computers, and one of the listservs I'm on, we had a discussion about whether students were losing research skills by relying on the web. My argument was more that students were being taught the research skillls - i.e. read the works cited, look for other pieces by the author, etc etc. Of course, the Internet has made it much more important to cross-check facts and sources, but you should be doing that with any research you do.
This question also is interesting as one of the organizations I work with required the purchase of a set of encyclopedias as the director felt that it was important for the kids to have the skills to use an encylopedia. I considered this a waste of resources, when CD-ROM encylopedias are a fraction of the cost of dead-tree versions, and easier to keep up to date.
Any thoughts on whether the expenditure was justified?
Forget the whole internet, all I need is slashdot for 100% of my news :)
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
I've been online since Delphi & MCIMail, The Well, AppleLink Personal Edition etc... I believed everything in "As We May Think" and in the Knowledge Navigator video(s).
Using OSX on a 'lowly' iBook 500 with a carefully cultivated suite of apps is getting close enough to the dream that I should stop dreaming and just revel in it. And get more done. Which I do.
It's not just the info at fingertips. I watched someone try to scan a book for a 60 year old article, then import it, try to OCR it and reformat it... nice, but it's on the web in text and I had it within seconds. Priceless.
I'ma teacher at a very non-traditional place with lots of need for proposals, classes, results, and lots of techie things happeneing anyway, but it's the everyday access that's needed, and the ability to do it all literally at your fingertips.
I can order the model rockets (in one typical case), check the weather for the best launch date, email all the parents to come see, fax the bus company to get the transportation, video and still photo the activities... create a summary of lessons that my students have done, download the stardust launch for them to see on a projection screen as part of class, prin their junior rocket scientist certificates, edit, compose and post their movies and pics to the web for all the parents to see, email parents or sms them or fax them to get all this done in the time it would take a staff of three twenty years ago.
could i just build the rockets,. launch the rockets and see how jazzed the kids were? sure. still do all that. plus add value to what the parents can get out of it too.
it's a faster more accessible source. i know i have the estes catalog around here somewhere, but where...
i know i have videos of other older launches, videodiscs of all of the apollo and shuttle test programs, but the batteries in the ldp remote are crusty, and well, this way all the kids can play the video to their heart's content...
i can send proposals as pdf attachments to email, submit all my nsf stuff online, if I don't know where I'm going this evening (vaguely know it's around yale somewhere) I jump to watson, get the address, see a map, add the location to my address book, sync my ipod before i leave and i'll get there one way or another. beats the big spiral bound map and hundreds of slips of paper i'd have carried around even 5 years ago.
i can do travel better. way better.
i can buy a car by driving around or going blind with classifieds in the local fish wrap
my wife and i can specify the house we want and get the info delivered to us without having to drive down roads nobody else drives down for days at a time trying to find that out of the way house or having to actually talk to a bevy of real estate agents ( i actually hear one of them refer to a old local place as an antique house - grrrrr... i prefer tocall them 'used houses' as in 'used cars' but don't get me started)
for that matter i can find out that a wedding can cost $1K or $100K and how to make it what we wanted, instead of taking someone's word on how much we should have spent.
ditto real estate. there's a wide range of what it will all cost when they fire the starter's pistol at the closing, and we know much more from the web - we could have just taken a single sources word for it, or bought a dozen books. an hour with safari and a broadband connection and we are much wiser. we hope.
i can get references to anything from various sources...
i can have my kids go research the mountains of little white lies us teachers have been spouting for years in the name of shorthand lessons... columbus, magellan, the pilgrims, abner doubleday, the wright brothers...
will i ever get rid of my books? never. ditto the back issues of bicycling or wired, my berke breathed paperbacks.
I'll always be able to put my hand on 'the compleat angler', 'a winter's tale'or the beaten copies of 'andromeda strain', 'banner in the sky', o
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Please don't ask me how it turned out... it pains me deeply to just recall the incident. Moral of the story: don't pick electives outside your field based solely on whether or not it lets you sleep til noon every morning.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Well, a sunday-only one. And every sunday morning, I shuffle out to the driveway, drag the behemoth back in, and begin to disect it.
w ww.arstechnica.com
;)]
;)
In pile A goes:
coupons
every single advertising insert
the sports section
In pile B goes:
Parade "magazine"
the TV guide section
In pile C goes everything else.
Pile A is mine. I immediately read all the ads seeing what's on sale this week and what financing deals are being offered. The sports section is only because the Fry's ad is on the back page of it.
Pile B is set aside for my wife. She always reads the Parade insert, and then keeps the TV guide stuff for later in the week (We have no cable, so no onscreen source for this)
Pile C goes directly into paper recycling, followed by piles A and B when they are done being read or cut up.
News? Yeah, i think they print news in there too, but I never notice. It's my weekly dose of local sales flyers and that's about it.
I rarely turn on the TV, usually only to plug in a video of some sort.
The radio plays nice music and gives me the all-important traffic reports and is otherwise ignored.
The net is used for everything else. I check my.yahoo.com throughout the day for any breaking news items, and then refer to other online sources if I need more. I live and die by google for looking up things. Well, that plus my canonical list of places I go directly to for the appropriate subject matter:
us.imdb.com - movies
www.allmusic.com - music
www.epinions.com - consumer reviews
www.amazon.com - consumer reviews and book ideas
www.addall.com - finding better prices for those books
My weekly computer geek dose:
www.sharkyextreme.com
www.anandtech.com
And then slashdot for its impeccible and accurate news reporting for everything else that might interest or entertain me. [insert "you must be new here" joke
The secret to getting dependable info on the net is usually just one of redundency. Find three or more sources that independently corroborate something, and it's likely to be true. The key words there are *independent* and *likely*. Neither of those are automatic assumptions.
But then I've been on the net for about 13 years now and am finally starting tp get the hang of telling when something is rotten...
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
I once went to this convention center in Pennsylvania and obtained directions online. Got lost and stopped at the first convenience store. I asked the attendant where the convention center was. She handed me a piece of paper with the correct directions. I asked, "get people like me often?" She replied, "Yes. We have tried to contact Mapquest to correct the problem but they simply haven't."
About this very thing, but I can't find the link just now...
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
I think your results will be a little skewed, given that you posted this question to Slashdot, of all places. Did you also think to ask this question in non-Internet forums, perhaps among people not so Internet-dependent?
thanks to the internet, i was able to graduate from college without ever having to check out a book from the university library! ;D
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
It's just the rural and residential streets it sucks at...
:-) Can't expect them to know everything everywhere I guess.
My wife and I are going to Novosibirsk in Siberia to adopt a child in a few weeks. I went to Mapquest to see where our hotel is in the city and to familarize myself with different parts of town. You can see what I got in the link, just try to zoom in a bit.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
McClintock should win just because of his name. Man, that was a great movie. Okay I love you byebye.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Remeber in 1984 how it was somebody's job to go back and modify all public records of an old "inconvinient" fact. Just imagine being able to control dictionary.com / cnn and a few other heavily hit sites. You'll be able to remove any record that something existed.
-Michael
Not a pretty heading, but the Internet, though the greatest index that I have used, does have drawbacks.
They are: database rot; non-referred opinion masquarading as fact; outright flaunting of responsibility and a lack of respect of others.
Database rot - typically 2% of entries become incorrect per month. Interestingly, the cost of carrying physical inventory is deemed to be about 1-2% by the accounting profession. We won't get into what inventory turns means in databases ... ;^>
Non- referred information means that there is no scholarly agreement on the verifiable truth of facts presented. Opinions are fine, but contrast the popular Zen of anything with the scholarly work of D.T. Suzuki (who, by the way corresponded with Thomas Merton). Entire areas of knowledge require a discipline of practice and conversation just to begin to access their content.
To express an opinion, is wonderful, but to speak from experience, to the needs of the listener, in a mentoring manner, without knowing the person is a little dangerous. I personally have misspoken more then once, without realizing the harm that would come of it, in that circumstance.
Respect for other people can disappear in a mass of flameage. Hasty words often carry little wisdom. Who hasn't felt the seductive draw of flamebait?
On the other hand, as a quick overview the net can't be beaten - And I use it to cull the things I am researching. But you need a broad viewpoint, grounded in the physical reality to effectively use the internet in its' full potential.
This is progress?
This is a long waited discussion in slashdot. I think most people agree with mblase. The web is quick and broad, but rarely deep or complete. What about the knowledge of the new citizens that are growing with the Internet as the Source of All Knowledge?
Some says that cultural icons in the modern days(as pop music or holywood movies) are, let's say, shallow and ephemere. How it relates with the Internet? If you take out the communities around narrow topics, the Internet in its surface is not that different from other cultural movements. Shallow and ephemere. And I am not saying this is bad. But it is really curious.
The Internet is already deeply inserted in our routine. Some e-mail joke that run all mailboxes in a night, and the day after everybody in your work, school and even at lunch with the family is saying the same thing. Two days later, nobody cares anymore about the e-mail. Yes, massification. The difference is that anyone is equally like to pull the trigger.
How will it be when our long term lives are ruled by the Internet?
I break up my information resources thus:
For visuals - I go with cable TV; news channels to see world events of a visual nature (natural disasters, war, etc); history channel for movies in history and war related stuff and the heavy metal/engineering series; some 'how to' shows such as: Monster Garage, Monster House, Trading Spaces, and more mundane shows of that ilk.
For detailed information on a subject I usually buy a book and read it.
For detailed information not available in book form, and for general information that I need 'quickly', then I go with the internet.
~
If I care about an issue significantly enough, I will validate it via more than one of these sources.
That is all there is to it for me.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
doctors who go online provide better care
or doctors who provide better care are more likely to go online?
It is usually difficult to analyze causality with these population studies.
Since I've gotten online, it has slowly become my primary media source in virtually every aspect. I still occasionally read books or watch television, but very rarely. One thing I still use books for is for researching in extreme depth, because 'net sources usually just aren't as in-depth.
I'm almost shocked! What else could there be?
Oh books..
I get pretty much everything what I need from a handful of web sites. I still go to Border's for things - as good content costs money and so authors will still prefer to write instead of web publish.
I am brushing up on calc based physics, and so have been re-reading the text book and then will sweep it again and do the problems, and there, a web site would be easier to use. But for some things you just have read material, then apply.
This is my sig.
I've become so hopelessly tied to looking for things on the internet that whenever I'm looking for something in my closet, I find myself wishing I could perform a search on it to see what box it is in.
Pretty much!!
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
I'm 36 and I still use a dictionary and go to the library when I need to research something. The only information I use the Internet exclusively while searching is for the news, product reviews, and what new games are coming out.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
First time I hit any snags with coding, Google groups (although I still keep calling it Deja) is my first port of call.
The net gives better access to information, but I think that I absorb information better from paper. If it's a big/thorny subject then I'll print something out and read about it from dead tree rather than CRT.
Also, whereas Google/MSDN/whatever will provide me with a more immediate solution to a problem, I still get a lot out books but on a longer timeline. I usually have something lying around on the sofa which I flick through during ad breaks, etc. and it's amazing how effective this is for absorbing knowledge.
My problem is that I'm paranoid. Well, maybe that's a topic for another time. Another problem for me is that something in solely electronic format can be purged more readily. The thought police, NSA, leet hackers, whoever, can go and kill/erase/crash the server(s) with the troublesome information much more easily than so with hardcopy. Once something is printed and distributed, it is very difficult to track down and destroy every copy.
Books still have their place.
When Isabel blew through Southeastern Virginia, we were without power for 6 days. Did the lack of power to my freezer, fridge, tv, or phone bother me? No.....
But I was **DYING** for an Internet fix.
I almost went to the airport to pay 25 cents/min.
Almost....
Heh, where I was from, you'd give directions like, turn right after the third red barn. Then take the second dirt road to the right. Then turn left at the dead cat.
Of course the roadkill would vary depending on the day, but you could usually count on there beig a dead cat in the road. You'd just have to change it from, turn after the dead cat to turn right before the dead cat, or if you pass the dead cat you've gone too far.
Now that doesn't mean I do all my reading online. I still prefer to curl up in a chair, without the hum of a computer, and read a good story.
This may seem odd, but I also read a lot of study material in book form, like Cisco courseware, Sun books, etc. Maybe it's just old study habits from high school.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
I asked Google, but it didn't give me what I was looking for, so after a couple of minutes I gave up on finding the information.
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
Not only do I have a computer constantly on my lap during non-school non-work hours (well, I do work around computers), but I carry my T-Mobile Sidekick around (with Google set as my homepage) and use it constantly during the day. I mean *constantly*. At stoplights. In between steps while walking. At those valuable 5 minutes in between classes. At meals. I think I need help...
Just follow the day, and reach fo
Boook? What is this Boook of which you speak?
... "if ever you want to find some information on the internet don't post a question, post a wrong answer."
When there is no evidence to support your ridiculous claims, you respond with insults. Classic.
I just got an SL-5500. Any tips on software resources? There seem to be _loads_ of sites on the 'net for it but I was just curious if you had any favorites so I could remove the chaff a little easier.
Why wait for something to be published when fresh information is available by the second on the internet?
If it's something old you need, chances are it's on the net as well!
http://www.google.com = 2nd brain
The Internet contains all true facts, such as this one, for example!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Are there any map systems which allow user feedback on portions of the trip? It seems like it is a very good thing to have those roads (see above post), but there are certain roads which should never be used unless absolutely necessary.
oh, snap!
I am also in my 40s and still go to paper books a lot of the time (esp. OReilly ), and while I first go to get news, factual, biographical information on the web, I often back it up with a lookup on another source, a book, if I have it, and at least try to attribute the source of the information. I am especially trying to discourage our 8-year-old (who just goes to Google, finds what he needs, and assumes it is correct) from blindly trusting what he finds on the web, and often ask him what he would do if our ISP wasn't working and he needed an answer. He gets the idea:)
I've been surrounded by dictionaries, encyclopedias and similar books for most of my life.
Here you define dictionaries, encyclopedias, and similar sources for information to exist only in book form. My guess is that these days when you want to look up a word's meaning, you still use a dictionary, except that it's online. Perhaps there should be a pair of categories; one that includes dictionareies and encyclopedias, and one that includes the ways in which they are presented. Either way what I basically want to say to you is, "don't be such a technophobe."
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
With around 425 replies so far (including trolls and flaimbait) I don't expect anyone to reade this, but I'm bored, so I'm going to write it anyway:
:)
I've become *almost* entierly dependent on the internet for news and information. Everyday, there are about a dozen sites that I load up (including slashdot, google news, and my local news paper's site) to get my news. When I want to look up information, I always spend time wading through the internet, looking for it there.
I do, however, use real books for programming (O'Reilly mostly) and physics (my text books from college). I also tune into BBC World News every evening to get my overview of world news (and it doesn't hurt that anchor girl Mishal Husain is rather attractive).
Okay. I'm gonna go do something else now.
Kind of makes me wonder when (if) actual physical libraries will just disappear. I can't even imagine myself in a scenario where I have to go to a library to find out something that I can't find out on Google in a short time. How many little questions do you answer each day in seconds on the web, where X number of years ago, the only recourse was to find someone who knows, or to go to the library? It would probably boggle the mind to keep track for a day or week.
;) .
Reading a book for leisure is a bit different, but I tend to just buy books that I want to read anyway. I'm 29 and I bet I haven't checked a book out from a library in 7 or 8 years, and I've sure read a hell of a lot in that time (and that includes a major chunk of college...yes, I was there for a while
I was having lunch with a PhD and an intern that had been working for him. This PhD works in a very advanced area of engineering optics.
.edu if appropriate (e.g. good medical statistics, descriptions, etc, at harvard.edu and ucsf.edu).
... or you want to know more about some obscure musician (Syd Barret)... well in the old days you would hunt for years for books, you would get lousy information and no way to know it was lousy.
.com, .net, .org.
We were asking this question about information on the internet, my position was that there really was all the information you could want, if you have the skills to separate the crap from the good stuff... but sometimes even that is done for you by doing searches on
The PhD said sure, but not really, the really latest and more hard hitting stuff was not on the net. The intern pointed out that HIS papers were all on the net, and all the paper of his colleagues were on the net... in fact, there are not that many books since it's a somewhat esoteric specialty (although it's involves billions of dollars and national security). He had to say, "good point".
I'm an info junke and just old enough to have had to feed my craving with libraries. It doesn't matter what it is... you want to know the life cycle of lice (don't ask)
Now it's the internet. The internet will even help you find what book to get when you do need a classic reference. There really his no question to small, or BIG.
Of course, you do need the love of info because there is a lot of sifting to be done to get the good stuff from
-pyrrho
Not having the internet to look stuff up is like a form of death. I really can't function without it. I Just dont do treeware any more. Even the shelf containing my O'Reilly zoo is there merely as a sort geeky form of modern art/territory marker.
The only bit of treeware I require these days is the dictionary - so I've got one in every room of the house.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
...as we say in our lab.
The only TV news source I trust is the "fake news" Daily Show with John Stewart. All other news comes from the Internet (although that is often times just on-line versions of the New York Times, Washintgon Post, etc.)
Some questions:
Your points about AI are good ones. Division of labor is an interesting topic, too. (Manicurists, for example, may know more about fingernail disorders than a 4th-year medical student.) Still, it's hard to replace years of clinical judgment, especially when sights and sounds are involved.
Age 35 - Child of the Info Age. With the exception of the Sunday paper, and certain types of books (Biographies and Fiction), I find all my news, information, and reference materials on the net. I guess I have become the product.
We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies? -Edward Young, poet (1683-1765)
I usually turn to the Internet first, whether looking for movie reviews, news or in depth information on . If I can't find it there, then I'll resort to newspapers, books, the library, encyclopedias, so on and so forth. The internet is just faster and more convenient, it's as biased and one-sided as anything else can be, so you have to always take things with a grain of salt, as the saying goes.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Except for traffic I get in on the net. I find that if you look hard enough there is higher quality avaible on the net. There is a lot of low quality stuff mixed in to deal with though. Books have an easier to obtain contentration of information once you find them, but the quality isn't there, if only because it is obsolete. More often books are lacking because of one advantage the internet has: there is someone else who has done it to help with specifics. Ask on USENET or a mailing list, and someone who has done that will help your specific problem. Ask a book and it will sit there. Search a bunch of books and you will find a bunch of different answers to similear questions, but they don't quite fit. Thinking is only a partial solution, unless someone who knows the answer is there to guide you, you can come up with the wrong answer.
Traffic is an exception though. I need updates as events happen, and the net doesn't provide a good interface for getting them. I'm stuck with a 55 mile commute (just started the job, planning on moving latter) with several choices of which road to take. Some days 94 is best, sometimes 694. Others 94->35e->694 is best. And many other combinations, and I may have to modify my choice in real time. Even if I had the net in my car it is dangerious to look at the screen while driving. Thus radio fills that need for me.
And a quote directly from Peter Lutus (or is it Phil?):
We used to think that a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true.
Books?...We don't need no stinking books!
You can enjoy video games no matter how out of shape you are.
You can pause a video game, eat a peanut-butter sandwich, and continue right where you left off.
Finally, if you have trouble with a video game, you can go to the store and buy a video game walk-through without feeling embarassed.
There, I said it - BTW, these jokes were leached from "The Castlevania Dungeon" http://www.classicgaming.com/castlevania
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Knowledge you have to "acquire". You can not "get" it. The internet is certainly the source of information and the source of "how to" in case of trouble.
... studying is the correct term.
... the idea that pharma, biogen, gentech and nanotech is now the time to go for, I *know* since some years.
:-)
Knowlege however, you get by "working" in the area you want to get knowledge
Certainly I "google" for infos when I think about another company I want to by stocks from. But
Well, a rather philosophic rant
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I am in an undergraduate psychology class at a small college and we have to write a paper with a minimum of five sources. The teacher said that we could only use one Internet source, and that we would have to visit the library to get the other four. She considers the Internet to be either less reliable or less valid a reference than the library.
I found this to be very upsetting because searching the content of an online article for keywords is so much more efficient than having to flip through books skimming to see if they are really what I need. I was not looking forward to making a trip to visit the library.
I was overjoyed after I used my husband's log in to access the library website at his (large) school. It allows limited searches of all their material, so if you have to go you can allready know the book and section and head straight for it. They have also archived old journals and such in pdf format, many of which are the original full text that was published. There were also links to the journal and society webpages for more information. I was able to search, view and print content from these journals from the comfort of my own desk and still haven't set foot in the library.
I feel great about the requirements of the class, since the teacher doesn't have to know I actually used the Internet for all five sources. For all she knows I was able to find those journals in their original printings. I am also horrified by her seemingly counterproductive stance for the class, and I hope the libraries at both schools continue to find ways to stay relevent.
I always think that if some old geezer new-reader like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, or Ted Koppel is reading a story to me, it must be big news.
Some points:
1. PR news stories. Newspapers, tv stations should not just parrot whatever is in a press release and treat it as news. The press release is obviously biased towards favoring its source. The facts need to be checked as well as outside experts interviewed for the news story.
2. Local newspapers covering news by taking most all stories from syndicated AP, UPI, NYT articles instead of reporting news actually dug up by the newspaper.
3. Network news is obviously biased toward parroting what is on the NYT and Washington Post front pages
4. Editorials passed off as news stories on the front page of the NYT and not even labeled as editorials. I remember when they were on a clearly marked editorial page.
5. Polls passed off as news stories. The news story should be that A, B, and C happended and by the way a poll related to ABC found that '65% of Americans think ABC is doing a bad job'. A poll passed off as a news story only exists to influence readers to agree with the poll.
6. The opionion setting crusade 'news' stories pushed by the NYT, Washington Post, LA Times, etc which are only there so that the newspaper can say it changed something. For example, the NYT crusade to pressure Augusta to accept a woman as a member. How tired are we all of a newspaper/media outlet trying to force people to change. Is this just a continual attempt to relive the 'greatness' of the media in getting people to oppose Vietnam or to force Nixon to resign. Just report the facts and let me decide.
This may be why people under 40 don't read newspapers and don't watch network news.
I use http://www.everything2.com a LOT to look of topics, techinical jargon, general information, etc, as its the most up to date and general source of knowledge i have found.
yer mileage may vary.
Reference librarians are one of the finest research resources available in the US.
My degrees are in hard science (chemistry, physiology) and law and I could never have completed my undergrad or grad degrees without the assistance of these professionals.
When I'm faced with difficult legal issues I'll ask the reference librarian BEFORE I start to avoid wasting time. I know that I talk wth librarians more than just about any other professional and they are invaluable.
As I said in the subject line: librarians are the original database managers. Dewey is dead and the OCLC / Library of Congress rule - but it takes a professional only a few minutes to narrow my searches where I might well have spent hours getting to the same place.
Quick: find me authority for the legal proposition that an employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the material stored on a computer used in the workplace - and, while you're at it find me authority for the rights to the data where the original computer used in the workplace was purchased by the employee but the data from the first machine has been transferred through three upgrades to the employer-owned computer. Let's add a dollop of employer policy that they recognize certain rights in the employee's work - and add that the employee is a public-sector employee with tenure.
Find that --- good luck on the web.
The internet?! For news?!
I rely on the Fox News Channel.
Why, they even say "Fair and Balanced" right in their slogan.
"Fair and Balanced" is a registered trademark of the Fox News Channel. Any such use of said words by another party shall be deemed inappropriate and punishable by us for reasons we may not understand.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
You have to agree though, sometimes it can be an amazing source of entertainment to see what the idiots think about a particular topic.
If you were dig information from a book in your public library, there would be no iron-clad guarantee that what you are reading is true. It is up to the individual to decide for himself whether to accept or reject a source no matter where it comes from... Even if that source includes your own relatives and peers. However, I must agree that there is a lot of misinformation that clouds the facts when viewing online content.
.
a few weeks ago I was without internet and trying to figure out how to find the phone number for the local pizza place without calling information. Should I call a friend of mine who was probably online at the moment?
it took a minute, but deep down inside my brain, somebody whispered "phone book." "What?" I said. "Phone Book!" he shouted.
Conveniently enough, I had a phone book and it worked. What this story illustrates is that the internet has become so pervasive for these daily tasks that I didn't even initially think about the phone book - I think that maybe 50% of the people out there would never even get THAT far and would just go to the pizza place, but maybe that's an overestimate.
all the other stuff that other people said, I echo - bills (I have a checkbook but have only written maybe 5-10 checks in the past 2 years), phone book, email, product research... "How did people do this before the internet?"
I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject.
YUP. DUH. NEXT QUESTION PLEASE.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
I got my entire Capstone paper for college copied off www.about.com and other websites. I love the internet; copy, paste, thesaurus on all the words I dont understand.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
The "news" is spun to hell on the net and TV. Newspapers are some what better. Shortwave radio is almost a must, then you have to filter for the truth. Books are good for learning things. The Net is very entertaining and some good information is there if you can filter out the background noise. The signal to noise ratio is not to good right now on the internet. So nope the internet is not my main source of information.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
I recently came across some of my ham radio notes that I had made back in 1992 involving some circuits, semiconductors, and specific radio information. I honestly can't remember how I dug it up, how much time it took, or where I found it. These days if I want to know something about anything, I can usually find it out within a few moments, or if it's really tough, at most a few hours. I'm not sure what I would do today without the internet, I fear that I have lost whatever research skills I had back then.
Being a 32 year old "computer geek" myself, I'm also finding I use the Internet as almost my only source of information for most things.
I don't get the local newspaper, for example. I do occasionally peek at the Sunday paper when I visit my parents (mainly for the advertisements). I'm sure I do miss out on a lot of "local news", but honestly - the Internet makes me realize how unimportant most of that is anyway. The newspapers and TV stations have been brainwashing us into believing we need their "fix" of local information, or else we're going to fall behind. In reality, I think I'm spending my time more wisely keeping up with bills in Congress that might affect our privacy rights, change copyright/patent law, or what-have-you, than knowing which building downtown caught fire last night, or the fact that (as usual), someone was killed in a fatal car crash on one of our highways.
Even for such things as "how to" guides for home improvement, I find better, more relevant information on the net than I do in the $20-40 books on the subject.
I've really found the net useful for learning about problems with my car and truck, too. Most problems seem to be experienced by at least a handful of other people, who talk about them on Usenet discussion groups. I may not want to do the repairs myself, but at least I can get a real good idea of what's broken - and feel like I'm not getting ripped off when they diagnose it and quote me a repair cost.
For computer or electronics purchases, there's absolutely no better method of research! Just do a Google search for "product-name opinion" or "product-name review" and you'll get everything you need to know, just about every time.
...my life would be meaningless if it wasnt for the internet.
Mapquest borders on useless in Los Angeles.
For instance -- I live in Hollywood, near the 101. I'm two blocks north of Hollywood; about 4-5 blocks north of Sunset.
I had just moved here and was trying to double-check where my insurance agent was on Sunset, so I punched his address into Mapquest. Now, the quickest and easiest way to get to his address is to take my street down to Sunset, and then east on Sunset to his office.
Mapquest starts out with, "Head south on the 101 freeway..."
So many directions here are marred by Mapquest's insistence to put you on freeways. Yahoo's driving directions, while sometimes a bit stupid, generally make more sense here than Mapquest.
Really, I check the Thomas Guide for LA more than I rely on Mapquest when I'm trying to confirm the quickest way to something.
I am not Herbert.
I still keep one of those mini B&W TVs in the office to watch the Live Car Chases in L.A. ;-)
The question you have to ask yourself is this: "would you have even started looking that up (whatever you couldn't find on the internet), if you hadn't had access to the internet?" For me the answer to this question in most all of those situations is a clear no.
If I had been curious about the same thing 40 years ago, I would have thought, "Gee, I haven't the time or willingness to bother going to the library to look that up; I guess I may never know." In the present I think, "Gee, I bet I can find that in less than a couple of minutes." The internet lowers the workfunction of finding many things, and I think this leads those of us who are used to it being around to allow our curiosity much more freedom. We stop thinking "I guess I may never know" so easily. We have the urge to tap a few keys to actually look. However, if the keys weren't there, it isn't that we would have looked elsewhere, but that we never would have looked at all.
It is missleading to think that the internet has prevented you from having finding out something in these cases. You probably wouldn't have found it out before the internet. And just consider all the things you do find in a couple of minutes. All those peaks of curiosity that are sated.
Maybe I'm just a little old-fashioned, but I still mostly believe in the internet dreams.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
I live in Canada and anytime I want directions between distant cities it tries to tell me to
1) Head south to Bellingham
2) Head east along the I-XX
3) Head north at XXXX
I call BS are there any Canadian mapping site out there?
my answer is yes.
Then you can all benefit from the ultimate source of information:
Yeah, it's my kid. She knows EVERYTHING.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
...until Slashdot can be accessed some other way.
I used to have to ask people, such as my parents for the answers to things. I'm 23, but I wonder about kids growing upwithout ever having to ask their parents "why is the sky blue" and instead they can just look it up online.
But I think it's important that the Internet has brought information-gathering to the hands of the public. Previously, people got their news and knowledge from schools and TV and newspapers; all compiled and chosen by a select few people. Now they can get information from anywhere in the world, with any number of different perspectives and slants.
$8.95/mo web hosting
How much do you rely on the Internet for information? Since getting online 7 or 8 years ago, I have gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news and information, to the point where they've pretty much disappeared from my life.
Don't worry, the mainstream media reports the same things as teh Intarweb.
These days, every other story in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and on ABC News is either Microsoft bashing, or about SCO.
And every other byline writer opens his article with "I, for one, welcome our new [ARTICLE SUBJECT] overlords."
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I'd be curious to know what it is you claim you can't find online...
I've had a long-standing bet with my friends and coworkers that there is nothing you can't find on the Internet.
Even inventing random fetishes is pretty futile... there's normally at least a mention of it somewhere, if not an entire Yahoo! group dedicated to it.
The toughest ones are "what was the name of the guy that quoted some book in that movie that starred John Malkovich"
--D
I can either remember an actual fact in detail, or I can instead remember a pointer to where to find the detail in said info.
I am a very poor speller, Google/Dictionary.com combined are my saviors.
Sites that I use all the time (approaching 50 times a day) for my knowledge base:
1) Google - both regular web pages and the newsgroup archives
2) everything2.com
3) snopes.com
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The only real reason I wouldn't want the Internet as my information source is for the shrinking number of cases where the information is locked in some book, and not online. In the next few decades, new books, new editions of old books, and old books will all find their way online and make their physical versions artifacts of a previous age. This will accelerate as more people move away from CRTs - this Samsung flatpanel that I got to save space has also made it very tolerable to read blocks of text for hours at a time, though sometimes the fonts aren't great.
Paper printouts will continue to be useful for much longer, since paper is comparatively so easy to work with when organizing and sorting information. I suspect some sort of digital replacement for paper sheets will eventually come out, though; you store the "sheets" in a box and then when you need them you take them out and press a button to move a document or screenshot onto the pages. Then when you're done the only filing you'd have to do is on the computer.
Of course, people say that dead trees will be used forever, but why would they? Before paper, we used papyrus or parchment. Before that, we carved tablets of clay or stone. Right now paper is still the leading edge in "mobile, portable visual information" but that doesn't mean it won't be challenged, eventually.
Print media takes time to produce. Internet content takes little to produce. On average, analytic content found in print is better than web-only content. Raw data is different. For example, if you want economic data, there's little sense in waiting for the BLS report to be published. Just pull it off the web. If you want something that someone has spent time on, lingered over, then you want print media.
Eventually, you realize that the Internet's best feature is the ability to find basic info. Let's say you've never heard of something, like hysteresis. Search Google for it. Use another search engine. You'll quickly find basic information. You will learn that hysteresis is an economic phenomenona with certain details, etc, etc. You will have to look very hard to find much more than basic info, however.
Content on the Internet is a mile wide and an inch deep. It's a dictionary of everything. Yet, if you want something that is in-depth, there is no easy way to find it. If there were a search engine that would give you lots and lots of in-depth info on your search terms, that would be great. That's not what we have today. Today, all you can expect is basic info.
Furthermore, on the web, you have to go looking for opinions that are contrary to yours. You have to think, "Hmm, I believe that the minimum wage should be increased, so let me go find someone's essay that argues that it should not be raised." It is really difficult and counterintuitive to think that way all the time. As a result, you tend to visit web sites with content that you tend to already agree with. In this way, your intellectual experience is sub-optimal.
Books are different. When you open a new book, you don't know what you're going to get. When you walk through a library or a bookstore, you will find books that you've never heard of. Then you will pick them up and be surprised and often challenged.
In conclusion, the web is useful as a dictionary of everything. The web is not useful as an in-depth encyclopedia of everything. Books are still the best.
... Since if it's on the Internet it has to be true!
I too have been on the 'net' for over 10 years and
have gradually changed 90% of my information
gathering practices to include the internet in one
form or another.
When learning something new that has established fields of study
You can't beat a bound book. Portability being the
number one reason and availability in bound format being the other.
My worries lie along the lines of the few bad apples
that are gradually becoming more and more contagious on the net.
As the internet becomes more and more intricate it's becoming easier to screw it up for everyone.
I have access to more varieties and depths of information than any other generation in my family before me and most of the time it is supremely overwhelming in its entirety.
The fact that 90% of internet users would feen for their chatrooms instead of the information flow when you cut them off is sickening.
Novosibirsk wasn't one of the hidden city (s) for nothing ehh
And after being exposed to the web for so long
Peanut butter is great with honey
My thoughts are just as fragmented as the web I view.
They are mp3's ("threes").
The real problem with MapQuest is not that it's maps are incorrect or that it's directions are wrong. It's that stupid people take them literally instead of actually looking at the damn map themselves. I use MapQuest all the time, because I travel a lot. I never have once followed the sheet of directions it gives me, because I know it's taking the way that a computer thought up. In other words, it's probably the shortest or quickest or easiest, in theory, but reality is far different from theory.
You can't program a computer to know that while this street is shorter, that one is more likely to have less traffic at this particular time of day. Well, you can program it to know that, I suppose, but is it? I doubt it.
I think MapQuest is a great tool, but people read those directions, which seem extremely detailed, and their brain shuts off. When the reality deviates from the expected course, they don't usually bother to turn the brain back on.
Use MapQuest to get a map and find approximate locations. But plot your own course. That's the way to use it properly.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The rumors of a thousand ill-informed people do not add up to the knowledge of a single well-informed person.
;)
Perhaps, but when looking for factual information, the internet is a great source to find a thousand well informed people on any given topic.
There's a difference between opinion and fact, and the internet is only useful as a research tool when you learn to distinguish someone who knows what he's talking about from someone who doesn't. In the realm of verifable, factual, knowledge, I find that it's rare that someone will put up something that is provably complete nonsense, unless they're a wacko. And most people's wacko-meter works pretty well.
In the realm of opinion, you're absolutely 100% correct. You can find thousands of conflicting opinions on the internet.
So be careful to verify what you read before accepting it as Truth.
Probably a good idea to do the same in libraries too.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject."
That's like asking a zookeeper if he likes animals. Or like asking a prostitute if they like money and sex.
Hypocrisy is the 8th deadly sin.
The schools will force you to use more than just the internet as a source of information in any large project. Can't say that I like it but it's definately good for me. If library texts were available in pdf that would be nice.
-Tim Louden
The Internet is great for information. You can find out just about anything when you think about it. Any kind of information, at your fingertips.
I don't think that the Internet is a good source of knowledge. I think knowledge is provided by synthesizing experience and integrating it into a worldview.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
I was doing an essay for a History class just last night. I had the textbook, multiple primary sources, and a sample essay out on my desk in treeware. Over the course of writing the essay, I turned less and less to the printed material and more often googled for information. I was too often frustrated at not being able to find a specific quote, or in which context a quote was made. Hundreds of non-text-searchable pages may have been sufficient if I had started a week earlier, but at T minus 4 hours and counting, I really didn't have the time to continuously flip through the treeware scanning for keywords. This is one reason I support textbooks that come with CD-ROMs of the entire text inside. I don't advocate getting rid of treeware completely, but more often than not it's becoming a last resource, not a first one.
My procedure when I want accurate information about things that matter. I go to 1. My university alumni account that allows me to access electronic books, whole text journal articles etc. Then I go 2. Lexis-Nexis... the GOD of information after that I go to google.
We are in a time where it takes a couple minutes to do research on google. Whether it's researching a major paper or just answering a question that's been floating around in your head for a while, the internet has become an easy way to find any information without driving to the library. I guess I am a child of the information age in that since sixth grade I've used the internet to help in research papers for school. I'm in college now and I still use them. The good part is that's easy to find information about a topic, but the bad part is that no academic body has approved the material.
Years ago, librarians would scare us into thinking that everything we found on the internet was a blatant lie trying to trick us...I'm not joking. But after years of using the internet for school work, I've found that it does take a little common sense in determining if a web site is reliable or not, but it's mostly common sense.
The point I'm trying to make is that the internet is a powerful research tool. Newspapers online are common for even small local papers. However, there is so much crap online that we need to have the common sense to distinguish it from the real stuff. Most people who have used the internet for years are used to this, but newbies are not. It is up to the educated to make it aware to people that the internet has many resources, some of which are bullshit, but most of which are good.
In Greensboro, I tried using mapquest to get to a movie theatre. The directions didn't make sense at one point. After driving around the area for a while we figured out what went wrong. For no apparent reason, one of the streets mapquest wanted us to drive down stopped, then resumed a quarter mile away. It reminded me of what happens on SimCity when you don't pay for road maintainence and individual road tiles dissappear. The area even had large trees, so you couldn't tell from a glance that there was a continuation of the road nearby.
Anyway, my guess is that the not-constructed section of road was never official. IOW the legal records show that the road is continuous when in real life it is not. This won't be the only oddity in this city that is like that; the road that my home lives in is officially non-existent. Actually, they have the name wrong. I live on a court and they omit the "court." Every now and then mail doesn't make it here because of that wierdness.
But it is inconsistencies like that that cause mapquest to be occasionally off, rather than mapquest itself being inaccurate.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
I stopped reading/watching news because they talk lots of stuff that i don't want to know: wars, terrorism, crimes, tragedies, ... because they aren't related to my life.
Most of the news related to my life/job are on slashdot. The only tv show that i watch are finance talks, because they resume everything is going on the finance world.
And ocassionaly visit some sport website to view my team results or when the next game is.
But for more in depth information i read books (get them in the library), their information is much better than the internet: all in one place, much better quality and very directed for learning.
OOOOH they have the internet on computers now?
If a (dead) tree hits the pavement and no one buys it will it stop being printed?
95% of my information is gleaned from the Net.
Of that 95%, 90% is from free sources and 10% is from commercial databases.
What I enjoy so much about the Net, I can choose from many different sites that concentrate on many different aspect of News (Tech, Gov't, Human Rights, Africa, Wireless, etc).
I've had several arguements settled rather quickly with a minute or two search on the Net (Is the answer "42" or "43"? The average rainfall is greater in the Amazon Basin then the rainforest(s) in Congo. Is it "wrapped up like a douche" or "revved up like a deuce"?).
The non-Net 5% is both from periodicals that I happen to pick up usually while waiting in some Medical Professional's office (MD, Dentist, etc) and from TV.
I probably watch twenty minutes, total time, of TV news or "news" and those five minutes are usually involuntarily (waiting for flight, sports bar, wife and I fighting and I sit and stare stonily at TV, etc) a week.
I have never liked newspapers, except for small small town print (well, they used to have a newspaper) and then only for the editorials and letters to the editor.
I do not really have a preference, book in hand or LCD in hand, for leisure reading. Whichever will get me the story is fine with me.
Having recently re-read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring (.pdf) and Snowcrash (.txt) was as enjoyable this time as reading them in their original pulp form.
What the fuck is the internet?
Really.
with a quick view of my e-mail but then THE NEWSPAPERS!! I could read them for hours.Back to the internet to check around and now that I am a member of Slashdot, a longer view for crime or passion. IT is hard to beat a comfortable chair at the library but then when I need to blast through some material for a paper or such nothing beats the computer cruise. Do not think I could stay at a screen all day, interacting with people is a large part of my life. I do not understand to much of what you folks say about the subject of computerspeak but bygum I always have an opinion and enjoy the science, space......A funny thing happened when I joined Slashdot, my windows and doors suddenly slammed shut, a strange fog came out of my floor vents and took the shape of an elephant, said his name was San Francisco. Out side the cops yelled over a bullhorn that they demanded a reason to arrest me and all the time I was struggleing with my KARMA, is bad,bad? or is it bad, bad, Leroy Brown, my head hurts, BACK to my generations heroin, T.V.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
My university, and I'm sure many others do as well, offer to students the ability to browse various journal articles via the Internet from home over "secure" connections.
This in effect, gives me virtaully unlimited access to verifiable information on a whole slew of information (if I want to access it). I certainly use it to help me research for some essays.
So yes, the Internet serves a very real information source for me.
Books are so much more material. They stay around for ages. The content on the web is forever changing, and I never trust the information I want access to to be still be there in a few years.
/. out of curiosity, and now I'm typing away and still now getting any further. You see?!
But there's also something slightly insidious about the web. It requires so little brain power to use. You can immerse yourself and end up staring at a screen for hours. It has answers to many of the things I need to know, but I often find out about things I just don't need to know as well.
In the process of doing research I often need to sit and think in order to make progress. It's very easy to not get to that point when there's a computer to hand. I keep looking things up, following the occasional tangential link, and even though I feel that I'm doing something productive I'm actually getting no further.
And here I am again, having just checked
Ebooks on an IPAQ 3950 is really not so bad, so long as it's really an EBOOK in .lit format. Anything else is really too hard to read...lags in the equipment between turning pages, etc...
But I remember looking in the paper for movie times....BIG PAIN. In the last 7 years haven't looked/called for a movie listing NOT on the net.
newspapers - same.
Here's the thing that I'd REALLY like to know...how many people have actually written college papers using only research found on the net?
THIS is the one thing that I truly wish I had when I was in college. Granted, college was only like 10 years ago, but PAPERS WOULD BE SO EASY AND SO ROBUST with the internet to use as a PRIMARY source of INFO.
I remember thinking that ENCARTA was cool, informative stuff with music clips built into papers about Mozart...
Now, it's absoltuely the thing. If it went away or changed culture significantly, I think that a part of my life would seriously have to re-learn how to gather info. The NET is it.
I've always found maps.yahoo.com to be more accurate (and less annoying, with an ad-proxy enabled) than mapquest.
I am a medical doctor.
I am also a geek and keep up with the latest in technology (I read slashdot, I read computing and science magazines).
I can assure you that, in the next 10 years and probably more, there is no way a machine is going to replace a human doctor for diagnosis of a patient.
There are just too many subjective things in medicine. It's way more complex than a chess game.
A complaint that starts out as "I have abdominal pain" can mean anything from the completely innocuous to something truly life-threathening. There is no machine, no software, no artifical neural network available today that can distinguish the thousands of possible causes of abdominal pain down to something you can work with. I don't see anything that can do this being invented in the next decade or two.
Doctors aren't going out of business anytime soon.
One more thing - medicine is expensive also because of the medical insurance, not just the doctors.
I used to go to the library once in a while, or ask people questions. But mostly, I just didn't have as much information. And it didn't seem to matter. I had a wider range of activities and I spent my spare time differently
1989: Cooked dinner for friends; read books, watched TV (gasp!); got married; chatted on ddials.
1993: Took road trips to insignificant historical sites; built a garden; redecorated the apartment; made felt; fenced a farm; chatted on IRC.
1998: Moved to Singapore; explored and travelled on weekends; wrote a play; took hundreds of rolls of film; started a mailing list and updated my website regularly.
2003: Same as you--get up, check e-mail, IRC, read websites, do some work, Google a lot of stuff, blog, send some e-mail, IRC, eat dinner, more Google, watch a DVD, IMDB, check e-mail, sleep.
I remember the times before the current internet..(dark ages)..I did not have access to the pre-browser internet age, but to find out about technical stuff, I had to collect information by reading magazines and watching tv, sendign away for books reading Omni, scientific american, pop science, pop-electronics etc...pretty dark age, as it took me about 1 week to 6 months to locate interesting stuff, now it's a few minutes to find something, and I can download programs/applications in a few min again...(super-fast, no cost). In fact, the internet is fundementallyy changes the way the world embraces change and how people educate themselves, get new technology, produce new tech etc. When the age of nanotech arrives, then things will move 100 or more times faster....
Yeah.
But it costs money.
ProMiles is a mapping package used by the trucking industry - if you're willing to use COM objects you can do all sorts of wonderful things.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
The political news I get from radio (eyes closed, in bed). On my way to work local and international headlines are shown on the tram, and once at work I start my day with slashdot, userfriendly, linuxdevices. That way I'm completely informed before 10AM :-)
i got rid of all my books (dumped them in the garbage). ...
now if i move to a new appartment i can do it in one day not
like half a week
anyway reading on the computer screen is less fun then reading a book,
because the computer screen standard is non-sense. the scrreen
shouldn't be 1024 x 764, but more 764 x 1024.
it's impossible to quick scan a webpage like one
could with a book, because one line goes on and on
and on.
if one would format lengthy texts on computer to
say 35-50 characters per line this would improve
reading capability alot.
and i dont mind a article that goes on and on for
pages as long as one line isn't more then 50
characters long.
for example: expert systems. the first work into these focussed on medical issues, and had a respectable hit rate in diagnosis when compared to a Real Live Doctor (tm). They never got implemented because a patient could end up suing the software vendors/authors for misdiagnosis...
i was just thinking the other month how amazing it is now that you can learn about anything by going on the internet, for example I managed to give a tree an extra lease of life by taking shoots and nurturing them (tho now they're back in the garden i'm not sure how they'll cope with winter).
However, of late, I'm realising that books still have a lot to offer: and have always been there. It's much quicker to find information in a bookstore: because it's all supposed to be high quality content that does what it says it does.
I don't know about you but I still take in information from the printed page far better than from the screen.
Canada 411 has the paper equiv ads
So are you complaining that MapQuest is bad, or that your friend is a retard?
Some independent news pages: Information Clearinghouse
Jeff Rense
What Really Happened
David Icke
Americans Annoyed
I agree that books are great-not just for information but for curling up with. I find it hard to get into reading when all the text is on a screen made of light. And I can never get positioned properly either. How ever I wouldn't doubt in the near future all books will be computerized. How ever no multi media shot will ever match a books plain cover, and nothing beats the suspence of turning a page.
I don't know why it's calling me an anonymous coward I didn't select anonymous~
Though, as long as you stick to the more travelled areas, and get directions to businesses, MapQuest more or less comes through. It's just the rural and residential streets it sucks at...
I remember trying it a few years ago by specifying an exact address. What I found that in the cities, it was very accurate, but wrong in the suburbs. It showed the suburb OK, but the location star was usually about 1/2 an mile off.
When I try it now, it's usually dead on. I even tried it for rural areas, and it was always correct. So it got much better over the years. My guess is, they do cooperate with postal office, to get the exact addresses right.
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
There are lots of misguided rants on the Net, and even some good stuff... but there are lots not yet there, specially if the authors are the kind of ethical lone rangers who don't get alond with corporate sponsors, or if the subject matter simply isn't simple or fashionable enough to be cheap to produce and publish on spare time.
For example, there is lots of stuff about various SQL and pseudo-SQL (think MySQL) implementations, but woefully little about the relational model of database management; there is lots about fashionable application servers, but little about their more solid antecessors, namely TP monitors, and the whole theory of transaction processing.
Not to mention real books that convey in-depth information are so much more pleasurable to read, at least until we have GNU/Linux UMTS handsets to read digital text.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Another 49 year old chimes in with the same observation of his behavior; my main source of news, satisfaction of my curiosity, etc, etc, comes from the Web. However, as I am recovering from an auto accident, I acquired a pile of books, and I have enjoyed immensely reading again. I am also finding that the internet is useful for my 8 y/o son, but the printed page is still the best learning tool for him, in most cases. In fact, I'm going right now to do something that I have only recently returned to...watching Headline News.
yea , the internet is a very good source for knowledge science e.g. you can find anything around using google.com and others books or ebooks are also good but some guys prefer the "normal" solutions :P
Non omnia possumus omnes !
books for general surveys... international crime. etc. Lunatic radio for news... valcano under yellowstone park, etc. comic pages for current news, (pulp versions) internet for anything i need details on. pat
packrat ; writer-informer. http://packrat.comicgenesis.com http://www.youtube.com/area163 https://www.smashwords.com/