I think the point that people are trying to make here is that Wikipedia can be used as a reference (not a sole reference), and that in general it is worth using (if people had major problems with it they wouldn't be using it). I don't get the impression that people are using Wikipedia for mission critical work; for that there are many sources that should be used (including Wikipedia), but Wikipedia can be a good starting point. I also have the impression that people here are aware of the limitations of Wikipedia. Caveat Emptor is always the rule, and I'm sure the / crowd tends to use this more than others. A person should be skeptical of all information they receive no matter what the source.
Slashdot too can be a good research tool. But / also should be used as merely a starting point or to expand upon ideas. I would not imply ignorance from a researcher just because they use something that isn't as verifiable as one would like. There are times that articles in peer-reviewed, prestigious scientific journals and magazines are found to be completely bogus afterall (like the journal Nature. I will leave you one reference for good measure: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/25/britannica_wikipedia_nature/). Tools like / and Wikipedia help to expand knowledge, and are not the be-all and end-all.
It seems like you are being too critical in defending your argument against professionals using Wikipedia. I would think even people with post-doctorate degrees in subjects like Linguistics or Literature may need to use a reference to look up the spelling of a word in Google or Wiktionary (for example). Even I need to do this sometimes, and yet I can always tell when I get the American version of the word as opposed to the British or Canadian version of the word, and I know to correct this. Obvious errors would also be noticeable, but I still find non-authoritative tools useful. It's more a matter of the mindset you have when using these tools, rather than the perceived quality of the specific tools you use.
If I pay someone in customer service to answer a question for me and then find that they are looking up the answer in an encyclopedia (be it the Wikipedia or World Book), I'm not going to be very happy with them.
Your expectations are too high. I've done customer service in the past. If I ever sound cynical about my employers it is largely do to my work in the customer service field. My professional experience has been inadequate product training with little or no resources available to the employees to reference. It's interesting because I've only done support for major brand name products, and these companies don't bother supplying their call-centre's with useful things like manuals, or even url references to internal or external resources. And yes, a lot of times for out-of-warrenty products people pay two dollars a minute for people like me to google for information (which can be hit-or-miss). The worst case I remember was when Windows XP first came out and we were supporting people who used Windows XP. We didn't have any product training on XP and we didn't have any computers at work that had XP on it, so I would constantly be asking people "What do you see on the screen?". Yep, people were paying two dollars a minute for this. With another company I would ask the customer to get out their manual and read me what it says. It was embarrassing for me, but at least I didn't make up answers like a lot of people did. Yep my talk times were unusually high and I never got promoted or even employee of the month, but I never made things up just to get customers off the phone (as often happens).
Don't expect much if you have to call "customer service". Wikipedia in my experience often has more useful information (especially the references) about a company or product than a lot of corporate Web sites do. This is not good, but is reality. Perhaps things have improved somewhat over the years, but I remain doubtful and would never pay for consumer-level support. I've never done enterprise-level support, but have worked with and talked to enterprise support people. Expect a bit more from them, but they are often just kids straight out of college with little experience (but with many more hours worth of formal company / product training).
It's censorship only if the sole reason for blocking access is to prevent free expression of ideas.
Redefining the meaning of words to match one's own tastes and standards is quite common and unfortunate.
From (the censored) Wikipedia:
Censorship is defined as the removal and/or withholding of information from the public by a controlling group or body.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
In the case of employees miss-using company time, well that is a completely different issue. Whether you agree with censorship or not, or whether you want to define censorship with your own narrow terms is a completely different issue. But in the case of employees miss-using company time a more effective measure would be individual punishments and not collective punishment. A more apt approach would be individual employee counseling and verbal or written warnings. If I were a Manager I would be able to tell that productivity is down without having to ask the IT department to check up on the employees. Obviously I am not lame enough to be considered management material and NEVER expect to be offered a management position.
In general it would be better to allow personal but modest use of the Internet during none-critical or busy hours of the work day. Keeping employees happy actually seems to increase productivity and employee-retention and keep them motivated. As I've said, if the company doesn't want people using the Internet, then they shouldn't offer it. But treating employees (or students for that matter) like they live in some type of prison where they are subject to restrictions will only harbor animosity and resentment. If you don't trust your employees then you shouldn't be in management. And if your employees are untrustworthy then they shouldn't be working for you. Either way the company either made the wrong hiring decisions or they just can't manage period. Excuse my Management rant, but I've been managed all my life by incompetents. My resentment to irrational and ubiquitous mediocrecy should be excused. I must be well outside the bell curve of "normal". Perhaps slashdot should hire me;)
Its not because of censorship, its because they want their employees doing their job instead of surfing the net. Plus it wastes network resources, which believe it or not are not free. Many employers ban employees from using their network for personal use.
Unless doing research on the Internet is part of your job description, then almost everything one does on the Internet (as opposed to an Intranet) is for personal use. It would make more sense for companies to not offer Internet access at all, or just have a whitelist of acceptable sites to use. And if you did need to do even a modicum of research for your job, then it would not make sense to blacklist one of the few most useful sites around (Wikipedia or Slashdot).
And as for the censorship issue. Yep, it is censorship. It doesn't matter whether it may be justified or not, but it still is censorship. You could look up that word on wikipedia.org if it is not being censored from you.
And why not through in one last rebuttal, even though it may seem quite redundant to the / community; Wikipedia and Slashdot are not bandwidth hogs. Sorry mate but your "wastes network resources" has not weight with me.
It's not a normally occuring fault that a 'real world' tech would ever experience in his lifetime.
It doesn't matter whether it is a real world problem or not. The point is that a tech should be able to trouble-shoot the problem. An inability to diagnose non-obvious problems only highlights the incompetence of (poor quality) technicians. In this scenario it could have been an unplugged connection, a bad wire, etc. It would have made sense to consider all the possibilities. Narrowing down the problem to individual components is a natural trouble-shooting procedure. If a tech can't figure it out, then that person isn't capable of properly trouble-shooting.
Nope, Penguinisto #20860243 isn't a Troll IMHO (as at least one mod thinks). I've seen people do things like this all the time (unplug a mouse, etc) to see if their fellow students / tech workers could figure out the problem. You'd be amazed at how often people with a handful of certifications just can't seem to figure it out.
People really need three things to be competent in this field: 1) A lot of well-rounded Education (knowledge) 2) Lot's of hands on experience trouble-shooting 3) The ability to successfully trouble-shoot (which often involves being humble enough to realize that their individual paradigms may be wrong, and to take the time to research, ask, and think outside of their MCSE or A+ manuals)
I should add, when I talk about sending it in to be repaired, I'm talking about when the dedicated repair facility has it. I'm not talking about if the Geek Squad gets their hands on it! Places like Best Buy will just ship out repairs to contractors who specialize in repairing HP laptops for example.
It shouldn't matter what operating system is installed. Many (most?) of the large retailers will tell you to expect your hard disk to be reformatted with a "Recovery Disk" when you send your computer in to be repaired. I doubt if they would even try to boot off a virgin customer disk do to liability and privacy issues. This is a case of warranties gone wrong and managers not having common sense to resolve issues outside (the warranty) box. My advice: take it up the chain of command, or threaten to sue them. That seems to get the ball rolling in my professional and personal experience.
I actually wrote up a reply in notepad similar to yours, but it didn't sound very easily understandable so I gave up. Kudos for an eloquent explanation.
A CEO isn't "just an employee". A CEO represents the company he works for. The position is very sales oriented in most cases. And a CEO is generally elected to that position by the shareholders. There is politics involved, so being politically astute is important.
You should be able to patent business models and concepts that give you a competitive advantage.
I don't see this as being practical or fair. Business models and concepts are things that everybody and anybody can (and often does) think of. It can only be used for monopolizing the market (on that idea) by patent trolls and the like. Common sense concepts like a one-click shopping experience do not take years of research and development and millions of dollars of investment to create, like developing an anti-cancer drug for example. Leave the patents for things the engineering community does, like creating new drugs, new micro-processor designs, etc; and let the average Joe like your 20 year old who wants to setup an e-commerce site do it the way he wants to do it without having to hire a lawyer to make sure he isn't breaking any patent laws because of the way his Web site is designed.
Although there may be valid prior art for the one-click patent, the real issue with me is that you can't and shouldn't be able to patent ideas. This is one of the most bizarre and unfair things I've ever heard of. If I had the time and money I'm sure I could patent two-click, three-click and all the other click shopping experiences. I would have a virtual monopoly on shopping. But stupid is as stupid does. Let's hope things improve.
but the 5 year max for welfare, to people not corporations, was part of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America"
It doesn't really matter whether it was Clinton's idea or not, he did sign it into law. Actions speak louder than words.
The stage was already set by 1996. The welfare reform movement reached its apex on August 22, 1996, when President Clinton signed a welfare reform bill, officially titled the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996...Under the law, no person could receive welfare payments for more than five years, consecutive or nonconsecutive.
but I wouldn't call the right conservative by any means.
Good point. I was really using "conservative" more as the way it is used in the media than it's actual formal definition. I think in general though that you along with the Slashdot community would get my point (without me having to go through all the vagaries of popular versus formal usage of the word).
"Liberal" too is something I would describe as a problem word. From a formal economic/political definition "liberal" is actually Laissez-faire, pro-big business, free-trade, etc; as opposed to the more popular folk usage where it generally means left-wing or socialist, and is used ironically enough, as a disparaging term by "conservative" commentators like Rush Limbaugh. Libertarians are far more accurately described as liberal than so-called liberals are.
I have read it (I think more than once) many, many years ago, and saw the movie... and Slaughterhouse 5, among many others. unlametheweak has many interests, and appreciates the wide array of ideas and (intellectual) experiences one can gather from other people's creativity. Though I've found myself reading more technically oriented books as I've grown older, and Web sites like this one. So it goes.
Yes it is. Too bad you can't prove it's illegal or a conflict of interest because it's a state secret.
And if you think that's insane, it just proves that it's sane, and therefore has to stay until the war is over
Interesting piece of rhetoric, but the "proves that it's sane" needs a proof. It's a classic catch 22. The problem is defining what "war" you (or the government) means, and how does one decide if "the war" is over.
The War on Terrorism is even more nebulous than the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, or any of the other Wars the US is fighting. I doubt if the US would want to define such a war with any tangible, objective definitions for a "win" situation, because if the US did win the War on Terrorism, then the government would have no excuse for keeping the excessive powers (of abuse) that it has. I don't believe that the US really does want to Win any war if it means losing power.
Since when did Clinton turn Liberal? Clinton was the guy who introduced the DMCA, 5 year max limit for anybody needing welfare, among other things. These points I just got off the top of my head. It's been said many times and in many ways that in America there is small "c" conservative and large "C" conservative. Nothing seems to be liberal about American politics except the rhetoric.
It's ironic, because that is what I thought of your post. I've signed non-disclosure agreements before, and have yet to figure out what is really worth disclosing. Yes there will always be SOMETHING, some argument one can use to get away with the most atrocious abuses.
It's the same type of logic that says torture is OK if Americans do it, but Americans don't torture because we changed the definition of torture to include torture. Therefore America is now safe.
For some reason I still don't feel safe because Mr. Bush knows what magazines his employees jack off to, or that people can be tortured without being tortured. The logic eludes me.
OK, the "certain right-wing profile." was just an example... It could (and probably is used to profile many types people.) The blackmail premise is old and weak and just an excuse snoop. I've just written a somewhat light analysis of this premise: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=284555 &cid=20420193
Too much debt? We'll get you out of trouble if you give us info.
People in debt don't give out information that they shouldn't. Only unscrupulous people do that. Students are not inherently unscrupulous.
Also, knowing "whether they've ever had sex and, if so, what type." has nothing to do with being dishonorable or embarrassed. Does this mean they are less likely to hire virgins because of the embarrassment of virginity? And apparently they ask people I know about my sex habits?... what if I don't tell my boss about my fetishes?... or I don't let my mom know about how I like to give it anally?
Nope... seems more about morals to me. The hostile agent premise never made sense, and it makes even less sense now. There is no logic to it (or VERY VERY week logic).
These background checks are only a preventative measure, to ensure that government employees have the utmost integrity and loyalty.
"employment history, past residences and any illegal drug use."... have absolutely nothing to do with integrity and loyalty. Although I'm sure they can be used to discriminate against people who don't fit into a certain right-wing profile.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point that people are trying to make here is that Wikipedia can be used as a reference (not a sole reference), and that in general it is worth using (if people had major problems with it they wouldn't be using it). I don't get the impression that people are using Wikipedia for mission critical work; for that there are many sources that should be used (including Wikipedia), but Wikipedia can be a good starting point. I also have the impression that people here are aware of the limitations of Wikipedia. Caveat Emptor is always the rule, and I'm sure the / crowd tends to use this more than others. A person should be skeptical of all information they receive no matter what the source.
Slashdot too can be a good research tool. But / also should be used as merely a starting point or to expand upon ideas. I would not imply ignorance from a researcher just because they use something that isn't as verifiable as one would like. There are times that articles in peer-reviewed, prestigious scientific journals and magazines are found to be completely bogus afterall (like the journal Nature. I will leave you one reference for good measure: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/25/britannica_wikipedia_nature/). Tools like / and Wikipedia help to expand knowledge, and are not the be-all and end-all.
It seems like you are being too critical in defending your argument against professionals using Wikipedia. I would think even people with post-doctorate degrees in subjects like Linguistics or Literature may need to use a reference to look up the spelling of a word in Google or Wiktionary (for example). Even I need to do this sometimes, and yet I can always tell when I get the American version of the word as opposed to the British or Canadian version of the word, and I know to correct this. Obvious errors would also be noticeable, but I still find non-authoritative tools useful. It's more a matter of the mindset you have when using these tools, rather than the perceived quality of the specific tools you use.
Your expectations are too high. I've done customer service in the past. If I ever sound cynical about my employers it is largely do to my work in the customer service field. My professional experience has been inadequate product training with little or no resources available to the employees to reference. It's interesting because I've only done support for major brand name products, and these companies don't bother supplying their call-centre's with useful things like manuals, or even url references to internal or external resources. And yes, a lot of times for out-of-warrenty products people pay two dollars a minute for people like me to google for information (which can be hit-or-miss). The worst case I remember was when Windows XP first came out and we were supporting people who used Windows XP. We didn't have any product training on XP and we didn't have any computers at work that had XP on it, so I would constantly be asking people "What do you see on the screen?". Yep, people were paying two dollars a minute for this. With another company I would ask the customer to get out their manual and read me what it says. It was embarrassing for me, but at least I didn't make up answers like a lot of people did. Yep my talk times were unusually high and I never got promoted or even employee of the month, but I never made things up just to get customers off the phone (as often happens).
Don't expect much if you have to call "customer service". Wikipedia in my experience often has more useful information (especially the references) about a company or product than a lot of corporate Web sites do. This is not good, but is reality. Perhaps things have improved somewhat over the years, but I remain doubtful and would never pay for consumer-level support. I've never done enterprise-level support, but have worked with and talked to enterprise support people. Expect a bit more from them, but they are often just kids straight out of college with little experience (but with many more hours worth of formal company / product training).
[citation needed] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=~%22If+you+plug+up+one+outlet%2C+they'll+just+find+another.%22&btnG=Search
Redefining the meaning of words to match one's own tastes and standards is quite common and unfortunate.
From (the censored) Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
In the case of employees miss-using company time, well that is a completely different issue. Whether you agree with censorship or not, or whether you want to define censorship with your own narrow terms is a completely different issue. But in the case of employees miss-using company time a more effective measure would be individual punishments and not collective punishment. A more apt approach would be individual employee counseling and verbal or written warnings. If I were a Manager I would be able to tell that productivity is down without having to ask the IT department to check up on the employees. Obviously I am not lame enough to be considered management material and NEVER expect to be offered a management position.
In general it would be better to allow personal but modest use of the Internet during none-critical or busy hours of the work day. Keeping employees happy actually seems to increase productivity and employee-retention and keep them motivated. As I've said, if the company doesn't want people using the Internet, then they shouldn't offer it. But treating employees (or students for that matter) like they live in some type of prison where they are subject to restrictions will only harbor animosity and resentment. If you don't trust your employees then you shouldn't be in management. And if your employees are untrustworthy then they shouldn't be working for you. Either way the company either made the wrong hiring decisions or they just can't manage period. Excuse my Management rant, but I've been managed all my life by incompetents. My resentment to irrational and ubiquitous mediocrecy should be excused. I must be well outside the bell curve of "normal". Perhaps slashdot should hire me
Unless doing research on the Internet is part of your job description, then almost everything one does on the Internet (as opposed to an Intranet) is for personal use. It would make more sense for companies to not offer Internet access at all, or just have a whitelist of acceptable sites to use. And if you did need to do even a modicum of research for your job, then it would not make sense to blacklist one of the few most useful sites around (Wikipedia or Slashdot).
And as for the censorship issue. Yep, it is censorship. It doesn't matter whether it may be justified or not, but it still is censorship. You could look up that word on wikipedia.org if it is not being censored from you.
And why not through in one last rebuttal, even though it may seem quite redundant to the / community; Wikipedia and Slashdot are not bandwidth hogs. Sorry mate but your "wastes network resources" has not weight with me.
It doesn't matter whether it is a real world problem or not. The point is that a tech should be able to trouble-shoot the problem. An inability to diagnose non-obvious problems only highlights the incompetence of (poor quality) technicians. In this scenario it could have been an unplugged connection, a bad wire, etc. It would have made sense to consider all the possibilities. Narrowing down the problem to individual components is a natural trouble-shooting procedure. If a tech can't figure it out, then that person isn't capable of properly trouble-shooting.
Nope, Penguinisto #20860243 isn't a Troll IMHO (as at least one mod thinks). I've seen people do things like this all the time (unplug a mouse, etc) to see if their fellow students / tech workers could figure out the problem. You'd be amazed at how often people with a handful of certifications just can't seem to figure it out.
People really need three things to be competent in this field:
1) A lot of well-rounded Education (knowledge)
2) Lot's of hands on experience trouble-shooting
3) The ability to successfully trouble-shoot (which often involves being humble enough to realize that their individual paradigms may be wrong, and to take the time to research, ask, and think outside of their MCSE or A+ manuals)
The most realistic alternative is to call the news media (or anyone you know who has a video camera).
Mods: Unless I had a brain-fart the parent #20565619 comment was not redundant when I posted it.
I should add, when I talk about sending it in to be repaired, I'm talking about when the dedicated repair facility has it. I'm not talking about if the Geek Squad gets their hands on it! Places like Best Buy will just ship out repairs to contractors who specialize in repairing HP laptops for example.
It shouldn't matter what operating system is installed. Many (most?) of the large retailers will tell you to expect your hard disk to be reformatted with a "Recovery Disk" when you send your computer in to be repaired. I doubt if they would even try to boot off a virgin customer disk do to liability and privacy issues. This is a case of warranties gone wrong and managers not having common sense to resolve issues outside (the warranty) box. My advice: take it up the chain of command, or threaten to sue them. That seems to get the ball rolling in my professional and personal experience.
I actually wrote up a reply in notepad similar to yours, but it didn't sound very easily understandable so I gave up. Kudos for an eloquent explanation.
A CEO isn't "just an employee". A CEO represents the company he works for. The position is very sales oriented in most cases. And a CEO is generally elected to that position by the shareholders. There is politics involved, so being politically astute is important.
I don't see this as being practical or fair. Business models and concepts are things that everybody and anybody can (and often does) think of. It can only be used for monopolizing the market (on that idea) by patent trolls and the like. Common sense concepts like a one-click shopping experience do not take years of research and development and millions of dollars of investment to create, like developing an anti-cancer drug for example. Leave the patents for things the engineering community does, like creating new drugs, new micro-processor designs, etc; and let the average Joe like your 20 year old who wants to setup an e-commerce site do it the way he wants to do it without having to hire a lawyer to make sure he isn't breaking any patent laws because of the way his Web site is designed.
Although there may be valid prior art for the one-click patent, the real issue with me is that you can't and shouldn't be able to patent ideas. This is one of the most bizarre and unfair things I've ever heard of. If I had the time and money I'm sure I could patent two-click, three-click and all the other click shopping experiences. I would have a virtual monopoly on shopping. But stupid is as stupid does. Let's hope things improve.
And there is the open sourced WididPad:
http://www.jhorman.org/wikidPad/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_reform
Good point. I was really using "conservative" more as the way it is used in the media than it's actual formal definition. I think in general though that you along with the Slashdot community would get my point (without me having to go through all the vagaries of popular versus formal usage of the word).
"Liberal" too is something I would describe as a problem word. From a formal economic/political definition "liberal" is actually Laissez-faire, pro-big business, free-trade, etc; as opposed to the more popular folk usage where it generally means left-wing or socialist, and is used ironically enough, as a disparaging term by "conservative" commentators like Rush Limbaugh. Libertarians are far more accurately described as liberal than so-called liberals are.
I have read it (I think more than once) many, many years ago, and saw the movie... and Slaughterhouse 5, among many others. unlametheweak has many interests, and appreciates the wide array of ideas and (intellectual) experiences one can gather from other people's creativity. Though I've found myself reading more technically oriented books as I've grown older, and Web sites like this one. So it goes.
Interesting piece of rhetoric, but the "proves that it's sane" needs a proof. It's a classic catch 22. The problem is defining what "war" you (or the government) means, and how does one decide if "the war" is over.
The War on Terrorism is even more nebulous than the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, or any of the other Wars the US is fighting. I doubt if the US would want to define such a war with any tangible, objective definitions for a "win" situation, because if the US did win the War on Terrorism, then the government would have no excuse for keeping the excessive powers (of abuse) that it has. I don't believe that the US really does want to Win any war if it means losing power.
Since when did Clinton turn Liberal? Clinton was the guy who introduced the DMCA, 5 year max limit for anybody needing welfare, among other things. These points I just got off the top of my head. It's been said many times and in many ways that in America there is small "c" conservative and large "C" conservative. Nothing seems to be liberal about American politics except the rhetoric.
It's ironic, because that is what I thought of your post. I've signed non-disclosure agreements before, and have yet to figure out what is really worth disclosing. Yes there will always be SOMETHING, some argument one can use to get away with the most atrocious abuses.
It's the same type of logic that says torture is OK if Americans do it, but Americans don't torture because we changed the definition of torture to include torture. Therefore America is now safe.
For some reason I still don't feel safe because Mr. Bush knows what magazines his employees jack off to, or that people can be tortured without being tortured. The logic eludes me.
OK, the "certain right-wing profile." was just an example... It could (and probably is used to profile many types people.) The blackmail premise is old and weak and just an excuse snoop. I've just written a somewhat light analysis of this premise: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=284555 &cid=20420193
People in debt don't give out information that they shouldn't. Only unscrupulous people do that. Students are not inherently unscrupulous.
Also, knowing "whether they've ever had sex and, if so, what type." has nothing to do with being dishonorable or embarrassed. Does this mean they are less likely to hire virgins because of the embarrassment of virginity? And apparently they ask people I know about my sex habits?
Nope... seems more about morals to me. The hostile agent premise never made sense, and it makes even less sense now. There is no logic to it (or VERY VERY week logic).
"employment history, past residences and any illegal drug use."
I think it's more a question of what he means than what he says (no pun intended).
(the previewed edition... argh)