Something that I have read about on Slashdot regularly (where Windows is criticized for bothering with it at all),...
Yeah, and you'll also see posts by people who don't understand all sorts of basic concepts.
Why complain about them? Why even bother to mention them at all?
Whether you need backward compatibility has never been in doubt. You simply cannot expect your customers to re-enter all their data every time you issue a patch.
The question is whether you should bring the old bugs forward for the sake of "backwards compatibility".
Personally, I believe it should be more of a case of killing the bugs with a new major release and treating it more as a "migration" than an "upgrade".
From your description, you're a prefect client for Microsoft.
So if there's no time or money to be wasted, and time is money, why are you wasting time on/.?
Instead of wasting time here, you would (more logically) be better off spending time on various Windows tech forums. You'll want to learn MORE about the systems that you use right now than spending time chatting about systems that you aren't going to use. (And you've detailed the reasons that you aren't going to use them.)
At a philosophical level, Novell probably didn't want to sign the agreement with Microsoft either... heck, Microsoft basically destroyed them as a leading software provider.
Novell destroyed themselves.
The only thing that Microsoft did was release WinNT without the license broadcast that NetWare boxes did. I could use one license and setup 1,000 WinNT boxes on a network. If I used the same license on 2 NetWare boxes on a network, they'd broadcast their license codes, see that they were duplicates and shut both boxes down. "Piracy" gave Microsoft the edge.
After that, it's been 100% Novell fuck ups.
Why buy SuSE when for a LOT less money you can just hire Linux developers to write the code/apps you want? You spent $210 MILLION.
Okay, you own SuSE now, why is it easier to run GroupWise on Windows than on Debian? Microsoft is a bigger threat to your existence than Debian.
Why haven't you ported the look and feel of you NetWare apps (inetcfg, nwconfig, etc) over to SuSE?
Service Pack 6 for NetWare 6.5 is over 800MB. Compressed.
But they're in an unenviable position of trying to turn a profit.
As is every other company out there. McDonald's manages it, yet their costs have got to be higher than cooking healthier food, yourself, at home.
On one side, they offer massive resources that can champion and push forward technologies that groups working in their spare time cannot. On the other, they must find a way to recoup some of those expenses, which sometimes lead them down the path that we've all worked hard to stay off (namely, software patents, commercialization, and closed sourcing parts of their product).
No. The problem is when closed source companies don't bother to understand the Open Source environment and believe they can treat it the same as their closed source products.
Which is exactly what Novell is trying to do.
Instead, Novell should have spent a one tenth of the money they spent on SuSE and paid lots of programmers to port Novell's money-making products (GroupWise, eDirectory, ZENworks, etc) to Linux. Go ahead. Try to get eDirectory running on Ubuntu. It's pretty easy on SuSE, but damn hard on Ubuntu.
Unfortunately I think we'll just have to deal with some closed source Linux programs and some software patents for technologies that required massive investment.
Oh really? You mean like Oracle? Their stuff is still closed. Yet they seem pretty happy with running it on Linux.
It is not a monopoly in the sense that people have no choice. People could choose Macintosh or Linux, but they choose to use Windows instead. My point stands.
Well it is obvious that your understanding of the market exceeds even that of federal judges who have studied it for years. No one can doubt your logic.
Consider how packaging (Windows) triumphs over design (Linux) in many markets.
Those "many markets" are the ones where Microsoft has a monopoly (desktop). Which explains whey Microsoft can change their design from Win2K to WinXP to WinVista and yet people will still be using it.
However, regardless of how brilliant your spec/design is if it does not get "sold" to the client it is useless. If color schemes and logos make the sale more likely then please let management work on that.
If the sale hinges on the colour scheme and logos, then save everyone some stress and take the client out for drinks and hire a hooker for him.
Yes I know it does everything we want and it's within our price range... but I'm not really comfortable with that shade of blue.
Another way to look at it, business is a pretty Darwinian process. If color schemes, logos, slogans, etc. were complete crap they would not be used so heavily.
In my experience, it is not "Darwinian" at all.
It's all about who you know, where you are and what the economy is like at that time.
Which is why when the economy turns down, so many companies fail. Anyone can captain the ship in calm weather.
The point that I am trying to make is that we engineers are not the all knowing genius' we like to think we are.
Who is this "we"?
We are often quite ill-informed with respect to business.
At times that is correct. But it is the exception, not the rule.
While PHB decisions absolutely do exist, we engineers falsely label some rational decisions as PHB due to our ignorance of issues outside of engineering.
Again, at times that is correct. But it is the exception, not the rule.
Which is the reason you'll see management books written about cheese while others are written about fish.
Learn from the mistake of the people of the "A" Ark.;-)
First off, "war" is a stupid metaphor for OS marketshare.
Secondly, there are multiple market segments. #1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
#2. The corporate/government desktop market. Pay attention to how Munich progresses. This is the next big market for Linux.
#3. The home (non-gamer) market. This isn't going to happen until you can buy Linux pre-loaded from the major OEM's. And that's not going to happen until Linux has the marketshare with the corporations/governments.
#4. Finally, the gamer market. This depends almost entirely upon the support of the hardware OEM's and game ISV's. If the newest video card doesn't come with Linux drivers, the gamers will buy the video card and run the OS that does have drivers. Look for this market to be the very, very last one that Linux will gain marketshare in.
Don't worry about whether Linux is taking over the gamer machines yet. Focus on getting Linux into corporation/government desktops. That will get the OEM's to start pre-loading it which will set the stage for the home user migration.
All Novell has to do is be up front and specific in what what purchased, why and how it directly affects their business and end users and other Linux users.
Since Novell does not seem to be willing to do that...
guy: it's when you have more than one machine that the benefits of free software get obvious. When you have more than a dozen, they're stunning.
Remember, it is in Microsoft's long term interest to prevent people from moving to Linux.
So, for a charity, Microsoft could give their software away (free as in beer) and still come out ahead because it would be another instance where Linux was denied.
This gets back to the "piracy" argument. "Piracy" helps your company if it gets people who would not normally purchase your product to use (and learn) your product rather than use (and learn) a competitor's product.
There's no loss on sales because they wouldn't have been able to afford the purchase price in the first place.
I've often wondered why companies don't just give away licenses for their product that are 2 generations old or older. Get the people hooked on the free stuff and then they'll pay you when they get money. Just like the drugs.
My company has been looking for a Sr DBA for over two months. There have been several candidates that are well qualified on paper, but they lack the interpersonal skills and ability to formulate ideas & present them well in the interview. If you're interested in computer science, I might recommend a major in business with a minor in comp sci.
You know, these "interpersonal" skills don't exist in a vacuum.
For some reason those "several candidates" you thought were good had managed to survive at their previous jobs long enough to become senior DBA's.
Before you blame other people for the problems meeting your standards, re-examine your standards and see if you understand the situation.
Particularly if you're suggesting that a business degree is more important that a computer science degree. That indicates that you don't understand the technological side of the issue. Just because someone does not agree with you does not mean that they're wrong.
Do you want a senior DBA or do you want a business analyst? Or do you want both for the price of one?
Seriously, we managed to "defeat" a 3rd world army that had been under economic sanctions for years.
How much "strategy" does that take? Particularly with our weapons.
His whole "strategy" is "keep dropping bombs until we drop the right bomb on the right place at the right time". Go check the new sites. Find the LAST time we dropped any bombs on Iraq. Was it a year ago? A month ago? A week ago? A day ago? An hour ago?
Just a quick search shows us bombing them on 27 October 2006.
And yet our troops keep being killed.
Rumsfeld is not "Good at war, bad at peace". Rumsfeld is bad at war and bad at peace. Rumsfeld cannot tell the difference between war and peace. And Rumsfeld doesn't care.
Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.
With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers. "Effectively" because no one is going to run a database big enough to track them as fast as the spammers change them. Every message could come from its own IP address on a cracked system.
And the other article... no way is it easier to upgrade the hardware, the OS and the apps at the same time. You'll waste too much time trying to find out if the problem is a bad motherboard or driver or... anything.
Not that you're wrong, of course, just that passing laws is how the government proves it's Doing Something, irrespective of wheter the law does anything other than screw the innocent.
So, how about if all the laws on the books had a limited life span? After 8 years (or 16 or 32 or whatever), they expired and needed to be passed again?
That way Congress could continue to "be tough on X" without needing to do any actual work or impact our Freedoms at all?
First off, passing a law that the criminals will disregard is just about useless. They're already criminals. Breaking another law is not going to deter them.
Secondly, there are so many ways around this when you are a criminal. Crack someone else's machine and you can do whatever you want as if you were legally that person. Who stupid is that?
If you're really good, you'd crack 2 machines outside Brazil and use them to bounce traffic around before it got to you. Your machine and record would be 100% clean.
Finally, let's talk wireless. Unless the government wants to crack down on unsecured wireless connections, they're going to lose this one.
This is nothing more than an attempt to scare the good citizens into self-censoring their legal activities. And that is disgusting.
The entire system depends upon computer voting systems without a verifiable paper trail. I thought that this issue was settled already, but apparently it is not.
In this scheme, your ballot has a part A and a part B. Neither of the parts has a human readable vote on it.
A computer is required and it must have been programmed with the relationship of your particular ballot's part A and part B. That means that on your ballot, the computer knows that selections A, B, C and D relate to John, Paul, George and Ringo, respectively.
Now, this relationship information CANNOT BE MADE PUBLIC because if it was, your vote receipt would be able to be used by anyone to confirm how you voted.
Since the information in the system CANNOT BE MADE PUBLIC, we are right back to the current Diebold situation. All it takes is a minor change in the programming that CANNOT BE MADE PUBLIC and the votes are going to another party. And this is, by design, UNVERIFIABLE by the public.
So, you vote this way, you follow all the instructions... and you can verify that the machine counted your vote marked in the 4th window on the ballot.
It's up the whomever programmed the computer to decide who your vote will count towards. And, by design, you'll never be able to validate that.
Of course, you can have variations, but that almost makes the whole system flawed- what if (deliberately or otherwise) the information on which ballots are associated with which keys is lost or confused? Suddenly, you have so much ink covered paper...
There is NO WAY to hand count these ballots.
The relationship of part A to part B must be kept on a computer. There's no way to count them otherwise. They don't have a complete vote on either part. The computer has to have been programmed with what letters correspond to which candidate on which ballots. And since having that information PUBLICLY AVAILABLE would invalidate the entire rest of the process... NO FUCKING WAY FUCK NO!!!
Which brings us back to the issue of whether we trust computers without a paper trail in our elections.
Since I do not trust computers without a paper trail, why would I trust some scheme that depends upon computers without a paper trail? And a bunch of "ink cover paper" is not a paper trail.
Remember, the ballots are numbered. So the printing process has to run off X variations where X is the sum of every candidate running for every office listed on that ballot.
And the ballots cannot be numbered sequentially. Or it would just be a matter of checking what version of the ballot was in that sequence. This can be done with friends and family who are already going to vote the way you do. Just stagger their voting throughout the day.
This system also depends upon a computer to remember which windows were associated with which letters on which ballot number. Any failure in that and these ballots cannot be hand-counted or verified in any other fashion.
This is stupid. Rather than go through all of that, why not just focus on getting the basics done and done right? Leave "verified" voting until after we've managed to identify who can vote and that their votes are actually counted.
You can't prove how you voted to someone who didn't see the other half of the ballot you voted with.
Unless the voter is expected to write in the various options (that's stupid), or the ballot forms are randomly generated (that's expensive), it would be easy for anyone who voted to check whether your receipt matched his/her's.
Unfortunately, from the video, I cannot tell which approach they are advocating.
Okay, I've watched the video and read the article.
I still don't understand it. Why does their video have two different types of hand writing on it? Is the voter supposed to write in all the options when s/he votes?
What's to stop someone from getting a copy of the form and threatening you unless you vote the way they want you to? Unless every form is different (is this the part why the hand writing is different?), any attempt to match the vote online can be used to verify that you voted the way you were told to.
But those who believe in the space alien stuff will consider themselves even more informed. This has nothing to do with democracy.
And you are the perfect example of the flaw in your approach.
This has EVERYTHING to do with Democracy. It isn't whether any person or group of people considers him/themselves to be "more informed". It matters whether they ARE more informed.
Democracy depends upon the participation of informed citizens. When you take away that "informed", Democracy fails. That is why every totalitarian government first cracks down on the media. It is not a coincidence.
But feel free to keep arguing that uninformed people make better decisions than informed people.
Yeah. It's not like a trained experienced proper journalist would knowingly air and stand behind a story based on faked documents on a major network news show!
I never said that they were perfect. But for every story like that you can find, I can link to 1,000 nut cases on the 'web.
So? Welcome to freedom of the press!
Again, that's for making my point. Freedom of the Press means that the government cannot stop you from printing your fantasies about space aliens. But Democracy requires an informed public. And when newspapers stop funding their own research and turn to those space alien conspiracy nut cases for their material, the public is no longer informed.
Yes, you can get some real information out of people... but you'll have to wade through pure crap to get to it.
And every fool with an agenda (space aliens, government cover-ups, etc) will be spewing their own brand of "information".
It isn't that the mass of humanity is better equipped to provide this information. It is that the news organizations are now no better trained in journalism or research than your average TV watcher.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and you'll also see posts by people who don't understand all sorts of basic concepts.
Why complain about them? Why even bother to mention them at all?
Whether you need backward compatibility has never been in doubt. You simply cannot expect your customers to re-enter all their data every time you issue a patch.
The question is whether you should bring the old bugs forward for the sake of "backwards compatibility".
Personally, I believe it should be more of a case of killing the bugs with a new major release and treating it more as a "migration" than an "upgrade".
If one vote was missing or applied to the wrong candidate, other votes could also be lost or shifted.
If other votes could, then enough votes to change the election could have.
It all starts with verifying a single vote.
From your description, you're a prefect client for Microsoft.
/.?
So if there's no time or money to be wasted, and time is money, why are you wasting time on
Instead of wasting time here, you would (more logically) be better off spending time on various Windows tech forums. You'll want to learn MORE about the systems that you use right now than spending time chatting about systems that you aren't going to use. (And you've detailed the reasons that you aren't going to use them.)
Strange how that works.
They couldn't "divide" them.
...
So they paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the people in one bloc.
Those people then tried to spin the deal in various ways.
Just because Novell was Microsoft's competitor and had purchased SuSE does not mean Novell had any depth in the Open Source community.
They bought their way in and they sold themselves out.
Now if Microsoft can buy Linus or Alan or Samba or Apache or
Novell destroyed themselves.
The only thing that Microsoft did was release WinNT without the license broadcast that NetWare boxes did. I could use one license and setup 1,000 WinNT boxes on a network. If I used the same license on 2 NetWare boxes on a network, they'd broadcast their license codes, see that they were duplicates and shut both boxes down. "Piracy" gave Microsoft the edge.
After that, it's been 100% Novell fuck ups.
Why buy SuSE when for a LOT less money you can just hire Linux developers to write the code/apps you want? You spent $210 MILLION.
Okay, you own SuSE now, why is it easier to run GroupWise on Windows than on Debian? Microsoft is a bigger threat to your existence than Debian.
Why haven't you ported the look and feel of you NetWare apps (inetcfg, nwconfig, etc) over to SuSE?
Service Pack 6 for NetWare 6.5 is over 800MB. Compressed.
As is every other company out there. McDonald's manages it, yet their costs have got to be higher than cooking healthier food, yourself, at home.
No. The problem is when closed source companies don't bother to understand the Open Source environment and believe they can treat it the same as their closed source products.
Which is exactly what Novell is trying to do.
Instead, Novell should have spent a one tenth of the money they spent on SuSE and paid lots of programmers to port Novell's money-making products (GroupWise, eDirectory, ZENworks, etc) to Linux. Go ahead. Try to get eDirectory running on Ubuntu. It's pretty easy on SuSE, but damn hard on Ubuntu.
Oh really? You mean like Oracle? Their stuff is still closed. Yet they seem pretty happy with running it on Linux.
This message posted with 100% Ubuntu Edgy Eft.
Well it is obvious that your understanding of the market exceeds even that of federal judges who have studied it for years. No one can doubt your logic.
Those "many markets" are the ones where Microsoft has a monopoly (desktop). Which explains whey Microsoft can change their design from Win2K to WinXP to WinVista and yet people will still be using it.
If the sale hinges on the colour scheme and logos, then save everyone some stress and take the client out for drinks and hire a hooker for him.
Yes I know it does everything we want and it's within our price range
In my experience, it is not "Darwinian" at all.
It's all about who you know, where you are and what the economy is like at that time.
Which is why when the economy turns down, so many companies fail. Anyone can captain the ship in calm weather.
Who is this "we"?
At times that is correct. But it is the exception, not the rule.
Again, at times that is correct. But it is the exception, not the rule.
Which is the reason you'll see management books written about cheese while others are written about fish.
I think you have your arks wrong.
First off, "war" is a stupid metaphor for OS marketshare.
Secondly, there are multiple market segments.
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
#2. The corporate/government desktop market. Pay attention to how Munich progresses. This is the next big market for Linux.
#3. The home (non-gamer) market. This isn't going to happen until you can buy Linux pre-loaded from the major OEM's. And that's not going to happen until Linux has the marketshare with the corporations/governments.
#4. Finally, the gamer market. This depends almost entirely upon the support of the hardware OEM's and game ISV's. If the newest video card doesn't come with Linux drivers, the gamers will buy the video card and run the OS that does have drivers. Look for this market to be the very, very last one that Linux will gain marketshare in.
Don't worry about whether Linux is taking over the gamer machines yet. Focus on getting Linux into corporation/government desktops. That will get the OEM's to start pre-loading it which will set the stage for the home user migration.
So what if Balmer is sowing discord?
...
All Novell has to do is be up front and specific in what what purchased, why and how it directly affects their business and end users and other Linux users.
Since Novell does not seem to be willing to do that
Microsoft talks about "interoperability" with Linux ... but the source code is Open. They don't need Novell to help them with that.
And certainly not at a third of a billion dollars for that "help".
What, specifically, is being purchased?
Remember, it is in Microsoft's long term interest to prevent people from moving to Linux.
So, for a charity, Microsoft could give their software away (free as in beer) and still come out ahead because it would be another instance where Linux was denied.
This gets back to the "piracy" argument. "Piracy" helps your company if it gets people who would not normally purchase your product to use (and learn) your product rather than use (and learn) a competitor's product.
There's no loss on sales because they wouldn't have been able to afford the purchase price in the first place.
I've often wondered why companies don't just give away licenses for their product that are 2 generations old or older. Get the people hooked on the free stuff and then they'll pay you when they get money. Just like the drugs.
You know, these "interpersonal" skills don't exist in a vacuum.
For some reason those "several candidates" you thought were good had managed to survive at their previous jobs long enough to become senior DBA's.
Before you blame other people for the problems meeting your standards, re-examine your standards and see if you understand the situation.
Particularly if you're suggesting that a business degree is more important that a computer science degree. That indicates that you don't understand the technological side of the issue. Just because someone does not agree with you does not mean that they're wrong.
Do you want a senior DBA or do you want a business analyst? Or do you want both for the price of one?
Seriously, we managed to "defeat" a 3rd world army that had been under economic sanctions for years.
How much "strategy" does that take? Particularly with our weapons.
His whole "strategy" is "keep dropping bombs until we drop the right bomb on the right place at the right time". Go check the new sites. Find the LAST time we dropped any bombs on Iraq. Was it a year ago? A month ago? A week ago? A day ago? An hour ago?
Just a quick search shows us bombing them on 27 October 2006.
And yet our troops keep being killed.
Rumsfeld is not "Good at war, bad at peace". Rumsfeld is bad at war and bad at peace. Rumsfeld cannot tell the difference between war and peace. And Rumsfeld doesn't care.
And the reason for that, in my experience, is that the bigger companies have more time and expertise invested in their existing systems.
Changing a server OS & app when you have 10 people using it is far different than when you have 10,000 people using it.
Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.
... no way is it easier to upgrade the hardware, the OS and the apps at the same time. You'll waste too much time trying to find out if the problem is a bad motherboard or driver or ... anything.
With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers. "Effectively" because no one is going to run a database big enough to track them as fast as the spammers change them. Every message could come from its own IP address on a cracked system.
And the other article
So, how about if all the laws on the books had a limited life span? After 8 years (or 16 or 32 or whatever), they expired and needed to be passed again?
That way Congress could continue to "be tough on X" without needing to do any actual work or impact our Freedoms at all?
First off, passing a law that the criminals will disregard is just about useless. They're already criminals. Breaking another law is not going to deter them.
Secondly, there are so many ways around this when you are a criminal. Crack someone else's machine and you can do whatever you want as if you were legally that person. Who stupid is that?
If you're really good, you'd crack 2 machines outside Brazil and use them to bounce traffic around before it got to you. Your machine and record would be 100% clean.
Finally, let's talk wireless. Unless the government wants to crack down on unsecured wireless connections, they're going to lose this one.
This is nothing more than an attempt to scare the good citizens into self-censoring their legal activities. And that is disgusting.
The entire system depends upon computer voting systems without a verifiable paper trail. I thought that this issue was settled already, but apparently it is not.
... and you can verify that the machine counted your vote marked in the 4th window on the ballot.
In this scheme, your ballot has a part A and a part B. Neither of the parts has a human readable vote on it.
A computer is required and it must have been programmed with the relationship of your particular ballot's part A and part B. That means that on your ballot, the computer knows that selections A, B, C and D relate to John, Paul, George and Ringo, respectively.
Now, this relationship information CANNOT BE MADE PUBLIC because if it was, your vote receipt would be able to be used by anyone to confirm how you voted.
Since the information in the system CANNOT BE MADE PUBLIC, we are right back to the current Diebold situation. All it takes is a minor change in the programming that CANNOT BE MADE PUBLIC and the votes are going to another party. And this is, by design, UNVERIFIABLE by the public.
So, you vote this way, you follow all the instructions
It's up the whomever programmed the computer to decide who your vote will count towards. And, by design, you'll never be able to validate that.
There is NO WAY to hand count these ballots.
The relationship of part A to part B must be kept on a computer. There's no way to count them otherwise. They don't have a complete vote on either part. The computer has to have been programmed with what letters correspond to which candidate on which ballots. And since having that information PUBLICLY AVAILABLE would invalidate the entire rest of the process
Which brings us back to the issue of whether we trust computers without a paper trail in our elections.
Since I do not trust computers without a paper trail, why would I trust some scheme that depends upon computers without a paper trail? And a bunch of "ink cover paper" is not a paper trail.
Remember, the ballots are numbered. So the printing process has to run off X variations where X is the sum of every candidate running for every office listed on that ballot.
And the ballots cannot be numbered sequentially. Or it would just be a matter of checking what version of the ballot was in that sequence. This can be done with friends and family who are already going to vote the way you do. Just stagger their voting throughout the day.
This system also depends upon a computer to remember which windows were associated with which letters on which ballot number. Any failure in that and these ballots cannot be hand-counted or verified in any other fashion.
This is stupid. Rather than go through all of that, why not just focus on getting the basics done and done right? Leave "verified" voting until after we've managed to identify who can vote and that their votes are actually counted.
Unless the voter is expected to write in the various options (that's stupid), or the ballot forms are randomly generated (that's expensive), it would be easy for anyone who voted to check whether your receipt matched his/her's.
Unfortunately, from the video, I cannot tell which approach they are advocating.
Okay, I've watched the video and read the article.
I still don't understand it. Why does their video have two different types of hand writing on it? Is the voter supposed to write in all the options when s/he votes?
What's to stop someone from getting a copy of the form and threatening you unless you vote the way they want you to? Unless every form is different (is this the part why the hand writing is different?), any attempt to match the vote online can be used to verify that you voted the way you were told to.
And you are the perfect example of the flaw in your approach.
This has EVERYTHING to do with Democracy. It isn't whether any person or group of people considers him/themselves to be "more informed". It matters whether they ARE more informed.
Democracy depends upon the participation of informed citizens. When you take away that "informed", Democracy fails. That is why every totalitarian government first cracks down on the media. It is not a coincidence.
But feel free to keep arguing that uninformed people make better decisions than informed people.
I never said that they were perfect. But for every story like that you can find, I can link to 1,000 nut cases on the 'web.
Again, that's for making my point. Freedom of the Press means that the government cannot stop you from printing your fantasies about space aliens. But Democracy requires an informed public. And when newspapers stop funding their own research and turn to those space alien conspiracy nut cases for their material, the public is no longer informed.
Fortunately, there's still The Daily Show.
Yes, you can get some real information out of people ... but you'll have to wade through pure crap to get to it.
And every fool with an agenda (space aliens, government cover-ups, etc) will be spewing their own brand of "information".
It isn't that the mass of humanity is better equipped to provide this information. It is that the news organizations are now no better trained in journalism or research than your average TV watcher.