Tech shouldn't be about "gee, everybody's using it."
Ok, lets switch our servers to Plan 9, surely any CS grad will understand how to perfectly use it, right? While yes, you are correct in saying you should look at the benefits of Solaris Vs Linux, and because it is still UNIX it is more or less a void point, but if most of the new graduates don't work with an OS, it is bound to die out and get replaced with a more familiar OS. Either that or you have an incompetent admin running your servers.
That's not a system you can trust for the long haul. You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.
No, but you can usually count on a more up-to-date system and generally a stable one at that. Solaris only has a few releases, Linux has many, many more (mostly because it is OSS). Also, most UNIX apps are developed for Linux and later ported to Solaris, not the other way around, meaning that some things may be untested on the Solaris platform.
Lets make another game! Lets call it a political MMORPG. You predict what the US will be in 2 years when Obama/McCain or another president becomes in charge. Oh, never mind the fact that unless you say that the world would be a wonderful place if whoever I want to win the election, you lose.
You are forgetting one thing that the Xbox does. It makes Microsoft relevant. If Microsoft can stop being associated with Windows and Office which most people have issues with, and start being associated with the Xbox, they have mindshare. It also helps keep at least one product from being "generic", for example, Live Messenger can easily be replaced with Pidgin, or AIM, Office can be replaced with another word processor, Windows can be replaced with your favorite operating system, Live Search by Google/Yahoo/etc, the Zune with an iPod or generic MP3 player. The Xbox and Halo represent one thing that can't be a drop-in replacement. Just look at the video game feuds of the '90s, Sonic wasn't a drop-in replacement for Mario, Digimon wasn't a drop-in replacement for Pokemon, granted, both of them were successful, but it wasn't a drop-in replacement the way that if someone decided to take a Linux desktop, theme it perfectly like your XP desktop, theme OOo to be like Office, etc, and the person I doubt would ever notice a change. On the other hand, give someone who is playing Mario a Sonic game and they would notice the change.
Yeah! Like Apple! Oh no, maybe not. Microsoft may have lost a little market share, but they are still generating lots of cash. Same with Oracle.
Yes, like Apple who has OS X based off of what? Oh yah, BSD which is open source, which uses what? Oh yah X which is open source, along with KHTML/Web Kit which is open source. MS lost both marketshare and mindshare with Vista. Everyone, from the kid down the street to the sysadmin to the 50 year old knows that Vista sucks. There is no denying it.
Marketing is a reasonable part of any product or service. Procter & Gamble is a very large company whose biggest assets are brands & marketing. Coke is just flavored water - the reason Coke is worth billions is marketing.
Yes, but most proprietary software companies are all marketing (see MS for an example) and have little code. In your example, Procter & Gamble make decent products, Coke makes a soda that tastes good. On the other hand, MS would be equivalent to a company that sold products that not only were inferior to the competition and cost more but were broken and I don't think that even Coke would survive if they started selling cans half the size of Pepsi's and charged just as much, or if they started making bad tasting Coke *cough* remember New Coke *cough*
Ok, tell me, in general in a company (not even a software company) why are most programs written? A) To make a million in sales B) To fix a need that the company has so it can run better. The answer is B. Most software developed by companies is in-house software. Meaning, that even if all software was open source tomorrow, those people would still have jobs developing software.
Wouldn't there cease to be many programming jobs where there once were?
No... Most software would still be developed in-house. What will cease is companies who can make a bloated program that is badly written and gain millions for it.
Wouldn't that lead to lower paying programming jobs in turn leading to less cs graduates and lower quality software?
No. It would only serve to increase the quality of code as the fact that it compiles does not mean that it is good code. Open source software has no secrets, the quality would go up because anyone could fix it.
I know some companies do alright supporting products they've written and give away freely, but I can't see that extending to applications beyond some mission critical business system type things.
Ever heard of the Geek Squad? They make a fortune supporting products that they never even written and most are trivial applications (Windows, iTunes, etc)
I've long wondered things such as this. OSS sounds great at a glance, but I really have a poor concept of where it will go in the long run. I like writing software, but I also like being able to pay my bills.
Where do you work now? Chances are, that company will still develop applications in house, not to mention that you would be in charge of changing various OSS programs to better fit the needs of the company.
Competition is good, but bad teaching is not. Proprietary software is going downhill. Just about every major software vendor that remains proprietary is losing marketshare and money. Teaching people how to "combat" open source software is like teaching people how to "combat" C and claim that COBOL is the language of the future. Its not going to work. Open source is the future, proprietary software is dying.
Not many unless you're looking at video or using a really slow connection, or something has gone wrong with the page.
Some pages get slow even after moderate amounts of traffic, others simply don't want to load. It could be many different problems, but to someone trying to get to the page, it won't load or it is slow.
I use Flashblock, BTW. Actually, this makes sites that use separate Flash objects for every damn button worse, but overall it's very useful- simply click to activate any Flash object you *do* wish to use.
Again, if the navigation of the site is in Flash (see Homestar Runner for an example) and if Flash by nature takes up insane amounts of CPU, just viewing the site will freeze your browser (Ok, so when you go to it, it won't, but if you try to actually do anything it will)
So basically your expectations of Wikipedia are act as a de facto dump/transfer of content that's already available on the web, and present it without adverts, flash, etc.? That's not a bad thing in itself, but it's a pretty low ambition and I don't believe it's what WP ever *claimed* to be about nor what it should be about.
More or less yes. Wikipeida should take the facts from the web, put it in somewhat of an order and present it with no annoyances. Much as how a paper encyclopedia sums up about one hundred books and makes it into a page long article without all the hunting for books and reading through them all. Wikipedia should be like Cliffnotes for the web, taking all the important info and organizing it, no matter how obscure the thing is. And sure, Wikipedia never *claimed* to be a gigantic mess with editors in edit wars constantly and average users getting called vandals for simple edits to pages. And sure, Wikipedia also *claimed* to be about the opinion of the masses, instead a few select editors seem to make all the decisions. And really, what is an encyclopedia other than a book of summaries of topics?
I wasn't discussing a *single* site anyway. Does it matter if it's on a single site if that site is so badly organised that you have to use Google or a similar search engine to get through it properly?
Again, it goes back to my argument that I don't have the time to check 20 different sites, I want only one or two to get all my info on.
You make it sound like you want to include everything in Wikipedia, regardless of the effect it would have on the organisation and readability, simply to get round some admittedly annoying sites. I'd rather people used browser plugins and the like to get round problems like that.
I believe that everything has its place for a Wikipedia article no matter how obscure with the exception of obvious spam, and by spam I mean things written like an advertisement, not just that someone has an article on some meaningless thing but it isn't written like an ad. And honestly, browser plugins are a bad thing, they end up making real browser problems hard to detect along with increase bloat and CPU/RAM usage.
LSB compliance is important. Coincidentally, it makes the experience from one distro to another roughly equivalent.
this issue evaporates under closer scrutiny (i.e. the end-user just needs to use Debian's "alien" program to transform and install the foreign RPM packages in the native package format).
So wait, not only does the end user have to use the command line alien program (which I thought the entire point of all this stuff was to simplify life) but LSB programs become a pain to install. Where on the other hand with APT (and a GUI program) you simply click and install using a GUI and it works 100% of the time unlike alien.
I honestly don't get the need for LSB. Perhaps 10 years ago when we still had problems with RPM, but not today. Most people will never need to download software that isn't in the Ubuntu (or insert favorite distro here) repositories. And most of the ones that aren't in the repos usually either A) Are minor software projects that very few people use B) Have.deb and.rpm files available for download C) Maintain a private repository to easily download software or D) have a binary that you can just click and it runs.
There is no need for yet another "standard" to install programs on Linux. And honestly, having RPMs and DEBs keeps all the major distros happy and most of the other distros that don't use RPM or DEB files for package management are either specialty distros where little software is installed or aimed towards experienced users where compiling software by hand isn't hard for them.
Additionally, Wikipedia needs to avoid being turned into an ad factory. Letting anyone put up an 'article' advertising their own pet project, if left unchecked, turns Wikipedia into an ad factory.
I don't understand how that would work. If I typed in *Insert project here* and it came up with an article I would obviously be interested in reading it on Wikipedia there isn't a sidebar that says "People who checked out this article also read".
(a) we already have such a repository that can- and always will- beat Wikipedia hands down. It's the whole World Wide Web and a search engine!
Ok, that's fine if you have ~3 hours searching through pages that take 15 minutes to load, others that are just copy and pastes of others, some which have layouts that make your eyes bleed, others which have enough annoying ads to make you pull your hair out and still others on which your browser freezes because some idiot webmaster decided to make the entire site in Flash. Most of us want one site to get information that doesn't use obscene amounts of JavaScript, Flash and bad design, while not taking forever to load.
Other than Wikipedia there is no site that holds a good amount of information on every topic while remaining free of ads, poor design and Flash.
Because we all know that all the "primary" sites your teachers always want you to go to never ever have misleading information and are always cited. Honestly, there are a lot of articles, particularly about technology, that Wikipedia is the best source for. Now, I'm not sure if I would write a 100 page book about American History based on Wikipedia, but a paper about most software Wikipedia is going to give you the most information short of talking to the actual developer (because most of the time the project's site is no good and man pages only tell you the flags you can use)
There was once a time that Wikipedia was thought up. The professors laughed at the idea, looking down from their leather chairs and fancy bookcases and said that nothing would be accomplished. That nothing would be accurate, that the wisdom of crowds would never produce an encyclopedia. And thus, Wikipedia was born. Built as a modern day Library of Alexandria, it had mottoes of be bold and to ignore all rules. And for a while it thrived, it took the professors by surprise, it became a haven for knowledge, a temple for facts. It grew quickly and spread into almost every written language. And then, the changes started to happen. The moderators who had so loudly proclaimed to ignore all rules had started to become much like the professors that had previously laughed at their attempts. What had started to destroy censorship now was slowly increasing its spread. Moderators turned on users and banned them for the most silly of reasons, users tried to correct errors and were banned for vandalism. And soon it became impossible to tell who were the editors of Wikipedia or who were the bureaucrats running the print encyclopedias.
I will end this post with a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question,
now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside
looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The problem with that is, what does that gain Wikipedia? Nothing. It loses facts. Granted, they might be badly written, or some might be poorly-researched, but deletion doesn't gain Wikipedia anything. Granted, deleting obvious spam written like an advertisement gains Wikipedia something, but deleting articles gains Wikipedia nothing
Ok, I'll admit, it might save them a few kilobytes of bandwidth or a gigabyte of storage, but honestly, bandwidth and storage are dirt cheap these days.
What I think the poster meant was for there to be a site like Wikipedia that was A) A Wiki and B) Had information about all kinds of things, while still being C) Somewhat serious. And there really isn't any other place. Granted, there are a lot of good Wikis for various things, just about every major game has one, and I use LyricWiki (whenever it isn't down) to check for lyrics. But there isn't one good place to get all kinds of information that is freely editable except for Wikipedia. Also, compared to most other sites Wikipedia is fast to load and doesn't have all the ads.
The problem with deleting articles on Wikipedia is that as long as it isn't spam it should honestly have a place in Wikipedia. When it comes down to it, a few kilobytes of information even on every single SourceForge project is unlikely to amount to more than a terabyte or two. I'm all for deleting spam but even small 200-500 word articles on something that isn't spam should be kept. And unlike a print encyclopedia where a few more pages could really add up, I doubt that even a terabyte of HD space or a gigabyte of bandwidth more is going to make much of a difference.
Sure, the Dreamcast didn't penetrate the market as well as it should have. That doesn't prevent it from being a great product that still sold (until the PS2 problem).
The Dreamcast problem happened mostly because Sega's other consoles managed to fail miserably. The Master System sold very well in Europe, and the Genesis (Mega Drive for all you people not in NA) sold very well all over. However, the addons didn't catch on as well as Sega had hoped for the Genesis. And the Saturn managed to basically fail. Wisely, Sega pulled out of the hardware business and now can make crap but sell it with the Sonic name and make decent sales.
And the 360, well, considering that it's the only modern console i'd ever think of buying these days (although I am probably just going to stick with my trusty PC) I would consider it a massive success.
Sure, the 360 actually made MS relevant for a while, but a few mistakes are going to lead to its downfall: A) Profit to loss margin. Every time someone buys a 360 MS makes no money on it. They actually lose money, same with Sony and the PS3, on the other hand Nintendo makes an instant $50 with every Wii console sold. B) HD-DVD. By supporting HD-DVD and then refusing to release a Blu-Ray drive, MS basically lost what the PS2's big selling point was: The next generation of video. The PS2 was a success not only because of the games made for it, but rather because at the time it was a cheap DVD player at the start of when DVDs started to become popular. With the rise of HD-TV and people refusing content that is not HD (I never can understand why, but then again I don't even own an HD-TV), Blu-Ray is going to push the PS3 forward. And lastly, C) The total cost of ownership. The 360 is like a bad computer, one that starts out cheap but requires a massive hardware upgrade to actually do anything. The $199 price point seems low, but when you realize that you have to buy an $86(!) wireless adapter to have the basic functionality of the $250 Wii. Not to mention that you also need to pay for online play, which, granted, Live is much better than the online services that Nintendo has to offer. Then you also need to buy a $50 hard drive to fully use it. This leaves you with a $335 console.
The 360 also has the RRoD problem and the scratched disk problem that may make customers not want to buy it.
Because a lot of browser vulnerabilities either inject platform specific code or download a binary. If the binary isn't made for Linux nothing happens. If the code doesn't run on Linux then again, nothing happens. Also, most Linux users know that something is wrong when they have a browser toolbar they didn't install, on the other hand Windows users are used to MS forcing updates after updates at them and think that it is perfectly natural that their homepage is hijacked to some ad website and they have 10 popups every hour and they have 3 browser toolbars they never installed. The Windows way teaches people they don't own their computers and so they are naturally less aware of changes whereas with Linux (or any other non-Windows platform) something got changed the average person would at least look into it somewhat.
Over the past several days, the Guardian has posted a five-part interview with Peter Moore, head of EA Sports. Moore was also the president of Sega, and a vice-president at Microsoft, so his experience at the top levels of the gaming industry is extensive. He describes how he came to be employed by Sega, the development of the Dreamcast, and its subsequent flop when confronted with the Playstation 2. He also discusses his involvement with the development of the Xbox franchise, how the integrated hard drive "killed" the original model, and he gives his account of how the Red Ring of Death fiasco affected the company. The series ends with a look at EA Sports' plans for the future, and how they're trying to create a new business model beyond the micro-payments popularized by iTunes, which Moore calls "a rip-off."
So in other words he has a lot of experience with companies that end up failing? Lets see... As the summary states the Dreamcast failed, when he worked with the Xbox he ended up when they started having the RRoD, and how he hates his current company (which can't make a decent game IMO) for charging micro-payments. Sure he has experience, but he doesn't seem to have any decent experience in succeeding.
This whole "who's fastest" is just like the chip wars. No real user understands this jive.
No, but this means that marketshare for IE will almost certainly go down and that is only a good thing. It also means that Firefox marketshare will go down which is also a good thing because competition always helps in open source projects and Firefox can't just be the only F/OSS browser that renders pages decently.
Worse, just like the CPU, the speed of the JS engine is usually not the limiting factor in the User Experience. Design, Function, Server Response, Ad Calls... those all typically are what retard the user experience.
Sure it isn't the limiting factor, but if it makes interactive web applications run faster it can help pave the way for the end of annoying Flash navigation (and thus the end of 99% CPU usage on non-Windows platforms) and help build standards.
Replace Google with any standards-supporting, partially open source vendor and you have the current market situation. Heck, if WebKit manages to somehow run JavaScript at twice the speed of assembly programs, Mozilla can still take that code and make Gecko's JavaScript engine just as fast. If Red Hat releases a tool that can run all Windows applications at full speed on Linux, Novell and Canonical don't lose out, they gain too, in that example even the WINE and ReactOS team could gain something. It is only the proprietary vendors that lose whenever the competition gets a new feature. Only IE and Opera that can't tap into these new JavaScript engines. It helps every open source browser project, from Firefox to Konqueror, to Chrome, to even Safari. It is only the few that remain closed that this will hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
Tech shouldn't be about "gee, everybody's using it."
Ok, lets switch our servers to Plan 9, surely any CS grad will understand how to perfectly use it, right? While yes, you are correct in saying you should look at the benefits of Solaris Vs Linux, and because it is still UNIX it is more or less a void point, but if most of the new graduates don't work with an OS, it is bound to die out and get replaced with a more familiar OS. Either that or you have an incompetent admin running your servers.
That's not a system you can trust for the long haul. You can't trust your applications will remain compatible.
No, but you can usually count on a more up-to-date system and generally a stable one at that. Solaris only has a few releases, Linux has many, many more (mostly because it is OSS). Also, most UNIX apps are developed for Linux and later ported to Solaris, not the other way around, meaning that some things may be untested on the Solaris platform.
Lets make another game! Lets call it a political MMORPG. You predict what the US will be in 2 years when Obama/McCain or another president becomes in charge. Oh, never mind the fact that unless you say that the world would be a wonderful place if whoever I want to win the election, you lose.
You are forgetting one thing that the Xbox does. It makes Microsoft relevant. If Microsoft can stop being associated with Windows and Office which most people have issues with, and start being associated with the Xbox, they have mindshare. It also helps keep at least one product from being "generic", for example, Live Messenger can easily be replaced with Pidgin, or AIM, Office can be replaced with another word processor, Windows can be replaced with your favorite operating system, Live Search by Google/Yahoo/etc, the Zune with an iPod or generic MP3 player. The Xbox and Halo represent one thing that can't be a drop-in replacement. Just look at the video game feuds of the '90s, Sonic wasn't a drop-in replacement for Mario, Digimon wasn't a drop-in replacement for Pokemon, granted, both of them were successful, but it wasn't a drop-in replacement the way that if someone decided to take a Linux desktop, theme it perfectly like your XP desktop, theme OOo to be like Office, etc, and the person I doubt would ever notice a change. On the other hand, give someone who is playing Mario a Sonic game and they would notice the change.
Yeah! Like Apple! Oh no, maybe not. Microsoft may have lost a little market share, but they are still generating lots of cash. Same with Oracle.
Yes, like Apple who has OS X based off of what? Oh yah, BSD which is open source, which uses what? Oh yah X which is open source, along with KHTML/Web Kit which is open source. MS lost both marketshare and mindshare with Vista. Everyone, from the kid down the street to the sysadmin to the 50 year old knows that Vista sucks. There is no denying it.
Marketing is a reasonable part of any product or service. Procter & Gamble is a very large company whose biggest assets are brands & marketing. Coke is just flavored water - the reason Coke is worth billions is marketing.
Yes, but most proprietary software companies are all marketing (see MS for an example) and have little code. In your example, Procter & Gamble make decent products, Coke makes a soda that tastes good. On the other hand, MS would be equivalent to a company that sold products that not only were inferior to the competition and cost more but were broken and I don't think that even Coke would survive if they started selling cans half the size of Pepsi's and charged just as much, or if they started making bad tasting Coke *cough* remember New Coke *cough*
Well, yes, but you know how mods are on /., you would either instantly be modded a troll or a +5 insightful.
Ok, tell me, in general in a company (not even a software company) why are most programs written? A) To make a million in sales B) To fix a need that the company has so it can run better. The answer is B. Most software developed by companies is in-house software. Meaning, that even if all software was open source tomorrow, those people would still have jobs developing software.
In the long term, what happens if all software ends up being free?
In the present, all software is free http://www.ubuntu.com/ http://thepiratebay.org/
Wouldn't there cease to be many programming jobs where there once were?
No... Most software would still be developed in-house. What will cease is companies who can make a bloated program that is badly written and gain millions for it.
Wouldn't that lead to lower paying programming jobs in turn leading to less cs graduates and lower quality software?
No. It would only serve to increase the quality of code as the fact that it compiles does not mean that it is good code. Open source software has no secrets, the quality would go up because anyone could fix it.
I know some companies do alright supporting products they've written and give away freely, but I can't see that extending to applications beyond some mission critical business system type things.
Ever heard of the Geek Squad? They make a fortune supporting products that they never even written and most are trivial applications (Windows, iTunes, etc)
I've long wondered things such as this. OSS sounds great at a glance, but I really have a poor concept of where it will go in the long run. I like writing software, but I also like being able to pay my bills.
Where do you work now? Chances are, that company will still develop applications in house, not to mention that you would be in charge of changing various OSS programs to better fit the needs of the company.
Competition is good, but bad teaching is not. Proprietary software is going downhill. Just about every major software vendor that remains proprietary is losing marketshare and money. Teaching people how to "combat" open source software is like teaching people how to "combat" C and claim that COBOL is the language of the future. Its not going to work. Open source is the future, proprietary software is dying.
Not many unless you're looking at video or using a really slow connection, or something has gone wrong with the page.
Some pages get slow even after moderate amounts of traffic, others simply don't want to load. It could be many different problems, but to someone trying to get to the page, it won't load or it is slow.
I use Flashblock, BTW. Actually, this makes sites that use separate Flash objects for every damn button worse, but overall it's very useful- simply click to activate any Flash object you *do* wish to use.
Again, if the navigation of the site is in Flash (see Homestar Runner for an example) and if Flash by nature takes up insane amounts of CPU, just viewing the site will freeze your browser (Ok, so when you go to it, it won't, but if you try to actually do anything it will)
So basically your expectations of Wikipedia are act as a de facto dump/transfer of content that's already available on the web, and present it without adverts, flash, etc.? That's not a bad thing in itself, but it's a pretty low ambition and I don't believe it's what WP ever *claimed* to be about nor what it should be about.
More or less yes. Wikipeida should take the facts from the web, put it in somewhat of an order and present it with no annoyances. Much as how a paper encyclopedia sums up about one hundred books and makes it into a page long article without all the hunting for books and reading through them all. Wikipedia should be like Cliffnotes for the web, taking all the important info and organizing it, no matter how obscure the thing is. And sure, Wikipedia never *claimed* to be a gigantic mess with editors in edit wars constantly and average users getting called vandals for simple edits to pages. And sure, Wikipedia also *claimed* to be about the opinion of the masses, instead a few select editors seem to make all the decisions. And really, what is an encyclopedia other than a book of summaries of topics?
I wasn't discussing a *single* site anyway. Does it matter if it's on a single site if that site is so badly organised that you have to use Google or a similar search engine to get through it properly?
Again, it goes back to my argument that I don't have the time to check 20 different sites, I want only one or two to get all my info on.
You make it sound like you want to include everything in Wikipedia, regardless of the effect it would have on the organisation and readability, simply to get round some admittedly annoying sites. I'd rather people used browser plugins and the like to get round problems like that.
I believe that everything has its place for a Wikipedia article no matter how obscure with the exception of obvious spam, and by spam I mean things written like an advertisement, not just that someone has an article on some meaningless thing but it isn't written like an ad. And honestly, browser plugins are a bad thing, they end up making real browser problems hard to detect along with increase bloat and CPU/RAM usage.
LSB compliance is important. Coincidentally, it makes the experience from one distro to another roughly equivalent.
this issue evaporates under closer scrutiny (i.e. the end-user just needs to use Debian's "alien" program to transform and install the foreign RPM packages in the native package format).
So wait, not only does the end user have to use the command line alien program (which I thought the entire point of all this stuff was to simplify life) but LSB programs become a pain to install. Where on the other hand with APT (and a GUI program) you simply click and install using a GUI and it works 100% of the time unlike alien.
I honestly don't get the need for LSB. Perhaps 10 years ago when we still had problems with RPM, but not today. Most people will never need to download software that isn't in the Ubuntu (or insert favorite distro here) repositories. And most of the ones that aren't in the repos usually either A) Are minor software projects that very few people use B) Have .deb and .rpm files available for download C) Maintain a private repository to easily download software or D) have a binary that you can just click and it runs.
There is no need for yet another "standard" to install programs on Linux. And honestly, having RPMs and DEBs keeps all the major distros happy and most of the other distros that don't use RPM or DEB files for package management are either specialty distros where little software is installed or aimed towards experienced users where compiling software by hand isn't hard for them.
Additionally, Wikipedia needs to avoid being turned into an ad factory. Letting anyone put up an 'article' advertising their own pet project, if left unchecked, turns Wikipedia into an ad factory.
I don't understand how that would work. If I typed in *Insert project here* and it came up with an article I would obviously be interested in reading it on Wikipedia there isn't a sidebar that says "People who checked out this article also read".
(a) we already have such a repository that can- and always will- beat Wikipedia hands down. It's the whole World Wide Web and a search engine!
Ok, that's fine if you have ~3 hours searching through pages that take 15 minutes to load, others that are just copy and pastes of others, some which have layouts that make your eyes bleed, others which have enough annoying ads to make you pull your hair out and still others on which your browser freezes because some idiot webmaster decided to make the entire site in Flash. Most of us want one site to get information that doesn't use obscene amounts of JavaScript, Flash and bad design, while not taking forever to load.
Other than Wikipedia there is no site that holds a good amount of information on every topic while remaining free of ads, poor design and Flash.
Because we all know that all the "primary" sites your teachers always want you to go to never ever have misleading information and are always cited. Honestly, there are a lot of articles, particularly about technology, that Wikipedia is the best source for. Now, I'm not sure if I would write a 100 page book about American History based on Wikipedia, but a paper about most software Wikipedia is going to give you the most information short of talking to the actual developer (because most of the time the project's site is no good and man pages only tell you the flags you can use)
I will end this post with a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The problem with that is, what does that gain Wikipedia? Nothing. It loses facts. Granted, they might be badly written, or some might be poorly-researched, but deletion doesn't gain Wikipedia anything. Granted, deleting obvious spam written like an advertisement gains Wikipedia something, but deleting articles gains Wikipedia nothing
Ok, I'll admit, it might save them a few kilobytes of bandwidth or a gigabyte of storage, but honestly, bandwidth and storage are dirt cheap these days.
What I think the poster meant was for there to be a site like Wikipedia that was A) A Wiki and B) Had information about all kinds of things, while still being C) Somewhat serious. And there really isn't any other place. Granted, there are a lot of good Wikis for various things, just about every major game has one, and I use LyricWiki (whenever it isn't down) to check for lyrics. But there isn't one good place to get all kinds of information that is freely editable except for Wikipedia. Also, compared to most other sites Wikipedia is fast to load and doesn't have all the ads.
The problem with deleting articles on Wikipedia is that as long as it isn't spam it should honestly have a place in Wikipedia. When it comes down to it, a few kilobytes of information even on every single SourceForge project is unlikely to amount to more than a terabyte or two. I'm all for deleting spam but even small 200-500 word articles on something that isn't spam should be kept. And unlike a print encyclopedia where a few more pages could really add up, I doubt that even a terabyte of HD space or a gigabyte of bandwidth more is going to make much of a difference.
No, everyone should be outraged that this seems to mean that facts are copyrightable.
Ok, then perhaps I should have added in the price of 3 other Xbox 360 controllers along with a chatpad, headset, etc.
Sure, the Dreamcast didn't penetrate the market as well as it should have. That doesn't prevent it from being a great product that still sold (until the PS2 problem).
The Dreamcast problem happened mostly because Sega's other consoles managed to fail miserably. The Master System sold very well in Europe, and the Genesis (Mega Drive for all you people not in NA) sold very well all over. However, the addons didn't catch on as well as Sega had hoped for the Genesis. And the Saturn managed to basically fail. Wisely, Sega pulled out of the hardware business and now can make crap but sell it with the Sonic name and make decent sales.
And the 360, well, considering that it's the only modern console i'd ever think of buying these days (although I am probably just going to stick with my trusty PC) I would consider it a massive success.
Sure, the 360 actually made MS relevant for a while, but a few mistakes are going to lead to its downfall: A) Profit to loss margin. Every time someone buys a 360 MS makes no money on it. They actually lose money, same with Sony and the PS3, on the other hand Nintendo makes an instant $50 with every Wii console sold. B) HD-DVD. By supporting HD-DVD and then refusing to release a Blu-Ray drive, MS basically lost what the PS2's big selling point was: The next generation of video. The PS2 was a success not only because of the games made for it, but rather because at the time it was a cheap DVD player at the start of when DVDs started to become popular. With the rise of HD-TV and people refusing content that is not HD (I never can understand why, but then again I don't even own an HD-TV), Blu-Ray is going to push the PS3 forward. And lastly, C) The total cost of ownership. The 360 is like a bad computer, one that starts out cheap but requires a massive hardware upgrade to actually do anything. The $199 price point seems low, but when you realize that you have to buy an $86(!) wireless adapter to have the basic functionality of the $250 Wii. Not to mention that you also need to pay for online play, which, granted, Live is much better than the online services that Nintendo has to offer. Then you also need to buy a $50 hard drive to fully use it. This leaves you with a $335 console.
The 360 also has the RRoD problem and the scratched disk problem that may make customers not want to buy it.
Because a lot of browser vulnerabilities either inject platform specific code or download a binary. If the binary isn't made for Linux nothing happens. If the code doesn't run on Linux then again, nothing happens. Also, most Linux users know that something is wrong when they have a browser toolbar they didn't install, on the other hand Windows users are used to MS forcing updates after updates at them and think that it is perfectly natural that their homepage is hijacked to some ad website and they have 10 popups every hour and they have 3 browser toolbars they never installed. The Windows way teaches people they don't own their computers and so they are naturally less aware of changes whereas with Linux (or any other non-Windows platform) something got changed the average person would at least look into it somewhat.
Over the past several days, the Guardian has posted a five-part interview with Peter Moore, head of EA Sports. Moore was also the president of Sega, and a vice-president at Microsoft, so his experience at the top levels of the gaming industry is extensive. He describes how he came to be employed by Sega, the development of the Dreamcast, and its subsequent flop when confronted with the Playstation 2. He also discusses his involvement with the development of the Xbox franchise, how the integrated hard drive "killed" the original model, and he gives his account of how the Red Ring of Death fiasco affected the company. The series ends with a look at EA Sports' plans for the future, and how they're trying to create a new business model beyond the micro-payments popularized by iTunes, which Moore calls "a rip-off."
So in other words he has a lot of experience with companies that end up failing? Lets see... As the summary states the Dreamcast failed, when he worked with the Xbox he ended up when they started having the RRoD, and how he hates his current company (which can't make a decent game IMO) for charging micro-payments. Sure he has experience, but he doesn't seem to have any decent experience in succeeding.
This whole "who's fastest" is just like the chip wars. No real user understands this jive.
No, but this means that marketshare for IE will almost certainly go down and that is only a good thing. It also means that Firefox marketshare will go down which is also a good thing because competition always helps in open source projects and Firefox can't just be the only F/OSS browser that renders pages decently.
Worse, just like the CPU, the speed of the JS engine is usually not the limiting factor in the User Experience. Design, Function, Server Response, Ad Calls... those all typically are what retard the user experience.
Sure it isn't the limiting factor, but if it makes interactive web applications run faster it can help pave the way for the end of annoying Flash navigation (and thus the end of 99% CPU usage on non-Windows platforms) and help build standards.
Replace Google with any standards-supporting, partially open source vendor and you have the current market situation. Heck, if WebKit manages to somehow run JavaScript at twice the speed of assembly programs, Mozilla can still take that code and make Gecko's JavaScript engine just as fast. If Red Hat releases a tool that can run all Windows applications at full speed on Linux, Novell and Canonical don't lose out, they gain too, in that example even the WINE and ReactOS team could gain something. It is only the proprietary vendors that lose whenever the competition gets a new feature. Only IE and Opera that can't tap into these new JavaScript engines. It helps every open source browser project, from Firefox to Konqueror, to Chrome, to even Safari. It is only the few that remain closed that this will hurt.