I'm not determining anything on my own. Western thought and social norms have already determined (and are constantly redefining) what knowledge is, what it means to be intelligent, and all those wonderful abstract topics. To an extent the processes that have produced these conclusions involve consensus, but they're also elitist in that they've been produced by people that have provided rational justification for their arguments.
Take what's taught in school - even if we can't define what makes something worthy of being taught there, most of us have a pretty good idea of what belongs and what doesn't. Or of which books belong in a library, or what art belongs in a museum. That understanding means so much more than an arbitrary consensus among a few biased people. The goal is to produce something generally useful for everybody, not just whoever wins a vote.
If you believe a consensus is more valid, why don't you explain why you think this way? Do you think knowledge is defined on an individual basis and intelligence only exists subjectively? What assumptions are you making and why?
The problems I was describing had to do with trivia seeping its way into otherwise useful articles, which is what gad_zuki was talking about. But to answer your question...
How does it detract?... If something is irrelevant to an article, the link inside that article can be deleted. Basically, I'm saying that you should orphan where appropriate, but not delete.
Maybe in an ideal world, the existence of fancruft articles would have no effect on other ones. But part of how Wikipedia is supposed to work is that you're supposed to cross-link. Orphan articles get less attention, which means a greater chance of a harmful edit going unnoticed.
So the solution to that problem is to cross-link liberally. But there's always going to be some idiot that thinks that the entry on Sapporo, Japan should link to every anime episode set there. This has the potential to go on and on when the simple solution is to delete the pointless articles and be done with it.
More than anything, the real problem is that fancruft doesn't serve any purpose beyond wasting time. Some people might read it and enjoy it, but it doesn't do anything to enrich your life as does actual knowledge, the kind you find in most of the rest of Wikipedia. Cross-linking helps the site present information, and you're suggesting creating an exception to that rule for drivel that goes against the whole point of the project to begin with?
Some information is intrinsically useless, this stuff fits squarely in that category, and obsessive fans have failed to convince others otherwise. Maybe some pointless trivia will be harder to find now. I think that's healthy.
But look at it this way, let's say Wikipedia was a business. By letting Wookiepedia take all the Star Wars traffic, Wikipedia just lost a decently large chunk of readers; if they were a TV network they'd be kicking themselves for it.
True enough. But thankfully Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit and doesn't run ads, which means it doesn't have to exist for the purpose of generating traffic. It's there for whoever finds it useful as it is.
If Wookieepedia funnels off the people so into Star Wars that they find it necessary to write articles summarizing nitpicky aspects of it, I don't see who that's hurting. It might even help weed out the people that add pointless trivia to Wikipedia in lieu of useful info.
The point is that it detracts from my ability to read about things that matter in the real world.
The whole point of an encyclopedia is to have the most pertinent information on a topic packed into a brief article. Information about anime is 99% of the time irrelevant to an article that isn't about anime. Whether you like the stuff doesn't figure into that.
I've had similar odd problems with ripping on so far three CDs: The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, Play by Moby, and Exciter by Depeche Mode. Both got numerous V's in Paranoia on both my no-name CD-ROM and my Philips CD-RW, only on the last few tracks. With the -z switch it couldn't complete the rips. cdda2wav did no better, ruining them with pops everywhere but ripping quickly. Because I first discovered this problem with my brand-new Depeche Mode CD, I guessed that the problem might be copy protection, but interestingly enough, all it took was a switch into Windows and Easy-CD Creator (not exactly renowned for its wonderful ripping, I don't think) got through them quickly and perfectly on my cheapo drive. No, I have no clue what the issue is.
Let me get this straight...the thief (note spelling) is going to give the laptop back to you with his fingerprints all over it just because the hard drive is passworded? Or are you saying that the existence of a password can substitute for your name and address?
not because I have anything worth reading on it
Not surprising, considering the quality of your Slashdot comments.
ICQ's numbers aren't very intuitive, true. However, AOL's problems are related to the sheer quantity of people on AOL and AIM. If Jabber were to get to those proportions, we'd have the same problems, PLUS the fun with domains. BTW, I think ICQ's method is the best, because it provides an ID that doesn't have to be used as one's screen name and is very obviously not a screen name. Thus people can tell the two apart, forget the UIN until they need to hand it out or whatever, and communicate using whatever handle they want, even if someone else is using it. Handy.
One of the problems with email that I've found, at least, is that people tend to have several email addresses and the one that they actually check regularly changes. If there are multiple servers with multiple payment plans, working perhaps, as proposed in other posts, in a system in which the Jabber server is provided by the ISP, people are apt to change Jabber addresses on a regular basis. And whereas with email, you can generally tell that an address isn't being used when you don't get a reply after sending a message to it, on an IM system, people will suddenly and mysteriously cease to be online, and on a large contact list, their absence might not be noticed. On a centralized service like AIM or ICQ, however, there is little reason to change one's user ID. That makes things easier for people.
BTW, Jabber should have some measures intact to combat spam, if it doesn't already - bulk Jabber messages should be difficult to send out.
Sad to say, but Jabber is just too complex for its own good. One of its biggest shortcomings, as I see it, is the fact that it orients itself around multiple servers. In order to contact a person, you must not only know their username, but also the server to which they connect. Even a search by real name or email only works on single servers. So, if any of you wanted to add me to your Jabber contact list, you'd have to know if I'm Locando@jabber.com or Locando@jabber.org, and that's assuming I'm on one of the major servers.
The other problem is that there are too many choices that could be confusing for the masses. Receive your messages AIM-style or ICQ-style? Or however the sender intended? And how about those transports...I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't find the system for interfacing with other IMs at all intuitive. Maybe it's different in the Windows Jabber clients (I've only used Gabber). Never mind that you have to convince people to switch from AIM which seems to work fine and also supports graphical emoticons.
You forget that between 6.0 and 7.0 there were dozens of minor releases that spanned at least a couple of years (I don't remember exactly how many) - 6.0.3, 6.0.5, 6.0.7, 6.0.8 immediately come to mind. There were definitely updates between each release - 6.0.7 introduced a new sound manager, for instance. Then 7.0 came around and completely broke everything, added AppleEvents, made it so multitasking was no longer optional, got rid of the beloved LAYO resource in the Finder, and so on. So there the major release was definitely more justified.
On a side note, I think that we should consider dispensing with traditional version numbering on Linux distros and just go 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. or Micro$oft-esque 95, 98, 2000 without major/minor numbers. It's all just a collection of package updates and I don't think you can really determine what warrants a major version number change.
Man pages still play an important role because they provide a lot of information in a nice compact space in a standardized manner. That last part is very important in my view. No matter which man page you look at, you can always find the command-line options at the top, followed by a description, and so on. This makes it very easy to find information for any command because it's always in the same place. Neither info docs nor HTML-formatted help files have this same standard structure (or at least I haven't seen it). Granted, GUIs are making command line options less important for everyday program use, but man pages are for me still invaluable when I forget which letter corresponds to which switch. For the quick and dirty help man pages give you, I don't think much more formatting is needed - just keep what works and is easy to use (scroll up and down...no-brainer).
Even though I have attended two high schools with "challenging" curricula and whatnot, many of my required classes have entailed performing mass quantities of busywork. Too often teachers (especially in the social sciences, it seems) don't want to make a class too hard for the students and require that we do work that doesn't require much thought but takes time instead. What does it mean, then, to get a B or a C in one of those classes? It simply indicates a lack of desire to spend time doing work that is not challenging. Yet, there are plenty of students who get mediocre grades in classes that actually require thought (physics, calculus, honors English, and the like), but get their grades boosted by electives and brain-dead required classes and in the end get the same GPAs as the people who can actually think. Which person is smarter? Which has greater intellectual curiosity? Which would be more likely to actually learn something in college?
Although the SAT/ACT can't answer those questions for the admissions officers, obviously it can give them a bit more insight into who is a better candidate.
I'm using Mandrake 7.2, and when I've tried KDE2, I've found fonts get very crappy very quickly when you use a "legacy" theme. When I tried to switch KDE over to Aqua to make Konqueror look like my GTK apps, it ignored the fonts I had set and used some hideous scaled version of Helvetica.
Another problem I have with KDE is that its font selector doesn't let you choose things like foundry and the like, making it difficult to pick the right font when you have different versions of one installed. It was a bigger problem with KDE1 (Courier looked horrible...), but I've seen problems with this crop up occasionally.
I'm curious as to how high the scores in Hextris have gotten. Does anyone still play this game? Myself, I've become slightly addicted to it and I'd like to see if my 452,960 at all measures up. At least that game actually stores scores on disk so I won't lose that.
It seems like everyone here has some reason for having his name. *yawn* Well, my handle is entirely arbitrary. It was specially crafted to sound like it perhaps could be a name in Spanish. As far as I know, it isn't, although a quick search on the fish showed me that it means "leasing" in Portuguese. This was entirely coincidental. I don't care, though, because no one would be stupid enough to intentionally choose a nick that means "leasing," and thus my name is almost always unique. Except on AIM. Then again, it seems any pronounceable string of 11 characters or less is taken on AIM (a throwback to before they allowed longer screen names).
Let's see, we use the BSD license, and then we integrate that code into a commercial product. Whoops, looks like we just defeated the purpose of having the licenses this way in the first place. This is one case where having a viral license is quite important.
Sorry, no quote, but as I remember, IT was the giant pulsating brain that commanded the citizens of Camazotz in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time. IT apparently had the ability to dominate humans' minds by forcing repetitive thinking. If this IT is supposed to be an allusion, I am scared.
Perhaps you should take a look at NetHack, if you're into adventure-type games. For a long while it was text-only but now it has non-animated graphical tiles. It is IMHO the most intricate, most entertaining, and most addictive game that I have ever played. It is still being updated (the current version is 3.3.1) but most updates have focused on adding more classes, more items, more text, and the like. The other Roguelikes (Angband, Moria, Adom, etc.) may be worth a look too.
KWord (at least the one shipped with Mandrake 7.2) has incredibly annoying flaws in selecting text. After you select a block, pushing delete or backspace will not delete the block - you need to use "Cut" to do that. Also, if you push backspace or delete, the text will appear to remain highlighted but is actually not. This does not become apparent until you force the window to refresh. Plus, I can't figure out how to permanently (i.e. between sessions) turn off all those annoying toolbars! Along with its tendency to crash, these problems make KWord unusable. You may unfortunately have to stick with StarOffice as I did.
Congratulations, you have proven that Red Hat 7.0 sucks.
However, the article was comparing Whistler with KDE and GNOME, not any specific distro. When I installed KDE 1.1 for the first time (on top of RH 5.2), the K menu didn't have any of those "half-finished CD writers" or "toys," just the core set of applications - kedit, kmail, etc. About the same amount as was included with my default Windows installation. Never mind that you have the option to not install these in the first place...
As for the NIC trouble, the only useful pieces of information I've ever found in the system controls are the names of the devices I'm using and the IRQs/DMAs they occupy. The latter info is located in KDE's own system controls section, echoed from/proc. Some device names are included there, but I don't see how far you can get in troubleshooting if you don't know what kinds of devices you're using in the first place.
And if you really, really want to install software from the net rather than from the CDs your distro includes, I don't think anyone is keeping you from going to freshmeat.net to get what you need. Again, this is also distro-specific.
Bah, I've wasted too much time responding to this...
Not to discount your concerns, but the PowerPC can be either big endian or little endian depending on how the OS wants it. The m68k series was big endian, so the MacOS is written under that assumption.
The question is, though, if the PowerPC can do that, could the Crusoe switch over as well?
It's also the philosophy behind GNOME. Surprise, surprise. The thing is, they are both larger in scope than a simple window manager (even though GNOME doesn't have a default one itself), so of course they'll have a little more bloat. The problem is that if you don't include everything including the kitchen sink, programmers will start devising incompatible versions of the kitchen sink with whatever killer apps they write. So it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not determining anything on my own. Western thought and social norms have already determined (and are constantly redefining) what knowledge is, what it means to be intelligent, and all those wonderful abstract topics. To an extent the processes that have produced these conclusions involve consensus, but they're also elitist in that they've been produced by people that have provided rational justification for their arguments.
Take what's taught in school - even if we can't define what makes something worthy of being taught there, most of us have a pretty good idea of what belongs and what doesn't. Or of which books belong in a library, or what art belongs in a museum. That understanding means so much more than an arbitrary consensus among a few biased people. The goal is to produce something generally useful for everybody, not just whoever wins a vote.
If you believe a consensus is more valid, why don't you explain why you think this way? Do you think knowledge is defined on an individual basis and intelligence only exists subjectively? What assumptions are you making and why?
The problems I was describing had to do with trivia seeping its way into otherwise useful articles, which is what gad_zuki was talking about. But to answer your question...
How does it detract? ... If something is irrelevant to an article, the link inside that article can be deleted. Basically, I'm saying that you should orphan where appropriate, but not delete.
Maybe in an ideal world, the existence of fancruft articles would have no effect on other ones. But part of how Wikipedia is supposed to work is that you're supposed to cross-link. Orphan articles get less attention, which means a greater chance of a harmful edit going unnoticed.
So the solution to that problem is to cross-link liberally. But there's always going to be some idiot that thinks that the entry on Sapporo, Japan should link to every anime episode set there. This has the potential to go on and on when the simple solution is to delete the pointless articles and be done with it.
More than anything, the real problem is that fancruft doesn't serve any purpose beyond wasting time. Some people might read it and enjoy it, but it doesn't do anything to enrich your life as does actual knowledge, the kind you find in most of the rest of Wikipedia. Cross-linking helps the site present information, and you're suggesting creating an exception to that rule for drivel that goes against the whole point of the project to begin with?
Some information is intrinsically useless, this stuff fits squarely in that category, and obsessive fans have failed to convince others otherwise. Maybe some pointless trivia will be harder to find now. I think that's healthy.
But look at it this way, let's say Wikipedia was a business. By letting Wookiepedia take all the Star Wars traffic, Wikipedia just lost a decently large chunk of readers; if they were a TV network they'd be kicking themselves for it.
True enough. But thankfully Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit and doesn't run ads, which means it doesn't have to exist for the purpose of generating traffic. It's there for whoever finds it useful as it is.
If Wookieepedia funnels off the people so into Star Wars that they find it necessary to write articles summarizing nitpicky aspects of it, I don't see who that's hurting. It might even help weed out the people that add pointless trivia to Wikipedia in lieu of useful info.
Sounds to me like things are going exactly as they should. Were you suggesting otherwise?
So you don't like it, then?
The point is that it detracts from my ability to read about things that matter in the real world.
The whole point of an encyclopedia is to have the most pertinent information on a topic packed into a brief article. Information about anime is 99% of the time irrelevant to an article that isn't about anime. Whether you like the stuff doesn't figure into that.
I've had similar odd problems with ripping on so far three CDs: The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, Play by Moby, and Exciter by Depeche Mode. Both got numerous V's in Paranoia on both my no-name CD-ROM and my Philips CD-RW, only on the last few tracks. With the -z switch it couldn't complete the rips. cdda2wav did no better, ruining them with pops everywhere but ripping quickly. Because I first discovered this problem with my brand-new Depeche Mode CD, I guessed that the problem might be copy protection, but interestingly enough, all it took was a switch into Windows and Easy-CD Creator (not exactly renowned for its wonderful ripping, I don't think) got through them quickly and perfectly on my cheapo drive. No, I have no clue what the issue is.
not because I have anything worth reading on it
Not surprising, considering the quality of your Slashdot comments.
ICQ's numbers aren't very intuitive, true. However, AOL's problems are related to the sheer quantity of people on AOL and AIM. If Jabber were to get to those proportions, we'd have the same problems, PLUS the fun with domains. BTW, I think ICQ's method is the best, because it provides an ID that doesn't have to be used as one's screen name and is very obviously not a screen name. Thus people can tell the two apart, forget the UIN until they need to hand it out or whatever, and communicate using whatever handle they want, even if someone else is using it. Handy.
BTW, Jabber should have some measures intact to combat spam, if it doesn't already - bulk Jabber messages should be difficult to send out.
The other problem is that there are too many choices that could be confusing for the masses. Receive your messages AIM-style or ICQ-style? Or however the sender intended? And how about those transports...I don't know about anyone else, but I didn't find the system for interfacing with other IMs at all intuitive. Maybe it's different in the Windows Jabber clients (I've only used Gabber). Never mind that you have to convince people to switch from AIM which seems to work fine and also supports graphical emoticons.
On a side note, I think that we should consider dispensing with traditional version numbering on Linux distros and just go 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. or Micro$oft-esque 95, 98, 2000 without major/minor numbers. It's all just a collection of package updates and I don't think you can really determine what warrants a major version number change.
Man pages still play an important role because they provide a lot of information in a nice compact space in a standardized manner. That last part is very important in my view. No matter which man page you look at, you can always find the command-line options at the top, followed by a description, and so on. This makes it very easy to find information for any command because it's always in the same place. Neither info docs nor HTML-formatted help files have this same standard structure (or at least I haven't seen it). Granted, GUIs are making command line options less important for everyday program use, but man pages are for me still invaluable when I forget which letter corresponds to which switch. For the quick and dirty help man pages give you, I don't think much more formatting is needed - just keep what works and is easy to use (scroll up and down...no-brainer).
Given that there is no 'tu' in Japanese, that would be a no, and besides, that's too many syllables...
I always thought it was Japlish for "dot-com." Like "pasokon" or "pokemon." The thing with "dokomo" was probably a convenient double meaning.
Even though I have attended two high schools with "challenging" curricula and whatnot, many of my required classes have entailed performing mass quantities of busywork. Too often teachers (especially in the social sciences, it seems) don't want to make a class too hard for the students and require that we do work that doesn't require much thought but takes time instead. What does it mean, then, to get a B or a C in one of those classes? It simply indicates a lack of desire to spend time doing work that is not challenging. Yet, there are plenty of students who get mediocre grades in classes that actually require thought (physics, calculus, honors English, and the like), but get their grades boosted by electives and brain-dead required classes and in the end get the same GPAs as the people who can actually think. Which person is smarter? Which has greater intellectual curiosity? Which would be more likely to actually learn something in college?
Although the SAT/ACT can't answer those questions for the admissions officers, obviously it can give them a bit more insight into who is a better candidate.
Another problem I have with KDE is that its font selector doesn't let you choose things like foundry and the like, making it difficult to pick the right font when you have different versions of one installed. It was a bigger problem with KDE1 (Courier looked horrible...), but I've seen problems with this crop up occasionally.
I'm curious as to how high the scores in Hextris have gotten. Does anyone still play this game? Myself, I've become slightly addicted to it and I'd like to see if my 452,960 at all measures up. At least that game actually stores scores on disk so I won't lose that.
It seems like everyone here has some reason for having his name. *yawn* Well, my handle is entirely arbitrary. It was specially crafted to sound like it perhaps could be a name in Spanish. As far as I know, it isn't, although a quick search on the fish showed me that it means "leasing" in Portuguese. This was entirely coincidental. I don't care, though, because no one would be stupid enough to intentionally choose a nick that means "leasing," and thus my name is almost always unique. Except on AIM. Then again, it seems any pronounceable string of 11 characters or less is taken on AIM (a throwback to before they allowed longer screen names).
Let's see, we use the BSD license, and then we integrate that code into a commercial product. Whoops, looks like we just defeated the purpose of having the licenses this way in the first place. This is one case where having a viral license is quite important.
Sorry, no quote, but as I remember, IT was the giant pulsating brain that commanded the citizens of Camazotz in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time. IT apparently had the ability to dominate humans' minds by forcing repetitive thinking. If this IT is supposed to be an allusion, I am scared.
Perhaps you should take a look at NetHack, if you're into adventure-type games. For a long while it was text-only but now it has non-animated graphical tiles. It is IMHO the most intricate, most entertaining, and most addictive game that I have ever played. It is still being updated (the current version is 3.3.1) but most updates have focused on adding more classes, more items, more text, and the like. The other Roguelikes (Angband, Moria, Adom, etc.) may be worth a look too.
KWord (at least the one shipped with Mandrake 7.2) has incredibly annoying flaws in selecting text. After you select a block, pushing delete or backspace will not delete the block - you need to use "Cut" to do that. Also, if you push backspace or delete, the text will appear to remain highlighted but is actually not. This does not become apparent until you force the window to refresh. Plus, I can't figure out how to permanently (i.e. between sessions) turn off all those annoying toolbars! Along with its tendency to crash, these problems make KWord unusable. You may unfortunately have to stick with StarOffice as I did.
Congratulations, you have proven that Red Hat 7.0 sucks.
/proc. Some device names are included there, but I don't see how far you can get in troubleshooting if you don't know what kinds of devices you're using in the first place.
However, the article was comparing Whistler with KDE and GNOME, not any specific distro. When I installed KDE 1.1 for the first time (on top of RH 5.2), the K menu didn't have any of those "half-finished CD writers" or "toys," just the core set of applications - kedit, kmail, etc. About the same amount as was included with my default Windows installation. Never mind that you have the option to not install these in the first place...
As for the NIC trouble, the only useful pieces of information I've ever found in the system controls are the names of the devices I'm using and the IRQs/DMAs they occupy. The latter info is located in KDE's own system controls section, echoed from
And if you really, really want to install software from the net rather than from the CDs your distro includes, I don't think anyone is keeping you from going to freshmeat.net to get what you need. Again, this is also distro-specific.
Bah, I've wasted too much time responding to this...
Not to discount your concerns, but the PowerPC can be either big endian or little endian depending on how the OS wants it. The m68k series was big endian, so the MacOS is written under that assumption. The question is, though, if the PowerPC can do that, could the Crusoe switch over as well?
It's also the philosophy behind GNOME. Surprise, surprise. The thing is, they are both larger in scope than a simple window manager (even though GNOME doesn't have a default one itself), so of course they'll have a little more bloat. The problem is that if you don't include everything including the kitchen sink, programmers will start devising incompatible versions of the kitchen sink with whatever killer apps they write. So it goes.