.."why should I trust Wikipedia, it's written by random people"?
.."there's been a successful experiment of inserting false information..."
"the neutral point of view doesn't work"
"it's just an encyclopedia.."
Please read this:
Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.
Article review
Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.
These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.
We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.
There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.
Neutrality
The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.
There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.
We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.
This is largely off-topic, so I'll be brief. Please contribute to the Wikimedia Commons, which was born out of Wikipedia and other projects by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a repository of free media to be used by our projects and others. We just started, but once we have aggregated all our images in one place, there'll be quite a lot of free (as in speech) images of politicians that you can use.
Next time a celebrity is in town, take a photo and upload it here.
Yeah, IBM loves us alright - on the server. On the client they are still pushing Windows. Every relevant IT corp except Microsoft is pushing Linux on the server, but who is pushing/selling Linux on the desktop? Our strongest ally in that department is probably Novell, but so far, the collective marketing strategy for Linux on the desktop has been very poor. What do I mean by that? Well, in some ways I'm guilty of the same mistake: I write "Linux on the desktop". But it's about more than Linux - it's about the applications.
When marketing Linux on the desktop we have to put into the center the gigantic set of free and useful applications that people can get on a Linux PC, as opposed to the blank slate that a Windows XP (without Office) is. We have word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs, sound editors, drawing/painting/image editing programs, cool web browsers, download managers, text editors, the best email clients, free games (some of them nice), RSS aggregators, heck, clients for any Internet service you can think of. Spyware is unheard of, all of this is free and installed if you want it.
I hope that with Ubuntu and Userlinux we'll see serious attempts to build user-ready Linux desktop computers with cool extra services like remote support via SSH and auto-update via apt-get, and with a lower price thanks to the lack of a Windows tax.
.. which KDE offers are the so-called io_slaves, so I can access, for example, my server using fish://bla (an SSH slave), WebDAV using webdav://bla, and so on. Does GNOME have something similar? It would be nice to be able to use these slaves in Mozilla/Firefox.
In fairness to all parties involved, I think we can state the following:
There were other formats like CDF, but right from the start, Dave promoted syndication where it mattered, in the nascent Blogosphere, not as part of the doomed "Push" bubble.
Dave and the W3C differ greatly in their vision of what syndication formats should look like. Dave favors simplicity, whereas W3C wants a powerful format to build the entire "semantic web".
Both Dave and the W3C people are interested in exercising control over the leading syndication format. That is, we are talking about a power struggle.
The combination of these factors led to the messy situation as it is now. We can criticize Dave for his participation in the fight over control, but we can criticize both groups for not coming to a reasonable conclusion like pursuing two different formats with different names. Given that RSS 1.0 is so different from its predecessor, I think it should have become a different format at that point (i.e. a new name).
I for one prefer to applaud the achievements these groups have made to dwelling on their mistakes, and personally prefer Dave's vision of simplicity to RDF. While I like the expressiveness of RDF, I find it too complex to communicate to the average web developer. I prefer simple, standardized, application-specific XML schemas.
Dave has proposed to merge Atom and RSS and make them an IETF-controlled standard. This sounds like a good idea, so we would end up with two formats (W3C's RSS and Dave/Atom's RSS-Atom-merge) that are so different as to be irreconcilable.
Before Netscape developed RSS, Dave created the scriptingNews format. Dave/Userland also took up RSS development after Netscape stopped working on it. See RSS history.
Tim Kosse of FileZilla, the only really good open-source FTP client for Windows I'm aware of. He's currently busy porting it to Linux using wxWidgets (read his development diary).
The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.
Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.
Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.
Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.
Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.
The situation has gotten orders of magnitude better than it was years ago. We're now at least on par with Windows (and our default themes are cooler), and thanks to the work of the X.org team as well as the KDE and GNOME developers, I'm sure we will have OS X quality fonts before OS X has reached the next quality level. We're catching up.
Where the Linux desktop really shines, however, is when it comes to customization. I prefer to operate in a very Windows-like manner, with maximized windows and taskbar. KDE allows me to do that (and gives me a nice launcher command bar with autocompletion - I haven't used the "start" menu in ages). Some want a nice file manger - KDE gives you Konqueror, GNOME gives you Nautilus. Others prefer doing everything in the shell, where you can use Midnight Commander and feel like you're back in the old DOS days.
Some want virtual desktops or virtual screens (larger than the physical screen size). Any decent window manager provides that. Some want a very efficient, slim system - they use something like Windowmaker or XFCE. Others want all the bells and whistles and install KDE or GNOME with lots of applets. Some like to experiment with innovative new UIs and try out window managers like ion. Others are happy just using a cloned Windows or Mac interface.
If you're willing to experiment, no system offers you as many possibilities as Linux. If you just want a clean, working desktop, all the major distro makers provide that by now.
There's room to improvement, and the devil is in the details: clipboard interoperability is still buggy and incomplete, performance in some areas can be improved (try resizing your window very fast with content visible), the driver situation is unsatisfactory etc. But none of the problems before us is unsolvable. It's just a matter of time.
The BBC article is certainly high on denial and short on substance. I particularly dislike the intro: " It was reported on the internet that the signal had been found.." - Oh, these wacky Internet people are at it again. The New Scientist is also a print publication, and it did not report that a signal had been found, it reported that there was a particularly strong candidate signal, which showed certain interesting oddities which may very well rule it out from being artificial:
There are other oddities. For instance, the signal's frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. "The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that's rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet," Korpela says.
This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.
Fishy and puzzling
The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is "fishy", he says. "If [the aliens] are so smart, they'll adjust their signal for their planet's motion."
The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second.
What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. "It just boggles my mind," Korpela says.
Now, in light of these facts, which are not denied in the BBC article, the "We're not investigating it further" type responses certainly sound like an attempt to prevent the media from getting their panties in a twist. "Actually it was a reflection from a weather balloon..."
I hope SETI does investigate. That's the whole point of the project, isn't it?
Early this year, c't magazine, probably the most respected German computer magazine, published a quite interesting comparison of office suites. They subjected all of them to a test with very large documents with 140 pages of text, 120 graphics and 240 footnotes. MS Word apparently became less and less reliable as more pictures were added - suddenly they could no longer be moved and aligned properly without destroying existing layout. The tester gave up on Word but managed to do it with most of the other suites (including OO). They also found OO to be on the same level as MSO in terms of functionality.
Now, many bad experiences people may have with OO are probably related to importing existing MS documents. Even though the filters are pretty good, they are obviously not perfect, and last I checked macros were ignored entirely. However, that is not a fair comparison -- Microsoft would utterly fail it, as they don't have the most basic OO import filter. And the complexity of this problem is similarly high as the one of emulating the Windows API on Linux - you don't just have to get the file format right, you also have to duplicate Microsoft's way of interpreting it, even if it's buggy and/or inconsistent.
Nevertheless, the developers are always working hard on improving import filters, as it is obviously essential to business migration. OpenOffice 2.0 will have improved filters, and it will also have much better database management with support for databases directly stored in files (as Access does).
OpenOffice is clearly more performance-hungry than MS Office, although in my experience that is mostly the start-up time. I don't anticipate major improvements in this area. If you're looking for a very slim MS Word replacement, KWord or AbiWord are probably projects worth keeping an eye on. TextMaker, a proprietary package, also exists for Linux. And if you're into DTP, Scribus is quite mature already.
You don't need anyone's permission to sell GPL software. That's what all the commercial distro makers do. The question is only whether the source code is made available or not (bundled with the app or on demand). Producing and selling binaries of GPL'd software is a perfectly legitimate business.
Before you bring up some of the standard arguments in defense of software patents, please read the FAQ. There is a lot more good analysis in that section. For an easier to understand example of how software patents affect real world applications - a big reason many small businesses oppose them - look at the webshop demo.
I am fully aware that being a member of a community like Everything2 is a great thing. E2 offers a lot of incentives for people to contribute - the voting/experience system, the constant feedback through private messages, the quests, etc. At the time it was created it was one of the most innovative sites on the Internet.
But let's get real here. The Wikipedia model of collaborative editing is far superior to having lots of redundant nodes on the same topic if you want to build a reference work. If you want to build a collection of opinions and views, then something like E2 is the way to go. But that's not usually what you want when you look up a subject in an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is comprehensive and well-illustrated. It doesn't have an idiotic anti-hyperlink policy. And it tries to summarize all the information on a subject in a single, neutrally written article. Most articles are far more detailed than the equivalents on E2. E2 has thousands of pages that belong on something like LiveJournal, but not into a reference work. It is, after all, about everything.
The peer review on E2 is quite laughable. The editor of an article has to authorize and make any changes to it. If the editor is no longer an E2 member, the node gets neglected. If they are biased, it becomes a one-sided tract. In either case, there's little that the other users can do about it except "nuke" the node. On the other side, nobody owns a Wikipedia article. Anyone can improve it at any time. The original author can keep the article in their watchlist and try to negotiate in case they do not agree with certain changes. If no consensus can be reached, voting is a last resort to resolve conflicts.
The editorial policies on E2 are extremely harsh and arbitrary. If you're a newbie, you will find your nodes nuked every other hour. If you're one of the high-level noders, you can get away with posting lots of crap.
Make no mistake, E2 has some excellent articles, but they're mixed with whiny teenage girls ranting about their boyfriends. In many cases, the whiny teenagers have a higher "level" than the knowledgeable experts.
The worst part of the story is that E2 is not open content. That's right, all the content on E2 is copyrighted. If I take it and use it for something else, I am a criminal under international law, even if I attribute the copy. That also means that if the E2 website dies, the data may well be lost forever. In either case, only a single group of people - the Everything2 people - has the right to distribute it as a whole. I see no attempts to remedy this situation by, for example, asking every contributor if they want to license their nodes under a copyleft license.
Wikipedia is copylefted. It uses the GNU FDL - not the prettiest copyleft license, but we are in talks with the FSF and the Creative Commons to produce an FDL 2.0 which will be greatly simplified and perhaps even CC-compatible.
Even if you believe that E2 is superior in terms of content - which can be easily disproven - its proprietary nature is a key disadvantage. Until that problem is solved, I strongly advise against contributing to E2, or at the very least to put a clear copyleft notice under all your contributions. Don't get caught in the copyright trap, kids.
Linspire, previously known as LindowsOS (also Lin---s, pronounced as Lindash), is a Linux distribution based on Debian. It targets the consumer user - its distributors market it more intensively than all other Unix-based or Unix-like distributions except Mac OS X. As Lindows, it was the first Linux distribution to replace Windows in home consumer desktop systems at a substantially lower price than Microsoft Windows.
Michael Robertson, the founder and former CEO of MP3.com functions as the CEO of Lindows, Inc. It is still called "Lindows, Inc" even though the product is now Linspire.
Microsoft Corporation sued Lindows, Inc for its use of the term "Windows", which Microsoft claimed constituted a trademark infringement. In February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims. Though Microsoft lost the core of its case, and says it will appeal the decision, for uncertain reasons it also called the decision "a victory". (See Microsoft vs Lindows for more information.) Lindows was renamed Linspire to avoid further legal action by Microsoft. Michael Robertson called the legal action "Sextuple Jeopardy", which is like "Double Jeopardy" but sextupled.
Lindows, Inc had the initial goal of developing a Linux-based operating system capable of running major Windows applications as well. It based its Windows compatibility on the development of WINE by the Linspire team. Lindows.com later abandoned its initial approach in favor of making Linux applications easy to download, install and use. They achieved this using an application called Click-N-Run, a program based on Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool, providing an easy-to-use interface and a slightly modified package system for an annual fee (apt-get costs no money, but has less user-friendliness). Click-N-Run has over 1,000 pieces of software for download.
Lindows, Inc sponsors many open-source projects and events, including the Gaim instant messaging client, the KDE-Apps.org (http://www.kde-apps.org/) and KDE-Look.org (http://www.kde-look.org/) websites, and the Nvu project, which has started to develop an open-source WYSIWYG website editor (based on the Mozilla composer code) to rival FrontPage. In the past, Linspire.com has contributed over $500,000 to the WINE project.
Editions
Several varieties of Linspire, known as editions, target different markets. Three main editions exist: Standard, Developer and Laptop.
Standard - The standard edition offers the standard distributions, intended for most consumer desktops.
Developer - A version designed for developers, this version comes with many development tools such as text editors, compilers and libaries for developing software.
Laptop - A version of Linspire optimized for notebook computers, which have different hardware requirements from desktop computers.
LindowsLive! - Potential users can download a no-cost LiveCD version of Linspire in ISO image format from P2P networks.
I think your sig speaks for itself. If you approach Wikipedia articles in a confrontational manner, then of course you will run into conflicts and edit wars. How else could it be, if people from all parts of the political, scientific and religious spectrum have to work together?
My experience is that the people who will get into conflicts are mostly those who have a problem with our neutrality policy. They feel that Wikipedia should clearly label certain views as nonsense. Of course people can never agree on what is and isn't nonsense, so they fight all day about it. But our policy states that in such cases, what we do is attribute the claims from both sides to their adherents.
Now, there are often misunderstandings regarding that policy, such as the belief that we have to give pseudoscience "equal time" in science articles. This is addressed in some detail in th actual policy page: NPOV and pseudoscience. And of course there are religious fanatics and other hardcore believers who find it difficult to work together and insist on the exclusion of certain points of view or on the prominent inclusion of their own in articles which have nothing to do with their belief system (e.g. religious views in scientific articles). However, as we develop and refine our policies, these cases become increasingly rare.
There is of course always conflict, and it contributes to truly adding all perspectives to an article. However, in terms of civility, Wikipedia fares much better than most other online communities, not least because we have a clear policy against personal attacks. In terms of getting the facts right, I have described several ideas in my campaign platform for the upcoming Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election.
The point [of open source] is that it is not a ready to roll program
No, that is not the point. You know what I do if I want to install gimp?
apt-get install gimp
That's it. That covers installation and download. I don't need to start some nonstandard installer program or reboot my machine like on Windows (I guess on MacOS I would have to drag and drop something, as that seems to be the way Apple likes to do everything). If that's not "ready to roll" I don't know what that is.
Open source developers primarily support the platforms they work with -- mainly Linux and FreeBSD. If you use a proprietary platform like MacOS then don't whine that there are no ready-made binaries for whatever you want to do.
The point of open source (or free software) is freedom - even if you never touch the source code, you know that no single company has control over what you can or cannot do, can decide to suddenly remove certain features or add certain requirements -- if that happens, and the majority of the community doesn't agree, then the program will be forked, i.e. someone will create THE BLIMP, the truly free alternative to THE GIMP. This is what just happened with X-Window, and it could never happen if a single company had control over the source code. If you don't care about freedom, don't use open source software.
Opening MacGimp for the first time was like stepping out onto the surface of an alien planet
That's because that is exactly what you are doing. MacOS is not Linux, it has its own proprietary desktop. If you take software that was developed under completely different conditions - one key condition being that the programmer doesn't know and doesn't need to know what underlying desktop the user works with (there's that pesky freedom again) - and you thrust this software into a proprietary environment where these choices do not exist, then yes, that's like stepping on an alien planet.
Most of the complaints of the author are the result of two things:
The GIMP is not a MacOS application
The port of the GIMP to MacOS is not particularly good (font engine, X11 requirement etc.)
The few complaints that are valid (chaotic menu structure, lack of previews) can only be addressed through contributing money, code, or detailed ideas. Whining about open source software is like complaining about the quality of a Wikipedia article.
So: Mac user rambles about obscure GIMP port to MacOS not being like other MacOS applications. Nothing to see here - move along.
MediaWiki is the open source software running Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Disinfopedia, the MozillaZine Knowledgebase, and many other wikis. Eugene is correct in noting that we need to work together in improving our collaborative tools. Wiki technology is one of them. Use it for your open source software documentation. Add a link to your documentation wiki to the software's "Help" menu, so that your users are encouraged to fill the gaps.
MediaWiki in particular implements many ideas that were already envisioned by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. It does show backlinks, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows dynamic inclusion of any page in the current development version. For example, you could have a header and footer in your documentation that is the same for every page. What's more, you can add parameters to these templates to dynamically search and replace patterns of text in the template before transcluding it. This will allow us to replace the currently statically hacked Wikipedia infoboxes with dynamically included and parametrized templates, for example. One long term feature that might be worth hacking on top of this would be transclusion of labeled sections from another page, or interwiki transclusion.
Check out the current feature list and the development roadmap. Subscribe to wikitech-l to help us in improving the software. In true wiki spirit, we are fairly liberal at handing out CVS access (over 40 developers with CVS access at present), so please do ask if you want to work on a larger project.
There are many other wiki engines that are worth working on, such as TWiki and MoinMoin. Their main deficiency, in my opinion, is that they do rely primarily on the traditional wiki link pattern of CamelCase, which is nice for geeks but very ugly for everyone else, and also useless for search engines. MediaWiki uses [[free links]] instead, which are harder to type, but look just like normal links to the reader. Still, working on any other wiki engine is a lot better than starting yet another one.
A collaborative tool which is badly needed is a free software clone of SubEthaEdit. Combine wikis with real-time editing and the fun really begins. I imagine something like that might be hackable on top of a powerful graphical editor like Kate. For now WebDAV-support for MediaWiki would also be very cool, as Kate/KDE already supports editing WebDAV resources. So many worthwhile hacks, so little time.
This is an area where open source coders can make a big difference while corporations are still bewildered by the fact that open wikis can produce useful content. So please, let's work together on these tools.
There are those of us who have been saying that Java is crappy technology for years. There are those who have been saying that Java is the best thing that ever happened to programming. The latter group consists of the same persons who also felt that Sun would not betray Linux, that Sun was a bulwark against Microsoft, etc. They only told us good things about Sun. Many of them were paid to write these things -- as Java developers and Sun employees, or as active astroturfers.
I never believed the official party line with regard to Sun. I saw great ideas devoured by Java -- as even most Java-lovers realize, it is absolutely unsuitable for desktop applications, yet it was marketed for them, and it was used for them. Remember JXTA? That was Sun's peer-to-peer initiative. I saw JXTA come and go and hundreds of peer-to-peer developers with it. Peer-to-peer and Java -- truly a winning combination.
Nor did I believe that this was merely a coincidence or gross incompetence. When the internal Sun memo the Java problem was released, where Sun engineers complained that Java was too slow even for internal use on Sun's operating system, it was clear to everyone what had always been clear to me: Java was never intended to be a fast, powerful programming language. It was intended to be a way to sell big hardware, and to tie people to a single company: Sun. They sucked up a lot of mindshare. Neither proprietary nor truly free, Java existed in that same state of justifiable coercion (by means of copyright) as, say, MacOS X. But both Apple and Sun have as their goal the same thing as Microsoft -- to become the only vendor that matters, to create a monopoly. Microsoft is just better at it.
If you want a powerful, truly free, cross-platform interpreted language, try Python or Perl. Just because your PHB hasn't heard about them because there are no glossy brochures doesn't mean they can't kick Java's ass any day, even (or especially) in "mission-critical" application. Both are modern, object-oriented languages, idiosyncratic to be sure, but scalable no less. This very website is probably a larger application than most of the stuff that runs in your company. When did you last lose a comment on Slashdot? And Slashdot's code is ugly and hackish.
Now it turns out that Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy are on the same football team. Their common enemy: Linux. Well, you know what? Linux can kick Sun's ass, and Linux can kick Microsoft's ass as well. And that's not because "Micro$oft sux0rZ!" It's because Linux has behind it not just governments and corporations, but the power of thousands of unimaginably creative volunteers. It's because Linux is free and will always remain so. Technology is not just about gadgets. It's also about freedom, and in the long run, freedom will prevail. Say about RMS what you want, but sometimes being a little overzealous can be a good thing.
Are corporations like Sun and Microsoft evil? Of course not. They are amoral (that also goes for IBM, by the way). They will do anything if it's good for their bottom line. If corporate murder was legal, every corporation would immediately start murdering people, other than by exposing them to toxic chemicals and unsafe workplace conditions. That's because if the current CEO doesn't like murdering people, they will simply be replaced by someone who does - shareholder value.
Linux is a little bit of everything. It incorporates elements of socialism (sharing your work, writing software in your free time), capitalism (being paid to program), of dictatorships (Linus coordinating the development process), of democracies (various associations with elected representatives), of meritocracy (those who develop, lead), of plutocracy (those who have money can get stuff done). This is in many ways a model for society. There is no single way to run a complex world. You need to combine the elements in a smart fashion.
The present Mars Rovers, like all successful NASA Mars missions since Viking, does not have instruments to detect life. Its payload is designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to detect whether there has been "ancient water" on Mars, i.e. whether oceans flowed billions of years ago.
It would be regrettable if this annoucement only amounted to "We have evidence from the rock layers / erosion patterns / spherule concretions that water must have been involved in the creation of these features", as we already know that water can today exist in liquid form on 30% of the planet's surface, and that water has been active on the Martian surface in the recent geological past (source).
But given NASA's reluctance regarding all things water-related, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what it's going to be.
The really interesting stuff is the things they have avoided talking about, like the "mud-like texture". But most interesting in terms of water evidence is the trench dug by Opportunity. If you look at the fairly solid wall of soil at the right you will see a slightly dark streak on it. That streak leads directly to a puddle on the floor. Given this visual evidence, and the structure of the soil, it is pretty obvious that this stuff is wet.
The simple reality is that Mars is a wet planet. The oceans didn't just vanish, they went underground into the porous subsurface world of Mars. That's where the real action is, not on the UV-sterilized surface. All we see of Mars' underground water world on the surface is the occasional puddle or pond, the black streaks and Malin's famous gullies. If you want to see Martian life, find wet underground regions with geothermal activity.
Also take a look at MediaWiki, the open source wiki that runs Wikipedia. It was especially developed for that purpose, but is now also used by our spin-off projects Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikibooks (the latter is an attempt to create free textbooks for use in education, and has already made some good progress). All of these projects are organized under the Wikimedia non-profit foundations. More projects such as a wiki news site are on the horizon.
MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.
Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:
section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
automatic image rescaling
LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
message transclusion - create messages that can be used
namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)
More cool features are in the works, including a larger set of backends for rendering music, chemical formulas, chessboards etc.
MediaWiki is always looking for new developers. Give it a try and join the mailing list to help out. There are other great wikis out there -- MoinMoin, Tiki, Zwiki, OddMuse etc. -- but I prefer MediaWiki because I find it the easiest to use, and most other wikis use the ugly CamelCaseSyntaxWhichMakesPagesHardToRead.
Hard facts, I see. From a Free Tibet group (and you might do some research on the Dalai Lama, he ain't such a nice guy at all). Quoting "some human rights groups". But the most bizarre thing: They put the number of prisoners at 20m and the number of dissidents in prison at 20K, while the parent post put the number of dissidents "in detention" at 1m and those in "re-education camps" at 300K. But there's no contradiction here because these numbers have the same origin: someone's ass.
Here's a clue: All these numbers have propaganda value. People lie to make their point. They do it all the time. That's why named sources are so important. The deaths attributed to communism in particular are subject to constant exaggeration, as communism is an absolute taboo in the West and needs to remain so.
Anyone with half a brain will admit that China is more repressive on most domestic issues than the US. However, the fact that valid comparisons can be made in limited areas should be enough to give Americans the heebie-jeebies. Furthermore, you will hardly convince anyone by listing "factoids" without botherting to cite sources. Case in point: The total prison population in China, according to the World Prison Population List, is about 1.4 million. It is highly doubtful that 1 million of these are "dissidents". So this seems to be a fairly blatant case of numbers being exaggerated for political effect ("1 million".. "300,000" - when you have nice, round numbers like these, you know you're dealing with public relations data).
What's worse, the US is currently leading the international list, both in relative and absolute numbers, with more than 1.9 million people in prison, and that does not include detentions abroad. This in spite of the fact that the US has about 1/4th the population of China. The only country that has a larger percentage of the population in prison is Rwanda, where over 100,000 people are held on suspicion of participating in the 1994 genocide of over 800,000 people.
Why are so many Americans in prison, under third world medical conditions? The war on drugs, primarily, but also idiotic minimum sentencing laws. Where China executes people as a "deterrence", the US lock them up for decades for the same reason, while still retaining a provably flawed capital punishment system. And, by the way, according to Amnesty International:
Seven countries since 1990 are known to have executed prisoners who were under 18 years old at the time of the crime - Congo (Democratic Republic), Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, USA and Yemen. The country which carried out the greatest number of known executions of child offenders was the USA (17 since 1990).
There are many other very serious social issues in the US (insufficient health care, police brutality, religious fundamentalism, sexual hysteria..), and just waving the finger at China and shouting "Woo, we're so great" is not going to cut it. The US needs to get serious about cleaning up at home before trying to impose itself as the world police elsewhere. Getting rid of your idiot president would be a good start.
Slashdot Mirror
Please read this:
Wikipedia has now hit another quantitative milestone (we reached 500,000 articles in the same year). It is now clear that volunteers can build a free, structured information resource which rivals all such proprietary resources. This is an accomplishment of immense importance, but it is not the end goal.
Article review
Wikipedia is not perfect yet. But from day one, we've been thinking about and tinkering with quality control mechanisms. The one which is currently in active use is the Featured Article Candidates nomination process as well as the Votes for deletion negative equivalent. There's also a peer review page which is in active use.
These are just trial balloons. They're not the end product, the peer review process which we need. There's a WikiProject Fact and Reference Check formed to explore a review system centered around individual factual statements in an article. I have also proposed such a system. There's also an article rating system that is currently in the CVS version of MediaWiki, our free wiki software.
We are all aware of the problem, and we all know that we have to fix this problem before Wikipedia can be a trusted authority. Doing this kind of systematic quality review will require the same level of dedication and effort as creating the encyclopedia in the first place. But we will do it, and not too far from now you will read "1000 reviewed articles", "10000 reviewed articles" announcements, and so on. And this review will be more in-depth than the review process of any traditional encyclopedia, because it will be done by thousands of volunteers from all political and religious persuasions.
There will always be an unstable edition of Wikipedia where you can go to read the latest information, with a big caveat lector sign on the front door. But we will also build a stable edition which we will distribute to the entire planet.
Neutrality
The Neutral Point of View is our guiding principle. However, that does not mean that it is the only way to write articles. Because Wikipedia's content is free, you can take it and start a fork that is written using a different methodology.
There's Wikinfo, which presents a "sympathetic point of view" on the main article, and critical views on separate pages. There's Disinfopedia and dKosopedia, which makes use of some of our content and develop it from a political/progressive perspective.
We will support dynamic cross-project transclusion of our content so that it will be easy to set up a project fork with a different policy. Wikipedia will always be the largest knowledge repository, but if you want the "truth" from a particular point of view, you will be able to consult a resource that is written by people who share that point of view. You can start such a fork right now if you want to - just download the database and get going.
It's more than an encyclopedia
The Wikimedia Foundation currently operates Wikip
Next time a celebrity is in town, take a photo and upload it here.
When marketing Linux on the desktop we have to put into the center the gigantic set of free and useful applications that people can get on a Linux PC, as opposed to the blank slate that a Windows XP (without Office) is. We have word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs, sound editors, drawing/painting/image editing programs, cool web browsers, download managers, text editors, the best email clients, free games (some of them nice), RSS aggregators, heck, clients for any Internet service you can think of. Spyware is unheard of, all of this is free and installed if you want it.
I hope that with Ubuntu and Userlinux we'll see serious attempts to build user-ready Linux desktop computers with cool extra services like remote support via SSH and auto-update via apt-get, and with a lower price thanks to the lack of a Windows tax.
.. which KDE offers are the so-called io_slaves, so I can access, for example, my server using fish://bla (an SSH slave), WebDAV using webdav://bla, and so on. Does GNOME have something similar? It would be nice to be able to use these slaves in Mozilla/Firefox.
And for those who wonder what that looks like, here's a PDF generated from the above style.
-
There were other formats like CDF, but right from the start, Dave promoted syndication where it mattered, in the nascent Blogosphere, not as part of the doomed "Push" bubble.
- Dave and the W3C differ greatly in their vision of what syndication formats should look like. Dave favors simplicity, whereas W3C wants a powerful format to build the entire "semantic web".
- Both Dave and the W3C people are interested in exercising control over the leading syndication format. That is, we are talking about a power struggle.
The combination of these factors led to the messy situation as it is now. We can criticize Dave for his participation in the fight over control, but we can criticize both groups for not coming to a reasonable conclusion like pursuing two different formats with different names. Given that RSS 1.0 is so different from its predecessor, I think it should have become a different format at that point (i.e. a new name).I for one prefer to applaud the achievements these groups have made to dwelling on their mistakes, and personally prefer Dave's vision of simplicity to RDF. While I like the expressiveness of RDF, I find it too complex to communicate to the average web developer. I prefer simple, standardized, application-specific XML schemas.
Dave has proposed to merge Atom and RSS and make them an IETF-controlled standard. This sounds like a good idea, so we would end up with two formats (W3C's RSS and Dave/Atom's RSS-Atom-merge) that are so different as to be irreconcilable.
Before Netscape developed RSS, Dave created the scriptingNews format. Dave/Userland also took up RSS development after Netscape stopped working on it. See RSS history.
The myriads of hackers on KDE and GNOME applications. I'm particularly fond of Kate, KDE's text editor, which is also a component in many other KDE applications.
Ward Cunningham, the creator of the original wiki idea, and Clifford Adams, the maintainer of one of the first usable wiki engines, UsemodWiki.
Rusty Foster, Dries Buytaert and Rob Malda, who created Scoop, Drupal and Slash, respectively, three very powerful weblog engines I use every day.
Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis for starting the GIMP. Ton Rosendaal and the rest of the Blender team for proving that proprietary applications can become open source through distributed funding.
Anthony Jones, creator of iRATE, for exploring new ways to discover free music.
Dave Winer of UserLand for developing a simple content syndication format (now RSS 2.0), the MetaWeblog API and the XML-RPC protocol.
Keith Packard of HP for his many improvements to X.
Guido van Rossum for creating Python, Larry Wall for creating Perl and the many people involved in making PHP, and making it useful.
And of course, the many other people involved in all of these programs, and those who built the software infrastructure that made them possible.
-
X with dropshadows (from the article)
- Old X which shipped with Red Hat 5.0
- Windows 95
- Windows XP
- Mac OS X
The situation has gotten orders of magnitude better than it was years ago. We're now at least on par with Windows (and our default themes are cooler), and thanks to the work of the X.org team as well as the KDE and GNOME developers, I'm sure we will have OS X quality fonts before OS X has reached the next quality level. We're catching up.Where the Linux desktop really shines, however, is when it comes to customization. I prefer to operate in a very Windows-like manner, with maximized windows and taskbar. KDE allows me to do that (and gives me a nice launcher command bar with autocompletion - I haven't used the "start" menu in ages). Some want a nice file manger - KDE gives you Konqueror, GNOME gives you Nautilus. Others prefer doing everything in the shell, where you can use Midnight Commander and feel like you're back in the old DOS days.
Some want virtual desktops or virtual screens (larger than the physical screen size). Any decent window manager provides that. Some want a very efficient, slim system - they use something like Windowmaker or XFCE. Others want all the bells and whistles and install KDE or GNOME with lots of applets. Some like to experiment with innovative new UIs and try out window managers like ion. Others are happy just using a cloned Windows or Mac interface.
If you're willing to experiment, no system offers you as many possibilities as Linux. If you just want a clean, working desktop, all the major distro makers provide that by now.
There's room to improvement, and the devil is in the details: clipboard interoperability is still buggy and incomplete, performance in some areas can be improved (try resizing your window very fast with content visible), the driver situation is unsatisfactory etc. But none of the problems before us is unsolvable. It's just a matter of time.
Now, in light of these facts, which are not denied in the BBC article, the "We're not investigating it further" type responses certainly sound like an attempt to prevent the media from getting their panties in a twist. "Actually it was a reflection from a weather balloon..."
I hope SETI does investigate. That's the whole point of the project, isn't it?
Now, many bad experiences people may have with OO are probably related to importing existing MS documents. Even though the filters are pretty good, they are obviously not perfect, and last I checked macros were ignored entirely. However, that is not a fair comparison -- Microsoft would utterly fail it, as they don't have the most basic OO import filter. And the complexity of this problem is similarly high as the one of emulating the Windows API on Linux - you don't just have to get the file format right, you also have to duplicate Microsoft's way of interpreting it, even if it's buggy and/or inconsistent.
Nevertheless, the developers are always working hard on improving import filters, as it is obviously essential to business migration. OpenOffice 2.0 will have improved filters, and it will also have much better database management with support for databases directly stored in files (as Access does).
OpenOffice is clearly more performance-hungry than MS Office, although in my experience that is mostly the start-up time. I don't anticipate major improvements in this area. If you're looking for a very slim MS Word replacement, KWord or AbiWord are probably projects worth keeping an eye on. TextMaker, a proprietary package, also exists for Linux. And if you're into DTP, Scribus is quite mature already.
You don't need anyone's permission to sell GPL software. That's what all the commercial distro makers do. The question is only whether the source code is made available or not (bundled with the app or on demand). Producing and selling binaries of GPL'd software is a perfectly legitimate business.
Before you bring up some of the standard arguments in defense of software patents, please read the FAQ. There is a lot more good analysis in that section. For an easier to understand example of how software patents affect real world applications - a big reason many small businesses oppose them - look at the webshop demo.
But let's get real here. The Wikipedia model of collaborative editing is far superior to having lots of redundant nodes on the same topic if you want to build a reference work. If you want to build a collection of opinions and views, then something like E2 is the way to go. But that's not usually what you want when you look up a subject in an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is comprehensive and well-illustrated. It doesn't have an idiotic anti-hyperlink policy. And it tries to summarize all the information on a subject in a single, neutrally written article. Most articles are far more detailed than the equivalents on E2. E2 has thousands of pages that belong on something like LiveJournal, but not into a reference work. It is, after all, about everything.
The peer review on E2 is quite laughable. The editor of an article has to authorize and make any changes to it. If the editor is no longer an E2 member, the node gets neglected. If they are biased, it becomes a one-sided tract. In either case, there's little that the other users can do about it except "nuke" the node. On the other side, nobody owns a Wikipedia article. Anyone can improve it at any time. The original author can keep the article in their watchlist and try to negotiate in case they do not agree with certain changes. If no consensus can be reached, voting is a last resort to resolve conflicts.
The editorial policies on E2 are extremely harsh and arbitrary. If you're a newbie, you will find your nodes nuked every other hour. If you're one of the high-level noders, you can get away with posting lots of crap. Make no mistake, E2 has some excellent articles, but they're mixed with whiny teenage girls ranting about their boyfriends. In many cases, the whiny teenagers have a higher "level" than the knowledgeable experts.
The worst part of the story is that E2 is not open content. That's right, all the content on E2 is copyrighted. If I take it and use it for something else, I am a criminal under international law, even if I attribute the copy. That also means that if the E2 website dies, the data may well be lost forever. In either case, only a single group of people - the Everything2 people - has the right to distribute it as a whole. I see no attempts to remedy this situation by, for example, asking every contributor if they want to license their nodes under a copyleft license.
Wikipedia is copylefted. It uses the GNU FDL - not the prettiest copyleft license, but we are in talks with the FSF and the Creative Commons to produce an FDL 2.0 which will be greatly simplified and perhaps even CC-compatible.
Even if you believe that E2 is superior in terms of content - which can be easily disproven - its proprietary nature is a key disadvantage. Until that problem is solved, I strongly advise against contributing to E2, or at the very least to put a clear copyleft notice under all your contributions. Don't get caught in the copyright trap, kids.
Yes, this comment is in the public domain.
Linspire, previously known as LindowsOS (also Lin---s, pronounced as Lindash), is a Linux distribution based on Debian. It targets the consumer user - its distributors market it more intensively than all other Unix-based or Unix-like distributions except Mac OS X. As Lindows, it was the first Linux distribution to replace Windows in home consumer desktop systems at a substantially lower price than Microsoft Windows.
Michael Robertson, the founder and former CEO of MP3.com functions as the CEO of Lindows, Inc. It is still called "Lindows, Inc" even though the product is now Linspire.
Microsoft Corporation sued Lindows, Inc for its use of the term "Windows", which Microsoft claimed constituted a trademark infringement. In February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims. Though Microsoft lost the core of its case, and says it will appeal the decision, for uncertain reasons it also called the decision "a victory". (See Microsoft vs Lindows for more information.) Lindows was renamed Linspire to avoid further legal action by Microsoft. Michael Robertson called the legal action "Sextuple Jeopardy", which is like "Double Jeopardy" but sextupled.
Lindows, Inc had the initial goal of developing a Linux-based operating system capable of running major Windows applications as well. It based its Windows compatibility on the development of WINE by the Linspire team. Lindows.com later abandoned its initial approach in favor of making Linux applications easy to download, install and use. They achieved this using an application called Click-N-Run, a program based on Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool, providing an easy-to-use interface and a slightly modified package system for an annual fee (apt-get costs no money, but has less user-friendliness). Click-N-Run has over 1,000 pieces of software for download.
Lindows, Inc sponsors many open-source projects and events, including the Gaim instant messaging client, the KDE-Apps.org (http://www.kde-apps.org/) and KDE-Look.org (http://www.kde-look.org/) websites, and the Nvu project, which has started to develop an open-source WYSIWYG website editor (based on the Mozilla composer code) to rival FrontPage. In the past, Linspire.com has contributed over $500,000 to the WINE project.
Editions
Several varieties of Linspire, known as editions, target different markets. Three main editions exist: Standard, Developer and Laptop.
External links
My experience is that the people who will get into conflicts are mostly those who have a problem with our neutrality policy. They feel that Wikipedia should clearly label certain views as nonsense. Of course people can never agree on what is and isn't nonsense, so they fight all day about it. But our policy states that in such cases, what we do is attribute the claims from both sides to their adherents.
Now, there are often misunderstandings regarding that policy, such as the belief that we have to give pseudoscience "equal time" in science articles. This is addressed in some detail in th actual policy page: NPOV and pseudoscience. And of course there are religious fanatics and other hardcore believers who find it difficult to work together and insist on the exclusion of certain points of view or on the prominent inclusion of their own in articles which have nothing to do with their belief system (e.g. religious views in scientific articles). However, as we develop and refine our policies, these cases become increasingly rare.
There is of course always conflict, and it contributes to truly adding all perspectives to an article. However, in terms of civility, Wikipedia fares much better than most other online communities, not least because we have a clear policy against personal attacks. In terms of getting the facts right, I have described several ideas in my campaign platform for the upcoming Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election.
No, that is not the point. You know what I do if I want to install gimp?
apt-get install gimp
That's it. That covers installation and download. I don't need to start some nonstandard installer program or reboot my machine like on Windows (I guess on MacOS I would have to drag and drop something, as that seems to be the way Apple likes to do everything). If that's not "ready to roll" I don't know what that is.
Open source developers primarily support the platforms they work with -- mainly Linux and FreeBSD. If you use a proprietary platform like MacOS then don't whine that there are no ready-made binaries for whatever you want to do.
The point of open source (or free software) is freedom - even if you never touch the source code, you know that no single company has control over what you can or cannot do, can decide to suddenly remove certain features or add certain requirements -- if that happens, and the majority of the community doesn't agree, then the program will be forked, i.e. someone will create THE BLIMP, the truly free alternative to THE GIMP. This is what just happened with X-Window, and it could never happen if a single company had control over the source code. If you don't care about freedom, don't use open source software.
Opening MacGimp for the first time was like stepping out onto the surface of an alien planet
That's because that is exactly what you are doing. MacOS is not Linux, it has its own proprietary desktop. If you take software that was developed under completely different conditions - one key condition being that the programmer doesn't know and doesn't need to know what underlying desktop the user works with (there's that pesky freedom again) - and you thrust this software into a proprietary environment where these choices do not exist, then yes, that's like stepping on an alien planet.
Most of the complaints of the author are the result of two things:
The few complaints that are valid (chaotic menu structure, lack of previews) can only be addressed through contributing money, code, or detailed ideas. Whining about open source software is like complaining about the quality of a Wikipedia article.
So: Mac user rambles about obscure GIMP port to MacOS not being like other MacOS applications. Nothing to see here - move along.
MediaWiki in particular implements many ideas that were already envisioned by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. It does show backlinks, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows dynamic inclusion of any page in the current development version. For example, you could have a header and footer in your documentation that is the same for every page. What's more, you can add parameters to these templates to dynamically search and replace patterns of text in the template before transcluding it. This will allow us to replace the currently statically hacked Wikipedia infoboxes with dynamically included and parametrized templates, for example. One long term feature that might be worth hacking on top of this would be transclusion of labeled sections from another page, or interwiki transclusion.
Check out the current feature list and the development roadmap. Subscribe to wikitech-l to help us in improving the software. In true wiki spirit, we are fairly liberal at handing out CVS access (over 40 developers with CVS access at present), so please do ask if you want to work on a larger project.
There are many other wiki engines that are worth working on, such as TWiki and MoinMoin. Their main deficiency, in my opinion, is that they do rely primarily on the traditional wiki link pattern of CamelCase, which is nice for geeks but very ugly for everyone else, and also useless for search engines. MediaWiki uses [[free links]] instead, which are harder to type, but look just like normal links to the reader. Still, working on any other wiki engine is a lot better than starting yet another one.
A collaborative tool which is badly needed is a free software clone of SubEthaEdit. Combine wikis with real-time editing and the fun really begins. I imagine something like that might be hackable on top of a powerful graphical editor like Kate. For now WebDAV-support for MediaWiki would also be very cool, as Kate/KDE already supports editing WebDAV resources. So many worthwhile hacks, so little time.
This is an area where open source coders can make a big difference while corporations are still bewildered by the fact that open wikis can produce useful content. So please, let's work together on these tools.
I never believed the official party line with regard to Sun. I saw great ideas devoured by Java -- as even most Java-lovers realize, it is absolutely unsuitable for desktop applications, yet it was marketed for them, and it was used for them. Remember JXTA? That was Sun's peer-to-peer initiative. I saw JXTA come and go and hundreds of peer-to-peer developers with it. Peer-to-peer and Java -- truly a winning combination.
Nor did I believe that this was merely a coincidence or gross incompetence. When the internal Sun memo the Java problem was released, where Sun engineers complained that Java was too slow even for internal use on Sun's operating system, it was clear to everyone what had always been clear to me: Java was never intended to be a fast, powerful programming language. It was intended to be a way to sell big hardware, and to tie people to a single company: Sun. They sucked up a lot of mindshare. Neither proprietary nor truly free, Java existed in that same state of justifiable coercion (by means of copyright) as, say, MacOS X. But both Apple and Sun have as their goal the same thing as Microsoft -- to become the only vendor that matters, to create a monopoly. Microsoft is just better at it.
If you want a powerful, truly free, cross-platform interpreted language, try Python or Perl. Just because your PHB hasn't heard about them because there are no glossy brochures doesn't mean they can't kick Java's ass any day, even (or especially) in "mission-critical" application. Both are modern, object-oriented languages, idiosyncratic to be sure, but scalable no less. This very website is probably a larger application than most of the stuff that runs in your company. When did you last lose a comment on Slashdot? And Slashdot's code is ugly and hackish.
Now it turns out that Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy are on the same football team. Their common enemy: Linux. Well, you know what? Linux can kick Sun's ass, and Linux can kick Microsoft's ass as well. And that's not because "Micro$oft sux0rZ!" It's because Linux has behind it not just governments and corporations, but the power of thousands of unimaginably creative volunteers. It's because Linux is free and will always remain so. Technology is not just about gadgets. It's also about freedom, and in the long run, freedom will prevail. Say about RMS what you want, but sometimes being a little overzealous can be a good thing.
Are corporations like Sun and Microsoft evil? Of course not. They are amoral (that also goes for IBM, by the way). They will do anything if it's good for their bottom line. If corporate murder was legal, every corporation would immediately start murdering people, other than by exposing them to toxic chemicals and unsafe workplace conditions. That's because if the current CEO doesn't like murdering people, they will simply be replaced by someone who does - shareholder value.
Linux is a little bit of everything. It incorporates elements of socialism (sharing your work, writing software in your free time), capitalism (being paid to program), of dictatorships (Linus coordinating the development process), of democracies (various associations with elected representatives), of meritocracy (those who develop, lead), of plutocracy (those who have money can get stuff done). This is in many ways a model for society. There is no single way to run a complex world. You need to combine the elements in a smart fashion.
Who cares about Sun? Who cares about Microsof
That's not quite accurate, see the Wikipedia article Flat Earth for a detailed discussion.
Ah, the impermeable naivete of the average techie. It gives them that aura of child-like innocence.
It would be regrettable if this annoucement only amounted to "We have evidence from the rock layers / erosion patterns / spherule concretions that water must have been involved in the creation of these features", as we already know that water can today exist in liquid form on 30% of the planet's surface, and that water has been active on the Martian surface in the recent geological past (source). But given NASA's reluctance regarding all things water-related, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what it's going to be.
The really interesting stuff is the things they have avoided talking about, like the "mud-like texture". But most interesting in terms of water evidence is the trench dug by Opportunity. If you look at the fairly solid wall of soil at the right you will see a slightly dark streak on it. That streak leads directly to a puddle on the floor. Given this visual evidence, and the structure of the soil, it is pretty obvious that this stuff is wet.
The simple reality is that Mars is a wet planet. The oceans didn't just vanish, they went underground into the porous subsurface world of Mars. That's where the real action is, not on the UV-sterilized surface. All we see of Mars' underground water world on the surface is the occasional puddle or pond, the black streaks and Malin's famous gullies. If you want to see Martian life, find wet underground regions with geothermal activity.
MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.
Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:
- section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
- automatic image rescaling
- LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
- message transclusion - create messages that can be used
- namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
- plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)
More cool features are in the works, including a larger set of backends for rendering music, chemical formulas, chessboards etc. MediaWiki is always looking for new developers. Give it a try and join the mailing list to help out. There are other great wikis out there -- MoinMoin, Tiki, Zwiki, OddMuse etc. -- but I prefer MediaWiki because I find it the easiest to use, and most other wikis use the ugly CamelCaseSyntaxWhichMakesPagesHardToRead.Here's a clue: All these numbers have propaganda value. People lie to make their point. They do it all the time. That's why named sources are so important. The deaths attributed to communism in particular are subject to constant exaggeration, as communism is an absolute taboo in the West and needs to remain so.
Why are so many Americans in prison, under third world medical conditions? The war on drugs, primarily, but also idiotic minimum sentencing laws. Where China executes people as a "deterrence", the US lock them up for decades for the same reason, while still retaining a provably flawed capital punishment system. And, by the way, according to Amnesty International:
There are many other very serious social issues in the US (insufficient health care, police brutality, religious fundamentalism, sexual hysteria ..), and just waving the finger at China and shouting "Woo, we're so great" is not going to cut it. The US needs to get serious about cleaning up at home before trying to impose itself as the world police elsewhere. Getting rid of your idiot president would be a good start.