Sorry for the extra reply. I forgot to recommend Camino which uses the Gecko rendering engine but is a real Mac application, and has built-in ad blocking.
I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.
The latestOpera still works fine on 10.3. It doesn't "look" very Mac-like but I'd call it effective.
You can also try iCab which has interesting features of its own. It uses the system WebKit engine, though, which in 10.3 is outdated.
That's interesting, I had the exact opposite feeling. Seems to me that Bing blatantly stole Google's layout: search results, preferences page, cache header are all virtually identical (except for that left margin).
But on second thought, I can actually see how copying Google except for a few details makes them seem like a fake Google. They probably would have felt less spammy/fraudulent if they had actually made a whole new layout of their own.
There is no universal standard GUI toolkit on Windows either. Firefox and Opera use their own. OpenOffice.org uses its own. Even Microsoft Office uses its own. On the Mac, there is even more GUI dissonance. Current Macs make the typical Linux environment look downright uniform.
Why is this always considered a problem on Linux but not on Windows or on the Mac?
If the Chrome developers feel too constrained by GTK, they should have chosen a better toolkit, such as Qt (which, incidentally, is also popular on Windows). They can't blame their own bad choices on Linux. Their gripe sounds like the standard "how dare Linux be different from Windows and make us have to learn something new" whining.
It's clear and undeniable that different families have different physical attributes. It's clear and undeniable that different families have differing level of susceptibility to different diseases, conditions, etc. Is one really to believe that everything is heritable EXCEPT for anything to do with the brain...really? What makes the brain exempt from evolution and heritability?
Nice straw man. I never claimed the brain is exempt from these. My claims are that intelligence is a culturally biased concept, that intelligence tests consequently have an inherent cultural bias, and that "race" is irrelevant in determining intelligence, its correlation with culture being mere coincidence. Not a word you said has done anything to refute these claims, for which the scientific evidence is overwhelming and widely accepted.
But the death blow to your argument is that there are no races. Individual/familial genetic variation is so much greater than genetic variation between races that the latter is insignificant, making any "racial" distinction on the basis of superficial appearances such as skin colour meaningless. That makes race a purely cultural concept.
How about this--if you had said the SAT was culturally biased, you MIGHT have a point. Brainpower is brainpower.
I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I think you might be implying that brainpower is purely genetically or "racially" determined. If so, that's wrong; environmental factors including culture have everything to do with it (ref.: Nature, Nurture and Early Brain Development). It starts right in babyhood where interaction with the baby is an important factor in determining brain development. How this interaction is done is culturally determined to a high degree.
It continues through adulthood where our mode of interacting with the environment is culturally determined and determines which brain parts are stimulated and strengthened and which are not. For example, London taxi drives have enlarged hippocampuses because they have memorized the entire London street map. More generally, our visual processing capacity has been massively increased for the recent few generations due to television and the image culture; simultaneously, most of us now have the attention span of a gnat and have become impaired in our ability to read a book or otherwise stay on the same task for hours on end. Conversely, our ancestors would have considered MTV a form of visual torture; their brains couldn't possibly handle it. These are all very real aspects of biological brain development that are culturally determined. (Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains is a good social commentary on that phenomenon.)
More proof? The Flynn effect: average IQ scores worldwide tends to increase about 3 points per decade, reflecting improvement in education standards worldwide. They have to periodically recalibrate IQ tests because of that. In a more extreme example, Dutch conscripts gained 21 points in only 30 years, or 7 points per decade, between 1952 and 1982 (see the wiki article for the reference). There is no way for any of this to be caused by genetics. Genes don't change that fast.
In short, denying cultural influence on brain development is just as silly as denying genetic influence on the same. And "race" is a genetically insignificant factor compared to individual and familial genetic variation, which puts any and all nonsense about Africans being stupid due to genetic inferiority in the rubbish bin where it belongs.
As I understand it, IQ tests were largely developed by whites. You'd think that if they were biased, they'd have fiddled it so they came out on top.
It's not that conscious. No conspiracy theory is required. Cultural bias slips into IQ tests without the designers noticing, but it's a well-established fact now that it has. There are efforts to eliminate cultural bias from IQ tests but it is unlikely that this is even possible; for example, visual processing, although language-independent, is culturally determined to a massive degree. For a little background here's the same link I gave to the other guy: Intelligence across cultures (APA).
Just out of curiosity, would you say the same thing about physical attributes?
So you claim that physical attributes are related to intelligence? If not, you're off topic; if so, you're not worth arguing with. Anthropometric theories of intelligence have been utterly discredited since the 1940s.
have different levels of "intelligence" (a culturally defined and therefore biased concept)
Ridiculously silly.
Your inability to come up with any substantial response is a sign of ignorance.
Correlation is not causation. Just because different "racial" groups statistically have different levels of "intelligence" (a culturally defined and therefore biased concept) doesn't mean that race has anything to do with it. The assumption that this difference is caused by "racial"/genetic factors, without offering any evidence to support that assumption, is invalid and may be considered racist.
The history of humanity suggests that culture is the overriding causal factor. Asians and Europeans are just as capable as Africans (or any other "race") of having a primitive, oppressive and destructive culture, as has been well established through the ages. For example, we saw the same abject poverty in Europe during the Middle Ages, for cultural reasons that are well known. Also, contrary to popular prejudice, there are African countries that are doing pretty well.
Sure - I've posted ideas many times, and suggested them to WPF, but the levels of red tape are absurd.
Considering you are suggesting a radical overhaul of an established community, it's hardly surprising your ideas aren't enthusiastically adopted.
The vast majority of people don't even know what a wiki really is,
If they care, they can learn. You can't cater to the ignorant. If you're suggesting edits are not transparent because the vast majority of people are too stupid to use the history tab, you're unlikely to be taken seriously.
Stop assuming each page is a linear series of edits. Use a branch and merge model or a hub and spoke model like git.
How are editors supposed to keep track of all that? They are not programmers.
Create explicit reputation systems for editors, based both on real-world credentials and on quantitative metrics of WP editing history.
Verifying real-world credentials is infeasible from a practical point of view, and quantitative metrics are completely irrelevant to quality.
Drop the assumption that democracy by plurality works (it doesn't)
That's a matter of opinion. I disagree.
and start creating clear incentives for people with experience and wisdom to contribute.
That proposal is vague enough to be meaningless. And perhaps people for whom contributing itself isn't incentive enough shouldn't be contributing anyway, as they are unlikely to produce high quality output.
Create a new view method for handling high-edit-rate sections of articles and recent edits, specifically in how the information is displayed to warn readers that sentences or paragraphs have been recently changed. Given the rich and interesting nature of how the data is collected, that it is displayed by default in plain text is missing a huge amount of very valuable info for the reader.
This is actually an interesting idea. It should be optional, though, and is mostly already available from the history tab using the 'compare versions' option.
Give up the assumption that only notable things have pages. Let everything people want have pages,
That is completely antithetical to the idea of an encyclopedia. The whole project would get bogged down with useless rubbish. Let them use myspace or facebook instead. This is not what Wikipedia is for.
just don't organize them in a way that gives them all an equal level of priority and publicity.
So you expect volunteer editors to spend hours of their free time prioritizing a sheer infinite amount of mostly useless rubbish. I don't think so.
As it is now, there is only 1 publication set of WP pages, and all pages are equivalent in that set. No need for that, really.
On the contrary, I see no need for that to change.
Don't publish all pages to the public, have sets of "preliminary" or lower quality pages available to logged in users only that over time will mature into public pages.
There is already a project for that called FlaggedRevs (google it), and several wikipedias have implemented it. But on the English-language wikipedia there has been too much resistance against it so far. Besides, this is directly contradictory to your own idea of putting "everything people want" on Wikipedia.
Start charging an optional small, monthly or annual fee, to sponsor the project, adjusted in amount for the economics of the country from which you access the site.
That is against the core mission of the project, which is spreading free knowledge free of charge.
Put messages on the site (not ads) reminding people that only through sponsorship does the service remain free - remove the messages if people pay for access.
Occasional donation drives seem to work fine, and unlike your idea are compatible with project's mission.
What I find baffling is that Goofy is a dog, and Pluto is a dog. But Goofy wears clothes, drives, and talks - and Pluto just runs around, barks and wags his tail.
It's called anthropomorphism, and there is a centuries-old literary tradition of it.
I don't find it inconsistent that some Disney characters are anthropomorphic and some are just plain animals. As a kid I certainly didn't have a problem with it.
No, it wasn't. Native Americans were divided in tribes. They didn't even have the concept of land ownership, let alone of nation states. Talk about not knowing history!
There is *so much* they could do to make explicit and transparent the edits, the timeliness of added information, and many other things - to handle issues like this -
Like what? Surely if there is that much they could do, you should be able to come up with some examples.
As for transparency of edits, have you ever noticed that 'history' tab?
How is relying on Hotmail for your email service any worse than relying on Comcast.
You pay Comcast for your connection incuding email service, so you are Comcast's customer. That means, at least in theory, that Comcast has a vested interest in running your service in a way that keeps you happy. But since Comcast has a local broadband monopoly in many regions, that theory tends to break down.
Hotmail does want to keep its customers happy, but since you don't pay Hotmail a dime, their customers are advertisers. That makes you their product, and Hotmail itself merely a conduit through which the customers profit from the product. Given the nature of advertising, keeping Hotmail's customers happy is mostly incompatible with keeping Hotmail's product happy, especially in the long run.
So which is better? I'd say Comcast wins by a very slight margin as you at least retain control over your own software and data storage. I'd prefer a third option if possible: a decent ISP that is set up so that it's in their interest to serve me well.
Use the email program that came with the operating system. Some normal people still do that, not all the world has switched to Gmail and Hotmail yet.
And no, sending email via an SMTP server is not "software as a service". Besides, most ISPs run perfectly libre/open source SMTP servers.
Oh, come on. You cannot credibly feign ignorance of the fact that "free" in this context refers to freedom and not cost; it is far too well known. Please try a better troll.
...that honor actually goes to Joe's Amazing Instant Home Pages (by the same guy who was the victim of the first Joe job, henceforth named after him). Unchanged since 1996 or so. Still active (!). You get one page. No graphics except some stock ones. That's real nostalgia there.
This is why the Wikimedia Foundation has been in talks with the FSF, which resulted in a new version of the GFDL that allows dual licensing with CC-BY-SA. A proposal is now underway to make such dual licensing mandatory for all new content on Wikimedia projects.
It also means that the state can deprive you of your liberty without the necessity of convincing your fellow citizens why that is a good idea. I much prefer the concept of the jury system.
The US jury system means your fellow citizens, specifically those who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty, can convict you on gut feeling. And judges are elected so they too tend to follow popular sentiment over objective deduction. I'd rather have justice carried out by qualified professionals without political agendas.
Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
what, only 6-7 years?;-)
Yeah, I'm a newbie.:-)
There's nothing wrong with posting on the same boards for many years, as long as enough similarly-minded people stick around. Sadly, Usenet is pretty much dead nowdays anf far too many people jump on the newest fad bandwagon (such as twitter/facebook).
Usenet is one place I still hang around as well. It is actually surprisingly un-dead now that it's relatively marginal enough that the spammers mostly leave it alone. If you get a high-quality feed (text-only services such as individual.net are usually the best) you can enjoy the discussions without any spam at all. Most groups are dead, of course, but so are most websites. You just visit those that matter.
Message boards have existed since the time of the BBS. That's nothing new. But are you posting on the same message boards you were using 10 years ago? 5 years ago? Heck even 2 years ago?
Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for the extra reply. I forgot to recommend Camino which uses the Gecko rendering engine but is a real Mac application, and has built-in ad blocking.
I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.
The latestOpera still works fine on 10.3. It doesn't "look" very Mac-like but I'd call it effective.
You can also try iCab which has interesting features of its own. It uses the system WebKit engine, though, which in 10.3 is outdated.
That's interesting, I had the exact opposite feeling. Seems to me that Bing blatantly stole Google's layout: search results, preferences page, cache header are all virtually identical (except for that left margin). But on second thought, I can actually see how copying Google except for a few details makes them seem like a fake Google. They probably would have felt less spammy/fraudulent if they had actually made a whole new layout of their own.
There is no universal standard GUI toolkit on Windows either. Firefox and Opera use their own. OpenOffice.org uses its own. Even Microsoft Office uses its own. On the Mac, there is even more GUI dissonance. Current Macs make the typical Linux environment look downright uniform.
Why is this always considered a problem on Linux but not on Windows or on the Mac?
If the Chrome developers feel too constrained by GTK, they should have chosen a better toolkit, such as Qt (which, incidentally, is also popular on Windows). They can't blame their own bad choices on Linux. Their gripe sounds like the standard "how dare Linux be different from Windows and make us have to learn something new" whining.
I believe that the Linux distribution you are describing is called Slackware.
What things look like is not nearly as important for dogs as what they smell like. I assume different breeds of dogs all still smell like dogs.
It's clear and undeniable that different families have different physical attributes. It's clear and undeniable that different families have differing level of susceptibility to different diseases, conditions, etc. Is one really to believe that everything is heritable EXCEPT for anything to do with the brain...really? What makes the brain exempt from evolution and heritability?
Nice straw man. I never claimed the brain is exempt from these. My claims are that intelligence is a culturally biased concept, that intelligence tests consequently have an inherent cultural bias, and that "race" is irrelevant in determining intelligence, its correlation with culture being mere coincidence. Not a word you said has done anything to refute these claims, for which the scientific evidence is overwhelming and widely accepted.
But the death blow to your argument is that there are no races. Individual/familial genetic variation is so much greater than genetic variation between races that the latter is insignificant, making any "racial" distinction on the basis of superficial appearances such as skin colour meaningless. That makes race a purely cultural concept.
How about this--if you had said the SAT was culturally biased, you MIGHT have a point. Brainpower is brainpower.
I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I think you might be implying that brainpower is purely genetically or "racially" determined. If so, that's wrong; environmental factors including culture have everything to do with it (ref.: Nature, Nurture and Early Brain Development). It starts right in babyhood where interaction with the baby is an important factor in determining brain development. How this interaction is done is culturally determined to a high degree.
It continues through adulthood where our mode of interacting with the environment is culturally determined and determines which brain parts are stimulated and strengthened and which are not. For example, London taxi drives have enlarged hippocampuses because they have memorized the entire London street map. More generally, our visual processing capacity has been massively increased for the recent few generations due to television and the image culture; simultaneously, most of us now have the attention span of a gnat and have become impaired in our ability to read a book or otherwise stay on the same task for hours on end. Conversely, our ancestors would have considered MTV a form of visual torture; their brains couldn't possibly handle it. These are all very real aspects of biological brain development that are culturally determined. (Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains is a good social commentary on that phenomenon.)
More proof? The Flynn effect: average IQ scores worldwide tends to increase about 3 points per decade, reflecting improvement in education standards worldwide. They have to periodically recalibrate IQ tests because of that. In a more extreme example, Dutch conscripts gained 21 points in only 30 years, or 7 points per decade, between 1952 and 1982 (see the wiki article for the reference). There is no way for any of this to be caused by genetics. Genes don't change that fast.
In short, denying cultural influence on brain development is just as silly as denying genetic influence on the same. And "race" is a genetically insignificant factor compared to individual and familial genetic variation, which puts any and all nonsense about Africans being stupid due to genetic inferiority in the rubbish bin where it belongs.
As I understand it, IQ tests were largely developed by whites. You'd think that if they were biased, they'd have fiddled it so they came out on top.
It's not that conscious. No conspiracy theory is required. Cultural bias slips into IQ tests without the designers noticing, but it's a well-established fact now that it has. There are efforts to eliminate cultural bias from IQ tests but it is unlikely that this is even possible; for example, visual processing, although language-independent, is culturally determined to a massive degree. For a little background here's the same link I gave to the other guy: Intelligence across cultures (APA).
Just out of curiosity, would you say the same thing about physical attributes?
So you claim that physical attributes are related to intelligence? If not, you're off topic; if so, you're not worth arguing with. Anthropometric theories of intelligence have been utterly discredited since the 1940s.
have different levels of "intelligence" (a culturally defined and therefore biased concept)
Ridiculously silly.
Your inability to come up with any substantial response is a sign of ignorance.
You might want to educate yourself. For example: Intelligence across cultures
Correlation is not causation. Just because different "racial" groups statistically have different levels of "intelligence" (a culturally defined and therefore biased concept) doesn't mean that race has anything to do with it. The assumption that this difference is caused by "racial"/genetic factors, without offering any evidence to support that assumption, is invalid and may be considered racist.
The history of humanity suggests that culture is the overriding causal factor. Asians and Europeans are just as capable as Africans (or any other "race") of having a primitive, oppressive and destructive culture, as has been well established through the ages. For example, we saw the same abject poverty in Europe during the Middle Ages, for cultural reasons that are well known. Also, contrary to popular prejudice, there are African countries that are doing pretty well.
Sure - I've posted ideas many times, and suggested them to WPF, but the levels of red tape are absurd.
Considering you are suggesting a radical overhaul of an established community, it's hardly surprising your ideas aren't enthusiastically adopted.
The vast majority of people don't even know what a wiki really is,
If they care, they can learn. You can't cater to the ignorant. If you're suggesting edits are not transparent because the vast majority of people are too stupid to use the history tab, you're unlikely to be taken seriously.
Stop assuming each page is a linear series of edits. Use a branch and merge model or a hub and spoke model like git.
How are editors supposed to keep track of all that? They are not programmers.
Create explicit reputation systems for editors, based both on real-world credentials and on quantitative metrics of WP editing history.
Verifying real-world credentials is infeasible from a practical point of view, and quantitative metrics are completely irrelevant to quality.
Drop the assumption that democracy by plurality works (it doesn't)
That's a matter of opinion. I disagree.
and start creating clear incentives for people with experience and wisdom to contribute.
That proposal is vague enough to be meaningless. And perhaps people for whom contributing itself isn't incentive enough shouldn't be contributing anyway, as they are unlikely to produce high quality output.
Create a new view method for handling high-edit-rate sections of articles and recent edits, specifically in how the information is displayed to warn readers that sentences or paragraphs have been recently changed. Given the rich and interesting nature of how the data is collected, that it is displayed by default in plain text is missing a huge amount of very valuable info for the reader.
This is actually an interesting idea. It should be optional, though, and is mostly already available from the history tab using the 'compare versions' option.
Give up the assumption that only notable things have pages. Let everything people want have pages,
That is completely antithetical to the idea of an encyclopedia. The whole project would get bogged down with useless rubbish. Let them use myspace or facebook instead. This is not what Wikipedia is for.
just don't organize them in a way that gives them all an equal level of priority and publicity.
So you expect volunteer editors to spend hours of their free time prioritizing a sheer infinite amount of mostly useless rubbish. I don't think so.
As it is now, there is only 1 publication set of WP pages, and all pages are equivalent in that set. No need for that, really.
On the contrary, I see no need for that to change.
Don't publish all pages to the public, have sets of "preliminary" or lower quality pages available to logged in users only that over time will mature into public pages.
There is already a project for that called FlaggedRevs (google it), and several wikipedias have implemented it. But on the English-language wikipedia there has been too much resistance against it so far. Besides, this is directly contradictory to your own idea of putting "everything people want" on Wikipedia.
Start charging an optional small, monthly or annual fee, to sponsor the project, adjusted in amount for the economics of the country from which you access the site.
That is against the core mission of the project, which is spreading free knowledge free of charge.
Put messages on the site (not ads) reminding people that only through sponsorship does the service remain free - remove the messages if people pay for access.
Occasional donation drives seem to work fine, and unlike your idea are compatible with project's mission.
It's called anthropomorphism, and there is a centuries-old literary tradition of it.
I don't find it inconsistent that some Disney characters are anthropomorphic and some are just plain animals. As a kid I certainly didn't have a problem with it.
No, it wasn't. Native Americans were divided in tribes. They didn't even have the concept of land ownership, let alone of nation states. Talk about not knowing history!
Like what? Surely if there is that much they could do, you should be able to come up with some examples.
As for transparency of edits, have you ever noticed that 'history' tab?
[citation needed]
You pay Comcast for your connection incuding email service, so you are Comcast's customer. That means, at least in theory, that Comcast has a vested interest in running your service in a way that keeps you happy. But since Comcast has a local broadband monopoly in many regions, that theory tends to break down.
Hotmail does want to keep its customers happy, but since you don't pay Hotmail a dime, their customers are advertisers. That makes you their product, and Hotmail itself merely a conduit through which the customers profit from the product. Given the nature of advertising, keeping Hotmail's customers happy is mostly incompatible with keeping Hotmail's product happy, especially in the long run.
So which is better? I'd say Comcast wins by a very slight margin as you at least retain control over your own software and data storage. I'd prefer a third option if possible: a decent ISP that is set up so that it's in their interest to serve me well.
Use the email program that came with the operating system. Some normal people still do that, not all the world has switched to Gmail and Hotmail yet. And no, sending email via an SMTP server is not "software as a service". Besides, most ISPs run perfectly libre/open source SMTP servers.
Oh, come on. You cannot credibly feign ignorance of the fact that "free" in this context refers to freedom and not cost; it is far too well known. Please try a better troll.
...that honor actually goes to Joe's Amazing Instant Home Pages (by the same guy who was the victim of the first Joe job, henceforth named after him). Unchanged since 1996 or so. Still active (!). You get one page. No graphics except some stock ones. That's real nostalgia there.
That troll would have been smarter a few years ago when whitehouse.com was still actually a porn site.
which is why, like my initial post, this will be modded down to -1 TROLL in no time.
Which is why you're now at "5, Insightful". Works almost every time. Which is why your post is in fact a troll. The mods should stop falling for it.
This is why the Wikimedia Foundation has been in talks with the FSF, which resulted in a new version of the GFDL that allows dual licensing with CC-BY-SA. A proposal is now underway to make such dual licensing mandatory for all new content on Wikimedia projects.
The US jury system means your fellow citizens, specifically those who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty, can convict you on gut feeling. And judges are elected so they too tend to follow popular sentiment over objective deduction. I'd rather have justice carried out by qualified professionals without political agendas.
Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...
what, only 6-7 years? ;-)
Yeah, I'm a newbie. :-)
There's nothing wrong with posting on the same boards for many years, as long as enough similarly-minded people stick around. Sadly, Usenet is pretty much dead nowdays anf far too many people jump on the newest fad bandwagon (such as twitter/facebook).
Usenet is one place I still hang around as well. It is actually surprisingly un-dead now that it's relatively marginal enough that the spammers mostly leave it alone. If you get a high-quality feed (text-only services such as individual.net are usually the best) you can enjoy the discussions without any spam at all. Most groups are dead, of course, but so are most websites. You just visit those that matter.
Well, I'm pretty sure I've been on Slashdot for six or seven years now...