I was the principal engineer on Wikipedia Zero, and one of the top code contributors to the MediaWiki itself, first as a volunteer, and later as an employee. I think Wikipedia Zero was a great attempt at promoting open knowledge in the less developed locations. I suspect that by now it is not as critical as it once was, and it would be good for the Wikimedia foundation to focus on better allocation of funds.
That said, I do have serious concern with how WMF does its allocation and chooses its priorities. Foundation collects over $80 million a year, and employs nearly 300 people, yet the **only** team that is directly driven by the community is a tiny 10 person Community Tech team. Community tech runs community surveys, and picks just the top 10 items to work on. Think about this - foundation that was created and prospers financially due to the community's efforts only lets 3% of its work, and even less of its funds be directly driven by that same community. Instead of allocating funds based on comunity's preferences, and in the same order, WMF has choosen the order and fund allocation according to the internal goals and inside politics. The recent priority setting efforts (which took nearly a year) may change that, but the process so far has seem to be far too complex, whereas the community tech team's voting was much more straightforward and simple to follow and participate.
There is fundamentally only one reason WMF gets the $80 millions in donations -- content. People value Wikipedia's content, and wish to support that content as much as possible. Despite this, almost none of these money goes towards improvements in the content -- Wikipedia is still a wall of text with a few static images, just like it was in 2001. I am still hopeful that a more interactive content would make its way to Wikipedia pages, avoiding stagnation and keeping the whole project relevant for the future.
Wasn't something like this mentioned in one of the Ender Game's books? If I remember correctly, the queen of the buggers/formics kept altering the "antivirus" against the semi-intelligent virus found on the planet.
"Vadim Roskomnadzora Ampelonsky" -- the second word is not part of the name, that's the organization name he is working for. It should be "Vadim Ampelonsky".
I don't think we should compare BPG with JPEG, since it is very outdated. I wonder how it stacks against WebP - does it also support animation? Better compression? Licenses? Faster encoding/decoding? Browser manufacturer support? I'm all for making web more optimal, because you can never have "fast-enough" bandwidth, especially on a mobile device in bad connection area, but lets compare similar things.
Wikipedia Zero does NOT, ever, pay any ISPs anything. Frequently, you, the client, might not have any internet access on your mobile device, and yet will still be able to access Wikipedia for free. This is frequently done as a CSR initiative or other reasons by the mobile operator.
I am part of the Wikipedia Zero initiative, and we need to ensure that http://m.wikipedia.org/ runs on ALL platforms, including the mostly forgotten flip phones with no JavaScript. Which obviously presents the problem of testing. There are some sites (we have an account with one of them) that provides multi-platform testing, but all that means is multiple flavors of Android & IOS... with possibly the latest BB thrown in. Unfortunately, the bigger problem is the older devices, where capabilities were much more varied. One day I hope we can have access to the most commonly used labs testing, including various Nokias, etc. Hoping...
"Physics" is a fairly artificial concept of separation of knowledge - after all, knowledge is just one. Our brains, on the other hand, are too tiny to fit all of it in. We started learning about surroundings "midway", e.g. F=ma - basic physical phenomenon, and from there started moving towards the very small (quarks), very large (galaxies), and much more complex - chemistry, biology. I think the discoveries tend to go in waves, and when there is an imbalance of knowledge, the area at the bottom shoots up. For example - enough data accumulated and enough mathematical tools were developed to boost physics and chemistry, which helped with computers, which in turn boosted biology. Next step - exact predictions of social sciences, terraforming,... Time to travel far far away.
P.S. Even though I couldn't find who was the original author, my physics teacher once told me that when governor visited Franklin's lab, and was shown all the electrical research, he wondered what was the purpose... to which Franklin replied "Physicists will tinker with it for a bit, and later you will start taxing it". It might have been someone else of course, but does not change the point - something gets discovered, and later it becomes ubiquitous in our everyday life.
The raw speed of the code might actually diminish since the.net runtime could have optimized it better for the specific environment (CPU model, available RAM, phase of the moon, etc). On the other hand, the startup would benefit - no more need to just-in-time compile. Plus there is no need for memory to compile it. On the other hand, the runtime might use some cycles to further optimize code during execution, whereas with this approach the code won't change any further. In any case, great for instant startup, but I suspect conceptually this is not much different from the older binary pre-compiled cached versions of the assemblies.
Thekohser, thanks for the reply, could you point me to the correct info? I only found http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... and that doc is not trivial, so any help explaining your position would greatly help. Where do 49+% go? Is it the same for all non-profits or non-profits in the same sector (if there is such a division). Thank you!
Disclaimer - I work for the Wikimedia foundation, but expressing my own opinion.
Donations go to the Wikimedia Foundation, covering various technology/organizational costs, but the foundation is not involved in the actual editing or reviewing process - that has always been done exclusivelly by the community. Donations would never affect the content of an article simply because its a different group of people - those who receive the money spend it on internet/development/building/conferences, while volonteers independently decide what should stay and in what form. An analogy here would be donating money to ISP to support the service, while abusing one of the web sites on the web.
This seems to talk purely about virtual servers, not hardware. Everything above hardware is nothing but programs, even if we call them virtual PCs. They only differ in the level of integration with the rest of the machine and peripheral devices. For example, javascript running in a browser could be considered as much of a virtual pc as Oracle's VirtualBox, with the only difference being the interface with which internal code communicates with the outside. Chrome's native client (NaCl) ability to run native code without any interpretation while still maintain complete isolation from the OS and other processes is the best example of complete virtualization.
MediaWiki developers are almost ready for Lua scripting to be enabled for all Wikipedia and related sites, and It has already been deployed to http://mediawiki.org./ Lua was chosen mostly because of how easy it is to sandbox and limit memory consumption.
I have had my AP open for almost a year in the middle of New York, and there are usually 10-20 mobile and other users connected. And even though I have assigned the highest priority to my own computer, sometimes network slows down considerably. It might be the "wonderful" TimeWarner messing up as usual, but it could also be some torrent usage which I would rather keep off. Sadly, specifically my revision of the linksys router does not run dd-wrt or any other open stacks, so I have no way to do any custom magic without router upgrade. And even if I do buy a new router, I don't think it is easy to filter torrent traffic. Plus I would really love to have an encrypted portion of my network for my own devices, as cookie stealing is fairly common and easy to do.
The reasoning on Intel's part seems to be that unless the laptop gains as much usability and "coolness" factor as the recent tablets have, Intel will be looking at a considerable laptop market shrinkage. And since Intel is by far better positioned in the laptop as oppose to tablet market, it is as critical for them as it is for Microsoft.
On the other hand, what Intel seems to be missing is that the screen resolution also plays a significant role in user's device appreciation. Microsoft does not seem to have as much say about this (strangely), but Intel could have added minimum resolution to the list of their requirements.
I learnt it during a summer internship in about a week, and never looked back to qwerty. This is purely a preference, and I heard both positives (speed) and negatives (fingers don't move as much so causes more rep strain injuries). It def improved my overall typing speed, but caused some grief when using CTRL+ZXCV and also in various games with one hand on keyboard (usually switch back to qwerty for them). You won't have as much problem switching because you already got the motorics skills down, just need to have the new layout in your head. Btw, switching back and forth between layouts takes about a few seconds for my head.
I am very confused. Should I love Apple or hate Apple? Should I feel sorry or angry about Samsung?
I am a simple individual, without many thoughts of my own, and I need guidance. When you say Apple's patent that got them $1 billion from Samsung is a bad thingtm and got invalidated - everyone seem to rejoice. Now you claim EU, which we all thought protected us from all the evils, is suing Samsung. Please please please, just say how we are suppose to feel towards these two behemoth.
A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes, and needs a new inventory system. Quickbooks just doesn't cut the load and such large inventories. Ideally, it should be an open source solution, either LAN or web-based, with very comprehensive inventory management and customer relationship management, barcode reading/printing, possibly unique ID (serial number) generation, and ideally some accounting/quickbooks integration.
Has anyone dealt with such systems? Any recomendations? Many thanks.
No no, its not about the strikes, its how many results you will get when searching! Goooogle = humongously too many, whereas usually you just need the one!
In the latest news, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are to be outlawed in the new law against piracy. Promoted by RIAA & MPAA, the bill named Pirates-Copy-Paste (PCP) will help fight piracy by not allowing pirates to create a perfect digital replica of the original. Disabling copy/paste will also teach kids early on that if you create something, it should be fully yours, and not based on works of others...
Just spent an hour on the phone with Verizon, speaking with
Verizon Wireless - Katie (refused to give either last name or her employee ID) Katie had absolutely no information on the next version releases, nor did she have any way to send request for this to be implemented. She called Motorola support @ 800-734-5870 with me on the line:
@Motorola: Kent, employee #352669 created a case ref # 111217-009859 No information yet except for the models provided, supervisor refused to speak with me on the phone.
Apparently just a run-around, without any info. I'm thinking of switching to another carrier/manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
None of the editors have ever been "hired"... Hard to fire someone if you haven't been paying them to begin with...
I was the principal engineer on Wikipedia Zero, and one of the top code contributors to the MediaWiki itself, first as a volunteer, and later as an employee. I think Wikipedia Zero was a great attempt at promoting open knowledge in the less developed locations. I suspect that by now it is not as critical as it once was, and it would be good for the Wikimedia foundation to focus on better allocation of funds.
That said, I do have serious concern with how WMF does its allocation and chooses its priorities. Foundation collects over $80 million a year, and employs nearly 300 people, yet the **only** team that is directly driven by the community is a tiny 10 person Community Tech team. Community tech runs community surveys, and picks just the top 10 items to work on. Think about this - foundation that was created and prospers financially due to the community's efforts only lets 3% of its work, and even less of its funds be directly driven by that same community. Instead of allocating funds based on comunity's preferences, and in the same order, WMF has choosen the order and fund allocation according to the internal goals and inside politics. The recent priority setting efforts (which took nearly a year) may change that, but the process so far has seem to be far too complex, whereas the community tech team's voting was much more straightforward and simple to follow and participate.
There is fundamentally only one reason WMF gets the $80 millions in donations -- content. People value Wikipedia's content, and wish to support that content as much as possible. Despite this, almost none of these money goes towards improvements in the content -- Wikipedia is still a wall of text with a few static images, just like it was in 2001. I am still hopeful that a more interactive content would make its way to Wikipedia pages, avoiding stagnation and keeping the whole project relevant for the future.
Wasn't something like this mentioned in one of the Ender Game's books? If I remember correctly, the queen of the buggers/formics kept altering the "antivirus" against the semi-intelligent virus found on the planet.
"Vadim Roskomnadzora Ampelonsky" -- the second word is not part of the name, that's the organization name he is working for. It should be "Vadim Ampelonsky".
I don't think we should compare BPG with JPEG, since it is very outdated. I wonder how it stacks against WebP - does it also support animation? Better compression? Licenses? Faster encoding/decoding? Browser manufacturer support? I'm all for making web more optimal, because you can never have "fast-enough" bandwidth, especially on a mobile device in bad connection area, but lets compare similar things.
Wikipedia Zero does NOT, ever, pay any ISPs anything. Frequently, you, the client, might not have any internet access on your mobile device, and yet will still be able to access Wikipedia for free. This is frequently done as a CSR initiative or other reasons by the mobile operator.
I am part of the Wikipedia Zero initiative, and we need to ensure that http://m.wikipedia.org/ runs on ALL platforms, including the mostly forgotten flip phones with no JavaScript. Which obviously presents the problem of testing. There are some sites (we have an account with one of them) that provides multi-platform testing, but all that means is multiple flavors of Android & IOS... with possibly the latest BB thrown in. Unfortunately, the bigger problem is the older devices, where capabilities were much more varied. One day I hope we can have access to the most commonly used labs testing, including various Nokias, etc. Hoping...
"Physics" is a fairly artificial concept of separation of knowledge - after all, knowledge is just one. Our brains, on the other hand, are too tiny to fit all of it in. We started learning about surroundings "midway", e.g. F=ma - basic physical phenomenon, and from there started moving towards the very small (quarks), very large (galaxies), and much more complex - chemistry, biology. I think the discoveries tend to go in waves, and when there is an imbalance of knowledge, the area at the bottom shoots up. For example - enough data accumulated and enough mathematical tools were developed to boost physics and chemistry, which helped with computers, which in turn boosted biology. Next step - exact predictions of social sciences, terraforming, ... Time to travel far far away.
P.S. Even though I couldn't find who was the original author, my physics teacher once told me that when governor visited Franklin's lab, and was shown all the electrical research, he wondered what was the purpose... to which Franklin replied "Physicists will tinker with it for a bit, and later you will start taxing it". It might have been someone else of course, but does not change the point - something gets discovered, and later it becomes ubiquitous in our everyday life.
The raw speed of the code might actually diminish since the .net runtime could have optimized it better for the specific environment (CPU model, available RAM, phase of the moon, etc). On the other hand, the startup would benefit - no more need to just-in-time compile. Plus there is no need for memory to compile it. On the other hand, the runtime might use some cycles to further optimize code during execution, whereas with this approach the code won't change any further. In any case, great for instant startup, but I suspect conceptually this is not much different from the older binary pre-compiled cached versions of the assemblies.
Current:
* http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Older (after AirFrance disaster)
* http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
* http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07...
Thekohser, thanks for the reply, could you point me to the correct info? I only found http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... and that doc is not trivial, so any help explaining your position would greatly help. Where do 49+% go? Is it the same for all non-profits or non-profits in the same sector (if there is such a division). Thank you!
Disclaimer - I work for the Wikimedia foundation, but expressing my own opinion.
Donations go to the Wikimedia Foundation, covering various technology/organizational costs, but the foundation is not involved in the actual editing or reviewing process - that has always been done exclusivelly by the community. Donations would never affect the content of an article simply because its a different group of people - those who receive the money spend it on internet/development/building/conferences, while volonteers independently decide what should stay and in what form. An analogy here would be donating money to ISP to support the service, while abusing one of the web sites on the web.
if a plane stops midflight, it might crash... costing waay more than a $100K...
This seems to talk purely about virtual servers, not hardware. Everything above hardware is nothing but programs, even if we call them virtual PCs. They only differ in the level of integration with the rest of the machine and peripheral devices. For example, javascript running in a browser could be considered as much of a virtual pc as Oracle's VirtualBox, with the only difference being the interface with which internal code communicates with the outside. Chrome's native client (NaCl) ability to run native code without any interpretation while still maintain complete isolation from the OS and other processes is the best example of complete virtualization.
MediaWiki developers are almost ready for Lua scripting to be enabled for all Wikipedia and related sites, and It has already been deployed to http://mediawiki.org./ Lua was chosen mostly because of how easy it is to sandbox and limit memory consumption.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Lua_scripting/Tutorial -- Introduction
I have had my AP open for almost a year in the middle of New York, and there are usually 10-20 mobile and other users connected. And even though I have assigned the highest priority to my own computer, sometimes network slows down considerably. It might be the "wonderful" TimeWarner messing up as usual, but it could also be some torrent usage which I would rather keep off. Sadly, specifically my revision of the linksys router does not run dd-wrt or any other open stacks, so I have no way to do any custom magic without router upgrade. And even if I do buy a new router, I don't think it is easy to filter torrent traffic. Plus I would really love to have an encrypted portion of my network for my own devices, as cookie stealing is fairly common and easy to do.
Any recommendations? Thanks!
The reasoning on Intel's part seems to be that unless the laptop gains as much usability and "coolness" factor as the recent tablets have, Intel will be looking at a considerable laptop market shrinkage. And since Intel is by far better positioned in the laptop as oppose to tablet market, it is as critical for them as it is for Microsoft.
On the other hand, what Intel seems to be missing is that the screen resolution also plays a significant role in user's device appreciation. Microsoft does not seem to have as much say about this (strangely), but Intel could have added minimum resolution to the list of their requirements.
I learnt it during a summer internship in about a week, and never looked back to qwerty. This is purely a preference, and I heard both positives (speed) and negatives (fingers don't move as much so causes more rep strain injuries). It def improved my overall typing speed, but caused some grief when using CTRL+ZXCV and also in various games with one hand on keyboard (usually switch back to qwerty for them). You won't have as much problem switching because you already got the motorics skills down, just need to have the new layout in your head. Btw, switching back and forth between layouts takes about a few seconds for my head.
Its funny how a comment that was meant as a joke got flagged as flamebait. Guess my sarcasm and jokes are not ./ friendly :(
Dear Slashdot,
I am very confused. Should I love Apple or hate Apple? Should I feel sorry or angry about Samsung?
I am a simple individual, without many thoughts of my own, and I need guidance. When you say Apple's patent that got them $1 billion from Samsung is a bad thingtm and got invalidated - everyone seem to rejoice. Now you claim EU, which we all thought protected us from all the evils, is suing Samsung. Please please please, just say how we are suppose to feel towards these two behemoth.
Sincerely,
a humble little me.
Could you give a link? I couldn't find it. Thanks!
A friend of mine has a small business selling specialized shoes, and needs a new inventory system. Quickbooks just doesn't cut the load and such large inventories. Ideally, it should be an open source solution, either LAN or web-based, with very comprehensive inventory management and customer relationship management, barcode reading/printing, possibly unique ID (serial number) generation, and ideally some accounting/quickbooks integration.
Has anyone dealt with such systems? Any recomendations? Many thanks.
No no, its not about the strikes, its how many results you will get when searching! Goooogle = humongously too many, whereas usually you just need the one!
In the latest news, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are to be outlawed in the new law against piracy.
Promoted by RIAA & MPAA, the bill named Pirates-Copy-Paste (PCP) will help fight piracy by not allowing pirates to create a perfect digital replica of the original. Disabling copy/paste will also teach kids early on that if you create something, it should be fully yours, and not based on works of others...
Just spent an hour on the phone with Verizon, speaking with
Verizon Wireless - Katie (refused to give either last name or her employee ID)
Katie had absolutely no information on the next version releases, nor did she have any way to send request for this to be implemented. She called Motorola support @ 800-734-5870 with me on the line:
@Motorola: Kent, employee #352669 created a case ref # 111217-009859
No information yet except for the models provided, supervisor refused to speak with me on the phone.
Apparently just a run-around, without any info. I'm thinking of switching to another carrier/manufacturer.