This came up all the time in pre-web days, when newspapers or Yellow Pages neglected to run ads people had taken out. Their liability has always been limited to returning the advertising fee. I remember one case about 10 years ago, when REI Coop failed to get their ad included in Silicon Valley area Yellow Pages for two years in a row. They lost a lot business, and in fact ended up closing two of their stores in the area. REI sued, of course, but got nothing beyond a refund.
I would consider that based upon fit for purpose, the interpretation of excellence could be made.
"Fit for purpose"? It's a fucking reference. How can a reference be "fit for purpose" if you the reliability of its material is totally unpredictable? Popularity has nothing to do with that. Next you'll be telling me Brittany Spears is the greatest singer in human history!
... I was going for humourous, not patronising, but tone is usually misinterpreted on the internet...
And elsewhere. People don't usually intend to sound patronizing.
...I had no way of knowing that you are an active participant...
The fact that I was talking about collaboration issues didn't give you a clue?
But the final articles, as we all know, tend to be reasonably high-quality, full of information, and more-or-less reliable.
"Tend to be"? "More-or-less"? This is supposed to be an encyclopedia, an online reference. That means hitting a certain level of quality consistently, not just most of the time.
Now, when I participated in Wikipedia, I had some hopes of addressing these issues. But most contributors don't give a shit, and never will until somebody says, "Cite your sources, or forget about contributing." That means a fundamental change in the way Wikipedia works. Which was the whole point of my criticism.
I spoke too soon in my previously reply. When I logged out from Yahoo, it did indeed identify my city (San Jose) correctly. But as an experiment, I logged into the system in L.A. that hosts my web site, and used lynx to bring up the web page. Instead of the L.A. news, I got:
Local News (BETA)
Change Location *
Source Name
More of what you want.
Sign in to add your favorite news sources from around the web here. For example, popular Local News sources are BBC News, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com. > Sign in now
Enter a U.S. ZIP Code or City and State to see local news ____________________ [ulm_btn_22px_l.gif] Go [X] Make this the default location for Yahoo!
Obviously they have a cookie for Yahoo users who don't sign in. Probably gets set when you do things like yellow pages searchs or maps. No reverse DNS. Not suprising — that wouldn't be accurate enough to be useful.
I stand corrected. But my being wrong about one issue reinforces what I said about the other: you can't browse the web without a web site tracing back your IP. If you're that concerned about privacy, you shouldn't use the web at all. Or use it through an anonymiser — assuming you trust the anonymization service! If you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't.
Well, you may think there's an obvious connection, as do I, but there are still many doubters. The article (which the Slashdot headline, as usual, mischaracterizes) simply reports that there's a little more evidence on one side of the argument.
Of course, it's all irrelevent if you're already convinced that this whole global warming thing is just a fantasy by tree-huggers and Bush-haters (no pun intended).
Well, the CPU drain is not that big a deal. And if you don't want a distraction, why do you even have the page up? But I do agree that those auto-cycle news applets are a pain — they make sites harder to browse.
What they're trying to do, of course, is get our attention. A better way would be to stop giving us dense lists of headlines, and actually present the first paragraph or two of each news story so we can decide for ourself whether to read the rest. Every high-school journalism student knows about the inverted pyramid. Why don't the folks who design news web sites?
RTFP dude. This service is available to signed-in users. Who have voluntarily given up their zip codes. No reverse DNS required. Anyway, if you consider somebody figuring out from reverse DNS where you live an invasion of privacy, you shouldn't access any web site.
But that's just bullshit. There are many reasons to worry about your privacy. The fact that web sites know the zip code you live in is just not one of them. So what if they know that you're an overprivileged type from 90210 or a blue-collar hispanic from 95112? Hardly a first step to finding all about you.
Incidentally, 95112 happens to be my zip code, and the databases actually do have this area classified as bch. Not that this classification actually describes me....
Why is this worthy of our attention? All they did was was create a new box that aggregates headlines form news sources near your zip code. Not exactly rocket science.
First off, I wasn't talking about the quality of the content, I was talking about the broken process that produces it.
But let's talk about the content.
You're the second person in this thread to insist that Wikipedia is "excellent", but neither of you give any evidence to support this assertion. Which I guess is consistent: few contributers to Wikipedia give a shit about documenting their sources.
There is a lot of good stuff on Wikipedia. There's also a lot of crap. Sure, there's more good stuff than crap, but that's not enough for a serious reference work. That requires that you know that what you're reading is documented properly. Pick a random article, and you don't know whether the content is a summary of various respected books, or something somebody saw on TV. The best you can say is that Wikipedia is fun for browsing — if the occassional muddled prose and misstated fact doesn't turn your stomach.
Finally, spare us the "if you think you can do better" copout. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn't — give me a $700,000 annual budget and I'd certainly give it a good try. But my abilities aren't the issue. Consumers have a right to complain about produceers. You don't have to be a chicken to complain about rotten eggs.
You're right, Google doesn't have the lockin with their search engine that Microsoft has with all the software that people can't move away from. I'm dubious that anyone will be able to reproduce Google's success with search engine technology, but it's always possible.
But that's all beside the point. I wasn't claiming that Google would always dominate searching the way Microsoft seems destined to always dominate PC software. I was simply pointing out that Google, like Microsoft, doesn't have to pay for their mistakes — they have enough cash coming in so they're not in trouble when they screw up. And they have screwed up.
Not in the same way Microsoft has, of course. Microsoft screws up with bad QA, mind-boggling feature bloat, and the odd product nobody could possibly want. The computer geniuses at Google have more professional pride than that. Their products are well tested, unbloated, and extremely useful — they just never seem to finish them.
The "Slashdot spin"? If Slashdot editors were sophisticated enough for "spin" they'd write their headlines a lot more carefully.
I think when you say "spin" you really mean "bias". Which goes with the usual assumption that when a news source reports something people don't like it's evidence of "bias." And of course, the opposite of "biased" is "fair".
That's a patronizing, kneejerk comment. It doesn't respond to any of the reasons I give why Wikipedia doesn't work (or at least doesn't work very well). And it ignore the fact that all my criticisms come from participating in Wikipedia editing.
Ever read about the writing of the U.S. Constitution? Those guys argued and agonized about how they were going to set up a true democracy that wasn't just mob rule. The didn't exactly do a perfect job, but they did suprisingly well.
My big gripe with Wikipedia is that it just takes it for granted that everybody wants to work together to create an optimal result. I'm not just talking about pranksters and vandals. I'm talking about people who aren't really interested in collaboration — they have a certain notion of what Wikipedia should be, and they're not interested in anything that contradicts that.
In any social system, somebody has to have the last word. In a hierachy, it's the folks on top. In a true democracy, it's something resembling a consensus. In mob rule, it's whoever's the biggest bully. Wikipedia seems to combine the worst aspects of all three!
If "bright future" means technical excellence, then of course this is obvious bullshit. But if it means 90% of the user base, then I'm afraid it's a foregone conclusion.
The thing is when you're a company like Microsoft and you've got this huge, unstoppable cash flow: you never really have to pay for your mistakes. Which makes it hard for you to stop making them. I hate to be the one to point this out, but Google has the same problem!
I'm not into online gaming, but from where I sit, your banning was fair. Here's why.
First of all, forget about WINE. That's not what they mean by "external software". They probably didn't even know you were running WINE until you told them. "External software" means that you had handed off control of your character to a software entity.
As indeed you had: the pre-programed key sequences in your keyboard. Of course, that's nowhere near as sophisticated as a true bot, but it still gives you a big advantage.
Then again, they probably don't care about programmable keyboards per se. It's just that the only way they can tell if somebody's using a bot is to look for bot-like behavior. Standing in one place, doing the same thing over and over, and doing it faster than a human hand could manage — that's clearly bot-like behavior. So don't act like a bot, and you'll be OK.
This was obviously written by the lawyers. Pretty meaningless.
Notice that most input devices you buy these days comes with a little leaflet on ergonomics that nobody reads. Why do they bother? Because when you get RSI and sue them, they can say, "Hey, did you read the leaflet?"
Slashdot Mirror
This came up all the time in pre-web days, when newspapers or Yellow Pages neglected to run ads people had taken out. Their liability has always been limited to returning the advertising fee. I remember one case about 10 years ago, when REI Coop failed to get their ad included in Silicon Valley area Yellow Pages for two years in a row. They lost a lot business, and in fact ended up closing two of their stores in the area. REI sued, of course, but got nothing beyond a refund.
To be honest, I missed the little biblical reference at the end of the parent post. So I deserved the "redundant" mods.
Now, when I participated in Wikipedia, I had some hopes of addressing these issues. But most contributors don't give a shit, and never will until somebody says, "Cite your sources, or forget about contributing." That means a fundamental change in the way Wikipedia works. Which was the whole point of my criticism.
Uh, no, since every politician these days campaigns as a "Washington outsider". Including Bush, who's a third-generation federal politician!
Microsoft giveth, and Microsoft taketh away. Blessed be the name of Microsoft!
But why on earth did o_o replace :). Less cute?
Smilies have gotten out of hand. I used to be able to decode a smily just by tilting my head. But what is a <3 or a o_o supposed to look like?
I stand corrected. But my being wrong about one issue reinforces what I said about the other: you can't browse the web without a web site tracing back your IP. If you're that concerned about privacy, you shouldn't use the web at all. Or use it through an anonymiser — assuming you trust the anonymization service! If you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't.
Of course, it's all irrelevent if you're already convinced that this whole global warming thing is just a fantasy by tree-huggers and Bush-haters (no pun intended).
What they're trying to do, of course, is get our attention. A better way would be to stop giving us dense lists of headlines, and actually present the first paragraph or two of each news story so we can decide for ourself whether to read the rest. Every high-school journalism student knows about the inverted pyramid. Why don't the folks who design news web sites?
You laugh, but have you ever seen a sampede of news? Nothing funny about that!
But that's just bullshit. There are many reasons to worry about your privacy. The fact that web sites know the zip code you live in is just not one of them. So what if they know that you're an overprivileged type from 90210 or a blue-collar hispanic from 95112? Hardly a first step to finding all about you.
Incidentally, 95112 happens to be my zip code, and the databases actually do have this area classified as bch. Not that this classification actually describes me....
Why is this worthy of our attention? All they did was was create a new box that aggregates headlines form news sources near your zip code. Not exactly rocket science.
But let's talk about the content. You're the second person in this thread to insist that Wikipedia is "excellent", but neither of you give any evidence to support this assertion. Which I guess is consistent: few contributers to Wikipedia give a shit about documenting their sources.
There is a lot of good stuff on Wikipedia. There's also a lot of crap. Sure, there's more good stuff than crap, but that's not enough for a serious reference work. That requires that you know that what you're reading is documented properly. Pick a random article, and you don't know whether the content is a summary of various respected books, or something somebody saw on TV. The best you can say is that Wikipedia is fun for browsing — if the occassional muddled prose and misstated fact doesn't turn your stomach.
Finally, spare us the "if you think you can do better" copout. Maybe I could, maybe I couldn't — give me a $700,000 annual budget and I'd certainly give it a good try. But my abilities aren't the issue. Consumers have a right to complain about produceers. You don't have to be a chicken to complain about rotten eggs.
But that's all beside the point. I wasn't claiming that Google would always dominate searching the way Microsoft seems destined to always dominate PC software. I was simply pointing out that Google, like Microsoft, doesn't have to pay for their mistakes — they have enough cash coming in so they're not in trouble when they screw up. And they have screwed up.
Not in the same way Microsoft has, of course. Microsoft screws up with bad QA, mind-boggling feature bloat, and the odd product nobody could possibly want. The computer geniuses at Google have more professional pride than that. Their products are well tested, unbloated, and extremely useful — they just never seem to finish them.
I think when you say "spin" you really mean "bias". Which goes with the usual assumption that when a news source reports something people don't like it's evidence of "bias." And of course, the opposite of "biased" is "fair".
That's a patronizing, kneejerk comment. It doesn't respond to any of the reasons I give why Wikipedia doesn't work (or at least doesn't work very well). And it ignore the fact that all my criticisms come from participating in Wikipedia editing.
My big gripe with Wikipedia is that it just takes it for granted that everybody wants to work together to create an optimal result. I'm not just talking about pranksters and vandals. I'm talking about people who aren't really interested in collaboration — they have a certain notion of what Wikipedia should be, and they're not interested in anything that contradicts that.
In any social system, somebody has to have the last word. In a hierachy, it's the folks on top. In a true democracy, it's something resembling a consensus. In mob rule, it's whoever's the biggest bully. Wikipedia seems to combine the worst aspects of all three!
The thing is when you're a company like Microsoft and you've got this huge, unstoppable cash flow: you never really have to pay for your mistakes. Which makes it hard for you to stop making them. I hate to be the one to point this out, but Google has the same problem!
First of all, forget about WINE. That's not what they mean by "external software". They probably didn't even know you were running WINE until you told them. "External software" means that you had handed off control of your character to a software entity.
As indeed you had: the pre-programed key sequences in your keyboard. Of course, that's nowhere near as sophisticated as a true bot, but it still gives you a big advantage.
Then again, they probably don't care about programmable keyboards per se. It's just that the only way they can tell if somebody's using a bot is to look for bot-like behavior. Standing in one place, doing the same thing over and over, and doing it faster than a human hand could manage — that's clearly bot-like behavior. So don't act like a bot, and you'll be OK.
Jeez, learn to read. In happened in another book!
Notice that most input devices you buy these days comes with a little leaflet on ergonomics that nobody reads. Why do they bother? Because when you get RSI and sue them, they can say, "Hey, did you read the leaflet?"