So as the Linux advocate pointed out, if Sun were to use their experience to add the features to Linux, with the requisite due diligence in making sure they don't break everything, t's likely Linus would integrate the features.
This is precisely the point that's under debate, and baldly asserting it does not count as debating it.
It's really typical how this Greg guy doesn't actually address the points that the Solaris guy makes. Let's paraphrase:
Eric: "The core Linux developers don't see the value of features X, Y and Z, so the Linux kernel won't get those features integrated to the main tree."
Greg: "Hey, Linux has X, Y and Z! You just need to get a third-party patch to the kernel!"
Get your ass whomped for 4 years in a engineering program, while all your friends slide by as buisness majors.
I bet you're one of those people who believe that, since you're an engineer, you could easily do an MBA's job. After all, you're smarter, because you're an engineer.
The problem is that your comment is saying the exact same thing as the code in question. One of the most useful principles in programming is "Don't Repeat Yourself": if you find yourself having to maintain two separate representations of the same fact, you're doing something wrong.
In the current case, we want to use the more convenient notation for these computations (the plain old mathematical notiation) as the canonical one, and somehow get from it to the executable code. The best solution is to have it happen automatically, i.e., to have some program that will convert "a + b / c" into the program you want. This can be done directly (use a computer language with appropriate features), or indirectly (use a preprocessor to automatically convert the good notation into the java code, and then compile the latter).
Your solution involves (a) writing the same thing twice manually, (b) having the easy, desired notation be a comment, and thus not be the one that's converted into executable code; (c) have the process of translating the friendly notation to the unfriendly one be done manually, one time after the other.
Yeah, but nowhere did I suggest duplicating the code.
But my point is that in this case the comment should be the code. If what's written in your comment needs to be translated manually into something else, then you should write code to translate it automatically.
The problem is that the slogan is just plain wrong on many levels:
The "eyeballs" are not actually looking at every article with the same amount of attention.
Programming and expository writing can by no means be reduced to "finding bugs" or "finding errors". In particular, both require some form of design work. Multiplying the number of uncoordinated people sticking their hands into code or text results in less design. The reason why so many Wikipedia articles read like 6 paragraphs written by 6 different people without regard for acheiving a unified article is that, indeed, that's how the "article" was written.
2) Most people using wikipedia would recognize it as violating NPOV (neutral point of view)
You're assuming too much. For example, you're assuming that anybody will notice. I've seen at least one article where exactly what the poster fears happens: a group of people with a political agenda come over and edit it to fit them. If the topic is obscure enough, they can get away with it quite easily.
4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back.
You're failing to take something into account: the "maintainers" have more time and resources to spend on a small set of articles than any other people involved. Multiply the number of maintainers, spread them out across all sorts of obscure topics, and make their distortions subtle enough, and you have an unsolveable problem in your hands.
Do you really think a "normal" encyclopedia can't be wrong? At least with Wikipedia, articles are constantly checked and updated.
Do you really think that real encyclopedias are not under constant revision?
Sometime during the 70's, my parents bought a World Book encyclopedia set. These encyclopedias were edited in a yearly basis; and the company also put out a yearbook each year, with (a) a summary of the developments over that year for major topics; (b) the new articles from that year's edition of the encyclopedia; (c) stickers for you to put in your edition, indicating a newer article available in the yearbook.
And your assertion that Wikipedia articles are constantly checked and updated is profoundly misleading. It's happening in a random fashion, and it's skewed towards an ill-defined set of the articles.
And of course, articles in a real encyclopedia have errors. But there's a fundamental difference here-- systematic review (while in Wikipedia it's haphazard), and accountability for errors (which Wikipedia doesn't offer).
Take for example a article about the city where I live. For most (or all) cities there are lists of famous people from that city. I noticed some obscure, but a few notable, people were left out. All I had to do was stick them in there with a few brackets around their names and Viola!
And then the people from the next three towns in either direction of the road go and do the same, because you all claim to have been the birthplace of this famous person.
And what makes you trust the research of, say, Encyclopedia Britannica?
The fact that their articles are generallly written by experts in the relevant topic, who sign their name to it, and reviewed by a number of other experts.
Hell, Britannica is the encyclopedia that, when they wanted an article on Phenomenology, they commissioned Husserl.
The lesson that all these Wikipedians seem to be trying to teach me is that, if there is a problem with Wikipedia, it's *my* fault, not Wikipedia's.
I tend to think that the burden of proof is on the wikipedia condemners to show that it's decidedly *worse* than proprietary solutions.
I'm sorry, but it's Wikipedia that advertises itself as being better than real encyclopedias, on the supposed grounds that it allows anybody to create and edit articles at any time. That is a fantastic claim, one which requires a lot of evidence to be believed.
Some of the sites that copy the content do not attribute it. And, it's hard to predict when a search will get you a bunch of Wikipedia redistributors anyway. The process is: (a) submit search, (b) see a whole page of identical results full of wikipedia copy sites (and no wikipedia in the first page of results!), give the "-wikipedia", then you just get like 5 such sites.
One misorganized article filled with half-truths and omissions, written by people who don't know better, overrides three well-written articles. Misinformation is far more costly than lack of information. This is one of the reasons that a real encyclopedia has far fewer articles than the Wikipedia-- because editing means not letting crap into the work.
If you just want to read and blindly believe what you're told, Wikipedia isn't for you.
How am I supposed in general to judge the content of an article that I consulted precisely because I know hardly anything of the topic at hand?
At any rate, inaccuracies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to low quality in Wikipedia. Far worse are omissions (it is possible to write something that says nothing but truths, but leaves out crucial bits that result in crass misinterpretation), and just plain bad writing and organization. There are countless Wikipedia articles that look like a dozen persons just wrote adjacent paragraphs independently of each other (because, in fact, the "article" came to exist in exactly that way!).
But, anyone really interested usually knows a lot of the subject before checking the new information.
So I guess if I don't know anything about topic X, I'm just screwed, because anything I ever come across about X will require me to know X already to understand it. (Sounds like my job, but what the hell.)
How good? In many cases better than proprietary solutions.
And you arrived at this conclusion exactly how?
Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia-- because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.
The poster you respond to links to a piece on how somebody managed to vandalize a Wikipedia article really easily and go undetected, and you respond with a canned "vandalism in Wikipedia gets corrected quickly" response.
It's even worse, because the piece that the poster linked was written to debunk the sort of canned response that you offer. To rephrase the "discussion":
[Grandparent poster]: "Contrary to Wikipedia zealots' insistence that vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly, I can demonstrate that it's really easy to do it in such a way that survives for many days."
[You]: "Vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly!"
It is hardly surprising to know that all of the vandalism that is *found* is fixed quickly.
The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article? That's the question that you'll see all the fanatics avoid frantically, either by pretending to have answered it ("it gets better all the time"), by blaming the critic ("that's *your* fault for not spending 3 hours a week editing Wikipedia!"), or just saying something completely unrelated ("...whenever somebody notices obvious vandalism 5 minutes after the fact, they revert it right away").
If your expected use is constrained enough, you can probably get away with writing some sort of simple code generator. You parse algebraic expressions, generate an abstract syntax tree, and use that tree to spit out appropriate java code.
I think the quality of the articles matter more than the mass. A smaller number of good, well-edited articles on topics that people actually care about would be better.
The worst part of the whole thing is how Wikipedia is gradually making so many Google searches useless. More and more i find myself typing some term into Google, and getting back a number of "reference" sites that simply grab all the content from Wikipedia and slap advertisements on. Sometimes the whole first page of Google results is like this recently. Aaargh.
Obviously a sorter needs to know how to compare values against each other: it needs, in short, to be able to turn anything into a string.
I'm sorry, but those are not equivalent statements at all. In most (decent) languages, you implement a sort order simply by providing an arbitrary function (or class, or object, or closure, or whatever) that compares two objects. Hardly ever do you need to convert them to strings.
Not to mention that even string sorting is done this way-- you don't sort strings in the same order in Spanish and English, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
They do it to piss you off. No, really.
So as the Linux advocate pointed out, if Sun were to use their experience to add the features to Linux, with the requisite due diligence in making sure they don't break everything, t's likely Linus would integrate the features. This is precisely the point that's under debate, and baldly asserting it does not count as debating it.
Eric: "The core Linux developers don't see the value of features X, Y and Z, so the Linux kernel won't get those features integrated to the main tree."
Greg: "Hey, Linux has X, Y and Z! You just need to get a third-party patch to the kernel!"
'Nuff said.
I bet you're one of those people who believe that, since you're an engineer, you could easily do an MBA's job. After all, you're smarter, because you're an engineer.
This is a pretty standard technique, which has been used by all sorts of software sytems for decades now.
In the current case, we want to use the more convenient notation for these computations (the plain old mathematical notiation) as the canonical one, and somehow get from it to the executable code. The best solution is to have it happen automatically, i.e., to have some program that will convert "a + b / c" into the program you want. This can be done directly (use a computer language with appropriate features), or indirectly (use a preprocessor to automatically convert the good notation into the java code, and then compile the latter).
Your solution involves (a) writing the same thing twice manually, (b) having the easy, desired notation be a comment, and thus not be the one that's converted into executable code; (c) have the process of translating the friendly notation to the unfriendly one be done manually, one time after the other.
Yeah, but nowhere did I suggest duplicating the code.
But my point is that in this case the comment should be the code. If what's written in your comment needs to be translated manually into something else, then you should write code to translate it automatically.
You're assuming too much. For example, you're assuming that anybody will notice. I've seen at least one article where exactly what the poster fears happens: a group of people with a political agenda come over and edit it to fit them. If the topic is obscure enough, they can get away with it quite easily.
4) The hired "maintainers" would change it back.
You're failing to take something into account: the "maintainers" have more time and resources to spend on a small set of articles than any other people involved. Multiply the number of maintainers, spread them out across all sorts of obscure topics, and make their distortions subtle enough, and you have an unsolveable problem in your hands.
Do you really think that real encyclopedias are not under constant revision?
Sometime during the 70's, my parents bought a World Book encyclopedia set. These encyclopedias were edited in a yearly basis; and the company also put out a yearbook each year, with (a) a summary of the developments over that year for major topics; (b) the new articles from that year's edition of the encyclopedia; (c) stickers for you to put in your edition, indicating a newer article available in the yearbook.
And your assertion that Wikipedia articles are constantly checked and updated is profoundly misleading. It's happening in a random fashion, and it's skewed towards an ill-defined set of the articles.
And of course, articles in a real encyclopedia have errors. But there's a fundamental difference here-- systematic review (while in Wikipedia it's haphazard), and accountability for errors (which Wikipedia doesn't offer).
And then the people from the next three towns in either direction of the road go and do the same, because you all claim to have been the birthplace of this famous person.
The fact that their articles are generallly written by experts in the relevant topic, who sign their name to it, and reviewed by a number of other experts.
Hell, Britannica is the encyclopedia that, when they wanted an article on Phenomenology, they commissioned Husserl.
I tend to think that the burden of proof is on the wikipedia condemners to show that it's decidedly *worse* than proprietary solutions.
I'm sorry, but it's Wikipedia that advertises itself as being better than real encyclopedias, on the supposed grounds that it allows anybody to create and edit articles at any time. That is a fantastic claim, one which requires a lot of evidence to be believed.
Wow. I would have never imagined it.
Actually, to be faithful to your vocabulary, we should substitute "morons" for "people".
Some of the sites that copy the content do not attribute it. And, it's hard to predict when a search will get you a bunch of Wikipedia redistributors anyway. The process is: (a) submit search, (b) see a whole page of identical results full of wikipedia copy sites (and no wikipedia in the first page of results!), give the "-wikipedia", then you just get like 5 such sites.
One misorganized article filled with half-truths and omissions, written by people who don't know better, overrides three well-written articles. Misinformation is far more costly than lack of information. This is one of the reasons that a real encyclopedia has far fewer articles than the Wikipedia-- because editing means not letting crap into the work.
How am I supposed in general to judge the content of an article that I consulted precisely because I know hardly anything of the topic at hand?
At any rate, inaccuracies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to low quality in Wikipedia. Far worse are omissions (it is possible to write something that says nothing but truths, but leaves out crucial bits that result in crass misinterpretation), and just plain bad writing and organization. There are countless Wikipedia articles that look like a dozen persons just wrote adjacent paragraphs independently of each other (because, in fact, the "article" came to exist in exactly that way!).
But, anyone really interested usually knows a lot of the subject before checking the new information.
So I guess if I don't know anything about topic X, I'm just screwed, because anything I ever come across about X will require me to know X already to understand it. (Sounds like my job, but what the hell.)
Indirectly, yes. It's an unintended bad consequence of a grossly bad project.
And you arrived at this conclusion exactly how?
Oh, and please don't drag the tired list of errors in Britannica, and trot out the "we fixed those errors in Wikipedia!" party line. No comparable list of errors exists for Wikipedia-- because nobody's even *trying* to get any sort of metrics on how good or bad the content is.
There is such a thing as the Google cache. I read it a few days ago, anyway.
It's even worse, because the piece that the poster linked was written to debunk the sort of canned response that you offer. To rephrase the "discussion":
[Grandparent poster]: "Contrary to Wikipedia zealots' insistence that vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly, I can demonstrate that it's really easy to do it in such a way that survives for many days."
[You]: "Vandalism in Wikipedia is corrected almost instantly!"
The serious question is: how good is the quality of information in the typical wikipedia article? That's the question that you'll see all the fanatics avoid frantically, either by pretending to have answered it ("it gets better all the time"), by blaming the critic ("that's *your* fault for not spending 3 hours a week editing Wikipedia!"), or just saying something completely unrelated ("...whenever somebody notices obvious vandalism 5 minutes after the fact, they revert it right away").
If your expected use is constrained enough, you can probably get away with writing some sort of simple code generator. You parse algebraic expressions, generate an abstract syntax tree, and use that tree to spit out appropriate java code.
The worst part of the whole thing is how Wikipedia is gradually making so many Google searches useless. More and more i find myself typing some term into Google, and getting back a number of "reference" sites that simply grab all the content from Wikipedia and slap advertisements on. Sometimes the whole first page of Google results is like this recently. Aaargh.
I'm sorry, but those are not equivalent statements at all. In most (decent) languages, you implement a sort order simply by providing an arbitrary function (or class, or object, or closure, or whatever) that compares two objects. Hardly ever do you need to convert them to strings.
Not to mention that even string sorting is done this way-- you don't sort strings in the same order in Spanish and English, for example.