but actually most of the good content on Wikimedia Commons just seems to be duplicates of images from WP articles (albeit organized in a different, and sometimes more convenient, way).
So it would seem, but that's just because if you stick a picture in Commons, you can automatically use it in all Wikipedias. Suppose if I translate an article for fi.wikipedia from en.wikipedia, I get the images for the new article without copying the images over.
And finally Wikibooks, which is mentioned briefly in the article, is pretty pathetic. You can spend an hour clicking around on Wikibooks without ever finding a successful, well written, complete book.
I agree, I think it's just because Wikibooks is seriously understaffed and all of the bright people who work on Wikipedia articles never bother to touch Wikibooks side - people need to take responsibility and stay working on the books. I'm working on a walkthrough and guide for Final Fantasy VII (just testing how well wiki principle works for writing game guides), and had great dreams like "Okay, I'll make a table of contents, people will fill in the chapters", but guess who has written like 90% of the guide now? =)
On second thoughts, wouldn't wikipedia do well with a moderation system ?
If you're thinking of Slashdot system, it works because most of the news stories get a lot of attention while they're hot.
Moderation systems don't work that well in places like Wikipedia where there's popular articles that get all the attention, and bulk of the articles that get very little attention.
Unless, of course, you make every edit to go through a moderation queue first, which makes concurrent editing very hard because the articles would need to be locked while they're being edited and the changes were in moderation queue. It'd make the whole thing really, really slow and inconvenient to use. Plus, moderation queue would probably be moderated by people who have no frigging clue about the subject - it'd only prevent obvious vandalism!
Couldn't find Faces of Death, but it probably would go under 18+ these days too. Unless it had something that was downright illegal, which I doubt.
Finnish movie laws changed recently and nowadays, almost everything previously banned can go through these days, just under 18+ age restriction. There's a lot more uncut violence and pornography out there these days. Thank you, VET! Some sanity at last!
Well.... if you want something done right, do it yourself!
Yeah, go ahead, assume any of us can dive right into the ginormous Firefox source tree and reimplement the entire history system overnight.
No thanks, I'm kind of waiting that the Mozilla folks finish designing and implementing the next generation stuff which should be million times better than the current absolute mess of different file formats. They know something more about this crap than I do.
Once you have the idea on how sucky Mozilla's history stuff is in practice, take a look at how the stuff is actually stored in history.dat. People have been rendered insane by just a single look at that stuff. Want to make sense of this format for some obscure reason? Read this and weep. This stuff is just about the most insane thing I've ever seen.
I sure hope Mozilla folks get the unified storage plans together for Firefox 2.0, and use something like sqlite to store most of the user data. MorkDB format used by Mozilla is... just not elegant.
I'm just asking, what could possibly be the point of this? I'm assuming if this is implemented, they'll first waste ludicruous amount of money on the filtering equipment, then set up a nice little bureau where you can get your filtering neutered in no time at all. Given two weeks, everyone and their dog would be opted out. Current "indecent material" filtering isn't perfect, there's always a large number of false positives, and even dumbest people know how to call their ISP, and after they've nicely explained where to call, they'll get themselves off the list.
So if this is handled in any world with any sanity left at all, this will just be an expensive useless thing.
The other alternative is the Reign of Terror: Make getting off the filter as hard and slow as possible. People will suffer. At least until the next elections.
There's no way anyone could possibly think it's a good idea to make massive investments in something that majority of the people subjected wants to turn off immediately.
(And no, I didn't read the article, I just went on rambling.)
You noticed "This is a spoof article" part, but not the "Please compare it with the original and you will see how little it has been changed" part.
It's a spoof, but it's not intended to be ignored completely. Nielsen just says, basically, "AJAX is like Frames were a few years back".
The article thus has a very good point. People went all crazy about frames, which broke a lot of stuff. Now, it's understood why and when frames are broken, and smart designers only use them in the places they make sense and work. And nowadays, people throw AJAX at everything and it just bloody well doesn't work right - but give it a few years, and AJAX has been pushed right where it belongs: places where asynchronous processing makes sense, without breaking the Javascript-less stuff. AJAX makes sense in Google Suggest, but not in every entyeerprice application.
In Finland we've already been using GSM-based tracking collars for wolves for a while now! Some of these things can, as far as I know, use both GPS and cell network triangulation to pick up the locations.
The only problem I've seen is that wolves have big paws, and cell phones are getting smaller all the time... Obviously, a small usability problem!
"Open" is hardly a new buzzword - they've been using it all over the past few decades. Usually, of course, "open" meaning "you can actually buy the specification and implement it yourself if you want to". It's only in the last decade when the grassroots sense has been rising, as in "you can get the whole specification free of charge and no strings attached, too".
Plus, I think it's a silly thing to stick "open" to the project title, especially in open source projects. But that's just me.
And yes, I agree with the conversions - in the future, we'll see awfully converted Word docs and vice versa. People need to stop thinking these as typesetting languages and think of them as a format to exchange textual contents and semantic structure. Word isn't a typesetting program, neither is OO.o, and people who scream that.docx to.odt conversion isn't "perfect" are using the wrong frigging tool - they should export the document to PDF, or go download Scribus or pay some serious money for InDesign or something if they're so concerned about maintaining perfect document layout.
Good Lord, why isn't Netscape dead yet? Can't the authorities see that AOLTW is keeping them in constant pain and misery? I mean, good grief this is awful.
People whine about corporations having all rights of humans but no responsibilities; I don't want to discuss the ethics of euthanasia what comes to humans, but bloody heck, someone ought to legalize corporate euthanasia.
Does the XHTML 2.0 specification say that "the client MUST display the object here, now, immediately, right the way the author intended, with no extra clicking whatsoever"?
Well, actually, many "Bible games" I've seen seem to be either completely lame based on some idiotic idea (like that one about throwing baby Moses around and stuff) or a secular game disguised as a biblical game. As in "Don't let your kid play that violent, Satanic secular game where the player shoots demons and stuff! Buy our... um... violent biblical game where the player shoots demons and stuff."
I still think Ultima IV is the best "Christian" game even when it doesn't deal with specifically Christian ethics. =)
If you consider Quake2 as the first game to really make it while introducing proper mouselook to the masses, yes it is.
Quake 1 had a perfectly working mouselook. (Put "+mlook" in autoexec.cfg.) Every good player used it back in the day, I was "nope, sounds too difficult to me, I think I'll stick to the keyboard" (which is why I stayed a rookie all the time)... Then several years later, after things like Half-Life and Q3A, when I wanted to play Q1 again I was thinking "Hey, where's my mouselook?" =)
Oh, right, thanks for the flamebait mod. Of course, it wasn't my intention at all for that to draw flames or anything. I think it's a valid issue.
The world is full of ridiculous trademark lawsuits, and I think it would be prudent to not play with fire. I'm not at all surprised if Microsoft forces Free60 folks to change name, if they don't do it themselves.
Why do all of these projects want to name themselves "Free This" or "Open That"? Okay, they are Free or Open projects and should be justifiably proud about that, but I think it's silly to boast about that in the project name. It gets in the way in the long run. I'm personally not happy with "OpenOffice.org", for example - They went "Oh, let's call this open office, that's so original", turned out the name was taken, "err, let's call it open office dot org instead"...
It's also way too silly if you try to work the "Free" into some sort of pun on original name. For a long time I thought XFree86 was "um, some sort of free x86 version of X? what a weird name." Then, someone explained it was actually a pun on X386 (X-three-eighty-six vs. free-eighty-six).
Not to even mention it can be dangerous to pull stunts like this - Blizzard wasn't happy about Freecraft, and I didn't think they really had a case about "Freecraft" being too similar to "Warcraft"; but I'm pretty sure Microsoft might be just annoyed enough to flame "Free60" to ground because, hey, it sounds pretty close to "Three-sixty"...
Here!, Thanks to link to (interestingly enough) Wikipedia.
Actually, I think the feature was already up when Jack vs Amazon was discussed, and the comments in the wiki wasn't really flattering at the time. Specifically, link to Wikipedia article which describes in excruciating detail, yet pretty fairly, what a nutball Jack is =) I think it's the same comment it has now.
I hope this makes people pause and reconsider the cell phone game thingies a bit, and other people who are cramming together widget functionality and saying "oh, by the way, you can play games with this thing too." (I'm looking at you, PSP.) I mean, if Nokia, being a really big company with supposedly smart people in it, couldn't do it right... what really went wrong?
I say there's a lot to be learned from Nokia's success with N-Gage (or lack of thereof).
Personally I think that what the open-source community needs in general terms is more marketing.
Yeah! Open source needs marketing. I think the developers just are too modest, as in "Oh, if this thing is any good, it will sell itself". Well, may be true, but they also need to catch people's attention by telling them how good it is.
Open source folks often don't try to communicate this properly. They don't try to answer people's questions. They make the information available, they just don't try to make it really all that well accessible. "Oh, we're just building the software, here's the download, here's the documentation. If you have any questions, RTFM/RTFS/RTF technical FAQ". (One of my big peeves is too technical FAQs - if I've never heard of the program, I assume the FAQs could cover some really basic questions, as in "What it is, what it does, what it needs to run" - not "This program blows up when I do X with Y" for pages and pages.)
For example, if I'm trying to find a CMS, and need to dig five minutes through the site to find out what database systems it supports, that's a problem. If they said up front "needs PHP (safe mode not supported) and MySQL" I might not have needed to waste five minutes on the site to know that I can't run the program on my web host. =)
Firefox folks are doing this right: "Here's a good web browser. People say it's good. Here's why it's so good and popular right now." They aren't really "selling" the thing as in "buy buy buy", they just have a refined way of telling what their software is good for and answering why you should use it.
If you want to see really amazing OSS marketing, try LilyPond (see the "Dive into" and the essay). This is how to do the thing.
Fallen behind??? GIMP never got past the competition.
Anyway, considering there's no corporation to whip the development along, GIMP folks have succeeded bolting in a lot of what I would consider basic necessities of drawing. Everything else is just extra that would be cool to have but not really necessary.
Sure, additional drawing tools and such would be nice, but at this price, I'm not complaining.
I haven't seen the movie, but the book does have its fair share of heroes despite not being idealized.
Ah, maybe the expression was a bit misleading. The point was, before the novel, the army always tried to paint a picture of shiny, upstanding soldiers who always were heroic and shiny and disciplined and well-behaving and all that. The book, and the movie, was a bit more realistic: Soldiers were just ordinary men, doing completely human things, not believing in orders for orders' sake or discipline in discipline's sake. Ordinary men who were called to the war and fought the best they could. Of course, this was completely against the shiny picture the army wanted to give, and completely against the tradition of giving shiny, heroic, patriotically inspiring picture of Finnish soldiers. So the army and the literature critics didn't like it much, but the people knew it was the truth.
Actually, Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning has been translated to Klingon... The subs and an annotated translation is somewhere in the subtitles forum. Quite an interesting read, even when I don't know that much of Klingon language myself. Why don't real Trek movies get this treatment? =)
Slashdot Mirror
So it would seem, but that's just because if you stick a picture in Commons, you can automatically use it in all Wikipedias. Suppose if I translate an article for fi.wikipedia from en.wikipedia, I get the images for the new article without copying the images over.
I agree, I think it's just because Wikibooks is seriously understaffed and all of the bright people who work on Wikipedia articles never bother to touch Wikibooks side - people need to take responsibility and stay working on the books. I'm working on a walkthrough and guide for Final Fantasy VII (just testing how well wiki principle works for writing game guides), and had great dreams like "Okay, I'll make a table of contents, people will fill in the chapters", but guess who has written like 90% of the guide now? =)
If you're thinking of Slashdot system, it works because most of the news stories get a lot of attention while they're hot.
Moderation systems don't work that well in places like Wikipedia where there's popular articles that get all the attention, and bulk of the articles that get very little attention.
Unless, of course, you make every edit to go through a moderation queue first, which makes concurrent editing very hard because the articles would need to be locked while they're being edited and the changes were in moderation queue. It'd make the whole thing really, really slow and inconvenient to use. Plus, moderation queue would probably be moderated by people who have no frigging clue about the subject - it'd only prevent obvious vandalism!
Deep Throat 1972 ... Finland:(Banned) (1993)
K-18 as of 1999.
Couldn't find Faces of Death, but it probably would go under 18+ these days too. Unless it had something that was downright illegal, which I doubt.
Finnish movie laws changed recently and nowadays, almost everything previously banned can go through these days, just under 18+ age restriction. There's a lot more uncut violence and pornography out there these days. Thank you, VET! Some sanity at last!
Yeah, go ahead, assume any of us can dive right into the ginormous Firefox source tree and reimplement the entire history system overnight.
No thanks, I'm kind of waiting that the Mozilla folks finish designing and implementing the next generation stuff which should be million times better than the current absolute mess of different file formats. They know something more about this crap than I do.
Once you have the idea on how sucky Mozilla's history stuff is in practice, take a look at how the stuff is actually stored in history.dat. People have been rendered insane by just a single look at that stuff. Want to make sense of this format for some obscure reason? Read this and weep. This stuff is just about the most insane thing I've ever seen.
I sure hope Mozilla folks get the unified storage plans together for Firefox 2.0, and use something like sqlite to store most of the user data. MorkDB format used by Mozilla is... just not elegant.
I'm just asking, what could possibly be the point of this? I'm assuming if this is implemented, they'll first waste ludicruous amount of money on the filtering equipment, then set up a nice little bureau where you can get your filtering neutered in no time at all. Given two weeks, everyone and their dog would be opted out. Current "indecent material" filtering isn't perfect, there's always a large number of false positives, and even dumbest people know how to call their ISP, and after they've nicely explained where to call, they'll get themselves off the list.
So if this is handled in any world with any sanity left at all, this will just be an expensive useless thing.
The other alternative is the Reign of Terror: Make getting off the filter as hard and slow as possible. People will suffer. At least until the next elections.
There's no way anyone could possibly think it's a good idea to make massive investments in something that majority of the people subjected wants to turn off immediately.
(And no, I didn't read the article, I just went on rambling.)
...and eek, not Nielsen at all, either, just someone who copied the entire useit layout. *blinks* Should read things far more carefully.
I still think the author has a great point though.
You noticed "This is a spoof article" part, but not the "Please compare it with the original and you will see how little it has been changed" part.
It's a spoof, but it's not intended to be ignored completely. Nielsen just says, basically, "AJAX is like Frames were a few years back".
The article thus has a very good point. People went all crazy about frames, which broke a lot of stuff. Now, it's understood why and when frames are broken, and smart designers only use them in the places they make sense and work. And nowadays, people throw AJAX at everything and it just bloody well doesn't work right - but give it a few years, and AJAX has been pushed right where it belongs: places where asynchronous processing makes sense, without breaking the Javascript-less stuff. AJAX makes sense in Google Suggest, but not in every entyeerprice application.
In Finland we've already been using GSM-based tracking collars for wolves for a while now! Some of these things can, as far as I know, use both GPS and cell network triangulation to pick up the locations.
The only problem I've seen is that wolves have big paws, and cell phones are getting smaller all the time... Obviously, a small usability problem!
Better to have that as "short" or even "void*", rather than "char"...
"Open" is hardly a new buzzword - they've been using it all over the past few decades. Usually, of course, "open" meaning "you can actually buy the specification and implement it yourself if you want to". It's only in the last decade when the grassroots sense has been rising, as in "you can get the whole specification free of charge and no strings attached, too".
Plus, I think it's a silly thing to stick "open" to the project title, especially in open source projects. But that's just me.
And yes, I agree with the conversions - in the future, we'll see awfully converted Word docs and vice versa. People need to stop thinking these as typesetting languages and think of them as a format to exchange textual contents and semantic structure. Word isn't a typesetting program, neither is OO.o, and people who scream that .docx to .odt conversion isn't "perfect" are using the wrong frigging tool - they should export the document to PDF, or go download Scribus or pay some serious money for InDesign or something if they're so concerned about maintaining perfect document layout.
Good Lord, why isn't Netscape dead yet? Can't the authorities see that AOLTW is keeping them in constant pain and misery? I mean, good grief this is awful.
People whine about corporations having all rights of humans but no responsibilities; I don't want to discuss the ethics of euthanasia what comes to humans, but bloody heck, someone ought to legalize corporate euthanasia.
Does the XHTML 2.0 specification say that "the client MUST display the object here, now, immediately, right the way the author intended, with no extra clicking whatsoever"?
I could give an easy guess: probably not.
Well, actually, many "Bible games" I've seen seem to be either completely lame based on some idiotic idea (like that one about throwing baby Moses around and stuff) or a secular game disguised as a biblical game. As in "Don't let your kid play that violent, Satanic secular game where the player shoots demons and stuff! Buy our... um... violent biblical game where the player shoots demons and stuff."
I still think Ultima IV is the best "Christian" game even when it doesn't deal with specifically Christian ethics. =)
Quake 1 had a perfectly working mouselook. (Put "+mlook" in autoexec.cfg.) Every good player used it back in the day, I was "nope, sounds too difficult to me, I think I'll stick to the keyboard" (which is why I stayed a rookie all the time)... Then several years later, after things like Half-Life and Q3A, when I wanted to play Q1 again I was thinking "Hey, where's my mouselook?" =)
The subtitle file doesn't need to be renamed or be even in the same folder.
Hit play, choose File, select the movie file, check Subtitle options and hit that little button next to it, and pick subtitle file.
Oh, right, thanks for the flamebait mod. Of course, it wasn't my intention at all for that to draw flames or anything. I think it's a valid issue.
The world is full of ridiculous trademark lawsuits, and I think it would be prudent to not play with fire. I'm not at all surprised if Microsoft forces Free60 folks to change name, if they don't do it themselves.
Why do all of these projects want to name themselves "Free This" or "Open That"? Okay, they are Free or Open projects and should be justifiably proud about that, but I think it's silly to boast about that in the project name. It gets in the way in the long run. I'm personally not happy with "OpenOffice.org", for example - They went "Oh, let's call this open office, that's so original", turned out the name was taken, "err, let's call it open office dot org instead"...
It's also way too silly if you try to work the "Free" into some sort of pun on original name. For a long time I thought XFree86 was "um, some sort of free x86 version of X? what a weird name." Then, someone explained it was actually a pun on X386 (X-three-eighty-six vs. free-eighty-six).
Not to even mention it can be dangerous to pull stunts like this - Blizzard wasn't happy about Freecraft, and I didn't think they really had a case about "Freecraft" being too similar to "Warcraft"; but I'm pretty sure Microsoft might be just annoyed enough to flame "Free60" to ground because, hey, it sounds pretty close to "Three-sixty"...
Here!, Thanks to link to (interestingly enough) Wikipedia.
Actually, I think the feature was already up when Jack vs Amazon was discussed, and the comments in the wiki wasn't really flattering at the time. Specifically, link to Wikipedia article which describes in excruciating detail, yet pretty fairly, what a nutball Jack is =) I think it's the same comment it has now.
I hope this makes people pause and reconsider the cell phone game thingies a bit, and other people who are cramming together widget functionality and saying "oh, by the way, you can play games with this thing too." (I'm looking at you, PSP.) I mean, if Nokia, being a really big company with supposedly smart people in it, couldn't do it right... what really went wrong?
I say there's a lot to be learned from Nokia's success with N-Gage (or lack of thereof).
Yeah! Open source needs marketing. I think the developers just are too modest, as in "Oh, if this thing is any good, it will sell itself". Well, may be true, but they also need to catch people's attention by telling them how good it is.
Open source folks often don't try to communicate this properly. They don't try to answer people's questions. They make the information available, they just don't try to make it really all that well accessible. "Oh, we're just building the software, here's the download, here's the documentation. If you have any questions, RTFM/RTFS/RTF technical FAQ". (One of my big peeves is too technical FAQs - if I've never heard of the program, I assume the FAQs could cover some really basic questions, as in "What it is, what it does, what it needs to run" - not "This program blows up when I do X with Y" for pages and pages.)
For example, if I'm trying to find a CMS, and need to dig five minutes through the site to find out what database systems it supports, that's a problem. If they said up front "needs PHP (safe mode not supported) and MySQL" I might not have needed to waste five minutes on the site to know that I can't run the program on my web host. =)
Firefox folks are doing this right: "Here's a good web browser. People say it's good. Here's why it's so good and popular right now." They aren't really "selling" the thing as in "buy buy buy", they just have a refined way of telling what their software is good for and answering why you should use it.
If you want to see really amazing OSS marketing, try LilyPond (see the "Dive into" and the essay). This is how to do the thing.
Script-fu > Shadow > Drop shadow..., change settings, hit OK.
Have fun with the contest!
Fallen behind??? GIMP never got past the competition.
Anyway, considering there's no corporation to whip the development along, GIMP folks have succeeded bolting in a lot of what I would consider basic necessities of drawing. Everything else is just extra that would be cool to have but not really necessary.
Sure, additional drawing tools and such would be nice, but at this price, I'm not complaining.
Ah, maybe the expression was a bit misleading. The point was, before the novel, the army always tried to paint a picture of shiny, upstanding soldiers who always were heroic and shiny and disciplined and well-behaving and all that. The book, and the movie, was a bit more realistic: Soldiers were just ordinary men, doing completely human things, not believing in orders for orders' sake or discipline in discipline's sake. Ordinary men who were called to the war and fought the best they could. Of course, this was completely against the shiny picture the army wanted to give, and completely against the tradition of giving shiny, heroic, patriotically inspiring picture of Finnish soldiers. So the army and the literature critics didn't like it much, but the people knew it was the truth.
Actually, Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning has been translated to Klingon... The subs and an annotated translation is somewhere in the subtitles forum. Quite an interesting read, even when I don't know that much of Klingon language myself. Why don't real Trek movies get this treatment? =)