I've been carrying a WinMo phone (the HTC Vogue, called the Touch by my carrier, Sprint, in the US). The hardware is nice to look at and touch. The OS is so feature laden and so random in its interaction design that I am about to go back to my Palm 755p. At the very least its ancient single tasking design and 1990-era touch interaction are SIMPLE enough that I will not be constantly frustrated when doing 90% of my phone use, i.e. talking or messaging.
Why not an iPhone or a RIM product? Early termination fees, a cheap "insider" rate, and a great data network make me loathe to switch, at least until my contract is done. Although Sprint carries Blackberry service, it is a ninth circle of hell ordeal to deal with the switch and maintain my cheap data plan. They also only carry older Blackberry products -- no Bold available.
Symbian is not a real option on this US carrier, either.
I work with the iPhone, in fact have written apps in Objective C. I've done with same for Palm and (god forgive) BREW. I agree with a lot of developers -- Objective-C is actually a relief after a lot of C++ work, makes a lot more sense. The XCode environment is pretty nice. The documentation is first rate. And as for buying a pricey Mac, well, I've had a lot of laptops running everything from FreeBSD+Openstep to Vista and this one is the most stable, sensible, versatile I've ever had. YMMV.
Further proof of the parent's point - I don't think its useful to rate the phones (or the development envirnment) by toting up features -- featuritis is one of the reasons I avoid most Microsoft products. the iPhone -- and the new Palm OS -- seem to have taken usability and overall user experience based on real world use cases, as their guiding design principles. That's why people are comparing the two so much.
For those that don't click through, here's a quote of a portion:
"the person has an unusual level of difficulty digesting proteins, fats, and starches since pancreatic enzyme levels are reduced and since the duodenum is missing. Unlike ferrets (who also get a little understood form of insulinoma, with insulinoma being a topic that needs a lot of study still) humans just don't have a lot of excess pancreas to spare. So, the upshot is that his body now will have more of his food go through without needed nutrients digested. Hence, the weight loss.
Add to this that he is a vegetarian, in fact, a vegan. Vegetable protein is especially difficult to break into usable amino acids. Animal protein is far easier to utilize.
Furthermore, people who have had the Whipple Procedure sometimes find themselves simply not feeling like having the many and frequent small meals the procedure makes necessary, and as a vegan Mr Jobs may resist the foods that settle the belly at such times: full fat yogurts, full fat milk, and cheeses. "
But when I can buy an copy off the 'net for less then a scanned, no doubt DRM'd, electronic copy - I have to wonder who the target of this website is.
Sheesh, are you people kidding me? This isn't a place to get a copy of RAH's books. This is a research library project that carefully identified, documented and scanned his lifetime correspondence and notes. It's a research tool for those interested in an influential contributer to the development of modern speculative fiction.
The money (do the math, its barely enough to pay a grad student to scan the documents) goes to the archive's work and the Heinlein Prize. The debate on whether or not an author's work should move into the public domain at a certain point, an idea I'm in favor of, is irrelevant to this collection. It doesn't even contain his copyrighted books. It's a research archive.
Go tote up the expense of getting similar material from Hemingway's archives. This is a relatively cheap source for the kind of information only an academic (or drooling fan) would be interested in. It has nothing to do with buying his published works.
For what it is, its cheap and I think its cool that such a popular author's literary archive is available on the web in such a way as to make it available to those, such as myself, who might have a few dollars worth of interest but no real academic project.
BTW, its made clear on the sites that for academic researchers, grants to use the archive gratis are available. You know, just like in every other University archive.
AAC is still a proprietary format that only exists in Apple's reality sphere, and outside of iPods and Macs, doesn't have much reason to exist at all other than to have yet another standard out there. AAC is a format only used by two types of people: iTunes customers who have no choice, and the rabid Mac fanatics who will happily jump to a locked, patent encumbered protocol because Apple approves it.
AAC is somewhat less "proprietary and locked" than MP3. While its true that AAC (and MP3 ) are patented,the patent is held by the MPEG standards organization and only requires payment and a license for the sale of encoders. The MP3 license requires use fees, that is, payments for the distribution of encoded content. The patent isn't held be Apple or any other corporate entity, but by the MPEG folks.
FOSS implementations are available in source code format.
The list of vendors that contributed to and promote AAC is much longer than just Apple - they include Sony, Nokia, ATT, and the Fraunhofer Society, largely responsible for the invention of the MP3 standard.
Almost every modern music player from the PS3 to Neuros to Archos to iRiver to Kenwood car audio players can play AAC, and encoders are available as a stock part of Nero software, as well as FOSS encoders available for the download. It's hard to understand what you mean by "only existing in Apple's reality sphere"
So while it may be technically proprietary because an IP patent was issued, its hardly as if Apple invented some in-house format that they won't share with anyone. Apple didn't invent it, doesn't own it, and receives no financial benefit from its use.
By "locked", maybe you mean the DRM applied to most iTunes content -- that has nothing to do with AAC and Apple has shown some tenacity in convincing a major label to risk going without. They may have done so for profit-oriented reasons, but I don't find that reasoning particularly "evil".
If you're willing to pay $3.00 / song, and your ears appreciate such a high bitrate -- why not buy CDs and rip them? Your needs are pretty specialized -- given iTunes vast audience, I doubt it will ever fully support the audiophile requirements. Its unlikely it could be profitable for such a small audience.
In case you hadn't noticed, open software and the computing academic community have revolutionized the way we live and work by being ahead of the curve. The essential conceptual work of the web, of network protocols, of OS refinement, and now of mobile networks owe their existence to folks like these. The issue isn't whether they'll attain a mass market, its whether their conceptual refinement of the the way we interact with mobile devices and what we expect of them will take root and inform the Cingulars and Oranges of the world.
Someone's got to break down the barrier of the walled gardens by changing the expectation of opinion leaders... Verizon isn't going to do it. Apple has created a mass market awareness of the basic problems that this phone, also, addresses. The iPhone strategy is hampered a bit by having to fit into a mass market model. This one is hampered by other things, like a significant lack of financial resources that it hopes the intellectual resource of open source contributions can counteract.
Who cares? People who have an interest in the direction that the mass market may take in the future. And that's a lot of people.
Will they succeed in mass marketing this particular gadget? Historical examples would indicate that no, they won't. But the project leaders' passion for the ideas embedded in the design are a great thing, and will drive the project forward. If they can take it just far enough to shift the direction of the mobile market as much as say, Mosaic changed its market, I think they'll have succeeded. Of course, it may just turn out to be like those home-built, woodcased hobbyist PCs those two guys named Steve were hawking backing back in the '70s.
How many times do people who don't see an immediate use for a particular device themselves have to generalize their personal requirements into a statement about the larger market impact of leading-edge technology? Don't you see that the design choices that make up this product are a significant step forward? Gestural interface, a solid embedded OS core derived from a mature code base, a mature graphical interface design for small screens, a gamble on the growing ubiquity of Wifi availability, a real push for location aware mobile apps... etc, etc.
It's really cool that you don't let hipness drive your phone choice, or even that you prefer tried-and-true technology over the latest and greatest. But this isn't Moto trying to sell you a refactored Razr for another 300 bucks. Just like the Lisa/Macintosh intro and the iPod, Apple designers have applied solid, thoughtful, strategic use of leading edge tech applied to existing products to create something that potentially makes a new kind of market.
Sure, there will be problems -- If I had to guess, I'd say battery life, display fragility, and heat would be some of them. it doesn't matter -- the tech on display in the device isn't fad-ish, its evolutionary in a advanced way, like the original Palm Pilot was to electronic address books or the Blackberry was to cell phones organizers. No one "needs" them, either. But they actually alter the way people conduct their business, just like graphical UIs on affordable computers changed the usefulness of PCs.
This is an exciting announcement, even if the first gen unit has problems. And certainly exciting despite the fact that you personally are satisfied with your cellphone. It will drive the market -- just think of the meeting scheduled tomorrow AM for the folks at Palm and RIM!
He just barely mentions it in TFA, but the documentary DVD set that Jason Scott produced is incredibly interesting and everything you'd want if you lived through those days. I was a classic lurker back then, not really into the scene, but certainly racked up my hours on BBSs. I found all 5 and half hours fascinating. The material is under a CC license -- heck, he'll even sell you the printed package for 10 bucks into which you can place your copied disks. I split the price of a purchase copy with a friend. Very cool, very authentic, very fun.
Sony's line this year is all (native resolution) 1920 x 1080 in the higher end sets. "Full HD" resolution is one of their marketing elements. A 50" rear-projection such as the KDS-50A2000 can be had for about 2200, which, while expensive, doesn't qualify as an arm and a leg with plasmas touching the 10K price for larger screens.
Am I missing something? This is what you meant about the native resolution spec and 1080 lines of resolution, right?
Umm, the fundamental issues many people have with Windows operating systems aren't related to device drivers. Nor are most drivers written by Microsoft. MS does pick and choose what hardware it chooses to place on its compatability lists, and leaves it to manufacturers to fill in the gaps. There is certainly motivation for manufacturers to write Windows drivers. What there isn't is good documentation and support. Why do you think it such a common occurence that Windows XP warns you that the such-and-such driver you just installed isn't signed?
I don't quite get your argument. Is it that MS's resources are eaten up by device support issues, and therefore they can't create an OS with as much stability and elegance as OSX? A) MS has a boatload more developers than Apple working on OS issues. B) MS can and does choose what platforms it supports, including having enormous influence on support chipsets created by Intel, NVidia, ATi and the like. C) Device drivers aren't the real problem, fundamental OS choices are.
if someone dual boots a Mac, changes the hardware settings and breaks the machine or cripples its performance, is that worthy of a call to Apple for support?
Horrors! Imagine the problems I might cause by actually writing software for my computer that "broke my machine or crippled its performance"! Surely I wouldn't deserve support. Maybe we can modify the DMCA so that us madmen will be prevented from running whatever code we want on our machines.
What is this sort of reactionary condemnation of people that want to play sophisticated games on their Macs or run a different OS or experiment with changing driver code? The distilled quote seems to be, "I use my Mac for x, therefore user who try something else are violating the intention of the manufacturer." So what? Tweaking hardware to see what it can do or to expose a possible bad design decision or (shock, horror) to learn something new is interesting to a lot of folks. Sheesh.
Hmmm.. Christmas sales spike the curve, creating an unheard of demand, it descends after the holidays but to 40% above last years sales. I'm sure they're terrified, you troll.
$10K? It's a testament to their brand marketing team that you think "Tommy Hilfiger" is some guy in a loft on 7th Avenue in New York cutting out T-Shirt prototypes.
From their corporate website http://investor.tommy.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98332&p= irol-fundIncomeA you can see the company brought in 1,780.77 million in revenue in their past fiscal year. They went through the process of bringing up a brand new online retail system, as well as improving their global supply chain systems, which is where a company like this can really save money.
I don't care for Windows servers (I'm a BSD fan myself), and I'm suspicious of global garment manufacturers labor issues, but all the same, he's a terrific spokesman choice for M$. A creative brand with a high tech profit center that spends tens of millions on improving its IT and had issues with their attempt to use FOSS. Use CAD to design the next T-Shirt? How else do you suppose you produce 6 million T-shirts in a range of colors and sizes utilizing JIT practices?
Companies with $10,000 IT budgets aren't known around the globe, and shipping product to every mall you've ever been to. You need to get a sense of corporate size and the fiscal power that they wield. You're clearly understimating the danger.
I was going to answer your question but noticed it could be answered in more depth by reading the second sentence of TFA. Btw, the article only contains two sentences. Shouldn't take long.
You also might consider reading the posts one or two inches above, should clicking the mouse prove overtaxing.
To suggest as the modern liberal does that criminals are less capable of understanding this than my dogs really does show what they think of the average individual and his capacity for self governance.
I'm a modern liberal and I don't suggest this at all, you insensitive clod.
Seriously, there are a lot of people out there who don't want the federal government doing things like wiretapping citizens without warrents AND who don't want them taking our guns. To suggest that liberalism is equal to mushy thinking or that conservatism is equal to big business supplication is to succomb to the very peril that TFA is trying to describe.
Quit flamebaiting by mixing your cogent arguments with hackneyed political jabs -- the country needs smart people to find consensus, not work to pad our parties with supporters won over by reactionary argument.
It's pretty clear from TFA that they are just now "talking to several agents and publishers about what they would be interested in", to quote Wales. They clearly don't plan to print out the whole damn thing and drop it from helicopters. They're just talking about making some articles available, such as ones on public health concerns as opposed to say, the history of the Marvel Universe. And they're mostly talking about CDs for libraries with computers, since telecomm infrastructure is unavailable to millions there even with the delivery of something as wonderful as a $100 terminal.
It's a community project that provides a unique and interesting source of information -- its not a reliable single resource tool. Who is it that you all think would clean up and "verify" all this information? The whole point of the thing is an experiment to see how a community manages its information as a collective, and a limited print or CD project for the third world fits in with this innovative mission. Somewhere along the line people started yakking about how lazy researchers might mistake it for an authoritative, edited resource and that this makes the _Wikipedia Project_ the bad guy.
Next thing you know they'll be believing something just because the President said it. Who's fault is that?
Slashdot Mirror
Amen, brother.
I've been carrying a WinMo phone (the HTC Vogue, called the Touch by my carrier, Sprint, in the US). The hardware is nice to look at and touch. The OS is so feature laden and so random in its interaction design that I am about to go back to my Palm 755p. At the very least its ancient single tasking design and 1990-era touch interaction are SIMPLE enough that I will not be constantly frustrated when doing 90% of my phone use, i.e. talking or messaging.
Why not an iPhone or a RIM product? Early termination fees, a cheap "insider" rate, and a great data network make me loathe to switch, at least until my contract is done. Although Sprint carries Blackberry service, it is a ninth circle of hell ordeal to deal with the switch and maintain my cheap data plan. They also only carry older Blackberry products -- no Bold available.
Symbian is not a real option on this US carrier, either.
I work with the iPhone, in fact have written apps in Objective C. I've done with same for Palm and (god forgive) BREW. I agree with a lot of developers -- Objective-C is actually a relief after a lot of C++ work, makes a lot more sense. The XCode environment is pretty nice. The documentation is first rate. And as for buying a pricey Mac, well, I've had a lot of laptops running everything from FreeBSD+Openstep to Vista and this one is the most stable, sensible, versatile I've ever had. YMMV.
Further proof of the parent's point - I don't think its useful to rate the phones (or the development envirnment) by toting up features -- featuritis is one of the reasons I avoid most Microsoft products. the iPhone -- and the new Palm OS -- seem to have taken usability and overall user experience based on real world use cases, as their guiding design principles. That's why people are comparing the two so much.
I look forward to getting a Pre at launch.
Your comments seem, well... under-informed.
Here's a link to a user comment that I found pretty interesting regarding the ability of post-Whipple procedures patients to process proteins.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/new-money/2009/01/05/some-arent-buying-steve-jobs-hormone-imbalance.html#1593509
For those that don't click through, here's a quote of a portion:
"the person has an unusual level of difficulty digesting proteins, fats, and starches since pancreatic enzyme levels are reduced and since the duodenum is missing. Unlike ferrets (who also get a little understood form of insulinoma, with insulinoma being a topic that needs a lot of study still) humans just don't have a lot of excess pancreas to spare. So, the upshot is that his body now will have more of his food go through without needed nutrients digested. Hence, the weight loss.
Add to this that he is a vegetarian, in fact, a vegan. Vegetable protein is especially difficult to break into usable amino acids. Animal protein is far easier to utilize.
Furthermore, people who have had the Whipple Procedure sometimes find themselves simply not feeling like having the many and frequent small meals the procedure makes necessary, and as a vegan Mr Jobs may resist the foods that settle the belly at such times: full fat yogurts, full fat milk, and cheeses. "
Sheesh, are you people kidding me? This isn't a place to get a copy of RAH's books. This is a research library project that carefully identified, documented and scanned his lifetime correspondence and notes. It's a research tool for those interested in an influential contributer to the development of modern speculative fiction.
The money (do the math, its barely enough to pay a grad student to scan the documents) goes to the archive's work and the Heinlein Prize. The debate on whether or not an author's work should move into the public domain at a certain point, an idea I'm in favor of, is irrelevant to this collection. It doesn't even contain his copyrighted books. It's a research archive.
Go tote up the expense of getting similar material from Hemingway's archives. This is a relatively cheap source for the kind of information only an academic (or drooling fan) would be interested in. It has nothing to do with buying his published works.
For what it is, its cheap and I think its cool that such a popular author's literary archive is available on the web in such a way as to make it available to those, such as myself, who might have a few dollars worth of interest but no real academic project.
BTW, its made clear on the sites that for academic researchers, grants to use the archive gratis are available. You know, just like in every other University archive.
AAC is somewhat less "proprietary and locked" than MP3. While its true that AAC (and MP3 ) are patented,the patent is held by the MPEG standards organization and only requires payment and a license for the sale of encoders. The MP3 license requires use fees, that is, payments for the distribution of encoded content. The patent isn't held be Apple or any other corporate entity, but by the MPEG folks.
FOSS implementations are available in source code format.
The list of vendors that contributed to and promote AAC is much longer than just Apple - they include Sony, Nokia, ATT, and the Fraunhofer Society, largely responsible for the invention of the MP3 standard.
Almost every modern music player from the PS3 to Neuros to Archos to iRiver to Kenwood car audio players can play AAC, and encoders are available as a stock part of Nero software, as well as FOSS encoders available for the download. It's hard to understand what you mean by "only existing in Apple's reality sphere"
So while it may be technically proprietary because an IP patent was issued, its hardly as if Apple invented some in-house format that they won't share with anyone. Apple didn't invent it, doesn't own it, and receives no financial benefit from its use.
By "locked", maybe you mean the DRM applied to most iTunes content -- that has nothing to do with AAC and Apple has shown some tenacity in convincing a major label to risk going without. They may have done so for profit-oriented reasons, but I don't find that reasoning particularly "evil".
You sound like an anti-Apple troll.
If you're willing to pay $3.00 / song, and your ears appreciate such a high bitrate -- why not buy CDs and rip them? Your needs are pretty specialized -- given iTunes vast audience, I doubt it will ever fully support the audiophile requirements. Its unlikely it could be profitable for such a small audience.
In case you hadn't noticed, open software and the computing academic community have revolutionized the way we live and work by being ahead of the curve. The essential conceptual work of the web, of network protocols, of OS refinement, and now of mobile networks owe their existence to folks like these. The issue isn't whether they'll attain a mass market, its whether their conceptual refinement of the the way we interact with mobile devices and what we expect of them will take root and inform the Cingulars and Oranges of the world.
Someone's got to break down the barrier of the walled gardens by changing the expectation of opinion leaders... Verizon isn't going to do it. Apple has created a mass market awareness of the basic problems that this phone, also, addresses. The iPhone strategy is hampered a bit by having to fit into a mass market model. This one is hampered by other things, like a significant lack of financial resources that it hopes the intellectual resource of open source contributions can counteract.
Who cares? People who have an interest in the direction that the mass market may take in the future. And that's a lot of people.
Will they succeed in mass marketing this particular gadget? Historical examples would indicate that no, they won't. But the project leaders' passion for the ideas embedded in the design are a great thing, and will drive the project forward. If they can take it just far enough to shift the direction of the mobile market as much as say, Mosaic changed its market, I think they'll have succeeded. Of course, it may just turn out to be like those home-built, woodcased hobbyist PCs those two guys named Steve were hawking backing back in the '70s.
How many times do people who don't see an immediate use for a particular device themselves have to generalize their personal requirements into a statement about the larger market impact of leading-edge technology? Don't you see that the design choices that make up this product are a significant step forward? Gestural interface, a solid embedded OS core derived from a mature code base, a mature graphical interface design for small screens, a gamble on the growing ubiquity of Wifi availability, a real push for location aware mobile apps... etc, etc.
It's really cool that you don't let hipness drive your phone choice, or even that you prefer tried-and-true technology over the latest and greatest. But this isn't Moto trying to sell you a refactored Razr for another 300 bucks. Just like the Lisa/Macintosh intro and the iPod, Apple designers have applied solid, thoughtful, strategic use of leading edge tech applied to existing products to create something that potentially makes a new kind of market.
Sure, there will be problems -- If I had to guess, I'd say battery life, display fragility, and heat would be some of them. it doesn't matter -- the tech on display in the device isn't fad-ish, its evolutionary in a advanced way, like the original Palm Pilot was to electronic address books or the Blackberry was to cell phones organizers. No one "needs" them, either. But they actually alter the way people conduct their business, just like graphical UIs on affordable computers changed the usefulness of PCs.
This is an exciting announcement, even if the first gen unit has problems. And certainly exciting despite the fact that you personally are satisfied with your cellphone. It will drive the market -- just think of the meeting scheduled tomorrow AM for the folks at Palm and RIM!
He just barely mentions it in TFA, but the documentary DVD set that Jason Scott produced is incredibly interesting and everything you'd want if you lived through those days. I was a classic lurker back then, not really into the scene, but certainly racked up my hours on BBSs. I found all 5 and half hours fascinating. The material is under a CC license -- heck, he'll even sell you the printed package for 10 bucks into which you can place your copied disks. I split the price of a purchase copy with a friend. Very cool, very authentic, very fun.
Sony's line this year is all (native resolution) 1920 x 1080 in the higher end sets. "Full HD" resolution is one of their marketing elements. A 50" rear-projection such as the KDS-50A2000 can be had for about 2200, which, while expensive, doesn't qualify as an arm and a leg with plasmas touching the 10K price for larger screens.
Am I missing something? This is what you meant about the native resolution spec and 1080 lines of resolution, right?
Umm, the fundamental issues many people have with Windows operating systems aren't related to device drivers. Nor are most drivers written by Microsoft. MS does pick and choose what hardware it chooses to place on its compatability lists, and leaves it to manufacturers to fill in the gaps. There is certainly motivation for manufacturers to write Windows drivers. What there isn't is good documentation and support. Why do you think it such a common occurence that Windows XP warns you that the such-and-such driver you just installed isn't signed?
I don't quite get your argument. Is it that MS's resources are eaten up by device support issues, and therefore they can't create an OS with as much stability and elegance as OSX? A) MS has a boatload more developers than Apple working on OS issues. B) MS can and does choose what platforms it supports, including having enormous influence on support chipsets created by Intel, NVidia, ATi and the like. C) Device drivers aren't the real problem, fundamental OS choices are.
Horrors! Imagine the problems I might cause by actually writing software for my computer that "broke my machine or crippled its performance"! Surely I wouldn't deserve support. Maybe we can modify the DMCA so that us madmen will be prevented from running whatever code we want on our machines.
What is this sort of reactionary condemnation of people that want to play sophisticated games on their Macs or run a different OS or experiment with changing driver code? The distilled quote seems to be, "I use my Mac for x, therefore user who try something else are violating the intention of the manufacturer." So what? Tweaking hardware to see what it can do or to expose a possible bad design decision or (shock, horror) to learn something new is interesting to a lot of folks. Sheesh.
Hmmm.. Christmas sales spike the curve, creating an unheard of demand, it descends after the holidays but to 40% above last years sales. I'm sure they're terrified, you troll.
$10K? It's a testament to their brand marketing team that you think "Tommy Hilfiger" is some guy in a loft on 7th Avenue in New York cutting out T-Shirt prototypes.
= irol-fundIncomeA
From their corporate website http://investor.tommy.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98332&p
you can see the company brought in 1,780.77 million in revenue in their past fiscal year. They went through the process of bringing up a brand new online retail system, as well as improving their global supply chain systems, which is where a company like this can really save money.
I don't care for Windows servers (I'm a BSD fan myself), and I'm suspicious of global garment manufacturers labor issues, but all the same, he's a terrific spokesman choice for M$. A creative brand with a high tech profit center that spends tens of millions on improving its IT and had issues with their attempt to use FOSS. Use CAD to design the next T-Shirt? How else do you suppose you produce 6 million T-shirts in a range of colors and sizes utilizing JIT practices?
Companies with $10,000 IT budgets aren't known around the globe, and shipping product to every mall you've ever been to. You need to get a sense of corporate size and the fiscal power that they wield. You're clearly understimating the danger.
I was going to answer your question but noticed it could be answered in more depth by reading the second sentence of TFA. Btw, the article only contains two sentences. Shouldn't take long.
You also might consider reading the posts one or two inches above, should clicking the mouse prove overtaxing.
Thanks.
Sheesh.
It's pretty clear from TFA that they are just now "talking to several agents and publishers about what they would be interested in", to quote Wales. They clearly don't plan to print out the whole damn thing and drop it from helicopters. They're just talking about making some articles available, such as ones on public health concerns as opposed to say, the history of the Marvel Universe. And they're mostly talking about CDs for libraries with computers, since telecomm infrastructure is unavailable to millions there even with the delivery of something as wonderful as a $100 terminal.
It's a community project that provides a unique and interesting source of information -- its not a reliable single resource tool. Who is it that you all think would clean up and "verify" all this information? The whole point of the thing is an experiment to see how a community manages its information as a collective, and a limited print or CD project for the third world fits in with this innovative mission. Somewhere along the line people started yakking about how lazy researchers might mistake it for an authoritative, edited resource and that this makes the _Wikipedia Project_ the bad guy.
Next thing you know they'll be believing something just because the President said it. Who's fault is that?
RTFA. RTFA. RTFA.