As for the posts below which respond with "yes, warmer in the age of the dinosaurs", well, there's a reason why Greenland was named Greenland. It was green, merely a few centuries ago. With regard to the greenness of the areas of Greenland settled by the Norse, it seems Google maps and satellite photos can come to out aid. Consider these Googlemaps images of the sites for the Western and Eastern Settlements:
For pure style you can't go past Cona vaccum brewers; they're just fun to watch. Conveniently they also make great coffee, and are pretty consistent at doing that: the design ensures you always get temperature and extraction rate perfect, and the result is an incredibly clean cup of coffee that is never too bitter.
Then perhaps you can tell me the figure, in W/m**2/ppm, that CO2 directly contributes to climate forcing...but I don't seem to be able to find a reliable source for it anywhere. It would seem you didn't look that hard. Current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels provide a radiative forcing of 1.66+/-0.17 W/m^2 (IPCC 4th Assessment Report, Working Group I, Summary for Policy Makers Figure SPM-2). Inferring from Figure SPM-1 it looks like atmospheric carbon dioxide provides approximately 0.02 W/m^2/ppm (though obviously there are threshold values involved). Feel free to dig through the details in the full WGI report.
BTW, your example about changing colors is particularly apt, since you can see that GNOME apps on Windows completely and utterly ignore the Windows theme and do their own thing. Because Apple's software for windows just blends in seamlessly with the native toolkit, right? At least GTK+ lets you change themes -- and even has themes that do blend in with windows, mimicking both Win2k and WinXP appropriately. Apple's stuff just sticks out like a sore thumb.
A quick note for anyone interested in this sort of thing who hsn't already run across it: there is a great documentary on the Kasparov/Deep Blue contest called Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. Well worth checking out.
Once it's more of a target, you'll see a gain in attacks. Not only that, but recently any exploits to a *nix based system weren't as publicized as Windows, due to the pure hate of Microsoft. Sure, but right now it is more secure because it has fewer attacks in the wild. A supposed downside of Linux is the lack of games, hardware support, and other commercial applications -- but if we're playing the "and when it has roughly equal market share" game then all those downsides evaporate completely: if Linux had waider marketshare then hardware manufacturers would make sure their stuff worked with Linux and software houses would all provide Linux versions. If people not wanting to move to Linux because of those problems is valid, then it is eqaully valid to want to move to Linux for better security.
People aren't moving to online services. They're still moving to "free". Just happens it's online instead of locally installed. Woop-de-fucking-do. And lets be honest, Linux is better at online applications than most. There's an application browser that has a vast array of applications. You click a couple of buttons, and lo and behold you are running the application. Sure, the application is running locally, but how different is it really from having (or example) a java webstart application download and fire itself up? Not a lot -- the only difference here is that we have a dedicated application browser isntead of having to hunt around web pages with a web browser.
Finnish is a completely unrelated language altogether. Finnish is from the Finno-Ugric language group which includes Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and a smattering of groups in Russia. It is truly a bizarre language (in that it is very different from Indo-European languages -- which includes pretty much all the other European languages). I'm trying to learn a little Finnish, and to be honest my knowledge of Japanese is far more helpful as background than my knowledge of English and other European languages. It really is the odd language out, and not easy to learn for a speaker of Indo-European languages.
I see it has annotations -- that's definitely a plus. Evince was in theory going to get annotations from the Summer of Code, but we'll have to see if that eventuates. PDF annotations are one of those horribly underused things because so few tools actually decently support them (Preview on MacOS X does, but I can't think of any other simple readily available readers that do).
Indeed, the real benefit is that if you fix things at the windowing level (which is really almost done, we just need wider uptake of FreeNX) then all of a sudden all applications are network applications -- you have the entire exisiting application base working over the network without the need to go and port each and every application to some web based AJAX monstrosity. Sure, everyone already has a web browser. Everyone using Linux (which is what we're talking about, right?) already has X11. One of them is designed and built for handling GUI applications, and already has a vast application base that runs on it.
With Linux, the client and server could be the same box. You could choose whether to install services or whether to use someone else's server. And amazingly enough Linux already does this, and it works for every graphical application! You see X11 already has the whole client server system built in, and is even nice enough to use extra efficient methods if both client and server are the same box. You can run your application on another box, however, and have it display on your local display just fine. No need to recode applications to be web based or anything! You might (legitimately) claim that X11 is not so great over lower bandwidth connections (like the internet, as opposed to a LAN), but surely the solution is to spend time fixing X11 (with something like FreeNX which compresses X11 protocols, or creating a new lower bandwidth less chatty X12 protocol). That way you only have to fix one piece of software (the windowing system) and all the existing software will magically work, as opposed to having to fix/change every single piece of software on the system to somehow be web based...
Why do these "online apps" always have to be delivered "through a browser"? Why not have it delivered "through a network transparent windowing system optimized for internet connections", like say FreeNX? If, for some reason, that's a problem, why not fix the problem at the windowing level rather than keep trying to build everyting into an application that started life as a document viewer. Surely "inside the browser" is the wrong leve of abstractio here?
So we should delete the article until such time as some extremely generous soul sees fit to write a complete and accessible article? That doesn't make any sense to me. It would be nice if someone did, but in the meantime I think there are plenty of people who will still find that stub useful -- indeed, I suspect most people who visit the page will, since most people looking at that topic will be familiar with all the terms involved (none are that advanced given the topic actually being discussed).
On the contrary, it's fantastic that Wikipedia provides precise information on obscure topics. What's important here is the attitude of experts that they cannot possibly be bothered to explain the broad significance of their subject, and thus that writing articles that are useless to 99.999999% of the population is not a problem, and is in no way contradictory to the aims of a public, free encyclopedia. Come now, most people who are actually going to read that page will understand it. Those that don't are provided with enoug links that they can work towards understanding by reading other appropriate articles first. The reality is that it take only a short amount of time to write an article like that, using terms of the art that most people involved would understand. It would take me, personally, probably around a month to write an "accessible" version if I was doing well. You are essentially complaining that someone bothered to write anything at all -- that they should either devote vast amounts of time, or not bother. I don't see that as very productive. The page, as is, provides an article that will be useful for 90% of the people that read it, so it is providing useful service to have it there. Wishing that it would better won't make it so, and insulting the people who, if they can find the time, might be able to make it better hardly improves the situation.
It tells you what it is in the first sentence: "In mathematics, residue class-wise affine groups are certain permutation groups acting on \mathbb{Z} (the integers), whose elements are bijective residue class-wise affine mappings." Is that highly technical? Yes, yes it is. So you've learned you've staumbled across a very technical area. This is Wikipedia though, and many (in fact most) of the difficult terms in that sentence are blue, which means you can click on them and try and get some background.
I agree that it would be nice if every single article was somehow made perfectly accessible to everyone with absolutely no prior knowledge of anything at all required. That is simply never going to happen though. If you prefer we could simply delete the entire page on residue class-wise affine groups and then you'll never be troubled by having to read it. Trying to convert it into a layman's explanation, given the concepts involved, is a distinctly non-trivial task and requires a lot of work. It would be nice if a particularly motivated individual could do that, but I can hardly fault Wikipedia for that not having happened yet. What has happened is that someone has come along and provided the core definition which is enough to understand if you can get to grips with the abstractions it is built on. It is something -- though it seems perhaps you would prefer nothing?
But if I want to edit Residue class-wise affine groups, I have no fucking clue where to begin in order to explain the concept in layman's terms. A valid question, however, is whether you should have to. I looked at the article, and while it could probably use a little tidying (which I might get to) in terms of how it is structured, it explains the concept pretty well for anyone who would want to look up Residue class-wise affine groups. I don't see that a layman's terms explanation is going to be much help, because I can't imagine anyone who doesn't understand the terms used in the article bothering to have any interest in that subject. The article is of little or no use to anyone who doesn't have the ncessary background, so you might as well write it for people who have that background.
I so agree. I'm not a math person and I've tried to look up math topics I was interested in learning more about (like Calculus) on Wikipedia and found that I couldn't even understand the description of the subject! Math is hard for two reasons: the first is that it is a highly layered subject, with abstraction built on abstraction, so that it can be hard to get a firm grasp of later concepts without solid understanding of the earlier ones; the second is that with mathematics the devil is often in the details -- without the nitpicking details, which are often tedious and complicated, things tend to unravel quickly. The latter point tends to mean that people often get caught up in the details (indeed, in my view math education is utterly detail obsessed), and the facts about mathematics, and lose sight of the bigger picture -- providing that bigger picture is hard though. I'm working on a project along those lines, The Narrow Road, in which I try and build up an explanation of advanced mathematics from simple beginnings, keeping an eye on the motivations and broader outlook wherever possible. I haven't gotten to calculus quite yet, though we are starting to get close, so if you like start at the beginning and see if it provides the sort of explanations you're looking for (it may not, different approaches work differently for everyone); if so, then hopefully I cna provide you with some explanations for calculus in the coming months.
Encyclopedias are *NOT* research journals. They should explain the subject in terms that someone who is wholly unfamiliar with the subject can understand. Yes, 'dumbing down' may create times when an article is technically inaccurate, but such inaccuracies in the name of simplicity should be noted, with a link to a more technically accurate, if less readable, explanation. Your sentiments are good, but such things are not always feasible. In the case you cite of "don the purple" in article on the Roman Empire, I agree it is something that could have been eliminated. My field is mathematics, and the mathematics articles often suffer a similar problem -- using advanced concepts and jargon as a crutch so you don't have to explain properly. However, there are also limits; at some point you have to expect the reader to have some context and understanding lest the article grow too long. Is "the purple" a crown, or a robe? If it's robe, then what's a robe anyway? In this case the second question is obviously silly -- we can reasonably expect people to know what a robe is. The higher you climb into advanced or highly specific topics, however, the more such layers there are that remain "non-obvious". At some point you have to face the fact the current topic is built upon an entire layer of ideas with which the "average person" may be wholey unfamiliar, and the best you can do in link back to the lower layers and provide a basic hand-waving explanation at the start to at least give them something to hold on to. As much as we would like to be able to explain everything to everyone in a single Wikipedia page, it isn't always possible.
As an example, I just looked up the Wikipedia entry on Group Theory. The first paragraph is comprehensible, but virtually information-free. The second paragraph uses technical terms that I would have to look up for them to mean enough to be informative. Heh. You think that's bad, try looking up fibration, pre-sheaf, sheaf cohomology, adjoint functor, or topos. Compared to the category theoretic material, a lot of the math articles are positively comprehensible. There are efforts underway, within the WikiprojectMathematics, t try and make things more accessible. For instance the manifold page is relatively low level, and tries to give a general explanation of the ideas, with the technical details left to more specific articles like differentiable manifold and topological manifold (although, to be honest, both of those are in need of some work).
Ultimately, however, it is hard because math is a very layered subject. Each idea builds upon the previous abstractions. You can bootstrap yourself straight into things via an axiomatic definition, but that fails to provide much in the way of context or motivation. I'm trying to slowly build my own explanation of more advanced mathematics at my website, The Narrow Road, building piece after piece and trying to keep track of the big picture and motivate things as we go along. That's a very slow process however: I'm only barely starting to scratch group theory and the beginnings of calculus -- algebraic topology, category theory, and topos theory, which are among my eventual goals, are a long way off yet.
At some point you have to recognise that without appropriate background context with which to explain things, explanations of advanced mathematics are going to be excessively long. I think providing better context for modern mathematics would be a good thing (check out Conceptual Mathematics by Lawvere for instance, a high school level category theory text). In the present, however, most people have been exposed to concepts of number and arithmetic sufficiently that they have an intuitive idea o those abstractions, but the basic abstractions of, say, group theory (while not necessarily that much harder) aren't generally encountered so people tend to lack the context. I agree that the current Wikipedia articles could use some work, and cleaning up some of the unnecessary use of technical terms as a crutch (as so often happens) would be good. Still, there's no substitute for having a grasp of the abstractions upon which the particular idea you're looking at is based.
It is the reason 24 keeps on working. Every year, it reaches its ending, and the next year's season is a totally new (sorta) scenario for Jack Bauer to fix. Personally I think they missed a golden opportunity with the second season of 24 when they went back to Jack Bauer. By sticking with Bauer they tied themselves down, and each series has had to be progressively "more of the same", resulting in a steady downward spiral. With the basic idea that what mattered was a 24 hour day, told in realtime, they could have gone many directions for a second season, and introduced a new character in an entirely different situation, living out his or her own personal "longest day of their life". No longer do you have to keep coming up with increasingly absurd terrorist plots and an easily infiltrated US government. They could have made, for example, season 2 a medical drama, somewhat akin to House, trying to analyse a bizarre condition that seems to be spreading; or about a rescue worker after some tragic event; or... And each new season they can jump to somethign else and start fresh. A missed opportunity if ever there was one.
If it can't be debunked, i.e. is not falsifiable, you are justified in believing it does not exist by Occam's Razor. Wow, that has to be the weirdest interpretation of Occam's razor I've ever seen. You seem to be conflating it with the popularised version of Popper's philosophy of science. Occam's razor is simply a rule of thumb for picking the most effective explanations (it suggests you lean toward those that require the least complication). Popper had a philosophy of science that used falsifiability as an important criterion. The popularised version (which is what we get here on Slashdot) reduces that to "Science == Falsifiability". There are alternatives -- you might like to try Kuhn for instance. In practice falsifiability is most certainly not a criterion for truth, nor existence, but it does provide a handy rule of thumb as to whether something is worth investigating: if it isn't falsifiable then, regardless of whether it is true or not, it probably isn't worth expending much time on because you'll never be able to tell if it is false.
I'm not going to call it piracy anymore. I prefer Consumer Choice Enablement. The interesting part is that you can call it CCE all you want, but it won't make any difference, it will still be called piracy because that's what the media calls it, and that's what everyone hears, and so that's what everyone calls it. Meantime DCE might actually work, because the people promoting it are a major media player and they can (and if they choose to go ahead with the idea, will) saturate the term all throughout the media until it becomes common usage. These days you don't need censorship to be able to control information, you just need enough control of information channels to shout down everyone else.
Christianity has a historical significance. Romans really did crucify people using crosses. King Herod really did exist. And Scientology has a geographic significance. Hawaii really does exist and has volcanos. The earth is a planet.
Picking out a few associated facts described in a religion and equating that with having meaning is a little silly. I can certainly understand that there are reasons why people believe in Christianity. I don't think having occasional historical truisms is one of them (or, at least, it shouldn't be).
I don't see how film franchises are any worse than TV shows that drag on for years and years, or comics that go on for decades. Just because a film uses old characters and an old premise doesn't mean it can't be entertaining. I agree. Some great films have been sequels. On the other hand TV shows that drag on for years and years (hell, many get tired after only a season or two) are indeed just as bad as many sequels. Think of how many TV shows are ruined as they run on: the characters become caricatures of their original selves, and everything has to become "more" and "better" season after season till things are bordering on the truly absurd. The same is often true for movies -- just consider the previews for the new Die Hard movie. Fresh ideas an fresh starts have a lot to offer.
If Solaris is on the decline, then why not suspend further Solaris development, and launch their own Linux distro along side? Because Solaris still has a lot of features, and can do many things, that Linux can't. More importantly, a lot of those features are either very hard, or well nigh impossible to port to Linux. Getting ZFS included? Over Andrew Morton's dead body. Get DTrace for Linux? Requires quite a lot of messing around with the kernel that you'll have to get all parties to agree to. How about Zones? Not any time soon. How about a stable driver interface? When hell freezes over. The list goes on.
There is still a lot that Solaris has to offer, so don't write it off just yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Eastern settlment area, and Eastern settlment map
Western settlment area, and Western settlement map.
Just for reference, here is a zoom of the area of the Brattahlid and Gardar farms (two of the largest/richest farms), and a zoom of the Sandnes farm area from the Western settlment.
Want more? How abut on the ground photos of the ruins?
Gardar ruins
Bratthlid ruins
Hvalsey church
So yes, Greenland was green with reagrd to where the Vikings settled, but then it has been the whole time, and still is today.
For pure style you can't go past Cona vaccum brewers; they're just fun to watch. Conveniently they also make great coffee, and are pretty consistent at doing that: the design ensures you always get temperature and extraction rate perfect, and the result is an incredibly clean cup of coffee that is never too bitter.
A quick note for anyone interested in this sort of thing who hsn't already run across it: there is a great documentary on the Kasparov/Deep Blue contest called Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. Well worth checking out.
I see it has annotations -- that's definitely a plus. Evince was in theory going to get annotations from the Summer of Code, but we'll have to see if that eventuates. PDF annotations are one of those horribly underused things because so few tools actually decently support them (Preview on MacOS X does, but I can't think of any other simple readily available readers that do).
Indeed, the real benefit is that if you fix things at the windowing level (which is really almost done, we just need wider uptake of FreeNX) then all of a sudden all applications are network applications -- you have the entire exisiting application base working over the network without the need to go and port each and every application to some web based AJAX monstrosity. Sure, everyone already has a web browser. Everyone using Linux (which is what we're talking about, right?) already has X11. One of them is designed and built for handling GUI applications, and already has a vast application base that runs on it.
Why do these "online apps" always have to be delivered "through a browser"? Why not have it delivered "through a network transparent windowing system optimized for internet connections", like say FreeNX? If, for some reason, that's a problem, why not fix the problem at the windowing level rather than keep trying to build everyting into an application that started life as a document viewer. Surely "inside the browser" is the wrong leve of abstractio here?
So we should delete the article until such time as some extremely generous soul sees fit to write a complete and accessible article? That doesn't make any sense to me. It would be nice if someone did, but in the meantime I think there are plenty of people who will still find that stub useful -- indeed, I suspect most people who visit the page will, since most people looking at that topic will be familiar with all the terms involved (none are that advanced given the topic actually being discussed).
It tells you what it is in the first sentence: "In mathematics, residue class-wise affine groups are certain permutation groups acting on \mathbb{Z} (the integers), whose elements are bijective residue class-wise affine mappings." Is that highly technical? Yes, yes it is. So you've learned you've staumbled across a very technical area. This is Wikipedia though, and many (in fact most) of the difficult terms in that sentence are blue, which means you can click on them and try and get some background.
I agree that it would be nice if every single article was somehow made perfectly accessible to everyone with absolutely no prior knowledge of anything at all required. That is simply never going to happen though. If you prefer we could simply delete the entire page on residue class-wise affine groups and then you'll never be troubled by having to read it. Trying to convert it into a layman's explanation, given the concepts involved, is a distinctly non-trivial task and requires a lot of work. It would be nice if a particularly motivated individual could do that, but I can hardly fault Wikipedia for that not having happened yet. What has happened is that someone has come along and provided the core definition which is enough to understand if you can get to grips with the abstractions it is built on. It is something -- though it seems perhaps you would prefer nothing?
Ultimately, however, it is hard because math is a very layered subject. Each idea builds upon the previous abstractions. You can bootstrap yourself straight into things via an axiomatic definition, but that fails to provide much in the way of context or motivation. I'm trying to slowly build my own explanation of more advanced mathematics at my website, The Narrow Road, building piece after piece and trying to keep track of the big picture and motivate things as we go along. That's a very slow process however: I'm only barely starting to scratch group theory and the beginnings of calculus -- algebraic topology, category theory, and topos theory, which are among my eventual goals, are a long way off yet.
At some point you have to recognise that without appropriate background context with which to explain things, explanations of advanced mathematics are going to be excessively long. I think providing better context for modern mathematics would be a good thing (check out Conceptual Mathematics by Lawvere for instance, a high school level category theory text). In the present, however, most people have been exposed to concepts of number and arithmetic sufficiently that they have an intuitive idea o those abstractions, but the basic abstractions of, say, group theory (while not necessarily that much harder) aren't generally encountered so people tend to lack the context. I agree that the current Wikipedia articles could use some work, and cleaning up some of the unnecessary use of technical terms as a crutch (as so often happens) would be good. Still, there's no substitute for having a grasp of the abstractions upon which the particular idea you're looking at is based.
Picking out a few associated facts described in a religion and equating that with having meaning is a little silly. I can certainly understand that there are reasons why people believe in Christianity. I don't think having occasional historical truisms is one of them (or, at least, it shouldn't be).
There is still a lot that Solaris has to offer, so don't write it off just yet.