See, that's the thing. Trolls aren't a problem here, because they're given a place to play: i.e., (Score:-1,Troll)
On the wikipedia, though, all they can do is try to impersonate trustworthy people (anyone who isn't a persistent vandal, really), creating a culture of suspicion that results in nobody being considered trustworthy.
The admins' utter hypocrisy in failing to embody the recommendations made for their behavior (which boil down to due diligence, due process, and humility, for the most part) makes them witting targets.
The wikipedia needs to start over with a new admin corps, one that doesn't have that self-congratulatory sense of importance and righteousness that comes from being able to utterly silence anyone who disagrees with them. Which also prevents a redress of grievances.
There have been maybe a few dozen genuine vandals on the system, but thousands and thousands of decent people have abandoned it because of the treatment they've received there.
It's time for total reform. Adminship should be easier to lose than to get. Admins should be reminded that their purpose is to act as functions of the system, not lord high inquisitioners nor ad hoc court justices. Policies should be made for and applied rigorously to admins, not to powerless users (the policies can be malleable, but that should be in the hands of the unanointed, not the powerful). In no case should anyone be denied a forum for presenting evidence, and in no case should evidence be ignored arbitrarily. In all cases the burden of proving a transgression (impersonation, vandalism, etc.) should be on the admin prior to the action, rather than after, and any error at all in that determination should result in immediate removal of admin power (because punishing the innocent is a crime regardless of whether it's malicious or negligent; and it's far worse and has longer-lasting effect on the user than anything the user can do to the system has on it).
Justice would be a nice thing to have in a community that seems to believe in the nobility of liberty.
RTFA. Its accuracy was proved not to be as good as Brittanica's, on a per-article basis, and the links are no better than the wiki.
Google is a more reliable source, as it gives you no illusion that any particular statement it returns is reliable, and it is more likely to find the one true statement on the net.
The real problem with the wikipedia isn't the vandals.
It's how the system creates and nurtures vandals.
The capricious, frustration-based, and heavy-handed behavior of the admins results in a game that vandals enjoy playing, over and over again.
People who might have been brought calmly into the business of improving the encyclopedia are goaded instead into becoming pests.
The problem isn't mechanical, it's social. Admins need to be trained that humility and acceptance are more powerful motivators than insults, imperiousness and backhanded punishments.
IBM has a lot of legacy stuff (documents, enterprise apps, specialized business and engineering tools) that wouldn't operate cleanly in a Linux environment. Even if it's a small percentage of their information and tool base, it's an argument for backward compatibility.
They can convince you to buy Linux if they can convince you to loose yourself from your legacy constraints. But they can't convince themselves because it would cost them more than they're willing to spend. You might have a different tolerance for the change.
>It would be a naive point of view to think that it hasn't already started. It would be equally naive to assume that the U.S. is not at the forefront of such a war.
We already lost the war.
America spent over $1 trillion in the 70's, 80's, and 90's creating the information economy.
Then shipped it to China and India in a matter of a few years.
They couldn't have taken $1 trillion in advantage from us in a shooting war, but they got it anyway.
The war is over, and this activity by the Chinese is to protect them from our attempt to take it back.
>At least in the printing case mentioned, Gnome apparently requires you to jump straight to "hacker mode" if you want to do something more than "simple".
Comparatively few people want anything more than simple in a desktop. They just want a place to put their icons and click on them. And a single drawer (i.e., a Start menu) to find their "other stuff" in.
The default multi-window navigation feature in Gnome is too much, even.
Slashdot Mirror
See, that's the thing. Trolls aren't a problem here, because they're given a place to play: i.e., (Score:-1,Troll)
On the wikipedia, though, all they can do is try to impersonate trustworthy people (anyone who isn't a persistent vandal, really), creating a culture of suspicion that results in nobody being considered trustworthy.
The admins' utter hypocrisy in failing to embody the recommendations made for their behavior (which boil down to due diligence, due process, and humility, for the most part) makes them witting targets.
The wikipedia needs to start over with a new admin corps, one that doesn't have that self-congratulatory sense of importance and righteousness that comes from being able to utterly silence anyone who disagrees with them. Which also prevents a redress of grievances.
There have been maybe a few dozen genuine vandals on the system, but thousands and thousands of decent people have abandoned it because of the treatment they've received there.
It's time for total reform. Adminship should be easier to lose than to get. Admins should be reminded that their purpose is to act as functions of the system, not lord high inquisitioners nor ad hoc court justices. Policies should be made for and applied rigorously to admins, not to powerless users (the policies can be malleable, but that should be in the hands of the unanointed, not the powerful). In no case should anyone be denied a forum for presenting evidence, and in no case should evidence be ignored arbitrarily. In all cases the burden of proving a transgression (impersonation, vandalism, etc.) should be on the admin prior to the action, rather than after, and any error at all in that determination should result in immediate removal of admin power (because punishing the innocent is a crime regardless of whether it's malicious or negligent; and it's far worse and has longer-lasting effect on the user than anything the user can do to the system has on it).
Justice would be a nice thing to have in a community that seems to believe in the nobility of liberty.
Um...downloading any program of any kind from the net is, virtually, "getting software over the radio..."
In case you're wondering where all the wonder's gone.
RTFA. Its accuracy was proved not to be as good as Brittanica's, on a per-article basis, and the links are no better than the wiki.
Google is a more reliable source, as it gives you no illusion that any particular statement it returns is reliable, and it is more likely to find the one true statement on the net.
The real problem with the wikipedia isn't the vandals.
It's how the system creates and nurtures vandals.
The capricious, frustration-based, and heavy-handed behavior of the admins results in a game that vandals enjoy playing, over and over again.
People who might have been brought calmly into the business of improving the encyclopedia are goaded instead into becoming pests.
The problem isn't mechanical, it's social. Admins need to be trained that humility and acceptance are more powerful motivators than insults, imperiousness and backhanded punishments.
We're all just waiting for Google to hit a slack quarter and cough up porn.google.com...
You know it'll happen.
The rules of public business operations don't allow it not to.
The Wikipedia is not documentation for anything. It is a lossy compression system for knowledge. Very lossy.
What modern computing lacks is a culture.
The oldbies had all that Gandalf/Chewbacca stuff to wallow in.
New times call for new surroundings.
It's certainly doable.
However, you need someone who understands business, sales, accounting, human resource management, etc.
So unless you plan on donating your time to open-source projects, start shopping for an Entrepreneur, and bring a viable Killer App idea with you.
100% of Brittanica articles will be useful to someone unfamiliar with the topic.
Maybe 20% of Wikipedia articles fit that standard.
Didn't Microsoft just say that two standards are better than one?
Or maybe they have a double-standard about that, too...
If we were improving our economy by giving the Internet to our competitors, I'd agree.
But we're not.
Making GDP bigger is not improving our economy.
It's improving theirs and counting it on our books.
This was a war we lost without even trying to stop it. Thank Carly Fiorina.
And you're right. It probably cost us closer to $3 to 5 Trillion...
Which one is more likely to be more wrong tomorrow than it is today?
I get 33% more errors, it takes me 160% more time, and random lusers on the Internet say it's a good thing...
It cost over a trillion dollars to create the Internet.
$1.5 million sounds like a honeypot, not a venture-capital firm...
They're sucking in neophytes who will sign over IP rights and get very little in return.
we've been blanket-collecting signals intelligence since WW2
remember, junior g-men: you only need a warrant for the evidence you use in court!
If I can't disable it, I don't buy it.
I'll buy from the guy next to you who's selling non-chipped systems.
You'll go broke.
Then I'll start selling chipped systems with user-enables.
Thanks for the private island, sucker.
Good point.
I have a job...and a girlfriend.
I believe I may also have little time for DD0.
Choosing between MMOs is hard.
What's old is new again:
http://www.pressplayontape.com/
This isn't quite hypocritical.
IBM has a lot of legacy stuff (documents, enterprise apps, specialized business and engineering tools) that wouldn't operate cleanly in a Linux environment. Even if it's a small percentage of their information and tool base, it's an argument for backward compatibility.
They can convince you to buy Linux if they can convince you to loose yourself from your legacy constraints. But they can't convince themselves because it would cost them more than they're willing to spend. You might have a different tolerance for the change.
>It would be a naive point of view to think that it hasn't already started. It would be equally naive to assume that the U.S. is not at the forefront of such a war.
We already lost the war.
America spent over $1 trillion in the 70's, 80's, and 90's creating the information economy.
Then shipped it to China and India in a matter of a few years.
They couldn't have taken $1 trillion in advantage from us in a shooting war, but they got it anyway.
The war is over, and this activity by the Chinese is to protect them from our attempt to take it back.
It's integrity.
That's where it went when it heard the Republicans were trying to find it in 1999.
Call your Senators.
h /patriot_act
They're trying to keep it true, forever, at the behest of the White House:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051214/ap_on_go_pr_w
Linux boots on a birthday cake!
http://chaotic.nexusvector.net/images/tux3.jpg
A note to advocates for the Bush administration:
There is no such thing as a "Massage-Therapy Engineer."
Our engineering jobs and the impetus to train engineers is moving to the other side of the Pacific.
Fix that, and stop trying to con us.
>At least in the printing case mentioned, Gnome apparently requires you to jump straight to "hacker mode" if you want to do something more than "simple".
Comparatively few people want anything more than simple in a desktop. They just want a place to put their icons and click on them. And a single drawer (i.e., a Start menu) to find their "other stuff" in.
The default multi-window navigation feature in Gnome is too much, even.