Read WP:N again, carefully. At least some references must specifically refer to the subject as an independent topic, not just mention it as a subtopic of something else. (The Time Magazine article comes close, but it doesn't really go into any detail, as the first commenter on the AfD mentioned [wikipedia.org].) That's why the article was merged. Why none of the content of said article appears in the lolcats article is another matter entirely.
Touche. I'll concede this one then and chalk it up to a policy that I don't agree with.
If there are so many references, why don't you add some of them to the article? You see, that's the beauty of Wikipedia: if something is wrong, you can fix it yourself. And it's almost impossible for an article with reliable, properly cited references to get deleted for good.
I could, in fact, fix it myself, but in all honesty, given my previous experiences with Wikipedia, I don't consider it to be worth my time. In all likelihood, as these things usually go, once someone important decides that an article needs to be deleted, putting it back, references or no, is pretty much futile. I can find several articles about Proto Man when I google him (video gaming magazines have devoted short but complete articles to the fact that he's now a playable character in Mega Man 9, thereby establishing notability independent of just the Mega Man community, if such a community even exists). Mind you, citing the character background and whatnot would take more time, since that would involve digging around in plot synopses and whatnot, but it could be done, and if the article were left in place, it would probably be done slowly over time by multiple interested parties.
But back to my original point. I've seen enough things happen on Wikipedia that I don't trust them to leave the article in existence even if it's properly cited; hard-headed admins feel the need to have their decisions stand long after the stated reasons for said decisions are no longer an issue (for an example of this, read the archived discussions for the Heroes TV show, and the ridiculous controversy over including a link to the Heroes wiki).
Regardless, even if all this crap were completely and undeniably consistent with Wikipedia policy, I still think the policy is fundamentally flawed. It's one thing to delete an article that some douchebucket writes about his two-week-old blog; it's another to delete something that's fairly well-known to a large but specific group of people.
When I typed Proto Man into that search box, I was more interested in seeing an extensive article about the character than a three sentence blurb on a list. Even if there's a notice at the top of the page that says "This information is unverified and needs to cite a source," I'm fine with it. If I felt better about Wikipedia's policies, I'd be a lot more inclined to help find those sources.
Have you actually even read WP:N [wikipedia.org]? The third sentence of the page begins "Notability is distinct from 'fame,' 'importance,' or 'popularity'...". For the most part, there is a very simple rule for deciding what is notable: if someone independent of the specific community of people related to the topic has written about the topic, it is notable; otherwise, it is not notable. Many stubs can automatically be saved from deletion by spending five minutes Googling for references.
Interesting you should mention that. The current article for Lolrus is a redirect. However, if you follow the redirect back and check the page history, you'll find a medium-length article with some independent citations (Slate and Time Magazine).
Unfortunately, "I think this is silly" is the unspoken reason that a lot of articles get deleted.
Finally, I refer you to one of my previous comments [slashdot.org].
The discussion you linked to is about someone complaining that they worked spent hours on an article and the powers that be reverted/deleted it. Someone challenged them for an example, which unfortunately they failed to provide. I, however, can provide several:
* Bubble Eye Goldfish - I wrote the original version of this article, and this is a link to a version of it before it was gutted. The reason given was a lack of references (which I had mistakenly given as External Links. Though there was plenty of data on the subject out on the internet, the person instead wiped out several hours worth of hard work and replaced the article with a stub, rather than a) taking the time to cite the article or b) putting up a notice that the article could use better citations.
* Proto Man - This article is currently intact, but only because I mentioned it on another website last night. Someone apparently went in and reverted the redirect, although if you check the history, you'll find that that's happened once before and the redirect was eventually replaced. The article lacks citations, but there are enough sources on the internet that citations could be provided. I did not have anything to do with the writing of this article.
* Cue creepy music and desaturated photo of current governor looking sneaky.
"Governor so-and-so is soft on crime. He's so soft on crime that he pardons sex offenders. Also, he hats old people and puppies. Vote for Other Dude, who we know is tough on crime because when he was DA he sent some kid to jail for 8 years for shoplifting a pack of gum.
Interestingly enough, the longest word that can be typed with the *other* half of the keyboard, which as a lot less letters, is "phyllophyllin" -- one letter longer than "stewardesses". Check this out:
In this case, we're lucky that the submitter actually did explain why he couldn't use Google, except the problem he cited isn't actually a problem. That doesn't make him an idiot, it just means he had a misconception about Google Apps that needed to be corrected.
Okay, fair enough. I retract that portion of my statement, at least in relation to you. What you said just hit a bit of a sore spot I have with geek community support in general, so my bad.:)
You've just described every Ask Slashdot answer, ever. It's always "Why on earth would you want to do that when my way is clearly superior" with a side of "I don't really understand all the nuts and bolts of your reasoning, but I'm just going to assume you're an idiot."
There are many perfectly good answers to the submitter's question. Unfortunately, every time someone gets a question up on Ask Slashdot, there are always a crowd of "why did you ask that here, you moron?" responses. Maybe this person doesn't know about any hosting forums. Maybe this person would like to get personal answers from a wide range of people with varying technical skills who aren't necessarily so gung ho about hosting that they hang out on hosting forums. Maybe they don't want google indexing their emails, but didn't see fit to include that tidbit in the small amount of space provided for them to ask their question.
This is a pretty major issue with Slashdot, the Linux Community, and geeks as a whole. In order to get any useful answers out of anyone, you have to ask your question and then include a thirty page essay about all of the "obvious" things that you've already tried and why they didn't work or are otherwise not an acceptable solution to your problem. Of course, once you do that, all the people who don't know anything shut up, and you're left with dead silence, and your question remains unanswered.:p
As a legitimate customer, it is NOT MY FAULT that other people are stealing the game. Let's say you're person A, and you're with person B and person C. Person C does something that pisses off person B. Person B can't reach person C, so they hit you instead.
Person C may be a douchebag, but your immediate concern is that person B just hit you, and you DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG.
Games will be pirated. DRM punishes legitimate customers. The pirates shouldn't goddamn be the ones to get the better product. Paying customers should.
As things currently stand, pirated software... * is a bitch to install * might not play successfully * could come with a rootkit
In contrast, legitimately purchased software... * is a bitch to install (don't you love those 40 character CD keys?) * might not play successfully (if you can't connect to the internet to validate the damn thing, god help you) * and might come with a fucking rootkit. * costs 50 bucks
Pirates will always have to use work-arounds to get software to install and run. Pirated software will always have a risk of carrying a rootkit. Legitimate software need not have these issues.
Corporations don't think quite the same way as individuals. The best way to reach an individual person is to convince them to do the right thing, and then morality and personal pride will often compel them to take your advice (provided you were convincing). When you're dealing with a big corporation, you have to bear in mind the fact that corporations don't work with pride or morals, they work with the bottom line. Ultimately, what you have to do is convince them that your way is the way that will make them more money, and if a boycott or bad ratings are the only way of doing that, then that's what you need to do.
I myself purchased the game, downloaded and installed the (cracked) pirated copy, then replaced the serial number in the system registry with the legitimate registration number. Illegal? Probably not, since I already own the software and I'm just downloading a backup. Breach of license? Definitely. That said, I bought their damn game. I don't intend to allow them to punish me for doing the right thing.
Also, just a note... Don't get me wrong on this, I like Firefox, and ultimately I'm rooting for it to come out on top. It's just that, as far as I'm concerned, competition -- especially this sort, where someone is jumping in with some radical new innovations -- can only help. Also, Chrome will likely peel off some of IE's market share, thereby adding momentum to the standards-compliant web.
For me, it's not about WebKit at all. Chrome has two features I've wanted for ages: One, separate tabs are separate processes, which means that alert windows and that kind of crap are all tab-modal instead of application-modal. That way one little alert window can't tie up five tabs. The other thing is the JavaScript execution speed, which is nice.
That said, I'm not 100% sold on it. I like Firefox, and there are big JavaScript improvements coming down the pipe in the near future. Hopefully the tab feature will be picked up by Firefox in the near future as well, but we'll see... it may require a major rewrite.
That reasoning is flawed. If a claim that they're 100% safe is untrue, then stop them from making *that claim*. The USDA has no right to stop them from testing 100% of the cows, even if the test isn't 100% accurate.
Very true. That said, if a company wants to do something perfectly safe with their product that they feel will generate more sales, they ought to be able to do so.
Funny how the same Republicans who *love* the free market when it suits them start crying foul when it's used in a way that makes big companies sad.
Next, these researchers will discover a bizarre new breed of Australian cows that like to point south.
Funny you should say that. In the northern hemisphere (they mention looking at cows in Britain, Ireland, India and the USA), the sun always comes from the south (southeast, southwest, etc). It could be the cows don't like to look into the sun, so they face the other way, and since the sun travels from southeast to southwest, the cow's average direction over the course of the day would be north.
In Australia, being in the southern hemisphere, the sun would cross the sky to the north, so Australian cows may actually point south as it is.
As it stands, the scientists here are making an inference from a sample that may not be representative of cows in general, but just cows in the northern hemisphere.
Does anyone know where one can obtain Fedora 9 packages? I've been suffering through 4.0 for a while and I'd love to be able to upgrade, but I'd prefer to use fedora's package management rather than compiling it myself. It's just simpler.
The long answer is that we have a fairly good situation at the moment. People may find the stickler types annoying, but ultimately they change things for the better by keeping the community from being complacent when commercial software is 'good enough'.
On the other hand, I do use a couple pieces of commercial software under Linux -- Skype and the Nvidia drivers, specifically (the same ones everyone else uses), and I'm not such an ideological purist that I'd want to use Linux without them (particularly the graphics driver).
I'm sure most people, purists and non-purists alike, would agree that they prefer to use Free software when the quality is equal to or better than comparable commercial offerings. Let the purists have their purity and the rest of us have our convenience, and say thank you to the purists every once in a while. They're changing things for the better.
Wow, that's too bad.... I didn't know Buffalo was having legal troubles. I bought one and put DD-WRT on it, tweaked some of the timeouts and raised the maximum tcp connections and now I can run bittorrents and surf the net at the same time with noticeable (but very tolerable) slowdown.
At any rate, it looks like you can order their routers on line. Just check DD-WRT's compatibility list first so you know you're getting something you can put a custom OS on.
I don't mind most advertising, but what I do mind are those adds that flash, shake, or move. If I'm trying to read an article and some stupid little dialog box warning me that I'm "broadcasting an IP address to the internet" is jiggling out of the corner of my eye, I'm going to download adblock.
Our DM teaches English and Fantasy Writing in Montana. You just can't have the interaction and creativity online that you do in person though. For those reasons I've never really enjoyed electronic RPGs. Really?
I find it easier. I've got a bunch of friends who play D&D via IRC (which, for the uninitiated, is a text-only internet chat system similar to instant messaging). In text only, I find it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief and see the characters instead of the people playing them. Imagination is a good thing.:)
Of course, by online, you may mean in MMORPGs, in which case I'd have to agree with you.
Yes, fortunately you don't have to invite a bunch of idiots to your table in order to get a D&D game going (although in my experience, the complexity of the game never kept the idiots out anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
So is mine, and I can plug my computer into it and use it as a modem. Of course, when I leave the city it's not very fast, but it's still there.
Read WP:N again, carefully. At least some references must specifically refer to the subject as an independent topic, not just mention it as a subtopic of something else. (The Time Magazine article comes close, but it doesn't really go into any detail, as the first commenter on the AfD mentioned [wikipedia.org].) That's why the article was merged. Why none of the content of said article appears in the lolcats article is another matter entirely.
Touche. I'll concede this one then and chalk it up to a policy that I don't agree with.
If there are so many references, why don't you add some of them to the article? You see, that's the beauty of Wikipedia: if something is wrong, you can fix it yourself. And it's almost impossible for an article with reliable, properly cited references to get deleted for good.
I could, in fact, fix it myself, but in all honesty, given my previous experiences with Wikipedia, I don't consider it to be worth my time. In all likelihood, as these things usually go, once someone important decides that an article needs to be deleted, putting it back, references or no, is pretty much futile. I can find several articles about Proto Man when I google him (video gaming magazines have devoted short but complete articles to the fact that he's now a playable character in Mega Man 9, thereby establishing notability independent of just the Mega Man community, if such a community even exists). Mind you, citing the character background and whatnot would take more time, since that would involve digging around in plot synopses and whatnot, but it could be done, and if the article were left in place, it would probably be done slowly over time by multiple interested parties.
But back to my original point. I've seen enough things happen on Wikipedia that I don't trust them to leave the article in existence even if it's properly cited; hard-headed admins feel the need to have their decisions stand long after the stated reasons for said decisions are no longer an issue (for an example of this, read the archived discussions for the Heroes TV show, and the ridiculous controversy over including a link to the Heroes wiki).
Regardless, even if all this crap were completely and undeniably consistent with Wikipedia policy, I still think the policy is fundamentally flawed. It's one thing to delete an article that some douchebucket writes about his two-week-old blog; it's another to delete something that's fairly well-known to a large but specific group of people.
When I typed Proto Man into that search box, I was more interested in seeing an extensive article about the character than a three sentence blurb on a list. Even if there's a notice at the top of the page that says "This information is unverified and needs to cite a source," I'm fine with it. If I felt better about Wikipedia's policies, I'd be a lot more inclined to help find those sources.
Have you actually even read WP:N [wikipedia.org]? The third sentence of the page begins "Notability is distinct from 'fame,' 'importance,' or 'popularity'...". For the most part, there is a very simple rule for deciding what is notable: if someone independent of the specific community of people related to the topic has written about the topic, it is notable; otherwise, it is not notable. Many stubs can automatically be saved from deletion by spending five minutes Googling for references.
Interesting you should mention that. The current article for Lolrus is a redirect. However, if you follow the redirect back and check the page history, you'll find a medium-length article with some independent citations (Slate and Time Magazine).
Unfortunately, "I think this is silly" is the unspoken reason that a lot of articles get deleted.
Finally, I refer you to one of my previous comments [slashdot.org].
The discussion you linked to is about someone complaining that they worked spent hours on an article and the powers that be reverted/deleted it. Someone challenged them for an example, which unfortunately they failed to provide. I, however, can provide several:
* Bubble Eye Goldfish - I wrote the original version of this article, and this is a link to a version of it before it was gutted. The reason given was a lack of references (which I had mistakenly given as External Links. Though there was plenty of data on the subject out on the internet, the person instead wiped out several hours worth of hard work and replaced the article with a stub, rather than a) taking the time to cite the article or b) putting up a notice that the article could use better citations.
* Proto Man - This article is currently intact, but only because I mentioned it on another website last night. Someone apparently went in and reverted the redirect, although if you check the history, you'll find that that's happened once before and the redirect was eventually replaced. The article lacks citations, but there are enough sources on the internet that citations could be provided. I did not have anything to do with the writing of this article.
* Cue creepy music and desaturated photo of current governor looking sneaky.
"Governor so-and-so is soft on crime. He's so soft on crime that he pardons sex offenders. Also, he hats old people and puppies. Vote for Other Dude, who we know is tough on crime because when he was DA he sent some kid to jail for 8 years for shoplifting a pack of gum.
"I'm Other Dude, and I approve this message."
Interestingly enough, the longest word that can be typed with the *other* half of the keyboard, which as a lot less letters, is "phyllophyllin" -- one letter longer than "stewardesses". Check this out:
$ grep -i '^[yuiophjklnm]\{12,\}$' /usr/share/dict/words
hypophyllium
miminypiminy
phyllophyllin
Mind you, I don't know what any of those mean. :)
"Talk to your kids about IT ... before someone else does."
In this case, we're lucky that the submitter actually did explain why he couldn't use Google, except the problem he cited isn't actually a problem. That doesn't make him an idiot, it just means he had a misconception about Google Apps that needed to be corrected.
Okay, fair enough. I retract that portion of my statement, at least in relation to you. What you said just hit a bit of a sore spot I have with geek community support in general, so my bad. :)
You've just described every Ask Slashdot answer, ever. It's always "Why on earth would you want to do that when my way is clearly superior" with a side of "I don't really understand all the nuts and bolts of your reasoning, but I'm just going to assume you're an idiot."
There are many perfectly good answers to the submitter's question. Unfortunately, every time someone gets a question up on Ask Slashdot, there are always a crowd of "why did you ask that here, you moron?" responses. Maybe this person doesn't know about any hosting forums. Maybe this person would like to get personal answers from a wide range of people with varying technical skills who aren't necessarily so gung ho about hosting that they hang out on hosting forums. Maybe they don't want google indexing their emails, but didn't see fit to include that tidbit in the small amount of space provided for them to ask their question.
This is a pretty major issue with Slashdot, the Linux Community, and geeks as a whole. In order to get any useful answers out of anyone, you have to ask your question and then include a thirty page essay about all of the "obvious" things that you've already tried and why they didn't work or are otherwise not an acceptable solution to your problem. Of course, once you do that, all the people who don't know anything shut up, and you're left with dead silence, and your question remains unanswered. :p
As a legitimate customer, it is NOT MY FAULT that other people are stealing the game. Let's say you're person A, and you're with person B and person C. Person C does something that pisses off person B. Person B can't reach person C, so they hit you instead.
Person C may be a douchebag, but your immediate concern is that person B just hit you, and you DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG.
Games will be pirated. DRM punishes legitimate customers. The pirates shouldn't goddamn be the ones to get the better product. Paying customers should.
As things currently stand, pirated software ...
* is a bitch to install
* might not play successfully
* could come with a rootkit
In contrast, legitimately purchased software ...
* is a bitch to install (don't you love those 40 character CD keys?)
* might not play successfully (if you can't connect to the internet to validate the damn thing, god help you)
* and might come with a fucking rootkit.
* costs 50 bucks
Pirates will always have to use work-arounds to get software to install and run. Pirated software will always have a risk of carrying a rootkit. Legitimate software need not have these issues.
Corporations don't think quite the same way as individuals. The best way to reach an individual person is to convince them to do the right thing, and then morality and personal pride will often compel them to take your advice (provided you were convincing). When you're dealing with a big corporation, you have to bear in mind the fact that corporations don't work with pride or morals, they work with the bottom line. Ultimately, what you have to do is convince them that your way is the way that will make them more money, and if a boycott or bad ratings are the only way of doing that, then that's what you need to do.
I myself purchased the game, downloaded and installed the (cracked) pirated copy, then replaced the serial number in the system registry with the legitimate registration number. Illegal? Probably not, since I already own the software and I'm just downloading a backup. Breach of license? Definitely. That said, I bought their damn game. I don't intend to allow them to punish me for doing the right thing.
Also, just a note... Don't get me wrong on this, I like Firefox, and ultimately I'm rooting for it to come out on top. It's just that, as far as I'm concerned, competition -- especially this sort, where someone is jumping in with some radical new innovations -- can only help. Also, Chrome will likely peel off some of IE's market share, thereby adding momentum to the standards-compliant web.
For me, it's not about WebKit at all. Chrome has two features I've wanted for ages: One, separate tabs are separate processes, which means that alert windows and that kind of crap are all tab-modal instead of application-modal. That way one little alert window can't tie up five tabs. The other thing is the JavaScript execution speed, which is nice.
That said, I'm not 100% sold on it. I like Firefox, and there are big JavaScript improvements coming down the pipe in the near future. Hopefully the tab feature will be picked up by Firefox in the near future as well, but we'll see... it may require a major rewrite.
That reasoning is flawed. If a claim that they're 100% safe is untrue, then stop them from making *that claim*. The USDA has no right to stop them from testing 100% of the cows, even if the test isn't 100% accurate.
Very true. That said, if a company wants to do something perfectly safe with their product that they feel will generate more sales, they ought to be able to do so.
Funny how the same Republicans who *love* the free market when it suits them start crying foul when it's used in a way that makes big companies sad.
Next, these researchers will discover a bizarre new breed of Australian cows that like to point south.
Funny you should say that. In the northern hemisphere (they mention looking at cows in Britain, Ireland, India and the USA), the sun always comes from the south (southeast, southwest, etc). It could be the cows don't like to look into the sun, so they face the other way, and since the sun travels from southeast to southwest, the cow's average direction over the course of the day would be north.
In Australia, being in the southern hemisphere, the sun would cross the sky to the north, so Australian cows may actually point south as it is.
As it stands, the scientists here are making an inference from a sample that may not be representative of cows in general, but just cows in the northern hemisphere.
http://www.kde.org/download/#v4.1
Does anyone know where one can obtain Fedora 9 packages? I've been suffering through 4.0 for a while and I'd love to be able to upgrade, but I'd prefer to use fedora's package management rather than compiling it myself. It's just simpler.
The answer is no,.
That's the short answer.
The long answer is that we have a fairly good situation at the moment. People may find the stickler types annoying, but ultimately they change things for the better by keeping the community from being complacent when commercial software is 'good enough'.
On the other hand, I do use a couple pieces of commercial software under Linux -- Skype and the Nvidia drivers, specifically (the same ones everyone else uses), and I'm not such an ideological purist that I'd want to use Linux without them (particularly the graphics driver).
I'm sure most people, purists and non-purists alike, would agree that they prefer to use Free software when the quality is equal to or better than comparable commercial offerings. Let the purists have their purity and the rest of us have our convenience, and say thank you to the purists every once in a while. They're changing things for the better.
Wow, that's too bad.... I didn't know Buffalo was having legal troubles. I bought one and put DD-WRT on it, tweaked some of the timeouts and raised the maximum tcp connections and now I can run bittorrents and surf the net at the same time with noticeable (but very tolerable) slowdown.
At any rate, it looks like you can order their routers on line. Just check DD-WRT's compatibility list first so you know you're getting something you can put a custom OS on.
If China manages to put a man on the moon, we'll put a goddamn elephant on the moon, because we're America!
I don't mind most advertising, but what I do mind are those adds that flash, shake, or move. If I'm trying to read an article and some stupid little dialog box warning me that I'm "broadcasting an IP address to the internet" is jiggling out of the corner of my eye, I'm going to download adblock.
He'll just regenerate anyway. :)
I find it easier. I've got a bunch of friends who play D&D via IRC (which, for the uninitiated, is a text-only internet chat system similar to instant messaging). In text only, I find it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief and see the characters instead of the people playing them. Imagination is a good thing.
Of course, by online, you may mean in MMORPGs, in which case I'd have to agree with you.
Yes, fortunately you don't have to invite a bunch of idiots to your table in order to get a D&D game going (although in my experience, the complexity of the game never kept the idiots out anyway).
George Bush has average intelligence (giving him the benefit of the doubt there), but he grew up filthy rich. He's hardly average.
This country has kind of a funny definition of 'elite'.