Just thought I'd put this out there, since some Qwest cutsomers may not be aware of this.
About a year ago, my fiancee and I noticed that we were no longer getting e-mail from some of our mailing lists. (For instance, I stopped receiving VersionTracker daily e-mails. She stopped receiving e-mails from various political interest groups and animal welfare groups.) We both have e-mail accounts through Qwest Choice, which provides us with bundled digital cable TV and Internet service all through a single VDSL link. (Yeah, it's pretty weird to tell people I get "cable TV" delivered through my phone lines...)
I spent a good deal of time with the VersionTracker folks to track this issue down. Finally, we figured out that it was Qwest who was bouncing the messages. I then contacted Qwest to find out why, and to see if we could fix this.
The tier-one tech support folks at Qwest are usually the last people to find out when Qwest changes a network policy. For instance, when Qwest started blocking certain ports to prevent their broadband users from hosting websites and reselling bandwidth, the tier-1 folks continued to insist that Qwest didn't block any port numbers -- even months after the policy had been instituted. (Point in fact, I had to get Qwest to unblock outbound NTP requests so my Mac could set its system clock correctly -- some network admin at Qwest got overzealous and blocked NTP in both directions. At the time, Mac OS 8 didn't let you change the port over which you made NTP requests. It took several days before I was put in touch with a real network engineer.) So when I contacted Qwest about this problem, they naturally didn't believe me and quoted from one of their talking scripts...
Only after I explained carefully the steps I had taken, and identified myself as an IT professional who knows a thing or two about networking, did they finally listen and forward my requests to higher tiers within their support organization. That's when I finally got confirmation from Qwest management that yes, indeed, Qwest had quietly instituted a spam filtering policy without notifying their customers.
Furthermore, the way Qwest instituted this policy provided zero transparency. There is no e-mail quarantine system to allow users to provisionally unblock mail or whitelist a particular sender. I was also told flatly that there was no opt-out policy for this "service," even though I complained loudly that I hadn't been getting perfectly legitimate e-mails that I had signed up to receive. So if Qwest's servers receive a message that they think might be spam, it gets bounced back to the sender and I hear nothing of it. Therefore, the system won't tune itself.
I thought perhaps Qwest had loosened its filters, but when I recently E-filed my taxes, I didn't get confirmation e-mails back from either the IRS or my state taxing authority. Fortunately, TurboTax was able to check with the appropriate E-file servers directly and report back on the status of my returns, so the confirmation e-mails were not strictly necessary; they just would have been nice from a peace-of-mind standpoint.
The Wired article rightly hits the nail on the head: Only the end-user knows what they consider to be "desirable" and "undesirable" e-mail. That's why I rely on the junk mail filters in my e-mail client software (the OS X built-in mail client).
In the meantime, I'm still getting spam through my Qwest e-mail account, as is my fiancee. She claims the spam problem with Qwest is worse now than it ever was before they instituted this crude filter.
So, do you pay sales tax at a book store? Because it seems to me that this tax is a tax on the sale, not upon the game itself -- I mean, what else could they tax? Taxation at the time of sale is generally the only enforceable option for merchandise such as this.
Actually, thanks for the clarification... although I still think the "bootstrapping" rationale is valid even for IT. Let's use your Latvian machinist example as a starting point; presumably, after we'd had Latvian machinists here on H1-B status for a number of years, there would be some absorption of the basic technology and talent to use the technology here in the U.S. After some time, there should be no more need to hire these famed Latvian machinists, as the technology and requisite skills would have been absorbed and taught to U.S. workers.
To bring this back to IT, suppose there's some new programming technology or methodology that isn't currently well understood in the U.S. -- a technology or methodology that was developed in another country. Naturally, you'd want to import the people who have these skills using H1-B visas. I don't think the H1-B visa regulations were meant to bar guest workers who have skills that could be learned by an American -- only to allow guest workers who have skills that no American currently possesses. Naturally, once the knowledge transfer takes place and a pool of domestic workers with this new skill is developed, you should no longer be relying on a pool of H1-B visa talent.
If no company is willing to put in the time/money to turn incompetant people into competant people, then how can they possibly expect to be able to hire competant people? I don't believe in ingrown talent for coding, aside from a few autistics (which other people would most certainly call incompetant due to their lack of ability to interact with customers). Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately.
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.
I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.
All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.
Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.
The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.
Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.
Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately. Of course, I'd start them out on an interpreter, and only slowly move them up to modern OOP programming....with stops at assembly, scripting, state machine theory, database normalization, database denormalization, procedural, RPN, SP, and multithreading along the way.
And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specifically useful but which should be covered as part of a more general curriculum. For instance, RPN -- assuming you meant Reverse Polish Notation -- is a specific subset of various notations and syntaxes that can be used in programming languages.)
An employer should not be expected to provide the foundations of a computer science degree. Unfortunately, most degree mills have programs that focus on "practical knowledge" and which gloss over general-but-useful information, such as determining the efficiency of an algorithm and expressing it in O-notation; hence, such degrees dilute the meaning of degrees issued by more prestigious institutions with more rigorous academic standards, so employers' standards have fallen as a result.
So, yeah, if you're an employer and you have 8 years to waste on teaching someone from ground zero, great. Most employers don't. An employer should be expected to train people up on the domain-specific knowledge they need, such as operational knowledge specific to how the company does business.
You know, I can see why some of the other comments on this article got a "Troll" moderation, but I really fail to see how this comment is a troll.
In short, this poster is correct -- the original intention of the H1B visa was to import unique talent that could not be found here. I'm going to disagree with sakusha on the scope of that -- s/he seems to think that this was primarily to lure native speakers of other languages here for foreign language instruction, and I don't think the scope was quite that narrow. (Specifically, there are foreign-developed technologies that we'd like to have here, and providing a path for foreign workers to come here to help us get up to speed on those technologies is a good thing.)
I'm sure there are those who would take exception to the suggestion that H1B workers are paid far less than their American counterparts, since the law says these workers are supposed to get paid the same... However, the reality doesn't match the letter of the law, as most employers who hire large numbers of H1B visas can play fast and loose with their estimates of a "typical salary" for any given position might be. And if an employer advertises for applicants for a position, but the posted salary range is far lower than what most Americans would be willing to work for, the employer can use the lack of response to the advertisement as evidence of a lack of skilled talent.
Besides, some unemployment is healthy. If you've ever had an actual job, you'd probably know that there's plenty of programmers out there that are so incompetent that they create more work than they do. [Emphasis mine.] Those guys SHOULD be unemployed, regardless of their country of origin. Who in their right mind would want to hire a dog like that over someone with talent?
Somebody who realizes that a good programmer can be trained to do anything?
Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.
Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."
As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.
considering H1b visas cost about 2k not including the legal fees (goes to about 4k per person overall) and they have to be paid the prevailing wage, the issue is not that is it cheap labor.
Except that in practice, H1B visa workers in the IT industry never get paid what their native-born counterparts get paid. As another poster in this thread pointed out, "prevailing wage" is hard to compute for IT companies where pay scales vary widely... and the standard practice at companies where I've worked is, the management always low-balls the estimate of "prevailing wage" when looking to hire H1B visa workers.
It's this disparity between the letter of the law and the actual practice of the law that has a lot of IT workers like myself steamed up.
Another related practice is the hiring of "perpetual contractors." It's so much easier to have a work force made entirely of disposable people, even if it means paying a small premium (higher hourly wages) for the flexibility of being able to get rid of someone at a moment's notice. (And let's not forget that most contractors get no benefits, or typically poor benefits if they work through a consulting company.)
I've been witness to both sides of this equation. There are no easy answers, because human nature is so f'ed up.
If the nerd/scientist gets the CEO position, nobody will take him seriously, because of the herd mentality that most "business" people suffer from. They don't care for or respect anyone who isn't a "business" person like them. They only see creative types for the value of what they can do for the businessman. It's likely that venture capital will be next to impossible to acquire. Furthermore, the nerd/scientist CEO will spend all his time dealing with accusations of being "inflexible" and "not suited to the job."
If the business major gets the CEO position, the nerd/scientist gets relegated to the CTO position. The nerd/scientist will only last with the company until (a) the CEO decides to oust the nerd/scientist so he can keep all the glory for himself, or (b) the venture capitalists have decided that the idea factory is no longer worth keeping on the payroll. If (a) doesn't happen, then (b) almost certainly will, unless you can avoid the VC trap altogether.
In the particular situation described by the querant, I feel bad for him because regardless of which path is taken, it will probably end badly; either way, the friendship between these two men will likely disintegrate.
The moral of the story is: There are no friends in business. Friendship and business don't mix, so don't go into business with someone you actually consider a friend.
The geek perspective: Business people exist in a culture of exploitation, though of course they don't see it that way and will bristle with indignation if you suggest so. To me, this doesn't change the fundamental facts. This isn't a screed against capitalism! I rather like capitalism. I just have a problem with "business" people. MBAs in particular are people I have no use for, as most of them are parasites.
The only real solution: If you're a geek and you want to start a business, learn how to run a business yourself and absolutely refuse to buy into the concept that someone can go to school to study "business" without understanding the actual business/market they'll be dealing with.
Maybe I'm just being cynical, so take everything I just wrote with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, it looks like the querant is already stuck with his partner, so the best advice I can give is this: Yield the CEO position to the other guy, make sure you're a CTO, and make sure your contract is iron-clad and bulletproof. And retain a good lawyer in case your buddy tries to sideline you. Perhaps even demand a majority stake in the LLC (51%) if you can negotiate that, as compensation for giving up the power position. But whatever you do, have a good, ruthless lawyer at your beck and call. Make sure that if they have an option to get rid of you, it's an expensive option (for them), so you'll be able to land on your feet.
Based on my prior experiences with GoDaddy, I'm not at all surprised that they would agree to such a flash-without-substance arrangement.
Maybe it was the horrifying not-quite-a-job-interview that I had with them, in which they gave me a "pseudo IQ test" (the words of the hiring manager, which is interesting because intelligence testing as a prerequisite for hiring is illegal in the United States), or the fact that the test they gave was administered and scored inconsistently with the type of test it was.
Maybe it's the Orwellian dreary work environment that I witnessed when I went to interview there. (It was worst for the call center peeps, but pretty dungeon-like everywhere else.)
Maybe it's the really (IMHO) offensive ads they ran.
Maybe it's the caliber of people I met there.
Maybe it's the irresponsible way they blacklisted Qwest's e-mail servers for the sites and mail accounts they host; at least one recruiter e-mailed me from an account hosted by them, and when I replied, the e-mail bounced because apparently GoDaddy considered Qwest to be a haven for spammers and zombies. (Kind of funny, when you consider that GoDaddy used to be a spammer's paradise, and probably still is. Pot, kettle, black.)
Whatever the reason, I quickly developed the impression that GoDaddy.com is nothing but a bunch of frat boys who like to play at being IT professionals. People who want to give the illusion of computer literacy and competency, but who don't care about technology as anything other than a means to screw other people out of money.
For a press release that's all about appearances and not about anything of import -- it's for parked domains, for crying out loud, so you know this is something only squatters probably care about -- it fits their MO perfectly. And Microsoft's, not coincidentally.
But hey, maybe all the dough they're getting from Microsoft for this little non-event will help pay for the perpetual party at the GoDaddy frat house... The sad thing is, I'm sure one of the scumbags running the show at GoDaddy figured this Microsoft partnership announcement would actually be good for their image. Whatever their reasons, it's pretty clear they don't value geek cred.
Yes, but the Nintendo 64 rumble pack didn't have multi-axis rumble features.
The dual shock design has two motors for vibration, and IIRC they're mounted along different axes so you can have multi-dimensional vibrational feedback. I think it's a bit of a stretch to call this true "force feedback," but whatever. (To my mind, force feedback implies that you push on a control and it "pushes back," like steering wheels that simulate difficult turns and joysticks that simulate a stuck rudder or elevator on an aircraft.)
I'm sure the razor companies are fighting it over who owns the patent for 3, 4, 5, 6, and higher number razor blades. But I just can't fathom there is anything materially different about them to be patentable.
That's why when you write a patent, you try to make its claims as broad as possible (e.g., "...for configurations of 3 or more razor blades," or in the context of this article, "...for configurations of 2 or more unbalanced weights driven by electric motors."), and when you're trying to work around someone else's patent, you find all the loopholes and exploit them (e.g., "Oh, look, they didn't cover the case for a single unbalanced weight!").
I used to work for a material scientist who was adept at both activities. He was very good at finding corner cases where other people's patents didn't apply, and then he'd file a patent on the corner case as an improvement to the original patent he was working around. Current patent law allows you to patent improvements to someone else's patented invention or process. (Traditionally, "process" means manufacturing process, although business process patents now seem to be allowed.)
My boss was also good at making his own patents nice and broad to insure that his competitors would violate his IP. He had this fabulous patent on a method for growing a crystalline probe that would be formed on the end of a fiber optic cable. The probe had a face that was at a specific angle with respect to the long axis of the crystal, which he calculated to be the optimal angle for this face, but his patent was written to allow for a range of angles. Sure enough, some company that was using this technology to probe oil wells violated my boss' patent, and of course he went after them to defend his IP. The competitor's product, IIRC, didn't use the optimal angle for the crystal face, but it didn't matter, as they still were within the claims of the patent.
Of course, there are some modifications which are materially insignificant -- like how many legs your apparatus has to stand off the ground -- but most patent authors these days like to leave nothing to chance.
BSD, Linux and even Windows already have patches for NX to contain buffer offerflows, where is Apple on this?
According to what I've been able to glean from Apple's developer resources (available at developer.apple.com), and from various articles about the new Intel-based Macs, the Macs with x86 processors all have chips that support the NX bit, and the NX bit is turned on by default. There is supposedly a work-around to allow you to compile a specific application without the NX bit set, so that the app can execute code on the stack (something that apparently some badly-written apps do). The "work-around" is a compiler flag. Certainly, few or no apps that you download or buy pre-packaged are going to have this bit turned off... unless you manage to download a trojan.
I don't recall whether or not the PowerPC ABI allows so-called stack trampolining (executing code on the stack). I know some compilers took advantage of the ability to execute code on the stack to implement certain language-level constructs, though at the moment I'm drawing a blank on the specific ones; regardless, you can implement such features without resorting to executing code on the stack.
I do recall, however, that the PowerPC ABI gives preference to argument passing through registers, whereas the x86 ABI requires passing arguments to functions on the stack (because the x86 has far fewer registers). This is one reason why PowerPC Macs are less vulnerable to buffer overflow / stack based exploits.
They should just throw a cheap old progressive scan DVD drive into the PS3 [...]
Just a nit-picky point, but the optical drive itself has nothing to do with whether the player (drive + additional logic + every other bit of support electronics) can output progressive scan video. The optical drive is just a way to get the data off the media. The video output hardware and the MPEG decode software both live outside the optical drive. The BD-ROM drive in the PS3 will probably include some crypto/authentication logic which is part of the Blu-Ray standard (mandated copy controls, etc.), but the way the video gets rendered for output is not something the optical drive has control over.
I know others have already responded, but there's a good Wikipedia reference that summarizes the duration of patent terms: For patents filed before and still in force by June 8, 1995, the patent term is either 17 years from the issue date or 20 years from the filing date, whichever is the longer of the two. For patents filed after June 8, 1995, it's 20 years from the earliest claimed filing date.
So it looks like this patent is set to expire April 6, 2007.
Reading the patent document, it clearly states it was filed in 1987, not 1985. Which means that's 2 more years (beyond what you thought) to wait before it expires...
I have about 6Mbps down and 384 Kbps up. To get anything faster (in my area) than a 384Kb upload, you have to buy a business level connection.
I thought bandwidth was bandwidth. Why is it so much more expensive to get a faster upload?
Well, because broadband-over-cable is a kludge. The cable design philosophy centers around distributing a signal from one point of origin to multiple endpoints; it's designed for one-way multicast.
Kludging the cable systems to allow for bidirectional data transfer was problematic at best, and the artifact of this difficulty is that upstream bandwidth for most users is going to be a small fraction of downstream bandwidth. (To use a bad analogy, you're trying to transmit data "against the flow," so it's more difficult... like paddling upstream in a canoe versus paddling downstream.)
Having said that... most cable broadband ISPs artificially limit upstream bandwidth, partly to offer tiered services for business customers (higher bitrates and a higher Quality of Service), and partly to minimize the impact of certain users on local network segments. Cable broadband has this really rotten feature of forcing people on local segments to share bandwidth, so capping upstream bandwidth can be seen as a way to preserve an already precious commodity.
If you want a true symmetric pipe to the 'net, T1/T3 or some DSL variant is your best bet.
One thing that people fail to consider is the cost of software licensing. The Blu-Ray specification mandates Java support in the player... because that's the language all the rich/interactive Blu-Ray content will be authored in. So there needs to be a bytecode interpreter in any Blu-Ray player's firmware, along with any libraries necessary.
So, since the PS3 will be fully Blu-Ray compliant, Sony will have to license Java from Sun (or perhaps they'll license IBM's VM instead of Sun's, which could save them some money since Sony is already sourcing the Cell processor from IBM). It's a non-zero cost. And this cost is not part of the cost of the Blu-Ray drive itself; this cost is along the same lines as the cost of licensing an MPEG2/4 codec for playback of the video/audio streams on media. Even if Sony authors their own MPEG codecs for the PS3, they'll still need to pay the appropriate licensing fees to the appropriate rights holders.
It's a pity you got modded down as a Troll for your post, because I actually agree with much of what you said (though your presentation leaves a bit to be desired).
I've had first-hand experience dealing with outsourcing software development to India. I worked for a small company which sold financial software as one of its products. (The other "products" were seminars on how to trade options and futures to reduce your risk in the stock market, by buying and selling "spreads" to minimize risk and maximize profit.)
There were two major IT-related tasks that needed to be completed. One was the re-engineering of the flagship software product, which generated both up-front and residual revenue for the company; the other task was redesigning a web site for the company.
Our fearless leader decided to give the web site work to Square Radius, which had some local talent (mainly DB folks) but kept most of its Java programmers in India. Square Radius decided they were hungry for more than just a web site development contract, so they bid to take over some of the reengineering effort for the flagship software product that I was working on.
During the first several meetings, it became clear that these "Java" programmers from India barely knew Java, and it became clear that their main area of expertise was J2EE. They had no experience writing Swing apps, and precious little writing stand-alone Java applications that could run on a server. Naturally, they wanted to force our architecture toward a web-centric design using technologies they'd used countless other times, even though we tried to explain to them that the transaction throughput of our system wouldn't accommodate that model. Our clients want real-time or near-real-time feeds on stock and options pricing data, as well as a rich UI that you really can't provide on a web page (even with AJAX, which wasn't a popular technology at the time).
We decided to farm out a small portion of the server-side code for this application reengineering effort. It was understood that they would work on this in parallel with their web site redevelopment effort.
Here's what came of all this:
The web site redevelopment effort took easily twice as long as was initially estimated.
The web site redevelopment yielded a site that included none of the improvements that our management asked for. The new site was essentially a clone of an existing site, with perhaps a bit cleaner layout and cleaner underlying code.
The small server-side piece of Java code that we tried to farm out to Square Radius' developers in India was a disaster. I wound up scrapping their code after I realized they were making no progress. Their developers pretty much needed constant hand-holding, which is difficult to do when the architects are in Arizona and the coders are in Mumbai and New Delhi. The code itself was the quality I'd expect from someone still learning Java -- maybe something a student might write.
Square Radius' management tried to use underhanded tactics to wedge themselves into the project and get my team, which was sourced from a domestic consulting company, kicked off the project so they could have the whole enchilada. One tactic was to play up friction between me and their team members who were visiting our site. Most of this friction was due to cultural differences, and my particular abrasive manner. Of course, if they had brought engineers who were both smarter and more experienced, maybe I wouldn't have been so frustrated with trying to teach them our architecture. And these were supposed to be their top engineers...
Yeah, these guys were cheaper (on an hourly basis) than their American counterparts, but they took far longer to do the same work. The quality of the work product was inferior, based on what I consider to be the hallmarks of good code and best practices. We did not get what we asked for in any case. We wound up having to farm the web site out a second time, this time to a domestic web
In some cases the electric motor can motivate the car on it's own, but that only applies to the Prius and Ford hybrids, the Civic still needs the engine to get it going. It's only under a limited set of circumstances that the engine can fully take over anyway.
Actually, the new Civic Hybrid models coming out (2006 model year) can operate on electric power only at low speeds, according to Honda's press releases and their own web site.
"For 2006, the electric motor can propel the car from a stop to speeds up to 35 mph."
So the Civic Hybrid is getting a bit more Prius-like. There's some more discussion of this new '06 feature for the Civic Hybrid here and here, where some folks have managed to get this new feature to kick in consistently. Apparently, unlike the Prius, the Civic Hybrid won't normally use electric-only power from a dead stop; rather, you have to be cruising at low speeds (under 35 MPH). This is according to actual users, and doesn't exactly agree with what Honda put on their web site.
The main criticism of aspartame that I'm familiar with isn't so much that the amounts of phenylalanine are so high, but that the rate at which it gets dumped into the blood stream is so high when the dipeptide (aspartame) is metabolized. A dipeptide takes very little time to chop up into its component amino acids, and while aspartame itself might be safe, the metabolic byproducts might not.
Personally, I'm a little leery of any chemical that can easily cross the blood-brain barrier. Nobody knows exactly what aspartame does in this case.
Other way around -- they replace hydroxyl groups with Chlorine atoms. Some opponents of splenda/sucralose have referred to it as "chlorinated sucrose" because of this, though that's a simplistic view.
What is known is that some users of splenda complain of kidney pain (I'm one of them, so I have to avoid splenda in soft drinks), and there is some evidence to suggest that splenda increases the risk of kidney stones. I can't really speak to other health effects (e.g., neurological).
Personally, I'd recommend people look into Xylitol as a sugar substitute. It ain't cheap, but you can bake with it and cook with it (with a couple exceptions -- breads won't rise with pure Xylitol, for instance). It has a low glycemic index. Best of all, it's totally natural, and our bodies can metabolize it. Well, OK, some people of Mediterranean Jewish descent can't metabolize Xylitol -- it's a 5-carbon sugar-alcohol, and some people lack the gene to make the right enzyme for that; the condition is called pentasuria. Xylitol has the added health benefit of promoting good teeth and gums, and retards the growth of some bacteria such as streptococcus. More info at http://www.xlear.com/
Wikipedia's accuracy and Britannica's accuracy were pretty similar on well-researched and popular topics
I quoted the above snippet from your comment to amplify a point -- what about the Wikipedia articles that aren't as popular and aren't as well-researched? At least with more traditional encyclopedias like Britannica, there's a certain minimum standard of fact checking and research that goes into each article before it is included. I don't think the same can be said for Wikipedia.
And, as I've said elsewhere, Britannica doesn't have a problem with vandalism.
This isn't to say that I don't find Wikipedia useful... just not authoritative from an academic standpoint.
The Nature article you cite still finds Britannica's accuracy in science articles to be marginally better than that of Wikipedia's. (The average is stated as: 4 errors per article in Wikipedia, 3 per article in Britannica.) This is hardly something you can spin doctor into "Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica," although I will concede that the difference is statistically small.
The methodology of the study cited in Nature has come into question; the article contains an addendum linking to supplementary information about how the data was collected.
So... according to Nature, Wikipedia "comes close" to Britannica in terms of accuracy, but does not seem to exceed it.
Furthermore, there are notorious examples of outright fabrications and falsehoods masquerading as fact in Wikipedia articles, mainly due to vandalism. This is a problem that Britannica doesn't seem to have. So... I stand by my statements.
More eyeballs is not an automatic guarantee of anything... so I guess in a sense I am saying yes, there may be a flaw in the OS argument for that paradigm's superiority. I think there is a measure of blind dogma and politics underlying the Open Source movement.
However, I'd be hard pressed to call this a critical flaw as you have done. And surely there are OS projects where the contributors are all competent people; the users of Wikipedia, on the other hand, are all over the spectrum of competency. See the difference?
Furthermore, I haven't said anything regarding the other benefits and advantages of Open Source. So don't go putting words in my mouth.:-)
he makes us use a crummy encyclopedia that isn't checked for accuracy like Wikipedia is such as Britanica.
Are you serious?
First of all, I can't imagine a college professor letting you get away with citing an encyclopedia at all. The whole point of doing college assignments is learning to use primary sources of information. This isn't high school!
Secondly, Britannica has much better fact checking than Wikipedia. The fact that some Wikipedia articles have glaring errors that don't get caught and corrected for months at a stretch is bad; some of these errors are the result of intentional vandalism, and unless you've been living under a rock the last few months, you're no doubt aware that some of this vandalism is in fact libel. I'd link to the Slashdot coverage of the most famous of these events, but it looks like you need a refresher course in doing basic research...
Don't assume that just because Wikipedia is being scanned by a bunch of eyeballs every day, that Wikipedia must automatically be better fact-checked. Not every reader of Wikipedia is an expert, so not every reader is qualified to make revisions or write authoritatively on the "facts" presented. Furthermore, not all articles on Wikipedia are checked equally; the more popular articles get more eyeballs than the obscure articles.
Slashdot Mirror
Just thought I'd put this out there, since some Qwest cutsomers may not be aware of this.
About a year ago, my fiancee and I noticed that we were no longer getting e-mail from some of our mailing lists. (For instance, I stopped receiving VersionTracker daily e-mails. She stopped receiving e-mails from various political interest groups and animal welfare groups.) We both have e-mail accounts through Qwest Choice, which provides us with bundled digital cable TV and Internet service all through a single VDSL link. (Yeah, it's pretty weird to tell people I get "cable TV" delivered through my phone lines...)
I spent a good deal of time with the VersionTracker folks to track this issue down. Finally, we figured out that it was Qwest who was bouncing the messages. I then contacted Qwest to find out why, and to see if we could fix this.
The tier-one tech support folks at Qwest are usually the last people to find out when Qwest changes a network policy. For instance, when Qwest started blocking certain ports to prevent their broadband users from hosting websites and reselling bandwidth, the tier-1 folks continued to insist that Qwest didn't block any port numbers -- even months after the policy had been instituted. (Point in fact, I had to get Qwest to unblock outbound NTP requests so my Mac could set its system clock correctly -- some network admin at Qwest got overzealous and blocked NTP in both directions. At the time, Mac OS 8 didn't let you change the port over which you made NTP requests. It took several days before I was put in touch with a real network engineer.) So when I contacted Qwest about this problem, they naturally didn't believe me and quoted from one of their talking scripts...
Only after I explained carefully the steps I had taken, and identified myself as an IT professional who knows a thing or two about networking, did they finally listen and forward my requests to higher tiers within their support organization. That's when I finally got confirmation from Qwest management that yes, indeed, Qwest had quietly instituted a spam filtering policy without notifying their customers.
Furthermore, the way Qwest instituted this policy provided zero transparency. There is no e-mail quarantine system to allow users to provisionally unblock mail or whitelist a particular sender. I was also told flatly that there was no opt-out policy for this "service," even though I complained loudly that I hadn't been getting perfectly legitimate e-mails that I had signed up to receive. So if Qwest's servers receive a message that they think might be spam, it gets bounced back to the sender and I hear nothing of it. Therefore, the system won't tune itself.
I thought perhaps Qwest had loosened its filters, but when I recently E-filed my taxes, I didn't get confirmation e-mails back from either the IRS or my state taxing authority. Fortunately, TurboTax was able to check with the appropriate E-file servers directly and report back on the status of my returns, so the confirmation e-mails were not strictly necessary; they just would have been nice from a peace-of-mind standpoint.
The Wired article rightly hits the nail on the head: Only the end-user knows what they consider to be "desirable" and "undesirable" e-mail. That's why I rely on the junk mail filters in my e-mail client software (the OS X built-in mail client).
In the meantime, I'm still getting spam through my Qwest e-mail account, as is my fiancee. She claims the spam problem with Qwest is worse now than it ever was before they instituted this crude filter.
So, do you pay sales tax at a book store? Because it seems to me that this tax is a tax on the sale, not upon the game itself -- I mean, what else could they tax? Taxation at the time of sale is generally the only enforceable option for merchandise such as this.
Actually, thanks for the clarification... although I still think the "bootstrapping" rationale is valid even for IT. Let's use your Latvian machinist example as a starting point; presumably, after we'd had Latvian machinists here on H1-B status for a number of years, there would be some absorption of the basic technology and talent to use the technology here in the U.S. After some time, there should be no more need to hire these famed Latvian machinists, as the technology and requisite skills would have been absorbed and taught to U.S. workers.
To bring this back to IT, suppose there's some new programming technology or methodology that isn't currently well understood in the U.S. -- a technology or methodology that was developed in another country. Naturally, you'd want to import the people who have these skills using H1-B visas. I don't think the H1-B visa regulations were meant to bar guest workers who have skills that could be learned by an American -- only to allow guest workers who have skills that no American currently possesses. Naturally, once the knowledge transfer takes place and a pool of domestic workers with this new skill is developed, you should no longer be relying on a pool of H1-B visa talent.
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.
I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.
Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.
The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.
Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.
And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specifically useful but which should be covered as part of a more general curriculum. For instance, RPN -- assuming you meant Reverse Polish Notation -- is a specific subset of various notations and syntaxes that can be used in programming languages.)
An employer should not be expected to provide the foundations of a computer science degree. Unfortunately, most degree mills have programs that focus on "practical knowledge" and which gloss over general-but-useful information, such as determining the efficiency of an algorithm and expressing it in O-notation; hence, such degrees dilute the meaning of degrees issued by more prestigious institutions with more rigorous academic standards, so employers' standards have fallen as a result.
So, yeah, if you're an employer and you have 8 years to waste on teaching someone from ground zero, great. Most employers don't. An employer should be expected to train people up on the domain-specific knowledge they need, such as operational knowledge specific to how the company does business.
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You know, I can see why some of the other comments on this article got a "Troll" moderation, but I really fail to see how this comment is a troll.
In short, this poster is correct -- the original intention of the H1B visa was to import unique talent that could not be found here. I'm going to disagree with sakusha on the scope of that -- s/he seems to think that this was primarily to lure native speakers of other languages here for foreign language instruction, and I don't think the scope was quite that narrow. (Specifically, there are foreign-developed technologies that we'd like to have here, and providing a path for foreign workers to come here to help us get up to speed on those technologies is a good thing.)
I'm sure there are those who would take exception to the suggestion that H1B workers are paid far less than their American counterparts, since the law says these workers are supposed to get paid the same... However, the reality doesn't match the letter of the law, as most employers who hire large numbers of H1B visas can play fast and loose with their estimates of a "typical salary" for any given position might be. And if an employer advertises for applicants for a position, but the posted salary range is far lower than what most Americans would be willing to work for, the employer can use the lack of response to the advertisement as evidence of a lack of skilled talent.
Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.
Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."
As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.
Except that in practice, H1B visa workers in the IT industry never get paid what their native-born counterparts get paid. As another poster in this thread pointed out, "prevailing wage" is hard to compute for IT companies where pay scales vary widely... and the standard practice at companies where I've worked is, the management always low-balls the estimate of "prevailing wage" when looking to hire H1B visa workers.
It's this disparity between the letter of the law and the actual practice of the law that has a lot of IT workers like myself steamed up.
Another related practice is the hiring of "perpetual contractors." It's so much easier to have a work force made entirely of disposable people, even if it means paying a small premium (higher hourly wages) for the flexibility of being able to get rid of someone at a moment's notice. (And let's not forget that most contractors get no benefits, or typically poor benefits if they work through a consulting company.)
I've been witness to both sides of this equation. There are no easy answers, because human nature is so f'ed up.
If the nerd/scientist gets the CEO position, nobody will take him seriously, because of the herd mentality that most "business" people suffer from. They don't care for or respect anyone who isn't a "business" person like them. They only see creative types for the value of what they can do for the businessman. It's likely that venture capital will be next to impossible to acquire. Furthermore, the nerd/scientist CEO will spend all his time dealing with accusations of being "inflexible" and "not suited to the job."
If the business major gets the CEO position, the nerd/scientist gets relegated to the CTO position. The nerd/scientist will only last with the company until (a) the CEO decides to oust the nerd/scientist so he can keep all the glory for himself, or (b) the venture capitalists have decided that the idea factory is no longer worth keeping on the payroll. If (a) doesn't happen, then (b) almost certainly will, unless you can avoid the VC trap altogether.
In the particular situation described by the querant, I feel bad for him because regardless of which path is taken, it will probably end badly; either way, the friendship between these two men will likely disintegrate.
The moral of the story is: There are no friends in business. Friendship and business don't mix, so don't go into business with someone you actually consider a friend.
The geek perspective: Business people exist in a culture of exploitation, though of course they don't see it that way and will bristle with indignation if you suggest so. To me, this doesn't change the fundamental facts. This isn't a screed against capitalism! I rather like capitalism. I just have a problem with "business" people. MBAs in particular are people I have no use for, as most of them are parasites.
The only real solution: If you're a geek and you want to start a business, learn how to run a business yourself and absolutely refuse to buy into the concept that someone can go to school to study "business" without understanding the actual business/market they'll be dealing with.
Maybe I'm just being cynical, so take everything I just wrote with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, it looks like the querant is already stuck with his partner, so the best advice I can give is this: Yield the CEO position to the other guy, make sure you're a CTO, and make sure your contract is iron-clad and bulletproof. And retain a good lawyer in case your buddy tries to sideline you. Perhaps even demand a majority stake in the LLC (51%) if you can negotiate that, as compensation for giving up the power position. But whatever you do, have a good, ruthless lawyer at your beck and call. Make sure that if they have an option to get rid of you, it's an expensive option (for them), so you'll be able to land on your feet.
Based on my prior experiences with GoDaddy, I'm not at all surprised that they would agree to such a flash-without-substance arrangement.
Maybe it was the horrifying not-quite-a-job-interview that I had with them, in which they gave me a "pseudo IQ test" (the words of the hiring manager, which is interesting because intelligence testing as a prerequisite for hiring is illegal in the United States), or the fact that the test they gave was administered and scored inconsistently with the type of test it was.
Maybe it's the Orwellian dreary work environment that I witnessed when I went to interview there. (It was worst for the call center peeps, but pretty dungeon-like everywhere else.)
Maybe it's the really (IMHO) offensive ads they ran.
Maybe it's the caliber of people I met there.
Maybe it's the irresponsible way they blacklisted Qwest's e-mail servers for the sites and mail accounts they host; at least one recruiter e-mailed me from an account hosted by them, and when I replied, the e-mail bounced because apparently GoDaddy considered Qwest to be a haven for spammers and zombies. (Kind of funny, when you consider that GoDaddy used to be a spammer's paradise, and probably still is. Pot, kettle, black.)
Whatever the reason, I quickly developed the impression that GoDaddy.com is nothing but a bunch of frat boys who like to play at being IT professionals. People who want to give the illusion of computer literacy and competency, but who don't care about technology as anything other than a means to screw other people out of money.
For a press release that's all about appearances and not about anything of import -- it's for parked domains, for crying out loud, so you know this is something only squatters probably care about -- it fits their MO perfectly. And Microsoft's, not coincidentally.
But hey, maybe all the dough they're getting from Microsoft for this little non-event will help pay for the perpetual party at the GoDaddy frat house... The sad thing is, I'm sure one of the scumbags running the show at GoDaddy figured this Microsoft partnership announcement would actually be good for their image. Whatever their reasons, it's pretty clear they don't value geek cred.
Yes, but the Nintendo 64 rumble pack didn't have multi-axis rumble features.
The dual shock design has two motors for vibration, and IIRC they're mounted along different axes so you can have multi-dimensional vibrational feedback. I think it's a bit of a stretch to call this true "force feedback," but whatever. (To my mind, force feedback implies that you push on a control and it "pushes back," like steering wheels that simulate difficult turns and joysticks that simulate a stuck rudder or elevator on an aircraft.)
That's why when you write a patent, you try to make its claims as broad as possible (e.g., "...for configurations of 3 or more razor blades," or in the context of this article, "...for configurations of 2 or more unbalanced weights driven by electric motors."), and when you're trying to work around someone else's patent, you find all the loopholes and exploit them (e.g., "Oh, look, they didn't cover the case for a single unbalanced weight!").
I used to work for a material scientist who was adept at both activities. He was very good at finding corner cases where other people's patents didn't apply, and then he'd file a patent on the corner case as an improvement to the original patent he was working around. Current patent law allows you to patent improvements to someone else's patented invention or process. (Traditionally, "process" means manufacturing process, although business process patents now seem to be allowed.)
My boss was also good at making his own patents nice and broad to insure that his competitors would violate his IP. He had this fabulous patent on a method for growing a crystalline probe that would be formed on the end of a fiber optic cable. The probe had a face that was at a specific angle with respect to the long axis of the crystal, which he calculated to be the optimal angle for this face, but his patent was written to allow for a range of angles. Sure enough, some company that was using this technology to probe oil wells violated my boss' patent, and of course he went after them to defend his IP. The competitor's product, IIRC, didn't use the optimal angle for the crystal face, but it didn't matter, as they still were within the claims of the patent.
Of course, there are some modifications which are materially insignificant -- like how many legs your apparatus has to stand off the ground -- but most patent authors these days like to leave nothing to chance.
According to what I've been able to glean from Apple's developer resources (available at developer.apple.com), and from various articles about the new Intel-based Macs, the Macs with x86 processors all have chips that support the NX bit, and the NX bit is turned on by default. There is supposedly a work-around to allow you to compile a specific application without the NX bit set, so that the app can execute code on the stack (something that apparently some badly-written apps do). The "work-around" is a compiler flag. Certainly, few or no apps that you download or buy pre-packaged are going to have this bit turned off... unless you manage to download a trojan.
I don't recall whether or not the PowerPC ABI allows so-called stack trampolining (executing code on the stack). I know some compilers took advantage of the ability to execute code on the stack to implement certain language-level constructs, though at the moment I'm drawing a blank on the specific ones; regardless, you can implement such features without resorting to executing code on the stack.
I do recall, however, that the PowerPC ABI gives preference to argument passing through registers, whereas the x86 ABI requires passing arguments to functions on the stack (because the x86 has far fewer registers). This is one reason why PowerPC Macs are less vulnerable to buffer overflow / stack based exploits.
Just a nit-picky point, but the optical drive itself has nothing to do with whether the player (drive + additional logic + every other bit of support electronics) can output progressive scan video. The optical drive is just a way to get the data off the media. The video output hardware and the MPEG decode software both live outside the optical drive. The BD-ROM drive in the PS3 will probably include some crypto/authentication logic which is part of the Blu-Ray standard (mandated copy controls, etc.), but the way the video gets rendered for output is not something the optical drive has control over.
I know others have already responded, but there's a good Wikipedia reference that summarizes the duration of patent terms:
For patents filed before and still in force by June 8, 1995, the patent term is either 17 years from the issue date or 20 years from the filing date, whichever is the longer of the two.
For patents filed after June 8, 1995, it's 20 years from the earliest claimed filing date.
So it looks like this patent is set to expire April 6, 2007.
Reading the patent document, it clearly states it was filed in 1987, not 1985. Which means that's 2 more years (beyond what you thought) to wait before it expires...
Well, because broadband-over-cable is a kludge. The cable design philosophy centers around distributing a signal from one point of origin to multiple endpoints; it's designed for one-way multicast.
Kludging the cable systems to allow for bidirectional data transfer was problematic at best, and the artifact of this difficulty is that upstream bandwidth for most users is going to be a small fraction of downstream bandwidth. (To use a bad analogy, you're trying to transmit data "against the flow," so it's more difficult... like paddling upstream in a canoe versus paddling downstream.)
Having said that... most cable broadband ISPs artificially limit upstream bandwidth, partly to offer tiered services for business customers (higher bitrates and a higher Quality of Service), and partly to minimize the impact of certain users on local network segments. Cable broadband has this really rotten feature of forcing people on local segments to share bandwidth, so capping upstream bandwidth can be seen as a way to preserve an already precious commodity.
If you want a true symmetric pipe to the 'net, T1/T3 or some DSL variant is your best bet.
One thing that people fail to consider is the cost of software licensing. The Blu-Ray specification mandates Java support in the player... because that's the language all the rich/interactive Blu-Ray content will be authored in. So there needs to be a bytecode interpreter in any Blu-Ray player's firmware, along with any libraries necessary.
So, since the PS3 will be fully Blu-Ray compliant, Sony will have to license Java from Sun (or perhaps they'll license IBM's VM instead of Sun's, which could save them some money since Sony is already sourcing the Cell processor from IBM). It's a non-zero cost. And this cost is not part of the cost of the Blu-Ray drive itself; this cost is along the same lines as the cost of licensing an MPEG2/4 codec for playback of the video/audio streams on media. Even if Sony authors their own MPEG codecs for the PS3, they'll still need to pay the appropriate licensing fees to the appropriate rights holders.
I've had first-hand experience dealing with outsourcing software development to India. I worked for a small company which sold financial software as one of its products. (The other "products" were seminars on how to trade options and futures to reduce your risk in the stock market, by buying and selling "spreads" to minimize risk and maximize profit.)
There were two major IT-related tasks that needed to be completed. One was the re-engineering of the flagship software product, which generated both up-front and residual revenue for the company; the other task was redesigning a web site for the company.
Our fearless leader decided to give the web site work to Square Radius, which had some local talent (mainly DB folks) but kept most of its Java programmers in India. Square Radius decided they were hungry for more than just a web site development contract, so they bid to take over some of the reengineering effort for the flagship software product that I was working on.
During the first several meetings, it became clear that these "Java" programmers from India barely knew Java, and it became clear that their main area of expertise was J2EE. They had no experience writing Swing apps, and precious little writing stand-alone Java applications that could run on a server. Naturally, they wanted to force our architecture toward a web-centric design using technologies they'd used countless other times, even though we tried to explain to them that the transaction throughput of our system wouldn't accommodate that model. Our clients want real-time or near-real-time feeds on stock and options pricing data, as well as a rich UI that you really can't provide on a web page (even with AJAX, which wasn't a popular technology at the time).
We decided to farm out a small portion of the server-side code for this application reengineering effort. It was understood that they would work on this in parallel with their web site redevelopment effort.
Here's what came of all this:
Yeah, these guys were cheaper (on an hourly basis) than their American counterparts, but they took far longer to do the same work. The quality of the work product was inferior, based on what I consider to be the hallmarks of good code and best practices. We did not get what we asked for in any case. We wound up having to farm the web site out a second time, this time to a domestic web
Actually, the new Civic Hybrid models coming out (2006 model year) can operate on electric power only at low speeds, according to Honda's press releases and their own web site.
"For 2006, the electric motor can propel the car from a stop to speeds up to 35 mph."
So the Civic Hybrid is getting a bit more Prius-like. There's some more discussion of this new '06 feature for the Civic Hybrid here and here, where some folks have managed to get this new feature to kick in consistently. Apparently, unlike the Prius, the Civic Hybrid won't normally use electric-only power from a dead stop; rather, you have to be cruising at low speeds (under 35 MPH). This is according to actual users, and doesn't exactly agree with what Honda put on their web site.
Even more discussion of this feature at greenhybrid.com.
The main criticism of aspartame that I'm familiar with isn't so much that the amounts of phenylalanine are so high, but that the rate at which it gets dumped into the blood stream is so high when the dipeptide (aspartame) is metabolized. A dipeptide takes very little time to chop up into its component amino acids, and while aspartame itself might be safe, the metabolic byproducts might not.
Personally, I'm a little leery of any chemical that can easily cross the blood-brain barrier. Nobody knows exactly what aspartame does in this case.
Other way around -- they replace hydroxyl groups with Chlorine atoms. Some opponents of splenda/sucralose have referred to it as "chlorinated sucrose" because of this, though that's a simplistic view.
What is known is that some users of splenda complain of kidney pain (I'm one of them, so I have to avoid splenda in soft drinks), and there is some evidence to suggest that splenda increases the risk of kidney stones. I can't really speak to other health effects (e.g., neurological).
Personally, I'd recommend people look into Xylitol as a sugar substitute. It ain't cheap, but you can bake with it and cook with it (with a couple exceptions -- breads won't rise with pure Xylitol, for instance). It has a low glycemic index. Best of all, it's totally natural, and our bodies can metabolize it. Well, OK, some people of Mediterranean Jewish descent can't metabolize Xylitol -- it's a 5-carbon sugar-alcohol, and some people lack the gene to make the right enzyme for that; the condition is called pentasuria. Xylitol has the added health benefit of promoting good teeth and gums, and retards the growth of some bacteria such as streptococcus. More info at http://www.xlear.com/
I quoted the above snippet from your comment to amplify a point -- what about the Wikipedia articles that aren't as popular and aren't as well-researched? At least with more traditional encyclopedias like Britannica, there's a certain minimum standard of fact checking and research that goes into each article before it is included. I don't think the same can be said for Wikipedia.
And, as I've said elsewhere, Britannica doesn't have a problem with vandalism.
This isn't to say that I don't find Wikipedia useful... just not authoritative from an academic standpoint.
The Nature article you cite still finds Britannica's accuracy in science articles to be marginally better than that of Wikipedia's. (The average is stated as: 4 errors per article in Wikipedia, 3 per article in Britannica.) This is hardly something you can spin doctor into "Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica," although I will concede that the difference is statistically small.
The methodology of the study cited in Nature has come into question; the article contains an addendum linking to supplementary information about how the data was collected.
So... according to Nature, Wikipedia "comes close" to Britannica in terms of accuracy, but does not seem to exceed it.
Furthermore, there are notorious examples of outright fabrications and falsehoods masquerading as fact in Wikipedia articles, mainly due to vandalism. This is a problem that Britannica doesn't seem to have. So... I stand by my statements.
More eyeballs is not an automatic guarantee of anything... so I guess in a sense I am saying yes, there may be a flaw in the OS argument for that paradigm's superiority. I think there is a measure of blind dogma and politics underlying the Open Source movement.
:-)
However, I'd be hard pressed to call this a critical flaw as you have done. And surely there are OS projects where the contributors are all competent people; the users of Wikipedia, on the other hand, are all over the spectrum of competency. See the difference?
Furthermore, I haven't said anything regarding the other benefits and advantages of Open Source. So don't go putting words in my mouth.
Are you serious?
First of all, I can't imagine a college professor letting you get away with citing an encyclopedia at all. The whole point of doing college assignments is learning to use primary sources of information. This isn't high school!
Secondly, Britannica has much better fact checking than Wikipedia. The fact that some Wikipedia articles have glaring errors that don't get caught and corrected for months at a stretch is bad; some of these errors are the result of intentional vandalism, and unless you've been living under a rock the last few months, you're no doubt aware that some of this vandalism is in fact libel. I'd link to the Slashdot coverage of the most famous of these events, but it looks like you need a refresher course in doing basic research...
Don't assume that just because Wikipedia is being scanned by a bunch of eyeballs every day, that Wikipedia must automatically be better fact-checked. Not every reader of Wikipedia is an expert, so not every reader is qualified to make revisions or write authoritatively on the "facts" presented. Furthermore, not all articles on Wikipedia are checked equally; the more popular articles get more eyeballs than the obscure articles.