As soon as I saw the topic "Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?", my first thought was: Is 'i' the new IBM euphemism for Lotus? Because, if it is, we don't need to go any further.
IBM can't take on Google and Microsoft with anything based on traditional Lotus Notes, because Lotus Notes is the only software worse than Microsoft Exchange Server, and the reason Google's enterprise services exist and are popular is specifically that it frees people from Lotus Notes and Exchange. If iNotes is anything at all like Lotus Notes' architecture, it's a failure waiting to happen — because a Lotus Notes that was hosted "in the cloud", with IBM techs who can't get it to stop stalling and trashing its databases, wouldn't be any better than Lotus Notes in your main business office with IBM techs who can't get it to stop thrashing and stalling its databases. In fact, maybe Lotus Notes in your main office might be better, because then you'll have access to yank the hard drive and write a few nice Perl scripts to convert it all to a real system when your bosses finally learn to cut their million-dollar losses and throw IBM out. As for the IBM employee saying IBM runs "the world's mission-critical systems" — if they're on Lotus Notes, they must not be that critical, since they're unavailable so often.
I had the Apple Software Update thing pop up on me the other day, I unchecked the items I didn't want (the iPhone Config Util being one of them), and I went ahead and updated the software that I did want. So how exactly are they "forcing" this one me?
Wait until the Apple Software Update pops up again and you discover that all the items that have even a minor version number change are back — even though you selected "ignore this software" — and not only back, but checked by default again, because, even though you refused to install an enormous new program when it was on version 4.3.2, surely you'll want to install it now that it's 4.3.2.1.
I have several business clients that feel a need for QuickTime. A couple of them even paid for QuickTime Pro. They certainly do not need iTunes. Yet, even though they paid money for the product, it won't stop trying (at least as of the last time I checked this summer) to trick them into installing 120MB of extra software as an "update" over and over. I've already had to uninstall iTunes twice for clients because Apple makes it look like it's a QuickTime-related "update" so important that it starts popping up again after a couple weeks (new version!) even after being ignored. There is no excuse for ASU's resetting the "ignore" flag on uninstalled software except to trojan machines with iTunes and Safari behind the computer tech's back and hope a large portion of users think that's just how their computers work now.
When IE and Windows Media Player were doing these kinds of things in Windows 9x, everyone howled, yet at least Windows Media Player doesn't embed itself in the startup registry where everyday users can't remove it. iTunes does.
In the late 1990s, I worked at an ISP that had at least a third of the market in a metro of about 200,000 people. I wanted to clear the virtual IP aliases (eth0:1, eth0:2, eth0:3...) on the main DNS/mail/web server, so I could run a script to renumber them cleanly with the next command. By remote, from home, on a Friday night:
for a in {,1,2}{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}; do ifconfig eth$a down; done
"Wow, that's lagging. I wonder what's burning cycles. Uh, wow, I can't even get an echo back..."
The foul stench creeping through your nose right now is the smell of total bare-faced bullshit.
What, you don't believe it's "competition and innovation" to blow identical Verizon interface firmware into every model of every brand and castrate Bluetooth transfers so all Verizon customers have to pay network charges to get their own multimedia to and from the phone, no matter what the manufacturer's specs say? (Those of you who didn't know everyone else could transfer pictures and sounds directly between phones without paying for MMS: That's right. You must be a Verizon or Sprint customer.)
More like UUCP mail over pigeon, if we're comparing it to a protocol. On the other hand, we could just call it files by carrier pigeon... uh... why are we having this conversation again? It didn't say the pigeon protocol you're all thinking of (RFC 1149) was used — just that a pigeon protocol was used. I'll just be quiet now.
For those who don't remember: Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, owns Mediaset, the biggest broadcast and media company in Italy, and as prime minister, he also controls the government broadcaster. More of Berlusconi's "insightful" ideas on Slashdot here:
An Italian bill about internet is a smoking gun?: (yet another) showgirl in Berlusconi's circle gets elected to the legislature, and proposes a bill, really written by the trade group for Sony BMG and Mediaset, related to the item above
I'll dive right in because this story popped right after I've reinstalled my main console, and I had to reinstall exactly because of my desktop getting "innovated" so much it was crippled. Maybe all these complaints of mine have already been covered elsewhere. But Linux GUI desktop developers had better get their stuff together and start thinking about how to make the GUI desktop quickly navigable for the full range of everyday work. (Not just for simple tasks, and not the new interface idea the GUI developers invent each month after a round of 'shrooms.) Between the Gnome Project's obsession with castrating its core programs' options, and KDE's obsession with making a new KDE app for every single type of application yet not being able to get its desktop and window decorations to be intuitive, I'm looking back at svgalib days with fondness. Or maybe Windows 3.1 days. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe I used to have more time for this kind of involuntary "adventure" than I do now. Right-clicks and resizing task bars should not have to be treated as uncharted waters for a user at this point.
On my main console machine, I've had Kubuntu 8.10 for a few months, "upgraded" from 7.04. It was clear that 8.10 had damaged the configs unsalvagably - it still refused to mount USB drives so that the normal user could read them. I always had to remount manually on the command line. Yesterday I just wiped the whole OS off my machine (except for moving my old home directory out of the way) and installed Kubuntu 9.04 clean. We'll see how it goes. If this doesn't behave like something other than a damaged system within the next couple weeks, I'm switching to Xubuntu or something - at least it resizes and moves almost anything when you click on the edge, instead of having windows do one thing, tool bars do another, the "desktop" box another. I switched away from Ubuntu to Kubuntu because I couldn't stand Gnome apps censoring any option that didn't fit an 8-year-old kid's reading level. (Fortunately Gimp and Pidgin ignored the the rules. They were hard to learn for their own reasons anyway, so what did they care? At least they could be learned though - Pidgin only played moving-target once when it switched from Gaim.) Now I'm thinking of dumping Kubuntu because there are hundreds of options somewhere, but I can't find them. Xubuntu (what little I've used it) seems to behave very politely on my dual-boot laptop.
Kubuntu 8.10 should never have happened. KDE 4.0 should never have happened. KDE 4.1 shouldn't have even happened. Plasma (KDE's new desktop interface) is too clever by half. It is extremely non-intuitive. I've dealt with Apple II Plus system monitor prompts through ProDOS with AppleWorks, through years of custom BBS menus in ANSI, then Windows 3.1 through 95, 2000, XP, and Vista, with a liberal helping full-screen DOS apps, OS/2, and old X display managers whose menus only appear when you hold down Ctrl or Alt. Yet I still can't figure out how to get the KDE 4 taskbar to form 2 rows of tasks instead of just growing enormous icons for no reason when I change the size.
Anything non-KDE inside KDE is, of course, not quite equal. Firefox has "nice" rounded GUI element emulation in Kubuntu 8.10 but hides things like window tabs under other things (like the web page) when I launch it directly from the menus - but has simpler buttons and works fine when I run it from a shell prompt inside Konsole! How come Firefox has a different skin from Konsole than directly from the KDE menus?!
P.S. while I'm ranting: Why does the KDE "Utilities" menu have an icon that looks like a console prompt, then Konsole isn't in that menu?! Konsole is hiding in System, among the control panels. And how come KDE 4 sometimes does the same thing with right click as left click? If I right-click, it's because I didn't like what the left click did and I'm looking for some other option! Argh!
This has been discussed previously on Slashdot. British writing often uses only initial-caps for pronounceable acronyms. The BBC is especially aggressive about this, resulting in things like "Nasa", which looks like a foreign name at first glance from an American eye. Why the BBC differentiates "BAFTA" from "NASA" in their style guide is a mystery to me; however, in recent BBC articles, it appears that the BBC is writing "Bafta" in actual practice.
BBC House Style and Writing Guidelines, September 2007 (in PDF or raw HTML):
"Usually, if an acronym is pronounced as a word, use an initial capital only. If it is pronounced as individual letters, use all capitals:
Aids Nato Acas Unicef
BBC CD GCSE PC
CD-Rom (pronounced partly as letters, partly as a word)
But follow the preference of organisations with their own names and brands: DfES BAFTA MORI RADA
This speculation from the ComputerWorld blog doesn't belong in the post. Even the blog author says its conjecture. Especially ridiculous since the NANOG post in the second link already explained that the problem was a routing error at Google.
All of this is true, but you're actually reinforcing the main point: journalists should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source for exactly the reasons you're giving.
I didn't address it because it seemed to be a given. However, just to make it explicit: the journalists have been had in this case, and it's their own fault for being incompetent by either (1) being so lacking in work ethic that they quoted Wikipedia as if it were a secondary or primary source, (2) plagiarizing #1 while simultaneously believing #1 was not just as incompetent; or (3) believing naively that their own press network (a legitimized form of #2) wouldn't actually be infested with #1 or #2 itself.
Shame on #1, shame on #2, and — even though high-volume news distribution requires interconnected news bureaus, shame on #3 eventually, since they reduce their own safeguards even below Wikipedia's level for people in their own press network. And on that note: Any news media journalist who makes fun of Wikipedia should be made to show the source for everything in the next issue of his publication, and have to hope "according to" happens to appears a lot in the main text of all those blindly-copied, often-uncredited press agency articles in the next 24 hours.
Well, there appear to be two main points to the article itself: (1) that Wikipedia can be completely inaccurate without further warning; (2) that news media are less accurate than expected because they've taken to deriving their "facts" from any stinking place: for example, Wikipedia.
I blazed through point #1 because I take it for granted, and jumped right to the point that anyone competent to do research in the first place should already be taking point #1 for granted. #2 I didn't address, but you did it, almost:
_That_ is the whole point. If a peer-reviewed journal was as easy to "experiment" on, it anyone with enough time could redefine physics or history in it just because he was bored, then everyone would agree that it's a fucking useless journal.
Which is exactly what happened to all these newspapers around the world when this guy trolled them through Wikipedia. Wikipedia's own structure concedes that it's probably going to have errors; Wikipedia tells people not to use Wikipedia itself as a citation. The news industry, on the other hand, appears to works on the assumption that its published material is right until proven otherwise; they only use the "we're not perfect" line when they've gotten caught with their pants down. Well, this time, they got caught. Not that one would expect the same level of accuracy from the news industry as what is commonly called a "peer-reviewed journal" — but news media is supposed to be internally reviewed before it gets released. It's the news media's reputation that is getting deflated more by the article, not Wikipedia. And I'd tend to say the same about any "peer-reviewed" journal that managed to get caught up in a Wikipedia hoax experiment.
So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
Wikipedia already knows approximately what it's nature is. The problem is alleged journalists or alleged academics, who imagine their research talent to be their stock in trade, but then feel it is appropriate to either perform invasive experiments on Wikipedia or borrow facts from it — either of which means the person doing it didn't even do proper research on his target subject/source (Wikipedia), which is grossly incompetent.
Again: what's not OK, isn't just the experiment itself, but the very fact that it's trivial to make such an experiment. Not that just it's hypothetically possible, but that it actually happens again and again.
Yes, it means that some people are assholes. Do you have some safeguards against that?
Within the context of this article, there are broadly two safeguards against that: (1) the lesser safeguard, which is lots of other people around who make the information tend to bias towards fact; and (2) the more important safeguard in this context, which is that anyone who does allegedly "proper" research on a daily basis ought to already know that Wikipedia's been tested on this point repeatedly and therefore knows it's not to be used as a sole source.
All parties involved in the article's incident (other than the Wikipedia editors who reverted the errors) seem to have refused to participate in either safeguard. And that was the thrust of my original reply: That the only people competent to do research by manipulating Wikipedia are those who are competent enough to realize it's already been done. While Wikipedia is not an oracle, it involves real people doing work they believe in, who didn't consent to being lab monkeys taking a similar shock every time some experimenter wants to claim their own credit for seeing how the animal really twitches.
That very need to scream that someone else didn't play by your rules, _that_ is what tells me that it's yet another failed utopianism.
The only failure here is in not realizing that, not only does Wikipedia not claim to have come anywhere close to utopia, but that this fact has been easily shown repeatedly. One doesn't need to do another experiment to discover this; it's open information for anyone who bothers to look first.
This "experiment" has happened repeated on Wikipedia, and is probably happening in multiple places on Wikipedia right now. Apparently there are a lot of these narcissists who think this is a really useful sociology/journalism experiment, but they're the same morons who didn't bother to take 30 seconds to go find out that it's been done before. So, since Slashdot is the most second most important source about everything that ever was (after Wikipedia, I mean), I'll point out a few other things for the so-called experimenters who think this is clever but at least do a search for "Wikipedia errors" before they try it: Not only has it been done before, but it's unlawful, against research ethics, and hypocritical. Specifically:
Wikipedia is a private not-for-profit and owns the servers, and Wikipedia specifically prohibits this in Wikipedia:Do not create hoaxes. Doing it on purpose is computer trespassing and/or unlawful vandalism, which is almost certainly illegal where you are.
You're intentionally experimenting on human beings without informed consent to research. (Surely your teacher told you about "informed consent" before sending you out to tweak people, right?) If you use the slightest bit of your "experiment" in a class or research paper at any reputable institution, there is absolutely no reason that every Wikipedia editor on that same article shouldn't file an ethics complaint about you, and your teacher that approved it. (Did I mention that you're doing exactly what the location's owner told you not to do, and against human subjects who it is clear consider your behavior abuse?)
It's hypocrisy. How would these so-called "experimenters" like it if someone repeatedly inserted hoax lines in their already-written news stories or sociology papers? It's OK, though, because it's an "experiment", right?
It's amazing the kind of people who wouldn't want someone to spray-paint their car over and over to see how long it takes to clean it off, but will do it to other people because it's "just the computer". I wonder what future journalists and sociologists think their jobs are going to be based on 10 years from now.
(P.S.: If someone wants this for Wikipedia or somewhere else for some bizarre reason - feel free to copy/modify it as long as you give the same rights to others for the copy/derivatives.)
Did he hack the bank across state lines from his home?
That's not a requirement for a federal crime in the US; theft from any federally insured bank (which is almost all of them) is a U.S. federal crime, even if the crime occurred in only one state and even if the bank operates under a state charter.
Wasn't the original point of Firefox (pre-1.0) that it was a rewrite that was supposed to use less memory and be faster than any other browser, as opposed to the browser in Mozilla Communicator/Suite (now Mozilla Seamonkey)? I have a friend who uses Seamonkey constantly and still swears it's faster than Firefox. On the other hand, I'm running several Firefox extensions, and whatever speed Firefox (2.0) is right now, I think it's worth it. (Opera tends to be very fast, by the way. I just like my extensions too much.)
I've heard the same story from a lot of ISPs in Illinois: Ameritech (now SBC) owns the copper here in most DSL areas, and often refuses to install DSL for third-party ISPs/CLECs, saying that the site is too far away, even when it's well within range. They refuse to install even if the ISP and end customer both want to try it anyway. On top of that, whether they reject the line or not, SBC's salesmen seem to "coincidentally" call the (ISP's!) customer directly to sell SBC Yahoo DSL within a couple of days of the DSL order, and somehow the customer usually is close enough for that, even when SBC is simultaneously refusing to handle the same signal from the other ISP.
If you order DSL, then get a call from SBC about switching to SBC Yahoo DSL right afterwards, call your state commerce commission. They need to know how often this "coincidence" is happening.
BBC News is usually first on my list. I hit the (non-UK) front page, use Ctrl-Alt-click in Opera to kick open all the interesting links, then go to Americas (because that's where I am) and do the same. Sometimes I go for Europe or Entertainment.
Slashdot - unlike all those other silly people who are replying!
If I actually feel like thinking, I look at Kuro5hin, which takes a different approach to same idea as Slashdot. Most everyone can post a new article. Many articles tend to go into depth, rather than just presenting a summary. You can vote the articles up or down; you can choose to view even low-rated articles in certain subjects, etc. Self-service text ads let you support the site - and you can let people comment on the ads.
After that it's usually off to non-news stuff like Diesel Sweeies or whatever.
I look at the local newspaper occasionally, even though their editing is awful and they get facts wrong in the subject areas I know about, which makes me wonder if they ever get it right the rest of the time. I only watch TV news if something important is happening. (Celebrities getting arrested isn't important, so I rarely watch TV news.) If something interesting is happening and I don't think the TV news is worth turning on, I hit the Google News beta site and type keywords.
Maybe you already tried this, but: Try installing GSview for Windows. If it can't grok the file, try printing it once the Evil Way but sending it to the RedMon virtual printer driver - then you'll have a copy you can actually use.
I wonder if a post office has ever been slashdotted before...
The answer is no, and nor will one ever be. That would require geeks to actually let go of the mouse, turn away from the monitor, pick up a pen, and maybe even [gasp] leave the house to buy stamps or get to the mailbox.
P.S.: They keep changing all the USPS addresses to.com. Don't worry: the government isn't trying to privatize the post office - they're just thinking about it a lot!
The baked Apple lady's perfect mate was in Peoria.
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 3, Funny
Around 1990, my friend Jeff Byers (later head of tech support for Telix at deltaComm) was sitting in the old basement computer lab at Illinois Central College, when a one of the lab staff, for no particular reason, cut up a 5.25" floppy disk with scissors and inserted the pieces into the floppy drive in the next computer over. When someone asked him why he did that, he just shrugged and said "I don't know" and went back to what he was doing. A couple days later, the computer was gone.
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as I saw the topic "Can IBM Take On Google, Microsoft With iNotes?", my first thought was: Is 'i' the new IBM euphemism for Lotus? Because, if it is, we don't need to go any further.
IBM can't take on Google and Microsoft with anything based on traditional Lotus Notes, because Lotus Notes is the only software worse than Microsoft Exchange Server, and the reason Google's enterprise services exist and are popular is specifically that it frees people from Lotus Notes and Exchange. If iNotes is anything at all like Lotus Notes' architecture, it's a failure waiting to happen — because a Lotus Notes that was hosted "in the cloud", with IBM techs who can't get it to stop stalling and trashing its databases, wouldn't be any better than Lotus Notes in your main business office with IBM techs who can't get it to stop thrashing and stalling its databases. In fact, maybe Lotus Notes in your main office might be better, because then you'll have access to yank the hard drive and write a few nice Perl scripts to convert it all to a real system when your bosses finally learn to cut their million-dollar losses and throw IBM out. As for the IBM employee saying IBM runs "the world's mission-critical systems" — if they're on Lotus Notes, they must not be that critical, since they're unavailable so often.
I had the Apple Software Update thing pop up on me the other day, I unchecked the items I didn't want (the iPhone Config Util being one of them), and I went ahead and updated the software that I did want. So how exactly are they "forcing" this one me?
Wait until the Apple Software Update pops up again and you discover that all the items that have even a minor version number change are back — even though you selected "ignore this software" — and not only back, but checked by default again, because, even though you refused to install an enormous new program when it was on version 4.3.2, surely you'll want to install it now that it's 4.3.2.1.
I have several business clients that feel a need for QuickTime. A couple of them even paid for QuickTime Pro. They certainly do not need iTunes. Yet, even though they paid money for the product, it won't stop trying (at least as of the last time I checked this summer) to trick them into installing 120MB of extra software as an "update" over and over. I've already had to uninstall iTunes twice for clients because Apple makes it look like it's a QuickTime-related "update" so important that it starts popping up again after a couple weeks (new version!) even after being ignored. There is no excuse for ASU's resetting the "ignore" flag on uninstalled software except to trojan machines with iTunes and Safari behind the computer tech's back and hope a large portion of users think that's just how their computers work now.
When IE and Windows Media Player were doing these kinds of things in Windows 9x, everyone howled, yet at least Windows Media Player doesn't embed itself in the startup registry where everyday users can't remove it. iTunes does.
Drones who sell stuff are prone to lie about their products? HAS THE PRESIDENT BEEN TOLD?
Yes, and re-elected in 2004 to boot. (And if you don't keep an eye on them, I'll be using this cheap joke in 2013 too.)
In the late 1990s, I worked at an ISP that had at least a third of the market in a metro of about 200,000 people. I wanted to clear the virtual IP aliases (eth0:1, eth0:2, eth0:3...) on the main DNS/mail/web server, so I could run a script to renumber them cleanly with the next command. By remote, from home, on a Friday night:
for a in {,1,2}{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}; do ifconfig eth$a down; done
"Wow, that's lagging. I wonder what's burning cycles. Uh, wow, I can't even get an echo back..."
The foul stench creeping through your nose right now is the smell of total bare-faced bullshit.
What, you don't believe it's "competition and innovation" to blow identical Verizon interface firmware into every model of every brand and castrate Bluetooth transfers so all Verizon customers have to pay network charges to get their own multimedia to and from the phone, no matter what the manufacturer's specs say? (Those of you who didn't know everyone else could transfer pictures and sounds directly between phones without paying for MMS: That's right. You must be a Verizon or Sprint customer.)
Revenge for Slahdot being 2 years ahead of a lot of the general media so many times.
More like UUCP mail over pigeon, if we're comparing it to a protocol. On the other hand, we could just call it files by carrier pigeon... uh... why are we having this conversation again? It didn't say the pigeon protocol you're all thinking of (RFC 1149) was used — just that a pigeon protocol was used. I'll just be quiet now.
For those who don't remember: Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, owns Mediaset, the biggest broadcast and media company in Italy, and as prime minister, he also controls the government broadcaster. More of Berlusconi's "insightful" ideas on Slashdot here:
I'll dive right in because this story popped right after I've reinstalled my main console, and I had to reinstall exactly because of my desktop getting "innovated" so much it was crippled. Maybe all these complaints of mine have already been covered elsewhere. But Linux GUI desktop developers had better get their stuff together and start thinking about how to make the GUI desktop quickly navigable for the full range of everyday work. (Not just for simple tasks, and not the new interface idea the GUI developers invent each month after a round of 'shrooms.) Between the Gnome Project's obsession with castrating its core programs' options, and KDE's obsession with making a new KDE app for every single type of application yet not being able to get its desktop and window decorations to be intuitive, I'm looking back at svgalib days with fondness. Or maybe Windows 3.1 days. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe I used to have more time for this kind of involuntary "adventure" than I do now. Right-clicks and resizing task bars should not have to be treated as uncharted waters for a user at this point.
On my main console machine, I've had Kubuntu 8.10 for a few months, "upgraded" from 7.04. It was clear that 8.10 had damaged the configs unsalvagably - it still refused to mount USB drives so that the normal user could read them. I always had to remount manually on the command line. Yesterday I just wiped the whole OS off my machine (except for moving my old home directory out of the way) and installed Kubuntu 9.04 clean. We'll see how it goes. If this doesn't behave like something other than a damaged system within the next couple weeks, I'm switching to Xubuntu or something - at least it resizes and moves almost anything when you click on the edge, instead of having windows do one thing, tool bars do another, the "desktop" box another. I switched away from Ubuntu to Kubuntu because I couldn't stand Gnome apps censoring any option that didn't fit an 8-year-old kid's reading level. (Fortunately Gimp and Pidgin ignored the the rules. They were hard to learn for their own reasons anyway, so what did they care? At least they could be learned though - Pidgin only played moving-target once when it switched from Gaim.) Now I'm thinking of dumping Kubuntu because there are hundreds of options somewhere, but I can't find them. Xubuntu (what little I've used it) seems to behave very politely on my dual-boot laptop.
Kubuntu 8.10 should never have happened. KDE 4.0 should never have happened. KDE 4.1 shouldn't have even happened. Plasma (KDE's new desktop interface) is too clever by half. It is extremely non-intuitive. I've dealt with Apple II Plus system monitor prompts through ProDOS with AppleWorks, through years of custom BBS menus in ANSI, then Windows 3.1 through 95, 2000, XP, and Vista, with a liberal helping full-screen DOS apps, OS/2, and old X display managers whose menus only appear when you hold down Ctrl or Alt. Yet I still can't figure out how to get the KDE 4 taskbar to form 2 rows of tasks instead of just growing enormous icons for no reason when I change the size.
Anything non-KDE inside KDE is, of course, not quite equal. Firefox has "nice" rounded GUI element emulation in Kubuntu 8.10 but hides things like window tabs under other things (like the web page) when I launch it directly from the menus - but has simpler buttons and works fine when I run it from a shell prompt inside Konsole! How come Firefox has a different skin from Konsole than directly from the KDE menus?!
P.S. while I'm ranting: Why does the KDE "Utilities" menu have an icon that looks like a console prompt, then Konsole isn't in that menu?! Konsole is hiding in System, among the control panels. And how come KDE 4 sometimes does the same thing with right click as left click? If I right-click, it's because I didn't like what the left click did and I'm looking for some other option! Argh!
Pull your head out of your GNU/Ass and fix your fucking code.
Gimme the source code for lib0ass. I wanna compile my own.
...I'm lonely
Right here! On a sister site of Slashdot, no less!
This has been discussed previously on Slashdot. British writing often uses only initial-caps for pronounceable acronyms. The BBC is especially aggressive about this, resulting in things like "Nasa", which looks like a foreign name at first glance from an American eye. Why the BBC differentiates "BAFTA" from "NASA" in their style guide is a mystery to me; however, in recent BBC articles, it appears that the BBC is writing "Bafta" in actual practice.
BBC House Style and Writing Guidelines, September 2007 (in PDF or raw HTML):
This speculation from the ComputerWorld blog doesn't belong in the post. Even the blog author says its conjecture. Especially ridiculous since the NANOG post in the second link already explained that the problem was a routing error at Google.
All of this is true, but you're actually reinforcing the main point: journalists should not be using Wikipedia as a primary source for exactly the reasons you're giving.
I didn't address it because it seemed to be a given. However, just to make it explicit: the journalists have been had in this case, and it's their own fault for being incompetent by either (1) being so lacking in work ethic that they quoted Wikipedia as if it were a secondary or primary source, (2) plagiarizing #1 while simultaneously believing #1 was not just as incompetent; or (3) believing naively that their own press network (a legitimized form of #2) wouldn't actually be infested with #1 or #2 itself.
Shame on #1, shame on #2, and — even though high-volume news distribution requires interconnected news bureaus, shame on #3 eventually, since they reduce their own safeguards even below Wikipedia's level for people in their own press network. And on that note: Any news media journalist who makes fun of Wikipedia should be made to show the source for everything in the next issue of his publication, and have to hope "according to" happens to appears a lot in the main text of all those blindly-copied, often-uncredited press agency articles in the next 24 hours.
That's nice, but it's missing the whole point.
Well, there appear to be two main points to the article itself: (1) that Wikipedia can be completely inaccurate without further warning; (2) that news media are less accurate than expected because they've taken to deriving their "facts" from any stinking place: for example, Wikipedia.
I blazed through point #1 because I take it for granted, and jumped right to the point that anyone competent to do research in the first place should already be taking point #1 for granted. #2 I didn't address, but you did it, almost:
_That_ is the whole point. If a peer-reviewed journal was as easy to "experiment" on, it anyone with enough time could redefine physics or history in it just because he was bored, then everyone would agree that it's a fucking useless journal.
Which is exactly what happened to all these newspapers around the world when this guy trolled them through Wikipedia. Wikipedia's own structure concedes that it's probably going to have errors; Wikipedia tells people not to use Wikipedia itself as a citation. The news industry, on the other hand, appears to works on the assumption that its published material is right until proven otherwise; they only use the "we're not perfect" line when they've gotten caught with their pants down. Well, this time, they got caught. Not that one would expect the same level of accuracy from the news industry as what is commonly called a "peer-reviewed journal" — but news media is supposed to be internally reviewed before it gets released. It's the news media's reputation that is getting deflated more by the article, not Wikipedia. And I'd tend to say the same about any "peer-reviewed" journal that managed to get caught up in a Wikipedia hoax experiment.
So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
Wikipedia already knows approximately what it's nature is. The problem is alleged journalists or alleged academics, who imagine their research talent to be their stock in trade, but then feel it is appropriate to either perform invasive experiments on Wikipedia or borrow facts from it — either of which means the person doing it didn't even do proper research on his target subject/source (Wikipedia), which is grossly incompetent.
Again: what's not OK, isn't just the experiment itself, but the very fact that it's trivial to make such an experiment. Not that just it's hypothetically possible, but that it actually happens again and again.
Yes, it means that some people are assholes. Do you have some safeguards against that?
Within the context of this article, there are broadly two safeguards against that: (1) the lesser safeguard, which is lots of other people around who make the information tend to bias towards fact; and (2) the more important safeguard in this context, which is that anyone who does allegedly "proper" research on a daily basis ought to already know that Wikipedia's been tested on this point repeatedly and therefore knows it's not to be used as a sole source.
All parties involved in the article's incident (other than the Wikipedia editors who reverted the errors) seem to have refused to participate in either safeguard. And that was the thrust of my original reply: That the only people competent to do research by manipulating Wikipedia are those who are competent enough to realize it's already been done. While Wikipedia is not an oracle, it involves real people doing work they believe in, who didn't consent to being lab monkeys taking a similar shock every time some experimenter wants to claim their own credit for seeing how the animal really twitches.
That very need to scream that someone else didn't play by your rules, _that_ is what tells me that it's yet another failed utopianism.
The only failure here is in not realizing that, not only does Wikipedia not claim to have come anywhere close to utopia, but that this fact has been easily shown repeatedly. One doesn't need to do another experiment to discover this; it's open information for anyone who bothers to look first.
It's amazing the kind of people who wouldn't want someone to spray-paint their car over and over to see how long it takes to clean it off, but will do it to other people because it's "just the computer". I wonder what future journalists and sociologists think their jobs are going to be based on 10 years from now. (P.S.: If someone wants this for Wikipedia or somewhere else for some bizarre reason - feel free to copy/modify it as long as you give the same rights to others for the copy/derivatives.)
As Oscar Wilde once said:
"Whoever uses Wikipedia as a source without checking the references, might as well trust the Irish"
I know that quote is false, because it's not on Uncyclopedia.
Did he hack the bank across state lines from his home?
That's not a requirement for a federal crime in the US; theft from any federally insured bank (which is almost all of them) is a U.S. federal crime, even if the crime occurred in only one state and even if the bank operates under a state charter.
Wasn't the original point of Firefox (pre-1.0) that it was a rewrite that was supposed to use less memory and be faster than any other browser, as opposed to the browser in Mozilla Communicator/Suite (now Mozilla Seamonkey)? I have a friend who uses Seamonkey constantly and still swears it's faster than Firefox. On the other hand, I'm running several Firefox extensions, and whatever speed Firefox (2.0) is right now, I think it's worth it. (Opera tends to be very fast, by the way. I just like my extensions too much.)
I've heard the same story from a lot of ISPs in Illinois: Ameritech (now SBC) owns the copper here in most DSL areas, and often refuses to install DSL for third-party ISPs/CLECs, saying that the site is too far away, even when it's well within range. They refuse to install even if the ISP and end customer both want to try it anyway. On top of that, whether they reject the line or not, SBC's salesmen seem to "coincidentally" call the (ISP's!) customer directly to sell SBC Yahoo DSL within a couple of days of the DSL order, and somehow the customer usually is close enough for that, even when SBC is simultaneously refusing to handle the same signal from the other ISP.
If you order DSL, then get a call from SBC about switching to SBC Yahoo DSL right afterwards, call your state commerce commission. They need to know how often this "coincidence" is happening.
After that it's usually off to non-news stuff like Diesel Sweeies or whatever.
I look at the local newspaper occasionally, even though their editing is awful and they get facts wrong in the subject areas I know about, which makes me wonder if they ever get it right the rest of the time. I only watch TV news if something important is happening. (Celebrities getting arrested isn't important, so I rarely watch TV news.) If something interesting is happening and I don't think the TV news is worth turning on, I hit the Google News beta site and type keywords.
Maybe you already tried this, but: Try installing GSview for Windows. If it can't grok the file, try printing it once the Evil Way but sending it to the RedMon virtual printer driver - then you'll have a copy you can actually use.
That's easy: The real Robert X. Cringely will show you his Stanford diploma.
I think Kuro5hin allows this - not that it helps you here.
Silly! USPS NetPost / Mailing Online.
P.S.: They keep changing all the USPS addresses to .com. Don't worry: the government isn't trying to privatize the post office - they're just thinking about it a lot!
Around 1990, my friend Jeff Byers (later head of tech support for Telix at deltaComm) was sitting in the old basement computer lab at Illinois Central College, when a one of the lab staff, for no particular reason, cut up a 5.25" floppy disk with scissors and inserted the pieces into the floppy drive in the next computer over. When someone asked him why he did that, he just shrugged and said "I don't know" and went back to what he was doing. A couple days later, the computer was gone.