You're wrong. The problem wasn't that we didn't have enough servers, but that the servers we had were misconfigured. The slowness experienced in January was resolved when the configuration bugs were ironed out. The problem is a lack of skilled sysadmins and developers. (And for the record, we just put in an order for 10 more servers)
First, full discloser - I'm a long time wikipedia user and I probably accidentally played a peripheral role in breaking this story. I first heard about the google deal back in July. Google is not the first company to offer to host wikipedia. The typical offer comes from "Mom and Pop ISPs" (Jimbo's words) that really don't have any idea what they're getting themselves into (1,400 hits/sec is a helleva lot to do for free). What I have to say in reply to this story is - it is, IMHO, totally FUD. It's completely hypothetical, and it's unrealistic. You have to remember - all the text on Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License or in the public domain; all the images and audio are licensed under the GNU Free Documetnation license, or CC-by-SA, or something liberal equivalent. So even if, on the off chance, Google succumbs to the Corporate pressure to be evil, anyone can take the text and reuse it in less evil ways. Furthmore, I trust Jimbo, Angela, and Anthere (the visible members of the board) in dealing with google to make sure the deal is done right by the rest of us contributors. There's a long history on Wikipedia of being against ads of any form - the spanish wikipedia forked several years ago over hypothetical discussion of it.
The exact same thing happened in 1980 when someone tried to patent an artificial bacteria. The USPTO rejected the claim, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, where In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court explained that while natural laws, physical phenomena, abstract ideas, or newly discovered minerals are not patentable, a live artificially-engineered microorganism is. So I suspect this is nowhere near over. As a matter of fact, (IANAL), I think the ideas set forth in that case would seem to be on Mr. Newman's side. If the court rules against him, they're going to have to come up with some kind of legal dividing line to explain why artificial bacteria are patentable but artificial humans/humanoids aren't.
"I'm sorry, but a photograph of a sculpture is not a reproduction of said sculpture. " - it's a transformative reproduction. There's enough creativity involved (choosing the angle etc) that if it were in the public domain, a picture if it would qualify for copyright; on the other hand, it's close enough to the original that it could be considered either a copy or a derivative work. These are the same issues that were litigated in the Bridegeman art Library v Corel case.
The shadow registers run in parallel with the computation logic and do not add anythign to the total path length, which means there's no loss of speed.
Dr. Trevor Mudge (U. Michigan) came to give a lecture at my University last year. He had an interesting proposal which I suspect is probably going to end up being used in nearly every architecture. The energy usage of a procesor is proportion to the square of the voltage - so dropping it as much as possible is desirable. The only problem is that once you get too close, you start getting bit level errors. He proposes to use a shadow register to keep track of values as they pass through and detect bit errors automatically, and route around them. If run at the optimal voltage (1.4 volts) a razored process will see a dramatic drop in energy consumption with a virtually-nonexistant hit to processing power.
" The Material eXchange Format (MXF) is an open file format targeted at the interchange of audio-visual material with associated data and metadata. It has been designed and implemented with the aim of improving file based interoperability between servers, workstations and other content creation devices. These improvements should result in improved workflows and result in more efficient working than is possible with today's mixed and proprietary file formats." -- What is MXF
The primary case law concerning what is and is not patentable was set forth in 1980's SCOTUS decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty. The court ruled that "n choosing such expansive terms as "manufacture" and "composition of matter," modified by the comprehensive "any," Congress contemplated that the patent laws should be given wide scope, and the relevant legislative history also supports a broad construction. While laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable, respondent's claim is not to a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon, but to a nonnaturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter - a product of human ingenuity "having a distinctive name, character [and] use." Believe it or not, this is actually a compromise, because the respondent had actually argued the case based on a 1952 congressional memo (pertaining to the 1952 patent recodification) that "include anything under the sun that is made by man" is patentable.
With BlueGene, the US gov't approached IBM and told them "We want the fastest super computers in the world. We want to eventually reach the the Petaflop range. Here's some money. Do it" and IBM happily complied. Late last year, the BlueGene/L prototype recaptured the title of world's fastest computer from the Japanese. The BlueGene/C design is due (on time) in June and should be available from the foundry in August (full discloser - my grad work involves testing & verficiation of this). The lesson? Where IT is concerned, the Government has a legitimate interest in outsourcing it to reliable companies (prefarably US based for security reasons).
I was a big fan of Civ II and I absolutely loved Alpha Centauri, but I did not like Civ III. Why? The waste and corruption was just far too high. (The patches moderated this slightly, but still not to my satisfaction). It ruined the game, IMHO. I hope Civ IV will improve upon this.
When TNG started, people were afraid it wouldn't suceed without having to bring back members of the original crew. And while it did eventually bring most of them back in some form or another (McCoy in the pilot, Spock in Season 4, Scotty in season 6, and Kirk in Generations), it spread it out so much that it was fairly innocuous. On the other hand, this is a blatant attempt to appeal to TNG's popularity to save what has been an otherwise horrible series.
Remember, we're limiting the question only to the milky way. The Milky Way galaxy is basically a sphere (diameter of 50,000? light years) surrounded by a disc with diameter of 100,000 light years. The earth is about 1/2 of the distance from the outer edge to the core. That means that the most distant part (from earth) is the other edge of the disc. This means it would take you 3/4 * 100,000 = 75,000 years to see the most distant suprnovas.
Astrophysicists used to think that a supernova occured once in the Milky Way (on average) every 100-300 years, but there was some work done in the early 90s that indicated it was more like once every 30 years or so.
Right, but did you actually read my comment? I said "semi-conductor capacity", not frequency. Off the top of my head, the number of transistors on your processor is a function of: the bus widths, the ISA, the branch prediction, the pipeline length, the amount of cache, the number of cores/ALUs/FPUs/thread units. Hell, in the future, even the voltage level will play a role (future processors will be razorized and run at a lower power level). All of the factors you named play into the capacity. So what I said is true - semi-condutor capacity is roughly proportional to speed.
Leave Moore's law out of this, please
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Moore's law has nothing to do with processor frequency. It says that semi-conductor capacity doubles every 18 monthsm, not frequency. (With the corollary that there is no appreciable change in price). As we all know, semi-conductor capacity is roughly proportional to speed, so saying processor speeds double every 18 months is not quite wrong, just a little inaccurate. On the other hand, saying that we're not seeing 10 ghz processors, so Moore's law is broken is wrong.
Yes, the turnover is high even for an internet project. I've been there 18 months (which is longer than most of the active contributors). It also helps to remember that Wikipedia has not yet reached the 4 year old mark, though.
nor apparently did he do his homework.... How do you know? - Compare his claims to mine. His are vast and nebulous, without a single citation to back them up. On the other hand, mine are specific and to the point, with accompanying citations.
It's also unfair to look at what a Wired journalist is doing to get up to speed as an exemplar of what Larry should or shouldn't do to stay on top of things Wiki. No, it's no - good research is good research, regardless of who is doing it. Larry didn't do his. If you want to find out how the community works, there aren't any shortcuts.Someone, like Larry, who was heavily involved at one point, could expend a lot less effort on a continous basis and still be fairly well up on the Wikipedia. Notice from his user contributions, he'd made 6 edits in 2 years, 5 of them to his page and 1 to criticize the (then) newly implimented categorization system. That's not much of an effort
"We don't need no experts making judgements on the Wikipedia -- trust me, I'm an expert." - Total nonsense. Unlike Mr. Sanger, I backed up most of my claims with links where people can go and check my claims for themselves.
"Yet Wikipedians seem unwilling to examine mechanisms which would allow such weighting to occur within the context of the Wikipedia." - An appeal to authority is a common logical fallacy. To restate - when I made claims, I back them up. We expect the same thing on Wikipedia proper (if not automatically, then when someone else requests verification of a particular claim).
They are all open and available, for someone who has enough time to invest to do his homework properly. Wikipedia is a big place, and if you really want to know how it works, it's takes a lot of time. For example, that there's a reporter from Wired magazine working on such a story right now. He *is* doing his homework - he came to the New York City meetup and listened and asked questions, he's done phone interviews with quite a few contributors, 'etc. I myself know most of it from memory, so I guess yes, that makes me an expert. That's also why I was elected to the arbitration commitee. On the other hand, Larry neither knows it from memory (since he left before the policies were created) nor apparently did he do his homework.
First, full disclosure - I'm a wikipedia admin, I'm the featured article director (I choose the featured articles on Wikipedia's main page), and I'm one of the arbitrators (on the arbitration committee Larry mentions). I'm going to try to address Larry's points in turn. Some of what he says is true, but much of it is wrong, or totally misses the point. Larry left in 2002, meaning that he has been away longer than most of th currently active people have been there. The policies have changed radically, and so I don't think it's unfair to say he has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to the community or the policies.
First, about the title of this thread - calling Larry Sanger a co-founder of Wikipedia is a bit of a stretch. It's before my time, but I know several people who were around from those days found this objectionable. As I understand it, Larry was more involved in Nupedia (now defunct). Wikipedia was started to augment Nupedia, and (as I understand it) the idea was Jimbo Wales'.
Now, this "lack of public perception of credibility" Larry mentions - this is misleading. Wikipedia is (as others on this thread have said) an experiment. However, I don't think the public percieves us as uncredible. I think it would be more accurate to say that the public is still making up its mind. Yes, there is some inaccurate information in Wikipedia - the same can be said of Britannica. However, Wikipedia has been cited in in books, in academic studies, in conferences, and in court cases. If the public really though of Wikipedia as a unreliable source, then I don't think that it would be drawing in these kinds of references
The next problem Larry mentiosn is the trolls. The arbitration committee was formed about a year ago as a way for Jimbo Wales (the actual founder of Wikipedia) to devolve his powers to the community. In particular, he appointed a committee of 12 users who would have the right to issue decrees and such - the ability to prohibit people from doing certain things, or ban them, 'etc etc. The primary (and pretty much only) complaint against the committee to date has been that it has been too slow to act. On the other hand, I think if you were to ask the average user what he thinks, the trolling problem has been getting much better in recent months - just look at the list of complete cases. Several long time trouble makers are currently banned (and if they come back, it resets the clock on their ban). I know one recently banned user (troll) said (before he was banned) how much he hated it, how much the "cabal" had taken over, 'etc. If the trolls are saying this, I take it as a good sign. Beyond that, I can't really reply to Larry's nebulous complaint about trolling because he's really not saying a whole lot there.
Larry's third (and perhaps only concrete point - IE, specifically refutable point) is that he claims Wikipedia has a lack of respect for experts. Nonsense, I say. As a rule of thumb, we expect that everyone (experts and laymen alike), if requested, can cite specific sources to justify their edits. In this respect, it is no different than Academia. Quite frankly (and this is my personal opinion) I think a great majority of the editing disputes could be solved by requiring disputants to cite and/or quote reputable sources. On the other hand, Larry's asseration that "But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best)." - I think this gets more to the heart of how Wikipedia works. If you want to contribut
Wikipedia gets 24.8 "submissions" (edits) per minute. This is several orders of magnitude higher than the linux kernel. Your comparison is specious. -- A Wikipedia Admin
Slashdot Mirror
They cannot. This article is nonsensical FUD from someone who doesn't know what he is talking about. (--A wikipedia admin)
You're wrong. The problem wasn't that we didn't have enough servers, but that the servers we had were misconfigured. The slowness experienced in January was resolved when the configuration bugs were ironed out. The problem is a lack of skilled sysadmins and developers. (And for the record, we just put in an order for 10 more servers)
First, full discloser - I'm a long time wikipedia user and I probably accidentally played a peripheral role in breaking this story. I first heard about the google deal back in July. Google is not the first company to offer to host wikipedia. The typical offer comes from "Mom and Pop ISPs" (Jimbo's words) that really don't have any idea what they're getting themselves into (1,400 hits/sec is a helleva lot to do for free). What I have to say in reply to this story is - it is, IMHO, totally FUD. It's completely hypothetical, and it's unrealistic. You have to remember - all the text on Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License or in the public domain; all the images and audio are licensed under the GNU Free Documetnation license, or CC-by-SA, or something liberal equivalent. So even if, on the off chance, Google succumbs to the Corporate pressure to be evil, anyone can take the text and reuse it in less evil ways. Furthmore, I trust Jimbo, Angela, and Anthere (the visible members of the board) in dealing with google to make sure the deal is done right by the rest of us contributors. There's a long history on Wikipedia of being against ads of any form - the spanish wikipedia forked several years ago over hypothetical discussion of it.
The exact same thing happened in 1980 when someone tried to patent an artificial bacteria. The USPTO rejected the claim, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, where In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court explained that while natural laws, physical phenomena, abstract ideas, or newly discovered minerals are not patentable, a live artificially-engineered microorganism is. So I suspect this is nowhere near over. As a matter of fact, (IANAL), I think the ideas set forth in that case would seem to be on Mr. Newman's side. If the court rules against him, they're going to have to come up with some kind of legal dividing line to explain why artificial bacteria are patentable but artificial humans/humanoids aren't.
If I had any mod points, you'd get them. 'Damned insightful.
"I'm sorry, but a photograph of a sculpture is not a reproduction of said sculpture. " - it's a transformative reproduction. There's enough creativity involved (choosing the angle etc) that if it were in the public domain, a picture if it would qualify for copyright; on the other hand, it's close enough to the original that it could be considered either a copy or a derivative work. These are the same issues that were litigated in the Bridegeman art Library v Corel case.
Parent poster is Jamesday, who is (more or less) Wikipedia's chief sysadmin
The shadow registers run in parallel with the computation logic and do not add anythign to the total path length, which means there's no loss of speed.
Dr. Trevor Mudge (U. Michigan) came to give a lecture at my University last year. He had an interesting proposal which I suspect is probably going to end up being used in nearly every architecture. The energy usage of a procesor is proportion to the square of the voltage - so dropping it as much as possible is desirable. The only problem is that once you get too close, you start getting bit level errors. He proposes to use a shadow register to keep track of values as they pass through and detect bit errors automatically, and route around them. If run at the optimal voltage (1.4 volts) a razored process will see a dramatic drop in energy consumption with a virtually-nonexistant hit to processing power.
" The Material eXchange Format (MXF) is an open file format targeted at the interchange of audio-visual material with associated data and metadata. It has been designed and implemented with the aim of improving file based interoperability between servers, workstations and other content creation devices. These improvements should result in improved workflows and result in more efficient working than is possible with today's mixed and proprietary file formats." -- What is MXF
The primary case law concerning what is and is not patentable was set forth in 1980's SCOTUS decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty. The court ruled that "n choosing such expansive terms as "manufacture" and "composition of matter," modified by the comprehensive "any," Congress contemplated that the patent laws should be given wide scope, and the relevant legislative history also supports a broad construction. While laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable, respondent's claim is not to a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon, but to a nonnaturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter - a product of human ingenuity "having a distinctive name, character [and] use." Believe it or not, this is actually a compromise, because the respondent had actually argued the case based on a 1952 congressional memo (pertaining to the 1952 patent recodification) that "include anything under the sun that is made by man" is patentable.
With BlueGene, the US gov't approached IBM and told them "We want the fastest super computers in the world. We want to eventually reach the the Petaflop range. Here's some money. Do it" and IBM happily complied. Late last year, the BlueGene/L prototype recaptured the title of world's fastest computer from the Japanese. The BlueGene/C design is due (on time) in June and should be available from the foundry in August (full discloser - my grad work involves testing & verficiation of this). The lesson? Where IT is concerned, the Government has a legitimate interest in outsourcing it to reliable companies (prefarably US based for security reasons).
How do you do that? (Add it to restricted sites?)
I was a big fan of Civ II and I absolutely loved Alpha Centauri, but I did not like Civ III. Why? The waste and corruption was just far too high. (The patches moderated this slightly, but still not to my satisfaction). It ruined the game, IMHO. I hope Civ IV will improve upon this.
When TNG started, people were afraid it wouldn't suceed without having to bring back members of the original crew. And while it did eventually bring most of them back in some form or another (McCoy in the pilot, Spock in Season 4, Scotty in season 6, and Kirk in Generations), it spread it out so much that it was fairly innocuous. On the other hand, this is a blatant attempt to appeal to TNG's popularity to save what has been an otherwise horrible series.
Remember, we're limiting the question only to the milky way. The Milky Way galaxy is basically a sphere (diameter of 50,000? light years) surrounded by a disc with diameter of 100,000 light years. The earth is about 1/2 of the distance from the outer edge to the core. That means that the most distant part (from earth) is the other edge of the disc. This means it would take you 3/4 * 100,000 = 75,000 years to see the most distant suprnovas.
Astrophysicists used to think that a supernova occured once in the Milky Way (on average) every 100-300 years, but there was some work done in the early 90s that indicated it was more like once every 30 years or so.
Right, but did you actually read my comment? I said "semi-conductor capacity", not frequency. Off the top of my head, the number of transistors on your processor is a function of: the bus widths, the ISA, the branch prediction, the pipeline length, the amount of cache, the number of cores/ALUs/FPUs/thread units. Hell, in the future, even the voltage level will play a role (future processors will be razorized and run at a lower power level). All of the factors you named play into the capacity. So what I said is true - semi-condutor capacity is roughly proportional to speed.
Moore's law has nothing to do with processor frequency. It says that semi-conductor capacity doubles every 18 monthsm, not frequency. (With the corollary that there is no appreciable change in price). As we all know, semi-conductor capacity is roughly proportional to speed, so saying processor speeds double every 18 months is not quite wrong, just a little inaccurate. On the other hand, saying that we're not seeing 10 ghz processors, so Moore's law is broken is wrong.
Yes, the turnover is high even for an internet project. I've been there 18 months (which is longer than most of the active contributors). It also helps to remember that Wikipedia has not yet reached the 4 year old mark, though.
nor apparently did he do his homework.... How do you know? - Compare his claims to mine. His are vast and nebulous, without a single citation to back them up. On the other hand, mine are specific and to the point, with accompanying citations.
It's also unfair to look at what a Wired journalist is doing to get up to speed as an exemplar of what Larry should or shouldn't do to stay on top of things Wiki. No, it's no - good research is good research, regardless of who is doing it. Larry didn't do his. If you want to find out how the community works, there aren't any shortcuts.Someone, like Larry, who was heavily involved at one point, could expend a lot less effort on a continous basis and still be fairly well up on the Wikipedia. Notice from his user contributions, he'd made 6 edits in 2 years, 5 of them to his page and 1 to criticize the (then) newly implimented categorization system. That's not much of an effort
"We don't need no experts making judgements on the Wikipedia -- trust me, I'm an expert." - Total nonsense. Unlike Mr. Sanger, I backed up most of my claims with links where people can go and check my claims for themselves.
"Yet Wikipedians seem unwilling to examine mechanisms which would allow such weighting to occur within the context of the Wikipedia." - An appeal to authority is a common logical fallacy. To restate - when I made claims, I back them up. We expect the same thing on Wikipedia proper (if not automatically, then when someone else requests verification of a particular claim).
Consider the source of that statement - Larry edited the article himself so it says that.
They are all open and available, for someone who has enough time to invest to do his homework properly. Wikipedia is a big place, and if you really want to know how it works, it's takes a lot of time. For example, that there's a reporter from Wired magazine working on such a story right now. He *is* doing his homework - he came to the New York City meetup and listened and asked questions, he's done phone interviews with quite a few contributors, 'etc. I myself know most of it from memory, so I guess yes, that makes me an expert. That's also why I was elected to the arbitration commitee. On the other hand, Larry neither knows it from memory (since he left before the policies were created) nor apparently did he do his homework.
First, full disclosure - I'm a wikipedia admin, I'm the featured article director (I choose the featured articles on Wikipedia's main page), and I'm one of the arbitrators (on the arbitration committee Larry mentions). I'm going to try to address Larry's points in turn. Some of what he says is true, but much of it is wrong, or totally misses the point. Larry left in 2002, meaning that he has been away longer than most of th currently active people have been there. The policies have changed radically, and so I don't think it's unfair to say he has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to the community or the policies.
First, about the title of this thread - calling Larry Sanger a co-founder of Wikipedia is a bit of a stretch. It's before my time, but I know several people who were around from those days found this objectionable. As I understand it, Larry was more involved in Nupedia (now defunct). Wikipedia was started to augment Nupedia, and (as I understand it) the idea was Jimbo Wales'.
Now, this "lack of public perception of credibility" Larry mentions - this is misleading. Wikipedia is (as others on this thread have said) an experiment. However, I don't think the public percieves us as uncredible. I think it would be more accurate to say that the public is still making up its mind. Yes, there is some inaccurate information in Wikipedia - the same can be said of Britannica. However, Wikipedia has been cited in in books, in academic studies, in conferences, and in court cases. If the public really though of Wikipedia as a unreliable source, then I don't think that it would be drawing in these kinds of references
The next problem Larry mentiosn is the trolls. The arbitration committee was formed about a year ago as a way for Jimbo Wales (the actual founder of Wikipedia) to devolve his powers to the community. In particular, he appointed a committee of 12 users who would have the right to issue decrees and such - the ability to prohibit people from doing certain things, or ban them, 'etc etc. The primary (and pretty much only) complaint against the committee to date has been that it has been too slow to act. On the other hand, I think if you were to ask the average user what he thinks, the trolling problem has been getting much better in recent months - just look at the list of complete cases. Several long time trouble makers are currently banned (and if they come back, it resets the clock on their ban). I know one recently banned user (troll) said (before he was banned) how much he hated it, how much the "cabal" had taken over, 'etc. If the trolls are saying this, I take it as a good sign. Beyond that, I can't really reply to Larry's nebulous complaint about trolling because he's really not saying a whole lot there.
Larry's third (and perhaps only concrete point - IE, specifically refutable point) is that he claims Wikipedia has a lack of respect for experts. Nonsense, I say. As a rule of thumb, we expect that everyone (experts and laymen alike), if requested, can cite specific sources to justify their edits. In this respect, it is no different than Academia. Quite frankly (and this is my personal opinion) I think a great majority of the editing disputes could be solved by requiring disputants to cite and/or quote reputable sources. On the other hand, Larry's asseration that "But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best)." - I think this gets more to the heart of how Wikipedia works. If you want to contribut
Wikipedia gets 24.8 "submissions" (edits) per minute. This is several orders of magnitude higher than the linux kernel. Your comparison is specious. -- A Wikipedia Admin