If "Wikis" were the source of information hundreds of years ago, we'd all still think that the world is flat, Earth was created in 7 days, and that black people are inferior.
Hundreds of years ago, people relied on what their neighbours and the priest in the church said, because they hadn't access to any information beside of that. Many people believed for hundreds of years that the earth was flat, because they heard what the authorities said (or their neighbours who heard it from the authorities).
"Majority rules" is not a way to determine whether or not information is valid.
"Authority rules" isn't the way either.
I vote for "Common sense" and a good understanding of how information technolgies work - past and present.
I think a antihydrogen bomb would work, but it would be pretty difficult to handle. I believe that the fission reaction would add nothing to the total energy output, because the result of a matter-antimatter reaction is pure energy, leaving behind no matter or antimatter - you can't gain more energy than that. But I'm no physicist...
This man clearly has no time to support his hair, because it is not part of his core business. Haircuts designed by an underpaid committee simply don't cut it. We suggest that he should open source his haircut using a GPL style license and let the community do all further development. ESR is already preparing a groundbreaking new paper named "The wig museum and the hairdresser's shop".
OMG, Chewbacca reciting his favourite poetry to a horde of cute muppet tribbles, as they rally for a devastating strike against the evil Klingon empire (Episode VII). I think I'm calling in sick.
Yes, but he could reinvest the money into rubber bands and apples and solve thousands of Poincaré conjectures at once and thus gather even more money to buy apples for the hungry children in the world and rubber bands for their trousers. Well, if this business model isn't patented yet, of course...
What about MacGyver? He didn't stay all day on a lab or something like that, but he surely knew a lot about physics and chemistry.
He knew a lot more about physics and chemistry than nature itself. It was a pity for us household cleaning agent nerds and Swiss army knife geeks that some component of his inventions was kept secret every time. Of course it was never hard to guess that this secret component had to be something like household-nitroglycerine, magical toad saliva with a high C4 percentage or natural plutonium he found in a rabbit hole.
if the wiki is considered unauthoritative, then it is more likely that people will scrutinize and correct the content. But the problem is that eventually this behaviour will result in the belief that the wiki is authoritative.
The same happened to most of the mass media. I would say that 90% of the average people think that TV news are authoritative. Who can tell where the information came from that we hear on TV or read in the newspaper? Why aren't people decrying mass media as unreliable and dangerous?
I guess the best thing to do is to continuously raise this issue in order to provoke people to be discerning with respect to the wiki content.
We should make sure that this awareness exists for all kinds of media. Wikipedia may have some shortcommings at the moment, but I'm sure that it (or some fork or alternative project) eventually will become as respectable as any encyclopedia out there. Wikipedia is still growing - not only quantitative - it's still defining itself. We have to question Wikipedia's mechanisms in order to optimize them and to adapt them to the respective situation we're in. This situation will change a great deal, especially when Wikipedia is nearing "completeness". E.g. the "everyone can edit everything immediately" priciple works best in times of fast growth, but may be not the best system when fewer and fewer edits are made to old and proven articles. I'm sure that in a few years we'll have a Wikipedia that will give wannabe vandals a pretty hard time and will have much more sophisticated mechanisms of quality control and categorization.
Nah - the HiFi-freaks will still swear that those unrecognizable things above 10 TBps *DO* make a difference. And a 100 TBps pipe still can't beat vinyl. I predict a celluloid-revival for 2009. People will trash their DVDs and enjoy the smooth gradients that only celluloid can deliver.
that function key had better be bright red, with a little plastic mollyguard over it, locked. And it should take two people standing fifteen feet apart turning a pair of keys at the same time to unlock it.
Nice idea, but Microsoft already patented that for the Longhorn product activation scheme...
No, this is not doing your public image in Europe any damned good!
Take it easy. The stupid joke works in both directions: it sounds equally hilarious for german speaking people as for english speakers. I don't think that any German minds the blinkenlight jokes. I'm only an Austrian, but after all we bred Hitler, so I think my opinion on this subject still counts.
In the case of Wikipedia, it's a good idea to disallow it as a trustable source. A Wikipedia entry is only as trustable as the most recent person who edited it.
Wikipedia just illustrates that there is no such thing as a trustable source. Using the traditional way of teaching, children think that what is written e.g. in the Encyclopedia Britannica is just the truth. They aren't tought where this "truth" is comming from - how it is manufactured. Technologies such as Wikipedia only make this manufactoring process more transparent: Somebody writes something down and it gets reviewed by other people. The quality of the information depends upon whether the peer review is good or not. But what constitutes a good peer review? How do you know what kind of review the source you rely on has gone through? When you use Wikipedia you have to take a good look at the document history before you can judge the value of the information. And you should consult other sources, too. I think it's a very good thing that children have to think about these questions. They need to know that they can't take for granted what they are reading. One has to judge the quality of the source - know the discussion process that led to the knowledge, know the agendas of the people who manufactured it. On the other hand, if we consume these new kinds of media in the naive way most of us use traditional media today, then it will make us more misinformed.
And there are people out there who sabotage information on Wikipedia, replacing it with lies suited to their own agenda.
Everyone has an agenda. The history books of different countries seldom represent our past in exactly the same way. It's hard to tell what the objective truth is, because no human being is able to be absolutely objective. When you look at Wikipedia at least you can see the struggle that led to the actual article (you won't find that in a printed encyclopedia).
the AMD 760MPX (not MP) Chipset, the one with 64bit 66Mhz PCI not 64/33 was the one with the USB bug.
I'm not sure if I understand you grammatically, but if you say that the USB of the AMD 760MPX doesn't work, then you're wrong. I have a MPX board (Tyan S2466N-4M) and I use the onboard USB on a daily basis. It works without problems. The AMD 760MPX is a very fine chipset for dual Athlons (much better than the AMD 760MP).
OK, USB didn't work with the old MP chipset. I'm not sure when they fixed the problem (maybe the first MPXs had it too), but at least all the later releases of the MPX did work.
Anyway the fact that it never got properly fixed is pretty pathetic.
Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide, and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. For the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it. -(Matthew 7:13-14)
Translated into a more contemporary language, this means that you might still be on the safe side, at least as long as you don't touch Windows.
AT&T was forced to license its software to anyone that wanted it. Patented or not, they had to license it.
If that was your point you should have said it more clearly. A patent that is licenced to everyone for free is as good as no patent.
But I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the situation. AT&T wasn't allowed to make money with computer software, but I don't think that means that they had to free every patent they couldn't sell. They could have patented it and simply refuse to license it to anyone ("we're not allowed to sell this at this point of time, please wait 10 years.").
It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.
There's a difference between proprietary software and patented software. BSD could easily reimplement all proprietary parts of UNIX and won the lawsuit that followed. But if these parts had been patented ("e.g. a method to write an OS using a programming language"), that wouldn't be possible. I think you're either uninformed or trolling, or both.
There was an implementation of UNIX and it was proprietary. But there were other implementations of UNIX that were free. What matters isn't some implementation, but ideas. And the idea of UNIX hasn't been developed only by AT&T, but also by the UNIX community - in a open way, since the beginning. Patent that and UNIX is dead.
Slashdot Mirror
If "Wikis" were the source of information hundreds of years ago, we'd all still think that the world is flat, Earth was created in 7 days, and that black people are inferior.
Hundreds of years ago, people relied on what their neighbours and the priest in the church said, because they hadn't access to any information beside of that. Many people believed for hundreds of years that the earth was flat, because they heard what the authorities said (or their neighbours who heard it from the authorities).
"Majority rules" is not a way to determine whether or not information is valid.
"Authority rules" isn't the way either.
I vote for "Common sense" and a good understanding of how information technolgies work - past and present.
a very nice collared shirt that makes it look like I work for Cray! I wer it to all the conventions and I become cool(er).
/me sings "No woman, no Cray..." ;)
I think a antihydrogen bomb would work, but it would be pretty difficult to handle. I believe that the fission reaction would add nothing to the total energy output, because the result of a matter-antimatter reaction is pure energy, leaving behind no matter or antimatter - you can't gain more energy than that. But I'm no physicist...
What happens if you make an anti-matter hydrogen bomb?
You're going to be the winner of the next the Darwin Award!
But what happens if you light your cigarette with a nuke? Will the chemical energy of the cigarette make the nuke light brighter?
IBM: Linus, I am your father!
Yaaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeehhhh! (Translation: All your patent belongs to me when you die after you killed emperor Ballmatine.)
Can someone say haircuit?
This man clearly has no time to support his hair, because it is not part of his core business. Haircuts designed by an underpaid committee simply don't cut it. We suggest that he should open source his haircut using a GPL style license and let the community do all further development. ESR is already preparing a groundbreaking new paper named "The wig museum and the hairdresser's shop".
Star Wars verses Star Trek
OMG, Chewbacca reciting his favourite poetry to a horde of cute muppet tribbles, as they rally for a devastating strike against the evil Klingon empire (Episode VII). I think I'm calling in sick.
There's more to life than money.
Yes, but he could reinvest the money into rubber bands and apples and solve thousands of Poincaré conjectures at once and thus gather even more money to buy apples for the hungry children in the world and rubber bands for their trousers. Well, if this business model isn't patented yet, of course...
What about MacGyver? He didn't stay all day on a lab or something like that, but he surely knew a lot about physics and chemistry.
He knew a lot more about physics and chemistry than nature itself. It was a pity for us household cleaning agent nerds and Swiss army knife geeks that some component of his inventions was kept secret every time. Of course it was never hard to guess that this secret component had to be something like household-nitroglycerine, magical toad saliva with a high C4 percentage or natural plutonium he found in a rabbit hole.
For grins and giggles, go download "The Last Ninja" and throw it into your c64 emulator of choice (Vice).
I hate the thought that Last Ninja II may already be released when the download over my 150 baud line emulator finishes...
The soundtrack on that is absoluetly amazing, and it was made.. what, almost 16 years ago? One of the best gaming soundtracks ever.
Yeah - enjoy it in new glory. (But please don't torture the little server to much.)
They could have at least waited for the 10th version: the awesome name "Direct X, X"
I think they rename it before they reach 10.0 to make it less obvious that they wanted to avoid version Direct-X11.
if the wiki is considered unauthoritative, then it is more likely that people will scrutinize and correct the content. But the problem is that eventually this behaviour will result in the belief that the wiki is authoritative.
The same happened to most of the mass media. I would say that 90% of the average people think that TV news are authoritative. Who can tell where the information came from that we hear on TV or read in the newspaper? Why aren't people decrying mass media as unreliable and dangerous?
I guess the best thing to do is to continuously raise this issue in order to provoke people to be discerning with respect to the wiki content.
We should make sure that this awareness exists for all kinds of media. Wikipedia may have some shortcommings at the moment, but I'm sure that it (or some fork or alternative project) eventually will become as respectable as any encyclopedia out there. Wikipedia is still growing - not only quantitative - it's still defining itself. We have to question Wikipedia's mechanisms in order to optimize them and to adapt them to the respective situation we're in. This situation will change a great deal, especially when Wikipedia is nearing "completeness". E.g. the "everyone can edit everything immediately" priciple works best in times of fast growth, but may be not the best system when fewer and fewer edits are made to old and proven articles. I'm sure that in a few years we'll have a Wikipedia that will give wannabe vandals a pretty hard time and will have much more sophisticated mechanisms of quality control and categorization.
Nah - the HiFi-freaks will still swear that those unrecognizable things above 10 TBps *DO* make a difference. And a 100 TBps pipe still can't beat vinyl. I predict a celluloid-revival for 2009. People will trash their DVDs and enjoy the smooth gradients that only celluloid can deliver.
ratpoison
that function key had better be bright red, with a little plastic mollyguard over it, locked. And it should take two people standing fifteen feet apart turning a pair of keys at the same time to unlock it.
Nice idea, but Microsoft already patented that for the Longhorn product activation scheme...
And the freeddom to use the code in closed commercial applications makes it *even more free* than restricting it to only other open source projets.
Then just use *BSD!
Everybody who doesn't like the GPL should contribute to BSD. Of course, most people who rant against the GPL just want to consume, not contribute.
No, this is not doing your public image in Europe any damned good!
Take it easy. The stupid joke works in both directions: it sounds equally hilarious for german speaking people as for english speakers. I don't think that any German minds the blinkenlight jokes. I'm only an Austrian, but after all we bred Hitler, so I think my opinion on this subject still counts.
In the case of Wikipedia, it's a good idea to disallow it as a trustable source. A Wikipedia entry is only as trustable as the most recent person who edited it.
Wikipedia just illustrates that there is no such thing as a trustable source. Using the traditional way of teaching, children think that what is written e.g. in the Encyclopedia Britannica is just the truth. They aren't tought where this "truth" is comming from - how it is manufactured. Technologies such as Wikipedia only make this manufactoring process more transparent: Somebody writes something down and it gets reviewed by other people. The quality of the information depends upon whether the peer review is good or not. But what constitutes a good peer review? How do you know what kind of review the source you rely on has gone through? When you use Wikipedia you have to take a good look at the document history before you can judge the value of the information. And you should consult other sources, too. I think it's a very good thing that children have to think about these questions. They need to know that they can't take for granted what they are reading. One has to judge the quality of the source - know the discussion process that led to the knowledge, know the agendas of the people who manufactured it. On the other hand, if we consume these new kinds of media in the naive way most of us use traditional media today, then it will make us more misinformed.
And there are people out there who sabotage information on Wikipedia, replacing it with lies suited to their own agenda.
Everyone has an agenda. The history books of different countries seldom represent our past in exactly the same way. It's hard to tell what the objective truth is, because no human being is able to be absolutely objective. When you look at Wikipedia at least you can see the struggle that led to the actual article (you won't find that in a printed encyclopedia).
the AMD 760MPX (not MP) Chipset, the one with 64bit 66Mhz PCI not 64/33 was the one with the USB bug.
I'm not sure if I understand you grammatically, but if you say that the USB of the AMD 760MPX doesn't work, then you're wrong. I have a MPX board (Tyan S2466N-4M) and I use the onboard USB on a daily basis. It works without problems. The AMD 760MPX is a very fine chipset for dual Athlons (much better than the AMD 760MP).
OK, USB didn't work with the old MP chipset. I'm not sure when they fixed the problem (maybe the first MPXs had it too), but at least all the later releases of the MPX did work.
Anyway the fact that it never got properly fixed is pretty pathetic.
Go away. You're talking out of your ass.
It said that OSDN (and thereby slashdot) has been bought by Microsoft. But now they deny it.
:-D
In other words, the end of the world was canceled.
Can you run AtheOS and still believe in God?
Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide, and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it. For the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it. -(Matthew 7:13-14)
Translated into a more contemporary language, this means that you might still be on the safe side, at least as long as you don't touch Windows.
IIRC, AtheOS was written in 100% assembler
No, I think it's written in C and C++.
Hm. What's causing this?
Maybe this?
AT&T was forced to license its software to anyone that wanted it. Patented or not, they had to license it.
If that was your point you should have said it more clearly. A patent that is licenced to everyone for free is as good as no patent.
But I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of the situation. AT&T wasn't allowed to make money with computer software, but I don't think that means that they had to free every patent they couldn't sell. They could have patented it and simply refuse to license it to anyone ("we're not allowed to sell this at this point of time, please wait 10 years.").
It was proprietary software, patents wouldn't have done a thing to it.
There's a difference between proprietary software and patented software. BSD could easily reimplement all proprietary parts of UNIX and won the lawsuit that followed. But if these parts had been patented ("e.g. a method to write an OS using a programming language"), that wouldn't be possible. I think you're either uninformed or trolling, or both.
There was an implementation of UNIX and it was proprietary. But there were other implementations of UNIX that were free. What matters isn't some implementation, but ideas. And the idea of UNIX hasn't been developed only by AT&T, but also by the UNIX community - in a open way, since the beginning. Patent that and UNIX is dead.