I agree - this is an achievement more from a business/marketing point of view, than a technical one. I don't know if someone can comment on some particularly innovative technical features of what he's done, but the general idea of writing a software product at 17 isn't in itself anything special - surely there are plenty of people beat this by many years? (Personally I feel that the tactic of writing "x years old" after your name to make it look more significant ought to end when you hit 16!)
The problem is that most people don't have the desire, funds, or possibly marketing ability to turn what they write into something commerically successful. I'm sure that most people fall into the situation that as soon as they have money to spend, they have less of a desire to make extra money when they're working a full week and would rather release as open source - plus, most people spend several more years in education after 16, so they're never in a situation where they both have money to invest, and are 17.
Not to mention that many job contracts will prohibit commercial projects such as this.
but I wonder if I'll live to see the day when it's considered "acceptable" to be proud of straight, male, caucasian heritage. That's not to say I think there's anything to be proud of, but rather that it's interesting how we have all these parades, celebrations, "history" months, and special exhibits for the accomplishments of all the various configurations of gender, race, and religion, except straight, white, Christian male.
Did I wake up in some parallel universe today where there's a stigma attached to being straight or Christian? Last time I looked, there was still stigma attached to homosexuality, and bisexuality is mostly ignored or assumed not to exist. Atheists are often thought of as immoral, and given none of the protections and exceptions that religious people - yes, including Christians - get.
There may be no "parades" and so on, but that's because your types are celebrated, or even forced upon us, all the time anyway. In the UK, even though I went to a state school, we had to celebrate your religion every morning. In most countries, same sex couples are not permitted to have legal recognition for their relationship. Perhaps there'd be less parades if they were allowed to celebrate in the same way that heterosexuals can?
The truth, of course, is that the vast majority of all historical accomplishments were achieved by straight, white, Christian males.
Emphasis on the word historical. The number of Christian scientific developments is far less in the last century.
Having said that - I agree that it's silly to start rating which-group-of-people-did-what (although you yourself fall into this trap with the above paragraph). But for the most part, things like "parades" are not about this anyway, they're about raising awareness against discrimination. I disagree with your claim that it's not acceptable to be proud of straight, male, caucasion or Christian heritage.
while straight white males stand at the sidelines with their mouths shut, lest they be considered racist, sexist, homophobic, or just generally discriminatory.
No one is stopping you from celebrating achievments of straight white males. The problem is that you seem to want to also say "...and we're better than all the rest".
The cost of makeing something doesn't matter one bit for it's market value.
No, but it matters for the company's profit, which is important.
If it costs $1000 to make each card and people will only pay $300 for them, then Nvidia would learn their lesson and not make them any more.
Wait, you just said the cost to make each card doesn't matter! It sounds like you agree - it most certainly does matter, and it certainly doesn't make any sense to have a price higher than the cost to make it.
If it costs them $1 to make each card and people will pay $1000 for them they'll make sure that they sell as many as they can at $1000. As soon as everyone that has paid $1000 for one they'll lower it to $900. When sales stop again they'll lower it to $800...$600...$300...$10 eventually they wont be able to sell them at any price. At that point it is called Market saturation.
How does what I said conflict with what you say? The point is that there isn't a single price point that everyone will pay. The OP was claiming that the company should sell things at a fraction of the price, and make the same amount of money, but both you and I disagree with him. If it costs $1 to make, then it wouldn't make sense to sell the cards for $1, even if there were 1000 times as many buyers.
I know the classes suck but all you have to do is pay a little attention during Macro Economics 101. Supply and Demand is a little more complicated than just lower supply higher demand.
It looks like you're the one simplifying things, by thinking that everyone is willing to pay exactly the same price - it's you who needs to pay more attention! You should also learn to read what I actually posted. What you write has nothing to do with what I wrote, and nowhere did I claim that it was as simple as "lower supply higher demand" - indeed, my point was that it wasn't simple - the OP claimed it was a simple linear relationship.
Please, learn to read what is written before spouting off about paying attention.
Firstly you need to factor out the variable costs. If each card costs $100, then it doesn't matter how many people will pay that price. If each card costs $50, then you need a lot more than 50 buyers to equal the profit at $1000 (95, in fact).
And secondly, demand doesn't scale linearly with price (or "price minus variable costs"). One could argue that the graphics card market is somewhat like a oligopoly, and not near that of perfect competition. The two main companies in the market have no incentive to lower their prices, so consumers have to pay that amount for a new card - and so, they won't get as significant increases in demand by dropping the price.
I'm sure that they take this into account and work out the price point where profit is maximised, rather than plucking a price out of thin air.
Even then, as well as that method, there were more direct methods which were comparable to what we have today - for example, it was common for games to use non-standard disk formats, which meant they couldn't be copied by the OS, and that's just the same sort of trick being done now with some CDs (you could get special disk copying programs which had more success, but even they had trouble with some disks).
The original comment is just simply false - if anything, hacky copy protection was more common back then, because it wasn't expected that the software should play nicely with the OS.
Sorry, but I don't want to be part of that brave new world.
You eat food, don't you? How is that different?
And I agree with the other comments - life begins with the creation of the sperm and egg cells. Sorry, you can't use the biological definition of "life" when it suits you, but not when it doesn't.
The point is that email was not designed for file transfer and probably will never be the best tool for that purpose. Unfortuantely it cannot always be avoided but it should be whereever possible. If email was seen as a good way to transfer files then FTP wouldn't have been invented--people would've extended email to do it from the start. Since FTP is still around today and is now extended to secure FTP with SSL encryption and authentication THAT is the tool that professionals should use to send such files (that is what I do anyways).
The problem isn't with "professionals", but between any two random people. I can't say "Hey, give me your FTP address, and I'll send you that file". Even amongst people who are knowledgable about computers, it's a hassle to set up your own FTP server.
It would be a different matter if ISPs are companies like Google would offer you "FTP space" in a similar way to email, but as far as I know they don't.
Wikipedia is still useful to go to find further sources - you can cite the references that Wikipedia gives, instead of citing Wikipedia directly.
And I'd hope that no encyclopdia should be quoted directly as a source. Encyclopedias are not intended to be original sources. You need to quote either primary sources (which encylopedias aren't) or secondary sources (for which it's important to quote the author - you can't do this with Wikipedia of course, but even with encyclopedias, you generally don't have an individual author that can be identified, as far as I know).
Sorry, what menu? What interpreter? What's an IDE? Why do I need to save this as a file before I can run it? What's a file? And you say my computer doesn't have this anyway? How do I get it? Oh, that sounds hard. Well, my computer says it's done something. What are all these little pictures on the screen? When I type nothing happens. Oh, I have to click on one. With a mouse. What's a mouse? Oh, right. Um, how do I work this? Which picture do I want? Okay, clicked. It's changed colour. Double-click, right. It's changed colour again. Faster? Uh... this is pretty hard... gah! What's all this stuff on my screen! Oh, this is an IDE? It looks really complicated. There are all these little boxes and more pictures and... tell you what, I'll use a calculator.
Let's be realistic though - the sort of person who can barely operate a modern computer at all isn't going to have been the sort of person who was writing programs in BASIC on the 8 bits.
A person who struggles to understand a mouse or be able to select the interpreter from the Start menu isn't going to have a clue about things like variables and remembering which commands to type.
The main advantages old computers had was that the BASIC came as standard, and there wasn't much you could do with a computer apart from program and play (not exactly brilliant) games. So people might be more likely to have a look at it. But it was not easier.
That prompt is saying to the user, "What do you want me to do?" Your average GUI is saying to the user, "These are all the things I will let you do." There's a key distinction there, that I'm afraid we're losing sight of.
Except we never had computers equipped with the AI to be able to understand what a user might want to do. What that prompt actually meant was "There are only some things I can let you do, but I'm not even going to tell you what those are; instead you have to know the commands".
I couldn't agree with you more! Right now, I'm telnetting in from port 80, in order to read and post from Slashdot! And of course, the telnet client and the OS it runs on were written by me, all in assembly, though I must confess to using an off-the-shelf computer as I am too stupid to make one of those.
Seriously though - an intelligent person doesn't just know how to do things, he knows when it's best to make use of existing tools rather than reinventing the wheel. I can write HTML, but it's nonetheless far more productive for me to make use of existing systems.
Furthermore, you're confusing design with the system as a whole. I tend to write raw HTML if necessary when posting to LiveJournal - but setting up a blog/journal system is a lot more work than just writing some HTML.
I don't think it was possible in 1995 to have a system where information from several sources was distributed to a single person so it could be presented in a single "page" view (e.g., RSS, or "friends" pages) - certainly I don't think it was easy to set up, either from the point of view of the author or the reader.
That's one of the significant differences over webpages - when I set up a homepage 9 years ago, the problem is that people would look at it once, then no longer bother because it's too much hassle to keep checking back to an individual webpage. (Having said this, I don't get the point of entirely standalone blogs - the ones where people are seemingly writing towards an audience, but they don't seem to have any readers because no one can be bothered to keep looking, just like old style webpages.)
In summary, the key point is that not only is this a webpage that updates, but that there is a mechanism for informing readers when the page updates, and transmitting the information to them directly.
A better comparison than webpages is perhaps email, in that they are useful tools for communication, and a fundamental improvement is that blogs are "pull" rather than "push" - the reader decides what he wants to read, rather than the sender having to decide who might want to read.
It would appear that I'm just one item on a long, long list.
No, it's just you. Your first reply had no relation to anything I said.
So the one in Paris near the Arc de Trimphe is the same as the one in at Detroit airport? They look pretty separate to me, even though I admit there is a resemblance. Are they like connected by tunnels or something?
And are these part of a well known chain of restaurants, or some individual opening a restaurant called McDonald's without permission from that well known chain of restaurants?
I'm sure you knew what I meant when I said "separate" - nowhere in my original post did I use that word anyway.
One thing to consider is why would someone who isn't seeking a broad audience post their personal journal in a world-wide public blog with no access control? I think people who post publicly are, at least subconsciously, seeking that attention, or, perhaps, they don't quite understand that *anyone*, from neighbor joe to psychopath jack, can access their postings and learn about them.
So are you seeking world-wide attention, by posting to a forum without restrictions on who can see this?
Of course not - the reason why people post without access control is not because they want everyone to see it, but because it's too much effort to implement a secure form of access so that only some people can see it. When they post something, they want some people (e.g., friends) to see it, but don't care who else sees it. So why bother worrying about access?
Not caring who sees what you right is not equivalent to wanting everyone to see. Or if it is, you're as attention-seeking as the rest of them, since you're posting for the world to see also.
Public forums have been around for years, from Usenet to webforums. Now for some reason, some Slashdotters seem to think the rules change for webpages such as "blogs".
Blogging has almost become the new Geocities. Anyone remember how many tons of crappy pages there were on Geocities in the late nineties? Every thirteen year old had a goofy ass page with a midi background and talked about how cool they were, or how shitty their life was (bonus if there was goth poetry). Now, blogging is like that, because everyone can have a blog for free.
In practice though, places like LiveJournal are a replacement for email (both individual emails and mailing lists) in terms of offering an efficient way for friends to discuss things with each other.
It's ironic that people criticise blogs for noise or being uninteresting, because it is here that they are superior to mailing lists, Usenet and web forums, in that you only read the people you want to. What can I do about all the boring uninteresting posts on places like mailing lists and Slashdot?
And in many ways, LiveJournal is most unlike the homepage trend, since it allows you to get the text without putting up with poor presentation (though unfortunately MySpace appears to be following the Geocities of allowing badly designed pages).
It's sort of like the September that Never Ended.
Not really. Blogs, just like email, are not things you have to read if you don't want to, unlike the invasion onto Usenet.
The "September that Never Ended" is far more of a problem on places like Slashdot (where trolls can ruin it for everyone) than LiveJournal.
Already, people have to wade through piles of "what I ate for breakfast" entries to see a handful of truly interesting ones.
But what on earth are people doing wading through the diary posts of complete strangers in the first place?
The people who use "blogs" for journalling don't claim that their posts should generally be of interest to someone who doesn't know them, so it's a flawed argument to attack them on those grounds.
Meanwhile, those blogs that do seem intended for a wider audience don't tend to have "What I ate for breakfast" type posts.
It makes me wonder, everytime this comes up on Slashdot - do Slashdotters actually waste their time reading things written by strangers that was never intended to be of interest to them? Or do they just mistakingly think that that's what other people do?
Er, yes actually. Are you suggesting there already is one, or several, with that name?
I'm not sure I understand you. Obviously there is one fast food restaurant with that name. Nowhere have I implied there are several - indeed, my point was that I'd be surprised if there were several separate restaurants out there all named "McDonalds".
Because stories are more interesting when it's "Entire Government Proved to be Incompetent" and less interesting when the story is "Some Guy/Gal screws up".
True - but it's the Government that gave that one person the power to do that. If they allow one person to have that power without safeguards to prevent abuse, then arguably they are still nonetheless responsible.
This is getting out of hand now. I remember that there was a person in New York that opened since the 1960's a restuarant called "Soni" since her name was "Soni". In early 1990's Sony sued her for using her name on her restuarant. Eventually she won but if it wasn't for the ACLU helping her she would have go bankrupt in court cost. As history taught us banning something doesn't work.
But that's a trademark issue, and not primarily about censorship. For example, do you really think that Mr McDonald should be able to open a restaurant bearing his name?
This case may have been stupid (eg, because of the different spelling, and because Sony don't have restaurants), but the principle of trademarks are quite reasonable (eg, to stop customers from being misled).
You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place. This basic error in logic has persisted for over a month
A month? The error was fixed within one day. One day from when the article first appeared!
It sounds like you're the one arguing against a strawman - no one claims that no article will ever have errors, but that errors will be fixed, and will be far less likely in mature articles rather than one that's only just appeared.
The fact is, he isn't generalizing from a single mistake - tens of thousands of mistakes just like it exist all across the Wikipedia.
Give us some examples - as the one that the earlier poster gave doesn't support his claims.
Here's a tidbit for you concerning the food crisis in the Horn of Africa: drought is caused by high prices, overpopulation, and conflict. From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia: "This shortage, along with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, have led to severe drought conditions." (1/11/06)
Let's look at that article again, shall we? It now says: "These conditions of drought, together with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, are leading to conditions of famine."
So, despite your claims, it has been fixed. It doesn't have to be YOU who has to fix it - the claim is that someone else will. The idea that someone else will revert it is mistaken - if your change if genuinely better, but it gets reverted, then someone else what put your change back.
The article was fixed on 11 January, the same day that you quoted - let's have a look at the progress: * Some changes "drought" to "famine" (I don't know if this was you?) * Someone reverts - it's clear from their edit summary that they misunderstood the intent, and they have a point when they say it isn't being referred to a famine yet. * Someone *else* then rewords it, to the current form. So even if the original editor was no longer paying attention, despite the revert, the change has made it through, in a manner that's even clearer than the original edit.
So, you posted an example supposedly showing Wikipedia's flaws, but it disproves the claims you make! Namely - the claim that no one else will spot the error (they did), and the claim that if it's reverted, the improvement is lost (it was fixed, despite a revert).
And let's be clear here - this wasn't some badly worded article which remained for months - this was sorted out in a matter of hours, just one day after the article was first created!
I have karma to burn, so here goes...
Here on Slashdot, it's popular to tout the wonder that is Wikipedia
On the contrary - on Slashdot it's trendy to criticise Wikipedia at every opportunity, far more than any other source that is ever mentioned. After all, look how you've got modded up;)
It's popular to write long-winded explanations of why Wikipedia supposedly can't work in theory, completely ignoring the reality of the situation of how things actually work in practice. And when they do post an example, it only disproves the claims they make!
Software is instructions for your computer, much like a recipe is instructions for how to make food, instructions for your hands.
It has long been held that, while you can copyright a book of recipes as a complete work, you can't actually hold copyright on the individual recipes themselves, as they constitute instructions on how to do something and NOT an actual creative work in and of themselves.
Aren't they treated exactly the same?
A particular instance of a receipe is surely copyrightable - you can't just make a copy of it. However, writing an original description of what happens to be the same receipe is legal.
Similarly with software - you can't make a copy of the exact set of instructions, but you can write a program which does the same thing (unless it's patented, which is another matter).
This is just like maps and phone numbers - obviously nobody can own the right to any map of a location, but you most certainly aren't allowed to make copies from a map which someone else has made.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree - this is an achievement more from a business/marketing point of view, than a technical one. I don't know if someone can comment on some particularly innovative technical features of what he's done, but the general idea of writing a software product at 17 isn't in itself anything special - surely there are plenty of people beat this by many years? (Personally I feel that the tactic of writing "x years old" after your name to make it look more significant ought to end when you hit 16!)
The problem is that most people don't have the desire, funds, or possibly marketing ability to turn what they write into something commerically successful. I'm sure that most people fall into the situation that as soon as they have money to spend, they have less of a desire to make extra money when they're working a full week and would rather release as open source - plus, most people spend several more years in education after 16, so they're never in a situation where they both have money to invest, and are 17.
Not to mention that many job contracts will prohibit commercial projects such as this.
but I wonder if I'll live to see the day when it's considered "acceptable" to be proud of straight, male, caucasian heritage. That's not to say I think there's anything to be proud of, but rather that it's interesting how we have all these parades, celebrations, "history" months, and special exhibits for the accomplishments of all the various configurations of gender, race, and religion, except straight, white, Christian male.
Did I wake up in some parallel universe today where there's a stigma attached to being straight or Christian? Last time I looked, there was still stigma attached to homosexuality, and bisexuality is mostly ignored or assumed not to exist. Atheists are often thought of as immoral, and given none of the protections and exceptions that religious people - yes, including Christians - get.
There may be no "parades" and so on, but that's because your types are celebrated, or even forced upon us, all the time anyway. In the UK, even though I went to a state school, we had to celebrate your religion every morning. In most countries, same sex couples are not permitted to have legal recognition for their relationship. Perhaps there'd be less parades if they were allowed to celebrate in the same way that heterosexuals can?
The truth, of course, is that the vast majority of all historical accomplishments were achieved by straight, white, Christian males.
Emphasis on the word historical. The number of Christian scientific developments is far less in the last century.
Having said that - I agree that it's silly to start rating which-group-of-people-did-what (although you yourself fall into this trap with the above paragraph). But for the most part, things like "parades" are not about this anyway, they're about raising awareness against discrimination. I disagree with your claim that it's not acceptable to be proud of straight, male, caucasion or Christian heritage.
while straight white males stand at the sidelines with their mouths shut, lest they be considered racist, sexist, homophobic, or just generally discriminatory.
No one is stopping you from celebrating achievments of straight white males. The problem is that you seem to want to also say "...and we're better than all the rest".
The cost of makeing something doesn't matter one bit for it's market value.
No, but it matters for the company's profit, which is important.
If it costs $1000 to make each card and people will only pay $300 for them, then Nvidia would learn their lesson and not make them any more.
Wait, you just said the cost to make each card doesn't matter! It sounds like you agree - it most certainly does matter, and it certainly doesn't make any sense to have a price higher than the cost to make it.
If it costs them $1 to make each card and people will pay $1000 for them they'll make sure that they sell as many as they can at $1000. As soon as everyone that has paid $1000 for one they'll lower it to $900. When sales stop again they'll lower it to $800...$600...$300...$10 eventually they wont be able to sell them at any price. At that point it is called Market saturation.
How does what I said conflict with what you say? The point is that there isn't a single price point that everyone will pay. The OP was claiming that the company should sell things at a fraction of the price, and make the same amount of money, but both you and I disagree with him. If it costs $1 to make, then it wouldn't make sense to sell the cards for $1, even if there were 1000 times as many buyers.
I know the classes suck but all you have to do is pay a little attention during Macro Economics 101. Supply and Demand is a little more complicated than just lower supply higher demand.
It looks like you're the one simplifying things, by thinking that everyone is willing to pay exactly the same price - it's you who needs to pay more attention! You should also learn to read what I actually posted. What you write has nothing to do with what I wrote, and nowhere did I claim that it was as simple as "lower supply higher demand" - indeed, my point was that it wasn't simple - the OP claimed it was a simple linear relationship.
Please, learn to read what is written before spouting off about paying attention.
Firstly you need to factor out the variable costs. If each card costs $100, then it doesn't matter how many people will pay that price. If each card costs $50, then you need a lot more than 50 buyers to equal the profit at $1000 (95, in fact).
And secondly, demand doesn't scale linearly with price (or "price minus variable costs"). One could argue that the graphics card market is somewhat like a oligopoly, and not near that of perfect competition. The two main companies in the market have no incentive to lower their prices, so consumers have to pay that amount for a new card - and so, they won't get as significant increases in demand by dropping the price.
I'm sure that they take this into account and work out the price point where profit is maximised, rather than plucking a price out of thin air.
Even then, as well as that method, there were more direct methods which were comparable to what we have today - for example, it was common for games to use non-standard disk formats, which meant they couldn't be copied by the OS, and that's just the same sort of trick being done now with some CDs (you could get special disk copying programs which had more success, but even they had trouble with some disks).
The original comment is just simply false - if anything, hacky copy protection was more common back then, because it wasn't expected that the software should play nicely with the OS.
Destroying life to build and enhance ours.
Sorry, but I don't want to be part of that brave new world.
You eat food, don't you? How is that different?
And I agree with the other comments - life begins with the creation of the sperm and egg cells. Sorry, you can't use the biological definition of "life" when it suits you, but not when it doesn't.
The point is that email was not designed for file transfer and probably will never be the best tool for that purpose. Unfortuantely it cannot always be avoided but it should be whereever possible. If email was seen as a good way to transfer files then FTP wouldn't have been invented--people would've extended email to do it from the start. Since FTP is still around today and is now extended to secure FTP with SSL encryption and authentication THAT is the tool that professionals should use to send such files (that is what I do anyways).
The problem isn't with "professionals", but between any two random people. I can't say "Hey, give me your FTP address, and I'll send you that file". Even amongst people who are knowledgable about computers, it's a hassle to set up your own FTP server.
It would be a different matter if ISPs are companies like Google would offer you "FTP space" in a similar way to email, but as far as I know they don't.
Wikipedia is still useful to go to find further sources - you can cite the references that Wikipedia gives, instead of citing Wikipedia directly.
And I'd hope that no encyclopdia should be quoted directly as a source. Encyclopedias are not intended to be original sources. You need to quote either primary sources (which encylopedias aren't) or secondary sources (for which it's important to quote the author - you can't do this with Wikipedia of course, but even with encyclopedias, you generally don't have an individual author that can be identified, as far as I know).
Sorry, what menu? What interpreter? What's an IDE? Why do I need to save this as a file before I can run it? What's a file? And you say my computer doesn't have this anyway? How do I get it? Oh, that sounds hard. Well, my computer says it's done something. What are all these little pictures on the screen? When I type nothing happens. Oh, I have to click on one. With a mouse. What's a mouse? Oh, right. Um, how do I work this? Which picture do I want? Okay, clicked. It's changed colour. Double-click, right. It's changed colour again. Faster? Uh... this is pretty hard... gah! What's all this stuff on my screen! Oh, this is an IDE? It looks really complicated. There are all these little boxes and more pictures and... tell you what, I'll use a calculator.
Let's be realistic though - the sort of person who can barely operate a modern computer at all isn't going to have been the sort of person who was writing programs in BASIC on the 8 bits.
A person who struggles to understand a mouse or be able to select the interpreter from the Start menu isn't going to have a clue about things like variables and remembering which commands to type.
The main advantages old computers had was that the BASIC came as standard, and there wasn't much you could do with a computer apart from program and play (not exactly brilliant) games. So people might be more likely to have a look at it. But it was not easier.
That prompt is saying to the user, "What do you want me to do?" Your average GUI is saying to the user, "These are all the things I will let you do." There's a key distinction there, that I'm afraid we're losing sight of.
Except we never had computers equipped with the AI to be able to understand what a user might want to do. What that prompt actually meant was "There are only some things I can let you do, but I'm not even going to tell you what those are; instead you have to know the commands".
I couldn't agree with you more! Right now, I'm telnetting in from port 80, in order to read and post from Slashdot! And of course, the telnet client and the OS it runs on were written by me, all in assembly, though I must confess to using an off-the-shelf computer as I am too stupid to make one of those.
Seriously though - an intelligent person doesn't just know how to do things, he knows when it's best to make use of existing tools rather than reinventing the wheel. I can write HTML, but it's nonetheless far more productive for me to make use of existing systems.
Furthermore, you're confusing design with the system as a whole. I tend to write raw HTML if necessary when posting to LiveJournal - but setting up a blog/journal system is a lot more work than just writing some HTML.
I don't think it was possible in 1995 to have a system where information from several sources was distributed to a single person so it could be presented in a single "page" view (e.g., RSS, or "friends" pages) - certainly I don't think it was easy to set up, either from the point of view of the author or the reader.
That's one of the significant differences over webpages - when I set up a homepage 9 years ago, the problem is that people would look at it once, then no longer bother because it's too much hassle to keep checking back to an individual webpage. (Having said this, I don't get the point of entirely standalone blogs - the ones where people are seemingly writing towards an audience, but they don't seem to have any readers because no one can be bothered to keep looking, just like old style webpages.)
In summary, the key point is that not only is this a webpage that updates, but that there is a mechanism for informing readers when the page updates, and transmitting the information to them directly.
A better comparison than webpages is perhaps email, in that they are useful tools for communication, and a fundamental improvement is that blogs are "pull" rather than "push" - the reader decides what he wants to read, rather than the sender having to decide who might want to read.
It would appear that I'm just one item on a long, long list.
No, it's just you. Your first reply had no relation to anything I said.
So the one in Paris near the Arc de Trimphe is the same as the one in at Detroit airport? They look pretty separate to me, even though I admit there is a resemblance. Are they like connected by tunnels or something?
And are these part of a well known chain of restaurants, or some individual opening a restaurant called McDonald's without permission from that well known chain of restaurants?
I'm sure you knew what I meant when I said "separate" - nowhere in my original post did I use that word anyway.
One thing to consider is why would someone who isn't seeking a broad audience post their personal journal in a world-wide public blog with no access control? I think people who post publicly are, at least subconsciously, seeking that attention, or, perhaps, they don't quite understand that *anyone*, from neighbor joe to psychopath jack, can access their postings and learn about them.
So are you seeking world-wide attention, by posting to a forum without restrictions on who can see this?
Of course not - the reason why people post without access control is not because they want everyone to see it, but because it's too much effort to implement a secure form of access so that only some people can see it. When they post something, they want some people (e.g., friends) to see it, but don't care who else sees it. So why bother worrying about access?
Not caring who sees what you right is not equivalent to wanting everyone to see. Or if it is, you're as attention-seeking as the rest of them, since you're posting for the world to see also.
Public forums have been around for years, from Usenet to webforums. Now for some reason, some Slashdotters seem to think the rules change for webpages such as "blogs".
Blogging has almost become the new Geocities. Anyone remember how many tons of crappy pages there were on Geocities in the late nineties? Every thirteen year old had a goofy ass page with a midi background and talked about how cool they were, or how shitty their life was (bonus if there was goth poetry). Now, blogging is like that, because everyone can have a blog for free.
In practice though, places like LiveJournal are a replacement for email (both individual emails and mailing lists) in terms of offering an efficient way for friends to discuss things with each other.
It's ironic that people criticise blogs for noise or being uninteresting, because it is here that they are superior to mailing lists, Usenet and web forums, in that you only read the people you want to. What can I do about all the boring uninteresting posts on places like mailing lists and Slashdot?
And in many ways, LiveJournal is most unlike the homepage trend, since it allows you to get the text without putting up with poor presentation (though unfortunately MySpace appears to be following the Geocities of allowing badly designed pages).
It's sort of like the September that Never Ended.
Not really. Blogs, just like email, are not things you have to read if you don't want to, unlike the invasion onto Usenet.
The "September that Never Ended" is far more of a problem on places like Slashdot (where trolls can ruin it for everyone) than LiveJournal.
If you thought livejournal was self-indulgent and obnoxious already...
then come to Slashdot!
I honestly wish that many of them would go away or make them private. The world does not need to hear what your dog did today.
The world doesn't need to hear it, but that doesn't mean that no one does, so that's an illogical argument for making them private.
There are these things that some people have called "friends", who like to hear about each other, and talk to each other.
And well, the world doesn't need to see your post here, but you're still posting!
Already, people have to wade through piles of "what I ate for breakfast" entries to see a handful of truly interesting ones.
But what on earth are people doing wading through the diary posts of complete strangers in the first place?
The people who use "blogs" for journalling don't claim that their posts should generally be of interest to someone who doesn't know them, so it's a flawed argument to attack them on those grounds.
Meanwhile, those blogs that do seem intended for a wider audience don't tend to have "What I ate for breakfast" type posts.
It makes me wonder, everytime this comes up on Slashdot - do Slashdotters actually waste their time reading things written by strangers that was never intended to be of interest to them? Or do they just mistakingly think that that's what other people do?
Er, yes actually. Are you suggesting there already is one, or several, with that name?
I'm not sure I understand you. Obviously there is one fast food restaurant with that name. Nowhere have I implied there are several - indeed, my point was that I'd be surprised if there were several separate restaurants out there all named "McDonalds".
Because stories are more interesting when it's "Entire Government Proved to be Incompetent" and less interesting when the story is "Some Guy/Gal screws up".
True - but it's the Government that gave that one person the power to do that. If they allow one person to have that power without safeguards to prevent abuse, then arguably they are still nonetheless responsible.
This is getting out of hand now. I remember that there was a person in New York that opened since the 1960's a restuarant called "Soni" since her name was "Soni". In early 1990's Sony sued her for using her name on her restuarant. Eventually she won but if it wasn't for the ACLU helping her she would have go bankrupt in court cost. As history taught us banning something doesn't work.
But that's a trademark issue, and not primarily about censorship. For example, do you really think that Mr McDonald should be able to open a restaurant bearing his name?
This case may have been stupid (eg, because of the different spelling, and because Sony don't have restaurants), but the principle of trademarks are quite reasonable (eg, to stop customers from being misled).
You miss the grandparents point - if the Wiki Way worked - that sentence should never have been bad by the time he read the article in the first place. This basic error in logic has persisted for over a month
A month? The error was fixed within one day. One day from when the article first appeared!
It sounds like you're the one arguing against a strawman - no one claims that no article will ever have errors, but that errors will be fixed, and will be far less likely in mature articles rather than one that's only just appeared.
The fact is, he isn't generalizing from a single mistake - tens of thousands of mistakes just like it exist all across the Wikipedia.
Give us some examples - as the one that the earlier poster gave doesn't support his claims.
My response would have to be to apologise for taking the parent poster at face value, I must have forgotten where I was reading for a moment.
If only people were as suspicious of the validity other sources as everyone seems to be of Wikipedia!
Here's a tidbit for you concerning the food crisis in the Horn of Africa: drought is caused by high prices, overpopulation, and conflict. From the Horn of Africa Food Crisis article on Wikipedia: "This shortage, along with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, have led to severe drought conditions." (1/11/06)
;)
Let's look at that article again, shall we? It now says: "These conditions of drought, together with other factors including high cereal prices, overpopulation in the region, and conflict, are leading to conditions of famine."
So, despite your claims, it has been fixed. It doesn't have to be YOU who has to fix it - the claim is that someone else will. The idea that someone else will revert it is mistaken - if your change if genuinely better, but it gets reverted, then someone else what put your change back.
The article was fixed on 11 January, the same day that you quoted - let's have a look at the progress:
* Some changes "drought" to "famine" (I don't know if this was you?)
* Someone reverts - it's clear from their edit summary that they misunderstood the intent, and they have a point when they say it isn't being referred to a famine yet.
* Someone *else* then rewords it, to the current form. So even if the original editor was no longer paying attention, despite the revert, the change has made it through, in a manner that's even clearer than the original edit.
So, you posted an example supposedly showing Wikipedia's flaws, but it disproves the claims you make! Namely - the claim that no one else will spot the error (they did), and the claim that if it's reverted, the improvement is lost (it was fixed, despite a revert).
And let's be clear here - this wasn't some badly worded article which remained for months - this was sorted out in a matter of hours, just one day after the article was first created!
I have karma to burn, so here goes...
Here on Slashdot, it's popular to tout the wonder that is Wikipedia
On the contrary - on Slashdot it's trendy to criticise Wikipedia at every opportunity, far more than any other source that is ever mentioned. After all, look how you've got modded up
It's popular to write long-winded explanations of why Wikipedia supposedly can't work in theory, completely ignoring the reality of the situation of how things actually work in practice. And when they do post an example, it only disproves the claims they make!
Software is instructions for your computer, much like a recipe is instructions for how to make food, instructions for your hands.
It has long been held that, while you can copyright a book of recipes as a complete work, you can't actually hold copyright on the individual recipes themselves, as they constitute instructions on how to do something and NOT an actual creative work in and of themselves.
Aren't they treated exactly the same?
A particular instance of a receipe is surely copyrightable - you can't just make a copy of it. However, writing an original description of what happens to be the same receipe is legal.
Similarly with software - you can't make a copy of the exact set of instructions, but you can write a program which does the same thing (unless it's patented, which is another matter).
This is just like maps and phone numbers - obviously nobody can own the right to any map of a location, but you most certainly aren't allowed to make copies from a map which someone else has made.
Some of us don't even have the luxury of a garden ;)
I suppose the question is, how does this compare to the average amount of farmland per person.