They're probably not bothering to make up edits themselves, but they clearly are digging through the history, rather than running the story whilst the incorrect information is on the current version of the page.
I mean, the one they talk about here was reverted in the same minute (01:49, 17 December 2005).
The Register's article is highly misleading (if not outright libellous). Yes, when sometimes other sites accidently let some incorrect information out, even if only for a moment, it can be reported by other sites - but those sites would report it as "So-and-so made a blooper", not "So-and-so claim X", when they are no longer claiming that. I very much doubt that they spotted it, wrote and published this article claiming that this is what Wikipedia are currently saying, all in less than 60 seconds!
Certainly it is a problem with Wikipedia that there is a small chance of reading a vandalised page - perhaps there needs to be a "This article has been recently edited" warning for any page edited in the last few minutes.
But it is unfair to take advantage of the fact that the history is available (which isn't for any other site, including The Register), especially when they falsely imply that the information is still up there.
I used to like The Register, but I find this anti-wikipedia war rather immature - at least I know that the immature edits that appear on Wikipedia are by random vandals and will get reverted. It says something that the Register intends to be this immature as an official policy.
but when it came to doing work we used IBM clones, because they were 'real' computers.
I disliked the way that people with expensive DOS-based 286 PCs viewed their machines as "real computers", and mocked other computers like the Amiga for being games machines.
And history showed them all wrong. Yes, the PC may have "won", but only by adopting all of what the other machines had: The PC is now seen as a mainstream gaming platform, and much of its hardware (eg, 3D cards) is devoted mainly for pushing games. Things like a GUI and sound are considered essential now, and not some toy add-on.
Where are the other PPC / ARM / SPARC / POWER contenders?
I suspect it is price. Yes, Apple can produce the Mac Mini, but they've been in business for years, have large purchasing power, and have money to spend.
There are other platforms (eg, the Pegasos and AmigaOne are two PowerPC boards), but the userbase is small, so they can't sell many, so the costs of the motherboards are high to cover their development costs, which means few people buy them, and so on.
Software is also a problem - yes, Linux can run anywhere, but anyone wanting to run Linux will do it on a cheaper common platform rather than some new expensive platform. So the most of the people attracted to other platforms do so because of the different OS (MorphOS and AmigaOS in my examples), but due to limited amounts of software, it's harder to attract more people.
It is interesting that companies can produce successful games machines which are separate platforms, but this isn't anything about "DRM", it's because they don't want to either write a new OS and a load of application software, or port Linux and try to find a reason why their platform is better for running Linux than anything else.
Re:But Wikipedia does NOT organize the world's inf
on
Google to Buy Opera?
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Now, if Google bought the OED, or the Britannica, then we'd have something to chat about.
Yes, as everyone knows, Britannica is written by robots, and therefore completely free of any possibility of opinions or bias. They also work 24/7, to detail every piece of knowledge ever, whilst Wikipedia meanwhile only covers a mere scattering of subjects.
Seriously, why would you choose Opera over Firefox?
One nice thing is that even if everything in Opera is possible in Firefox with the relevant extension, it's nice to have those features (eg, saving which tabs are open) available as standard; Opera seems to do better out of the box, which is crucial if you want to persuade people to convert from IE, without having to go "and now you have to download this, this and this extension".
Now let me ask: Why would you choose Firefox over Opera?
The whole forced banner ads thing kind of drove me away from it (not that I ever used it, but it kept me from ever using it again even).
I found Opera with banner ads preferable to IE (Firefox either didn't exist at the time, or was in an early state). Now there are no ads.
Opera may be a fine browser, but we already have a really good (and open) thing going on with Firefox.
Opera was around long before Firefox, so the question should really have been asked the other way round, if at all.
Last time I checked, it forced you to download this really crappy email client of theirs and address book and other things.
Size of Opera 8.51 Installer: 3754K Size of Firefox 1.5 Installer: 5103K
The nonsense that everytime someone mentions Wikipedia as a reference, a whole load of people say "You can't trust that", when the same criticisms are not made when people cite other websites or books in general.
The point I keep making is that Wikipedia is not a good source of information. It may well be accurate in 99% of the facts you review, but the trust comes in both having that remainig 1% be accurate,
No source is going to be 100% accurate. Not even Britannica. I'll accept that Wikipedia may not be as good as Britannica - you get what you pay for I guess. But it may still be better than any free online source, and better than many books. The question is not "Is Wikipedia 100% accurate?", but "How does Wikipedia compare to other sources?". See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm as an example of this.
You can claim that Wikipedia's approach is "doomed to fail", but I can easily think up arguments in Wikipedia's favour (eg, whilst it may be easier to put in incorrect information, it's also easier for people to correct it - maybe you can write into Britannica, but few people do). The question is, how successful is each method in practice - and the evidence does not suggest that Wikipedia's approach is failing.
Anonymous and collaborative sources of information such as Wikipedia are suspect by their very nature, and therefore are not to be used as reference sources.
You shouldn't be citing any encyclopedia as a reference source.
or validate web sites or any other absurdity you may extrapolate to.
I said the complete opposite - other websites (and books) are at least as bad as Wikipedia. If you agree with me, then great. (And I never said anything about Linux.)
Personally I think it's a good thing that Wikipedia makes people think about the validity of sources - you should be careful of trusting Wikipedia, but you should also not be believing everything you read on a website, book or see on TV; yet sadly people do.
It's that I can't trust the data. It may very well be spot on, but while it can be edited by anyone, that means that there is always a question mark over it. If I want an answer to a question, I want a solid answer, not one which requires me to cross-check and verify with other sources
So you are telling me that you would totally trust a single webpage or what is written in a book, without considering that it may be misleading or wrong, or considering other sources?
(in which case - why not start with the other sources?)
Ultimately, the best sources are always primary sources. Wikipedia isn't a primary source, it's a secondary source; the advantage is that you have someone to already collect the facts and present them for you, the disadvantage is that the results may be biased, misleading, or outright wrong. But then, this is true of all secondary sources, including all encyclopedias.
In addition, often you may not know what the primary sources are, so it's useful to check an encyclopedia (Wikipedia or otherwise) to find out.
Well the phrase was tech novice rather than computer novice. You can use computers for years without knowing anything much about how they actually work, and phrases like techie tend to imply more than just using them.
I wouldn't use phrases like "tech" to talk about someone who was an experienced AOL user for example, no matter how much of an expert they were at sending upside-down quoted HTML posts with graphical smilies.
(Having said that, there's nothing in the article I can see to imply this person claims to be lacking in computer knowledge - I'm just saying that if he is, then "tech novice" isn't necessarily an incorrect phrase to use, even if he's been owning computers for years.)
And why is credit card theft always called "identity theft" ?
In the UK at least, possibly so we can be scared by news stories about how common "identity theft" is, and then the Government can use it as support for compulsory ID cards (ignoring the fact that ID cards will do nothing to help credit card theft, and the planned central database with everyone's details will likely make real identity theft more common)...
The perception is that all blogs are just like LiveJournal/MySpace self-absorbed bitchfests.
Actually I'd say the opposite. People seem to think "blogs" are always those hosted on a standalone website, written by people hoping they'll get a massive audience, and expecting people who don't know them to read it. Hence you get a whole load of "Why should I read crap from someone I don't know" comments everytime Slashdot mentions the word "blog". Most blogs are simply people who use them for things like journalling or communicating with friends. That doesn't make them "self absorbed bitchfests".
In some sense though, that's inevitable - once an article has reached a certain level of maturity and is reasonably good, it's hard to improve it that much further. The popular mature articles continue to get a lot of attention and edits, but it's hard to actually make it that much better without causing disagreements.
I mean, the OP was complaning that his edits were getting reverted - I'd say the real problem is that people are wasting time editing already mature articles whilst not really making them any better (no offence to the OP - but it's hard to accept his claim as evidence that Wikipedia has gone downhill, without knowing what some of these edits actually were).
As you say, the edits tend to be vandalism or "low-quality edits", so I don't see it's a problem that these tend to get reverted on Wikipedia. Change shouldn't be done for the sake of it - if an article is essentially the same over a month, then I'd say that's good, and a sign of maturity.
The problem here is editors wasting their time (both the new contributors, and those who have to revert/edit the changes). Personally I prefer to try to work on the many newer articles out there that are in need of attention.
Even when these new articles look like someone's pet project, I've still gotten away with making significant changes.
WP is right up there with Civilization and Freecell in the competition for the most efficient time-eaters ever created. It's sort of like the humans in The Matrix -- they're all pumping huge amounts of energy into the system, and most of it isn't productive.
Wikipedia is nonetheless quite an achievement, and I've found it very useful. The way I look at it is time spent debating on Wikipedia at least results in something, unlike time spent debating on forums such as Slashdot;)
The point about Windows wasn't just that it was a generic word, but that it was a generic word *which had meaning in that market* - ie, "window" was already commonly used to refer any window in a GUI.
If window had never been used in the context of a GUI before, then it's possible the case may have been done differently. I mean, do you think another company would get away with calling themselves "Apple", and selling computers?
"Risk" being a generic word surely isn't enough to mean it can't be trademarked - I would say the question is whether this term already has a specific meaning in the context of board games. It's possible you may end up being right and a court may rule that it isn't a valid trademark, but I wouldn't be sure simply because it's a word in the English language.
And there goes the point flying straight over a moderator's head.
I have nothing against anyone writing their opinions online. I'm not the one claiming that MySpace/LiveJournal users wish to foist their opinions on humanity, whilst not applying the same logic to people who post elsewhere online.
But I don't see people here mocking Usenet in the same way, because Usenet is supposed to be good and useful unlike anything that's come along since, right?
To be fair, I think the same could be said of many older people. You know the ones - the ones who insist on HTML Comic-Sans font emails with top down quoting with pages of past emails and with a massive signature; the ones who fill their webforum posts and IM messages with millions of graphical smilies; the ones who made webpages with blue text on slightly darker blue backgrounds, millions of animGIFs and a MIDI file playing in the background, but forgot to put any content on it; the ones who write letters covered with lots of crappy irrelevant clip art.
Although just like we blame browsers which invented FONT tags, email clients which invented HTML emails, and webforum software and IM clients which introduced graphical smilies, part of the problem is that MySpace allows such braindead customisations (no thanks, I don't want to have your music blasted out my speakers).
Another thought is that although I associate the above behaviours with older people too, it's usually people who are less technically minded with computers. Given we usually associate younger people as being more knowledgeable with computers, it's a shame this isn't translating into avoiding all these behaviours of appalling presentation.
I generally agree with what you say - all of the sites focused primarily on friends-networking (Sixdegrees was the first one I remember) seem to fade away quickly. LiveJournal on the other hand is still around after several years, primarily I would say because it provides a useful means of communication between existing friends networks, and it's less obsessed with only getting people to find new people.
Having said that, I'm not sure which category MySpace falls into - my impression was that it was more like LiveJournal in terms of allowing things like journals and communication (although MySpace seems to be worse in various ways, such as the awful interface...)
My police for MySpace content is the same as LiveJournal. Don't ask me to check out your page on either one - I'm not going to look at it. If you want to tell me something, you can tell me. You are not so precious and my time so worthless that I need to share in a mass-broadcast on what kind of cheese you had on your sandwhich today or how cute you think someone else's hair bow is.
Firstly, I'm sorry if your friends are so boring that they only talk about what food they had, but not everyone's friends are like that.
Now sure, I wouldn't expect someone not on LiveJournal, or someone who doesn't use RSS readers, to do so just to follow what I'm up to. But remember that your attitude is exactly the sort of thing that some people have said in the past.
"Oh, I think Usenet is a stupid place full of trolls. I'm not going there. If you really care about me, you can take the time to have a conversation with me." or "Oh, I'm not going to get onto this Internet thing just so you can talk to me by email. If you really care about me, you can take the time to have a conversation with me in real life."
For those people who use it, you can't change the fact that it is a powerful system for keeping in touch with people, organising events and so on, online, far better than email (either individual emailing, or mailing lists) for various reasons (most notably, it's "pull" rather than "push" so the readers decide what to read, rather than the writing having to make assumptions), and far better than Usenet (see below).
Of course, the big problem is that it's no good for people who aren't part of it - it's not easy for those people who aren't signed up to the same or any community, though things like RSS and OpenID are changing that. Also there's no easy way of filtering (eg, something like a party invite or special announcement might be more important than more mundane matters, in the same way that the former would remain in my Inbox in my email, whilst more conversational things might be on a mailing list which gets filtered).
MySpace is just the equivalent of AOL chat rooms. Those who aren't self-involved cliquish drama whores and dorks trolling for pussy from average girls with self-image problems over it are busy using Usenet and other more appropriate and useful places.
Except Usenet, whilst good for what it does, is not more appropriate or better:
- Can I make it so my Usenet posts are only readable by certain people?
- Is there a way to not put up with spam on Usenet?
- Can I read a particular set of posters (ie, everything they post, and only from those people)? It's not clear at all what newsgroups I should subscribe to, if I'm interested in using the medium to communicate with many existing friends, rather than being interested in a particular topic.
In addition, Usenet has the same problem that you can't use it to communicate with people who don't watch Usenet.
At the end of the day, if it's not for you, fine, and I'm sorry if you have lots of friends who badger you to read what they had to eat. But for those who do use such systems, they can be very useful.
A shared site is not going to become a journal for users to cry about how Sally Crotchrot cheated on them, and is not going to have articles about some uninteresting nobody's bad day.
And I'm not going to read a journal where someone I don't care about cries about cheating, or an uninteresting nobody writes about their bad day.
The point is that I get to choose which to read, not the Slashdot editors. That's not to say that the Slashdot system is bad - it's nice to have someone else looking out for content. But I don't see how reading a set of blogs that interest you is a worse system.
You may have noticed that the "better" blogs (what remarkably few of them there are) are those that present editorial content on issues relevant and interesting to readers. No-one is bashing those. But they are the exception, rather than the rule.
What people seem to forget is that no one has to read uninteresting blogs. Most things on the Internet full stop are uninteresting to most people.
But I still use Firefox for one reason: you can middle-click links in the bookmarks toolbar to open them in a new tab (in Opera this only works on links in web pages).
Not quite as convenient, but note that you can shift-click bookmarks in Opera to open them in a new tab.
On the other hand, everyone who used OSX for a month will never go back to Windows.
Even if this true, this is a case that people only decide to use it after much research and consideration. You can't try out OSX for a month, you have to buy a new machine, and people tend not to spend hundreds on a new machine just to go back to their old machine.
Let's start with a fact that moving a window on XP leaves annoying flicker on the background while the "damaged" windows redraw themselves, while on MacOSX the movement is perfectly smooth.
Doesn't happen on any Windows machine I've used.
You are correct that Windows tells applications to repaint rather than remembering the contents by default. Whatever the pros and cons of each method, OS X is far from the only platform which saves the window contents - for example, AmigaOS did this years ago, so it's hardly new functionality from OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
They're probably not bothering to make up edits themselves, but they clearly are digging through the history, rather than running the story whilst the incorrect information is on the current version of the page.
I mean, the one they talk about here was reverted in the same minute (01:49, 17 December 2005).
The Register's article is highly misleading (if not outright libellous). Yes, when sometimes other sites accidently let some incorrect information out, even if only for a moment, it can be reported by other sites - but those sites would report it as "So-and-so made a blooper", not "So-and-so claim X", when they are no longer claiming that. I very much doubt that they spotted it, wrote and published this article claiming that this is what Wikipedia are currently saying, all in less than 60 seconds!
Certainly it is a problem with Wikipedia that there is a small chance of reading a vandalised page - perhaps there needs to be a "This article has been recently edited" warning for any page edited in the last few minutes.
But it is unfair to take advantage of the fact that the history is available (which isn't for any other site, including The Register), especially when they falsely imply that the information is still up there.
I used to like The Register, but I find this anti-wikipedia war rather immature - at least I know that the immature edits that appear on Wikipedia are by random vandals and will get reverted. It says something that the Register intends to be this immature as an official policy.
how much things would suck if all sources of information carried the same junk that sometimes appears on Wikipedia.
And there's me thinking how much better things would be, if I could edit out some of the POV junk that appears in mainstream news services...
but when it came to doing work we used IBM clones, because they were 'real' computers.
I disliked the way that people with expensive DOS-based 286 PCs viewed their machines as "real computers", and mocked other computers like the Amiga for being games machines.
And history showed them all wrong. Yes, the PC may have "won", but only by adopting all of what the other machines had: The PC is now seen as a mainstream gaming platform, and much of its hardware (eg, 3D cards) is devoted mainly for pushing games. Things like a GUI and sound are considered essential now, and not some toy add-on.
Where are the other PPC / ARM / SPARC / POWER contenders?
I suspect it is price. Yes, Apple can produce the Mac Mini, but they've been in business for years, have large purchasing power, and have money to spend.
There are other platforms (eg, the Pegasos and AmigaOne are two PowerPC boards), but the userbase is small, so they can't sell many, so the costs of the motherboards are high to cover their development costs, which means few people buy them, and so on.
Software is also a problem - yes, Linux can run anywhere, but anyone wanting to run Linux will do it on a cheaper common platform rather than some new expensive platform. So the most of the people attracted to other platforms do so because of the different OS (MorphOS and AmigaOS in my examples), but due to limited amounts of software, it's harder to attract more people.
It is interesting that companies can produce successful games machines which are separate platforms, but this isn't anything about "DRM", it's because they don't want to either write a new OS and a load of application software, or port Linux and try to find a reason why their platform is better for running Linux than anything else.
Now, if Google bought the OED, or the Britannica, then we'd have something to chat about.
Yes, as everyone knows, Britannica is written by robots, and therefore completely free of any possibility of opinions or bias. They also work 24/7, to detail every piece of knowledge ever, whilst Wikipedia meanwhile only covers a mere scattering of subjects.
Seriously, why would you choose Opera over Firefox?
One nice thing is that even if everything in Opera is possible in Firefox with the relevant extension, it's nice to have those features (eg, saving which tabs are open) available as standard; Opera seems to do better out of the box, which is crucial if you want to persuade people to convert from IE, without having to go "and now you have to download this, this and this extension".
Now let me ask: Why would you choose Firefox over Opera?
The whole forced banner ads thing kind of drove me away from it (not that I ever used it, but it kept me from ever using it again even).
I found Opera with banner ads preferable to IE (Firefox either didn't exist at the time, or was in an early state). Now there are no ads.
Opera may be a fine browser, but we already have a really good (and open) thing going on with Firefox.
Opera was around long before Firefox, so the question should really have been asked the other way round, if at all.
Last time I checked, it forced you to download this really crappy email client of theirs and address book and other things.
Size of Opera 8.51 Installer: 3754K
Size of Firefox 1.5 Installer: 5103K
Did you have a point?
"Totally trust a website"?
What is this nonsense?
The nonsense that everytime someone mentions Wikipedia as a reference, a whole load of people say "You can't trust that", when the same criticisms are not made when people cite other websites or books in general.
The point I keep making is that Wikipedia is not a good source of information. It may well be accurate in 99% of the facts you review, but the trust comes in both having that remainig 1% be accurate,
No source is going to be 100% accurate. Not even Britannica. I'll accept that Wikipedia may not be as good as Britannica - you get what you pay for I guess. But it may still be better than any free online source, and better than many books. The question is not "Is Wikipedia 100% accurate?", but "How does Wikipedia compare to other sources?". See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm as an example of this.
You can claim that Wikipedia's approach is "doomed to fail", but I can easily think up arguments in Wikipedia's favour (eg, whilst it may be easier to put in incorrect information, it's also easier for people to correct it - maybe you can write into Britannica, but few people do). The question is, how successful is each method in practice - and the evidence does not suggest that Wikipedia's approach is failing.
Anonymous and collaborative sources of information such as Wikipedia are suspect by their very nature, and therefore are not to be used as reference sources.
You shouldn't be citing any encyclopedia as a reference source.
or validate web sites or any other absurdity you may extrapolate to.
I said the complete opposite - other websites (and books) are at least as bad as Wikipedia. If you agree with me, then great. (And I never said anything about Linux.)
Personally I think it's a good thing that Wikipedia makes people think about the validity of sources - you should be careful of trusting Wikipedia, but you should also not be believing everything you read on a website, book or see on TV; yet sadly people do.
It's that I can't trust the data. It may very well be spot on, but while it can be edited by anyone, that means that there is always a question mark over it. If I want an answer to a question, I want a solid answer, not one which requires me to cross-check and verify with other sources
So you are telling me that you would totally trust a single webpage or what is written in a book, without considering that it may be misleading or wrong, or considering other sources?
(in which case - why not start with the other sources?)
Ultimately, the best sources are always primary sources. Wikipedia isn't a primary source, it's a secondary source; the advantage is that you have someone to already collect the facts and present them for you, the disadvantage is that the results may be biased, misleading, or outright wrong. But then, this is true of all secondary sources, including all encyclopedias.
In addition, often you may not know what the primary sources are, so it's useful to check an encyclopedia (Wikipedia or otherwise) to find out.
Novice means you're new to it.
Well the phrase was tech novice rather than computer novice. You can use computers for years without knowing anything much about how they actually work, and phrases like techie tend to imply more than just using them.
I wouldn't use phrases like "tech" to talk about someone who was an experienced AOL user for example, no matter how much of an expert they were at sending upside-down quoted HTML posts with graphical smilies.
(Having said that, there's nothing in the article I can see to imply this person claims to be lacking in computer knowledge - I'm just saying that if he is, then "tech novice" isn't necessarily an incorrect phrase to use, even if he's been owning computers for years.)
And why is credit card theft always called "identity theft" ?
In the UK at least, possibly so we can be scared by news stories about how common "identity theft" is, and then the Government can use it as support for compulsory ID cards (ignoring the fact that ID cards will do nothing to help credit card theft, and the planned central database with everyone's details will likely make real identity theft more common)...
Of course not, because nobody would buy your CD anyway.
"I wouldn't have bought it anyway" is exactly the same justification many people give for downloading music owned by RIAA companies.
As opposed to linking their blog at the top of everything they write online...
The perception is that all blogs are just like LiveJournal/MySpace self-absorbed bitchfests.
Actually I'd say the opposite. People seem to think "blogs" are always those hosted on a standalone website, written by people hoping they'll get a massive audience, and expecting people who don't know them to read it. Hence you get a whole load of "Why should I read crap from someone I don't know" comments everytime Slashdot mentions the word "blog". Most blogs are simply people who use them for things like journalling or communicating with friends. That doesn't make them "self absorbed bitchfests".
In some sense though, that's inevitable - once an article has reached a certain level of maturity and is reasonably good, it's hard to improve it that much further. The popular mature articles continue to get a lot of attention and edits, but it's hard to actually make it that much better without causing disagreements.
;)
I mean, the OP was complaning that his edits were getting reverted - I'd say the real problem is that people are wasting time editing already mature articles whilst not really making them any better (no offence to the OP - but it's hard to accept his claim as evidence that Wikipedia has gone downhill, without knowing what some of these edits actually were).
As you say, the edits tend to be vandalism or "low-quality edits", so I don't see it's a problem that these tend to get reverted on Wikipedia. Change shouldn't be done for the sake of it - if an article is essentially the same over a month, then I'd say that's good, and a sign of maturity.
The problem here is editors wasting their time (both the new contributors, and those who have to revert/edit the changes). Personally I prefer to try to work on the many newer articles out there that are in need of attention.
Even when these new articles look like someone's pet project, I've still gotten away with making significant changes.
WP is right up there with Civilization and Freecell in the competition for the most efficient time-eaters ever created. It's sort of like the humans in The Matrix -- they're all pumping huge amounts of energy into the system, and most of it isn't productive.
Wikipedia is nonetheless quite an achievement, and I've found it very useful. The way I look at it is time spent debating on Wikipedia at least results in something, unlike time spent debating on forums such as Slashdot
The point about Windows wasn't just that it was a generic word, but that it was a generic word *which had meaning in that market* - ie, "window" was already commonly used to refer any window in a GUI.
If window had never been used in the context of a GUI before, then it's possible the case may have been done differently. I mean, do you think another company would get away with calling themselves "Apple", and selling computers?
"Risk" being a generic word surely isn't enough to mean it can't be trademarked - I would say the question is whether this term already has a specific meaning in the context of board games. It's possible you may end up being right and a court may rule that it isn't a valid trademark, but I wouldn't be sure simply because it's a word in the English language.
And there goes the point flying straight over a moderator's head.
I have nothing against anyone writing their opinions online. I'm not the one claiming that MySpace/LiveJournal users wish to foist their opinions on humanity, whilst not applying the same logic to people who post elsewhere online.
A study on how well do Slashdot trolls perform at school/work would be interesting too...
They kill themselves online on Usenet too: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/11/04/suicide.inter net/
But I don't see people here mocking Usenet in the same way, because Usenet is supposed to be good and useful unlike anything that's come along since, right?
To be fair, I think the same could be said of many older people. You know the ones - the ones who insist on HTML Comic-Sans font emails with top down quoting with pages of past emails and with a massive signature; the ones who fill their webforum posts and IM messages with millions of graphical smilies; the ones who made webpages with blue text on slightly darker blue backgrounds, millions of animGIFs and a MIDI file playing in the background, but forgot to put any content on it; the ones who write letters covered with lots of crappy irrelevant clip art.
Although just like we blame browsers which invented FONT tags, email clients which invented HTML emails, and webforum software and IM clients which introduced graphical smilies, part of the problem is that MySpace allows such braindead customisations (no thanks, I don't want to have your music blasted out my speakers).
Another thought is that although I associate the above behaviours with older people too, it's usually people who are less technically minded with computers. Given we usually associate younger people as being more knowledgeable with computers, it's a shame this isn't translating into avoiding all these behaviours of appalling presentation.
I generally agree with what you say - all of the sites focused primarily on friends-networking (Sixdegrees was the first one I remember) seem to fade away quickly. LiveJournal on the other hand is still around after several years, primarily I would say because it provides a useful means of communication between existing friends networks, and it's less obsessed with only getting people to find new people.
Having said that, I'm not sure which category MySpace falls into - my impression was that it was more like LiveJournal in terms of allowing things like journals and communication (although MySpace seems to be worse in various ways, such as the awful interface...)
whatever happened to writing a journal FOR YORUSELF and not foisting it on humanity?!
Whatever happened to keeping your opinions on MySpace/LiveJournal to yourself, and not foisting it on humanity?
My police for MySpace content is the same as LiveJournal. Don't ask me to check out your page on either one - I'm not going to look at it. If you want to tell me something, you can tell me. You are not so precious and my time so worthless that I need to share in a mass-broadcast on what kind of cheese you had on your sandwhich today or how cute you think someone else's hair bow is.
Firstly, I'm sorry if your friends are so boring that they only talk about what food they had, but not everyone's friends are like that.
Now sure, I wouldn't expect someone not on LiveJournal, or someone who doesn't use RSS readers, to do so just to follow what I'm up to. But remember that your attitude is exactly the sort of thing that some people have said in the past.
"Oh, I think Usenet is a stupid place full of trolls. I'm not going there. If you really care about me, you can take the time to have a conversation with me." or "Oh, I'm not going to get onto this Internet thing just so you can talk to me by email. If you really care about me, you can take the time to have a conversation with me in real life."
For those people who use it, you can't change the fact that it is a powerful system for keeping in touch with people, organising events and so on, online, far better than email (either individual emailing, or mailing lists) for various reasons (most notably, it's "pull" rather than "push" so the readers decide what to read, rather than the writing having to make assumptions), and far better than Usenet (see below).
Of course, the big problem is that it's no good for people who aren't part of it - it's not easy for those people who aren't signed up to the same or any community, though things like RSS and OpenID are changing that. Also there's no easy way of filtering (eg, something like a party invite or special announcement might be more important than more mundane matters, in the same way that the former would remain in my Inbox in my email, whilst more conversational things might be on a mailing list which gets filtered).
MySpace is just the equivalent of AOL chat rooms. Those who aren't self-involved cliquish drama whores and dorks trolling for pussy from average girls with self-image problems over it are busy using Usenet and other more appropriate and useful places.
Except Usenet, whilst good for what it does, is not more appropriate or better:
- Can I make it so my Usenet posts are only readable by certain people?
- Is there a way to not put up with spam on Usenet?
- Can I read a particular set of posters (ie, everything they post, and only from those people)? It's not clear at all what newsgroups I should subscribe to, if I'm interested in using the medium to communicate with many existing friends, rather than being interested in a particular topic.
In addition, Usenet has the same problem that you can't use it to communicate with people who don't watch Usenet.
At the end of the day, if it's not for you, fine, and I'm sorry if you have lots of friends who badger you to read what they had to eat. But for those who do use such systems, they can be very useful.
MySpace is to writing and publishing what a bowel movement is to art. Honestly, I can't even believe you would compare the two.
Everyone knows that if you want prime examples of quality well thought out writing, you just pop over to Slashdot.
A shared site is not going to become a journal for users to cry about how Sally Crotchrot cheated on them, and is not going to have articles about some uninteresting nobody's bad day.
And I'm not going to read a journal where someone I don't care about cries about cheating, or an uninteresting nobody writes about their bad day.
The point is that I get to choose which to read, not the Slashdot editors. That's not to say that the Slashdot system is bad - it's nice to have someone else looking out for content. But I don't see how reading a set of blogs that interest you is a worse system.
You may have noticed that the "better" blogs (what remarkably few of them there are) are those that present editorial content on issues relevant and interesting to readers. No-one is bashing those. But they are the exception, rather than the rule.
What people seem to forget is that no one has to read uninteresting blogs. Most things on the Internet full stop are uninteresting to most people.
But I still use Firefox for one reason: you can middle-click links in the bookmarks toolbar to open them in a new tab (in Opera this only works on links in web pages).
Not quite as convenient, but note that you can shift-click bookmarks in Opera to open them in a new tab.
On the other hand, everyone who used OSX for a month will never go back to Windows.
Even if this true, this is a case that people only decide to use it after much research and consideration. You can't try out OSX for a month, you have to buy a new machine, and people tend not to spend hundreds on a new machine just to go back to their old machine.
Let's start with a fact that moving a window on XP leaves annoying flicker on the background while the "damaged" windows redraw themselves, while on MacOSX the movement is perfectly smooth.
Doesn't happen on any Windows machine I've used.
You are correct that Windows tells applications to repaint rather than remembering the contents by default. Whatever the pros and cons of each method, OS X is far from the only platform which saves the window contents - for example, AmigaOS did this years ago, so it's hardly new functionality from OS X.