Sorry, I can reliably inform you that Mr Tanenbaum was amused that you could not get his name right.. As they say; it does not matter what they write as long as they get the name right..:)
When this is done for "strategic" reasons, than it is clear again why open standards are relevant. It is also once more clear why proprietary standards are in danger, they are because they have to compete..
I am a heavy Skype user and I will move slowly to something else like Google talk if this is what must be.
Only if there is only one language considered. The Kamusi project is more relevant for English when you consider it in combination with Swahili for instance.. Only English is so limited..
Thanks,
GerardM
preserving the heritage trumps copyright
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As the publishing companies have an abysmal record of preserving the heritage; they leave it to libraries. History is full of important libraries that have burned with all its content.
The argument that these people use is ONLY about copyright and how they THINK they might be worse off in this deal. Their reasoning is not at all why this is a good thing for the society and they do not even consider how it will benefit themselves.
It is a well known but little understood fact that people who go to libraries are the ones most likely to buy books. It is as little understood that file sharers are the ones most likely to buy records.. You do not need to stretch your imagination to understand that when books are known courtesy of this program, that people will be interested in copies these often out of print books.
Please wake up, you are robbing yourself when you spout this nonsence.
not really relevant, Firebird is now Firefox because of a database program by that name. Now Vista is the dominant Open Source Health software in the world.
It is used the world over. And by the recent push for the use of electronic health records its dominance will increase.
Thanks,
GerardM
Why is it that Microsoft thinks it can use the name VISTA ? It is already used by one of the more significant open source projects. It may be that not everyone knows about Vista.. http://www.vistasoftware.org/
Again, you do not know what you are talking about. Jimbo is not a payed employee of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The difference with my POV and yours is that I put my money where my mouth is.
There are many ways of looking at the quality of developers. I am sure that there will be few websites running as cheaply as the WMF does. Just compare the hardware costs for instance. Another way is looking at the number of developers and look at the amount of traffic is served. I am sorry but you provide no metrics to back up your claim why the quality is substandard.
This is not to say that the quality of the code could not be improved. I am not convinced that money is the only answer. The big advantage that the WMF developers have is intrinsic motivation. Often missing with hired hackers.
You characterise one of my arguments as a strawman. Well, you hide behind the back of someone else. That is cheap.
About corporate sponsorship; we have some of it. We have payed for projects but then again, would you know. The argument that some people are against it is just that. When development is needed and someone is willing to pay for it, it can be done.
Your suggestion that professional programmers do not work with trial and error is.. based on what ? Often software does not work as advertised in manuals.. Certainly when you are scaling outside known terroty you need new methods, clever hacks.
When the amount of servers go up, you find that at the same time the usage of the servers goes up. The demand for information is such that throwing hardware at the problem gives an equal amount of new users. As to software, the last software versions have made this growth possible. The notion that it is only hardware that is seen as a solution is false if you consider the statistics.
Then again, why am I arguing - you know better.. this is slashdot:)
Well actually, you must not have followed things because closely; Wikimedia now has one paid full time admin. The 1.5 implementation which will give us huge benefits from a performance point of view is possible because of this.
Your suggestion that paid full time administrators are always superior is your POV and given Wikimedia's policies on POVs you know where you stand.
Your suggestion that no effort is put into Mediawiki is horrible. The developpers are volunteers and as such they work on the things that they want to work on. Being volunteers that is there right. When someone wants particular features, he can either do it himself or find someone willing to do it for him. If only a paid programmer can be found, than it is up to the person who wants it to make the money flow.
Your suggestion that the Mediawiki developers do not have experience with high traffic websites is stupid. The Wikimedia servers are high traffic websites.
As far as I am concerned the Mediawiki developers do an amazing job and if what you say is true how come the Wikimedia services are doing so well ??
For me what Larry has to say was a letdown. Apparently Larry did not have one look at the current wiktionary. If he had typed in wiktionary.org He would have found a portal page for several wiktionaries. He would have known that it is not possible to make a comparison with the likes of Webster's and the OED because wiktionary is not like these pillars of wisdom. Wiktionary is not only about the English language. He would have found many projects in many languages. A bit like Wikipedia but different. Different because if Larry had looked into any of these projects, he would have found that all these projects have the ambition to have all words in all languages. He would have found that current wiktionary has moved far beyond what where the issues at the start.
So it is no suprise that Larry has not learned about the Ultimate Wiktionary. A new ambitious project that may integrate all Wiktionary projects and that will be the first "any to any" dictionary. His arguments against the use of a wiki in relation to dictionaries is a rehash of his POV that you need authority to do some work. If he had done some research, he could have found the soundfiles, something anyone with a "standard" pronounciation can produce. He could have found (with some difficulty) all the Papiamento words in the Dutch Wiktionary, a resource that has (as far as I can find) no equal on the Internet. He could have found that collaboration that exists between Wiktionaries resulting in things like the "Cristianesimo" list of words.
So I am disapointed. As Larry Sanger is a man respected for his contributions in the initial stage of the Wikipedia project, I would be ever so pleased if he had another look. I would really look forward to an opportunity to discuss the opportunies that I foresee in the Ultimate Wiktionary. It would be ever so cool if Larry had a serious look at the current Wiktionary because then we could compare notes on what is wrong with the current crop of Wiktionary projects. It would also make him relevant because what he wrote in slashdot is for me nothing but a blast from the past.
Thanks,
GerardM
At this moment in time we have no real problem getting money. It is not a ruse to have people pay more into our account. It is as much about emancipating the people that give a small amount of money. People that give much can an do indicate what money is to be spend on.
In this policy, the board decides what the money can be earmarked for so it will go to things where the money is wanted. Thanks,
GerardM
Within the Wikimedia Foundation there is a movement of allowing the person to give money to selected targets. This could be hardware, it could be development and it could be something even more specific. For more details see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donations:Putting_y our_money_where_your_mouth_is a proposal to make the donator decide what he want his money to be spend on. Obviously, we welcome any money:)
Wikimedia's projects are worth a lot. The thing is it cannot be sold as the content is not owned by the foundation but by the people who contribute.
Every now and then organisations that CAN be bought and sold are. This gives us an idea of the worth of our organisation. It is in the hundreds of millions.
Thanks,
GerardM
Actually this has only just became PUBLIC knowledge, it was actually something that predates the public outing of Encarta on the Microsoft search machine.
For that matter the way that Microsoft has the Wikipedia content moved to the back is an indication of the way that Microsoft behaves when it meets competition. It is exactly this kind of behaviour that rightly gets them into a tangle with the anti monopoly organisations from all kinds of institutions.
The synchronisation between languages is done by "interwiki" links. They are references to the other article by its name in the other article. eg on nl: it would be [[en:article]] and on en: it would be [[nl:artikel]], they function as an hyperlink.
There is no automatic synchronisation between articles, and the usage of the information of one wikipedia in the other is left to the contributors of the article. This way there is also room for cultural differences as with many truths there is not always one absolute truth.
Choosing between wikipedia's is not required, you can contribute to all wikipedia's just as you like. Feel free..
One misconception of many is that there is one wikipedia, there are many. Articles on the same topic can be found in many languages, each language is a wikipedia in its own right.
When you compare the articles in the different languages, the quality differs. The quality of the wikipedia differ. Some have fewer than 100 articles (chr) Some have 32000 articles (nl) and some have 314000 articles (en). This results in different maturity levels of the wikipedia, it means something because of the amount of editors involved. The maturity of a wikipedia relates in general to the quality of the overall articles. When there are more articles with more edits per article, the better the quality will get.
Weaknesses are spotted everywhere, it takes critical mass in an area to get the quality up. In classical encyclopedia it is this one man writing up on a set of subjects, here you find a group of people writing on the same subject. You find people who write stuff, you find people who edit stuff. This is the process that can be observed to work.
When writing on a subject, you do look and refer to what is said in other versions of wikipedia. This is also how you find the cultural differences:)
Longhorn is planned for over 2 years. In yesteryear they said that 1 sunyear is 4 internet years. So next generation IE is next generation. I'll be old.
However if XUL is to be the client platform, it will NOT work on IE. To Oracle that will not be relevant as it is not about HTML but about database communication and presentation platform independent..
When you want to do some clever stuff, you do not want to restrict yourself to HTML so you do not necessaraly want to use *any* browser. With the Mozilla technology they have a platform that has implementations on many platforms.
So I think they get it and it is less browser technology than presentation technology that they find in Mozilla
I live in Europe, a friend of mine went to Iran recently and met his cousin. She is studying computer technology at a Teheran University. She does not have a computer. My friend brought her an old pentium 2...
OS X is not for Iran, export is propably not allowed. Windows is available and cheap. for EUR 3,- you can have XP or Longhorn. I want Farsi support on Linux for my sister who is learning Farsi.
Open Office does not (yet) support Farsi. Thanks,
Gerard
I would like to know how to use two languages on one system so that I have a Farsi environment or an English environment at will.
I have many friends, among them Iranians, Turks and Israeli, who would like to have a bilingual system. Multiple keyboards are also an issue. Preferably it would need a switch to go from one language to the next alternatively a reboot would be acceptable.
Both the RIAA, Microsoft and Verisign have a dominant role in their respective markets. This forum is about providing a infrastructure for digital content.
There is inherently nothing wrong with that. That is, as long as they define infrastructure that will be universally applicable. So if it only runs on an Microsoft platform it has failed. If it only protects data by companies associated with the RIAA it has failed. If the only security it allows for is the security as provided by Verisign it has failed.
When content, of a type protected by the mechanisms to be worked out by this committee, become available, the content is the copyright of the issuer of the data and as such it is entitled to the protection offered by the infrastructure. This means that music is secured at the time of publication within the infrastructure. This allows for people to create their own content and do with it as they like and, if at all it is secured, it is secured within the same infrastructure as is the commercial content as published by the organisations associated with the RIAA.
* Linus Torvalds has said before that the inclusion of DRM is not a problem as far as he is concerned. * Music Midi and computers have a long history. It cannot be that the use of computers connencted with music or photo's or video will cease. * There is nothing inherently wrong with DRM but it has to be open and it must secure my data as much as the data from a commercial entity. * Given the pedegree of the people in this committee THEY have to prove their bona fides. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and the RIAA wants the law to grant them the right to be a monopolist. They have one good thing going for them; Microsoft is one of the greatest marketing companies ever.
My solution to not doing the laundry? I go for a run. They often have a T-shirt as a memento. On one side something about the event the other a message from the sponsor. Celavita,,
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I can reliably inform you that Mr Tanenbaum was amused that you could not get his name right.. As they say; it does not matter what they write as long as they get the name right.. :)
When this is done for "strategic" reasons, than it is clear again why open standards are relevant. It is also once more clear why proprietary standards are in danger, they are because they have to compete..
I am a heavy Skype user and I will move slowly to something else like Google talk if this is what must be.
Thanks,
GerardM
Well, this is another customer that is not interested in the 20% of the market in Europe that does not use Internet Explorer.
It may be a good product (technically) but its marketing is fataly broken when it requires IE.
Thanks,
GerardM
Only if there is only one language considered. The Kamusi project is more relevant for English when you consider it in combination with Swahili for instance.. Only English is so limited..
Thanks,
GerardM
As the publishing companies have an abysmal record of preserving the heritage; they leave it to libraries. History is full of important libraries that have burned with all its content.
The argument that these people use is ONLY about copyright and how they THINK they might be worse off in this deal. Their reasoning is not at all why this is a good thing for the society and they do not even consider how it will benefit themselves.
It is a well known but little understood fact that people who go to libraries are the ones most likely to buy books. It is as little understood that file sharers are the ones most likely to buy records.. You do not need to stretch your imagination to understand that when books are known courtesy of this program, that people will be interested in copies these often out of print books.
Please wake up, you are robbing yourself when you spout this nonsence.
Thanks,
GerardM
not really relevant, Firebird is now Firefox because of a database program by that name. Now Vista is the dominant Open Source Health software in the world. It is used the world over. And by the recent push for the use of electronic health records its dominance will increase. Thanks, GerardM
Why is it that Microsoft thinks it can use the name VISTA ? It is already used by one of the more significant open source projects. It may be that not everyone knows about Vista.. http://www.vistasoftware.org/
I would say that the name is already in use.
Thanks,
GerardM
Again, you do not know what you are talking about. Jimbo is not a payed employee of the Wikimedia Foundation.
.. based on what ? Often software does not work as advertised in manuals.. Certainly when you are scaling outside known terroty you need new methods, clever hacks.
:)
The difference with my POV and yours is that I put my money where my mouth is.
There are many ways of looking at the quality of developers. I am sure that there will be few websites running as cheaply as the WMF does. Just compare the hardware costs for instance. Another way is looking at the number of developers and look at the amount of traffic is served. I am sorry but you provide no metrics to back up your claim why the quality is substandard.
This is not to say that the quality of the code could not be improved. I am not convinced that money is the only answer. The big advantage that the WMF developers have is intrinsic motivation. Often missing with hired hackers.
You characterise one of my arguments as a strawman. Well, you hide behind the back of someone else. That is cheap.
About corporate sponsorship; we have some of it. We have payed for projects but then again, would you know. The argument that some people are against it is just that. When development is needed and someone is willing to pay for it, it can be done.
Your suggestion that professional programmers do not work with trial and error is
When the amount of servers go up, you find that at the same time the usage of the servers goes up. The demand for information is such that throwing hardware at the problem gives an equal amount of new users. As to software, the last software versions have made this growth possible. The notion that it is only hardware that is seen as a solution is false if you consider the statistics.
Then again, why am I arguing - you know better.. this is slashdot
Thanks,
GerardM
Well actually, you must not have followed things because closely; Wikimedia now has one paid full time admin. The 1.5 implementation which will give us huge benefits from a performance point of view is possible because of this.
Your suggestion that paid full time administrators are always superior is your POV and given Wikimedia's policies on POVs you know where you stand.
Your suggestion that no effort is put into Mediawiki is horrible. The developpers are volunteers and as such they work on the things that they want to work on. Being volunteers that is there right. When someone wants particular features, he can either do it himself or find someone willing to do it for him. If only a paid programmer can be found, than it is up to the person who wants it to make the money flow.
Your suggestion that the Mediawiki developers do not have experience with high traffic websites is stupid. The Wikimedia servers are high traffic websites.
As far as I am concerned the Mediawiki developers do an amazing job and if what you say is true how come the Wikimedia services are doing so well ??
Thanks,
GerardM
It is always good to learn an extra language. It is even better to learn Porugese as well, the language spoken in Brasil. :)
GerardM
For me what Larry has to say was a letdown. Apparently Larry did not have one look at the current wiktionary. If he had typed in wiktionary.org He would have found a portal page for several wiktionaries. He would have known that it is not possible to make a comparison with the likes of Webster's and the OED because wiktionary is not like these pillars of wisdom. Wiktionary is not only about the English language. He would have found many projects in many languages. A bit like Wikipedia but different. Different because if Larry had looked into any of these projects, he would have found that all these projects have the ambition to have all words in all languages. He would have found that current wiktionary has moved far beyond what where the issues at the start. So it is no suprise that Larry has not learned about the Ultimate Wiktionary. A new ambitious project that may integrate all Wiktionary projects and that will be the first "any to any" dictionary. His arguments against the use of a wiki in relation to dictionaries is a rehash of his POV that you need authority to do some work. If he had done some research, he could have found the soundfiles, something anyone with a "standard" pronounciation can produce. He could have found (with some difficulty) all the Papiamento words in the Dutch Wiktionary, a resource that has (as far as I can find) no equal on the Internet. He could have found that collaboration that exists between Wiktionaries resulting in things like the "Cristianesimo" list of words. So I am disapointed. As Larry Sanger is a man respected for his contributions in the initial stage of the Wikipedia project, I would be ever so pleased if he had another look. I would really look forward to an opportunity to discuss the opportunies that I foresee in the Ultimate Wiktionary. It would be ever so cool if Larry had a serious look at the current Wiktionary because then we could compare notes on what is wrong with the current crop of Wiktionary projects. It would also make him relevant because what he wrote in slashdot is for me nothing but a blast from the past. Thanks, GerardM
At this moment in time we have no real problem getting money. It is not a ruse to have people pay more into our account. It is as much about emancipating the people that give a small amount of money. People that give much can an do indicate what money is to be spend on.
In this policy, the board decides what the money can be earmarked for so it will go to things where the money is wanted.
Thanks,
GerardM
Within the Wikimedia Foundation there is a movement of allowing the person to give money to selected targets. This could be hardware, it could be development and it could be something even more specific. For more details see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Donations:Putting_y our_money_where_your_mouth_is :)
a proposal to make the donator decide what he want his money to be spend on. Obviously, we welcome any money
Thanks,
GerardM
Wikimedia's projects are worth a lot. The thing is it cannot be sold as the content is not owned by the foundation but by the people who contribute. Every now and then organisations that CAN be bought and sold are. This gives us an idea of the worth of our organisation. It is in the hundreds of millions. Thanks, GerardM
Actually this has only just became PUBLIC knowledge, it was actually something that predates the public outing of Encarta on the Microsoft search machine.
For that matter the way that Microsoft has the Wikipedia content moved to the back is an indication of the way that Microsoft behaves when it meets competition. It is exactly this kind of behaviour that rightly gets them into a tangle with the anti monopoly organisations from all kinds of institutions.
Thanks,
GerardM
The synchronisation between languages is done by "interwiki" links. They are references to the other article by its name in the other article. eg on nl: it would be [[en:article]] and on en: it would be [[nl:artikel]], they function as an hyperlink.
There is no automatic synchronisation between articles, and the usage of the information of one wikipedia in the other is left to the contributors of the article. This way there is also room for cultural differences as with many truths there is not always one absolute truth.
Choosing between wikipedia's is not required, you can contribute to all wikipedia's just as you like. Feel free..
One misconception of many is that there is one wikipedia, there are many. Articles on the same topic can be found in many languages, each language is a wikipedia in its own right.
:)
When you compare the articles in the different languages, the quality differs. The quality of the wikipedia differ. Some have fewer than 100 articles (chr) Some have 32000 articles (nl) and some have 314000 articles (en). This results in different maturity levels of the wikipedia, it means something because of the amount of editors involved. The maturity of a wikipedia relates in general to the quality of the overall articles. When there are more articles with more edits per article, the better the quality will get.
Weaknesses are spotted everywhere, it takes critical mass in an area to get the quality up. In classical encyclopedia it is this one man writing up on a set of subjects, here you find a group of people writing on the same subject. You find people who write stuff, you find people who edit stuff. This is the process that can be observed to work.
When writing on a subject, you do look and refer to what is said in other versions of wikipedia. This is also how you find the cultural differences
Thanks,
GerardM
Longhorn is planned for over 2 years. In yesteryear they said that 1 sunyear is 4 internet years. So next generation IE is next generation. I'll be old.
However if XUL is to be the client platform, it will NOT work on IE. To Oracle that will not be relevant as it is not about HTML but about database communication and presentation platform independent..
When you want to do some clever stuff, you do not want to restrict yourself to HTML so you do not necessaraly want to use *any* browser. With the Mozilla technology they have a platform that has implementations on many platforms.
So I think they get it and it is less browser technology than presentation technology that they find in Mozilla
Gerard
I live in Europe, a friend of mine went to Iran recently and met his cousin. She is studying computer technology at a Teheran University. She does not have a computer. My friend brought her an old pentium 2...
OS X is not for Iran, export is propably not allowed. Windows is available and cheap. for EUR 3,- you can have XP or Longhorn. I want Farsi support on Linux for my sister who is learning Farsi.
Open Office does not (yet) support Farsi.
Thanks,
Gerard
I would like to know how to use two languages on one system so that I have a Farsi environment or an English environment at will.
I have many friends, among them Iranians, Turks and Israeli, who would like to have a bilingual system. Multiple keyboards are also an issue. Preferably it would need a switch to go from one language to the next alternatively a reboot would be acceptable.
Any ideas, resources that I might look at?
Thanks,
Gerard
Both the RIAA, Microsoft and Verisign have a dominant role in their respective markets. This forum is about providing a infrastructure for digital content.
There is inherently nothing wrong with that. That is, as long as they define infrastructure that will be universally applicable. So if it only runs on an Microsoft platform it has failed. If it only protects data by companies associated with the RIAA it has failed. If the only security it allows for is the security as provided by Verisign it has failed.
When content, of a type protected by the mechanisms to be worked out by this committee, become available, the content is the copyright of the issuer of the data and as such it is entitled to the protection offered by the infrastructure. This means that music is secured at the time of publication within the infrastructure. This allows for people to create their own content and do with it as they like and, if at all it is secured, it is secured within the same infrastructure as is the commercial content as published by the organisations associated with the RIAA.
* Linus Torvalds has said before that the inclusion of DRM is not a problem as far as he is concerned.
* Music Midi and computers have a long history. It cannot be that the use of computers connencted with music or photo's or video will cease.
* There is nothing inherently wrong with DRM but it has to be open and it must secure my data as much as the data from a commercial entity.
* Given the pedegree of the people in this committee THEY have to prove their bona fides. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and the RIAA wants the law to grant them the right to be a monopolist. They have one good thing going for them; Microsoft is one of the greatest marketing companies ever.
Thanks,
Gerard
My solution to not doing the laundry? I go for a run. They often have a T-shirt as a memento. On one side something about the event the other a message from the sponsor. Celavita,,
Gerard
Can we now all agree that Mr Bush is a lunatic? I do appreciate that some serious flaming is required to achieve this goal..
Thanks,
Gerard