"Current allegations relating to Jimmy Wales soliciting donations for the Wikimedia Foundation in order to protect or edit Wikipedia articles are completely false. The Wikimedia Foundation has never accepted nor solicited donations in order to protect or make edits to a Wikipedia article - nor has Jimmy Wales. This is a practice the Wikimedia Foundation would never condone."
Notice the scope shift from "Jimmy Wales" to "Wikimedia Foundation," and then stating that the Wikipedia Foundation "has never accepted nor solicited donations in order to protect or make edits to a Wikipedia article," not Jimmy Wales. You just accused somebody of accepting a bribe. What evidence do you have to support this accusation?
It's not the protection that's in question here, in my opinion, although most people would just write the article in a personal sandbox and copy the content into position when they were ready. It's the fact that the edit history now starts with Jimbo's edit in May 2006, when, by his edit comment, it's pretty obvious there was an article in place there before. That's normal practice. When an article about a living person is compromised by defamatory, abusive and derogatory claims, we get rid of the abusive revisions. Remember that the goal is to write an encyclopedia that contains reliable, source information, not to let anybody with an axe to grind use our wiki as a toilet wall to scrawl their messages of hate on. We're an encyclopedia project first and last, not in any way an experiment in free speech or democracy.
So you are saying that Jeff did give a donation? No, sorry. I nothing of any donation, although Jeff's claim that he had paid for his article to be fixed sounds familiar. We will fix anybody's article if it contains distortions, absolutely free, and if it's enough of a mess we'll have to stub it down (reduce it to a basic one or two sentence description) and start again from scratch.
Can you explain why, even the negatives about Jeff that can be well documented were removed? Policy. It's called the "Biographies of living persons" policy, BLP for short, and it says that anything even slightly questionable that is unsupported can be removed, and only restored when it passes all Wikipedia's content policies. I might look at the article and think, to myself "sure, that can be documented, leave it in" but somebody else may not have read the relevant documentation, and that creates uncertainty which we resolve by requiring that whoever puts it back put in enough reference to documentation to ensure that it's verifiable from what we consider reliable external sources. Footnotes, basically. We follow this procedure with content related to living people, because we've found that it's the only way to keep our articles reasonably free of rubbish and unsupported rumors.
> So it's really a non-story. We protect articles against people who want to write "WEE WEE WEE JACK IS GAY."
Was the stuff about Merkey really of that nature? I saw the original article, and it did not look like that to me. I did not see the original article. My point is that the kind of protection Jimbo used was nothing special. Every ordinary Wikipedia editor with an account (you don't even need an email address to set up an account, just make up a unique username and a password) that is more than about three days old can edit that article any time he wants.
This is the only Slashdot account I could remember at short notice (all the other ones are lame Ian M Banks ship names). My name is Tony Sidaway and I've been a Wikipedia editor about three years.
Like the "Jimbo ordered people to fix Marsden's bio" thing, this is a non-story. Jimbo has frequently taken the initiative in stubbing down crappy articles and asking editors to start afresh. Good practice. Nice of Jeff to give a donation, but stubbing down a bad biography is standard practice.
The reason for temporary protection (locking the article to stop edits by some users) is given by Wales as "an attempt to keep trolling to a minimum during an experimental rewrite" which is pretty sensible.
One thing that does look very odd is that the protection was not removed until this story broke. We're as partial to kool-aid as the next guy, so we do tend to defer to him perhaps more than he would like.:/ But this did NOT stop anybody editing the article, and I'll explain why.
There are two main modes of protection on the open source mediawiki software on which Wikipedia operates, usually called semi-protection and full protection, and in addition to that, protection applies to both editing and renaming/moving (because a common form of vandalism used to be to rename an article to something nasty). In the edit summary of Jimbo Wales' edit timestamped 20:58, 23 May 2006 , you'll see "[edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed]". This indicates normal semiprotection ("autoconfirmed" users are those who have registered a username and waited about three days--there's nothing more to it than that--no vetting, no human intervention at all). So anybody patient enough to wait three days could edit that article.
So it's really a non-story. We protect articles against people who want to write "WEE WEE WEE JACK IS GAY!" all the time and this is precisely the mode of protection we use for, say, "George W. Bush"
Any Wikipedia editor with an account over three days old could edit that article for the whole of its post-Jimbo existence.
It's true that stand-alone PDAs have faced competition from cellphones. If I use a PDA, it's for programming. The Palm 105 is in my opinion the VW Beetle of the PDA field. It's cheap to buy and you can throw it down a stair well without breaking it. The plastic digitizer screen is prone to scratching but you fix that by putting a film of scotch tape over it. As a lisper, I think Fred Bayer's R4RS "Lispme" is the dog's bollocks in mobile programming.
Of course that only proves what we all knew all along--that palmtop computing is a geek toy.
They might as well just put a big label on the disk saying 'You have only eight hours. Rip me!' Even if the music is crap, the crackers will not be able to pass on this one.
And how long before someone finds a way to read the 'opaqued' surface?
One comment in the Life After Redhat article stuck out. He loves FreeBSD and his systems are "upgraded once a week (all software)". Is this normal pratice? I still have SuSE 6.3 systems running.
It seems to be normal practice on Debian, probably because it's the best way to pick up the security patches. apt-get update apt-get upgrade
When encrypting a message with PGP you can use the -m option (or sellect the 'secure viewer' if you are using one of the windoze versions)
Doing this prevents the recipiant from saving a plain text version on their disks
I hope nobody reading this will rely on "pgp -m" for security--it's just a convenience that tries to ensure that your recipient doesn't do something insecure such as saving plaintext to disk, but if he wants to he can probably still do that with a couple of keypresses.
Of course the boss who sends you email with all block caps and exclamation marks is long overdue for some luser attitude readjustment, and if you're any good he'll know it. You alone should have a final say over what email you accept, and if you want to delegate that to a script, that's up to you. If your boss needs to contact you infallibly, arrange a system.
There isn't much there as yet, but I guess it could grow. What happens will partly depend on how much feeling there is for free (rather than open source) software and partly, let's face it, on how much effort they're prepared to put into it.
I think I can sum it up: I was typing the other day... a window poped up. Something had happened. I inadvertantly hit enter (since I was already typing) and as a result, still don't know what the message said... Well, that and I lost what I was typing. The irritation factor was a 9.6.
This is a serious usability problem in my view, and one that isn't restricted to Windows. With task bars and all manner of other ways to display important information nowadays, there really is no excuse for a GUI system that permits applications to grab focus for a modal dialog whilst the user is typing.
Old enough and sad enough still to remember how to hand punch cards, but what I wanted to say was that the first ATM card I ever had, in the UK in 1975, was a hole-punched card. You got two of them and a PIN. The machine swallowed each card when you used it, and the bank posted it back by snailmail (there was no other kind of mail in those days) a couple of days later.
That didn't last long, of course. The bank introduced a new kind of card, with a magnetic strip. You got the card back at the end of the transaction, and you could use it to ask for your balance or order a statement. Using a weird display system based on printed questions on cloth scrolled across rollers controlled by a stepper motor.
We ignored creationism for decades, and it became a powerful enough force to start rewriting our grade school science textbooks. Creationism is completely irrelevant to science, but anything people believe in carries political pressure, and politics affects everybody.
The underlying problem appears to be that in the USA religions are permitted to wield far too much political power. It's an odd contrast with my own country, where we have an established religion but few people take it seriously and hardly anybody goes to church. Darwin's face is currently on our ten pound banknote and his body is buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, and hardly anybody finds this extraordinary.
"The achievement is a landmark in evolutionary biology, not only because it shows how new animal body plans could arise from a simple genetic mutation, but because it effectively answers a major criticism creationists had long leveled against evolution--the absence of a genetic mechanism that could permit animals to introduce radical new body designs.
"
It's a shame that UCSD found it necessary to refer to the creationist bugbear. Creationism has been dead and buried for well over a century except in the USA, where it lives on as a political movement impervious to scientific discussion. Scientists should deny it the courtesy of appearing to take it seriously.
It seems that Sony has protected the intellectual property invested in its closed system by putting Linux on top of a virtual machine. That's pretty clever, though I'm also fairly certain that this will only spur open source developers to develop a Linux that will run on the bare metal.
Why don't they just get a big stick and beat anyone over the head who doesn't code to the standards? That why you never need to worry about which brand of libc you're using.
Perhaps I should clarify: the question at hand is mainly about dynamic linking dependencies in.deb binary packages. You're right to state that properly written C source code doesn't cause any problems with either libc. It's also the case that the NetBSD libc contains several libraries that are normally packaged outside libc6 in GNU userlands.
Some of the source packages also have dependencies on, say, libc6-dev, and this has to be rethought where the package will compile perfectly well in the BSD environment with no GNU libc at all.
If you've delved as far as Linux-from-scratch and are happy with Debian and Slackware, you might like to have a look at the Debian-BSD mailing list. There was an article here about it around a week ago. Most of the work going on is around a NetBSD port, but others are working on a FreeBSD port. It's at a very early stage where they're still debating what to do about libc (BSD) versus libc6 (GNU) dependencies in packages.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the stuff about Merkey really of that nature? I saw the original article, and it did not look like that to me.
I did not see the original article. My point is that the kind of protection Jimbo used was nothing special. Every ordinary Wikipedia editor with an account (you don't even need an email address to set up an account, just make up a unique username and a password) that is more than about three days old can edit that article any time he wants.
Like the "Jimbo ordered people to fix Marsden's bio" thing, this is a non-story. Jimbo has frequently taken the initiative in stubbing down crappy articles and asking editors to start afresh. Good practice. Nice of Jeff to give a donation, but stubbing down a bad biography is standard practice.
The reason for temporary protection (locking the article to stop edits by some users) is given by Wales as "an attempt to keep trolling to a minimum during an experimental rewrite" which is pretty sensible.
One thing that does look very odd is that the protection was not removed until this story broke. We're as partial to kool-aid as the next guy, so we do tend to defer to him perhaps more than he would like. :/ But this did NOT stop anybody editing the article, and I'll explain why.
There are two main modes of protection on the open source mediawiki software on which Wikipedia operates, usually called semi-protection and full protection, and in addition to that, protection applies to both editing and renaming/moving (because a common form of vandalism used to be to rename an article to something nasty). In the edit summary of Jimbo Wales' edit timestamped 20:58, 23 May 2006 , you'll see "[edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed]". This indicates normal semiprotection ("autoconfirmed" users are those who have registered a username and waited about three days--there's nothing more to it than that--no vetting, no human intervention at all). So anybody patient enough to wait three days could edit that article.
So it's really a non-story. We protect articles against people who want to write "WEE WEE WEE JACK IS GAY!" all the time and this is precisely the mode of protection we use for, say, "George W. Bush"
Any Wikipedia editor with an account over three days old could edit that article for the whole of its post-Jimbo existence.
Of course that only proves what we all knew all along--that palmtop computing is a geek toy.
And how long before someone finds a way to read the 'opaqued' surface?
It seems to be normal practice on Debian, probably because it's the best way to pick up the security patches.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Doing this prevents the recipiant from saving a plain text version on their disks
I hope nobody reading this will rely on "pgp -m" for security--it's just a convenience that tries to ensure that your recipient doesn't do something insecure such as saving plaintext to disk, but if he wants to he can probably still do that with a couple of keypresses.
Of course the boss who sends you email with all block caps and exclamation marks is long overdue for some luser attitude readjustment, and if you're any good he'll know it. You alone should have a final say over what email you accept, and if you want to delegate that to a script, that's up to you. If your boss needs to contact you infallibly, arrange a system.
...to the grand merging of your CVS trees
There isn't much there as yet, but I guess it could grow. What happens will partly depend on how much feeling there is for free (rather than open source) software and partly, let's face it, on how much effort they're prepared to put into it.
This is a serious usability problem in my view, and one that isn't restricted to Windows. With task bars and all manner of other ways to display important information nowadays, there really is no excuse for a GUI system that permits applications to grab focus for a modal dialog whilst the user is typing.
I followed the link to the story, and got an idiotic popup spam for some online casino.
That didn't last long, of course. The bank introduced a new kind of card, with a magnetic strip. You got the card back at the end of the transaction, and you could use it to ask for your balance or order a statement. Using a weird display system based on printed questions on cloth scrolled across rollers controlled by a stepper motor.
Gerald Ford was the President of the USA.
The underlying problem appears to be that in the USA religions are permitted to wield far too much political power. It's an odd contrast with my own country, where we have an established religion but few people take it seriously and hardly anybody goes to church. Darwin's face is currently on our ten pound banknote and his body is buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, and hardly anybody finds this extraordinary.
Deduct one point: troll. :)
It's a shame that UCSD found it necessary to refer to the creationist bugbear. Creationism has been dead and buried for well over a century except in the USA, where it lives on as a political movement impervious to scientific discussion. Scientists should deny it the courtesy of appearing to take it seriously.
sherilyn@monkey:~$ finger bruce@perens.com
[perens.com]
finger: connect: Connection refused
Damn my literal-mindedness.
Yikes, a local finger displays my entire exim .forward file!
It seems that Sony has protected the intellectual property invested in its closed system by putting Linux on top of a virtual machine. That's pretty clever, though I'm also fairly certain that this will only spur open source developers to develop a Linux that will run on the bare metal.
Perhaps I should clarify: the question at hand is mainly about dynamic linking dependencies in .deb binary packages. You're right to state that properly written C source code doesn't cause any problems with either libc. It's also the case that the NetBSD libc contains several libraries that are normally packaged outside libc6 in GNU userlands.
Some of the source packages also have dependencies on, say, libc6-dev, and this has to be rethought where the package will compile perfectly well in the BSD environment with no GNU libc at all.
ITYM Morrrrdorrrr.
The list archives are here.
I think Professor Tanenbaum is laughing.
Well I guess I have four more years to brush up on ed...