And the Wiki-cultists think we owe them something. Wuh?
Truth, Wikipedia-style, is the result not of empirical analysis but of an endurance contest for fanatics. Truth is defined by whoever has most time to waste^H^H^H spare.
The Wikipedia model has always repelled many potential expert contributors and over the past 18 months the project has started to lose good Admins too.
So, no surprise, only the dingbats and twiddlers are left. Who else but an anally retentive nut would want to stick around either engaging in or policing an edit war?
Wikipedia tells us a lot about the psychology of Asperger's sufferers but adds very little else to humanity by propagating unreliable "information" as fact. (See the definition of Pedophilia). It seems to be a fun game for the Aspies, though. They get to give each other titles, awards ("Barn Stars"), and pretend the world gives a fuck about them. And get real upset when it doesn't. Boo hoo.
The EFF might well be doing the best job it can, but that still doesn't mean it's doing a good job. And you have to compare it against all the alternatives.
A lot of lawsuits it chooses to fight are symbolic, and the EFF doesn't seem to mind losing them. The best argument I've heard in favor of the EFF is that the ACLU is cyber-clueless. In which case the EFF can play an advisory role to the real lawyers at the ACLU.
A pretty good summary. Digg has more problems here, because it will be easier for Slashdot to get timely than it will be for Digg get a community. Without the community it's just a set of public bookmarks, like deli.cio.us.
Digg's comments are real trash. It's already astroturfed and the trolls haven't even come out to play yet. When you hear the word "collective intelligence" used to pimp a site, you know there's trouble ahead. Today's "collective intelligence" site is tomorrow's entropy graveyard
I'm amazed how quickly Wikipedia fans back track. One second it's the Greatest Reference Book The World Has Ever Seen, but as soon attention is drawing to its weaknesses, we're reminded that it isn't really reliable and needs fixing. With the moral responsibility for the mess handed to the critic.
... it's just like with opensource software.. it requires interaction... ah different wqay of thinking
But most people don't give ah flying fuck about the process by which something is created. They want good quality end results.
Open source software helps other open source software people write open source software. I can hack together a new driver model for Linux and it would be rejected, because it would be crap.
But lots of bad entries remain in Wikipedia, because the people doing the accept/reject procedures often don't know what they're talking about.
So the peer production model that works for programmers doesn't work on Wikipedia.
Peer to peer file sharing is really just interactive radio consumers get to listen to exactly what they want when they want it. This demand is not addressed by the record industry. In fact, it cant be offered legally at any price. And as I think Ive illustrated, technology and reality will insure that supply finds its way to meet that demand...
and
My partner Fred and I therefor support compulsory blanket licensing. The same way restaurants, radio stations and elevators pay for background music, a tariff on communications technology could permit non-commercial file sharing to flourish, and copyright owners to benefit financially. File sharing is NOT piracy. Piracy is big fat guys manufacturing fake CDs in Mexico and selling them at swap meets. File sharing is tens of millions of music fans swapping copies of things they wouldnt otherwise buy. An ASCAP or BMI like pool of money allocated in an equitable way amongst copyright owners is the only solution that could be of benefit to creators, consumers and copyright owners. Compulsory blanket licensing for non-commercial file sharing is the equivalent of loosening a tourniquet tied around the entertainment industrys neck. - ACLU Bill of Rights Dinner - Thursday, December 12, 2002
Wake up and change the record. The poor of urban New Orleans were emphatically not blogging - because most of them can't afford computers - and oops! forgot to take them to the toxic Superdome.
... " and blogs are how everyday citizens publish on the web."
No, it's how everyday white suburban college-educated professionals publish on the web.
This time it was the professional broadcast media who exposed this scandal, thanks to mass media and helicopters. Not bloggers - and maybe you need a more diverse group of friends.
BOZEMAN, MT--The few people close to Mitch Delomme say that he doesn't realize the implications of his new podcast, an agonizingly personal 40-minute digitally recorded capsule of news, information, and trivia about the chronically lonely pizza-delivery man.
"I wanted to share something about myself," said Delomme, 48, who in the course of his life has been heavily involved in ham and CB radio, personal home-page construction, and participation in late-night community-access cable.
Delomme's podcast is currently available on all major subscription links, where it has attracted no attention.
Why stop with a speaker that generates a "click"?
The mouse should also have an internal receptacle that slowly disperses cigarette ash, pizza topping and pubic hair over the surface of the desk - or graphic novel, or whatever surface us being used as a mouse mat.
This receptacle would need to be refilled periodically, like a Hoover bag, but in reverse. However Apple could patent the formula and interface, so you only use "genuine Apple Mouse grime".
Yes, it's baloney - an attempt to confuse appropriation, which has always fuelled creativity, with a specific use of a particular technology.
But why do the Asperger types who have only just discovered "remix" culture (20 years after it started, and 5 years after the cult of the DJ died out) have such a fear of creativity and originality? It's almost as great as their fear of having to pay for anything.
There is nothing original about sticking a loop behind a recording of Billie Holliday - and not one of her original recordings has been "improved" by this.
Styles are mutated into new shapes every day, but the copyright nerds can't seem to accept anything that hasn't first been piped through a DMA bus.
This comment in the same thread points out how useless Wired has been at predicting the future. But why is it so useless?
Because it's a circus. Negroponte set the template when he created MIT's Media Lab. The goal was only ever to attract funding with high profile media gimmicks, which in practice involved lots of art students pinning carpet onto dumb robots. So he helped start Wired magazine to hype them. It was his baby, and Negroponte was the star columnist.
Good computer science means making computers that don't crash. It's hard to do, and it isn't sexy.
But outside of USA Today, Boing Boing, or NPR Radio - which has dropped the progressive politics in favor of gawp-eyed techno utopianism - I don't think this 80s thinking has very much traction. Go, Hannibal.
"Not everything bloggers have to say about brands correlates to the real world. Last summer, Umbria, working for a fast-food client, was monitoring Burger King Corp.'s Angus Burger and found it got some bad reviews from bloggers. Some were deriding Burger King's tongue-in-cheek TV ads that called the burger a diet food. Bloggers notwithstanding, the Angus Burger has become a hit.
In other news: Banana Republic cancelled a range of unisex one-piece pyjama suits, after discovering that its blog research didn't represent its potential market.
Spot on, but this is a dangerous heresy round here.
According to the autistic/geek/net nerd orthodoxy, cybernetic exchanges are much more truthful than anything found in real life. Because, y'know, they use computers!
Of course to someone who's never seen or tasted a fruit, an orange is an acid bomb, and a banana is a dangerous phallic intrusion.
Re:more censorship, unimpressed
on
Google TrustRank
·
· Score: 1
But then GE, GM or Unilever don't set themselves up for it such s, with sanctimonious crap like Do No Evil as a corporate mission statement. Larry and Sergey may as well walk around with a "kick me here" sign stapled to their asses.
Maybe I got it all wrong describing Wikipedia as a religious cult. It's only really a religious crusade for techno utopian supporters in the media, and marketing consultants who blog. But it is a cult, and only in a cult can behavior like this flourish. Someday Wikipedia is going to be a sociological case study.
I'm bookmarking this part of the thread. It's as good an introduction to Wikipedia for outsiders as any article I've read about it. Thanks again, Orthogonal.
.... Expect many failures of these communities, but also expect a few to produce flourishing growth of ideas that might spread into the non-blogging world.
How? Will we walk around with pictures of our cats stapled to our foreheads? Or three foot long paper representations of blogrolls trailing behind us?
You may be right about reinforcement though, but probably not in the way you intended...
Blogs permit people to engage free speech without the usual consequences, to say anything they want without getting the punch on the nose they would get in the Real World.
If this behaviour spreads beyond the pyjamahadeen, we'll see two things. More people walking about with bandaged noses, or many, many disappointed people walking the streets, wondering why they have no friends.
--
"Society changes technology, not the other way round" - Linus Torvalds
PageRank(tm) has only ever been one of many factors that Google considered - according to Google, over a hundred other criteria are considered. Now that Google has been comprehensively gamed by SEOs - "auto-generated spam accounts for 30% of Google's results" - according to one SEO, PageRank(tm) is deployed for marketing purposes only.
Removing bogus catalogs from the search results is harder. For now, I use Yahoo! search, which isn't as clogged with zero value catalog pages as Google.
Financial analysts, previously anxious about profit margins declining to 20 per cent, praise Apple's move. With a profit margin of 6000 per cent, the vMac looks "set to restore Apple's fortunes," says one.
Walt Mossberg publishes a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal. "Apple has made the computer invisible!" he writes, excitedly.
"Arthur C Clarke once said that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'," writes Mossberg. "Apple has gone one step further - and made it indistinguishable from the air around it. It's the most beautiful computer I have ever used - since the last one they sent me."
Technology is often driven by producer-push not consumer demand, and lots of companies go out of business and their products deservedly fail.
Apple defies this trend because demand is inelastic, or in other words, it's a cult whose members will buy anything. Then justify it post-facto with crap like "Something has to drive the technology forward."
If steve could create a sphere with one single button on the outside, that glowed, and had any realistic expectation that it might sell, he would.
Yes, he probably would.
(and the button would be optional)
No, it would be mandatory. It would also be placed round the back near the bottom of the sphere, making it as hard as possible to reach.
Within two weeks first generation spheres would develop discoloration and hairline cracks. Apple fanatics would flood Slashdot telling users "to quit whining." Two months later Apple would acknowledge the problem and recall the early, faulty spheres.
Slashdot Mirror
Truth, Wikipedia-style, is the result not of empirical analysis but of an endurance contest for fanatics. Truth is defined by whoever has most time to waste^H^H^H spare.
The Wikipedia model has always repelled many potential expert contributors and over the past 18 months the project has started to lose good Admins too.
So, no surprise, only the dingbats and twiddlers are left. Who else but an anally retentive nut would want to stick around either engaging in or policing an edit war?
Wikipedia tells us a lot about the psychology of Asperger's sufferers but adds very little else to humanity by propagating unreliable "information" as fact. (See the definition of Pedophilia). It seems to be a fun game for the Aspies, though. They get to give each other titles, awards ("Barn Stars"), and pretend the world gives a fuck about them. And get real upset when it doesn't. Boo hoo.
Why, that's one every 10 weeks! This guy must be obsessed.
A lot of lawsuits it chooses to fight are symbolic, and the EFF doesn't seem to mind losing them. The best argument I've heard in favor of the EFF is that the ACLU is cyber-clueless. In which case the EFF can play an advisory role to the real lawyers at the ACLU.
Digg's comments are real trash. It's already astroturfed and the trolls haven't even come out to play yet. When you hear the word "collective intelligence" used to pimp a site, you know there's trouble ahead. Today's "collective intelligence" site is tomorrow's entropy graveyard
But most people don't give ah flying fuck about the process by which something is created. They want good quality end results.
Open source software helps other open source software people write open source software. I can hack together a new driver model for Linux and it would be rejected, because it would be crap.
But lots of bad entries remain in Wikipedia, because the people doing the accept/reject procedures often don't know what they're talking about.
So the peer production model that works for programmers doesn't work on Wikipedia.
You're really helping Wikipedia shed that Trekkie-Klingon image, aren't you?
More interestingly, Hertz is a proponent of blanket licenses:
Peer to peer file sharing is really just interactive radio consumers get to listen to exactly what they want when they want it. This demand is not addressed by the record industry. In fact, it cant be offered legally at any price. And as I think Ive illustrated, technology and reality will insure that supply finds its way to meet that demand...
and
My partner Fred and I therefor support compulsory blanket licensing. The same way restaurants, radio stations and elevators pay for background music, a tariff on communications technology could permit non-commercial file sharing to flourish, and copyright owners to benefit financially. File sharing is NOT piracy. Piracy is big fat guys manufacturing fake CDs in Mexico and selling them at swap meets. File sharing is tens of millions of music fans swapping copies of things they wouldnt otherwise buy. An ASCAP or BMI like pool of money allocated in an equitable way amongst copyright owners is the only solution that could be of benefit to creators, consumers and copyright owners. Compulsory blanket licensing for non-commercial file sharing is the equivalent of loosening a tourniquet tied around the entertainment industrys neck.
- ACLU Bill of Rights Dinner - Thursday, December 12, 2002
No, it's how everyday white suburban college-educated professionals publish on the web.
This time it was the professional broadcast media who exposed this scandal, thanks to mass media and helicopters. Not bloggers - and maybe you need a more diverse group of friends.
BOZEMAN, MT--The few people close to Mitch Delomme say that he doesn't realize the implications of his new podcast, an agonizingly personal 40-minute digitally recorded capsule of news, information, and trivia about the chronically lonely pizza-delivery man.
"I wanted to share something about myself," said Delomme, 48, who in the course of his life has been heavily involved in ham and CB radio, personal home-page construction, and participation in late-night community-access cable.
Delomme's podcast is currently available on all major subscription links, where it has attracted no attention.
He is Dave Winer!
This receptacle would need to be refilled periodically, like a Hoover bag, but in reverse. However Apple could patent the formula and interface, so you only use "genuine Apple Mouse grime".
I see Upside Margin Potential!
But why do the Asperger types who have only just discovered "remix" culture (20 years after it started, and 5 years after the cult of the DJ died out) have such a fear of creativity and originality? It's almost as great as their fear of having to pay for anything.
There is nothing original about sticking a loop behind a recording of Billie Holliday - and not one of her original recordings has been "improved" by this.
Styles are mutated into new shapes every day, but the copyright nerds can't seem to accept anything that hasn't first been piped through a DMA bus.
Who needs the convenience of protocols built into the browser?
Because it's a circus. Negroponte set the template when he created MIT's Media Lab. The goal was only ever to attract funding with high profile media gimmicks, which in practice involved lots of art students pinning carpet onto dumb robots. So he helped start Wired magazine to hype them. It was his baby, and Negroponte was the star columnist.
Depressingly the same philosophy has now infected Sun Labs: see Inside Sun Labs - the best and the 'bots and *especially* Sun's newest star lauds the PT Barnum way .
Good computer science means making computers that don't crash. It's hard to do, and it isn't sexy.
But outside of USA Today, Boing Boing, or NPR Radio - which has dropped the progressive politics in favor of gawp-eyed techno utopianism - I don't think this 80s thinking has very much traction. Go, Hannibal.
"Not everything bloggers have to say about brands correlates to the real world. Last summer, Umbria, working for a fast-food client, was monitoring Burger King Corp.'s Angus Burger and found it got some bad reviews from bloggers. Some were deriding Burger King's tongue-in-cheek TV ads that called the burger a diet food. Bloggers notwithstanding, the Angus Burger has become a hit.
In other news: Banana Republic cancelled a range of unisex one-piece pyjama suits, after discovering that its blog research didn't represent its potential market.
According to the autistic/geek/net nerd orthodoxy, cybernetic exchanges are much more truthful than anything found in real life. Because, y'know, they use computers!
Of course to someone who's never seen or tasted a fruit, an orange is an acid bomb, and a banana is a dangerous phallic intrusion.
But then GE, GM or Unilever don't set themselves up for it such s, with sanctimonious crap like Do No Evil as a corporate mission statement. Larry and Sergey may as well walk around with a "kick me here" sign stapled to their asses.
Maybe I got it all wrong describing Wikipedia as a religious cult. It's only really a religious crusade for techno utopian supporters in the media, and marketing consultants who blog. But it is a cult, and only in a cult can behavior like this flourish. Someday Wikipedia is going to be a sociological case study.
I'm bookmarking this part of the thread. It's as good an introduction to Wikipedia for outsiders as any article I've read about it. Thanks again, Orthogonal.
- Control the audio in the DVD player with a powerful equalizer
An equalizer!.
Not just an equalizer, an innovation never seen before on a personal computer, but a powerful equalizer! Take that, Redmond, Penguinistas, etc etc.
How? Will we walk around with pictures of our cats stapled to our foreheads? Or three foot long paper representations of blogrolls trailing behind us?
You may be right about reinforcement though, but probably not in the way you intended...
Blogs permit people to engage free speech without the usual consequences, to say anything they want without getting the punch on the nose they would get in the Real World.
If this behaviour spreads beyond the pyjamahadeen, we'll see two things. More people walking about with bandaged noses, or many, many disappointed people walking the streets, wondering why they have no friends.
--
"Society changes technology, not the other way round" - Linus Torvalds
Kudos, AC.
In other words you're guessing.
PageRank(tm) has only ever been one of many factors that Google considered - according to Google, over a hundred other criteria are considered. Now that Google has been comprehensively gamed by SEOs - "auto-generated spam accounts for 30% of Google's results" - according to one SEO, PageRank(tm) is deployed for marketing purposes only.
Removing bogus catalogs from the search results is harder. For now, I use Yahoo! search, which isn't as clogged with zero value catalog pages as Google.
Walt Mossberg publishes a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal. "Apple has made the computer invisible!" he writes, excitedly.
"Arthur C Clarke once said that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'," writes Mossberg. "Apple has gone one step further - and made it indistinguishable from the air around it. It's the most beautiful computer I have ever used - since the last one they sent me."
Apple defies this trend because demand is inelastic, or in other words, it's a cult whose members will buy anything. Then justify it post-facto with crap like "Something has to drive the technology forward."
Yes, he probably would.
(and the button would be optional)
No, it would be mandatory. It would also be placed round the back near the bottom of the sphere, making it as hard as possible to reach.
Within two weeks first generation spheres would develop discoloration and hairline cracks. Apple fanatics would flood Slashdot telling users "to quit whining." Two months later Apple would acknowledge the problem and recall the early, faulty spheres.