McDonald's may not be the best restaurant in the world, but I'd say you'd have a hard time arguing that it's doomed to go out of business because everyone's flocking to those restaurants where you can pay a week's wage on a meal prepared by a cook that got three stars from Michellin or Gault Millau. That's not gonna happen, and in fact, I'd also say that many people who eat at McDonald's (or other allegedly low-quality restaurants) are not even unhappy with it or secretly wishing they could afford those fancier restaurants and escape from that McDonald's fast-food hell.
That being said, I also think the comparison between restaurants and encyclopedias as such is not a good one. In a restaurant, much of the quality of the final product depends on a) the quality of the ingredients, b) the skill of the cook and c) the amount of time and energy the cook can use for preparing the dish. With McDonald's, all of these are usually pretty low; McDonald's cooks don't go to the market in the morning to buy fresh vegetables and the like to use on that day, they don't adjust their menus based on what kinds of vegetables they can find that meet their quality requirements, they are not masters of their trade, and they usually cannot invest hours into "fine-tuning" (so to speak) a dish until it is absolutely perfect: McDonald's is about quantity first and quality second.
The same does not hold true for Wikipedia: the ingredients for an encyclopedic article (that is, information) cannot be compared to the ingredients a chef would use.
Information comes in two qualities only, namely "false" and "true". Information is also almost entirely always available; most of the time, Google will be a good starting point, and you can also check books (whether your own or ones from a library), traditional encyclopedias and so on.
Writing a good and nicely flowing article needs a bit of skill, but it's nowhere near comparable to the amount of skill and expertise a good chef will need before he can even think about getting a star; basically, anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence can write a good article. Furthermore, even if your article is not perfect, it will still be a base upon which other people can build: you don't *have* to make it perfect all on your own.
And of course, unlike chefs (those employed in restaurants, that is, rather than cooking for their own pleasure only), Wikipedia editors typically do have an unlimited amount of time and energy they can invest, at least in the sense of not having a boss who tells them to get things done by this or that time and not having to take into consideration that the time they invest costs money and that the finished product needs to be worth at least as much.
With regard to your response to point 2, based on my personal experience, I think that the amount of inaccurate information in Wikipedia is, typically, vastly overrated. There certainly is some, I'm sure, but the idea that a substantial amount of Wikipedia's articles and the information contained therein are factually inaccurate probably stems from the fact that Wikipedia *does* admit that inaccuracies happen. Not that Wikipedia should claim there is none, of course, but I think that this is mostly a case of "things might be like this" becoming "things are like this" in people's minds rather than an actual fact. It would be interesting to see a study on it, though, of course.
One might add these aren't mutually exclusive. It would be perfectly possible, for example, to take a "snapshot" of Wikipedia, have the articles reviewed by (paid?) experts, grammar and spelling errors corrected, rubbish that crept in weeded out and all that and then publish that "stable" version - whether it's on a website (presumably a static one, not a Wiki), on CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/... or even in print or another medium.
The GFDL under which all Wikipedia content is licensed does allow you to do that. In fact, it already *has* been done, too: a snapshot of the German Wikipedia was published on CD-ROM (also available for download as an ISO image) last September, IIRC.
Errors like that can slip in in any encyclopedia; the difference between Wikipedia and - say - Britannica is not that that the former is more error-prone but rather that a) it is admitted that errors can, in fact, happen and b) it is possible to correct an error when you come across it.
Furthermore, you're making another crucial mistake (one that McHenry also made): you assume that people are, generally, stupid, uninformed and/or not able/willing to check facts. Now, that may be true for many people, of course, but it's not true for *all* people, and in fact, I'd say that anyone who makes substantial edits on Wikipedia is likely to have a reasonable amount of intelligence at least.
Also, new articles in Wikipedia *are* being checked by others (I'm doing that myself, some time), and that *does* include checking for factual accuracy just as much as it includes checking for spelling errors (like "intelligen"), grammatical mistakes and the like.
Finally, last I checked, George Washington's birthday as listed in Wikipedia is, in fact, correct, so that's not a good example by any means.
If you'd read the article in full, you'd notice that Aaron does not, in fact, claim that it does. Quite the opposite; unlike McHenry, he specifically states that there are several ways to define quality and that coverage (like cohesion) is one of them (but not the only one).
That being said, "coverage" does not refer to how widely-known/widely-used a certain piece of information is. It's not about how much coverage an article (or a music video) gets; it's about how much coverage it *contains*. What Krowne means is that a longer article with more information and more details has a higher quality (measured in the coverage metric, that is) - provided that the information is correct, but that goes without saying -, not that an article that's read by more people is of a higher quality (even though in Wikipedia's collaborative model where everyone can edit articles, at least, an article with more readers will likely reach a higher coverage and/or cohesion, too).
In its own specialized field, yes - IIRC, this is the field that Ada actually was developed for. It's not a language that's generally-used outside of that field, though - and, for that matter, there are many languages that are still alive in their niches. COBOL and Fortran are two that immediately come to mind, but I'm sure there several others.
Actually, if I didn't know you're probably referring to Ada, I'd guess that the answer to both questions is "Perl".
Of course, technically, I spend the least time debugging other people's Ada code, too (as opposed to other people's C and Perl code), but that's just because I never debug any Ada code at all...
The most important optimization is still the optimization of the algorithms you use. Unless under the most extreme circumstances, it doesn't really matter anymore whether the compiler might generate code that takes two cycles more than the optimal solution on today's CPUs; instead of attempting to work around the compiler's perceived (or maybe real) weaknesses, it's probably much better to review your code on a semantic level and see if you can speed things up by doing them differently.
The only exception I can think of is when you're doing standard stuff where the best (general) solution is well-known, like sorting; however, in those cases, you shouldn't reinvent the wheel, anyway, but instead use a (presumably already highly-optimized) library.
It's similar for me. My (cheap) PC came without any media whatsoever except for some driver CDs; however, the manufacturer reserved a partition of about 4 or 5 GB and put a "rescue system" there, which you can use to wipe out your entire hard disk and put it back into the state it was in when you bought the PC.
Yes, that also means you lose all your personal data, settings, installed programs and so on unless you back them up - which is something I wouldn't trust people like my parents to know how to do. Sure, they know how to copy their own files to a USB memory stick, but backing up the registry, for example, is beyond them - they don't even know what the registry is.
The only positive thing is that from what I gather, I don't need to reactive Windows if I do that because it's a preactivated OEM version. But still, if I had to reinstall windows (I haven't so far, fortunately), I doubt I'd take this route.
Maybe. But not everyone is like that, and advertising is not really about getting *everyone* to buy your products. If you can get 99.9% of the people to do (or at least consider doing) so, that's good enough. There is a certain sweet spot with maximum effectiveness and minimum effort/investment.
Here's a convenient link for those too lazy to Google for it: NukeAnything. Note, however, that this is a one-time nuke only; the object will be back the next time you view the page.
You are making a big mistake if you think that click-through rates are the only important factor when it comes to ads, though.
Think about ads on TV - obviously, noone ever clicks those. People are just (passively) subjected to them while they wait for their favourite shows/movies/... to start/resume, and many will in fact use the break to do other things, or turn of the sound so they don't have to listen to the ads (I do that), or switch to another channel (my parents do that), or other such things.
Nevertheless, ads on TV are a big market, and more or less every major company uses them. So... why? The answer is that click-through rates, or, more generally, the "omgcool-I-need-to-have-this-right-now" response isn't neither realistic to expect nor important. What *is* important is exposure to the product, which *will* un/sub/pre-consciously influence you. Have you ever thought just *why* you buy a particular brand of pizza at the supermarket? Sure, you may say "I like this brand" etc., and that certainly plays a big role, too, but I think it's safe to say that advertising also does (not just for pizzas, of course, but for any product you buy). More often than not, the point of advertising is to make sure the people subjected to it know that the product or service even *exists*.
Yeah. It's much better to live in a country where exposed nipples cause national scandals and where cartoon characters like Spongebob are accused of promoting the "gay agenda" (whatever *that* is).
Not to mention a country where people get interrogated by the Secret Service for saying (quote) "Bush is out of control" in Internet chatrooms (look it up, it happened!) and similar things...
I don't want to defend what's happening there in Germany, really, but sometimes, it's good to remember that nobody's perfect, and that just because a country's constitution talks about free speech, it doesn't actually mean that everything's fine and dandy.
While you're right, basically, it may be worth pointing out that the USA has its own share of problems in this regard, too, only that it's nudity and sexuality that's frowned upon rather than violence.
Google does that based on your IP, yes. However, there is a link to the english version at the bottom of the page, and going to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ will always get you the english version, too.
English is the first foreign language you learn in 99.9% of all German schools (from fifth grade on), so I think *that* wouldn't be much of a problem, especially since Google's interface is clean enough to be used even when you don't understand the language it's in.
You don't need to run Linux for chkrootkit. More or less any Un*x or Un*x-like OS will do fine:
"chkrootkit has been tested on: Linux 2.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.6.x, FreeBSD 2.2.x, 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, OpenBSD 2.x and 3.x., NetBSD 1.6.x, Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, 8.0 and 9.0, HP-UX 11, Tru64 and BSDI."
Why not? The purpose of a rootkit is usually not so much to take over a box (trivial on a standard windows installation), but rather to hide the fact that such a take-over occured.
Slashdot Mirror
McDonald's may not be the best restaurant in the world, but I'd say you'd have a hard time arguing that it's doomed to go out of business because everyone's flocking to those restaurants where you can pay a week's wage on a meal prepared by a cook that got three stars from Michellin or Gault Millau. That's not gonna happen, and in fact, I'd also say that many people who eat at McDonald's (or other allegedly low-quality restaurants) are not even unhappy with it or secretly wishing they could afford those fancier restaurants and escape from that McDonald's fast-food hell.
That being said, I also think the comparison between restaurants and encyclopedias as such is not a good one. In a restaurant, much of the quality of the final product depends on a) the quality of the ingredients, b) the skill of the cook and c) the amount of time and energy the cook can use for preparing the dish. With McDonald's, all of these are usually pretty low; McDonald's cooks don't go to the market in the morning to buy fresh vegetables and the like to use on that day, they don't adjust their menus based on what kinds of vegetables they can find that meet their quality requirements, they are not masters of their trade, and they usually cannot invest hours into "fine-tuning" (so to speak) a dish until it is absolutely perfect: McDonald's is about quantity first and quality second.
The same does not hold true for Wikipedia: the ingredients for an encyclopedic article (that is, information) cannot be compared to the ingredients a chef would use.
Information comes in two qualities only, namely "false" and "true". Information is also almost entirely always available; most of the time, Google will be a good starting point, and you can also check books (whether your own or ones from a library), traditional encyclopedias and so on.
Writing a good and nicely flowing article needs a bit of skill, but it's nowhere near comparable to the amount of skill and expertise a good chef will need before he can even think about getting a star; basically, anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence can write a good article. Furthermore, even if your article is not perfect, it will still be a base upon which other people can build: you don't *have* to make it perfect all on your own.
And of course, unlike chefs (those employed in restaurants, that is, rather than cooking for their own pleasure only), Wikipedia editors typically do have an unlimited amount of time and energy they can invest, at least in the sense of not having a boss who tells them to get things done by this or that time and not having to take into consideration that the time they invest costs money and that the finished product needs to be worth at least as much.
With regard to your response to point 2, based on my personal experience, I think that the amount of inaccurate information in Wikipedia is, typically, vastly overrated. There certainly is some, I'm sure, but the idea that a substantial amount of Wikipedia's articles and the information contained therein are factually inaccurate probably stems from the fact that Wikipedia *does* admit that inaccuracies happen. Not that Wikipedia should claim there is none, of course, but I think that this is mostly a case of "things might be like this" becoming "things are like this" in people's minds rather than an actual fact. It would be interesting to see a study on it, though, of course.
One might add these aren't mutually exclusive. It would be perfectly possible, for example, to take a "snapshot" of Wikipedia, have the articles reviewed by (paid?) experts, grammar and spelling errors corrected, rubbish that crept in weeded out and all that and then publish that "stable" version - whether it's on a website (presumably a static one, not a Wiki), on CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/... or even in print or another medium.
The GFDL under which all Wikipedia content is licensed does allow you to do that. In fact, it already *has* been done, too: a snapshot of the German Wikipedia was published on CD-ROM (also available for download as an ISO image) last September, IIRC.
Errors like that can slip in in any encyclopedia; the difference between Wikipedia and - say - Britannica is not that that the former is more error-prone but rather that a) it is admitted that errors can, in fact, happen and b) it is possible to correct an error when you come across it.
Furthermore, you're making another crucial mistake (one that McHenry also made): you assume that people are, generally, stupid, uninformed and/or not able/willing to check facts. Now, that may be true for many people, of course, but it's not true for *all* people, and in fact, I'd say that anyone who makes substantial edits on Wikipedia is likely to have a reasonable amount of intelligence at least.
Also, new articles in Wikipedia *are* being checked by others (I'm doing that myself, some time), and that *does* include checking for factual accuracy just as much as it includes checking for spelling errors (like "intelligen"), grammatical mistakes and the like.
Finally, last I checked, George Washington's birthday as listed in Wikipedia is, in fact, correct, so that's not a good example by any means.
If you'd read the article in full, you'd notice that Aaron does not, in fact, claim that it does. Quite the opposite; unlike McHenry, he specifically states that there are several ways to define quality and that coverage (like cohesion) is one of them (but not the only one).
That being said, "coverage" does not refer to how widely-known/widely-used a certain piece of information is. It's not about how much coverage an article (or a music video) gets; it's about how much coverage it *contains*. What Krowne means is that a longer article with more information and more details has a higher quality (measured in the coverage metric, that is) - provided that the information is correct, but that goes without saying -, not that an article that's read by more people is of a higher quality (even though in Wikipedia's collaborative model where everyone can edit articles, at least, an article with more readers will likely reach a higher coverage and/or cohesion, too).
In its own specialized field, yes - IIRC, this is the field that Ada actually was developed for. It's not a language that's generally-used outside of that field, though - and, for that matter, there are many languages that are still alive in their niches. COBOL and Fortran are two that immediately come to mind, but I'm sure there several others.
Actually, if I didn't know you're probably referring to Ada, I'd guess that the answer to both questions is "Perl".
Of course, technically, I spend the least time debugging other people's Ada code, too (as opposed to other people's C and Perl code), but that's just because I never debug any Ada code at all...
Not just that - you never know whether the compiler you're using is advanced enough to optimize away comments!
I actually prefer to bash Python, myself. Ada is merely obsolete; Python is an abomination. :)
Ada? o.o I can understand Java and Perl, yes, but who on earth still uses or recommends Ada, especially on Slashdot?
The most important optimization is still the optimization of the algorithms you use. Unless under the most extreme circumstances, it doesn't really matter anymore whether the compiler might generate code that takes two cycles more than the optimal solution on today's CPUs; instead of attempting to work around the compiler's perceived (or maybe real) weaknesses, it's probably much better to review your code on a semantic level and see if you can speed things up by doing them differently.
The only exception I can think of is when you're doing standard stuff where the best (general) solution is well-known, like sorting; however, in those cases, you shouldn't reinvent the wheel, anyway, but instead use a (presumably already highly-optimized) library.
Maybe not Indiana, but India sure does, and most M$ customers probably won't be able to tell the difference. ;)
(It's funny. Laugh.)
It's similar for me. My (cheap) PC came without any media whatsoever except for some driver CDs; however, the manufacturer reserved a partition of about 4 or 5 GB and put a "rescue system" there, which you can use to wipe out your entire hard disk and put it back into the state it was in when you bought the PC.
Yes, that also means you lose all your personal data, settings, installed programs and so on unless you back them up - which is something I wouldn't trust people like my parents to know how to do. Sure, they know how to copy their own files to a USB memory stick, but backing up the registry, for example, is beyond them - they don't even know what the registry is.
The only positive thing is that from what I gather, I don't need to reactive Windows if I do that because it's a preactivated OEM version. But still, if I had to reinstall windows (I haven't so far, fortunately), I doubt I'd take this route.
Maybe. But not everyone is like that, and advertising is not really about getting *everyone* to buy your products. If you can get 99.9% of the people to do (or at least consider doing) so, that's good enough. There is a certain sweet spot with maximum effectiveness and minimum effort/investment.
Here's a convenient link for those too lazy to Google for it: NukeAnything. Note, however, that this is a one-time nuke only; the object will be back the next time you view the page.
You are making a big mistake if you think that click-through rates are the only important factor when it comes to ads, though.
Think about ads on TV - obviously, noone ever clicks those. People are just (passively) subjected to them while they wait for their favourite shows/movies/... to start/resume, and many will in fact use the break to do other things, or turn of the sound so they don't have to listen to the ads (I do that), or switch to another channel (my parents do that), or other such things.
Nevertheless, ads on TV are a big market, and more or less every major company uses them. So... why? The answer is that click-through rates, or, more generally, the "omgcool-I-need-to-have-this-right-now" response isn't neither realistic to expect nor important. What *is* important is exposure to the product, which *will* un/sub/pre-consciously influence you. Have you ever thought just *why* you buy a particular brand of pizza at the supermarket? Sure, you may say "I like this brand" etc., and that certainly plays a big role, too, but I think it's safe to say that advertising also does (not just for pizzas, of course, but for any product you buy). More often than not, the point of advertising is to make sure the people subjected to it know that the product or service even *exists*.
Actually, those body parts (nipples) are common to more or less 100% of the population. :)
Thanks! Now I finally know what I'm up to.
Yeah. It's much better to live in a country where exposed nipples cause national scandals and where cartoon characters like Spongebob are accused of promoting the "gay agenda" (whatever *that* is).
Not to mention a country where people get interrogated by the Secret Service for saying (quote) "Bush is out of control" in Internet chatrooms (look it up, it happened!) and similar things...
I don't want to defend what's happening there in Germany, really, but sometimes, it's good to remember that nobody's perfect, and that just because a country's constitution talks about free speech, it doesn't actually mean that everything's fine and dandy.
While you're right, basically, it may be worth pointing out that the USA has its own share of problems in this regard, too, only that it's nudity and sexuality that's frowned upon rather than violence.
Google does that based on your IP, yes. However, there is a link to the english version at the bottom of the page, and going to http://www.google.com/intl/en/ will always get you the english version, too.
English is the first foreign language you learn in 99.9% of all German schools (from fifth grade on), so I think *that* wouldn't be much of a problem, especially since Google's interface is clean enough to be used even when you don't understand the language it's in.
"--×oe"? Something tells me that the editor should have checked the blurb instead of blindly hitting submit.
Oh, wait, it's timothy. My bad. He's proven already he's not able to take care of editorial duties...
Or use a SCSI hard disk with jumper-enabled hardware write protection (enabled after a known-good install, of course). :)
You don't need to run Linux for chkrootkit. More or less any Un*x or Un*x-like OS will do fine:
"chkrootkit has been tested on: Linux 2.0.x, 2.2.x, 2.4.x and 2.6.x, FreeBSD 2.2.x, 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, OpenBSD 2.x and 3.x., NetBSD 1.6.x, Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, 8.0 and 9.0, HP-UX 11, Tru64 and BSDI."
Why not? The purpose of a rootkit is usually not so much to take over a box (trivial on a standard windows installation), but rather to hide the fact that such a take-over occured.