* And the person who told me this is trustworthy, and definately an expert in their field having 20+ years experience.
In my experience, Wikipedia admins don't act like you said. Unless you can show me the diffs, I don't believe you. I surmise that what probably happened is that the person who told you this was acting like a dick and refusing to justify their changes on the discussion page. There are policy rules (like no more than 3 reverts in 24 hours) that if you violate you get blocked even if your edits happen to be correct.
As computer/net usership continues to become a more mainstream thing, I think we'll see the balance of topics on Wikipedia become better.
Honestly, it's already quite balanced. Any non-nerd topic I can think of has an article, often a very long one. I get the impression people who complain about this kind of thing are typically nerds themselves, and only search for those topics! (Penny-Arcade's recent criticism of Wikipedia comes to mind...) I can't remember reading any article in the mainstream media criticizing Wikipedia for too much fancruft.
The lines of programming code upon which SCO based its claims had changed owners through acquisitions over time; at some point they were added into Linux.
This is giving way too much credit to SCO's claims. I don't think it was ever proved that a single line owned by SCO was found in Linux. As I recall they were basing their claims on free lines of BSD which were added to both SCO and Linux.
And after the furore over the biographical entry last year, Wikipedia changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing entries
This is simply wrong. Anonymous users can and always have been able to edit existing articles.
Well, this article is still pretty decent but I expect better from The Economist.
Or the people who have a large investment in ActiveX, and other IE technologies.
Er, certainly a few companies have inhouse ActiveX applications, and that's fine. I imagine your company is among them, or you wouldn't be making this post. But get a little perspective: those people represent a tiny fraction of the market.
*How very 1984'ish.
Uh huh, right. The grandparent "Pantero Blanco" controls a vast world-controlling network of agents, and he will soon deploy black helicopters to your house for daring to dispute his assessment of the best web browser.
A person steps up, makes an extraordinary claim, and the community of peers does its best to suggest every possibility for falsification.
The problem is that the claim wasn't that extraordinary. There was every reason to expect that someone would get Windows running on Intel Macs rather quickly. Why bother lying about it?
Purchases can genuinely increase your quality of life if chosen intelligently. Good medical care can save you much needless pain. Travelling to foreign countries is surely a meaningful life experience. Paying for sports clubs or social groups like dance classes can improve your health and widen your circle of friends. Sure that extra-large TV may not do much for you, but it's simply wrong to imply that no consumption can improve your happiness.
Funny, I tried using a Mac for three weeks or so (after 10 years of Windows use) and although it's true I didn't have much trouble adjusting, I continue to find Windows more comfortable. I mean, Expose in particular I really love, but I just don't think the Dock is as good as the taskbar for experienced users. It's too hard to tell which applications are started with that tiny arrow, and I keep starting applications by mistake when I only mean to switch applications. I'm also used to looking at the Taskbar to figure out which application is currently active (it's pressed in) and in Mac OS the menu bar at the top of the screen is just not obvious enough. Finally, the command line I find pretty lame compared to Linux (the GNU toolset is better than the BSD toolset) so I prefer to be on a Windows box with an ssh connection to a Linux box, with a shared fileserver.
Well, these are all pretty minor quibbles. But you say "vastly" increased productivity? There's nothing about Mac OS X that can give an experienced user more than slightly increased productivity.
Maybe you don't need it, but a lot of people do. For example, game developers often work with loads of images in similar formats. As a really simple example, you might want to convert a thousand files from gif to png. Or let's say you have 100 images containing blue text and you want to make the text white.
if you're editing and re-saving a PNG while keeping the layers un-flattened
It forces you to jump through these hoops because this is a dangerous operation: you're actually throwing away data by doing this. I'd rather go through this dialog a hundred times than to once lose my layered copy of an image I've been working on for hours because some UI designer thought it would be "friendly" to have it rapidly save in an unlayered file format without warnings.
The difference is that a seatbeat doesn't harm you, but antivirus software does. As incidents like this clearly show, antivirus software is practically a virus itself. It slows down your computer, it pesters you with popups ("Update to the newest definitions!"), and on rare occasions it deletes your files. It also potentially opens new backdoors on your network: a year or so ago, the Witty worm spread on top of a security flaw in a security program.
Frankly, I'd rather run the risk of being infected by a "real" virus occasionally (the vast majority of which do not delete your files), which I will then have to clean up, than intentionally install a McAfee/Norton-branded virus on my system and run it on a permanent basis.
No, I think we can put the blame on bad design here. What happened here was that the standard question-answer program was used to input the password, software which was never designed for security. The password getting put into a logfile was an unexpected side effect of that. If Ubuntu had been designed with security in mind, a special-purpose password input system would've been used in the first place.
Yeah, and the WMF bug I can understand --- it's legacy code written back in a time when no one cared about security. Leaving the root password in a plaintext file, though, is a colossal, inexcusable fuckup, and I don't care that they fixed it quickly. Whoever designed that installer should be ashamed of themselves.
That's nothing. The highly dangerous chemical Dihydrogen Monoxide has been allowed on aircraft for years, and calls for banning it have been summarily ignored. According to this essay at DHMO.org, it is known to frequently cause severe burns, and inhaling it is often lethal. Its MSDS states it forms dangerous explosive gases if you only mix it with calcium carbide.
Now that's a terrorist's dream. Methanol is the least of our problems.
Re:Google's Philosophy: a love and hate relationsh
on
Gauging Google's Gaffes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So you used dishonest techniques to increase your pagerank on Google (you claim unintentionally, but that's irrelevant) and Google knocked your site off its listing as a result. I don't see what the problem is.
You have a "love/hate relationship" with Google because you're running a website. My experience is that it's mainly webmasters and advertisers that have any dislike of Google, because they're so relentless at protecting the interests of their users.
Yes, I'm not criticizing him about it especially. I was mostly trying to poke him into giving his opinion, since he seems better-informed than I am.
Re:In a comparison, Ruby suffers for one big reaso
on
Exploring Active Record
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm not sure I get your neutral tone in that document. Even though the Unicode standard has certain minor flaws and is not entirely perfect for Japanese needs, do you really believe the arguments put forth by the Japanese nationalists at all justify the total rejection of Unicode in favor of some incompatible local standard? To me this seems a very clear case of politics getting in the way of sound technical decisions.
The only way to keep usage constant is to keep industry and population at current levels.
That would be assuming that industry uses its energy at 100% efficiency, which is certainly not the case. If you gave companies an incentive to improve their efficiency by substantially increasing the price of power, power usage would decrease but production would not decrease proportionately. Never underestimate the amount of bloat that naturally appears when there's no incentive to conserve (just think of the big American Fords compared to tiny Japanese/European cars).
If someone really wants to destroy a city, they can come up with a way that doesn't involve a fission bomb. I can think of a few just sitting here typing this reply.
Uh huh, you mean your magic city-destroying pixie dust? Unless the city is New Orleans, the only thing that can destroy it is a nuclear bomb or massive amounts of conventional weapons. A chemical weapon just don't cut it (fairly uneven and partial killing at best) and a biological weapon has 90% chance of not spreading into the epidemic you want.
That said, you're right that the number of nuclear plants has little to do with the probability that a nuclear bomb is built; all it takes is one or two to produce the necessary plutonium/enriched uranium.
Filemaker. Same general functionality as Access, more sanely designed. For those who've used it a long time ago, note that it's gotten a lot better since version 7. It still doesn't have the power or elegance of an SQL database from the point of view of a hardcore DB developer, but I've used it for several small businesses and they are very happy with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like just a regular paper to me. Lots of math problems have silly names. The guy didn't even make up the name himself.
What's an "actual writer" supposed to be? You think writers have a degree in writology?
How about his sig, then? Face it, you got trolled.
In my experience, Wikipedia admins don't act like you said. Unless you can show me the diffs, I don't believe you. I surmise that what probably happened is that the person who told you this was acting like a dick and refusing to justify their changes on the discussion page. There are policy rules (like no more than 3 reverts in 24 hours) that if you violate you get blocked even if your edits happen to be correct.
Honestly, it's already quite balanced. Any non-nerd topic I can think of has an article, often a very long one. I get the impression people who complain about this kind of thing are typically nerds themselves, and only search for those topics! (Penny-Arcade's recent criticism of Wikipedia comes to mind...) I can't remember reading any article in the mainstream media criticizing Wikipedia for too much fancruft.
This is giving way too much credit to SCO's claims. I don't think it was ever proved that a single line owned by SCO was found in Linux. As I recall they were basing their claims on free lines of BSD which were added to both SCO and Linux.
And after the furore over the biographical entry last year, Wikipedia changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing entries
This is simply wrong. Anonymous users can and always have been able to edit existing articles.
Well, this article is still pretty decent but I expect better from The Economist.
Er, certainly a few companies have inhouse ActiveX applications, and that's fine. I imagine your company is among them, or you wouldn't be making this post. But get a little perspective: those people represent a tiny fraction of the market.
*How very 1984'ish.
Uh huh, right. The grandparent "Pantero Blanco" controls a vast world-controlling network of agents, and he will soon deploy black helicopters to your house for daring to dispute his assessment of the best web browser.
"Jokes" which are based on misconceptions aren't funny, they're just stupid.
Also, TSS's system is really not that great. It gets pretty damn shallow after a few days of practice.
The problem is that the claim wasn't that extraordinary. There was every reason to expect that someone would get Windows running on Intel Macs rather quickly. Why bother lying about it?
Purchases can genuinely increase your quality of life if chosen intelligently. Good medical care can save you much needless pain. Travelling to foreign countries is surely a meaningful life experience. Paying for sports clubs or social groups like dance classes can improve your health and widen your circle of friends. Sure that extra-large TV may not do much for you, but it's simply wrong to imply that no consumption can improve your happiness.
Just wanted to say, great post.
Well, these are all pretty minor quibbles. But you say "vastly" increased productivity? There's nothing about Mac OS X that can give an experienced user more than slightly increased productivity.
Maybe you don't need it, but a lot of people do. For example, game developers often work with loads of images in similar formats. As a really simple example, you might want to convert a thousand files from gif to png. Or let's say you have 100 images containing blue text and you want to make the text white.
It forces you to jump through these hoops because this is a dangerous operation: you're actually throwing away data by doing this. I'd rather go through this dialog a hundred times than to once lose my layered copy of an image I've been working on for hours because some UI designer thought it would be "friendly" to have it rapidly save in an unlayered file format without warnings.
Frankly, I'd rather run the risk of being infected by a "real" virus occasionally (the vast majority of which do not delete your files), which I will then have to clean up, than intentionally install a McAfee/Norton-branded virus on my system and run it on a permanent basis.
No, I think we can put the blame on bad design here. What happened here was that the standard question-answer program was used to input the password, software which was never designed for security. The password getting put into a logfile was an unexpected side effect of that. If Ubuntu had been designed with security in mind, a special-purpose password input system would've been used in the first place.
Yeah, and the WMF bug I can understand --- it's legacy code written back in a time when no one cared about security. Leaving the root password in a plaintext file, though, is a colossal, inexcusable fuckup, and I don't care that they fixed it quickly. Whoever designed that installer should be ashamed of themselves.
Now that's a terrorist's dream. Methanol is the least of our problems.
You have a "love/hate relationship" with Google because you're running a website. My experience is that it's mainly webmasters and advertisers that have any dislike of Google, because they're so relentless at protecting the interests of their users.
Yes, I'm not criticizing him about it especially. I was mostly trying to poke him into giving his opinion, since he seems better-informed than I am.
I'm not sure I get your neutral tone in that document. Even though the Unicode standard has certain minor flaws and is not entirely perfect for Japanese needs, do you really believe the arguments put forth by the Japanese nationalists at all justify the total rejection of Unicode in favor of some incompatible local standard? To me this seems a very clear case of politics getting in the way of sound technical decisions.
That would be assuming that industry uses its energy at 100% efficiency, which is certainly not the case. If you gave companies an incentive to improve their efficiency by substantially increasing the price of power, power usage would decrease but production would not decrease proportionately. Never underestimate the amount of bloat that naturally appears when there's no incentive to conserve (just think of the big American Fords compared to tiny Japanese/European cars).
Uh huh, you mean your magic city-destroying pixie dust? Unless the city is New Orleans, the only thing that can destroy it is a nuclear bomb or massive amounts of conventional weapons. A chemical weapon just don't cut it (fairly uneven and partial killing at best) and a biological weapon has 90% chance of not spreading into the epidemic you want.
That said, you're right that the number of nuclear plants has little to do with the probability that a nuclear bomb is built; all it takes is one or two to produce the necessary plutonium/enriched uranium.
Filemaker. Same general functionality as Access, more sanely designed. For those who've used it a long time ago, note that it's gotten a lot better since version 7. It still doesn't have the power or elegance of an SQL database from the point of view of a hardcore DB developer, but I've used it for several small businesses and they are very happy with it.