Just for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know who the parent poster Baldrson is, he's a crank with wildly "unconventional" views, who seems unwilling to compromise. That the likes of him are always getting reverted is a sign that Wikipedia is working properly.
Re:The responses to this post are fascinating
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
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· Score: 1
The absolute best of the bunch, though, has to be the one who claimed that the fact that Knuth is Christian places his computer science research in question!
Yeah, I guess we should then also ditch the science of Newton and Gauss, both of whom were devoutly religious.
There is a difference in not taking time to read and not being able to read.
Actually, not really. Literacy is a continuum. Nobody except people with brain damage are completely unable to recognize our 26 letters and simple words written using them. People defined as being "illiterate" are just sufficiently inept that it is unpleasant and time-consuming for them to read, so they avoid doing so (and thus remain illiterate).
someone who instead knowingly commits to spending the rest of their life, year after year, trying to achieve something?
Doesn't that make secretaries and manufacturing workers heroes too? They are working to the best of their capacity to support their families. No, heroism involves sacrifice, and working all your life at something you love like Knuth is no sacrifice. If anything manufacturing workers are more heroic than Knuth because many of them hate their jobs but suffer on anyway.
Your definition seems like a Special-Olympics one that makes us all heroes. Look, Knuth is a great guy but he's not a hero.
To be fair, they appear to have changed heart recently. Their CEO has publicly stated that they are trying to improve on their past players (see this slashdot interview), and Realplayer 10 is notably less nasty than the previous versions. The free player link on their website is much easier to find now too.
sue large companies for spilling hot coffee on themselves
This case was actually less silly than it sounds. McDonalds was intentionally serving their coffee hotter than safe levels in order to make people take longer to drink it, thus decreasing the number of free refills they had to give out and saving them money. They were repeatedly warned about this but continued serving the coffee too hot, thus the lawsuit.
To assume that/. does not have some system of quid-pro-quo in place to ensure front-page story placement for a client, especially given all the non-Google/EFF slashvertisements, is bizarrely naive.
Marge: Do you want your son to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or a sleazy male stripper? Homer: Can't he be both, like the late Earl Warren? Marge: Earl Warren wasn't a stripper! Homer: Now, who's being naive?
Haven't you considered that maybe the Slashdot editors are just silly fanboys of Google and the EFF who'll report anything they do? Lots of such people exist, as you'll see just by reading the comments in this thread (... or are they all shills too, according to you?)
Your conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense. Everything I know about the slashdot editors tells me they are dumb (duplicate stories, bad grammar), but nothing tells me they are corrupt. When in doubt, assume stupidity rather than malice. Also, Google is one thing but accusing a nonprofit entity like the EFF of bad business practices is bizarre.
So...if Wikipedia had been around way back when... the "world-is-flat" crowd would have edited out the silly "world-is-round" guy, right?
No. The Wikipedia article would've said roughly "Many people, including X, Y, Z and believe the Earth is flat, but others (such as A, B, C) believe the Earth is round. Here are the arguments for and against each position."
That's the meaning of Wikipedia's NPOV policy. Only if no one believed in a round Earth at all would the viewpoint not be mentioned.
The asian mindset doesn't really understand the open source concept and would prefer reliable software with a strong manufacture behind it.
This is nonsense. The real reason is that Linux/BSD currently have poorly integrated support for CJK characters. There are lots of different standards and programs, it's a pain to input them using the keyboard and everything is incompatible. You might need to lots of additional configuration to do a task as simple as editing a text file in the input method you prefer.
So someone can show their individuality (just like everone else.)
[Brian, to a crowd:] "You are all individuals!"
[Crowd] "YES YES WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!"
[Brian:] "You are all different."
[Crowd] "YES WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT"
[Lone voice in the crowd:] "I'm not."
[Person next to him]: "SHH!"
I don't think anyone argues here that identity theft isn't theft.
I for one would. A more accurate description of this crime would be "impersonation". Theft can be (and often is) involved as an enabling factor or consequence of it, but the impersonation itself isn't theft.
Similarly, copying MP3s is not, strictly speaking, "theft" or "piracy" but "copyright infringement".
All this has nothing to do with whether these acts are right or wrong. It's just a question of using precise vocabulary to avoid getting muddled. Calling a wide variety of unrelated illegal acts "theft" can mislead.
"What is making the site slow is mainly configuration and software issues."
What I'm saying is that if Wikipedia had, say, 200 servers instead of 40, it would probably run quite nicely regardless of software problems. Having lots of extra capacity is how most companies with money manage to stay reliable through tough stretches. It's obvious to me that Wikipedia doesn't have nearly enough machines for its size, and although "one stops working" was an exaggeration, I don't think I'm "flagrantry wrong".
Old games have vary difrent gameplay . Namely the old do this or die. Hell look at Halo vs Contra and you see a world of difrence in how much pure skill it takes to beat the game.
There are plenty of very hard new games; you just aren't looking in the right places. Jak II, Ikaruga, Beatmania IIDX, for example.
I don't get the impression the servers were "misconfigured" so much as they weren't optimized to squeeze every last bit of life out of them. As I understand it, resolving the "misconfigurations" required writing whole new load-balancing software.
Wikipedia seems to have just barely enough machines to handle its load, and if one stops working or there's a little inefficiency the whole thing slows to a crawl. By any reasonable standard this is "not enough servers". Virtually any other organization running a site this big would have a lot of extra machines.
Wikipedia is under the control of the Wikimedia foundation; Google's programmers wouldn't be making any changes to the way it works. This is just an offer to provide servers and bandwidth.
But gameplay-wise, Rez is just a simple on-rails shooter, and its delayed targeting system is IMHO even a step backwards from traditional instant shooting. Time Crisis 2 and the original SNES Starfox are superior to Rez, gameplay-wise. The only reason to play Rez is for the visuals and sound effects.
And try to imagine Castlevania: SOTN without the wonderful flowing sprite artwork of Alucard. Imagine if he was just a colored square. Would the game really be as enjoyable?
This is not to bash Rez and SOTN; they are very fine games that achieve what they're trying to do. What I'm saying is that a game is an organic experience, and you can't isolate out one element like "gameplay" and say that's all that matters. You're right that graphics for the sake of bland "realism" (like in too many FPSes) are usually not worthwhile; but visuals that are fresh, original and inspiring (like those of Rez) and that work together with the gameplay to create an atmosphere (like SOTN) can be what makes a game worth playing.
The bottom line is that optimization is rarely the best thing a developer can be doing with his time. There's a lot more you can do with "a day" than tweak a poorly thought out algorithm. By all means optimize if your program is as slow as molasses and your profiling shows that a particular section of your code is at fault. Otherwise, good programming practice is to think about other things.
Yeah, there's really no reason to do things that way since IIRC the MP3 format is divided into nice streamable blocks. That would be spectacularly lazy design if true.
There's no objective standard --- yes, everyone would agree with you on that. But then you jump from this to the assumption that the only reasonable standard is what the "public" likes? Surely you wouldn't claim that the public's opinion is valuable when it comes to, say, science or the finer details of government policy. So why this sudden respect for it when it comes to art? Haven't you considered that art might be something that one can develop expertise in by consuming and creating a lot of it, just like any other type of culture?
To start, one of the features regarding Sokal's hoax and also GLARINGLY ABSENT from the wikipedia entry is the initial efforts by Social Text's editorial board to have Sokal revise his article.
Read carefully before you make accusations in all caps. The following sentence is in the Wikipedia article (and was there before you posted your comment):
They also described their earlier dealings with Sokal when the article was first sent in: they said the article wasn't very good and that Sokal refused to make several changes they suggested, and they only accepted it because it was of relevance to a special issue they happened to be preparing.
No, if they deleted people's mail then people would simply say, "It's beta. You shouldn't trust beta software with your private data."
Yes, they would say exactly that, and then they would follow their own advice and stop using gmail.
Gmail is probably staying invitation-only for this long because they're steeling themselves for gigantic server loads when it goes public. It's not because they don't want to be "accountable".
Good. Definitely good. Honestly, Wikipedia is running one of the world's most popular websites (80 million hits/day) on a shoestring donation-based budget, and mirrors like this help them save bandwidth and server power. Most people who would be inclined to seriously contribute to Wikipedia have already heard about it anyway.
Yes, but if they really deleted people's mail it would cause a massive PR scandal and would seriously hurt their business. They're not stupid enough to do something like that. Being "beta" gives them a cover for things like occasional downtime and unexpected featureset changes. But come on, you don't need to worry about actual data loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for the benefit of anyone who doesn't know who the parent poster Baldrson is, he's a crank with wildly "unconventional" views, who seems unwilling to compromise. That the likes of him are always getting reverted is a sign that Wikipedia is working properly.
Yeah, I guess we should then also ditch the science of Newton and Gauss, both of whom were devoutly religious.
Actually, not really. Literacy is a continuum. Nobody except people with brain damage are completely unable to recognize our 26 letters and simple words written using them. People defined as being "illiterate" are just sufficiently inept that it is unpleasant and time-consuming for them to read, so they avoid doing so (and thus remain illiterate).
Doesn't that make secretaries and manufacturing workers heroes too? They are working to the best of their capacity to support their families. No, heroism involves sacrifice, and working all your life at something you love like Knuth is no sacrifice. If anything manufacturing workers are more heroic than Knuth because many of them hate their jobs but suffer on anyway.
Your definition seems like a Special-Olympics one that makes us all heroes. Look, Knuth is a great guy but he's not a hero.
To be fair, they appear to have changed heart recently. Their CEO has publicly stated that they are trying to improve on their past players (see this slashdot interview), and Realplayer 10 is notably less nasty than the previous versions. The free player link on their website is much easier to find now too.
This case was actually less silly than it sounds. McDonalds was intentionally serving their coffee hotter than safe levels in order to make people take longer to drink it, thus decreasing the number of free refills they had to give out and saving them money. They were repeatedly warned about this but continued serving the coffee too hot, thus the lawsuit.
Marge: Do you want your son to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or a sleazy male stripper?
Homer: Can't he be both, like the late Earl Warren?
Marge: Earl Warren wasn't a stripper!
Homer: Now, who's being naive?
Your conspiracy theory doesn't make any sense. Everything I know about the slashdot editors tells me they are dumb (duplicate stories, bad grammar), but nothing tells me they are corrupt. When in doubt, assume stupidity rather than malice. Also, Google is one thing but accusing a nonprofit entity like the EFF of bad business practices is bizarre.
No. The Wikipedia article would've said roughly "Many people, including X, Y, Z and believe the Earth is flat, but others (such as A, B, C) believe the Earth is round. Here are the arguments for and against each position."
That's the meaning of Wikipedia's NPOV policy. Only if no one believed in a round Earth at all would the viewpoint not be mentioned.
This is nonsense. The real reason is that Linux/BSD currently have poorly integrated support for CJK characters. There are lots of different standards and programs, it's a pain to input them using the keyboard and everything is incompatible. You might need to lots of additional configuration to do a task as simple as editing a text file in the input method you prefer.
[Brian, to a crowd:] "You are all individuals!"
[Crowd] "YES YES WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!"
[Brian:] "You are all different."
[Crowd] "YES WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT"
[Lone voice in the crowd:] "I'm not."
[Person next to him]: "SHH!"
I for one would. A more accurate description of this crime would be "impersonation". Theft can be (and often is) involved as an enabling factor or consequence of it, but the impersonation itself isn't theft.
Similarly, copying MP3s is not, strictly speaking, "theft" or "piracy" but "copyright infringement".
All this has nothing to do with whether these acts are right or wrong. It's just a question of using precise vocabulary to avoid getting muddled. Calling a wide variety of unrelated illegal acts "theft" can mislead.
What I'm saying is that if Wikipedia had, say, 200 servers instead of 40, it would probably run quite nicely regardless of software problems. Having lots of extra capacity is how most companies with money manage to stay reliable through tough stretches. It's obvious to me that Wikipedia doesn't have nearly enough machines for its size, and although "one stops working" was an exaggeration, I don't think I'm "flagrantry wrong".
There are plenty of very hard new games; you just aren't looking in the right places. Jak II, Ikaruga, Beatmania IIDX, for example.
Wikipedia seems to have just barely enough machines to handle its load, and if one stops working or there's a little inefficiency the whole thing slows to a crawl. By any reasonable standard this is "not enough servers". Virtually any other organization running a site this big would have a lot of extra machines.
Wikipedia is under the control of the Wikimedia foundation; Google's programmers wouldn't be making any changes to the way it works. This is just an offer to provide servers and bandwidth.
And try to imagine Castlevania: SOTN without the wonderful flowing sprite artwork of Alucard. Imagine if he was just a colored square. Would the game really be as enjoyable?
This is not to bash Rez and SOTN; they are very fine games that achieve what they're trying to do. What I'm saying is that a game is an organic experience, and you can't isolate out one element like "gameplay" and say that's all that matters. You're right that graphics for the sake of bland "realism" (like in too many FPSes) are usually not worthwhile; but visuals that are fresh, original and inspiring (like those of Rez) and that work together with the gameplay to create an atmosphere (like SOTN) can be what makes a game worth playing.
The bottom line is that optimization is rarely the best thing a developer can be doing with his time. There's a lot more you can do with "a day" than tweak a poorly thought out algorithm. By all means optimize if your program is as slow as molasses and your profiling shows that a particular section of your code is at fault. Otherwise, good programming practice is to think about other things.
Yeah, there's really no reason to do things that way since IIRC the MP3 format is divided into nice streamable blocks. That would be spectacularly lazy design if true.
Or in other words, developers spending less time on petty optimization to work on features and bugfixes.
There's no objective standard --- yes, everyone would agree with you on that. But then you jump from this to the assumption that the only reasonable standard is what the "public" likes? Surely you wouldn't claim that the public's opinion is valuable when it comes to, say, science or the finer details of government policy. So why this sudden respect for it when it comes to art? Haven't you considered that art might be something that one can develop expertise in by consuming and creating a lot of it, just like any other type of culture?
Read carefully before you make accusations in all caps. The following sentence is in the Wikipedia article (and was there before you posted your comment):
Yes, they would say exactly that, and then they would follow their own advice and stop using gmail.
Gmail is probably staying invitation-only for this long because they're steeling themselves for gigantic server loads when it goes public. It's not because they don't want to be "accountable".
Good. Definitely good. Honestly, Wikipedia is running one of the world's most popular websites (80 million hits/day) on a shoestring donation-based budget, and mirrors like this help them save bandwidth and server power. Most people who would be inclined to seriously contribute to Wikipedia have already heard about it anyway.
Yes, but if they really deleted people's mail it would cause a massive PR scandal and would seriously hurt their business. They're not stupid enough to do something like that. Being "beta" gives them a cover for things like occasional downtime and unexpected featureset changes. But come on, you don't need to worry about actual data loss.