Because of WikiPedia's current editorial model, any time I want information on a person or a debated topic, if I read the WikiPedia entry on it, I take that with a HUUUGE grain of salt.
Way back when the Napster brand was bought for a buttload of cash, I said it was a bad buy. The buyers thought the brand strength and name recognition would turn into cash when they rolled out a for-pay music service. But the people who used Napster to share music had moved on to Kazaa, Morpheus, and new ones when those got nailed or started barfing up spyware.
When Napster was finally re-rolled out as a subscription service, all of its fans had moved on. There was some advantage to the name recognition, but overall it had lost its chic, its cool, and its cred. It was now a bunch of suits wearing the hip little cat head and everyone knew it. The users who "made" Napster were either illegally sharing via different apps, were buying off iTunes, or were going to hold the new Napster service up to pinpoint scrutiny like an ant under a magnifying glass.
The term "irrational exhuberance" comes to mind. The people who bought the brand and built the new service got a lot of things, but didn't get *it*. Branding the service with the Napster name, while creating a certain amount of buzzz, also brought with it a certain amount of baggage, sets of varying expectations that would be hard to meet. And their declining numbers and murmurs of selling the business just go to prove that this was a bad idea that was not well-executed.
Years ago, when I was in school, there were services that did this at my university. They ran with the U's blessing and had to get Prof permission. They didn't sell lectures, just lecture notes. But if the midterm was approaching and you slept through a morning class, $1.50 for the notes on the lecture you missed was well worth it.
"Or maybe they got lucky and wasted thousands of dollars on learning about Shakespear, atoms, Africa, grammar,"
The reason colleges make you take all those stupid classes is to help round out your education, so you learn to think in a variety of different ways and learn different methods of analysis... at least at good colleges. If you really want to be a better programmer, take a class on the philosophy of language.
"cuz they made me go early since I was so smart."
Book smart, life foolish. You come off as an arrogant little punk with few social skills and a big ego. Sad thing is that while you may be a big fish in a small pond at ITT Tech or DeVry, when you get out into the real world, you'll find you're a very small fish and that your skills are just good enough to get you an entry level job. To advance from there, you'll need a variety of skills you're not learning. And that's why guys who wasted time on Shakespeare and grammar own the companies and guys like you work for them.
"While searching a bit torrent site for old episodes of La Femme Nikita, I was regaled by an ad which read: "Can't find La Femme? Buy it on eBay!""
Of course this is Google AdSense (or possibly Overture) trying to provide keyword-targeted ads, based on your search term. The ads probably aren't even placed by EBay. If you click, some EBay affiliate pays Google some small fee, and you go to EBay tagged with an affiliate code. If you buy anything on EBay, they get a piece of the listing and final value fees charged to the seller, plus if you're new to EBay, they get a new customer bounty.
Using pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to merchants where you get an affiliate payment is a narrow-margin business and requires very smart tweaking and tuning of your keyword selections and bid amounts, but if you can do it at a high enough volume, you can make some serious coin.
"Well, if you'd tried the Linux version, you'd find out it DOES support SVG... It's still in early stages"... Yeah, and my best friend could put on silk panties and tell me he was in the early stages of a sex change, but it doesn't mean I'd want to kiss him.
How many GPL projects reach 1.0 or get those features added? I've been looking for a solution to deal with ImageMagick in PHP. iMagick stopped development at v 0.9.3 in 1994. MagickWand for PHP... last I checked the discussion forums for it at imagemagick.org a couple of weeks ago, the developer in charge of it had dropped off the radar in January and hasn't been responding to e-mails from the group moderators.
I tried the time-limited trial of the $79 closed-source version for Windows and it wasn't up to snuff for me. Why would I get excited that they're open-sourcing the Linux version to try to get some free development work done? Oft-times, that's a cry for help.
There are some very basic filters that their major commercial competitors have that they lack, and I'd say this is a symptom of what's kept them from widespread adoption. So excuse me if I'm not jumping for joy that another not-ready-for-primetime application has been added to the OSS community. When some people actually get behind it, make it ready for primetime, and get it out of beta, then I'l start being a little less cynical.
Just tried the Windoze version for a quickie look at features. No SVG support. As more of the OSS community and others start to create and deliver vector graphics in SVG (check out all the SVGs in Wikimedia Commons or OpenClipart.org), any illustration program without it will gradually lose its user base. It's not that SVG is so wonderful, but it's becoming a necessary tool to have in your arsenal.
"I remember my grandpa once got adware that was an advertisement for adware removal."
This was pioneered, or at least most famously done, by Sanford "Spamford" Wallace. This guy, an early pioneer of spam in the '90s, was sued by AOL and some of the other majors into ending his attacks on people's mailboxes.
A few years later, he surfaces with a new bright idea... install adware on people's computers which then deluges them with pop-ups to buy his buggy adware remover that actually installs more adware. I believe this wonderful idea of his was shut down by the FTC last year.
AFAIK, there's a per-address fee for every address you want to check against the registry. And since:
an address can be added at any time
having a record of a double-opt-in request to be on your list is no defense
it seems you have to stop mailing that address upon registration, not after a period of time
You basically have to clean your whole list pretty frequently and you have to pay each time you do. Furthermore, since each state is setting up their own registry, if you're cleaning your lists weekly and your list is big enough to cost $1,000 per state, you could end up having fees of $2,600,000 annually to clean a list of about 250,000 people (or less).
Furthermore, since the states are collecting the fees, one could argue that it's a tax, and it's a tax that the states are imposing on out of state businesses, meaning it's taxation without representation. I seem to recall we fought a big war with England over that around 230 years ago.
The politicians are saying "it's for the kids". That way, if you oppose their ill-conceived power/money grabs, they can portray you as anti-kid. But on the other hand, this is being done by the less corrupt state officials because they can't get the sinfully corrupt federal officials to do anything about it.
In the long run, it's the wrong solution to let states have their own lists and regulate the behaviors of out-of-state companies. OTOH, unless the Feds step in and put in a system with teeth that shuts down homegrown spam and classifies offshore spam a border incursion that can be met with military force, I can understand the frustration of the states. I don't agree with their methods, but I understand their desire to get *something* done.
Maybe I'm totally off base here, and IANAL, but the shield law is to encourage whistleblowers and confidential sources to share information with journalists, not to protect any journalistic "right". Giving journalists the ability to legally refuse to testify so they can protect those sources from retribution or other harm serves that purpose.
That said, if a journalist is merely at an event and records it as any regular citizen could, there should be no special status given to that recording. I believe that the material must meet one of the following requirements to receive special status:
It was obtained using special access granted to the journalist by virtue of his/her being a journalist. Said access was unique to this journalist and explicitly granted (such as a guarantee of safe conduct).
The journalist's actions in being there and choosing what to document were based on information from a confidential source, and access to the unedited documentation could identify the source, harm the source, or reasonably deter the source from entrusting any journalist with future confidential information.
In the course of documenting the event, a participant says something to the journalist that may be considered confidential information.
If the journalist merely heard something was going on via a publicly available information source, showed up, and started shooting pictures or video, there should be no special status granted to the material he does not publish.
All that said, we cannot rely on the assertions of the journalist and his lawyers that one of these cases are true. A confidential panel, composed of two journalists and one judge (not the judge on the case), chosen by mutual agreement of the prosecution and the journalist's lawyers, should be allowed to review the material. They are under legal penalty of imprisonment if they should ever reveal the contents of the material or use it to gain any advantage in their careers. The panel will determine if any of the material is subject to protection, and if so, what portions.
I think that's the best way to handle this. Journalists should not be able to declare anything they want confidential. Sometimes they're just in the right place at the right time by dumb luck or "gut instinct" and any footage they get through dumb luck or "gut instinct" should not be considered privileged.
Long ago, I realized I just could not afford to have nbig, involved PC games around because I could start one up in a fit of boredom and lose an entire day.
I just go and play a flash game for 20 minutes at yahoo games or clevermedia.com when I need a game fix.
The $2499 mid-range will sport TWO Xeon 5150s, and the high end will sport dual 5160s?
I was hoping he's say the high-end will not be available until October (since I'm planning my Mac as a late-Oct birthday present to myself) and will sport a double-dose of the quad-core chips Intel is releasing in Q4.
But hey, dual 5150s for $2500? I think I might just buy that baby and an extra flat panel instead.
Go over to Rent A Coder or Elance, find yourself some really smart foreign techies who will each give you 2 weeks of his undivided attention for $500-600, and set them loose on tightening up your code and configs. It will be the best $1000 you ever spent.
For strategic planning, go to SCORE (a volunteer group of retired executives who advise small business owners) and get a couple of advisors... one to show you how to break down and analyze the financial numbers, one to help you learn how to better manage your moderators.
You're in over your head and you no longer have the luxury of burying your nose in a book until you've figured out the solution. You need to begin figuring out where your best place in the organization is. If it's in a leadership position, then start leading, delegating, and making leadership decisions. If it's not, you need to find someone qualified and hand over the reins.
PowerMac G5
Dual 2.5ghz dual core Power PC
4 gb 533 mhz ECC memory
2 500 GB SATA HDD
1 Quadro FX 4500 video card
Dell 690 Workstation
Dual 2.66 GHZ Woodcrest Xeon 5150
4 gb 533 mhz ECC memory
2 500 GB SATA HDD
1 Quadro FX 4500 video card
Apple's price: $6924 Dell's price: $6887
Now Dell only offers Quadros and Fire GLs while Apple has a history of offering a consumer grade video card, so they may well offer an NVidia GeForce 7900 as the low end option. Buy your RAM from Crucial or Newegg, save a few hundred more. You can have a pretty badass Apple system for $5k'ish, which is what you'd expect to pay for a badass Apple system.
I have no doubt that Parallels could run Windows XP as fast or faster on a Quad 2.66 core Woodcrest machine as it does on my single core P4 3.2ghz machine.
Basically, I get all the fun of commandline BSD, all the polish of OS/X, and my old PC running in a window faster than it ever did... if I can afford the price, sign me up.
Ah yes... slashdot's moderation and karma system. It is excellent at producing . . . groupthink? Let's face it. There is a prevailing set of opinions on slashdot, and if you follow those opinions, then you get karma and mod points, thus reinforcing the groupthink, because only those who follow it can make their way into the (large) group of people who enforce it.
The example of Slashdot's moderation system was not meant to imply that WikiPedia should adopt it, just that it's an example of how a trust-based system could work. I didn't mean to start an argument over the merits, or lack thereof, of Slashdot's moderation system.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's all very well to have a few movie buffs keep track of a few dozen movie facts per day...
Try a few thousand movie facts a day.
But there are ways to make this simpler. Enable trust scoring on contributors, add a value component to the trust score. Every contribution gets checked and scored on its validity/verifiability, then it also gets scored on how much value it added (i.e. a grammatical correction gets a 1, while a large passage of new information gets a 10). When editors are reviewing a contribution, they get a clue from the contributor's scores as to how deeply they need to check it. If the guy has a 98% validity record with an average value add of 7 over 150 contributions, the editor may be able to let some of the smaller things through with a quick read-over just to be sure it makes sense. An editor could clear 30 such items an hour rather than 2 a day.
Additionally, an invite-only peer-review area could be created. Someone who has contributed a minimum of 20 items on science with a 100% validity rate and average value add of 4 or higher might be invited to review items in the science category. When 2-3 volunteer peers give a new article or significant edit a thumbs up, it's incorporated.
Now, the methods I describe may not be how IMDb does it. I don't know their data management practices for sure. But assigning trust scores to longtime contributors... that's not hard. Look at Slashdot's moderation system. Adding a Contributor Karma system to the back-end management interface for the Wikipedia editors shouldn't be too tough.
- Greg
How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There are a number of sites that are based on user-submitted data. One that immediately comes to mind is the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). Now, I'm not intimately familiar with the workings of Wikipedia, but based on TFA, the main difference I see between them and IMDb is that IMDb has a more restrictive additions policy. With IMDb, any registered user can submit information, but every iota of information (aside from some user reviews/comments, which are presented as such) must pass through an editorial review.
Some will say that IMDb has the luxury of doing this, being owned by Amazon. But IMDb has been online since before there really was World Wide Web. It was started in the Usenet newsgroups back in 1990 and didn't get a web interface until a Welsh grad student built one in 1993. They have always exercised editorial oversight and did so even back when they were a loose group of volunteers with no funding to speak of.
It used to be that IMDb's structure made it less than nimble in responding to breaking news because of an involved and complicated build process. But over the years, more modularization and granularity have been built into their systems. But even if they're right on the forefront of a news event, their editors and data managers are scrutinizing what becomes part of their "official" record.
Now, people try to trick IMDb, flood them with wrong facts and bad info. Sometimes a bit gets by their editors. But the bits still have to go by an editor before they become publicly visible. AFAICT, this isn't the case with WikiPedia and that is its fatal flaw. And it's not just the wackos and those with an agenda that need to be guarded against. More damage can be done by a cadre of well-meaning fools than a handful of agitators. And it seems that even if they need to defend their systems against the axe grinders, they need to put double the effort into defending against fools.
Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges since IMDb is a lot more narrow in scope than WikiPedia. But they're both large repositories of user-submitted information, they both started as volunteer projects, and they're both widely regarded as great resources. The difference is that IMDb has always exercised more editorial oversight before letting user submissions go live, and IMO, that makes it more trustworthy. Perhaps Wikipedia should take a page from IMDb's book.
You own the physical book. You can do what you want with it... including tearing out pages
You might think so but you would be wrong. There have been a few cases in which doing exactly that - tearing the pages out of a book - and reselling the pages was deemed a copyright violation.
Too true. My wife is into the whole arts and crafts thing, and one of the big trends now is "altered books", where a crafter makes a new work of art out of an existing bound book. Just as the parent poster noted, it is considered a derivative work, so if you plan to sell your work, you have to use books that are in the public domain (i.e. generally books published before 1913 or some date like that).
If you give the altered books as gifts, it's not so much of an issue. First, it's unlikely that the copyright holder would ever get wind of it, and second, I believe that has different legal implications (though I'm not fully certain).
Perhaps, we can take the "FUD" that people like to associate with any exaggeration nowadays, blend it with "hyperbole" which is what a name like "Vista Killer" really is, and call it "FUDperbole."
Of course, people who don't know where the accents go, might pronounce it "Fud-per-bowl", which might make it sound as if it's the U.S. championship of FUD.... little CGI bottles of FUD squaring off during the commercials...
Okay, this is going way off course. It's pronounced FUD-per-bowl-ee. New cool haxor word within 6 months. Gahronteed.
"That means your professional school principles who handle 10,000 children a year but hever married and had children of their own are not up to the task."
So you believe that Britney Spears (married with two kids) is up to the task?
GD does not handle as many file formats as ImageMagick, particularly not certain vector-based formats.
GD doesn't offer as many "effects" as ImageMagick.
It's as simple as that.
As for why I don't wish to use exec(). Even the best programmer occasionally leaves an unintentional hole in his code, and if that hole allows a command to be smuggled into the exec statement, you can be in a lot of trouble. I am not the best programmer, so though I do try to validate within an inch of its life every variable that a user can pass or spoof, I figure it's best for me to avoid sending anything from my scripts to the commandline whenever possible.
It may be Nielsen talking on a subject that's newer than his seminal book (which is now over 5 years old, an eternity in Web time), but he's just hitting the same old points... broad usability, design for the broadest audience, etc.
Why should I design for or even think about my grandmother's tastes if I'm doing a coding blog, or a baseball blog (that's assuming Grandma isn't a rabid Ichiro fan)?
I view Nielsen as someone who has taken a good idea and turned it into ideology. And when you do that, the goodness begins to evaporate.
Design for two audiences... your users and Googlebot. That's my motto.
What I would like to know is why is HP & MySQL helping to finance this?!? What a way to get company blacklisted - especially a GPL project.
I looked at TFA, the SCO contest site, the SCO site, and NONE of it said MySQL or HP was sponsoring this contest. It did say there would be MySQL and HP training at the SCO forum, but that doesn't mean that the training is provided by or sponsored by those companies.
SCO is trying to promote its alternative to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with SCAMP (SCO, Apache, etc.). But because it can easily acquire and redistribute all of these components under the GPL and even offer its own support and training for them, it can make things look official when they're really not.
I'd need some more evidence than an unsupported post on/. that MySQL is giving any aid or comfort to the enemy before I started modifying my opinion of the company or their software.
Slashdot Mirror
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shing-Tung_Yau
Because of WikiPedia's current editorial model, any time I want information on a person or a debated topic, if I read the WikiPedia entry on it, I take that with a HUUUGE grain of salt.
- Greg
Way back when the Napster brand was bought for a buttload of cash, I said it was a bad buy. The buyers thought the brand strength and name recognition would turn into cash when they rolled out a for-pay music service. But the people who used Napster to share music had moved on to Kazaa, Morpheus, and new ones when those got nailed or started barfing up spyware.
When Napster was finally re-rolled out as a subscription service, all of its fans had moved on. There was some advantage to the name recognition, but overall it had lost its chic, its cool, and its cred. It was now a bunch of suits wearing the hip little cat head and everyone knew it. The users who "made" Napster were either illegally sharing via different apps, were buying off iTunes, or were going to hold the new Napster service up to pinpoint scrutiny like an ant under a magnifying glass.
The term "irrational exhuberance" comes to mind. The people who bought the brand and built the new service got a lot of things, but didn't get *it*. Branding the service with the Napster name, while creating a certain amount of buzzz, also brought with it a certain amount of baggage, sets of varying expectations that would be hard to meet. And their declining numbers and murmurs of selling the business just go to prove that this was a bad idea that was not well-executed.
Greg
Years ago, when I was in school, there were services that did this at my university. They ran with the U's blessing and had to get Prof permission. They didn't sell lectures, just lecture notes. But if the midterm was approaching and you slept through a morning class, $1.50 for the notes on the lecture you missed was well worth it.
- Greg
"Or maybe they got lucky and wasted thousands of dollars on learning about Shakespear, atoms, Africa, grammar,"
The reason colleges make you take all those stupid classes is to help round out your education, so you learn to think in a variety of different ways and learn different methods of analysis... at least at good colleges. If you really want to be a better programmer, take a class on the philosophy of language.
"cuz they made me go early since I was so smart."
Book smart, life foolish. You come off as an arrogant little punk with few social skills and a big ego. Sad thing is that while you may be a big fish in a small pond at ITT Tech or DeVry, when you get out into the real world, you'll find you're a very small fish and that your skills are just good enough to get you an entry level job. To advance from there, you'll need a variety of skills you're not learning. And that's why guys who wasted time on Shakespeare and grammar own the companies and guys like you work for them.
Greg
Of course this is Google AdSense (or possibly Overture) trying to provide keyword-targeted ads, based on your search term. The ads probably aren't even placed by EBay. If you click, some EBay affiliate pays Google some small fee, and you go to EBay tagged with an affiliate code. If you buy anything on EBay, they get a piece of the listing and final value fees charged to the seller, plus if you're new to EBay, they get a new customer bounty.
Using pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to merchants where you get an affiliate payment is a narrow-margin business and requires very smart tweaking and tuning of your keyword selections and bid amounts, but if you can do it at a high enough volume, you can make some serious coin.
- GB
"Well, if you'd tried the Linux version, you'd find out it DOES support SVG... It's still in early stages"... Yeah, and my best friend could put on silk panties and tell me he was in the early stages of a sex change, but it doesn't mean I'd want to kiss him.
- Greg
How many GPL projects reach 1.0 or get those features added? I've been looking for a solution to deal with ImageMagick in PHP. iMagick stopped development at v 0.9.3 in 1994. MagickWand for PHP... last I checked the discussion forums for it at imagemagick.org a couple of weeks ago, the developer in charge of it had dropped off the radar in January and hasn't been responding to e-mails from the group moderators.
I tried the time-limited trial of the $79 closed-source version for Windows and it wasn't up to snuff for me. Why would I get excited that they're open-sourcing the Linux version to try to get some free development work done? Oft-times, that's a cry for help.
There are some very basic filters that their major commercial competitors have that they lack, and I'd say this is a symptom of what's kept them from widespread adoption. So excuse me if I'm not jumping for joy that another not-ready-for-primetime application has been added to the OSS community. When some people actually get behind it, make it ready for primetime, and get it out of beta, then I'l start being a little less cynical.
- Greg
Just tried the Windoze version for a quickie look at features. No SVG support. As more of the OSS community and others start to create and deliver vector graphics in SVG (check out all the SVGs in Wikimedia Commons or OpenClipart.org), any illustration program without it will gradually lose its user base. It's not that SVG is so wonderful, but it's becoming a necessary tool to have in your arsenal.
"I remember my grandpa once got adware that was an advertisement for adware removal."
This was pioneered, or at least most famously done, by Sanford "Spamford" Wallace. This guy, an early pioneer of spam in the '90s, was sued by AOL and some of the other majors into ending his attacks on people's mailboxes.
A few years later, he surfaces with a new bright idea... install adware on people's computers which then deluges them with pop-ups to buy his buggy adware remover that actually installs more adware. I believe this wonderful idea of his was shut down by the FTC last year.
- Greg
AFAIK, there's a per-address fee for every address you want to check against the registry. And since:
- an address can be added at any time
- having a record of a double-opt-in request to be on your list is no defense
- it seems you have to stop mailing that address upon registration, not after a period of time
You basically have to clean your whole list pretty frequently and you have to pay each time you do. Furthermore, since each state is setting up their own registry, if you're cleaning your lists weekly and your list is big enough to cost $1,000 per state, you could end up having fees of $2,600,000 annually to clean a list of about 250,000 people (or less).Furthermore, since the states are collecting the fees, one could argue that it's a tax, and it's a tax that the states are imposing on out of state businesses, meaning it's taxation without representation. I seem to recall we fought a big war with England over that around 230 years ago.
The politicians are saying "it's for the kids". That way, if you oppose their ill-conceived power/money grabs, they can portray you as anti-kid. But on the other hand, this is being done by the less corrupt state officials because they can't get the sinfully corrupt federal officials to do anything about it.
In the long run, it's the wrong solution to let states have their own lists and regulate the behaviors of out-of-state companies. OTOH, unless the Feds step in and put in a system with teeth that shuts down homegrown spam and classifies offshore spam a border incursion that can be met with military force, I can understand the frustration of the states. I don't agree with their methods, but I understand their desire to get *something* done.
- Greg
That said, if a journalist is merely at an event and records it as any regular citizen could, there should be no special status given to that recording. I believe that the material must meet one of the following requirements to receive special status:
- It was obtained using special access granted to the journalist by virtue of his/her being a journalist. Said access was unique to this journalist and explicitly granted (such as a guarantee of safe conduct).
- The journalist's actions in being there and choosing what to document were based on information from a confidential source, and access to the unedited documentation could identify the source, harm the source, or reasonably deter the source from entrusting any journalist with future confidential information.
- In the course of documenting the event, a participant says something to the journalist that may be considered confidential information.
If the journalist merely heard something was going on via a publicly available information source, showed up, and started shooting pictures or video, there should be no special status granted to the material he does not publish.All that said, we cannot rely on the assertions of the journalist and his lawyers that one of these cases are true. A confidential panel, composed of two journalists and one judge (not the judge on the case), chosen by mutual agreement of the prosecution and the journalist's lawyers, should be allowed to review the material. They are under legal penalty of imprisonment if they should ever reveal the contents of the material or use it to gain any advantage in their careers. The panel will determine if any of the material is subject to protection, and if so, what portions.
I think that's the best way to handle this. Journalists should not be able to declare anything they want confidential. Sometimes they're just in the right place at the right time by dumb luck or "gut instinct" and any footage they get through dumb luck or "gut instinct" should not be considered privileged.
IMO.
- Greg
Long ago, I realized I just could not afford to have nbig, involved PC games around because I could start one up in a fit of boredom and lose an entire day.
I just go and play a flash game for 20 minutes at yahoo games or clevermedia.com when I need a game fix.
- G
I was hoping he's say the high-end will not be available until October (since I'm planning my Mac as a late-Oct birthday present to myself) and will sport a double-dose of the quad-core chips Intel is releasing in Q4.
But hey, dual 5150s for $2500? I think I might just buy that baby and an extra flat panel instead.
Go over to Rent A Coder or Elance, find yourself some really smart foreign techies who will each give you 2 weeks of his undivided attention for $500-600, and set them loose on tightening up your code and configs. It will be the best $1000 you ever spent.
For strategic planning, go to SCORE (a volunteer group of retired executives who advise small business owners) and get a couple of advisors... one to show you how to break down and analyze the financial numbers, one to help you learn how to better manage your moderators.
You're in over your head and you no longer have the luxury of burying your nose in a book until you've figured out the solution. You need to begin figuring out where your best place in the organization is. If it's in a leadership position, then start leading, delegating, and making leadership decisions. If it's not, you need to find someone qualified and hand over the reins.
Trying to match the configs as best I could...
PowerMac G5
Dual 2.5ghz dual core Power PC
4 gb 533 mhz ECC memory
2 500 GB SATA HDD
1 Quadro FX 4500 video card
Dell 690 Workstation
Dual 2.66 GHZ Woodcrest Xeon 5150
4 gb 533 mhz ECC memory
2 500 GB SATA HDD
1 Quadro FX 4500 video card
Apple's price: $6924
Dell's price: $6887
Now Dell only offers Quadros and Fire GLs while Apple has a history of offering a consumer grade video card, so they may well offer an NVidia GeForce 7900 as the low end option. Buy your RAM from Crucial or Newegg, save a few hundred more. You can have a pretty badass Apple system for $5k'ish, which is what you'd expect to pay for a badass Apple system.
I have no doubt that Parallels could run Windows XP as fast or faster on a Quad 2.66 core Woodcrest machine as it does on my single core P4 3.2ghz machine.
Basically, I get all the fun of commandline BSD, all the polish of OS/X, and my old PC running in a window faster than it ever did... if I can afford the price, sign me up.
- Greg
Ah yes... slashdot's moderation and karma system. It is excellent at producing . . . groupthink? Let's face it. There is a prevailing set of opinions on slashdot, and if you follow those opinions, then you get karma and mod points, thus reinforcing the groupthink, because only those who follow it can make their way into the (large) group of people who enforce it.
The example of Slashdot's moderation system was not meant to imply that WikiPedia should adopt it, just that it's an example of how a trust-based system could work. I didn't mean to start an argument over the merits, or lack thereof, of Slashdot's moderation system.
It's all very well to have a few movie buffs keep track of a few dozen movie facts per day...
Try a few thousand movie facts a day.
But there are ways to make this simpler. Enable trust scoring on contributors, add a value component to the trust score. Every contribution gets checked and scored on its validity/verifiability, then it also gets scored on how much value it added (i.e. a grammatical correction gets a 1, while a large passage of new information gets a 10). When editors are reviewing a contribution, they get a clue from the contributor's scores as to how deeply they need to check it. If the guy has a 98% validity record with an average value add of 7 over 150 contributions, the editor may be able to let some of the smaller things through with a quick read-over just to be sure it makes sense. An editor could clear 30 such items an hour rather than 2 a day.
Additionally, an invite-only peer-review area could be created. Someone who has contributed a minimum of 20 items on science with a 100% validity rate and average value add of 4 or higher might be invited to review items in the science category. When 2-3 volunteer peers give a new article or significant edit a thumbs up, it's incorporated.
Now, the methods I describe may not be how IMDb does it. I don't know their data management practices for sure. But assigning trust scores to longtime contributors... that's not hard. Look at Slashdot's moderation system. Adding a Contributor Karma system to the back-end management interface for the Wikipedia editors shouldn't be too tough.
- Greg
There are a number of sites that are based on user-submitted data. One that immediately comes to mind is the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). Now, I'm not intimately familiar with the workings of Wikipedia, but based on TFA, the main difference I see between them and IMDb is that IMDb has a more restrictive additions policy. With IMDb, any registered user can submit information, but every iota of information (aside from some user reviews/comments, which are presented as such) must pass through an editorial review.
Some will say that IMDb has the luxury of doing this, being owned by Amazon. But IMDb has been online since before there really was World Wide Web. It was started in the Usenet newsgroups back in 1990 and didn't get a web interface until a Welsh grad student built one in 1993. They have always exercised editorial oversight and did so even back when they were a loose group of volunteers with no funding to speak of.
It used to be that IMDb's structure made it less than nimble in responding to breaking news because of an involved and complicated build process. But over the years, more modularization and granularity have been built into their systems. But even if they're right on the forefront of a news event, their editors and data managers are scrutinizing what becomes part of their "official" record.
Now, people try to trick IMDb, flood them with wrong facts and bad info. Sometimes a bit gets by their editors. But the bits still have to go by an editor before they become publicly visible. AFAICT, this isn't the case with WikiPedia and that is its fatal flaw. And it's not just the wackos and those with an agenda that need to be guarded against. More damage can be done by a cadre of well-meaning fools than a handful of agitators. And it seems that even if they need to defend their systems against the axe grinders, they need to put double the effort into defending against fools.
Maybe I'm comparing apples to oranges since IMDb is a lot more narrow in scope than WikiPedia. But they're both large repositories of user-submitted information, they both started as volunteer projects, and they're both widely regarded as great resources. The difference is that IMDb has always exercised more editorial oversight before letting user submissions go live, and IMO, that makes it more trustworthy. Perhaps Wikipedia should take a page from IMDb's book.
- Greg
You own the physical book. You can do what you want with it... including tearing out pages
You might think so but you would be wrong. There have been a few cases in which doing exactly that - tearing the pages out of a book - and reselling the pages was deemed a copyright violation.
Too true. My wife is into the whole arts and crafts thing, and one of the big trends now is "altered books", where a crafter makes a new work of art out of an existing bound book. Just as the parent poster noted, it is considered a derivative work, so if you plan to sell your work, you have to use books that are in the public domain (i.e. generally books published before 1913 or some date like that).
If you give the altered books as gifts, it's not so much of an issue. First, it's unlikely that the copyright holder would ever get wind of it, and second, I believe that has different legal implications (though I'm not fully certain).
- Greg
Perhaps, we can take the "FUD" that people like to associate with any exaggeration nowadays, blend it with "hyperbole" which is what a name like "Vista Killer" really is, and call it "FUDperbole."
Of course, people who don't know where the accents go, might pronounce it "Fud-per-bowl", which might make it sound as if it's the U.S. championship of FUD.... little CGI bottles of FUD squaring off during the commercials...
Okay, this is going way off course. It's pronounced FUD-per-bowl-ee. New cool haxor word within 6 months. Gahronteed.
"That means your professional school principles who handle 10,000 children a year but hever married and had children of their own are not up to the task."
So you believe that Britney Spears (married with two kids) is up to the task?
- G
It's as simple as that.
As for why I don't wish to use exec(). Even the best programmer occasionally leaves an unintentional hole in his code, and if that hole allows a command to be smuggled into the exec statement, you can be in a lot of trouble. I am not the best programmer, so though I do try to validate within an inch of its life every variable that a user can pass or spoof, I figure it's best for me to avoid sending anything from my scripts to the commandline whenever possible.
- Greg
It may be Nielsen talking on a subject that's newer than his seminal book (which is now over 5 years old, an eternity in Web time), but he's just hitting the same old points... broad usability, design for the broadest audience, etc.
Why should I design for or even think about my grandmother's tastes if I'm doing a coding blog, or a baseball blog (that's assuming Grandma isn't a rabid Ichiro fan)?
I view Nielsen as someone who has taken a good idea and turned it into ideology. And when you do that, the goodness begins to evaporate.
Design for two audiences... your users and Googlebot. That's my motto.
- G
What I would like to know is why is HP & MySQL helping to finance this?!? What a way to get company blacklisted - especially a GPL project.
/. that MySQL is giving any aid or comfort to the enemy before I started modifying my opinion of the company or their software.
I looked at TFA, the SCO contest site, the SCO site, and NONE of it said MySQL or HP was sponsoring this contest. It did say there would be MySQL and HP training at the SCO forum, but that doesn't mean that the training is provided by or sponsored by those companies.
SCO is trying to promote its alternative to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with SCAMP (SCO, Apache, etc.). But because it can easily acquire and redistribute all of these components under the GPL and even offer its own support and training for them, it can make things look official when they're really not.
I'd need some more evidence than an unsupported post on
- G
Luring a developer to code for your products: $100,000 and a BMW.
Finding out developers still hate you passionately: Priceless
- G