SMITH & TINKER'S Patent Double-Action, Extra-Responsive, Thought-Creating, Perfect-Talking MECHANICAL MAN Fitted with our Special Clock-Work Attachment. Thinks, Speaks, Acts, and Does Everything but Live. Manufactured only at our Works at Evna, Land of Ev. All infringements will be promptly Prosecuted according to Law.
I heard about this at one Information Systems reception during Parent's Weekend at my school. Apparently the school used to buy long-distance in bulk at 13 cents a minute, sell it for 25 cents... and they made millions every year. These days they buy them for 3 cents, sell them for 5, and there's practically no use of them anymore; they make thousands.
Incidentally, they are now pushing Cingular Wireless phones with a "special" university offer every year at orientation (and with the mailings before) and looking (for the future) into some way to combine their wireless network with some PDA/phone they can give to all students as part of their "incoming freshman" technology package. There's nothing particularly exciting on that front yet, though...
Just more proof that the proprieter was a sell-out, I guess. Maybe he was taking money from both sides of the fence. Hmm, there's a business plan for ya...
Please note that Wikipedia's number one rule is called NPOV for "neutral point of view", before you go accusing it of widespread bias left and right. Not that it always lives up to the goal of being entirely bias-free, but I'd hardly call Encarta unbiased either, and it makes no claim that objectivity is an object.
And it's not like the two are mutually exclusive, either. If you have Encarta, you can still look up stuff on Wikipedia, compare and contrast their approaches, and learn more from the profit.
But Encarta probably is more suitable for children, because Wikipedia makes little effort to self-censor offensive material that you may not want your child to know about.
Actually, what you describe is not entirely unlike Inner Space, a classic action game which was developed in the days of Windows 3.1 and still runs on Windows XP systems. It's a slightly different genre: you fly around in a small spaceship through several 'waves' set in various directories on your hard disk, collecting icons (extracted from the executables on your hard drive) for their 'resources'. These can then be used in the 'Ambulance' for ship repairs, upgrades, and shiny new weapons.
Nominally, the game ends after you've captured all icons, but the semi-secretive 'Inner Demon' sequence allows you to win without completing such an arduous task.
A 14-day trial download is available; after the trial period has expired certain ships (including the array of 'Fuzzy Ones' such as the Platypus, Rubber Duck, and Fruit Bat') and features (such as saving the game) are disabled.
Mod parent overrated, as post is misinformative. As others have stated already, all the letters of Paul are from a pretty-darned-early disciple, and then there's the Gospel of Matthew, and...
Generally, the quality of WP will converge to the mean of all users, a college education
You presume that each edit would bring the quality level average closer to that of the person who edits it. But really, if I'm ignorant about a certain topic, I'm not going to go through the article about it and "bring it down to my level", so to speak. In the real world, at least some people can realize that the other person writing the article is more informed than they are, and will not clobber the article in the manner you seem to suggest they will.
And Wikipedia is not about "science". It notably makes several provisions against "original research". Science and research should not be conducted on Wikipedia, though the progress of science and research elsewhere may be reported as such.
You do have the right idea about how Wikipedia is good as an introduction to an area, but certainly not a comprehensive guide to a topic. It's not supposed to be. It's just an encyclopedia, for crying out loud, not the end-all and be-all of reference works. If I want to learn the intimate details of a topic, I don't run to Britannica, or Encarta, either.
Architecture? According to our server page, we have five database machines (one master and four slaves), six Squid caches, and 23 Apache and memcached machines (to render pages). There are also two "other" machines for things such as images and NFS storage, and three Squid caches to be installed over in France (I believe they were donated there).
I'm fairly sure Jamesday is exxagerating regarding "200 or 500" servers; there are about ten servers currently being ordered for this quarter.
Wikipedia is above Slashdot: it already routinely gets about a thousand hits a second, another hundred from Slashdot don't make much of a difference. In particular, if Slashdot links to some articles, then the visitors will be served the pages from one of the Squid caches, which isn't quite "free" but is pretty darned cheap in terms of resource consumption. It doesn't even touch that Apache or database machines.
Now, if you want to get more interesting, Yahoo! Japan got us pretty well once or twice after linking to something from their front page, which gave more than 400 extra hits per second; we survived.:)
You verify it. Wikipedia has a big fat disclaimer about how it makes no guarantees of validity. If your topic matters, then look it up somewhere else in addition to Wikipedia, and see if the facts seem to match. If you're doing research for something important, do not rely on Wikipedia alone- heck, if you're doing a major research paper or something, you shouldn't be using an encyclopedia, let alone Wikipedia.
You can also check the page history. Find an old version, see the "diff" between it and the current version, notice what stands out.
Wikipedia is a bit like the Internet in general. Some information is right, some is probably wrong (whether due to ignorance or malice). But unlike the Internet, anyone can edit Wikipedia to fix something. Now, they can also edit it to break something, but if they do it in a systematic fashion they have a rather high chance of getting caught, tracked down, and banned. We've had a variety of users like that in the past.
Wikipedia is a "convenience" source. It's excessively convenient. It can provide a useful summary of information, and you can then know what other information you ought to look up.
It was locked because of people blanking it, changing the content to "omgwtf Bush is Evil!", and other such malicious vandalism. The John Kerry article was also protected for similar reasons on multiple occasions.
Really. In the past two years Larry Sanger has made precisely one edit to Wikipedia that was not on his "user page", and that was to post the complaint that "I don't like the categorization scheme". I don't think he's qualified to suggest a sweeping paradigm shift at this point, because he really hasn't a clue what's going on.
Query. If they use it for online access does that mean that they read them through some stupid Win Doze, Internet Explorer, embedded ActiveX control to actually access the device?
"Pulsars are intriguing and puzzling objects. They pack as much mass as the Sun crammed into an object with a cross-sectional area about as large as Boston,"
Now, I'm originally from Philadelphia, so using its area as a unit doesn't particularly faze me... but the size of Boston? Come on! That's not even properly polysyllabic!
My university had a (surprisingly sucky) course in "The Science in Science Fiction" (eh, it was a first-year seminar). However, after reading Prey we had an actual nanotechnologist-type guy come in; he discussed the state of the field and the novel. The gist of it was that even if we could mass-produce nanomachines (which isn't happening any time soon), most these nanotechnological threats in fiction are just about impossible given the sheer energy requirements - it's not easy to deliver energy to microscopic devices, and even if you could, the sheer heat generated by millions of these things in close proximity would easily be enough to melt them, if not explode them. (You think your Pentium IV has heat dissipation problems? What do you think intense heat does to something that's only a few dozen atoms wide?)
This is known as a "Joe job", apparently after one guy (Joe) who had this happen to him. The use of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) may help, but only if the mail recipients check this.
What's the point of hooking this device up to a PC? Why not, just, you know, use the device without a PC? What benefits does hooking it up to the PC bring?
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, they are now pushing Cingular Wireless phones with a "special" university offer every year at orientation (and with the mailings before) and looking (for the future) into some way to combine their wireless network with some PDA/phone they can give to all students as part of their "incoming freshman" technology package. There's nothing particularly exciting on that front yet, though...
Just more proof that the proprieter was a sell-out, I guess. Maybe he was taking money from both sides of the fence. Hmm, there's a business plan for ya...
Please note that Wikipedia's number one rule is called NPOV for "neutral point of view", before you go accusing it of widespread bias left and right. Not that it always lives up to the goal of being entirely bias-free, but I'd hardly call Encarta unbiased either, and it makes no claim that objectivity is an object.
And it's not like the two are mutually exclusive, either. If you have Encarta, you can still look up stuff on Wikipedia, compare and contrast their approaches, and learn more from the profit.
But Encarta probably is more suitable for children, because Wikipedia makes little effort to self-censor offensive material that you may not want your child to know about.
Nominally, the game ends after you've captured all icons, but the semi-secretive 'Inner Demon' sequence allows you to win without completing such an arduous task.
A 14-day trial download is available; after the trial period has expired certain ships (including the array of 'Fuzzy Ones' such as the Platypus, Rubber Duck, and Fruit Bat') and features (such as saving the game) are disabled.
Mod parent overrated, as post is misinformative. As others have stated already, all the letters of Paul are from a pretty-darned-early disciple, and then there's the Gospel of Matthew, and...
Slashdot also makes no guarantees of validity. If your topic really matters, look it up somewhere else as well.
Why not just get a "virtually indestructable keyboard"?
You presume that each edit would bring the quality level average closer to that of the person who edits it. But really, if I'm ignorant about a certain topic, I'm not going to go through the article about it and "bring it down to my level", so to speak. In the real world, at least some people can realize that the other person writing the article is more informed than they are, and will not clobber the article in the manner you seem to suggest they will.
And Wikipedia is not about "science". It notably makes several provisions against "original research". Science and research should not be conducted on Wikipedia, though the progress of science and research elsewhere may be reported as such.
You do have the right idea about how Wikipedia is good as an introduction to an area, but certainly not a comprehensive guide to a topic. It's not supposed to be. It's just an encyclopedia, for crying out loud, not the end-all and be-all of reference works. If I want to learn the intimate details of a topic, I don't run to Britannica, or Encarta, either.
I'm fairly sure Jamesday is exxagerating regarding "200 or 500" servers; there are about ten servers currently being ordered for this quarter.
Now, if you want to get more interesting, Yahoo! Japan got us pretty well once or twice after linking to something from their front page, which gave more than 400 extra hits per second; we survived. :)
Alexa's page ranking also puts Wikipedia well above Slashdot.
You can also check the page history. Find an old version, see the "diff" between it and the current version, notice what stands out.
Wikipedia is a bit like the Internet in general. Some information is right, some is probably wrong (whether due to ignorance or malice). But unlike the Internet, anyone can edit Wikipedia to fix something. Now, they can also edit it to break something, but if they do it in a systematic fashion they have a rather high chance of getting caught, tracked down, and banned. We've had a variety of users like that in the past.
Wikipedia is a "convenience" source. It's excessively convenient. It can provide a useful summary of information, and you can then know what other information you ought to look up.
It was locked because of people blanking it, changing the content to "omgwtf Bush is Evil!", and other such malicious vandalism. The John Kerry article was also protected for similar reasons on multiple occasions.
Probably refers to Sollog, self-proclaimed "Son of light, light of god" or something like that.
And hey, look! We've locked the article again, since it's been featured on Slashdot. Lovely. :)
Really. In the past two years Larry Sanger has made precisely one edit to Wikipedia that was not on his "user page", and that was to post the complaint that "I don't like the categorization scheme". I don't think he's qualified to suggest a sweeping paradigm shift at this point, because he really hasn't a clue what's going on.
How about the people who (bother to) read it?
Wow. I never knew that. What a useful tidbit. +1 Informative to "Sammy at Palm Addict"!
Query. If they use it for online access does that mean that they read them through some stupid Win Doze, Internet Explorer, embedded ActiveX control to actually access the device?
Actually, from TFA:
My university had a (surprisingly sucky) course in "The Science in Science Fiction" (eh, it was a first-year seminar). However, after reading Prey we had an actual nanotechnologist-type guy come in; he discussed the state of the field and the novel. The gist of it was that even if we could mass-produce nanomachines (which isn't happening any time soon), most these nanotechnological threats in fiction are just about impossible given the sheer energy requirements - it's not easy to deliver energy to microscopic devices, and even if you could, the sheer heat generated by millions of these things in close proximity would easily be enough to melt them, if not explode them. (You think your Pentium IV has heat dissipation problems? What do you think intense heat does to something that's only a few dozen atoms wide?)
This is known as a "Joe job", apparently after one guy (Joe) who had this happen to him. The use of Sender Policy Framework (SPF) may help, but only if the mail recipients check this.
Anyone using Java (or Flash!) for "nothing more than animated icons" on a website ought to be shot.
Let alone hooking it up to the Internet...