An encyclopedia is meant to be an amalgam of information from citable sources. Wikipedia's editing guidelines follow this - you're only supposed to include information that has a verifiable source. So follow the cited sources from Wikipedia (if they exist) and reference those, or if you're lazy, use a site like BookRags that compiles citable sources on tons of topics (including info from Wikipedia), or even (god forbid!) use the library.
Microsoft's entire business is built on upgrading existing products that don't need to be upgraded. As a techie, it rubs me as completely unnatural - a word processor might have add-in features over time, or even be re-architectured to support web collaboration, etc., but the entire focus of the Office suite and the OS should be on STABILITY and SPEED. Everything else is fluff, and it's the fluff that MS is trying to shove down everyone's throats using every trick in the book as leverage.
If Microsoft wanted to make an appealing product, they would release some "Windows Core OS" that is built solely for speed and stability - yank out all the backward compatability (or allow it only as modular driver add-ons when needed), strip all the bloat, and test the bloody hell out of it. In other words, build Windows the Linux way - then they'd have a pleasing product that people could rally around. It is ridiculous for an OS to require GIGS of RAM, and still take 30 seconds to boot up.
It's interesting to think about the economic implications of Craigslist - certainly, not slapping ads everywhere and charging for all sorts of posts has allowed the site to grow to its huge size, but on the other hand, it has all but killed newspapers' cash cow, the classifieds. You can say, "who cares, newspapers are dying anyway," but the resources newspapers have - trained journalists, editors, the whole damn infrastructure - is quite valuable to our society as a whole. I don't really think Craigslist is going to kill the whole industry, but it's certainly had a big effect on how newspapers will move into the 21st century.
That being said, this decision on Craigslist's part to not monetize the site fully is something like "accelerated capitalism". In other words, they're skipping that whole phase where they maximize their size and influence to make lots of money until a competitor comes in to undercut them - because you pretty much CAN'T undercut them, they're undercutting themselves to achieve scale. Sites like Youtube are doing this too - the technology of everything has grown faster than the market can respond.
If you look at the history of math, it's always leaps of stupidity like this that were responsible for actually improving and extending mathematics. Start with the number zero. People said zero doesn't exist, so it's not a number etc. Then people took note of it's special properties and started playing around with it, and lo and behold we went from roman numerals to arabic numbers, making something like multiplication much, much easier.
Most other big innovations were caused by people doing what was supposed to be avoided. Wherever "things got fuzzy," that's where big changes occurred. Think of calculus, which is only allowed by accepting Zeno's paradox, ignoring the drama, and focusing on what can be manipulated mathematically.
Instead of buying out individual copyrights, why not invest the $100 million in lobbyists to go head to head with Disney and fix the infinite copyright problem?
The reason everyone still uses Google isn't because they have the best ranking of results anymore, which is usually encrusted with spam sites designed to beat Google, but because they have the most COMPLETE results. When you search for something rare, Google most likely will return results no other basic engine has. So people have gotten accustomed to checking Google first out of habit more than anything else.
To me, I think the future of search isn't necessarily a better Google, but something different. The problem with Google is the same as its strength - its simplicity. There is very little control on Google for more complicated searches, such as searching only company websites, or searching only encyclopedia content. It's just a big kludge for them to add stuff like travel info or weather or movie info without knowing the intent of the searcher beforehand. Searchers have to get savvier, not just the algorithms. I think search aggregating sites like Seaurch.com which has 200 engines but still uses a simple interface, is a great idea. Sites like Clusty.com also take an interesting approach towards understanding the searcher's intentions.
I do a lot of small scripts (Perl, PHP, etc) and reuse a lot of code. What works for me is to have put each little project in its own directory and make a README file describing each script and whatever else. That helps at least digging around for a chunk of code rather than going through 100 scripts I can go through 20 READMEs.
As Wikipedia has developed, there has been a push for more metadata, more semantic markup. It seems to me that Wikipedia is in the best position to pioneer the "semantic web" - you can see the beginnings of it with "category" and "portal" pages, as well as the current discussion for "attribute" fields in Wikipedia (something like "Boston IS_CAPITAL_OF Massachusetts"). Beyond that, do you see Wikipedia itself having a strong hand in determining the future of the semantic structuring of all this data, or do you see this development as something outside of Wikipedia's mission, maybe to be picked up and advanced by other parties? Also, do you think semantic markup could be used as a way to address some of the credibility issues of the content, since it's easier to verify a structured fact than a blob of text?
You've got to give people a reason to go to you rather than EB or Best Buy. Good staff is probably a good idea. Know your audience - use the same tactics that make good comic book stores, indie book stores, and good board game stores succeed. What does that mean? Cater to the hardcore gamer who will hang out in your store all day talking about games with the staff. Build a community that way - people will spend $5 more on a game if they LIKE your store and feel like they're "helping the local store." Be local and quirky. Organize games by type of game (RPG, FPS, etc.) rather than title. Inexplicably have a Dreamcast area. Sell stuff that you know will sell to hardcore gamers - such as the Penny Arcade book when that comes out in January.
How to draw people in? Why not a Ms. Pacman machine that runs for free? Probably cheaper than setting up an XBox 360 station, and you never have to change it. Non-gamers dragged into the store would recognize the game and play it, hardcore gamers will dig it as old school. After all, you can't compete with Best Buy's big leather chairs, so don't try to.
If you have room, you can do tournaments. But why not try to do a deal with a local arcade (if there is one) - any game purchase you get $1 in tokens free or something like that. Think of things like that, where you can work with other hotspots for geeks in your specific neighborhood to get coupons for games or in other ways draw them in and let them know you exist.
More importantly, I would avoid getting sucked into competing head to head with the big game stores. Don't take trade-ins that lose you money. Don't do anything that loses you money - you can win customers in other ways. You don't need to get every gamer in the area to make money - remember you need to be profitable, so make smart decisions to differentiate yourself rather than battle the big guys on every front.
Another crap article predicting the end of life as we know it. Shitty journalism like this is spreading the stupid more than study guides for Shakespeare, which have been around just about as long as people have been forcing kids to read. Enjoyment of art/entertainment cannot be forced. The point of teaching through literature is to give students the tools to appreciate and learn from books the rest of their lives, and how to engage and flex their minds. If they happen to like a book along the way, all the better. But don't miss the point here - if a student struggles remembering the plot they'll never pick up anything in class discussion, so from that point study guides might help.
For a job in the game industry, you need game industry experience. Stupid but true. The degree won't help at all. Why not save 2 years of tuition and time, and use it instead to make actual soundtracks for indie projects for free or minimal pay. Then you'll have an awesome portfolio and hey, maybe even make a few contacts with programmers that break into the biz that you can use to swing bigger jobs.
Ok, after grokking all the info on this, it doesn't seem to be a particularly big deal at all. At best, this will bring Wikipedia a few K a year. I think this is a very bad business decision on the part of Wikipedia, not because the deal itself is bad, but because this is almost completely a PR deal, with very little financial incentive for either side. But on the PR side, this is positive for Answers and obviously a big negative for Wikipedia, so why would Wikipedia want to do it? The board seems to have judged it solely as a monetary deal, which was a mistake. Logically, the deal is fine, it makes sense to try it, there's not really anything at risk here. The reality is, Wikipedia has likely already lost more than it will make from this deal in lost donations from disenchanted contributors. A horrible, horrible deal. If you're going to do partnerships, make them big or don't make them at all. This is a PR nightmare for Wikipedia, and a minor win for Answers.com (which will lessen more and more over time unless they can expand this relationship).
Why does Answers.com want this deal? Not for revenue, but for the clout of saying they have a "partnership" with Wikipedia. They're trying to get bought out by a big player, and every relationship strengthens their easily-replicated product. That's why they have 50 trillion partnerships with Google and Opera and anyone else they can find. That's the entirety of their company approach.
The whole "feel and smell of a book" argument isn't a real issue. People that say that are the same people that prefer vinyl over CDs because they're used to the comfort of the medium.
eBooks will get big when there's a compelling reason to use them. What ADVANTAGES do eBooks bring? That's the very simple question that will determine more than the disadvantages, which people are likely to overlook if there's a good reason to use an ebook.
Right now the advantages are - immediate access (don't have to go to the store), if you're taking your laptop/palm/etc anyway you save space, and you can have a trillion pages on your harddrive but not on your shelf. None of those are really great reasons, which is why ebooks aren't really great.
What could change that? How about taking ADVANTAGE of the digital form - share notes with other readers while reading the book, include metadata and links for more information within the book (web-ize it, especially non-fiction with footnotes), dictionary lookup for strange words, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Last 4 days (and currently) they intermittently take people's money but don't notify the ecommerce site. Oops.
Windows Orifice... Ultimate.
An encyclopedia is meant to be an amalgam of information from citable sources. Wikipedia's editing guidelines follow this - you're only supposed to include information that has a verifiable source. So follow the cited sources from Wikipedia (if they exist) and reference those, or if you're lazy, use a site like BookRags that compiles citable sources on tons of topics (including info from Wikipedia), or even (god forbid!) use the library.
Microsoft's entire business is built on upgrading existing products that don't need to be upgraded. As a techie, it rubs me as completely unnatural - a word processor might have add-in features over time, or even be re-architectured to support web collaboration, etc., but the entire focus of the Office suite and the OS should be on STABILITY and SPEED. Everything else is fluff, and it's the fluff that MS is trying to shove down everyone's throats using every trick in the book as leverage.
If Microsoft wanted to make an appealing product, they would release some "Windows Core OS" that is built solely for speed and stability - yank out all the backward compatability (or allow it only as modular driver add-ons when needed), strip all the bloat, and test the bloody hell out of it. In other words, build Windows the Linux way - then they'd have a pleasing product that people could rally around. It is ridiculous for an OS to require GIGS of RAM, and still take 30 seconds to boot up.
It's interesting to think about the economic implications of Craigslist - certainly, not slapping ads everywhere and charging for all sorts of posts has allowed the site to grow to its huge size, but on the other hand, it has all but killed newspapers' cash cow, the classifieds. You can say, "who cares, newspapers are dying anyway," but the resources newspapers have - trained journalists, editors, the whole damn infrastructure - is quite valuable to our society as a whole. I don't really think Craigslist is going to kill the whole industry, but it's certainly had a big effect on how newspapers will move into the 21st century.
That being said, this decision on Craigslist's part to not monetize the site fully is something like "accelerated capitalism". In other words, they're skipping that whole phase where they maximize their size and influence to make lots of money until a competitor comes in to undercut them - because you pretty much CAN'T undercut them, they're undercutting themselves to achieve scale. Sites like Youtube are doing this too - the technology of everything has grown faster than the market can respond.
If you look at the history of math, it's always leaps of stupidity like this that were responsible for actually improving and extending mathematics. Start with the number zero. People said zero doesn't exist, so it's not a number etc. Then people took note of it's special properties and started playing around with it, and lo and behold we went from roman numerals to arabic numbers, making something like multiplication much, much easier.
Most other big innovations were caused by people doing what was supposed to be avoided. Wherever "things got fuzzy," that's where big changes occurred. Think of calculus, which is only allowed by accepting Zeno's paradox, ignoring the drama, and focusing on what can be manipulated mathematically.
Instead of buying out individual copyrights, why not invest the $100 million in lobbyists to go head to head with Disney and fix the infinite copyright problem?
"More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft."
...and the other 50,000 uninstalled before it could crash. Seriously, why would you install this before 2009? Or at all?
http://www.tag-board.com/ Tag boards have been around a while. Basically they are a chat window that refreshes every few seconds or so.
They say 40% of the time... it works every time.
The reason everyone still uses Google isn't because they have the best ranking of results anymore, which is usually encrusted with spam sites designed to beat Google, but because they have the most COMPLETE results. When you search for something rare, Google most likely will return results no other basic engine has. So people have gotten accustomed to checking Google first out of habit more than anything else.
To me, I think the future of search isn't necessarily a better Google, but something different. The problem with Google is the same as its strength - its simplicity. There is very little control on Google for more complicated searches, such as searching only company websites, or searching only encyclopedia content. It's just a big kludge for them to add stuff like travel info or weather or movie info without knowing the intent of the searcher beforehand. Searchers have to get savvier, not just the algorithms. I think search aggregating sites like Seaurch.com which has 200 engines but still uses a simple interface, is a great idea. Sites like Clusty.com also take an interesting approach towards understanding the searcher's intentions.
Why not release the results of all the bugs? All those OSS projects will then have 0.00% bugs!
I do a lot of small scripts (Perl, PHP, etc) and reuse a lot of code. What works for me is to have put each little project in its own directory and make a README file describing each script and whatever else. That helps at least digging around for a chunk of code rather than going through 100 scripts I can go through 20 READMEs.
As Wikipedia has developed, there has been a push for more metadata, more semantic markup. It seems to me that Wikipedia is in the best position to pioneer the "semantic web" - you can see the beginnings of it with "category" and "portal" pages, as well as the current discussion for "attribute" fields in Wikipedia (something like "Boston IS_CAPITAL_OF Massachusetts"). Beyond that, do you see Wikipedia itself having a strong hand in determining the future of the semantic structuring of all this data, or do you see this development as something outside of Wikipedia's mission, maybe to be picked up and advanced by other parties? Also, do you think semantic markup could be used as a way to address some of the credibility issues of the content, since it's easier to verify a structured fact than a blob of text?
Would be to provide a robust, free, POP accessible mail account. Then I can use whatever damn interface I want.
You've got to give people a reason to go to you rather than EB or Best Buy. Good staff is probably a good idea. Know your audience - use the same tactics that make good comic book stores, indie book stores, and good board game stores succeed. What does that mean? Cater to the hardcore gamer who will hang out in your store all day talking about games with the staff. Build a community that way - people will spend $5 more on a game if they LIKE your store and feel like they're "helping the local store." Be local and quirky. Organize games by type of game (RPG, FPS, etc.) rather than title. Inexplicably have a Dreamcast area. Sell stuff that you know will sell to hardcore gamers - such as the Penny Arcade book when that comes out in January.
How to draw people in? Why not a Ms. Pacman machine that runs for free? Probably cheaper than setting up an XBox 360 station, and you never have to change it. Non-gamers dragged into the store would recognize the game and play it, hardcore gamers will dig it as old school. After all, you can't compete with Best Buy's big leather chairs, so don't try to.
If you have room, you can do tournaments. But why not try to do a deal with a local arcade (if there is one) - any game purchase you get $1 in tokens free or something like that. Think of things like that, where you can work with other hotspots for geeks in your specific neighborhood to get coupons for games or in other ways draw them in and let them know you exist.
More importantly, I would avoid getting sucked into competing head to head with the big game stores. Don't take trade-ins that lose you money. Don't do anything that loses you money - you can win customers in other ways. You don't need to get every gamer in the area to make money - remember you need to be profitable, so make smart decisions to differentiate yourself rather than battle the big guys on every front.
So finally Slashdot has an article about Digg. Will Digg have an article linking to this article? How far can this go?!
But this text message this is a joke.
For a job in the game industry, you need game industry experience. Stupid but true. The degree won't help at all. Why not save 2 years of tuition and time, and use it instead to make actual soundtracks for indie projects for free or minimal pay. Then you'll have an awesome portfolio and hey, maybe even make a few contacts with programmers that break into the biz that you can use to swing bigger jobs.
Why does Answers.com want this deal? Not for revenue, but for the clout of saying they have a "partnership" with Wikipedia. They're trying to get bought out by a big player, and every relationship strengthens their easily-replicated product. That's why they have 50 trillion partnerships with Google and Opera and anyone else they can find. That's the entirety of their company approach.
eBooks will get big when there's a compelling reason to use them. What ADVANTAGES do eBooks bring? That's the very simple question that will determine more than the disadvantages, which people are likely to overlook if there's a good reason to use an ebook.
Right now the advantages are - immediate access (don't have to go to the store), if you're taking your laptop/palm/etc anyway you save space, and you can have a trillion pages on your harddrive but not on your shelf. None of those are really great reasons, which is why ebooks aren't really great.
What could change that? How about taking ADVANTAGE of the digital form - share notes with other readers while reading the book, include metadata and links for more information within the book (web-ize it, especially non-fiction with footnotes), dictionary lookup for strange words, etc, etc.
Print them in a book and wait for Google Print to scan them all for you.
...in the title of an article about Microsoft. A /. classic!
Why, friendly google adwords, of course! Talking about baseball? Why not visit espn.com? Or better yet, Baseball on eBay. 1000s of Baseballs for Sale!
That Slashdot users make up 100% of that 40% of users?