People don't tend to maintain a list of links to every subject they've ever discussed. So somebody has to do the searching, rightfully it should be the one who wants to know the answer...
Weren't you the one who just asked me elsewhere to post a link to the thread I was referring to?
This happened 3-5 years ago on a forum that I never revisited because the people were so utterly rude. It would take my hours to find the thread, assuming it's even still available.
But my karma is generally good here, and you have access to my post history if you want to review it. Of all the things that people could accuse me of, no one who knows me would accuse me of being impolite when unprovoked or even particularly hot-tempered when provoked. I know lots of people are rude, but I'm almost always (at least!) less rude than the person I'm talking with.
No, what's stupid is suggesting that a mailing-list or forum full of unpaid experts should be compelled to answer your trivial questions is the 'retarded' part.
Ummm... I don't know how to explain this to you since you seem to be somehow impaired, but it was a HELP FORUM. It was a forum specifically set up so that people could ask those sorts of questions, it was posted in the right place, and I had already searched the forum and many others to see if the question had already been asked and answered. Not one single person in the forum was questioning whether it was appropriate to ask the question, but they were all just blowing me off anyway and calling names.
So what the hell is your problem? Seriously. I'm asking.
Beware of things like "salary sacrifice" - where accountants can convince people to give up their own benefits to buy a computer that the workplace should provide anyway and sneak it past the IT departmen
People do that? I'd beware of that no matter what. If your employer wants you to do your job, they'll have to provide you with the supplies you need to do that job. If employers want you to take a pay cut before they'll provide you with those tools, then either your employer is scamming you or your employer isn't serious about getting the job done. Either way, you don't want to work for those people.
Honestly, I might be in the classification of people who don't understand, but I resent the implication of "incompetent". I really hate the idea that you have to be an all-knowledgeable ubergeek, or else stay completely away from computers.
It seems like a simple issue: people have obviously felt the need to jail users for security reasons. They've been lead by someone to believe that chroot is a solution. If chroot isn't the solution, then why not give people a better solution instead of calling them incompetent.
It reminds me of a discussion that I was involved in a while back. I'll tell the story:
I posted to a forum asking what the best method was to jail SFTP users. I wanted something like FTP, but secure, and I didn't want users to be able to browse the whole filesystem. Some security expert chimed in basically calling me a moron, that if I didn't want people to browse the whole filesystem, I should use FTP and jail people. A lot of people in the forum agreed.
I tried to explain that I didn't want to use FTP because authentication wasn't encrypted, but if I must use FTP did anyone know how to get encryption on the login. The same security expert chimed in again to inform me that there wasn't actually a good implementation for SSL on FTP. A lot of people in the forum agreed.
I replied again asking more general advice. I wanted some kind of FTP-type login where authentication was encrypted and users were jailed. Again, it was implied that I was a moron. I was told I didn't understand security at all. I was told: If you trust your users, you shouldn't need to keep them from browsing the filesystem. If I didn't trust my users, then I should only worry about protecting my system from users, and jailed FTP logins were a good solution.
I tried to explain again that I didn't want to trust my users, but I wanted to protect my users' information by providing a secure method for login. The reply again was that I was stupid and incompetent, didn't understand security, and shouldn't be running a server anyway. Many people in the forum agreed.
So all I wanted was to know how to do something, and everyone thought it was a lot of fun to tell me how incompetent I was. If the answer is so obvious, why not explain it? More to the point, if you're such a fricken genius, why not figure out a way to get people the functionality they want in a form they'll understand? I still don't understand why secure authentication is a silly thing to want.
Assuming that everyone running a server is going to be a super-genius who wants to spend all day researching everything-- having that expectation is retarded. I've been working in IT for a while, and I'll tell you right now that there are an awful lot of admins that are way dumber than I am. A solution that only super-geniuses can figure out isn't a practical solution because no one will use it.
So if a lot of people want to jail users into a specific directory for various reasons, why can't we have that functionality? If one particular method (in this case, chroot) doesn't do a good job of jailing users, then can one of the super-geniuses out there come up with a good/real/practical/secure method for accomplishing that?
If you can't, please refrain from name-calling because they want to do something that you can't figure out how to accomplish.
Yeah, so they're basically including all computer equipment, not just "the Internet". They're even including servers in datacenters and air conditioning in datacenters.
So computer equipment uses a decent percentage of all electricity in a civilization where a lot of industry is based on knowledge, entertainment, and other intellectual property, most of which has gone digital. Thanks, captain obvious. Next thing you know, you'll tell me that a large percentage of oil and coal are used in transportation and energy generation.
On the other hand, it is interesting to know the actual percentage. 10% doesn't seem that high to me. Compare all computer equipment used by both businesses and home users to the various home appliances, office equipment, lighting, air conditioning, elevators, etc. Considering I have many computers/routers running pretty much 24/7, and the only other electricity I use is for lighting, TV, AC, washer/dryer, fridge, and microwave, 10% sounds ok.
Sun offers support for ZFS, which right now seems to be the filesystem that everyone uses.
Sorry, a bit of a typo there. Right now, everyone seems to *want* to use ZFS. It's very advanced and has lots of good features, but AFAIK it isn't well-supported in any OS other than Solaris, and so it isn't widely used.
The fact that you think that illustrates the problem. In fact, there are lots of differences between operating systems besides what software they run.
For example, Mac OSX runs on a microkernel that many people argue is more secure and flexible than a monolithic kernel. Linux usese a monolithic kernel which is faster than Apple's microkernel. Sun offers support for ZFS, which right now seems to be the filesystem that everyone uses.
In fact, most software that runs on Linux can also run on FreeBSD, Solaris, OSX, or other Unix derivatives. Lots of people still choose to use Linux. Even once you've chosen Linux, a lot of people prefer a specific distro in spite of the fact that one distro can generally run the same software as other distros. Why do you think that is?
Lots of people choose their OS based on things like development process, development philosophy, speed, security, license, package management, installation process, ease of management, the specific tools included in installation or kernel-specific features.
I'm not saying the computer is a solved problem, but people want to take the functionality for granted. If you want to use cars as a metaphor, it'd be like if cars were constantly stalling out, required specialized gasoline and oil for each brand, and you couldn't just get out of one car and get in another without buying a new seat belt set for each person riding in each car. Buying a new car also requires you to buy a new coffee mug because the cup-holders are all different sizes, and requires you to buy a new garage because car-makers make sure that their cars only fit in the garages that they make.
What I'm saying is that, in both cases, the design can keep changing and improving, but the basic problems should be solved. We should be getting to the point where we have basic standards for filesystems, network file sharing, office document formats, etc. The only way to do that is to create coherent standards and stick with them, and Microsoft absolutely refuses to participate in that process, and in fact takes steps to ensure that their software can only interact properly with other pieces of their own software.
Microsoft is not NEARLY at that point yet, and there are few indicators that they will be. Hardware manufacturers are certainly not giving up driver development for XP, but that doesn't translate into them launching new development for OSX or Linux, because they still don't necessarily see a return on investment.
I think they are there. I'm not saying Microsoft's OS dominance is threatened yet, but I think that the Vista problems have contributed to vendors/developers questioning whether Microsoft's dominance will continue in the long-term view. Dell has started selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. AMD is opening the source for the ATI graphics cards. More and more governments/organizations are using open document formats instead of MS Office formats.
So it's happening already. There are questions about how far it will go, how quickly, and whether Microsoft can reassert their lock-in in these areas, but progress is already being made.
Even if it's not any worse than other Windows releases, it does seem to have gotten a bigger backlash than previous releases.
I've been working in IT and support Windows machines since WFW 3.11. I've gone through pretty much every version of Windows between then and now, and I agree, each transition has caused problems (well... except for 2000->XP and 95->98, neither of which hurt too much). However, I've never seen so many IT people generally pissed off about a Windows release, and so few that are enthusiastic about it.
It's not necessarily because it's worse or more buggy than previous Windows releases, but I get the sense that people are fed up. It's like, "Oh no. Not this shit again." After so many years and so many upgrades, having the same problems with each upgrade, people would like to see Microsoft learning from its mistakes and doing a better job anticipating the problems they're going to cause with the updates. Also, it seems like a lot of people are genuinely having problems with Microsoft products, but they've been having the same problems for over 10 years and none of the upgrades actually solve the problems.
I think people are just getting tired of it all, thinking that there should be better solutions by now. It was excusable when desktop PC were still considered novel and new. Now people want to be able to take the technology for granted, and Microsoft isn't doing a good job of filling that desire.
Of course, if Microsoft switched to a support model, they wouldn't have any incentive to improve their software at all. When your user base is continually re-buying the same software every month anyway, who needs updates?
I don't think it's really that Microsoft is trying to be everything to everyone. It's debatable, but I honestly believe that the problem is their own monopoly. Once they entered the monopoly position, their business interests were no longer served by putting out the best product that would make things easiest for users and IT professionals. Instead, their business interests were best served by increasing vendor lock-in, making it harder to use their software with other platforms, and using market segmentation to try to make everyone spend as much as possible on a product that they inevitably have to buy in some form, leveraging their monopoly to establish themselves in other markets, and spreading improvements between many paid upgrades to keep people paying.
In effect, Microsoft is now forced to make crappy products in the name of "profitability", and the only thing that will get them to release good products again is sufficient competition to hurt profitability.
Well the headline (and summary, and article? Didn't RTFA yet) doesn't suggest that Microsoft should abandon Windows totally, only Vista. They could realistically retreat back to XP, backport any Vista features/improvements that are actually good, and start from there.
Honestly, I don't think the failure of Vista will come anywhere close to breaking Vista, but hopefully it will make hardware and software vendors question their strategy of only supporting Windows. If the future dominance of Windows is called into question, the developers may look to support other platforms instead. Then, hopefully, theoretically, you could have all the software you need running on Linux. In that case, Microsoft can still compete in the OS market, but they just won't be able to use vendor lock-in as such a huge barrier to switching to another OS.
Personally, I'd love to see vendors generally developing cross-platform solutions. Ideally, people should be able to choose their operating system on the strengths or weaknesses of that operating system, and not on the basis of what software it can run.
I hope this service takes off, as competition between iTunes and other services only means less DRM, higher quality songs, and better selection for all of us. Amazon just needs to land some deals with record labels...
The "deals with record labels" is where this all confuses me. Apple wants to sell higher quality songs without DRM, too. They can't because the record companies won't let them. The conflict between Apple and the record companies is that the record companies want stricter DRM and higher prices.
So how has Amazon gotten license to sell albums without DRM that Apple hasn't? How are they going to get the labels to DRM-free when Apple can't? Will other online stores be able to get the same deal as Amazon? And if other companies can negotiate this deal for DRM-free music and cheaper prices, will the record companies continue to refuse the same deal to Apple?
I know it'll probably sound like I'm paranoid, but it just seems suspicious to me. We hear that Universal is fighting with Apple because Universal wants to raise prices and have stricter DRM. And now suddenly there are Universal artists on Amazon's cheaper DRM-free service.
What's the plan here? Are they simply changing their minds about pricing and DRM? That sounds unlikely. Are they hoping to drive Apple out of the music distribution business so they can raise prices and institute stricter DRM later? That plan sounds too stupid for even a record company exec.
So what's the deal? Honestly, I'd love to see a variety of services spring up, all with a catalog of millions of DRM-free songs. I'd love to see every song ever recorded available for online purchase without DRM. I've love to see all these stores (and even the different record lables!) trying to compete on price. But it's not Apple that's preventing it, it's the record companies. So the question for me is, how is Amazon going to negotiate that sort of deal?
At some point, though, that cost is recouped already. After some number of sales, all costs have been recouped, and a tidy profit has been collected. Once they hit that point, and the file has already been delivered to iTunes, the record companies aren't doing anything but collecting a check.
In any event, you think they'd be somewhat happy that their distribution costs are being cut to near-zero.
I wasn't claiming that Leopard is Apple's Vista. In fact I said I haven't used Leopard.
In any event it's a totally different situation because Microsoft's business is focused around selling their operating system. Apple's business model is much more focused on selling hardware. Apple isn't trying to sell as many copies of Leopard as they can, they're trying to make Leopard exciting enough that it might persuade someone to buy an Apple computer instead of a Dell.
In both cases, of course they want the operating system to be good. However, if Apple could sell more computers by switching to another operating system, Apple can do that and Apple would still be fine. If Dell could sell more computers by switching to to another operating system, then Microsoft is completely screwed.
Tiger doesn't feel any slower for me, and i've used it on a variety of machines. I've never benchmarked anything, but general system responsiveness hasn't been noticeably slower, except maybe when you do a fresh install and Spotlight tries to index everything.
I'll probably get modded to hell and back, but Leopard is rapidly becoming Apple's version of Vista.
I haven't used Leopard enough to know whether it's a step backwards for OSX and has no useful new features. However, even if that's the case, at least they only wasted 2 years making it.
Well, but seriously you need at least two. You need an editor to review the article, and another level to review the editor. That's not recursion, it's just common sense. It's like having the police department and having Internal Affairs division. Who investigates Internal Affairs? I don't know, but it seems like the Internal Affairs division makes sense, but an Internal Affairs division to investigate the Internal Affairs division seems like a bit much.
You need someone to watch the watchmen, but it might be overkill to have someone watch those watching the watchmen. Those watching the watchmen should watch each other, too.
The main problem I see here is that it doesn't lend itself to creating coherent articles. If you start dropping out particular edits because they don't match some set criteria, then I think many articles would end up more nonsensical and less coherent. Removing a "controversial" edit might also remove the appropriate context for a "cited" edit, and in doing so might cause the "cited" edit to become misleading.
You really have to understand how good writing and good editing works. Removing some fact because it's inaccurate might require several adjustments throughout an article, and so a particular edit of the entire article should be set as "approved" or "stable". This also implies that there might need to be a single editor per-article, in order to make sure that the article is well-written.
Of course, I'm assuming that part of the goal is to create good, informative, well-written articles instead of a simple list of objective facts which are either true or false.
ather than merging changes from one branch to the other, like in software development, however, I think WP would be better off tagging a version of an article as stable, and keeping the latest version as unstable....[snip]... An automated trust network (like the one described in the article) should be used to assign contributors a trust rating, and then let people vote on the validity of an article or section.
I see a conflict here; if you base the trust on a per-user basis, it doesn't get you to trusting the article as a unit. Even if 90% of the page is a series of contributions made by trusted individuals, the remaining 10% might be made by non-trusted individuals, and that 10% might create a very misleading impression on the topic.
I think you need some method for signing off on the article as a whole, as being valid, true, and coherent. I don't think a single 50% majority vote will accomplish this. You really need a person or team who can serve in an editorial capacity, bringing the whole article together, making sure it's coherent and void of misleading ideas.
And yes, you're right that this is a foreign idea to the Wikipedia as it is today. That's exactly why I think a branch is necessary. The Wikipedia should remain essentially as it is for an unstable branch, but the stable version should be new, and it should have a more coherent editorial system.
You're right, truth is not reached via consensus. But then, truth is not reached via authority either. In fact, I can't think of any set path which will always arrive and truth and never falsehood. If you have, please share, since it would lead to a huge philosophic and scientific revolution.
In the mean time, the best means to truth available to us (AFAICT) seems to be open discussion and review by knowledgeable and experienced people. So far, the Wikipedia has all of that, but I'm not sure it has a method for distinguishing between "open discussion" and "review by knowledgeable and experienced people". Perhaps it should.
Slashdot Mirror
People don't tend to maintain a list of links to every subject they've ever discussed. So somebody has to do the searching, rightfully it should be the one who wants to know the answer...
Weren't you the one who just asked me elsewhere to post a link to the thread I was referring to?
This happened 3-5 years ago on a forum that I never revisited because the people were so utterly rude. It would take my hours to find the thread, assuming it's even still available.
But my karma is generally good here, and you have access to my post history if you want to review it. Of all the things that people could accuse me of, no one who knows me would accuse me of being impolite when unprovoked or even particularly hot-tempered when provoked. I know lots of people are rude, but I'm almost always (at least!) less rude than the person I'm talking with.
No, what's stupid is suggesting that a mailing-list or forum full of unpaid experts should be compelled to answer your trivial questions is the 'retarded' part.
Ummm... I don't know how to explain this to you since you seem to be somehow impaired, but it was a HELP FORUM. It was a forum specifically set up so that people could ask those sorts of questions, it was posted in the right place, and I had already searched the forum and many others to see if the question had already been asked and answered. Not one single person in the forum was questioning whether it was appropriate to ask the question, but they were all just blowing me off anyway and calling names.
So what the hell is your problem? Seriously. I'm asking.
Beware of things like "salary sacrifice" - where accountants can convince people to give up their own benefits to buy a computer that the workplace should provide anyway and sneak it past the IT departmen
People do that? I'd beware of that no matter what. If your employer wants you to do your job, they'll have to provide you with the supplies you need to do that job. If employers want you to take a pay cut before they'll provide you with those tools, then either your employer is scamming you or your employer isn't serious about getting the job done. Either way, you don't want to work for those people.
Honestly, I might be in the classification of people who don't understand, but I resent the implication of "incompetent". I really hate the idea that you have to be an all-knowledgeable ubergeek, or else stay completely away from computers.
It seems like a simple issue: people have obviously felt the need to jail users for security reasons. They've been lead by someone to believe that chroot is a solution. If chroot isn't the solution, then why not give people a better solution instead of calling them incompetent.
It reminds me of a discussion that I was involved in a while back. I'll tell the story:
So all I wanted was to know how to do something, and everyone thought it was a lot of fun to tell me how incompetent I was. If the answer is so obvious, why not explain it? More to the point, if you're such a fricken genius, why not figure out a way to get people the functionality they want in a form they'll understand? I still don't understand why secure authentication is a silly thing to want.
Assuming that everyone running a server is going to be a super-genius who wants to spend all day researching everything-- having that expectation is retarded. I've been working in IT for a while, and I'll tell you right now that there are an awful lot of admins that are way dumber than I am. A solution that only super-geniuses can figure out isn't a practical solution because no one will use it.
So if a lot of people want to jail users into a specific directory for various reasons, why can't we have that functionality? If one particular method (in this case, chroot) doesn't do a good job of jailing users, then can one of the super-geniuses out there come up with a good/real/practical/secure method for accomplishing that?
If you can't, please refrain from name-calling because they want to do something that you can't figure out how to accomplish.
Yeah, so they're basically including all computer equipment, not just "the Internet". They're even including servers in datacenters and air conditioning in datacenters.
So computer equipment uses a decent percentage of all electricity in a civilization where a lot of industry is based on knowledge, entertainment, and other intellectual property, most of which has gone digital. Thanks, captain obvious. Next thing you know, you'll tell me that a large percentage of oil and coal are used in transportation and energy generation.
On the other hand, it is interesting to know the actual percentage. 10% doesn't seem that high to me. Compare all computer equipment used by both businesses and home users to the various home appliances, office equipment, lighting, air conditioning, elevators, etc. Considering I have many computers/routers running pretty much 24/7, and the only other electricity I use is for lighting, TV, AC, washer/dryer, fridge, and microwave, 10% sounds ok.
Sun offers support for ZFS, which right now seems to be the filesystem that everyone uses.
Sorry, a bit of a typo there. Right now, everyone seems to *want* to use ZFS. It's very advanced and has lots of good features, but AFAIK it isn't well-supported in any OS other than Solaris, and so it isn't widely used.
The fact that you think that illustrates the problem. In fact, there are lots of differences between operating systems besides what software they run.
For example, Mac OSX runs on a microkernel that many people argue is more secure and flexible than a monolithic kernel. Linux usese a monolithic kernel which is faster than Apple's microkernel. Sun offers support for ZFS, which right now seems to be the filesystem that everyone uses.
In fact, most software that runs on Linux can also run on FreeBSD, Solaris, OSX, or other Unix derivatives. Lots of people still choose to use Linux. Even once you've chosen Linux, a lot of people prefer a specific distro in spite of the fact that one distro can generally run the same software as other distros. Why do you think that is?
Lots of people choose their OS based on things like development process, development philosophy, speed, security, license, package management, installation process, ease of management, the specific tools included in installation or kernel-specific features.
I'm not saying the computer is a solved problem, but people want to take the functionality for granted. If you want to use cars as a metaphor, it'd be like if cars were constantly stalling out, required specialized gasoline and oil for each brand, and you couldn't just get out of one car and get in another without buying a new seat belt set for each person riding in each car. Buying a new car also requires you to buy a new coffee mug because the cup-holders are all different sizes, and requires you to buy a new garage because car-makers make sure that their cars only fit in the garages that they make.
What I'm saying is that, in both cases, the design can keep changing and improving, but the basic problems should be solved. We should be getting to the point where we have basic standards for filesystems, network file sharing, office document formats, etc. The only way to do that is to create coherent standards and stick with them, and Microsoft absolutely refuses to participate in that process, and in fact takes steps to ensure that their software can only interact properly with other pieces of their own software.
Microsoft is not NEARLY at that point yet, and there are few indicators that they will be. Hardware manufacturers are certainly not giving up driver development for XP, but that doesn't translate into them launching new development for OSX or Linux, because they still don't necessarily see a return on investment.
I think they are there. I'm not saying Microsoft's OS dominance is threatened yet, but I think that the Vista problems have contributed to vendors/developers questioning whether Microsoft's dominance will continue in the long-term view. Dell has started selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. AMD is opening the source for the ATI graphics cards. More and more governments/organizations are using open document formats instead of MS Office formats.
So it's happening already. There are questions about how far it will go, how quickly, and whether Microsoft can reassert their lock-in in these areas, but progress is already being made.
Even if it's not any worse than other Windows releases, it does seem to have gotten a bigger backlash than previous releases.
I've been working in IT and support Windows machines since WFW 3.11. I've gone through pretty much every version of Windows between then and now, and I agree, each transition has caused problems (well... except for 2000->XP and 95->98, neither of which hurt too much). However, I've never seen so many IT people generally pissed off about a Windows release, and so few that are enthusiastic about it.
It's not necessarily because it's worse or more buggy than previous Windows releases, but I get the sense that people are fed up. It's like, "Oh no. Not this shit again." After so many years and so many upgrades, having the same problems with each upgrade, people would like to see Microsoft learning from its mistakes and doing a better job anticipating the problems they're going to cause with the updates. Also, it seems like a lot of people are genuinely having problems with Microsoft products, but they've been having the same problems for over 10 years and none of the upgrades actually solve the problems.
I think people are just getting tired of it all, thinking that there should be better solutions by now. It was excusable when desktop PC were still considered novel and new. Now people want to be able to take the technology for granted, and Microsoft isn't doing a good job of filling that desire.
Of course, if Microsoft switched to a support model, they wouldn't have any incentive to improve their software at all. When your user base is continually re-buying the same software every month anyway, who needs updates?
I don't think it's really that Microsoft is trying to be everything to everyone. It's debatable, but I honestly believe that the problem is their own monopoly. Once they entered the monopoly position, their business interests were no longer served by putting out the best product that would make things easiest for users and IT professionals. Instead, their business interests were best served by increasing vendor lock-in, making it harder to use their software with other platforms, and using market segmentation to try to make everyone spend as much as possible on a product that they inevitably have to buy in some form, leveraging their monopoly to establish themselves in other markets, and spreading improvements between many paid upgrades to keep people paying.
In effect, Microsoft is now forced to make crappy products in the name of "profitability", and the only thing that will get them to release good products again is sufficient competition to hurt profitability.
Well the headline (and summary, and article? Didn't RTFA yet) doesn't suggest that Microsoft should abandon Windows totally, only Vista. They could realistically retreat back to XP, backport any Vista features/improvements that are actually good, and start from there.
Honestly, I don't think the failure of Vista will come anywhere close to breaking Vista, but hopefully it will make hardware and software vendors question their strategy of only supporting Windows. If the future dominance of Windows is called into question, the developers may look to support other platforms instead. Then, hopefully, theoretically, you could have all the software you need running on Linux. In that case, Microsoft can still compete in the OS market, but they just won't be able to use vendor lock-in as such a huge barrier to switching to another OS.
Personally, I'd love to see vendors generally developing cross-platform solutions. Ideally, people should be able to choose their operating system on the strengths or weaknesses of that operating system, and not on the basis of what software it can run.
I hope this service takes off, as competition between iTunes and other services only means less DRM, higher quality songs, and better selection for all of us. Amazon just needs to land some deals with record labels...
The "deals with record labels" is where this all confuses me. Apple wants to sell higher quality songs without DRM, too. They can't because the record companies won't let them. The conflict between Apple and the record companies is that the record companies want stricter DRM and higher prices.
So how has Amazon gotten license to sell albums without DRM that Apple hasn't? How are they going to get the labels to DRM-free when Apple can't? Will other online stores be able to get the same deal as Amazon? And if other companies can negotiate this deal for DRM-free music and cheaper prices, will the record companies continue to refuse the same deal to Apple?
I know it'll probably sound like I'm paranoid, but it just seems suspicious to me. We hear that Universal is fighting with Apple because Universal wants to raise prices and have stricter DRM. And now suddenly there are Universal artists on Amazon's cheaper DRM-free service.
What's the plan here? Are they simply changing their minds about pricing and DRM? That sounds unlikely. Are they hoping to drive Apple out of the music distribution business so they can raise prices and institute stricter DRM later? That plan sounds too stupid for even a record company exec.
So what's the deal? Honestly, I'd love to see a variety of services spring up, all with a catalog of millions of DRM-free songs. I'd love to see every song ever recorded available for online purchase without DRM. I've love to see all these stores (and even the different record lables!) trying to compete on price. But it's not Apple that's preventing it, it's the record companies. So the question for me is, how is Amazon going to negotiate that sort of deal?
At some point, though, that cost is recouped already. After some number of sales, all costs have been recouped, and a tidy profit has been collected. Once they hit that point, and the file has already been delivered to iTunes, the record companies aren't doing anything but collecting a check.
In any event, you think they'd be somewhat happy that their distribution costs are being cut to near-zero.
I wasn't claiming that Leopard is Apple's Vista. In fact I said I haven't used Leopard.
In any event it's a totally different situation because Microsoft's business is focused around selling their operating system. Apple's business model is much more focused on selling hardware. Apple isn't trying to sell as many copies of Leopard as they can, they're trying to make Leopard exciting enough that it might persuade someone to buy an Apple computer instead of a Dell.
In both cases, of course they want the operating system to be good. However, if Apple could sell more computers by switching to another operating system, Apple can do that and Apple would still be fine. If Dell could sell more computers by switching to to another operating system, then Microsoft is completely screwed.
What features have been cut out of iTunes in version 7?
Tiger doesn't feel any slower for me, and i've used it on a variety of machines. I've never benchmarked anything, but general system responsiveness hasn't been noticeably slower, except maybe when you do a fresh install and Spotlight tries to index everything.
I'll probably get modded to hell and back, but Leopard is rapidly becoming Apple's version of Vista.
I haven't used Leopard enough to know whether it's a step backwards for OSX and has no useful new features. However, even if that's the case, at least they only wasted 2 years making it.
I don't understand how you're using the word "ontology". Can you explain that some other way?
A lot.
Well, but seriously you need at least two. You need an editor to review the article, and another level to review the editor. That's not recursion, it's just common sense. It's like having the police department and having Internal Affairs division. Who investigates Internal Affairs? I don't know, but it seems like the Internal Affairs division makes sense, but an Internal Affairs division to investigate the Internal Affairs division seems like a bit much.
You need someone to watch the watchmen, but it might be overkill to have someone watch those watching the watchmen. Those watching the watchmen should watch each other, too.
The main problem I see here is that it doesn't lend itself to creating coherent articles. If you start dropping out particular edits because they don't match some set criteria, then I think many articles would end up more nonsensical and less coherent. Removing a "controversial" edit might also remove the appropriate context for a "cited" edit, and in doing so might cause the "cited" edit to become misleading.
You really have to understand how good writing and good editing works. Removing some fact because it's inaccurate might require several adjustments throughout an article, and so a particular edit of the entire article should be set as "approved" or "stable". This also implies that there might need to be a single editor per-article, in order to make sure that the article is well-written.
Of course, I'm assuming that part of the goal is to create good, informative, well-written articles instead of a simple list of objective facts which are either true or false.
ather than merging changes from one branch to the other, like in software development, however, I think WP would be better off tagging a version of an article as stable, and keeping the latest version as unstable....[snip]... An automated trust network (like the one described in the article) should be used to assign contributors a trust rating, and then let people vote on the validity of an article or section.
I see a conflict here; if you base the trust on a per-user basis, it doesn't get you to trusting the article as a unit. Even if 90% of the page is a series of contributions made by trusted individuals, the remaining 10% might be made by non-trusted individuals, and that 10% might create a very misleading impression on the topic.
I think you need some method for signing off on the article as a whole, as being valid, true, and coherent. I don't think a single 50% majority vote will accomplish this. You really need a person or team who can serve in an editorial capacity, bringing the whole article together, making sure it's coherent and void of misleading ideas.
And yes, you're right that this is a foreign idea to the Wikipedia as it is today. That's exactly why I think a branch is necessary. The Wikipedia should remain essentially as it is for an unstable branch, but the stable version should be new, and it should have a more coherent editorial system.
You're right, truth is not reached via consensus. But then, truth is not reached via authority either. In fact, I can't think of any set path which will always arrive and truth and never falsehood. If you have, please share, since it would lead to a huge philosophic and scientific revolution.
In the mean time, the best means to truth available to us (AFAICT) seems to be open discussion and review by knowledgeable and experienced people. So far, the Wikipedia has all of that, but I'm not sure it has a method for distinguishing between "open discussion" and "review by knowledgeable and experienced people". Perhaps it should.