No... maybe... how do you know for sure? There's simply never any guarantee of that. Perhaps a random page is accurate, perhaps it just looks plausible but is in fact dangerously wrong. I think the history pages are the most worrying. If, rather than a direct large scale act of vandalism, some interested group was to slowly over a number of years quietly change little things you could really distort a view of the world. Fox News anyone?
Depsite much publicity (and on/. too) about how low quality and unreliable many Wikipedia pages are, it never ceases to amaze me how many people link to it from these pages or are willing to trust it to prove their point. I guess most people here are university educated and really should know better. Personally, I would prefer to mod every post with a wikipedia link offtopic (unless obviously intended to be funny) - at least until such time as it is a trusted source.
As a so-called web 2.0 entity it seems to be praised where MySpace or similar would never be thus. I assume that this is due to the fact that the stated aims of Jimbo et al are non-profit, and the intention of many, though clearly not all, contributors is the genuine advancement of humanity.
Noble goals, but horrifically exploitable, and there is much evidence on Wikipedia that exploited is just what it sometimes is. This ferry thing being yet one more example of that proof. (The fact that ferries on Lake Michigan have doubled in numbers over the past 3 months notwithstanding.) The obvious exploits are all good and well, the danger is in the subtle errors or deliberate manipulations. We not spot them until serious damage is done, lives lost, governments overthrown - all possible as real history indicates. Again, Fox News anyone?
So, if this storm in a teacup about ferries was taking place through competing MySpace pages would/. run an article on it? I don't think so.
In truth MySpace is occasionally as valid a source for data as Wikipedia, similarly, as is a guy you met in a bar last night.
Thus please, please, stop taking Wikipedia seriously. At least until such time as its editors start taking the truth seriously.
Dislcaimer: I studied Environmental Economics at university. I do believe in protecting the environment, and would take a radical approach in doing so in many cases.
However, this report may not be what it seems to be. Very little data is provided as to how they have gathered their information. Assessing the environmental impact of even a small company, or doing an audit of same, is a very large task requiring weeks and weeks of onsite anlysis and testing. It is time consuming and requires a great deal of access to confidential business processes.
I, for one, do not believe for one single second that Greenpeace was given access to such data.
Greenpeace as an organisation gathers very large sums of money annually. Legally and fiscally Greenpeace is not a charity. There are many questions as to what they do with the money they raise. A few annual publicity stunts involving a handful of people, publicity material, and the running of a small ship, do not adequately explain where the money goes.
Greenpeace was famously incorrect in its stance against the Brent Spar disposal and provably lied during that campaign.
I would be astonished if this report was anything other than propaganda - you may draw your own conclusions as to why some companies should be favoured over others. But it cannot be as a result of balanced investigation and scientific method, unless they've arrived at the right result by accident.
I do believe that all companies should report their environmental impact truthfully as a result of a defined reporting standard in their annual reports. This is the only way such data can be accurately compared and contrasted. Some companies do do this volutarily, but we are a long way from an accepted standard method of reporting or auditing thereof.
Judging by their poor website it could be anything at all... Very pretty yes - and not at all overloaded with information, or in fact any information that would encourage anyone to visit.
It has very typical German marketing style - "It is here. You may come. If you want"
Which is a missed opportunity since I live about 15 miles from Berlin Messe and am interested in the subject matter. They are lucky Slashdot picked up this story...
If by any chance anyone from IFA is reading this... "Willkommen in" translates as "Welcome to", and not "Welcome in" - very common in Dinglish, but not in English.
Oh, and good luck with the exhibition, I think you might need it...
How much demand will there really be from corporate users?...
Not really sure why the parent is considered insightful. I would consider it more short-sighted, most especially when supported by wikipseudofacts.
Google is a corporation. Google probably knows, or at least very much should know, what a corporation needs in terms of security in an office package, particularly in light of the behaviour of its competitors. Assuming Google wishes to go down this road they would need to be prepared to offer secure solutions to potential corporate clients. I would be astounded if they haven't already thought of that.
Sheesh, they are pretty smart guys, they aren't jumping in head first with a half-finished product. The volume of beta products shows they are prudent, and apparently concerned with delivering quality. If they want the corporate world there's a good chance they can eventually take it.
Writely is good. It is already capable of completing the vast majority of real everyday WP tasks. It is fast and simple - far faster and simpler and more appropriate than Word for most things. Word already has far too much stuff crammed into it, and the new version seemingly even more deadwood than the current.
It may be marginal, but a corporation could save money and increase productivity by switching to this product once it is fully ready. The only issues would be ones that you raised - which are solvable...
Write a cult african sci-fi TV show / movie franchise / trilogy or whatever. You'll have thousands of (contradictory) wiki pages by lunchtime.
Though, admittedly some waiting is still necessary as the pages on the detailed history of Namibia will be written some, if not many, many, years later...
Perhaps Wikipedia could learn from the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler - um, assuming of course that the wikipedia entries on these guys are in any way accurate.
It is never wise to fight a battle on more than one front. Focus! Do one thing well and then expand once you've got it right. The English version of Wikipedia has a long way (years of work) to go before it approaches being a valuable reliable source of data.
By the time that the quality and reliability issues are fixed, Most Africans will have broadband and be able to create any pages they like.
question of life the universe and everything it was not, of course, as big as the Earth. A computer so large that it was often mistaken for a planet. Except by the IAU who saw through the Earth's feeble attempt to be considered a planet and reclassified it as a large pocket calculator...
Whether the inhabitants of Earth's matrix retaliate by reclassifying astronomers as pseudoscientists remains to be seen...
I realized that I couldn't figure out how Gartner make money, especially in light of the fact that any articles I've seen bearing the results of their research have ranged from unlikely to improbable and all the way up to hallucinogenically created. It looks to me that they hire recent graduates with lots of opinions and absolutely no experiential knowledge. (and likely also milk them for all they can, burn them out and trash them at the first opportunity - just like most other analysis and consultancy firms do. Which explains much about the corporate world.)
Not entirely sure why someone bothered to create that page. One (more) example of why Wikipedia is not necessarily useful or respected... and
Gartner's own web page is an absurd mix of buzzwords and corporate design - confident yes, but vacuous.
So, does anyone know how they make money? A serious question, just the "how", I'm sure that no-one really knows the "why".
Do people realize just how obscene these kinds of specs are? For a friggin' word processor? Word processors existed in the 80's, and believe me they didn't have 256 MB on their hard disks, let alone 256 MB of RAM.
Yes! I couldn't agree more.
Back in the day I used Word 2.0 as pretty much my main application for all types of word processing tasks and layout stuff. It mostly worked despite the size of hard disks, RAM and processors back then. However, the time taken to start up your PC and open a document in Word does not feel significantly different now from what it did then (I grant you that feeling is unscientific and subjective).
I don't remember the last time I used Word.
Mostly for creative writing I use Final Draft, for general text stuff I use Notepad and for format important stuff I would use an InDesign/Notepad combination. Likely some of these tasks will now be switched over to Writely since it is but a swift bookmark away.
Privacy concerns aside, Writely is considerably quicker and easier for most general text tasks - I see no reason why Word couldn't be this fast - or in fact faster since it would be local.
I find Word to be too cumbersome for most simple tasks, and too unspecialized for others. What percentage of Word users use more than 30% of its features? A very small number I would guess.
Admittedly I don't work in a corporate environment, but I can't help thinking that perhaps Word is just regarded as the thing to use in most situations, rather than using a faster and more appropriate text tool. I wonder what the accumulative total man hours lost is over a year for the Corporate World for them using recent versions of Word over a slimmer faster product...
Who? Well in my experience about 50% (or slightly higher) of those doing professional or broadcast video. Sony, despite all the problems with consumer products, remains incredibly strong with pro-video. The only competition of note is Panasonic - and even they collaborate with Sony on some projects.
IBM's decision to buy the ISS was a fantastic decision. They can now freely ignore the Sarbanes Oxlley laws as well as Monopoly and other laws in every country as the IBM headquarters will not be located in outer space making them immune to earth laws.
cut and fade up on...
INT. REDMOND OFFICE. DAY.
SECRETARY: Mr Ballmer! Mr Ballmer! Please stop! You are ruining the paintwork on the ceiling with that chair...
I do too. But just a few words of caution though...
1. It is partly owned by eBay. And has no obvious source of revenue generation. So, and assuming eBay in its current form stays in business long term (not at all certain IMHO), you should expect to see changes at Craigslist eventually - like fees for example...
2. Craigslist has a significant, and growing, spam and fraud problem too. Which, as far as I can see, they are not really on top of right now. For example, take a look at any city listing outside of the United States. They are dependent on community reporting, and ouside of the US it's pretty much only a handful of English speaking ex-pats ever reading the pages - not enough for abuse to be rated enough to be taken down. It's often the same blatant spam again and again and again. It would be a piece of cake to filter it out - even easier than email spam. But they don't.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may... It look to me that Craigslist may peak in a couple of years max and then rapidly decline as soon as a better alternative comes around, and that could easily be MySpace or Google.
In some cases yes, that's true. However, having an unfair dismissal case on your CV isn't going to make you look like a fun addition to a corporate team. Rightly or wrongly (actually only wrongly) it makes you look like a trouble maker - even if you were only rightly defending yourself and were supported by the court.
"If you're words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter spaced typography won't help," he says. "And if your images aren't on point, making them dance in color in three dimensions won't help."
I don't entirely agree with this. It depends on the motivation of the presenter. If the objective of the presentation is to manipulate sentiment and/or data then this can indeed be a very successful approach. For proof, take a look at Fox News.
It won't stand up to closer scrutiny of course, but the whole point of this presentation (or any presentation perhaps) is to win hearts and minds, foregoing scrutiny until it is too late.
The main problem with such ads is that they don't explicitly show the product enough. They work fine for an insurance ad, as insurance really isn't a tangible thing (like a bottle of beer or a particular restaurant are). When it comes to something like insurance, you're trying to get the viewer to remember the name or the logo. It's rare that one can successfully associate something memorable with the name of a firm, as in the case of a gecko with the name "Geico".
No! Not at all true. False...
Want proof? Among many possible examples. Two words. "Budweiser" and "frog".
Good advertising is entertaining advertising is good advertising. Period. It's just that simple.
Expect some mild hysteria over this and some nuts demanding labelling.
Yes, ok, these are to some degree different from virusy viruses. However, hysteria aside, this is extremely unpalatable. That's one very damn good reason to expect, or indeed demand, a label for this process.
Seriously, good food does actually grow on trees - there's no legitimate reason (other than squeezing the last cent out of production) for screwing around with it. Me, I'll pay you extra to leave it alone, and I'll probably live healthier and longer too.
I'm assuming that they would try to patent this so they could block other companies from creating this sort of software. ..if Sony decides to go Pro-P2P the RIAA would shit themsleves.
Sony is a member of the RIAA. One of the more powerful and nefarious ones too obviously.
Nixon resigned under the shadow of impeachment for illegally wiretapping a hotel. One single place. This administration basically wrietapped the entire country. I can't understand why their wasn't more outrage. It saddens me.
I totally agree. Despite the many articles on Slashdot and other sources such as The Daily Show etc, our rights and freedoms have been eroded to a level previously unheard of in the West. The so-called "War on Terror" has been a gift to extremists in US and EU governments to begin implementing types of controls similar to those of the Nazis in the 1930s. (I live in Berlin, I know the history here pretty well - and I use the comparison carefully, the Nazis did things small step, by small step, by small step). We seem perilously close to being under the complete control of dictatorships here. The war on Terror is clearly being won by both the terrorists and the extremists in Western governments. You, I, and everyone else are losing this War. Which makes me wonder when the terms like "regime change" were being bandied about, which regimes did they actually mean?
I am shocked, saddened and disgusted by the news each day. Obviously many of us would like to see our present governments replaced with more democratic and accountable institutions. But how? Protesting seems not to work, and so many are apathetic to any kind of truth. There really does need to be more public outcry, perhaps we need to see more anti-Vietnam types of scenes? What do we need to do to convert raised awareness into actions that will get Bush and Blair etc voted out of office?
Or perhaps I just need to move to Cuba where the government might allow me some more freedom, and at least the weather's nice.
Using a cell phone on a plane would be incredibly dangerous to your health.
If you were sitting near me on a plane spouting corporate buzzwords or telling your hard of hearing relatives that "...yes! We're on the plane...", for hours on end, and if I have to hear the latest (and always truly inane and über-irritating) ring tone over and over, then trust me, you would be in terrible terrible terrible danger...
Slashdot Mirror
Depsite much publicity (and on
As a so-called web 2.0 entity it seems to be praised where MySpace or similar would never be thus. I assume that this is due to the fact that the stated aims of Jimbo et al are non-profit, and the intention of many, though clearly not all, contributors is the genuine advancement of humanity.
Noble goals, but horrifically exploitable, and there is much evidence on Wikipedia that exploited is just what it sometimes is. This ferry thing being yet one more example of that proof. (The fact that ferries on Lake Michigan have doubled in numbers over the past 3 months notwithstanding.) The obvious exploits are all good and well, the danger is in the subtle errors or deliberate manipulations. We not spot them until serious damage is done, lives lost, governments overthrown - all possible as real history indicates. Again, Fox News anyone?
So, if this storm in a teacup about ferries was taking place through competing MySpace pages would
In truth MySpace is occasionally as valid a source for data as Wikipedia, similarly, as is a guy you met in a bar last night.
Thus please, please, stop taking Wikipedia seriously. At least until such time as its editors start taking the truth seriously.
how about badwear? or better yet naughtywear?
Now those sound much more interesting!
Dislcaimer: I studied Environmental Economics at university. I do believe in protecting the environment, and would take a radical approach in doing so in many cases.
However, this report may not be what it seems to be. Very little data is provided as to how they have gathered their information. Assessing the environmental impact of even a small company, or doing an audit of same, is a very large task requiring weeks and weeks of onsite anlysis and testing. It is time consuming and requires a great deal of access to confidential business processes.
I, for one, do not believe for one single second that Greenpeace was given access to such data.
Greenpeace as an organisation gathers very large sums of money annually. Legally and fiscally Greenpeace is not a charity. There are many questions as to what they do with the money they raise. A few annual publicity stunts involving a handful of people, publicity material, and the running of a small ship, do not adequately explain where the money goes.
Greenpeace was famously incorrect in its stance against the Brent Spar disposal and provably lied during that campaign.
I would be astonished if this report was anything other than propaganda - you may draw your own conclusions as to why some companies should be favoured over others. But it cannot be as a result of balanced investigation and scientific method, unless they've arrived at the right result by accident.
I do believe that all companies should report their environmental impact truthfully as a result of a defined reporting standard in their annual reports. This is the only way such data can be accurately compared and contrasted. Some companies do do this volutarily, but we are a long way from an accepted standard method of reporting or auditing thereof.
Judging by their poor website it could be anything at all... Very pretty yes - and not at all overloaded with information, or in fact any information that would encourage anyone to visit. It has very typical German marketing style - "It is here. You may come. If you want"
Which is a missed opportunity since I live about 15 miles from Berlin Messe and am interested in the subject matter. They are lucky Slashdot picked up this story...
If by any chance anyone from IFA is reading this... "Willkommen in" translates as "Welcome to", and not "Welcome in" - very common in Dinglish, but not in English.
Oh, and good luck with the exhibition, I think you might need it...
Google is a corporation. Google probably knows, or at least very much should know, what a corporation needs in terms of security in an office package, particularly in light of the behaviour of its competitors. Assuming Google wishes to go down this road they would need to be prepared to offer secure solutions to potential corporate clients. I would be astounded if they haven't already thought of that.
Sheesh, they are pretty smart guys, they aren't jumping in head first with a half-finished product. The volume of beta products shows they are prudent, and apparently concerned with delivering quality. If they want the corporate world there's a good chance they can eventually take it.
Writely is good. It is already capable of completing the vast majority of real everyday WP tasks. It is fast and simple - far faster and simpler and more appropriate than Word for most things. Word already has far too much stuff crammed into it, and the new version seemingly even more deadwood than the current.
It may be marginal, but a corporation could save money and increase productivity by switching to this product once it is fully ready. The only issues would be ones that you raised - which are solvable...
I'm sure the demand is there.
or, take a shortcut...
Write a cult african sci-fi TV show / movie franchise / trilogy or whatever. You'll have thousands of (contradictory) wiki pages by lunchtime.
Though, admittedly some waiting is still necessary as the pages on the detailed history of Namibia will be written some, if not many, many, years later...
Perhaps Wikipedia could learn from the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler - um, assuming of course that the wikipedia entries on these guys are in any way accurate.
It is never wise to fight a battle on more than one front. Focus! Do one thing well and then expand once you've got it right. The English version of Wikipedia has a long way (years of work) to go before it approaches being a valuable reliable source of data.
By the time that the quality and reliability issues are fixed, Most Africans will have broadband and be able to create any pages they like.
question of life the universe and everything it was not, of course, as big as the Earth. A computer so large that it was often mistaken for a planet. Except by the IAU who saw through the Earth's feeble attempt to be considered a planet and reclassified it as a large pocket calculator...
Whether the inhabitants of Earth's matrix retaliate by reclassifying astronomers as pseudoscientists remains to be seen...
I realized that I couldn't figure out how Gartner make money, especially in light of the fact that any articles I've seen bearing the results of their research have ranged from unlikely to improbable and all the way up to hallucinogenically created. It looks to me that they hire recent graduates with lots of opinions and absolutely no experiential knowledge. (and likely also milk them for all they can, burn them out and trash them at the first opportunity - just like most other analysis and consultancy firms do. Which explains much about the corporate world.)
So I thought I'd take a look at Wikiality... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner
Not entirely sure why someone bothered to create that page. One (more) example of why Wikipedia is not necessarily useful or respected... and Gartner's own web page is an absurd mix of buzzwords and corporate design - confident yes, but vacuous.
So, does anyone know how they make money? A serious question, just the "how", I'm sure that no-one really knows the "why".
OMG!!!!11!! Space Ponies!!!1!
Back in the day I used Word 2.0 as pretty much my main application for all types of word processing tasks and layout stuff. It mostly worked despite the size of hard disks, RAM and processors back then. However, the time taken to start up your PC and open a document in Word does not feel significantly different now from what it did then (I grant you that feeling is unscientific and subjective).
I don't remember the last time I used Word.
Mostly for creative writing I use Final Draft, for general text stuff I use Notepad and for format important stuff I would use an InDesign/Notepad combination. Likely some of these tasks will now be switched over to Writely since it is but a swift bookmark away.
Privacy concerns aside, Writely is considerably quicker and easier for most general text tasks - I see no reason why Word couldn't be this fast - or in fact faster since it would be local.
I find Word to be too cumbersome for most simple tasks, and too unspecialized for others. What percentage of Word users use more than 30% of its features? A very small number I would guess.
Admittedly I don't work in a corporate environment, but I can't help thinking that perhaps Word is just regarded as the thing to use in most situations, rather than using a faster and more appropriate text tool. I wonder what the accumulative total man hours lost is over a year for the Corporate World for them using recent versions of Word over a slimmer faster product...
Who? Well in my experience about 50% (or slightly higher) of those doing professional or broadcast video. Sony, despite all the problems with consumer products, remains incredibly strong with pro-video. The only competition of note is Panasonic - and even they collaborate with Sony on some projects.
INT. REDMOND OFFICE. DAY.
SECRETARY: Mr Ballmer! Mr Ballmer! Please stop! You are ruining the paintwork on the ceiling with that chair...
1. It is partly owned by eBay. And has no obvious source of revenue generation. So, and assuming eBay in its current form stays in business long term (not at all certain IMHO), you should expect to see changes at Craigslist eventually - like fees for example...
2. Craigslist has a significant, and growing, spam and fraud problem too. Which, as far as I can see, they are not really on top of right now. For example, take a look at any city listing outside of the United States. They are dependent on community reporting, and ouside of the US it's pretty much only a handful of English speaking ex-pats ever reading the pages - not enough for abuse to be rated enough to be taken down. It's often the same blatant spam again and again and again. It would be a piece of cake to filter it out - even easier than email spam. But they don't.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may... It look to me that Craigslist may peak in a couple of years max and then rapidly decline as soon as a better alternative comes around, and that could easily be MySpace or Google.
In some cases yes, that's true. However, having an unfair dismissal case on your CV isn't going to make you look like a fun addition to a corporate team. Rightly or wrongly (actually only wrongly) it makes you look like a trouble maker - even if you were only rightly defending yourself and were supported by the court.
This, of course, sucks...
It won't stand up to closer scrutiny of course, but the whole point of this presentation (or any presentation perhaps) is to win hearts and minds, foregoing scrutiny until it is too late.
Everyone at Steorn would like to thank you for being suckered on the free publicity that they have inexpertly and blatantly generated.
Coming Soon - Aflac throws down the gauntlet on time travel, and Proctor and Gamble says "anti-gravity, go on prove it, I dare you!"
Want proof? Among many possible examples. Two words. "Budweiser" and "frog".
Good advertising is entertaining advertising is good advertising. Period. It's just that simple.
Seriously, good food does actually grow on trees - there's no legitimate reason (other than squeezing the last cent out of production) for screwing around with it. Me, I'll pay you extra to leave it alone, and I'll probably live healthier and longer too.
I am shocked, saddened and disgusted by the news each day. Obviously many of us would like to see our present governments replaced with more democratic and accountable institutions. But how? Protesting seems not to work, and so many are apathetic to any kind of truth. There really does need to be more public outcry, perhaps we need to see more anti-Vietnam types of scenes? What do we need to do to convert raised awareness into actions that will get Bush and Blair etc voted out of office?
Or perhaps I just need to move to Cuba where the government might allow me some more freedom, and at least the weather's nice.
Don't astronomers have anything better to do? Shouldn't you be off astronomizing or astronomating somewhere?
If we launch all the militant pedantic astronomers into space I, for one, would be delighted to call them all planets.
Using a cell phone on a plane would be incredibly dangerous to your health.
If you were sitting near me on a plane spouting corporate buzzwords or telling your hard of hearing relatives that "...yes! We're on the plane...", for hours on end, and if I have to hear the latest (and always truly inane and über-irritating) ring tone over and over, then trust me, you would be in terrible terrible terrible danger...