Re:Bio diesel from Algae has this beat by a long w
on
Tiny Biodiesel Reactors
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Nice karma whoring. That's from your blog eh? I personally collated those statistics and added them to the Wikipedia biodiesel articlewith this diff. They were subsequently improved with additional unit conversions and I and maybe others added some additional ones later. And your units aren't even right, what's an m/km?. If you're going to take GFDL material, which I do agree you can use freely as long as you follow the license, at least get the fixes too.
Besides the comments already in this thread, you may be interested in some different projects. One is the Wikibooks project, and specifically the Rhetoric and Composition book developed as a class project for a computers and writing class. There is also the School and university projects projects page listing several different class projects that have used Wikipedia in teaching. Your contributions would be appreciated too.
Yup, and opensource by nature of it being open and staying open has the potential to compound, snowball if you will. More users will mean more developers working on it releasing code that improves it all faster. Of course more developers doesn't always mean better code, but on the whole it's going to work. There's a tipping point and we're probably finally getting there. Of course supplanting proprietary software producers is not good for them if they don't adjust to the change, but it is good for everyone else. It will make all other businesses that much more profitable. Which means more jobs and pay, opportunities, etc.
Yes, there is a lot of discussion on how to move to something like this. So no offense, but your idea certainly isn't new.:) Basically what has happened is Wikipedia has hit the big time popularity wise before it was really ready content wise. That's fine as long as people reallize it's a work in progress, but many people don't. Now we may need to make some major changes on how things are done.
I think a stable version where only trusted editors (by some metric) are alloweed to edit could work. Then let anyone edit the unstable version and you may have the best of both worlds. If you only show the stable version by default, you reduce the incentive to vandalize, but still make the unstable version available for users to see easily. Diff functions between the versions would make it easy to incorporate good changes from the unstable into the stable. Not having to deal with constant vandalism in the stable version could help attract the real experts that currently aren't willing to put up with the crap that the radically open current system allows. The linux kernel is still free, but you and I can't edit the source code directly and that's a good thing. Wikipedia could benefit if the best of those two models could be combined and I think the above could do it.
Yeah, I'm not sure either. They're obviously hugely pro opensource, so why they've decided to make disparaging Wikipedia their mission I have no idea. Of course, much of the negative press about Wikipedia is true-- there are thousands of crappy articles there. But where the register horribly misses the point is that Wikipedia is a work in progress and nowhere claims to be authoritative and correct. The value in Wikipedia is in the process and the open license. If this current model fails, the information can still be freely used. That's what's so powerful.
Besides that I think people taking potshots at Wikipedia has just become the think to do. Wikipedia is more important than the Register and traffic stats prove it. I suppose that's not easy to take if you're a site with your income depending on drawing traffic. Wikipedia's traffic is rising at an enormous rate, and has actually made a leap since all this bad press has come out. http://noc.wikimedia.org/stats.php?period=monthly (and yes that M is million). But what everyone should reallize is that it's a work in progress, it's certainly not ready for brick and mortar publication, and as a whole, it's contributors are just fine with that for now. But trolls like the register will keep claiming as this article does that Wikipedia supporters think it is perfect in order to get people riled up.
The parent links to an article describing the problem. If you read it, it links to http://www.dwheeler.com/openformula/ which describes a potential solution.
Ok, so you make it sound like you can buy small pieces of the stuff anywhere. Can you? 3M's site makes it look like they only sell to professional automotive installers.
Yes, Pimental's work has been nearly totally discredited. Here's a point by point rebuttal of his paper. The rebuttal also explains that pimental assesses the full costs of the production of biofuels to the fuel and ignores the fact that there are valuable byproducts such as corn oil and *food*. He comes up with the same horrible analysis for biodiesel, which is even more off base. Even the ethanol industry doesn't claim more than a 1.29 energy balance which means the bioethanol contains 29% more energy than the energy that was used in the processing of it. Biodiesel, even with soybeans, which are not a very efficient crop to use just for the oil, has a 3.29 energy balance. Again Pimental assigns all of the costs to the soy oil and thus the biodiesel, which is ludicrous. The co author, Tad Patzek is also the Director of the University of California Oil Consortium which this year is funded by Chevron and Phillips Petroleum. Pretty fishy for sure. I really don't understand why people still quote Pimental, but the press doesn't seem to understand he is FOS.
Outsourcing will definately bring down the average wages. The only way for local graduates to be hired will be to offer their services for lesser pay.
You didn't read or understand anything in the article did you? Outsourcing will only bring wages down for those not smart enough to take calculated risks and find areas they can create greater value. Yeah if you want to be a sheep and make mindless decisions and expect that just because you got a piece of paper from a university (or have X characteristic) employers should shower you with money, you'll be worse off.
But it will also create tremendous opportunity. As economies shift, money is made by those that can fill demand and take advantage of scarcity. There is a scarcity of people willing to take risk and therefore those people will always be rewarded for it. Not every individual time, but in the long run they will. There is an even greater scarcity of people that can understand risk and opportunity. They will always be ahead.
I've said it before, but it is important enough to be worth repeating.
The Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help [spymac.com] run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?
The other thing that Sanger misses in his "hey look I used to be important in this thing too" essay is that that what Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. There are a number of projects working to organize and solve this problem, see the project on verifiability for one.
I still cant figure out how spammers have been kept at bay. Any idea?
Basically the transaction costs for healing Wikipedia are less than those to harm it, over a reasonable period of time. I am an admin and if I see vandalism to an article, it takes about ten total clicks to check that editor has vandalized other articles and made no positive contributions, block the IP address or username, and rollback all of the vandalism by that user. It takes more clicks if they editd a lot of articles quickly, but they had to spend much more time coming up with stupid crap to put in the articles, hitting edit, submit, etc.
After being blocked, they have to be really persistant to keep coming back to vandalize. Some are, but luckily many more people are there to notice them and revert the vandalism. Its a beautiful thing.
Again it is better to sit in your mom's basement and snipe at what other people are doing wrong instead of helping.
Do you understand Wikipedia's traffic doubles every few months? No amount of planning can allow a site to work in that scenario unless you had unlimited resources to start out with. Wikipedia is a volunteer, non profit site. The only way to make it work well is for people that know how to run it better to get invovled and contribute. So anyone that does have the know how, please pitch in.
Agreed, its just like any other idiot that just wants some attention. Now, if he had provided some diffs to show actually having made those edits, then we would have something. If he had backed up edits with supposed sources, those sources are easy to check and easy to recheck with other sources. It may even last a little while if he had done it, but referencing makes it much easier to verify the facts, and those would eventually get weeded out.
Many of you were probably already aware Wikipedia had reached 500,000 articles. What may be of even more interest to many Slashdot readers though is that the Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?
The other thing Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. I for one am promoting work on a list of Wikipedia's otherwise best articles that do not cite their sources properly. If you want to contribute to something, researching and citing facts in these articles could be one of the most valuable things you could do.
This level of fanboyness is unbelievable. Well actually I should not be surprised, blindness to linux's faults is endemic here on Slashdot.
The author is not "Running around screaming...", he is simply very surprised that a local user can exhaust a system so easily. Maybe every single admin should think of all n possible security problems every single time they take a box live, but people are human.
Which one is worse: limits in place by default so that an admin needs to know how to raise them when necessary and the forkbomb would not work, or no limits in place and having to know to set them or else the box can be brought to its knees? Secure by default or free for all.
I suppose you think every default install should also have telnetd enabled by default because any admin with half a brain should know how to turn that off? Point is admins are fallible, the default should be the lower total risk/cost option. I think which one that is is clear here.
I would like it if you would point out the technical article you edited and the changes were reverted. While your version of the events is possible, and probably does happen rarely, it is unlikely. If you are correct, I will personally look to make sure the correct information and reference are in the article.
1) It would work for a while, but eventually the incorrect facts and bias they add will be rooted out. A proper research and verification process would ensure this.
2) A libre, open, gift-culture-based process for creating a public good that is currently growing at an astounding rate is not "breaking with the established dogma/doctrine/explanandum of the era"?
3)Given enough time and edits, Wikipedia articles can cite every fact to those same peer reviewed papers and collate all important human knowledge. Those biases can be discussed and accounted for.
4)When the above is done, Wikipedia will be reliable. Until then it is not. But if you trust any other one single source now to be 100% correct you are naive. So why is Wikipedia different? Of course it contains errors, but the process is that they are rooted out *relatively* quickly.
So you've basically joined the countless others that want to sit on the sidelines and point out the problems instead of contributing. It is much more difficult to build something remarkable than it is to be a critic.
People should use caution when trusting info from there
Just as you should from anywhere, if the answer is important to you. There are of course lots of errors in Wikipedia. But there are errors in almost every book printed, and the difference is Wikipedia can be fixed easily. The only disconnect is in expecting it to be perfect today. If I was teaching in a classroom, I would welcome my students using Wikipedia because it would make it all the more obvious that they should question what is there and what is fact.
People really need to keep in mind that Wikipedia is a work in process. So far there has not been any formal editing and verification process for the content. But there well could be in the future. A formal peer review process could be instituted where trusted experts in a field hand check the article fact by fact, and then repeat that with another expert. As an analogy to software Wikipedia is in pre Alpha stage. But it will get there.
What is remarkable about Wikipedia is the process and that it works. Not every article on it gets better all the time, but on the whole, articles improve. If you do not believe it is getting better, you are not looking. I have hundreds of articles on my watchlist and I constantly follow articles nominated to be featured. There are some remarkably high quality articles that get nominated and they get better all the time. I see improvements on the whole, over time on every single article on my watchlist.
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Nice karma whoring. That's from your blog eh? I personally collated those statistics and added them to the Wikipedia biodiesel article with this diff. They were subsequently improved with additional unit conversions and I and maybe others added some additional ones later. And your units aren't even right, what's an m/km?. If you're going to take GFDL material, which I do agree you can use freely as long as you follow the license, at least get the fixes too.
Besides the comments already in this thread, you may be interested in some different projects. One is the Wikibooks project, and specifically the Rhetoric and Composition book developed as a class project for a computers and writing class. There is also the School and university projects projects page listing several different class projects that have used Wikipedia in teaching. Your contributions would be appreciated too.
Yup, and opensource by nature of it being open and staying open has the potential to compound, snowball if you will. More users will mean more developers working on it releasing code that improves it all faster. Of course more developers doesn't always mean better code, but on the whole it's going to work. There's a tipping point and we're probably finally getting there. Of course supplanting proprietary software producers is not good for them if they don't adjust to the change, but it is good for everyone else. It will make all other businesses that much more profitable. Which means more jobs and pay, opportunities, etc.
Yes, there is a lot of discussion on how to move to something like this. So no offense, but your idea certainly isn't new. :) Basically what has happened is Wikipedia has hit the big time popularity wise before it was really ready content wise. That's fine as long as people reallize it's a work in progress, but many people don't. Now we may need to make some major changes on how things are done.
I think a stable version where only trusted editors (by some metric) are alloweed to edit could work. Then let anyone edit the unstable version and you may have the best of both worlds. If you only show the stable version by default, you reduce the incentive to vandalize, but still make the unstable version available for users to see easily. Diff functions between the versions would make it easy to incorporate good changes from the unstable into the stable. Not having to deal with constant vandalism in the stable version could help attract the real experts that currently aren't willing to put up with the crap that the radically open current system allows. The linux kernel is still free, but you and I can't edit the source code directly and that's a good thing. Wikipedia could benefit if the best of those two models could be combined and I think the above could do it.
Yeah, I'm not sure either. They're obviously hugely pro opensource, so why they've decided to make disparaging Wikipedia their mission I have no idea. Of course, much of the negative press about Wikipedia is true-- there are thousands of crappy articles there. But where the register horribly misses the point is that Wikipedia is a work in progress and nowhere claims to be authoritative and correct. The value in Wikipedia is in the process and the open license. If this current model fails, the information can still be freely used. That's what's so powerful.
Besides that I think people taking potshots at Wikipedia has just become the think to do. Wikipedia is more important than the Register and traffic stats prove it. I suppose that's not easy to take if you're a site with your income depending on drawing traffic. Wikipedia's traffic is rising at an enormous rate, and has actually made a leap since all this bad press has come out. http://noc.wikimedia.org/stats.php?period=monthly (and yes that M is million). But what everyone should reallize is that it's a work in progress, it's certainly not ready for brick and mortar publication, and as a whole, it's contributors are just fine with that for now. But trolls like the register will keep claiming as this article does that Wikipedia supporters think it is perfect in order to get people riled up.
If you look at the GENERIC kernel config file for 6.0 Release, it shows the ULE scheduler is not enabled by default, the 4BSD scheduler still is. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/s rc/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC?rev=1.429.2.3.2.1&content -type=text/plain&only_with_tag=RELENG_6_0_0_RELEAS E
The basic benefit the ULE scheduler was designed to have is O(1) performace for the SMP case. Here's the BSDcon '03 whitepaper Jeff Robertson wrote about ULE http://www.chesapeake.net/~jroberson/ULE.pdf Yes it's been fixed up a lot, you can read kerneltrap's coverage of it a few times, but you'd have to dig into the mailing lists to see why it is not default still, which I didn't do.
The parent links to an article describing the problem. If you read it, it links to http://www.dwheeler.com/openformula/ which describes a potential solution.
Ok, so you make it sound like you can buy small pieces of the stuff anywhere. Can you? 3M's site makes it look like they only sell to professional automotive installers.
Yes, Pimental's work has been nearly totally discredited. Here's a point by point rebuttal of his paper. The rebuttal also explains that pimental assesses the full costs of the production of biofuels to the fuel and ignores the fact that there are valuable byproducts such as corn oil and *food*. He comes up with the same horrible analysis for biodiesel, which is even more off base. Even the ethanol industry doesn't claim more than a 1.29 energy balance which means the bioethanol contains 29% more energy than the energy that was used in the processing of it. Biodiesel, even with soybeans, which are not a very efficient crop to use just for the oil, has a 3.29 energy balance. Again Pimental assigns all of the costs to the soy oil and thus the biodiesel, which is ludicrous. The co author, Tad Patzek is also the Director of the University of California Oil Consortium which this year is funded by Chevron and Phillips Petroleum. Pretty fishy for sure. I really don't understand why people still quote Pimental, but the press doesn't seem to understand he is FOS.
Outsourcing will definately bring down the average wages. The only way for local graduates to be hired will be to offer their services for lesser pay.
You didn't read or understand anything in the article did you? Outsourcing will only bring wages down for those not smart enough to take calculated risks and find areas they can create greater value. Yeah if you want to be a sheep and make mindless decisions and expect that just because you got a piece of paper from a university (or have X characteristic) employers should shower you with money, you'll be worse off.
But it will also create tremendous opportunity. As economies shift, money is made by those that can fill demand and take advantage of scarcity. There is a scarcity of people willing to take risk and therefore those people will always be rewarded for it. Not every individual time, but in the long run they will. There is an even greater scarcity of people that can understand risk and opportunity. They will always be ahead.
I've said it before, but it is important enough to be worth repeating.
The Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help [spymac.com] run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?
The other thing that Sanger misses in his "hey look I used to be important in this thing too" essay is that that what Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. There are a number of projects working to organize and solve this problem, see the project on verifiability for one.
I still cant figure out how spammers have been kept at bay. Any idea?
Basically the transaction costs for healing Wikipedia are less than those to harm it, over a reasonable period of time. I am an admin and if I see vandalism to an article, it takes about ten total clicks to check that editor has vandalized other articles and made no positive contributions, block the IP address or username, and rollback all of the vandalism by that user. It takes more clicks if they editd a lot of articles quickly, but they had to spend much more time coming up with stupid crap to put in the articles, hitting edit, submit, etc. After being blocked, they have to be really persistant to keep coming back to vandalize. Some are, but luckily many more people are there to notice them and revert the vandalism. Its a beautiful thing.
Again it is better to sit in your mom's basement and snipe at what other people are doing wrong instead of helping.
Do you understand Wikipedia's traffic doubles every few months? No amount of planning can allow a site to work in that scenario unless you had unlimited resources to start out with. Wikipedia is a volunteer, non profit site. The only way to make it work well is for people that know how to run it better to get invovled and contribute. So anyone that does have the know how, please pitch in.
Agreed, its just like any other idiot that just wants some attention. Now, if he had provided some diffs to show actually having made those edits, then we would have something. If he had backed up edits with supposed sources, those sources are easy to check and easy to recheck with other sources. It may even last a little while if he had done it, but referencing makes it much easier to verify the facts, and those would eventually get weeded out.
Many of you were probably already aware Wikipedia had reached 500,000 articles. What may be of even more interest to many Slashdot readers though is that the Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?
The other thing Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. I for one am promoting work on a list of Wikipedia's otherwise best articles that do not cite their sources properly. If you want to contribute to something, researching and citing facts in these articles could be one of the most valuable things you could do.
This level of fanboyness is unbelievable. Well actually I should not be surprised, blindness to linux's faults is endemic here on Slashdot.
The author is not "Running around screaming...", he is simply very surprised that a local user can exhaust a system so easily. Maybe every single admin should think of all n possible security problems every single time they take a box live, but people are human.
Which one is worse: limits in place by default so that an admin needs to know how to raise them when necessary and the forkbomb would not work, or no limits in place and having to know to set them or else the box can be brought to its knees? Secure by default or free for all.
I suppose you think every default install should also have telnetd enabled by default because any admin with half a brain should know how to turn that off? Point is admins are fallible, the default should be the lower total risk/cost option. I think which one that is is clear here.
I would like it if you would point out the technical article you edited and the changes were reverted. While your version of the events is possible, and probably does happen rarely, it is unlikely. If you are correct, I will personally look to make sure the correct information and reference are in the article.
1) It would work for a while, but eventually the incorrect facts and bias they add will be rooted out. A proper research and verification process would ensure this.
2) A libre, open, gift-culture-based process for creating a public good that is currently growing at an astounding rate is not "breaking with the established dogma/doctrine/explanandum of the era"?
3)Given enough time and edits, Wikipedia articles can cite every fact to those same peer reviewed papers and collate all important human knowledge. Those biases can be discussed and accounted for.
4)When the above is done, Wikipedia will be reliable. Until then it is not. But if you trust any other one single source now to be 100% correct you are naive. So why is Wikipedia different? Of course it contains errors, but the process is that they are rooted out *relatively* quickly.
So you've basically joined the countless others that want to sit on the sidelines and point out the problems instead of contributing. It is much more difficult to build something remarkable than it is to be a critic.
Just as you should from anywhere, if the answer is important to you. There are of course lots of errors in Wikipedia. But there are errors in almost every book printed, and the difference is Wikipedia can be fixed easily. The only disconnect is in expecting it to be perfect today. If I was teaching in a classroom, I would welcome my students using Wikipedia because it would make it all the more obvious that they should question what is there and what is fact.
People really need to keep in mind that Wikipedia is a work in process. So far there has not been any formal editing and verification process for the content. But there well could be in the future. A formal peer review process could be instituted where trusted experts in a field hand check the article fact by fact, and then repeat that with another expert. As an analogy to software Wikipedia is in pre Alpha stage. But it will get there.
What is remarkable about Wikipedia is the process and that it works. Not every article on it gets better all the time, but on the whole, articles improve. If you do not believe it is getting better, you are not looking. I have hundreds of articles on my watchlist and I constantly follow articles nominated to be featured. There are some remarkably high quality articles that get nominated and they get better all the time. I see improvements on the whole, over time on every single article on my watchlist.