Thing is, wikipedia has an excellent system in place already to deal with this problem, it's called the Disambiguation page. If one searches and hits the wrong bit of information, one just has to click the disambiguous button and one is taken to a nice hierarchal view of what a term could be referring to. If one does not care about large sections of possibilities, one can gloss over them.
The cost to the user for having information they don't need is far higher then the cost of not finding what one is looking for at all. Esp since the purges are pretty damn arbitrary. You only need one person going through and deciding they don't care about some class of infrequently accessed information,.. the only counter is to hope that someone just happens to want to access that page during the deletion period AND cares enough about the internals to fight the deletion.
What had the potential to be a useful archive of civilization has started degrading into 'only certain things are worth remembering'. Which partly means that real research on a topic will still be the domain of the reference section of the library. maybe someone needs a wiki version of lexusnexus..
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a discussion forum, a scientific journal, or a blog.
The core problem is that many of the admins want the social status and self-importance associated with a 'high' project, so many quietly purge anything viewed as 'low' from the encyclopedia.
The job of an encyclopedia is to record information for reference. Traditional ones have a trade off of cost vs data so they have to stick to what they consider to be most important. wikipedia is far less restricted here, but the human element, those who build their status around wikipedia, feel it is important to keep that distinction and look more refined to the outside world. After all, someone who edits a refined high class encyclopedia is perceived as a 'better person' then one who edits a fan site or even worse, a nitch community database.
Ultimately such edits will not effect most people. But they will re-enforce the message that smaller communities should 'stay in the shadows where they belong' and will communicate to the outside that 'wikipedia editors are not one of THOSE people, who use the internet for low brow things' but instead are 'culturally sophisticated perveayers of information equal to those old respected encycolopedia editors'
Because when I search for something on Wikipedia, I am looking for a different sort of result than if I search for it on LiveJournal, Blogger, or the Web at large. Currently, I generally find it.
Actually this is a good example of why the notability purges are bad things. When I go to wikipedia to find out about something, I would like the article to actually be there instead of deleted by someone who considers the topic sufficiently unimportant. I don't want a small inner circle and their quest for "credibility" (read: boosting their egos and self importantance by being a big fish in a 'high social' pond) to effect my ability to look things up.
Trivial? Most people spend decades paying back student loans. Unless one lands a high paying job strait out of school and avoids things like a mortgage or paying rent, paying back 30-100k worth of debt can take a while.
This is actually a good example of why I like OSX (running with most of the silly stuff turned off). It stays the expletive out of my way and makes an efficient task switcher. Outside booting, launching the apps I want, and switching between them, I basicly do not interact with it. Which is nice.
Unfortunately the two tend to be mutually exclusive.
When we look at all these slick 'intelligent' interfaces that are newbie oriented, they all hinge on the computer figuring out what the user 'intends' to do. They work because they wrap up and automate the common cases, but in doing so they inherently limit the possible functionality.
When one looks at these technologies, even things like Programming By Example, they are cases of automating the usage of the computer like an appliance. They tend to make life much more difficult for any task that requires digging into what the computer is actually doing or preforming any task the UI developer did not consider important. A good example would be comparing a file browser to command line interface... I have never seen a graphical browser that has even a small fraction of the capability of the command line, but they DO usually make the most common tasks much simpler.
The examples in the original article.... these UI technologies are all very 'pretty' and add in a nice 'ooh/ahh' element that will coax people to use computers and doing graphic related things, but they really do not add in much for say programmers, administrators, etc.
I think part of the problem in these various usability debates is that a good UI for learning and bringing in newbies is not the most effective solution once one has greater needs.
This 'one size fits all' mentality is the issue. We need interfaces that scale from basic to advanced so the basic users doing get slammed with all the advanced stuff and advanced users don't find themselves without the tools they need to actually do their work.
Ok... so now paying customers who buy a service as it is advertised are freeloaders?
This is getting silly..... ISPs should NOT be advertising services they can not actually provide and then blaming groups of their own customers for their lack of infrastructure.
A user never had to honor the GPL and the GPL never required a User to give changes or anything back.
And that is really the crux of the difference. AGPL functions exactly like GPL if you count 'connect to remote computer' as 'distribute the software'.. which is exactly what AGPL is doing.
I wonder how long till the extend the concept to IPC? Modify any app that communicates with any other app anywhere even on your own machine and poof you have to contribute back any changes. GPLv4?
restriction, freedom, in cases like this FSF turns them into a bit of a zero sum game and decides _who's_ freedoms are more important... and that seems to have been changing over the years (ok, their end goal hasn't changed, but how much leverage they have has changed so they are removing the 'compromises')
The tricky part with humor like this is there are a significant number of people who will say pretty much the exact same thing in complete seriousness. Even on a tech site you can still get that thought process.
That is one of the problems with text... without hearing the voice one can read in either satire or serious from the same piece.
I think the core of the disagreement is... while some view a tiny robot as a source of wonder and pride, some others view it as getting further from some twisted romantic vision of 'natural' humanity with zero population growth, zero progress, frozen in time. In short they want a sculpture, something pristine they can put on a shelf and admire how unchanging it is....
They also tend to over estimate humanity's impact on, well, anything. Reading the original link, there were plenty of people who believed that mining the moon could somehow destroy the earth, or somehow reverse the effects the moon has had on the planet over the last few billion years... an OMG! WITHOUT THE MOON WE"LL HAVE TOO MUCH ATMOSPHERE!!!
In short.. people who don't actually know anything about environments but have seen some pretty posters.
*nods* and if they had pushed that intention, GPL code would be pretty much absent from many, many websites and companies and much of the FUD one hears would actually be true.
And yep, this will not stop Tivo (since the kernel is still v2), at least not for now. Though sooner or later _something_ critical that an embedded developer might with to sign will go v3 and that will be a problem.
They have already pretty much ruled out GPLv3 on electronic voting machines (with the FSF justifying it with a flippant 'we don't believe in electronic voting anyway' remark)
The Anti-Tivolization clause, yes, has some pretty significant holes. It reaks of 'who can we piss off and who can we not'. It really feels like RMS went after the more vulnerable companies (that have high profile toys that average supports would want) while steering clear of companies that hold some sway.
Companies like Tivo are pretty nitch, few and far between.... RMS can risk alienating them. But could you imagine a clause like 'you must supply the back-end code to anyone who connects to your website'?
Yeah, I really should not have followed the parent's word usage. I was attempting to make it clear that I was mirroring the specific wording but it just came off as stupid ^_^;
Though I wonder if "Arab" would have been a better term yet.
Ah, the "other people do bad things, so our government should be able to do whatever it likes!' argument.
Even if it isn't as bad as what the Islamics do, I don't think that the US government holding that behavior up as something to do it'self is a good thing. We are supposed to be FIGHTING this behavior, not emulating it.
If you want a common engine that will run on multiple platforms, then go to a company who's business model is, well, making a common engine that will run on multiple platforms.
Granted EA would probably be happier if the entire industry just changed to suit them rather then paying a license to some other company for something they want.
The world doesn't revolve around you. Learn to accept this.
Ahm, isn't this exactly the problem you are facing? So the OP said they prefer single player games and wanted to know how alone they were. Yet the response you just gave the person is incredibly defensive and has the tone of 'if you don't like multiplayer games then there is something wrong with you!'. The game market isn't a zero sum game.... people CAN play single player games without seeking to destroy multiplayer games.
Sounds like a classic case of reading one's own attitudes into someone else's words...
TFA gives a few more details, including dosages, but like most mythbusters experiments they are probably going to do just a simple set of the most commonly know situations and completely ignore fallout and such.
Or in cases like this, when there is no one else to go to.
Comcast thrives in broadband because in many regions it is your only choice. You can't get alternative cable modem ISPs and DLS is not always available. Market forces are unlikly to effect them much.
The internet will erode some of the complexity, but that is happening with or without the internet.
English, and every other language, slowly drops the aspects of the language that are unneeded and add complexity without adding meaning. It has been happening for hundreds of years, and will happen for hundreds more.
Historical linguistics is a really interesting field to read over ^_^
That is a good question. I wonder how long such procedures usually take.
Actually, another theory concerning this 'gay porn' flap is that he is trying to provoke the judge into saying something sufficiently negative that he can claim the judge is bias and be thrown off the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, wikipedia has an excellent system in place already to deal with this problem, it's called the Disambiguation page. If one searches and hits the wrong bit of information, one just has to click the disambiguous button and one is taken to a nice hierarchal view of what a term could be referring to. If one does not care about large sections of possibilities, one can gloss over them.
The cost to the user for having information they don't need is far higher then the cost of not finding what one is looking for at all. Esp since the purges are pretty damn arbitrary. You only need one person going through and deciding they don't care about some class of infrequently accessed information,.. the only counter is to hope that someone just happens to want to access that page during the deletion period AND cares enough about the internals to fight the deletion.
What had the potential to be a useful archive of civilization has started degrading into 'only certain things are worth remembering'. Which partly means that real research on a topic will still be the domain of the reference section of the library. maybe someone needs a wiki version of lexusnexus..
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a discussion forum, a scientific journal, or a blog.
The core problem is that many of the admins want the social status and self-importance associated with a 'high' project, so many quietly purge anything viewed as 'low' from the encyclopedia.
The job of an encyclopedia is to record information for reference. Traditional ones have a trade off of cost vs data so they have to stick to what they consider to be most important. wikipedia is far less restricted here, but the human element, those who build their status around wikipedia, feel it is important to keep that distinction and look more refined to the outside world. After all, someone who edits a refined high class encyclopedia is perceived as a 'better person' then one who edits a fan site or even worse, a nitch community database.
Ultimately such edits will not effect most people. But they will re-enforce the message that smaller communities should 'stay in the shadows where they belong' and will communicate to the outside that 'wikipedia editors are not one of THOSE people, who use the internet for low brow things' but instead are 'culturally sophisticated perveayers of information equal to those old respected encycolopedia editors'
Because when I search for something on Wikipedia, I am looking for a different sort of result than if I search for it on LiveJournal, Blogger, or the Web at large. Currently, I generally find it.
Actually this is a good example of why the notability purges are bad things. When I go to wikipedia to find out about something, I would like the article to actually be there instead of deleted by someone who considers the topic sufficiently unimportant. I don't want a small inner circle and their quest for "credibility" (read: boosting their egos and self importantance by being a big fish in a 'high social' pond) to effect my ability to look things up.
Trivial? Most people spend decades paying back student loans.
Unless one lands a high paying job strait out of school and avoids things like a mortgage or paying rent, paying back 30-100k worth of debt can take a while.
Well put.
This is actually a good example of why I like OSX (running with most of the silly stuff turned off). It stays the expletive out of my way and makes an efficient task switcher. Outside booting, launching the apps I want, and switching between them, I basicly do not interact with it. Which is nice.
Unfortunately the two tend to be mutually exclusive.
When we look at all these slick 'intelligent' interfaces that are newbie oriented, they all hinge on the computer figuring out what the user 'intends' to do. They work because they wrap up and automate the common cases, but in doing so they inherently limit the possible functionality.
When one looks at these technologies, even things like Programming By Example, they are cases of automating the usage of the computer like an appliance. They tend to make life much more difficult for any task that requires digging into what the computer is actually doing or preforming any task the UI developer did not consider important. A good example would be comparing a file browser to command line interface... I have never seen a graphical browser that has even a small fraction of the capability of the command line, but they DO usually make the most common tasks much simpler.
The examples in the original article.... these UI technologies are all very 'pretty' and add in a nice 'ooh/ahh' element that will coax people to use computers and doing graphic related things, but they really do not add in much for say programmers, administrators, etc.
I think part of the problem in these various usability debates is that a good UI for learning and bringing in newbies is not the most effective solution once one has greater needs.
This 'one size fits all' mentality is the issue. We need interfaces that scale from basic to advanced so the basic users doing get slammed with all the advanced stuff and advanced users don't find themselves without the tools they need to actually do their work.
Ok... so now paying customers who buy a service as it is advertised are freeloaders?
This is getting silly..... ISPs should NOT be advertising services they can not actually provide and then blaming groups of their own customers for their lack of infrastructure.
A user never had to honor the GPL and the GPL never required a User to give changes or anything back.
And that is really the crux of the difference. AGPL functions exactly like GPL if you count 'connect to remote computer' as 'distribute the software'.. which is exactly what AGPL is doing.
I wonder how long till the extend the concept to IPC? Modify any app that communicates with any other app anywhere even on your own machine and poof you have to contribute back any changes. GPLv4?
restriction, freedom, in cases like this FSF turns them into a bit of a zero sum game and decides _who's_ freedoms are more important... and that seems to have been changing over the years (ok, their end goal hasn't changed, but how much leverage they have has changed so they are removing the 'compromises')
Which is ironic since Diabold makes both ATM and Voting machines....
The tricky part with humor like this is there are a significant number of people who will say pretty much the exact same thing in complete seriousness. Even on a tech site you can still get that thought process.
That is one of the problems with text... without hearing the voice one can read in either satire or serious from the same piece.
I think the core of the disagreement is... while some view a tiny robot as a source of wonder and pride, some others view it as getting further from some twisted romantic vision of 'natural' humanity with zero population growth, zero progress, frozen in time. In short they want a sculpture, something pristine they can put on a shelf and admire how unchanging it is....
They also tend to over estimate humanity's impact on, well, anything. Reading the original link, there were plenty of people who believed that mining the moon could somehow destroy the earth, or somehow reverse the effects the moon has had on the planet over the last few billion years... an OMG! WITHOUT THE MOON WE"LL HAVE TOO MUCH ATMOSPHERE!!!
In short.. people who don't actually know anything about environments but have seen some pretty posters.
*nods* and if they had pushed that intention, GPL code would be pretty much absent from many, many websites and companies and much of the FUD one hears would actually be true.
And yep, this will not stop Tivo (since the kernel is still v2), at least not for now. Though sooner or later _something_ critical that an embedded developer might with to sign will go v3 and that will be a problem.
They have already pretty much ruled out GPLv3 on electronic voting machines (with the FSF justifying it with a flippant 'we don't believe in electronic voting anyway' remark)
The Anti-Tivolization clause, yes, has some pretty significant holes. It reaks of 'who can we piss off and who can we not'. It really feels like RMS went after the more vulnerable companies (that have high profile toys that average supports would want) while steering clear of companies that hold some sway.
Companies like Tivo are pretty nitch, few and far between.... RMS can risk alienating them. But could you imagine a clause like 'you must supply the back-end code to anyone who connects to your website'?
Yeah, I really should not have followed the parent's word usage. I was attempting to make it clear that I was mirroring the specific wording but it just came off as stupid ^_^;
Though I wonder if "Arab" would have been a better term yet.
Ah, the "other people do bad things, so our government should be able to do whatever it likes!' argument.
Even if it isn't as bad as what the Islamics do, I don't think that the US government holding that behavior up as something to do it'self is a good thing. We are supposed to be FIGHTING this behavior, not emulating it.
Isn't this exactly the role middleware fills?
If you want a common engine that will run on multiple platforms, then go to a company who's business model is, well, making a common engine that will run on multiple platforms.
Granted EA would probably be happier if the entire industry just changed to suit them rather then paying a license to some other company for something they want.
The world doesn't revolve around you. Learn to accept this.
Ahm, isn't this exactly the problem you are facing? So the OP said they prefer single player games and wanted to know how alone they were. Yet the response you just gave the person is incredibly defensive and has the tone of 'if you don't like multiplayer games then there is something wrong with you!'. The game market isn't a zero sum game.... people CAN play single player games without seeking to destroy multiplayer games.
Sounds like a classic case of reading one's own attitudes into someone else's words...
TFA gives a few more details, including dosages, but like most mythbusters experiments they are probably going to do just a simple set of the most commonly know situations and completely ignore fallout and such.
Or in cases like this, when there is no one else to go to.
Comcast thrives in broadband because in many regions it is your only choice. You can't get alternative cable modem ISPs and DLS is not always available. Market forces are unlikly to effect them much.
I personally read the BBFC's comments as
'They didn't take our suggestions and tell us how wonderful and insightful we are so we are going to throw a tantrum and now allow their game'
Their amazing B.S. comments about how they don't have a double standard for games vs movies is just icing on the cake...
Sort of.
The internet will erode some of the complexity, but that is happening with or without the internet.
English, and every other language, slowly drops the aspects of the language that are unneeded and add complexity without adding meaning. It has been happening for hundreds of years, and will happen for hundreds more.
Historical linguistics is a really interesting field to read over ^_^
That is a good question. I wonder how long such procedures usually take.
Actually, another theory concerning this 'gay porn' flap is that he is trying to provoke the judge into saying something sufficiently negative that he can claim the judge is bias and be thrown off the case.
It has, unfortunately, worked in the past.
Yes actually, it is quite complicated for me.