I'm completely amazed. Why on earth are the majority of the highly modded comments attacking this idea?
A teacher decides to take an intelligent, constructive attitude towards the Wikipedia. And the loudest Slashdotters deplore her for the Demise of Western Civilization.
Surely, you don't go to the Wikipedia for well-verified fact. Surely you don't read Wikipedia articles expecting them to be 100% true, but rather understand it as a shortcut for googling till you find the homepage of the one person who's so freakin' passionate about whatever obscure thing you want to know about that they learned how to write html to put a webpage up.
Surely, you use the Wikipedia as a way to get a quick overview of a company/product/project in a less biased way than you'd find on the project's own web page.
Surely you don't go to the Wikipedia expecting to learn something about topics like God and evolution, or even politicians.
Surely you know that pages on the Wikipedia aren't static and will be edited sooner or later.
I don't understand the problem: college professor asks college students to write Wikipedia articles. Where there was before no information available, some is now available. It might be sketchy. It might even be wrong. But it's providing a starting point for someone learning about the subject. How is this a bad thing? Why are college students, the people who, at times, do a lot of the heavy lifting on doctoral dissertations, people we can't trust with the Wikipedia?
I'd expect this sort of reaction in 'Academics Against the Internet' coffeeshop meeting. My mind is blown that people who post on Slashdot would react in any way that didn't include either sentiment: "'bout time' or 'this isn't news'."
I work for the radar company that made the radar gun the cop used. I don't have all the information about what happened, but I have a hard time believing the GPS is more accurate.
Radar guns are certified regularly, which is most often a pretty simple accuracy test (but very well could have been a full diagnostic), so it's doubtful the radar gun was malfunctioning (iirc, those guns have an internal lockout in case of malfunction).
Also, remember that we're talking basically the speed of light here, with some minor latency for the unit to process the Doppler shift. Radar's pretty much instaneous, within miliseconds, at least.
Now, that's not to say that the officer didn't make an error. Radar's not an exact tool--b/c the beam is so wide, you can pick up a lot of things and an untrained officer can get some misleading speeds.
At the same time, remember that most traffic officers do this all day, at least five days a week. They make mistakes just like anybody else, but they're rare. And for that matter, officers are trained to use the radar as a confirmation of their own judgement of how fast the vehicle's moving. And since they're doing it all day long every day, they can tell you within a mph or two how fast a car is going just by looking at it.
Again, I'm not pretending to have all the information, but if it came down to trusting GPS or trusting the radar, I'd trust the radar. It's just a simpler tool, with less hoops to jump through (and fewer things to go wrong).
Disclaimer: I'm in marketing for Decatur Electronics. But for what it's worth, I use Linux on my machine at home, hehehe.
I think it has a lot to do with screen quality, or the way your OS font hinting interacts w/ your screen. Fonts in Linux look pretty bad no matter what I do on my laptop. I blamed it on Linux for a long time, then went back to Windows and realized they look crappy there, too.
Speaking from a marketing perspective, this seems like boder line great marketing on Novell's part, border-line FUD.
I would guess that quote started in the marketing department, got rewritten by the CEO to something a bit more honest, then went back to the marketing department where they changed a couple words back to give us that dumb "already works with Windows."
For the first time, though, this whole Novell/MS thing makes sense to me from Novell's standpoint: get MS on your side, and knock down that whole "well, what about moving from Microsoft--that's going to be a pain in the butt" thing real quick.
Saying 'works with Windows' doesn't really make any sense, which is a pretty clear indication that the marketing department wrote it (I'm in marketing--I have no clue how our products work (particularly compared to the competition); I doubt Novell's in that much better a position, at least with their low-level marketing grunts like me).
I wouldn't call it FUD. I'd call it misinformed/misspeaking Marketing Dept.
And I'd call Novell pretty smart for figuring out a way to get past one of the major obstacles for Linux adoption.
mod parent up.
KDE's a little too bloated from a performance standpoint for me, but Gnome drives me crazy: gconf-editor? It's practically the freakin' registry.
you can't mod something up past 5 can you? too bad. B/c the parent poster here is 100% on target. So, will I have to install metacity myself to get Gutsy to run on my laptop? who thought this was a good idea?
I don't know what's up right now. But I watched 100% of Heroes that way (I wanted to support them doing something that was at least on the right track) and the second half of Studio 60 the same way.
Lost (on ABC) is going the same way--I used to torrent them, but if they're going to post them online (for free with minimal commercials), I'll sit through the commericals as long as they're not long or overly obnoxious.
I'm not willing to pay for my TV--i don't love it that much. But I'm willing to watch commercials if I don't have a choice, and I want to send a message to the people who are making decisions that alternate distribution models are good ideas.
that was my frustration w/ the article (this is the first thing by RMS I've read. as it turns out, the rumors are true).
"Windows is the name of an operating system....that subjugates users"?
Subjugates? I switched to Linux b/c Windows is a pain in the butt and I have to pirate it if I want to reinstall it on my machine. That's lame, but it's a far cry from subjugation.
That kind of polarizing, inflammatory talk doesn't do much to convince me that you have a valid point. No way.
I've work for a company doing the same (although the software involved is a tiny part of a end-of-life product). Only the engineer who led development on the product even has the faintest idea of what the GPL is, and he's not really sweating it--he gave me the same answer when I asked about it.
The head of marketing's head would explode if I tried to explain the GPL to him the next time he goes off on how we want to protect the 'proprietary' software (which is basically just a fancy skin on a really popular FOSS program).
there's a Opera plug-in for Firefox? I might have to try that out.
I love Opera--it's quite simply the best browser, but I hate that it's not open source and the fact that it uses Qt on linux. but I can't go to Firefox w/o installing approximately 15 plugins, and that's just not worth it.
this is 100% why I'm switching to Linux. I've dealt w/ a year's worth of hassle and I'm still not really close to satisified with my Ubuntu install.
But I want to learn how to be b/c I'm sick of having to move in gray areas of piracy with Windows just so I don't have to blow my hd out when I reinstall.
I'd be curious what the stats are for people using the ie wrapper kind of browsers, Maxthon and all that.
About a year ago, I downloaded every single browser I could find (including a mess of IE wrappers--security isn't really too much of a concern for me) and spent some time with them. My biggest considerations were:
1. functionality
2. customizability (yes, it's a word. in my world)
3. resources used
Opera won, followed closely by Firefox. It's a shame Opera 9 is such a buggy mess, though--it's making me think about switching to FF.
I love listening to arguments from engineers about language. It's funny.
Here's some good reading about the thru/through type arguments from the language log, everyone's favorite linguistic blog.
Their conclusion: seriously--it' ain't that wrong.
You're hitting the nail on the head. As a linux noob, I find the overwhelming majority of documentation completely incomprehensible. You can give me a command line way to do something, but I'm still trying to figure out how get to a command line from the GUI. And I certainly can't tell what are the things I'm supposed to change in the example you're giving me.
That, and most open source documentation is just crappy. Most software developers are NOT writers. Plain and simple.
if there was an OS out there that people was a) cheap b) easy to use for nongeek windows users who had a little bit of time, but not a ton of time to learn something new c) played nice w/ windows to the point of being so transparent that nobody else knew you were using a new OS, I think a lot of those upper-middle class, male types would make the switch.
As it is now, you've got dedicate at least a week of, in essence, having no computer to learn Linux, and jump over a million hurdles and deal w/ a crippled system (sorry, saving.docs in.rtf makes you look cheap and lame; I know it's cheap and lame, but that's how it looks), just to run something different.
Going to Apple won't be an option till they start putting out budget machines, which I don't see happening--at this point, unless you're a graphics person, you buy an $1K ibook for the same reason you buy an ipod--b/c it's a freakin' sweet status symbol. If you want a computer, you buy a $700 windows machine.
There might be a windows tax, but there's definately a mac tax, too, and it's usually about 20%.
I tried to do a dualboot install w/ unbuntu and xp on my work laptop. this was a mistake. Thank God (in the most literal sense of the phrase) that I had my data on third partition. Chalk it up to operator error. Still, nobody told me it was a 5 hour install.
Gave me an excuse to reformat and reinstall xp, though....
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I don't understand why you would make that assumption. It's the freakin' Wikipedia after all.
A teacher decides to take an intelligent, constructive attitude towards the Wikipedia. And the loudest Slashdotters deplore her for the Demise of Western Civilization.
Surely, you don't go to the Wikipedia for well-verified fact. Surely you don't read Wikipedia articles expecting them to be 100% true, but rather understand it as a shortcut for googling till you find the homepage of the one person who's so freakin' passionate about whatever obscure thing you want to know about that they learned how to write html to put a webpage up.
Surely, you use the Wikipedia as a way to get a quick overview of a company/product/project in a less biased way than you'd find on the project's own web page.
Surely you don't go to the Wikipedia expecting to learn something about topics like God and evolution, or even politicians.
Surely you know that pages on the Wikipedia aren't static and will be edited sooner or later.
I don't understand the problem: college professor asks college students to write Wikipedia articles. Where there was before no information available, some is now available. It might be sketchy. It might even be wrong. But it's providing a starting point for someone learning about the subject. How is this a bad thing? Why are college students, the people who, at times, do a lot of the heavy lifting on doctoral dissertations, people we can't trust with the Wikipedia?
I'd expect this sort of reaction in 'Academics Against the Internet' coffeeshop meeting. My mind is blown that people who post on Slashdot would react in any way that didn't include either sentiment: "'bout time' or 'this isn't news'."
You're the one who wrote that hysterical article on ninjas, weren't you? hehehe
Sounds like a job for an English major.
Where do I apply?
Oh, I whole-heartedly agree with that--when there's multiple targets, deciding which target's speed the radar is displaying can be really tough.
I only meant that well-practiced officers are good judges of speed, using only their eye.
If I get a chance, I'll talk w/ engineering about all this, see what they know.
Here's our technical spec sheet for the unit used (pdf warning). Maybe that'll help clear things up.
I work for the radar company that made the radar gun the cop used. I don't have all the information about what happened, but I have a hard time believing the GPS is more accurate.
Radar guns are certified regularly, which is most often a pretty simple accuracy test (but very well could have been a full diagnostic), so it's doubtful the radar gun was malfunctioning (iirc, those guns have an internal lockout in case of malfunction).
Also, remember that we're talking basically the speed of light here, with some minor latency for the unit to process the Doppler shift. Radar's pretty much instaneous, within miliseconds, at least.
Now, that's not to say that the officer didn't make an error. Radar's not an exact tool--b/c the beam is so wide, you can pick up a lot of things and an untrained officer can get some misleading speeds.
At the same time, remember that most traffic officers do this all day, at least five days a week. They make mistakes just like anybody else, but they're rare. And for that matter, officers are trained to use the radar as a confirmation of their own judgement of how fast the vehicle's moving. And since they're doing it all day long every day, they can tell you within a mph or two how fast a car is going just by looking at it.
Again, I'm not pretending to have all the information, but if it came down to trusting GPS or trusting the radar, I'd trust the radar. It's just a simpler tool, with less hoops to jump through (and fewer things to go wrong).
Disclaimer: I'm in marketing for Decatur Electronics. But for what it's worth, I use Linux on my machine at home, hehehe.
I think it has a lot to do with screen quality, or the way your OS font hinting interacts w/ your screen. Fonts in Linux look pretty bad no matter what I do on my laptop. I blamed it on Linux for a long time, then went back to Windows and realized they look crappy there, too.
Stuff looks fine on my old CRT on my desktop.
Speaking from a marketing perspective, this seems like boder line great marketing on Novell's part, border-line FUD. I would guess that quote started in the marketing department, got rewritten by the CEO to something a bit more honest, then went back to the marketing department where they changed a couple words back to give us that dumb "already works with Windows." For the first time, though, this whole Novell/MS thing makes sense to me from Novell's standpoint: get MS on your side, and knock down that whole "well, what about moving from Microsoft--that's going to be a pain in the butt" thing real quick. Saying 'works with Windows' doesn't really make any sense, which is a pretty clear indication that the marketing department wrote it (I'm in marketing--I have no clue how our products work (particularly compared to the competition); I doubt Novell's in that much better a position, at least with their low-level marketing grunts like me). I wouldn't call it FUD. I'd call it misinformed/misspeaking Marketing Dept. And I'd call Novell pretty smart for figuring out a way to get past one of the major obstacles for Linux adoption.
mod parent up. KDE's a little too bloated from a performance standpoint for me, but Gnome drives me crazy: gconf-editor? It's practically the freakin' registry.
you can't mod something up past 5 can you? too bad. B/c the parent poster here is 100% on target. So, will I have to install metacity myself to get Gutsy to run on my laptop? who thought this was a good idea?
I don't know what's up right now. But I watched 100% of Heroes that way (I wanted to support them doing something that was at least on the right track) and the second half of Studio 60 the same way. Lost (on ABC) is going the same way--I used to torrent them, but if they're going to post them online (for free with minimal commercials), I'll sit through the commericals as long as they're not long or overly obnoxious. I'm not willing to pay for my TV--i don't love it that much. But I'm willing to watch commercials if I don't have a choice, and I want to send a message to the people who are making decisions that alternate distribution models are good ideas.
that was my frustration w/ the article (this is the first thing by RMS I've read. as it turns out, the rumors are true). "Windows is the name of an operating system....that subjugates users"? Subjugates? I switched to Linux b/c Windows is a pain in the butt and I have to pirate it if I want to reinstall it on my machine. That's lame, but it's a far cry from subjugation. That kind of polarizing, inflammatory talk doesn't do much to convince me that you have a valid point. No way.
I've work for a company doing the same (although the software involved is a tiny part of a end-of-life product). Only the engineer who led development on the product even has the faintest idea of what the GPL is, and he's not really sweating it--he gave me the same answer when I asked about it. The head of marketing's head would explode if I tried to explain the GPL to him the next time he goes off on how we want to protect the 'proprietary' software (which is basically just a fancy skin on a really popular FOSS program).
there's a Opera plug-in for Firefox? I might have to try that out. I love Opera--it's quite simply the best browser, but I hate that it's not open source and the fact that it uses Qt on linux. but I can't go to Firefox w/o installing approximately 15 plugins, and that's just not worth it.
this is 100% why I'm switching to Linux. I've dealt w/ a year's worth of hassle and I'm still not really close to satisified with my Ubuntu install. But I want to learn how to be b/c I'm sick of having to move in gray areas of piracy with Windows just so I don't have to blow my hd out when I reinstall.
I'd be curious what the stats are for people using the ie wrapper kind of browsers, Maxthon and all that. About a year ago, I downloaded every single browser I could find (including a mess of IE wrappers--security isn't really too much of a concern for me) and spent some time with them. My biggest considerations were: 1. functionality 2. customizability (yes, it's a word. in my world) 3. resources used Opera won, followed closely by Firefox. It's a shame Opera 9 is such a buggy mess, though--it's making me think about switching to FF.
I love listening to arguments from engineers about language. It's funny. Here's some good reading about the thru/through type arguments from the language log, everyone's favorite linguistic blog. Their conclusion: seriously--it' ain't that wrong.
for real. preach on, brotha'
+40 xp: you made your wisdome check!
You're hitting the nail on the head. As a linux noob, I find the overwhelming majority of documentation completely incomprehensible. You can give me a command line way to do something, but I'm still trying to figure out how get to a command line from the GUI. And I certainly can't tell what are the things I'm supposed to change in the example you're giving me. That, and most open source documentation is just crappy. Most software developers are NOT writers. Plain and simple.
that's 100% kept me from thinking that going mac was even an option.....problem solved.
if there was an OS out there that people was a) cheap b) easy to use for nongeek windows users who had a little bit of time, but not a ton of time to learn something new c) played nice w/ windows to the point of being so transparent that nobody else knew you were using a new OS, I think a lot of those upper-middle class, male types would make the switch. As it is now, you've got dedicate at least a week of, in essence, having no computer to learn Linux, and jump over a million hurdles and deal w/ a crippled system (sorry, saving .docs in .rtf makes you look cheap and lame; I know it's cheap and lame, but that's how it looks), just to run something different.
Going to Apple won't be an option till they start putting out budget machines, which I don't see happening--at this point, unless you're a graphics person, you buy an $1K ibook for the same reason you buy an ipod--b/c it's a freakin' sweet status symbol. If you want a computer, you buy a $700 windows machine.
There might be a windows tax, but there's definately a mac tax, too, and it's usually about 20%.
I tried to do a dualboot install w/ unbuntu and xp on my work laptop. this was a mistake. Thank God (in the most literal sense of the phrase) that I had my data on third partition. Chalk it up to operator error. Still, nobody told me it was a 5 hour install. Gave me an excuse to reformat and reinstall xp, though....