Can someone remind me what is the point of a browser allowing "driveby downloads" and automatically launching the content of the download?
Sadly, I believe that'd be "marketing reasons". Joe User is simply more impressed if he can click on a file and it does its stuff, be that a local or remote file, without him having to click on it again. I believe the term is "a seamless, more immersive experience", or somesuch junk.
The question is, just what are they getting themselves neck-deep in?
That is a good point, and I'll admit that my phrasing was a little lax (I did mean "as big as the English one is currently).
Then again, what with Wikipedia's desire to converge to Wikipedia 1.0, new article creation may slow considerably towards some ceiling, when most major topics have reasonable articles. Of course, there'll still be the collaberation, but the effort will go towards improving existing ones, not creating new ones on more obscure topics. And Wikipedia itself measures the size of its different language versions in article count (admittedly other metrics would be much more complicated).
As an interesting note, the Chinese version currently has 56,826 articles. The English version was this size in approximately October 2002, so ceteris paribus, my premise will occur in about June 2009. What with the Chinese government's efforts, though, ceteris is most certainly not paribus, so this is purely theoretical...
As for historians who have access to these documents, having already made copies of their contents - what's their legal status now?
What if they were using some of these documents for a paper or thesis; presumably they'll have to re-write that part? How about if they've already published a paper quoting parts of those documents verbatim - would the classification then extend to their paper? The documents are being reclassified while the information is already public domain... while it's going to be as ineffective as closing the door after the horse is long gone, does the classification thus legally extend to the information too?
Those are all reasonable points, but on balance, wiki-style collaberations have proved surprisingly successful. Take a look at WhyWikiWorks on Ward Cunningham's wiki (which IIRC was one of the first wikis) for the other side of the coin. Particularly relevant highlights include:
Wiki pages represent consensus because it's much easier to delete insults and remove WikiSpam than indulge them. What remains is naturally meaningful and has been essentially collated from multiple points of view.
To make an impact on Wiki, you need to generate real content. Anything else will be removed. So anyone can play, but only good players remain.
I'd say that I agree in general - there's no real motivation to edit a wiki in an unconstructive way - any vandalism is incredibly temporary, and can easily be undone. Going back to your question:
"Anyone can edit it... [but] why would I? Why would anyone waste their time?"
that can be considered one of the strengths, and applies to those who would do harm as well as good. People who do take the trouble to edit articles in a non-trivial fashion are doing so because they really want to - perhaps because they enjoy sharing their specialist knowledge with everyone freely, but in any case because they get a reward (feeling good, peer acclaim) from doing so. Essentially, this reward is what keeps good wiki-users coming back and leads to bad ones losing interest.
"I respectfully disagree with the assertion that actions by Jimbo Wales may not be overturned except by appeal to Jimbo. Jimbo seems to agree, noting he will accept it if the arbcom issued a ruling overturning something he did."
And that hasn't been seen in any dictatorship in history: "Yes, I have supreme ultimate power, but if you, the puppet parliament, don't like something I've done and decide against it, I'll go with what you want."
While I recognise that dictatorships (especially in the real world) are far from ideal, those powers let you get important things done rather quickly. From one angle, it's nice to know that Jimbo has the ability to immediately and permanently put a stop to childish back-and-forth 'arguments' between two contributers who both believe they're in the right.
Jimbo's comment, that "in 10 years, it seems likely to me that many languages which are now quite small will have very large Wikipedia projects," ties in in an interesting fashion with the current blocking of Wikipedia in China. At the moment, it's a relatively small issue in their grand scheme of things. But fast-forward 10 years, (if and) when the Chinese wikipedia is about the same size as the English version, and I wonder how the government will cope. It's already technologically very possible to circumvent the block with proxies - and although I don't envy those who go against the regime, doubtless many thousands, if not millions, will, and Wikipedia will continue to grow.
Will the Chinese government continue to try to brush it under the carpet, perhaps coming up with more exotic and powerful blocking techniques? Or will it decide it can't just be stamped out, and perhaps more worryingly, attempt to influence the content of articles on Chinese Wikipedia? I would imagine that a government can't bring enough force to bear in a Wiki context to overcome the concensus of the userbase as a whole, which is fantastic and one of the major pluses of wikis.
But a possibly more interesting question is those situations where the majority of the userbase does have a different viewpoint - how would Arabic Wikipedia relate the Danish cartoons incident as compared to the English one, for example? Scale that up to millions of entries, and then re-read Jimbo's goal:
"a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia for every single person on the planet"
and it seems that everyone will have an encyclopedia, but the knowledge contained therein may well differ depending on the flavour you have.
Now I'm not knocking the concept and I think it's a great thing to aim for - but I see this as an extremely interesting issue for wiki-style collaberative projects in general. Most projects have a standardised community invisibly guiding them - and what we're seeing here is multiple communities with essentially the same task and input, so it'll be extremely interesting to see what comes out. Hopefully Wikipedia's emphasis on neutrality will be enough to overcome cultural bias, but I'm not sure if it'll be completely successful (I'm not sure that people will even notice that bias half the time)...
Your last line reminds me of a line from (the rather underrated) Starship Troopers:
"When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."
Lossless certainly does have a role to play - perhaps not, as you pointed out (and I agree), to stick on your portable media player and take about with you; but instead as a 'master copy', of sorts.
I currently encode everything these days in OGG Vorbis, but still I have a lot of music on my hard drive in MP3 format. I'd rather have it in OGG, but to re-encode from MP3 to OGG would involve a rather hideous loss of quality because of the many conversion steps. (I'm working through the CDs I have, but since I haven't worked out how to get Perl to put discs in my CD tray it's taking longer than it otherwise could). Now I'm not saying that most people would bother with this, but there are certainly situations where having a FLAC (or whatever) version of a file on a disc would be very handy (especially with hard drive space being so very cheap nowadays) - you could encode to whatever format you wanted, as many times as you wanted, without losing any more fidelity than is standard for that codec.
What might be really cool, is if PMP syncing devices could convert on the fly into a variety of lossy formats from a variety of lossless format source files - so you keep a lossless copy on your HD as the 'reference' copy, so to speak, and when space and decoding CPU power are at a premium you can convert that into a form more amenable for carrying about. I'm not sure how fast MP3 encoding is compared to USB2.0 transfers, but I don't think it would create an intolerable bottleneck...
OK, so surround sound is a technological advance, and will help with certain applications - but for the main market of plain ol' music, is it going to make any difference? Is anyone really rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of being able to hear their favourite bands in surround sound?
I might be missing something here, but to me surround sound is more Training Day than Green Day...
*Though in a corollary to my own comment, I will add that WMA has a lossless mode, which is apparently rather good (performance-wise), slightly smaller output files than FLAC albeit more CPU-intensive. AAC also has a lossless mode, but for whatever reason that doesn't seem to be as popular and I haven't really heard anything about it.
It's really a matter of hardware/software support, at the end of the day. For most end-users, mp3's compression:quality ratio is good enough that they can store their music in what they feel to be a reasonably small amount of space, and what matters most is the support. If they can't play, say, Ogg Vorbis files on their media players then why should they encode/buy music in that format? And likewise, if no-one's encoding or buying Ogg Vorbis music, why should manufacturers include support for it in their devices? It's the old chicken-and-egg story that Linux advocates will know and, err, love...
That said, if there are better formats, they'll have a tendancy to surface. FLAC, for example, is lossless which immediately gives it a USP over most other codecs out there (including, IIRC, all the 'popular' ones). And of course, it's free and open like Vorbis. The major barrier to these codecs taking their rightful place, though, is Microsoft and Apple pushing their own formats; why should Joe User worry about some strange-sounding hacker codec ("what's a codec?") when WMA sounds great, is smaller than mp3(wow!) and works flawlessly with WMP11 out of the box?
Well, according to Leo Strauss:
"... a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli,... if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured."
I believe Napoleon said something along the same lines - and at least, acted in that fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
That only stops the file being automatically opened - something you can also do by turning that option off in Safari (as noted several times above).
The main problem is in the way OS X handles remote metadata.
The question is, just what are they getting themselves neck-deep in?
That is a good point, and I'll admit that my phrasing was a little lax (I did mean "as big as the English one is currently).
Then again, what with Wikipedia's desire to converge to Wikipedia 1.0, new article creation may slow considerably towards some ceiling, when most major topics have reasonable articles. Of course, there'll still be the collaberation, but the effort will go towards improving existing ones, not creating new ones on more obscure topics. And Wikipedia itself measures the size of its different language versions in article count (admittedly other metrics would be much more complicated).
As an interesting note, the Chinese version currently has 56,826 articles. The English version was this size in approximately October 2002, so ceteris paribus, my premise will occur in about June 2009. What with the Chinese government's efforts, though, ceteris is most certainly not paribus, so this is purely theoretical...
As for historians who have access to these documents, having already made copies of their contents - what's their legal status now?
What if they were using some of these documents for a paper or thesis; presumably they'll have to re-write that part? How about if they've already published a paper quoting parts of those documents verbatim - would the classification then extend to their paper? The documents are being reclassified while the information is already public domain... while it's going to be as ineffective as closing the door after the horse is long gone, does the classification thus legally extend to the information too?
- Wiki pages represent consensus because it's much easier to delete insults and remove WikiSpam than indulge them. What remains is naturally meaningful and has been essentially collated from multiple points of view.
- To make an impact on Wiki, you need to generate real content. Anything else will be removed. So anyone can play, but only good players remain.
I'd say that I agree in general - there's no real motivation to edit a wiki in an unconstructive way - any vandalism is incredibly temporary, and can easily be undone. Going back to your question: that can be considered one of the strengths, and applies to those who would do harm as well as good. People who do take the trouble to edit articles in a non-trivial fashion are doing so because they really want to - perhaps because they enjoy sharing their specialist knowledge with everyone freely, but in any case because they get a reward (feeling good, peer acclaim) from doing so. Essentially, this reward is what keeps good wiki-users coming back and leads to bad ones losing interest.While I recognise that dictatorships (especially in the real world) are far from ideal, those powers let you get important things done rather quickly. From one angle, it's nice to know that Jimbo has the ability to immediately and permanently put a stop to childish back-and-forth 'arguments' between two contributers who both believe they're in the right.
I'm not really sure, but judging by the above comments it's not the Shack that the B52's were singing about...
Lossless certainly does have a role to play - perhaps not, as you pointed out (and I agree), to stick on your portable media player and take about with you; but instead as a 'master copy', of sorts.
I currently encode everything these days in OGG Vorbis, but still I have a lot of music on my hard drive in MP3 format. I'd rather have it in OGG, but to re-encode from MP3 to OGG would involve a rather hideous loss of quality because of the many conversion steps. (I'm working through the CDs I have, but since I haven't worked out how to get Perl to put discs in my CD tray it's taking longer than it otherwise could). Now I'm not saying that most people would bother with this, but there are certainly situations where having a FLAC (or whatever) version of a file on a disc would be very handy (especially with hard drive space being so very cheap nowadays) - you could encode to whatever format you wanted, as many times as you wanted, without losing any more fidelity than is standard for that codec.
What might be really cool, is if PMP syncing devices could convert on the fly into a variety of lossy formats from a variety of lossless format source files - so you keep a lossless copy on your HD as the 'reference' copy, so to speak, and when space and decoding CPU power are at a premium you can convert that into a form more amenable for carrying about. I'm not sure how fast MP3 encoding is compared to USB2.0 transfers, but I don't think it would create an intolerable bottleneck...
OK, so surround sound is a technological advance, and will help with certain applications - but for the main market of plain ol' music, is it going to make any difference? Is anyone really rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of being able to hear their favourite bands in surround sound?
I might be missing something here, but to me surround sound is more Training Day than Green Day...
*Though in a corollary to my own comment, I will add that WMA has a lossless mode, which is apparently rather good (performance-wise), slightly smaller output files than FLAC albeit more CPU-intensive. AAC also has a lossless mode, but for whatever reason that doesn't seem to be as popular and I haven't really heard anything about it.
It's really a matter of hardware/software support, at the end of the day. For most end-users, mp3's compression:quality ratio is good enough that they can store their music in what they feel to be a reasonably small amount of space, and what matters most is the support. If they can't play, say, Ogg Vorbis files on their media players then why should they encode/buy music in that format? And likewise, if no-one's encoding or buying Ogg Vorbis music, why should manufacturers include support for it in their devices? It's the old chicken-and-egg story that Linux advocates will know and, err, love...
That said, if there are better formats, they'll have a tendancy to surface. FLAC, for example, is lossless which immediately gives it a USP over most other codecs out there (including, IIRC, all the 'popular' ones). And of course, it's free and open like Vorbis. The major barrier to these codecs taking their rightful place, though, is Microsoft and Apple pushing their own formats; why should Joe User worry about some strange-sounding hacker codec ("what's a codec?") when WMA sounds great, is smaller than mp3(wow!) and works flawlessly with WMP11 out of the box?
Well, according to Leo Strauss: "... a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, ... if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured."
I believe Napoleon said something along the same lines - and at least, acted in that fashion.