But this is local color news! Somewhere, an academic historian is lamenting the decline of standards! That means 144 papers will carry the same 2 paragraph AP news blip, so it's Notable! Hooray! Let's make a wiki page!/Weeps
I feel we do need some secondary spinoff with clearly marked borders that contains all the range of stuff from pure astroturf to just-barely-deleted. Wikipedia is becoming a worm that eats its own tail. Once you remove the notability bit, you both get trolls, but you also get current culture items which are "popular" but not "notable". Call it "Descartes System". The topics exist therefore they are there on the ShadowWiki.
Then later when some "reputable" source decides to make it officially notable, it gets to be "promoted" to the main Wikipedia. If something on the main Wiki gets voted off the island, it just flips back over to the ShadowWiki.
People who believe they are doing the right thing can still work on protecting the ShadowWiki from abuse. The main difference is that it should be a little harder to delete pages - not from "notability", but more on abusive grounds if it's slander, etc.
I dunno, I see Anonymous as Chaotic Good, but with a problem much like a chess computer calculating a tricky move. What "is good to do" may be provisionally true, as a "fight censorship / fight the man / fight the corps" kind of thing. Per the other thread if more than one side is morally wrong, it becomes a mess to evaluate your own decision. HBGary would have been one more faceless semi-competent little gov agent of dubious morals. We wring our hands when the gov doesevil stuff, because "don't you know who they are? They're the Governaut, bitch!". But when citizens do it, look at the paid anonymous turfers trying to poison the discussion. (What's a political astroturfer called? They're selling mercs, not merch.) But yes, only Chaotic Good, because then they miscalc something and drift off into the lulz and lose the storybook ending for something messier.
Also Anonymous has a big weakness. Gov is trying to deliberatly apply the logical fallacy that "there is only one Anonymous and they must be stopped by draconian measures."
There might be a split here between utility and functionality. Updating the world on _____ is the split. In Egypt it was enough to get the Internet nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, just like all good tech can be mashed up into a weapon, all good tech can also be dumbed down for a low common denominator desire. I'll suggest we take a page out of certain sports lore and Godel Encode menu items.
Activist 1: "Darwin's_Breakfast had Cheerios today." Activist 2: "Ho Hum"
(Next Day)
Activist 1: "That's a new one. Darwin's_Breakfast had Cherry Yogourt this time for breakfast." Activist 2: "Dammit!"
It's one of those questions that can either be honest or a really slick troll.
Fair enough you went honest, and I agree the difference of a word or two can make all the difference. I wanted to call attention to a possible new cross-thread troll trend where, if it happened 4 stories in a row, would set a meme.
Anonymous just might be the invisible morality scale. I'd say they're either lawful evil or chaotically good. I don't know my D&D well enough to apply it. Means, Ends, that whole moebius strip.
Although he was trolling hard, in a way "what is it to us who HBGary is in the scheme of things if it allows a total conflation abuse by the govt to say "look, Anonymous hacked sensitive federal companies! They must be stopped!"
Maybe we can frame the question this way - I thought first-numbers were supposed to be big Oh-Wow changes, with the point releases being the little boosts. Now I am roughly aware they did some sort of deep Gecko improvement that started the whole 4.0 branch, but would some of that other stuff have been fine with 4.1 and 4.2?
On the other hand, where does this put us with "shoot for the moon" technologies? If it's so hard that it takes a year to finish a big new piece of tech, is that more of a Minefield Alpha series thing rather than "perpetual betas"? Can't stuff parked in Dev hang out in Alpha / Minefield? Maybe then make "Beta" the point where you think it really is vetted enough to kick into Beta, then a point relese.
I meant that cool stuff "can be done". "Whether it will be done" is the whole other problem with the political side. Sometimes the "can be done" is pretty hard, and politicians hate hard stuff. "We can have a moon base in 20 years" - but only if we were so scared we stopped most of our petty squabbling to do it. Seriously, you engineer types out there, how hard is it really to get a quad-protected airtight building to the moon? Put it at some kind of shade-crossover point to use the solar power but not get totally fried.
The problem now is we have a Terrorist meme that will instantly shut down any planetary science because we have decided we can't trust anyone to be on the base without blowing it up.
Didn't we have the same "what use is this" question after that math story the other day? It's like a oblique troll that something is Useless Until Proven Useful.
General Theory of Truth: If something is true, something cool can be done with it. No exceptions. Politics don't count.
I agree *you* don't need this, but someone out there has to know this stuff.
I'll give you 14 years, but I have real trouble thinking of copyrightable projects that take longer than 28 years to finish. There might be 100 tops.
It's more about how long the company thinks they can get the long trail of money. The newest thing seems to be Reboots, like the James Bond movies.
A poster elsewhere had a point about the $ threshold. There's metric tons of stuff that has micro amounts of sales left, but are still locked under the monolithic copyright law. Call it the "disturbed hornet" theory. The company can't sell it itself, but the minute you try to make a derived work, the fake backlash publicity that 3 press releases creates will produce "controversy sales", which are then used to fuel Schrodinger's Lawsuit.
All they would have to do is call some of their betas number releases.
This is a trench op on the marketing side, to make pointy heads happy that Firefox can be in version 7 this year and version 10 next year. Apparently something pending about betas exhausted them.
So now each version will only have some three features and a few bug fixes. That's about the same as the jump from version 3 to 4 which all told, tackled a whole lot.
In a way, this is a medium-bad thing. It says that "Good enough works" - so truth be told, if we're running a 10+ year old OS happily, it means that the dream of new tech is fading. There was the world of difference between Win 3.1 and XP - but you saw that Bubbles thing, even the experimental labs group can't figure out a 21st century OS. We truly have no idea what it will take to wow us.
I'll second the Accounting line position buttressed by tech route.
Accounting often has some of the trickiest software in an otherwise low-tech business, so you see a lot of these hybrid 80-20 positions. We have a back end IT guy, and I do level 1 helpdesk in between my "line" duties.
It used to be if you were logged in somewhere likeslashdot but you closed the browser, when you went back you were still logged in. Now it seems to be doing hourglass-stuff on close, and it is making me re-login. Is that the far side of fixing the "memory leak"?
Slashdot Mirror
But this is local color news! Somewhere, an academic historian is lamenting the decline of standards! That means 144 papers will carry the same 2 paragraph AP news blip, so it's Notable! Hooray! Let's make a wiki page! /Weeps
I disagree.
I feel we do need some secondary spinoff with clearly marked borders that contains all the range of stuff from pure astroturf to just-barely-deleted. Wikipedia is becoming a worm that eats its own tail. Once you remove the notability bit, you both get trolls, but you also get current culture items which are "popular" but not "notable". Call it "Descartes System". The topics exist therefore they are there on the ShadowWiki.
Then later when some "reputable" source decides to make it officially notable, it gets to be "promoted" to the main Wikipedia. If something on the main Wiki gets voted off the island, it just flips back over to the ShadowWiki.
People who believe they are doing the right thing can still work on protecting the ShadowWiki from abuse. The main difference is that it should be a little harder to delete pages - not from "notability", but more on abusive grounds if it's slander, etc.
I dunno, I see Anonymous as Chaotic Good, but with a problem much like a chess computer calculating a tricky move. What "is good to do" may be provisionally true, as a "fight censorship / fight the man / fight the corps" kind of thing. Per the other thread if more than one side is morally wrong, it becomes a mess to evaluate your own decision. HBGary would have been one more faceless semi-competent little gov agent of dubious morals. We wring our hands when the gov doesevil stuff, because "don't you know who they are? They're the Governaut, bitch!". But when citizens do it, look at the paid anonymous turfers trying to poison the discussion.
(What's a political astroturfer called? They're selling mercs, not merch.)
But yes, only Chaotic Good, because then they miscalc something and drift off into the lulz and lose the storybook ending for something messier.
Also Anonymous has a big weakness. Gov is trying to deliberatly apply the logical fallacy that "there is only one Anonymous and they must be stopped by draconian measures."
There might be a split here between utility and functionality. Updating the world on _____ is the split. In Egypt it was enough to get the Internet nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. However, just like all good tech can be mashed up into a weapon, all good tech can also be dumbed down for a low common denominator desire. I'll suggest we take a page out of certain sports lore and Godel Encode menu items.
Activist 1: "Darwin's_Breakfast had Cheerios today."
Activist 2: "Ho Hum"
(Next Day)
Activist 1: "That's a new one. Darwin's_Breakfast had Cherry Yogourt this time for breakfast."
Activist 2: "Dammit!"
It's one of those questions that can either be honest or a really slick troll.
Fair enough you went honest, and I agree the difference of a word or two can make all the difference. I wanted to call attention to a possible new cross-thread troll trend where, if it happened 4 stories in a row, would set a meme.
Anonymous just might be the invisible morality scale. I'd say they're either lawful evil or chaotically good. I don't know my D&D well enough to apply it. Means, Ends, that whole moebius strip.
Although he was trolling hard, in a way "what is it to us who HBGary is in the scheme of things if it allows a total conflation abuse by the govt to say "look, Anonymous hacked sensitive federal companies! They must be stopped!"
Insert TV Trope here.
Oh wait! So you mean the analogy is perfect!!
"This nice smooth service you see, dear customer, is actually quite violent inside, and can shake 150,000 accounts very strongly."
I'll run with whichever terms you care to use - call the OS the janitor. What do we call the nifty new tricks? Add-ons? Plugins?
I like my tech exciting, because to me excitement is the emotional response to functionality. It's the realization "Now I, me, can do ___".
Thanks for the detailed reply.
Maybe we can frame the question this way - I thought first-numbers were supposed to be big Oh-Wow changes, with the point releases being the little boosts. Now I am roughly aware they did some sort of deep Gecko improvement that started the whole 4.0 branch, but would some of that other stuff have been fine with 4.1 and 4.2?
On the other hand, where does this put us with "shoot for the moon" technologies? If it's so hard that it takes a year to finish a big new piece of tech, is that more of a Minefield Alpha series thing rather than "perpetual betas"? Can't stuff parked in Dev hang out in Alpha / Minefield? Maybe then make "Beta" the point where you think it really is vetted enough to kick into Beta, then a point relese.
But before he won the internets, you could sorta keep all that stuff under wraps. Facebook is like a "friendly wikileaks".
Who gets the peace prize?
Sorry, I wasn't clear.
I meant that cool stuff "can be done". "Whether it will be done" is the whole other problem with the political side. Sometimes the "can be done" is pretty hard, and politicians hate hard stuff. "We can have a moon base in 20 years" - but only if we were so scared we stopped most of our petty squabbling to do it. Seriously, you engineer types out there, how hard is it really to get a quad-protected airtight building to the moon? Put it at some kind of shade-crossover point to use the solar power but not get totally fried.
The problem now is we have a Terrorist meme that will instantly shut down any planetary science because we have decided we can't trust anyone to be on the base without blowing it up.
Didn't we have the same "what use is this" question after that math story the other day? It's like a oblique troll that something is Useless Until Proven Useful.
General Theory of Truth: If something is true, something cool can be done with it. No exceptions. Politics don't count.
I agree *you* don't need this, but someone out there has to know this stuff.
Is this the Peer Reviewed research that our academic publishers are claiming deserves high fees for? What happened to outrage at bad methodology?
P.S. Bill and Ted like this.
I'll give you 14 years, but I have real trouble thinking of copyrightable projects that take longer than 28 years to finish. There might be 100 tops.
It's more about how long the company thinks they can get the long trail of money. The newest thing seems to be Reboots, like the James Bond movies.
A poster elsewhere had a point about the $ threshold. There's metric tons of stuff that has micro amounts of sales left, but are still locked under the monolithic copyright law. Call it the "disturbed hornet" theory. The company can't sell it itself, but the minute you try to make a derived work, the fake backlash publicity that 3 press releases creates will produce "controversy sales", which are then used to fuel Schrodinger's Lawsuit.
Beta 12 was supposed to be the one that fixed a bunch of memory leak problems. Are you still having them on Beta 12?
All they would have to do is call some of their betas number releases.
This is a trench op on the marketing side, to make pointy heads happy that Firefox can be in version 7 this year and version 10 next year. Apparently something pending about betas exhausted them.
So now each version will only have some three features and a few bug fixes. That's about the same as the jump from version 3 to 4 which all told, tackled a whole lot.
But it's so soft and fluffy and will cradle you in a cushion of customer service who will get you back up and running in no time! /humor
In a way, this is a medium-bad thing. It says that "Good enough works" - so truth be told, if we're running a 10+ year old OS happily, it means that the dream of new tech is fading. There was the world of difference between Win 3.1 and XP - but you saw that Bubbles thing, even the experimental labs group can't figure out a 21st century OS. We truly have no idea what it will take to wow us.
I'll second the Accounting line position buttressed by tech route.
Accounting often has some of the trickiest software in an otherwise low-tech business, so you see a lot of these hybrid 80-20 positions. We have a back end IT guy, and I do level 1 helpdesk in between my "line" duties.
Can we trade you your better private music laws for our better hiring of self taught IT workers?
In some ways this is more like the Minefield alpha channel, except they are calling them betas. I'm curious to see what 650 bug fixes solve!
Now that they are close, they can start to do harder tests having gotten the churn down.
They already found one.
"Sports Entertainment".
It used to be if you were logged in somewhere likeslashdot but you closed the browser, when you went back you were still logged in. Now it seems to be doing hourglass-stuff on close, and it is making me re-login. Is that the far side of fixing the "memory leak"?
Actually, you might be on to an idea.
Can we contact the agents for Ray Bradbury for permission to crowd-source Fahrenheit 451?
in DRM America, Libraries want Harper Collins to destruct after being sued 26 times!