A friend recently started Dummipedia and is experiencing the same issue, I think. Dummipedia's angle is 'a Wikipedia companion', where articles must be no more than 500 words in length. A visitor can get the gist on some subject, and if they want all of what millions of editors know, there's a 'more...' link on every article to Wikipedia.
It's slow starting - like you said, the articles are small islands in a big empty index. I suggested a button on empty pages like "Get me started by scraping 500 words from Wikipedia", but he didn't like it. Maybe it was the word 'scrape'. Or maybe it's not just programmers who like to 'roll their own'.
Irritating was my opinion too, though my summary has always been "It's very difficult to explain, but I am jolly clever, so you'll have to take my word for it". It's well written and there's plenty of interesting material if you can ignore the fact he's selling you a lemon.
Hey! I thought he was great in The Matrix. My friends forced me to watch it when we'd gone to watch something sold out in the other theatre. i saw his name, thought "Forsooth, there's a bomb on the bus", and suggested I'd go for a drink on my own across the road and join them later. I was really pleased I saw The Matrix. He might be good again in a similar role in a good movie. Reloaded and Revolutions don't count: clause 2. My biggest worry is that they might turn this into another example of homoerotic cheesiness that is a Tom Cruise franchise. He was all right in Legend.
Last time I flew UK-Malaysia on Emirates, I enjoyed the flat panel screen in the headrest in front of me for a few hours, then turned it off to get some sleep. After a couple of hours stopover at Dubai, right when I should have been deepest asleep, we boarded another plane for the rest of the journey. The flat panels could be switched off, but were switched back on every ten minutes or so for advertisements. I tore the cover off the inflight magazine and shoved it into the gap between the screen and the headrest at the top, so that it hung completely over the screen. Bliss! On second thoughts, maybe this new system would interpret my actions as 'fabricating a device to interrupt aeroplane function'. Maybe it's not the right time to add this to instructables.com...
I live in Malaysia. Two years ago I bought a PC from a busy computer store here, my wife said she wanted Windows XP on it, so I went back to the shop and asked. They went out the back, and a few minutes later gave me a still-warm CDR with an XP serial number scrawled on it. I asked them "how much?" and they said "nothing - we don't sell software".
Whenever anybody says "Intellectual Property", I think of a law that allows stupid people to own ideas. Not only say it's theirs, but take it home and hide it, and if anybody has an idea like it, they can set the law on them.
OK, maybe the person who only ever has one good idea in their life will benefit from such a law. They can sit somewhere comfortable, stroking their preciousss, counting the money the stupid person who can afford lawyers gave them. If however, you're in a position where having good ideas is what you do for work, then you have to spend half your life talking to stupid people with money about how best to prevent anybody else from benefiting from your idea!
If you're a law-abiding intellectual, IP makes your life harder. If you're a law-abiding small business that wants to do 'new stuff' IP makes your life harder. If you're a law-breaking stupid person, IP makes your life harder, unless you're in a country where nobody really gives a shit about laws that make it harder to 'do business', in which case it just makes your competitors' lives harder - which is great!
I love to see pictures of really, really, stupendously rich people enjoying their private planes and tropical islands as much as the next person. You have to admire their intellectual property, after all - they paid for it! But a rethink of the idea as commodity is long overdue, even if we don't get as many pimped-out dreamliners to drool over.
I've stopped ranting now. I feel better. Thanks for listening. Hello?
Exactly. There are plenty of corporations more worthy of/.ers ire, and they get it on a regular basis. This story wouldn't be worth commenting on except for that "Do no evil" thing.
I see that the google entry for wikipedia says "unofficial slogan is \"don't be evil\"". I've got to confess to laughing out loud at the delicious conspiracy theories that fired off in my mind. Has someone from google, or a concerned shareholder already started retracting? Not only 'unofficial', not only 'slogan' (not policy, or even motto), but also some-evil-from-time-to-time-should-be-okay-on-balance.
Any wikipedia archaeologists know of a long-lost period when the "do no evil" thing was in the article?
Corporations act in a world where the rules vary from place to place. Principles aside, all they have to do is follow the local law. I'm in favour of corporations (and people, come to think of it) being bound to follow both their home and local (to their action) laws. So Google would have to divulge data and perform deletions at the request of a foreign government, but they would also be liable to some sort of invasion of privacy, reckless endangerment type legal action at home. That might make their business in China less tenable, which is surely a bad thing for them, and for anybody else who thinks Google being in China is good-on-balance. On the other hand, perhaps the countries who buy gazillions of credits worth of products that turn out to be hazardous, from countries whose laws we might wish were more respectable and more rigorously enforced, maybe those countries could launch legal actions that result in fines. The fines would doubtless never be paid. But when the countries come with their bank statements asking for the trade deficit to be paid, they could be met by the list of unpaid fines. I'm just saying...
...my copy of Stroud's Engineering Mathematics has "DOVER" and "M1 SOUTH" written in marker pen on the inside covers. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach says "CALGARY" on one flyleaf, "ABERDEEN" on another. I've sat on my books to keep my arse warm on a freezing crash barrier, rested my head on them to sleep on borrowed dorm floors, stuffed them up my shirt to avoid hypothermia while waiting to hitch a ride in a car that never comes in that kind of weather. Some of them have tickets and receipts from strange destinations between the pages, leaves left to dry and little notes by those girlfriends you recall less painfully every time you open the pages. Whereabouts in your favourite memories will a Kindle transport you to, when you use it 20 years after you bought it? My books are battered, creased and stained, but function as perfectly as the day I bought them. Maybe one or two have loose pages now, but I can fix that with sticky tape.
Maybe when e-books can refresh more than just my technical memories, maybe I'll make the change. Maybe. But I won't be junking those old books, they grow more precious to me every day. I can't recall one single item of information technology I feel anything like the same attachment to.
I don't mean this as a troll. Ever since I started reading sci-fi as a kid, I've wanted a computing device that replaces books, radio, TV, phones. I buy plenty of gadgets, but they all end up being thrown away without a trace of regret. I'd really like to see some reports of people being moved by their gadgets (at mHz, or less).
...maybe when it becomes popular. I see a few people above making the "hmmm, lightweight, huge/high side profile" observation. How about leaving the wings at the airport. If the hangar space issue is such a biggy, wouldn't that be a reasonable compromise? Hanging wings alone up in a hangar has to be much more space efficient than leaving a whole plane. You could hire wings too, maybe last years ones that had had just a few light crashes would be cheap, and you could pay extra for a brand new set of delta wings to go lawn-darting at the weekend.
Me too - I think I was 9 years out of school, wondering where I was going to, from IT jobs, some of them well-paid and occasionally interesting. Some of the earlier jobs involved a lot of shovelling and some involved conveyor belts. At 27 I went to Uni and did an engineering degree, did some IT consulting for a year or two, then back to Uni for a PhD. I had some savings, a little investment or two, and they grew a bit while I was studying. Now I do interesting stuff that makes a bit of money from time to time. Nowhere near as much as I was, but it is interesting, I have a lot of time with my family, and there's always the promise of one of the interesting things 'taking off'. The only promise I had from the old jobs was that I could grow old and die in the same chair.
If anything, I might have had my mid-life crisis a bit early, and I keep thinking I should have another adventure. At 40, I look back and think 'that was fucking great!' I'm looking forward to thinking the same at 60 and 80, but that's a long stretch, so I'm going to need some more adventure one day.
I always try to warn people against planning for a short life. Your contribution to your kids isn't just money. If they need some in the future, they'll make some, just like you do.
If the geek is ambidextrous, the "girlfriend" could be the right, or could be the left. Ahhh, Miss Palmer and her quirky sister. Variety is the spice of life.
I was trying to work out a plan like this for big$$$ a while ago. You could just keep all that data wandering the Tubes, mostly stored redundantly, moved and error checked to correct bit rot from time to time. All well and good until our glorious rulers decide to wipe the balance sheet clean and EMP each other's Tubes out of existence.
You could always invest in rarely-connected data centres underground, but that puts the project out of my reach.
I think it's called "bombing back to the Stone Age" because that's the last reliable backup.
When I read "can easily pull down weight of more than 90 kilos", the picture in my mind was the operator trying to escape after a bad foot placement put this thing in the canal.
I can see it, like those restaurants with fish tanks in the walls, only the walls would be the bong, and there would be bubbles floating up all the time, like being inside a lava lamp.
The bit I'm struggling with is where to suck? I'm thinking recycling: old asthma inhalers.
No need to worry about complaints from the neighbours either, not once it's been fired up for a few minutes.
Something like this would make me look at a map to see where this 'Vancouver' is that you mention.
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A friend recently started Dummipedia and is experiencing the same issue, I think. Dummipedia's angle is 'a Wikipedia companion', where articles must be no more than 500 words in length. A visitor can get the gist on some subject, and if they want all of what millions of editors know, there's a 'more...' link on every article to Wikipedia.
It's slow starting - like you said, the articles are small islands in a big empty index. I suggested a button on empty pages like "Get me started by scraping 500 words from Wikipedia", but he didn't like it. Maybe it was the word 'scrape'. Or maybe it's not just programmers who like to 'roll their own'.
As if those were your first programs!
...
I still remember my ZX81 code that hooked me on programming, burnt onto my retinas:
10 DATA "Anne", "Barbara", "Caroline"...
20 DATA "lingerie", "a nurse outfit", "nothing but perspiration"...
30 DATA "touches", "licks", "kisses"...
40 DATA
100 PRINT G$(RND * G); " in "; C$(RND * C); " "; A$(RND * A); " my "; P$(RND * P)
120 GOTO 120 - 20 * (INKEY$ = "Y") + 10 * (INKEY$ = "N")
130 CLS
He'll be able to edit that into shape in no time - but may prefer to work on it alone.
Irritating was my opinion too, though my summary has always been "It's very difficult to explain, but I am jolly clever, so you'll have to take my word for it". It's well written and there's plenty of interesting material if you can ignore the fact he's selling you a lemon.
I've never wanted to go to see the Royal Family, but I'm booking a ticket for this event. Do I need binoculars, or what? Oh the image!
I have not written a reply to your post.
Oh wait...
Hey! I thought he was great in The Matrix. My friends forced me to watch it when we'd gone to watch something sold out in the other theatre. i saw his name, thought "Forsooth, there's a bomb on the bus", and suggested I'd go for a drink on my own across the road and join them later. I was really pleased I saw The Matrix. He might be good again in a similar role in a good movie. Reloaded and Revolutions don't count: clause 2. My biggest worry is that they might turn this into another example of homoerotic cheesiness that is a Tom Cruise franchise. He was all right in Legend.
1. Not much
2. Not much
Last time I flew UK-Malaysia on Emirates, I enjoyed the flat panel screen in the headrest in front of me for a few hours, then turned it off to get some sleep. After a couple of hours stopover at Dubai, right when I should have been deepest asleep, we boarded another plane for the rest of the journey. The flat panels could be switched off, but were switched back on every ten minutes or so for advertisements. I tore the cover off the inflight magazine and shoved it into the gap between the screen and the headrest at the top, so that it hung completely over the screen. Bliss! On second thoughts, maybe this new system would interpret my actions as 'fabricating a device to interrupt aeroplane function'. Maybe it's not the right time to add this to instructables.com...
I live in Malaysia. Two years ago I bought a PC from a busy computer store here, my wife said she wanted Windows XP on it, so I went back to the shop and asked. They went out the back, and a few minutes later gave me a still-warm CDR with an XP serial number scrawled on it. I asked them "how much?" and they said "nothing - we don't sell software".
Are we talking like, parking meters? And are they side-by-side, or laid end-to-end?
Apply to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for funding to keep them going.
And there I was all along thinking it was a kernel!
How out of touch can you be?
Whenever anybody says "Intellectual Property", I think of a law that allows stupid people to own ideas. Not only say it's theirs, but take it home and hide it, and if anybody has an idea like it, they can set the law on them.
OK, maybe the person who only ever has one good idea in their life will benefit from such a law. They can sit somewhere comfortable, stroking their preciousss, counting the money the stupid person who can afford lawyers gave them. If however, you're in a position where having good ideas is what you do for work, then you have to spend half your life talking to stupid people with money about how best to prevent anybody else from benefiting from your idea!
If you're a law-abiding intellectual, IP makes your life harder. If you're a law-abiding small business that wants to do 'new stuff' IP makes your life harder. If you're a law-breaking stupid person, IP makes your life harder, unless you're in a country where nobody really gives a shit about laws that make it harder to 'do business', in which case it just makes your competitors' lives harder - which is great!
I love to see pictures of really, really, stupendously rich people enjoying their private planes and tropical islands as much as the next person. You have to admire their intellectual property, after all - they paid for it! But a rethink of the idea as commodity is long overdue, even if we don't get as many pimped-out dreamliners to drool over.
I've stopped ranting now. I feel better. Thanks for listening. Hello?
Exactly. There are plenty of corporations more worthy of /.ers ire, and they get it on a regular basis. This story wouldn't be worth commenting on except for that "Do no evil" thing.
I see that the google entry for wikipedia says "unofficial slogan is \"don't be evil\"". I've got to confess to laughing out loud at the delicious conspiracy theories that fired off in my mind. Has someone from google, or a concerned shareholder already started retracting? Not only 'unofficial', not only 'slogan' (not policy, or even motto), but also some-evil-from-time-to-time-should-be-okay-on-balance.
Any wikipedia archaeologists know of a long-lost period when the "do no evil" thing was in the article?
Corporations act in a world where the rules vary from place to place. Principles aside, all they have to do is follow the local law. I'm in favour of corporations (and people, come to think of it) being bound to follow both their home and local (to their action) laws. So Google would have to divulge data and perform deletions at the request of a foreign government, but they would also be liable to some sort of invasion of privacy, reckless endangerment type legal action at home. That might make their business in China less tenable, which is surely a bad thing for them, and for anybody else who thinks Google being in China is good-on-balance. On the other hand, perhaps the countries who buy gazillions of credits worth of products that turn out to be hazardous, from countries whose laws we might wish were more respectable and more rigorously enforced, maybe those countries could launch legal actions that result in fines. The fines would doubtless never be paid. But when the countries come with their bank statements asking for the trade deficit to be paid, they could be met by the list of unpaid fines. I'm just saying...
...my copy of Stroud's Engineering Mathematics has "DOVER" and "M1 SOUTH" written in marker pen on the inside covers. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach says "CALGARY" on one flyleaf, "ABERDEEN" on another. I've sat on my books to keep my arse warm on a freezing crash barrier, rested my head on them to sleep on borrowed dorm floors, stuffed them up my shirt to avoid hypothermia while waiting to hitch a ride in a car that never comes in that kind of weather. Some of them have tickets and receipts from strange destinations between the pages, leaves left to dry and little notes by those girlfriends you recall less painfully every time you open the pages. Whereabouts in your favourite memories will a Kindle transport you to, when you use it 20 years after you bought it? My books are battered, creased and stained, but function as perfectly as the day I bought them. Maybe one or two have loose pages now, but I can fix that with sticky tape.
Maybe when e-books can refresh more than just my technical memories, maybe I'll make the change. Maybe. But I won't be junking those old books, they grow more precious to me every day. I can't recall one single item of information technology I feel anything like the same attachment to.
I don't mean this as a troll. Ever since I started reading sci-fi as a kid, I've wanted a computing device that replaces books, radio, TV, phones. I buy plenty of gadgets, but they all end up being thrown away without a trace of regret. I'd really like to see some reports of people being moved by their gadgets (at mHz, or less).
...maybe when it becomes popular. I see a few people above making the "hmmm, lightweight, huge/high side profile" observation. How about leaving the wings at the airport. If the hangar space issue is such a biggy, wouldn't that be a reasonable compromise? Hanging wings alone up in a hangar has to be much more space efficient than leaving a whole plane. You could hire wings too, maybe last years ones that had had just a few light crashes would be cheap, and you could pay extra for a brand new set of delta wings to go lawn-darting at the weekend.
Me too - I think I was 9 years out of school, wondering where I was going to, from IT jobs, some of them well-paid and occasionally interesting. Some of the earlier jobs involved a lot of shovelling and some involved conveyor belts. At 27 I went to Uni and did an engineering degree, did some IT consulting for a year or two, then back to Uni for a PhD. I had some savings, a little investment or two, and they grew a bit while I was studying. Now I do interesting stuff that makes a bit of money from time to time. Nowhere near as much as I was, but it is interesting, I have a lot of time with my family, and there's always the promise of one of the interesting things 'taking off'. The only promise I had from the old jobs was that I could grow old and die in the same chair.
If anything, I might have had my mid-life crisis a bit early, and I keep thinking I should have another adventure. At 40, I look back and think 'that was fucking great!' I'm looking forward to thinking the same at 60 and 80, but that's a long stretch, so I'm going to need some more adventure one day.
I always try to warn people against planning for a short life. Your contribution to your kids isn't just money. If they need some in the future, they'll make some, just like you do.
Just how far away from other massive bodies, and how slowly would you have to throw the balls to get them to go into orbit around you?
I was trying to work out a plan like this for big$$$ a while ago. You could just keep all that data wandering the Tubes, mostly stored redundantly, moved and error checked to correct bit rot from time to time. All well and good until our glorious rulers decide to wipe the balance sheet clean and EMP each other's Tubes out of existence. You could always invest in rarely-connected data centres underground, but that puts the project out of my reach. I think it's called "bombing back to the Stone Age" because that's the last reliable backup.
When I read "can easily pull down weight of more than 90 kilos", the picture in my mind was the operator trying to escape after a bad foot placement put this thing in the canal.
I can see it, like those restaurants with fish tanks in the walls, only the walls would be the bong, and there would be bubbles floating up all the time, like being inside a lava lamp.
The bit I'm struggling with is where to suck? I'm thinking recycling: old asthma inhalers.
No need to worry about complaints from the neighbours either, not once it's been fired up for a few minutes.
Something like this would make me look at a map to see where this 'Vancouver' is that you mention.