Posts by James Pearson

Wikipedia kills Greatest Show On Earth

@frymaster

"Unfortunately it seems wikipedia as a whole runs on the "he hasn't done anything wrong but we have a bad feeling about him / he's done something wrong but he meant it for the best" mentality"

Well, yes, one of the core guidelines (though, mind you, not policy) is WP:AGF - assume good faith. From personal experience, much of the harm that comes is from people who aren't trying to do so; they're merely bad writers, or don't understand copyright issues. If you immediately start treating them as vandals, rather than misguided users, they are driven away, and it's been shown (rather informally) that casual editors do a majority of the content work. -> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Korea's P2P pirate goes legal, targets Europe

title

As AC noted above, very little of the money spent on a record goes towards the artist/songwriter. This is why I love Magnatune; 50% goes towards the artist, straight - you choose how much to pay. I feel much better paying for music when I know I'm actually supporting the artist. It seems to me that most online downloads of music cost more than buying the cd, when the distribution costs are obviously less.

Adobe Reader Trojan predates mystery update by two weeks

@anon

Foxit ftw. It has constantly amazed people when I open pdfs fast. Though, of course now I'm using KPDF, but that's a different story.

Wikipedia ruled by 'Lord of the Universe'

wiki != wikipedia

Please, you can at least be a little educated about the difference between the type of software that runs a website and the website itself. That'd be like referring to El Reg as "Server-side".

oh dear - el reg is at it again

1. For those of you commenting - "wiki" is *not* the same as "wikipedia".

2. From TFA: "Working in tandem with others, he soon created a separate article called "Criticism of Prem Rawat," moved all Rawat criticisms to this new article, and eventually had it deleted."

a) In general, splitting off a section such as that is a result of it's getting too large to fit comfortably in the main article. As such, "split off" articles are much larger than they would be if they remained in the main article. And y'know, they're summarized and linked to from the main article. (concession: in this case, not anymore)

b) From the RfD: "Keep - After reading Gary's comments, I reluctantly vote to keep. --≈ jossi ≈ 04:54, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)"

3. In the COI noticeboard, a new user brought up some issues, they debated, and it was over. There was no cabal-ish hush-hush.

4. The very nature of a wiki is that people can edit articles themselves, which naturally are things they are interested in. COI needs some reworking still (after a bit of work) to address this issue; those who are involved in something are those who actually know something about it.

5. I can't view wannabekate's summary of Jossi's edits ('cause there are so darn many), but from familiarity with the tool, I'm guessing that you're looking at the articles he's edited the most. I hope you realize that with over 55k edits, it takes a while to change that kind of thing...

6. Jossi posted a brief note about the Reg article on his page. You might want to take a look at it.

Something awful happens to somethingawful.com

Why the hell are they using Network Solutions?

title

SETI@home needs You!

as many others have said...

I found it, shall we say, irrelevant crunching WUs for SETI, when found that I could participate in worldcommunitygrid's compilation of projects that actually benefit humanity...

Dell spills its Guts over Ubuntu gear

linux is not useful?

Some of the above comments are saying that those who use linux are not actually using it *for* anything useful. I've been a winxp user for, eh, 4 or so years (when I convinced my parents to buy it) and I like it overall. I had installed various flavors of linux over time, but never used them because, well, there was no benefit. Now that I'm in college as a computer science major, I've found that programming is much easier on linux than windows, since I was using cygwin to compile C code anyways. Just about 2 weeks ago, I switched to using Kubuntu as my primary OS, and I'm loving it. Almost all the applications I use are available on linux (firefox, OOo, pidgin, w:et, UrT, etc.), and those that don't either have decent replacements (winamp -> amarok) or run very nicely on wine (Guild Wars). While I had to do some configuration for things, I just followed several different HOWTOs on the ubuntu forums, where I don't even have to know what the heck I'm doing, I just copy and paste. And apt-get? It finds, downloads and installs the program for me? Oh, and the other things it needs to run? Yeah, much better than .exe setup files.

Of course, this came after I had finally gotten rid of the last part of Microsoft on xp that I could (explorer -> xplorer2). I was already running tbird and firefox under bblean.

Oh, and automatix is very nice, though I found out about it after I had already installed stuff myself.

@jeff

Most of us here are not going to buy from Dell. I personally like building my pcs. The reason it's important that Dell is offering ubuntu is because it's *Dell*, the cheap pc giant. This is where quite a few people buy their pcs.

Anti-virus protection gets worse

well, I'm doing decent

avast! seemed to do decently, though they didn't mention how kubuntu does...