Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-12-06
Today, it was announced that Wikipedia is restricting article creation to registered users only. Many might choose to argue one position or the other on this issue. I happen to not feel strongly either way. However, I find the process by which it was decided to be questionable.
A week after being contacted by John Seigenthaler Sr. about an inaccurate article, Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) made the change to an official built-in policy of Wikipedia. He logged on to the Wikipedia chat to discuss the change, but it is clear that this was not required prior to making his decision.
Wikipedia is:
a multi-lingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with an internet connection and added by anyone with a Wikipedia member account.
wikipedia.org
Because of its very nature, it is clear that Wikipedia should not be considered to be owned or controlled by one man alone. Yet this is exactly how some high-level decisions are made.
Of course, this situation would be different if elections were held for every position. Currently, only two of the five members of the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation (the parent organization of Wikipedia) are elected. Jimmy Wales is on the board, but also has additional arbitrary powers over the direction of Wikipedia.
A rudimentary search turned up no substantial results with discussion about the decision making processes and leadership of Wikipedia. This discussion must take place. If it does not take place now, the possibility exists that our community will devolve into something which few of us find acceptable.
Essentially, what is needed is an official handing over of the community to the community. The new structure should also be decided upon by the community. Wikipedia should not continue to run with arbitrary processes governing its decision making. Jimmy Wales may be a “benevolent dictator”, but we cannot rely on his or his successors’ benevolence indefinitely.
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-11-23
Here is a list of websites that I find to be best for these basic purposes. New tools are constantly coming out that are later and greater than what is currently out, so this is simply a current snapshot.
weather National Weather Service
maps/directions Google Maps
reference Wikipedia
news Google News
all-in-one homepage Google Personalized Home
sports Yahoo Sports
Do you think I am missing something? I generally give higher points to websites that don’t have moving ads and are easy to use.
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-11-20
A public experiment discovering which of the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, or MSN) really offers the best results. By taking the test you also find out which engine you personally prefer (and it’s a blind test, so prejudice won’t effect the outcome).
read more | digg story
Evidently I’m a *gasp* Yahoo guy.
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-11-17
I’ve been drooling over computer parts recently. Well, I usually do, but I mean more than normal. The problem is that I am a computer snob, so I cannot settle with just a regular computer, and therefore it gets quite expensive. If I were to buy today, here is what I’ve got lined up:
1 Athlon 64 X2 3800+
1 ABIT KN8 SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI
2 CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
1 Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JD 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150
1 MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E Geforce 7800GTX 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16
2 NEC Black IDE DVD Burner Model ND-3540
1 Lian Li PC-6070BPLUS Black Computer Case
1 SeaSonic S12-600 ATX12V 600W Power Supply
Total cost: $1837.98 before shipping and tax.
Yeah, so that is a lot of money, and I should really hold off, although I’d be selling my laptop to raise about half of that money. I figure I should squeeze at least a couple more months out of my laptop. I think a good way to enforce this for myself is to plan a wild case-mod that I don’t have time to do right now.
This post motivated by this case mod.
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-10-21
Holy shit, I just made a blog post using Flock. Although I had to go back and edit it because it screwed up my link.
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-07-20
I was a long-time user of Internet Explorer until maybe 1 year ago. I switched to firefox. It is better than Internet Explorer, but it still sucks. Here is what is wrong with all web browsers I have tried:
- Internet Explorer: no tabs. bad security. no pop-up blocking
- Firefox: disables extensions when you upgrade to a new version. copy/paste doesn’t work correctly when you have two firefox windows open. scrolling with the up and down keys doesn’t work when you have two firefox windows open. firefox crashes. firefox has a serious memory leak problem. There are hundreds of unresolved bugzilla bugs. You can’t customize the toolbars like in IE
- Opera: ads
- Maxthon and Avant: standardized hotkeys for tabs don’t work (ctrl-t). f6 also doesn’t work.
Sigh. I guess I will put this on my list of projects. Maybe I should learn how to program better first. Something based off of firefox would be best, I think.
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-06-30
I have written a tutorial on using the Unix utility GNU screen. Click this link to read the tutorial.
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-06-07
I have been using Wikipedia a lot lately. I have been editing a lot of pages too. I have read stories about the extremely dedicated users who spend hours per day editing Wikipedia stories.
This got me thinking that there has got to be a way that people will make money from their Wikipedia skills. One way is, as Wikipedia becomes more popular as a reputable source of information, companies, political groups, or religious groups might hire a full-time Wikipedia expert to support their views and polish their image.
Scary, isn’t it?
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-05-11
Yahoo! today launched their new Yahoo! Music Unlimited. For $4.99/month (when paying for a whole year), you can listen to their whole music library from your Windows PC. You also have the option to pay $0.79 to burn a track to a CD.
You access their service with the Yahoo! Music Engine (pictured below).
The interface is pretty nice. It is much more responsive than iTunes, which I have found to take a decent amount of time between page loads and music imports.
When I first started the Yahoo! Music Engine, I was prompted to import the music that I already had. I directed it to the C:\Music folder, and it imported all subdirectories, including files encoded in ogg, flac, and mp3 formats. I was able to go about my business exploring the program while it was busy importing my music.
I decided to put Yahoo! Unlimited to the test right from the start. One of my favorite artists is Dieselboy. I attempted to type “Dieselboy” into the search box on the Y! Unlimited page, but my text would not take. Instead, I used the “Browse By Genre” dropdown box to the right to select “Electronic / Dance” and from there choose “Jungle / Drum & Bass”. I saw several tracks listed, and I wanted to see how quickly their music would start streaming after I clicked play next to one of the tracks. When I clicked the play button, I was informed that I had to download a security update to play the music. The download seemed to go pretty quickly (I am on a fat connection at work). When I next clicked on the play button, the album art simply greyed out. This seemed to be a deal breaker, but having the classic computer mentality, I restarted the program.
And, I am now successfully listening to an artist I have never heard before “MJ Cole”. Clicking “play” on the album started playing the first song within a second. Again, I am on a fat Internet connection, but this is still impressive. I had been wondering for a while where I could find good Drum & Bass. I have now found that place.
I have not used any of the other subscription-based music services to be able to compare, but Yahoo! Unlimited does seem to be lacking in one very important area: completeness. As mentioned before, one of my favorite artists is Dieselboy. My all-time favorite is Tool. Searches on both of these artists turn up a grand total of 0 albums. This isn’t a big deal for these two artists, since I have all of their albums stored locally on my hard drive, but it does not sound good for future searches. Other artists that I have searched have missing albums. I understand that this may be very hard to acheive, but what is really needed is for this service to have very close to all the music I would ever be looking for. Then it would really be of full value to me.
A great part about this program is that it integrates countless radio stations into the interface. You can pick from a standard Launchcast station on the left, or you can choose to “Play Artist Fan Station”, which is supposedly a mix of what fans of that artist will like. In the limited time that I have listened to the Tool and Dieselboy Artist Fan Stations, I have noticed a nice correlation to the artist, and the type of music that is played on the station. I have also noticed something very peculiar. For both artists there are no albums available for download/streaming, but their songs are included in the station mix. I am sure it is some sort of licensing crap, but still annoying that they can play it on the station but you can’t stream the album as a whole.
Another note about the stations is that it can be rather awkward on some stations to not have the tracks mix together, like in almost any electronic station. The tracks were meant to be played back-to-back, so you are left with an abrupt start and ending to each track. There may be a feature to do this, but I haven’t found it yet.
Even on the first day that this program has been out, there are plugins for it. One of them is “1337 m1n1 m0d3” (pictured below) which replaces the current inadequate mini mode.
Overall, this program and service seems to have some growing to do, but being the first day that it is out, I am very impressed. $4.99/month is a bargain, and I think they realize that. This seems to be a limited-time offer. I went ahead and signed up for a year, but my card won’t be charged for another week, so I can cancel if I don’t like it!
Author: FourMajor
Date: 2005-05-09
My brother and I love the classic game Genghis Khan for the NES. I just thought of a way to play on a REAL NES over the Internet. You could make a controller emulator that plugs into a computer’s serial port on one end, and into the Nintendo controller port on the other end. Make the video and audio output go into the computer. On the remote end, have the other user plug a modified controller into their serial port, and transmit it back to the NES video/controller server. There could even be a nice all-in-one window that would display video, sound, and maybe even a clickable controller on the client side. This sounds like a lot of work, but DAMN that would be awesome. I am assuming it wouldn’t be too good for action-packed games, but it would be great for a turn-based game like Genghis Khan.
