Mayhem & Chaos Blog

Microsoft Bashing

Dvorak whines about tech media bias

Yesterday, John Dvorak whines about a tech reporting media bias:

As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today's newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. It's a fact.

Tech reporters are waking up and finding a laptop that works better, lasts longer and isn't bogged down with viruses and spyware. The sad fact is that you haven't discovered this yet and that you're still using crappy Windows PCs. Oh! I forgot you've been sucking at M$ corporate teat for a decades now and you're not allowed to talk shit about M$ and its allies. Poor you! I hope you can drown your pathetic sorrows in all the money M$ you've earned from being M$'s mouthpiece for so long.

This is why when Microsoft actually does have a good idea, people look to trash it out of hand.

M$ doesn't have original ideas - they buy them elsewhere. Short of M$ Bob, I've not heard of a single original idea come out of M$. Period.

Every time Steve Jobs sneezes there is a collective chorus of "Gesundheit" from tech writers pounding away on their Macs.

Yes, that is because people care about companies that actually innovate! Apple is on the forefront of innovation after the whole computing field lay fallow during the dreaded M$ years. I'm glad that the world is slowly climbing out of its collective rut and moving on to bigger and better things. Thanks for stifling the entire industry for a decade M$! And thanks to Dvorak for being there to cheer M$ on.

Technorati Tags: media, microsoft, apple

Cool Tech

Wikipedia and quality problems

So the cat is out of the bag: Wikipedia head honcho Jimbo Wales has acknowledged that Wikipedia has quality problems! Of course it has problems -- what did you think? Did you think that the entire Encyclopedia Britannica was written in 5 years? Of course not -- I'm sure it took many more years and I doubt that EB looked as good as Wikipedia did after 5 years.

Ok, Wikipedia critics, listen up: Wikipedia sucks, don't use it! Jimbo has said so himself. Go buy another encyclopedia and talk about that. Dig into your paid-for encyclopedia and start complaining about it. I'm sure the authors of that encyclopedia will be very receptive to your feedback and will fix your problems post haste. And they'll be glad to sell you another copy with the improvements you suggested.

I'm hoping that since the cat is out of the bag now, people will shut up about Wikipedia -- I'm sick of hearing the constant bickering about how it does not measure up. Wikipedia will never be complete, never fully accurate. It will always be catching up, given that information that should be in the wiki is created everyday and cannot be captured as fast. The Wikipedians will carry on their work and in another 5 years time it will be better than encyclopedia britannica -- its only a matter of time.

For everyone else, especially poor people and people from developing nations of the world, Wikipedia will be an awesome resource. These people don't care about evil Mr. Bill Gates' entry. They will care about topics like water purification or housing, where Wikipedia can bring knowledge to places that can't afford a real encyclopedia.

Wikipedia's bottom-up approach gives top-down university stiffs like Larry Sanger the willies. People like him don't understand how the unwashed masses could possibly create something of worth without a proper university education. Lack of quality is Wikipedia's greatest recruiting tool -- when someone who possesses more knowledge on a topic than a current article, it motives people to help out. This process is pervasive until all the experts are contributing to the project and it can truly rival real encyclopedias. But guess what? Its a different model from writing a traditional encyclopedia and it will take a massive amount of time -- and 5 years is not nearly enough to judge if Wikipedia is a successful or failed model.

In the meantime, the only tricky thing about Wikipedia's lack of quality is that no one gets hurt in the process. If someone builds something from faulty information in Wikipedia and ends up killing themselves, thats bad. But I believe that Wikipedia has built up enough of a community that self polices itself that this is not likely to happen.

In the meantime, Wikipedia will be useful to some people on this planet. Myself included.

Technorati Tags: bottom-up, collaboration, quality, wikipedia

Blogging

I never thought that...

...my first published work would be in a book called "The Great American Road Trip". (no link yet -- I have a prerelease copy apparently). The book is published by Publications International Ltd and it covers a trip through america highlighting pictures of wacky sights:

Navigate nooks and crannies, take time to pull over and smell the daisies -- and snap photos of the wackiest sights the roadside has to offer. Remember, it's not just the destination, it's the journey.

Hmm. OK, it is a bit cheezy, but the pictures are pretty cool -- I gotta admit. My claim to fame is this picture:

... of Bubblegum Alley in San Luis Obispo. I've been getting interesting hits on my photo blog, but this is the biggest one yet. I'm stoked. But really, I thought I'd be published in something much geekier first. Alas.