whazzmaster

I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information.

I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary source and started randomly changing entries.

His first (and in my mind best) work was when another friend who is very into music mentioned a jazz musician that he really liked. The professor friend said, "Oh yeah, he's the one that composed the background track to I Wanna Sex You Up". Then he rushed off to update that artist's wikipedia page to reflect that statement. My musically-inclined friend called back the next day and said, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!"

Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. However, seeing the unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia content has opened my eyes to the way that the system can be gamed or used to support lies or propaganda. Because a musician was wronged? No, its the principle. I now take everything I read on wikipedia with a colossal grain of salt. You should too.

When I think about branding a generation, which is always done by a member of a previous generation and with not a little whiff of "kids these days' syndrome, it occurs to me that there might be a feedback loop involved.

If you're firmly part of Generation G (for Generic, a theoretical generation) which has qualities X, Y, and Z but born in the mid-to-late period of said generation, you're told from the moment you're born that you're part of a group that is X, Y, and Z.

I don't have an answer, but I suspect that the problem with 20-30 year-spanning "generations" which are defined and classified by older folks is that, over time, they take on the qualities imbued by an outside observer.

(Hopefully very slight) tangent: The article describes the Millenial Generation as "born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s." Yikes.

I suppose when attempting to reduce such a group to a simple catchphrase ("post-emotional"), no additional harm is done by throwing those who were 21 in the year 2000 with those who were five.

My opinion is that it's always difficult to describe phenomena while inside; easier to categorize the mood of an era once the era has passed.

Ruby does indeed have continuous testing for major (and even not-so-major) gems at http://travis-ci.org/.

I'm not quibbling with the rest of your response; just wanted to shout-out Travis since I learned of it myself recently.

I really wanted to purchase but would rather not send CC info over non-SSL connections. Are you going to be putting the store on SSL at some point?

Or maybe it is supposed to be but there are some fallbacks being used under the current heavy load.

I attended a git workshop by Scott Chacon and was surprised to learn that github's production site can be deployed by many folks on the development team, and at any time during the day. In fact, he mentioned that github.com can be updated as many as a dozen or more times per day as small features or fixes are pushed live.

There is a great description of their web server stack[1] that allows them to seamlessly push new code live without downtime (see the second Slow Deploys section.) It's a great idea about how to continue serving during a deployment, and I'm looking into using Unicorn like this for some projects I'm working on.

[1] https://github.com/blog/517-unicorn

How can a cartel be disrupted? While this article makes me angry (especially as a consumer, where the limiting of choice has a definite impact) I don't see a way for anyone to 'disrupt' this behavior.

Tech- and entrepreneurial-minded folk like to look for disruption opportunities and while they may exist in theory, these are industries supported by mind-boggling displays of corruption. In this case, you couldn't touch any of the six points on that list without offering a billion dollars in campaign contributions to Congress yourself.

It makes me extremely sad about that state of affairs.

The first 100 pages or so of Anathem seemed like such a chore to get through, mainly because of the tons of exposition required to build the world. It was one of those books, however (Frank Norris' The Octopus being the other for me personally,) that really rewards the reader for taking the time to understand the world that is built. In both cases I read the last few hundred pages straight through to find out how it ended.

I've been down on Slashdot for the last few years, even going so far as to remove it from my RSS reader and bookmarks bar. I check back sometimes here and there but devote most of my time to HN/reddit now.

Taco's farewell (and Hemos' reply in comments) really brought to me back why I liked Slashdot in the first place back in 1998- an editorial voice curating interesting tech stories.

That editorial voice was important to me in 1998, as I was in college for CS and was really uninformed about things like (as _delirium notes in this thread) the EFF, the RIAA, open source software, The Many Uses of Linux, etc. I compare that to today when I just scan lists of links on reddit or HN and pick out the items that interest me. The editorial voice was a good starting point for me- it directed me to interesting things that I couldn't have fathomed. As I grew into my techy career and interests, I needed it less and less.

I hope it's not viewed as complaining or whatnot, but I do wonder if anyone else avoids Slashdot in 2011 almost purely because of the commenters' obnoxiousness. I always get a picture of sysadmin-like greybeards pounding away furiously at their keyboards the moment anyone suggests that some software, somewhere be written in something other than C or perl. Ah slashdot, you truly taught me what a 'troll' was (and "-5, Troll"? shudder.) And for that I thank you.

I was thinking the same thing re: google influence. Also, was it any wonder that at a photowalk attended by a ton of Google people, Google+ would be talked about more than Flickr?

He makes some good points about the interface stagnation and community excitement (even my own Flickr account has grown weedy and sparse over the years.) However, it was off-putting to see so much, I don't know, what seemed like personal vitriol next to evaluations of the service itself.

I've been using twitter since very early in its life, and I have to admit I never conceived of it in such an awful, high-school-popularity way. I use it as a mini-RSS feed to follow people and technologies I find interesting.

Honest Question: is the OP's view the mainstream or minority attitude of the twitterverse at-large?

I would support his position if only because, in this day and age, should a Linux power user have to do hours and hours of research to avoid purchasing the 'wrong' hardware? To me, his opinion boils down to: bad support for cutting edge (or even just current day) tech. He mentioned at the beginning that he was a cutting edge guy.

Desktop Linux is really for people that can/will line up all their ducks in a row (and then sometimes debug those ducks) when upgrading hardware. Even as a technical person I can understand if you don't wish to continue to pour time into that sort of thing.