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The Media

Submission + - Commercial product descriptions on Wikipedia 1

Submitted by raner
raner writes: Recently my company sent out an internal request for comments concerning the modification and maintenance of existing Wikipedia pages about the company's products. Not surprisingly, this message came from the marketing department. I am a longtime Wikipedia fan, and my first gut reaction was "Uh oh, marketing and Wikipedia in the same sentence, does not sound like a good idea." What do people here think about this? Should companies edit Wikipedia pages that pertain to the company's own products?

In my view, it is possible to provide an informative description of a commercial product while still abiding by Wikipedia's rules of conduct. Clearly, a Wikipedia article cannot use the same lingo as an advertising brochure, but an objective (verifiable) description of a notable product seems to be okay by my book. After all, Wikipedia is full of articles about commercial products — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_A4, etc. What we don't know is how much of these articles was contributed or edited by people who are actually associated with the product's manufacturer.

Keeping the recent Microsoft/Wikipedia scandal — http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/22/20 56214 — in mind, what is a good approach regarding this? Is it okay if the edits are within the rules stipulated by Wikipedia and the modifications are clearly attributed to a user that is associated with the company? For example, would you put some sort of mission statement on your user page that clarifies that the intention of the contributions is to make sure that all product information is accurate and up-to-date (and not just blatant advertising)? What about creating new articles about specific products? Or is it better to not edit or create pages at all and maybe just point out inaccuracies on the discussion page?

Comments and suggestions welcome!
United States

Submission + - Engineers and scientists as political leaders

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The outgoing President of India, Abdul Kalam, is an oddity in the political world. He has a great deal of brains as well as hardcore geek credentials. Abudl Kalam studied Aero Engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology and later contributed to the design, development and management of India's first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle. A technological visionary he has the kind of background that I would love to see in a political leader. While the President of India is a largely ceremonial position, its the Indian Prime Minister (currently an Economist) who has the power, its still remarkable that a geek can ascend to such a position of political prominence. Is there any hope for America that something similar will one day ensue? Will we someday have a geek as the Vice-President or a viable Presidential candidate? Can America put aside its prejudice of anti-intellectualism and support somebody with a strong background in science and/or technology? If not, do you see this harming America's competitiveness in the future?
Businesses

Submission + - Open sourcing: How do average users respond?

Submitted by
Mekki MacAulay
Mekki MacAulay writes: "Developers get excited when closed source software gets released as open source. We see an opportunity to add new features, poke around in the code to figure out how it ticks, fix that annoying bug, or set it free. We have our own views on the open source debate. We've considered the trade offs. We've picked our sides.

But, how does the average user respond to open sourcing of software they use? How does it affect the their perception of the product? How they feel about the company? How they feel about the product's security? How more or less likely they are to recommend the product to a friend? Their performance expectations?

Think of the average user of Skype, MSN, Second Life, World of Warcraft, MS Office, Photoshop, Acrobat, Quicken, and so on. How do you think average users would respond to an announcement that their product was being open sourced? How would these views differ from the responses of developers?

If a business with a closed source product was considering open sourcing it, what would you tell them to expect the average user response to be?"
Programming

Submission + - Practical ways to improve bad progammers 2

Submitted by walt101
walt101 writes: There is plenty of material around stating how to spot bad programmers — the question I've got is how to improve them. Some companies (such as mine) have a culture of personal development; in other words, it's impossible to just sack someone unless you've proven they can't do their job after training. What are the practical techniques to instill a deep-routed approach to structured programming, defensiveness, etc, to a colleague who's happy to cobble together brittle, monolithic code?
Books

Submission + - Best Open Ebook Format / Store?

Submitted by
cuteseal
cuteseal writes: "Having been a Palm Reader user from back in the day when a Palm was still called a Pilot, I have built up a sizable collection of ebooks, that can only be read by their proprietary Ereader software. I love reading ebooks on my handheld, but I am frustrated that my technology choices have inevitably been limited based on the criteria — does it support the Palm Ereader software? Blackberry — not supported, Psion — nada, Sony Reader — nope, until recently, Windows Smartphones were off the list as well.

Ebook users out there — what ebook formats do you use, and what reader software gives you the most platform flexibility? There are many alternatives out there (Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, Adobe PDF) but the ultimate, IMHO, would be to buy ebooks in an open, ubiquitous format that every reader and platform could support, and still have the variety, range and currency of carrying recent titles. An added bonus would be to have DRM-free formats, such as text files (wishful thinking?) or even Aportis DOC. Do you know of any ebook stores that do so, and if so, which ones are your favourite and why?"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - How would YOU rebuild?

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "I recently came across a paper I wrote in high school about extinction-level events and the consequences to plant and animal life. I got to thinking how far we've come as a species since the last such event, and (inspired in part by recent posts about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) I thought I'd ask Slashdot: how would you go about "bootstrapping" a modern society after an ELE? What would you safeguard beforehand to ensure a smooth recompile?"
Software

Submission + - Testing AJAX applications

Submitted by
matthew.thompson
matthew.thompson writes: "At work we've recently taken delivery of a web application that we host for a partner company. We were informed that the application would use a little more bandwidth but in going live it's gone from creating 4Mbps to 20Mbps of traffic. While we're a little late in discovering this can anyone suggest any load testing tools which make it easy to test AJAX applications with results that management can understand but enough detail for developers to be able to tweak the app?"
Slashdot.org

Submission + - The Eight-Hour Day: An excuse for poor planning?

Submitted by
athloi
athloi writes: "On a technical writing mailing list, insane deadlines became a controversial topic when it was suggested that working more than eight hours a day encouraged higher-ups to take advantage of that extra time when scheduling projects. This causes a spiral into more work with less time, and causes burnt-out workers. On every job I've ever had, I have found that without the meetings, politics, and goofing off, what I needed to do could get accomplished in three hours. Would we all be happier and more productive if we worked less but harder? If we eliminated more boredom and created a more playful, more challenging workplace, might we get less of the bloatware and other signs of burnt-out employees that currently plague technology? I wanted to Ask Slashdot for some feedback from the experienced developers and writers here."
Linux Business

Which Embedded Linux Distribution? 62

Posted by Cliff from the cream-of-the-crop dept.
Abhikhurana writes "I work for a company which designs a variety of video surveillance devices (such as MPEG4 video servers). Traditionally, these products have been based on proprietary OSs such as Nucleus and VxWorks. Now, we are redesigning a few of our products and I am trying to convince my company to go down the Linux route. Understandably, our management is quite skeptical about that and so I was asked by our CTO to recommend a few RTOSs which have mature networking stacks and which work well on ARM platform. I know that there are many embedded Linux based distributions out there. There are commercial ones such as Montavista, LynuxWorks, free ones such as uclinux, muLinux and some Linux like distros such as Ecos. What is the most stable and best community supported embedded Linux distribution out there?"
Privacy

Submission + - Texas High School Suspends over Counter-Strike

Submitted by Phi Kai
Phi Kai writes: As found on the GamePolitics.com main page, a 17 year old High School Student was arrested and suspended from school for creating a Counter-Strike map based on the school. The student's map was brought to the attention of the administration the day after the VT shootings. The map has evidently been available for months prior to this, but was only brought to light after the shootings. The student in question is of Asian decent and the Asian-American community in the area is rallying around the student. Read more at GamePolitics.com or just check the Google.com results.
Media

Submission + - Do We Need Another OS Platform?

Submitted by tupac
tupac writes: We have been battling it out between Apple's OS X, Microsoft's Windows and Linux for a long time now. Is it time for us to come up with a fourth platform to completely shift the computing industry? OSWeekly.com writer Brandon Watts ponders in his latest column. "One of the advantages that alternative operating systems have is that they're usually composed of small development teams, so changes and new ideas can be implemented, tested, and released quickly without having to be coordinated by numerous different groups within a major corporation. In addition, whereas an operating system like Windows relies on abundance of what can be considered as legacy code, these smaller operating systems have a chance to start fresh and build a great product from the ground up.
Businesses

Submission + - Dell chooses Ubuntu

Submitted by troylanes
troylanes writes: Tech Tree News Staff reports. FTA: Ever since Dell's IdeaStorm Web site was bombarded with user requests asking for more of Linux support on Dell computers as an alternative to the existing Microsoft Windows OS, Dell has been under pressure to comply with popular demand. Among the several requests on IdeaStorm, the preferred choice of Linux distribution turned out to be Ubuntu. No wonder, Dell went the whole hog, and selected Ubuntu Linux for some of its computers. Besides, it is well publicized that Michael Dell himself is a fan of Ubuntu Linux version 7.04, also called 'Feisty Fawn,' which he uses on his Dell Precision M90 laptop. The Story
Operating Systems

Submission + - Dell Computers with Ubuntu

Submitted by
widhalmt
widhalmt writes: "According to an article on golem.de(German), Dell created a partnership with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux to sell at least 3 different Desktops with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled. By now, there is no information what Desktop series Dell will ship with Ubuntu. The article further reads that Dell chose Ubuntu because of the large reaction on Dells own Idea Storms Website to some user asking especially for Ubuntu Linux on Dells Desktops."
Google

Submission + - Google Sends Disgruntled Blogger Superman Cape

Submitted by
rulesaremyenemy
rulesaremyenemy writes: "Google's sense of humor strikes once again:

"While at SXSW, I tried out the new Google Transit service. I was far away from the hotel and wanted to find an efficient way to get back. Well, Google got me close, then expected me to cross an eight-lane highway on foot. Um, no. I had to explore for a long time to find a way to get across the damn thing and back to my hotel. I bitched at my blog.
Today, I got a package from Google at my workplace. At first, I saw the hand-written "Google" return address and thought "anthrax", but figured, what the hell. I ripped it open. I was treated to the single greatest customer service experience I had ever had. Enclosed was a hand-written note from Joe Hughes at Google. The note said:

Dear Superman, Reading your blog post about Google Transit at SXSW made us wonder if you were losing your powers — I mean, how hard could it be to leap over a simple 8-lane highway intersection, man of steel? We've enclosed a new cape — hopefully it will help you find your powers again.
...seriously, though, Adam, we're sorry that Google Transit sent you on such an expedition, and we wanted to let you know that we've since improved our routing, so that it returns more plausible walking sections at the start & end of transit routes.

Cheers, Joe Hughes Google Transit"

(Picture of the Cape and Letter on Flickr)"

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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