Altavista was a great search engine until they redesigned it as a 'portal' jam-packed with widgets and animated GIF ads that took forever to load. Then Google came along with a simple, fast, mostly text-based UI. Altavista, Yahoo, or anyone could have done it, had it occurred to the guys in charge that users actually know how to type.
IDONS sounds promising, seeing how Lauren Weinstein was some sort of early ARPAnet architect. Van Jacobsen has also been talking about this kind of stuff the last few years -- essentially turning the internet into a global P2P CDN.
People are already using the PGP web-of-trust model. Long-term, I'm pretty sure that'll be central to internet freedom. Regular people will just have to learn it.
I bought some laptop adapters on Amazon a few months ago. I chose one with about 20 good reviews, 4-5 stars..... and what do I get in the mail? Cheap, clunky adapters with ill-fitting plugs. Bait and switch.
This is just one more reason I'm not giving Amazon my business unless the company changes its ways.
If you just want to learn how to hack out some code, sure, you can teach yourself. I would not recommend this approach for theoretical topics in CS, except for the most basic concepts; at more advanced levels, you are really studying abstract math, and it really does help to have a teacher.
Absolutely. Now can somebody tell me, how would a 12-year-old (who already knows the basics) get to the good stuff without sitting through 10 more years of basics? That's what's wrong with the schools and colleges.
For that reason, I've been mostly avoiding formal education for 20 years, sorting out the advanced stuff the hard way. Now I'm screwed. I would love to be part of a study group, with peers and mentors. Maybe I could find that in grad school, or maybe not. For $100,000 or so, I don't care to find out... I'd have to give up too many more important things. But if it ever becomes practical for me, I'll definitely give it a try.
In the meantime, yeah, Wikipedia is crap, but there are better resources. At the elementary-through-undergrad level, Khan Academy is on the right track. I'd prefer more written material than video, but at least it's fairly cohesive. It's great that kids today can turn to people like Khan when they're stuck in overcrowded classrooms where teachers are reduced to babysitting. Now if only something could be done about these schools which only waste kids' time and teach them to hate everything to do with learning!
I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2005 or so. I can go back to articles in my subject (linguistics) that I used to follow, and I find mistakes that are still left there half a decade later. There have been plenty of edits in the meantime, but they've never fixed specific factual errors.
Ok, let's see about my area. I found Wikipedia slightly helpful when I was looking for simpler approaches to computer-language parsing, around 2003. However, the material seems skewed toward recent research and tends not to tie in prior art. Oh sure, in 2006 someone added a stub for Schorre's influential "META-II" technique from 1962 -- exactly the kind of simple, practical approach I was looking for -- but in all the Wikipedia articles on parsing, there's nothing to point me in that direction. The META-II stub links to TREE-META, which looks interesting; I wasn't aware of that until now. So there's some value in Wikipedia, but primary sources are much better.
Encyclopedias in general provide a shallow overview of many subjects, and are not intended to be definitive sources. I've seen a few factual errors and unsubstantiated opinions in 'reputable' published encyclopedias, so it's not just Wikipedia. But since Wikipedia is open and unlimited in scope, quality control is problematic, and inevitably it becomes a breeding ground for little fiefdoms of self-aggrandizing researchers and such. What's worse: editor bias lurking in the Wikipedia backwaters, or the 'objectivity' that allows garbage to accumulate because nobody has the authority to purge it? I guess it's the latter, because it exacerbates the fragmentation of human knowledge... whereas 'proprietary' encyclopedic works tend to synthesize knowledge.
The internet is a great distribution medium for the inherently biased work of individuals and small groups, which I shall continue to rely upon. The dream of a superior 'hive mind' ('collective wisdom', 'community', whatever you want to call it) is just bunk. It's waste of time. Even compared to Slashdot.
It isn't easy being the parent of a six-year-old. However, it's a pretty small price to pay for having somebody around the house who understands computers.
