Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I really wonder what the next big changes will be Temps up 2°C, marine ecosystems collapse, and hundreds of millions of refugees?
Optimist
Start with the happy case or people will shut down and stop listening.
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
251–260 of 419 posts
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't pretend like Wikipedia doesn't depend on donations from primarily capitalist economy citizens. Just because an organization is non-profit does not mean it's anti-capitalist, or commons-based. It is still a private organization run by private individuals. They just don't distribute profits to shareholders and their business model is donation-based, just as churches have been for centuries. I agree that there's a…
I don't know why you would suggest I was pretending that? The rest of your comment seems like an irrelevant rebuttal to something I didn't even suggest, except that you seem to not know what "commons-based" means, so you falsely assert that Wikipedia isn't commons-based [peer production product]. Capitalism is a system of production in which productive work is carried out by employees using means of production, such…
Fair enough, I read it wrong. When I read "commons based" I assume the word commons to mean public property, or Commonwealth concepts. And while Wikipedia doesn't copyright its material, it's still very much a private enterprise, despite depending on volunteers to add content. There are still paid employees of Wikipedia that ultimately manage it. It's not entirely decentralized in that sense.
I think your definition of capitalism is overly simplistic. Capitalism is merely a byproduct of private property. If you hold that individuals can own property, and have certain rights to that property, then capitalism is an emergent property of an economy that respects private property as a concept.
Employee owned corporations are a thing in capitalism, as are publically owned corporations, as are state owned corporations, as are non-profit corps. I get that organizations which produce IP that is open source or non-copyrighted is novel, but I still don't follow how it's "non-capitalistic". Donations are simply an alternative revenue model.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Encarta’s case, cheap, high density storage mediums were passed by something that already existed and had existed for quite some time before, the internet. In other regards maybe the storage medium was just a side detail and the important part was what could be done with that data thanks to faster computers. There might be some parallels here today with machine learning. Neal Stephenson's quote about the future al…
As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those u…
I think the phase that usurped Ecarta's position had more to do with good quality web search and to a lesser extent the crowdsourcing model of Wikipedia (run by a foundation rather than a for profit mega corporation) than to content or data standards.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#254Here in Poland Encarta is probably best remembered for its ridiculous entry on Poland, depicting it in a rather outdated manner, to put it mildly. It caused quite an uproar back in the day, and went sort of viral. See http://of19.internetdsl.pl/bzdury/encarta/ (in Polish, but includes the screenshots in English, which are self-explanatory)
Seems about right.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#255There was a certain method of presenting information that just doesn't seem to exist anymore in the modern world. The by-design weaving together of text, images, video, and audio when giving information about a certain topic. Sure, wikipedia articles have one or two images, maybe an audio clip, and plenty of links to other text articles, but nothing like an encyclopedia or other informational software of the 90s. You…
Video of the dino browsing experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgOZUPUGuwY
Exactly what I was thinking of, thank you.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why you would suggest I was pretending that? The rest of your comment seems like an irrelevant rebuttal to something I didn't even suggest, except that you seem to not know what "commons-based" means, so you falsely assert that Wikipedia isn't commons-based [peer production product]. Capitalism is a system of production in which productive work is carried out by employees using means of production, such…
Fair enough, I read it wrong. When I read "commons based" I assume the word commons to mean public property, or Commonwealth concepts. And while Wikipedia doesn't copyright its material, it's still very much a private enterprise, despite depending on volunteers to add content. There are still paid employees of Wikipedia that ultimately manage it. It's not entirely decentralized in that sense. I think your definition…
No, there are paid employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, but not of Wikipedia. They do not ultimately manage Wikipedia, just its hosting; an ArbCom ultimately manages each Wikipedia, although there are the predictable and tiresome power struggles from time to time.
However, that's ultimately irrelevant — what counts is that Wikipedia isn't written by employees and isn't owned by the owners of the means of production.
I gave an entirely standard definition of capitalism, though yes, somewhat simplified. If you want to use the word in a way that does not accord with its standard definition in history, sociology, economics, and politics, that's up to you, but you will of course reach different conclusions about your "capitalism" than those of us who are discussing its standard definition (your definition, for example, implies that capitalism has existed for several thousand years), and you will have a hard time understanding what we are saying. I suggest you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons-based_peer_production.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#257I don’t miss Microsoft anything.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#258Encarta is a great example of Microsoft winning a market, and after it was defeated, letting it fade out. Wikipedia in some ways beat it, but the interactivity elements of Encarta make it something that you kind of wish had a more direct role in the modern day. I wrote about this topic a few years ago ( https://tedium.co/2017/07/13/who-killed-the-encyclopedia/ ), and it led a former CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica to…
> It didn’t have to be like that, honestly. Imagine what might have happened if, for example, Microsoft worked more closely with the Wikimedia Foundation on the highly visual treatments the company was known for with Encarta. The nonprofit ownership was a good move, but the fact that MS seemed to cede the market entirely, especially so soon after disrupting the whole thing, was unfortunate. We actually asked them abo…
That’s very unfortunate, but I’m glad to hear Wikipedia was actually thinking in this general direction.
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
As Encarta was being developed (~1991 per another comment here), the Internet was still highly nascent. I was at uni during this period, and a major bragging right of the campus I was on was dedicated high-speed network connections to other schools within the university system ... over 56K leased lines. Those were shared amongst the 100k+ student, faculty, and staff population (though a very small fraction of those u…
I think the phase that usurped Ecarta's position had more to do with good quality web search and to a lesser extent the crowdsourcing model of Wikipedia (run by a foundation rather than a for profit mega corporation) than to content or data standards.
Search within an encyclopedia (e.g., Wikipedia) doesn't rely on Web search generally (e.g., DDG).
I can see your point that content outside a curated context replaces an encyclopedia to an extent, and up until about 5-10 years ago, as clickbait and black-hat SEO finally won out, much noncommercial Web content was at least informative, if of generally lower quality than traditional printed sources. Convenience has a huge edge over quality, though. These days, it's Wikipedia's curated content, especially for complex breaking news stories, that is my first go-to. After Idleword's (Maciej Cezglowski's) piece on Hong Kong hit HN last week, I finally took a look at Wikipedia's article on the protests there. A full 73 page long article with references on a protest movement only a couple of months old. That's staggering, and exceeds all but the very best news sources. (Another case I'd noted was the Oroville Dam case, where Brad Plumer's article for Vox was the only trad med piece I could find even remotely approaching Wikipedia's article. The first instance of this I recall was the 2004 Boxing Day quake/tsunami in Indonesia / Indian Ocean.)
Wikipedia, on the other hand, greatly enhances Web search, though it also benefits generally from the high profile resulting from that.
Wikipedia's crowdsourcing, the reliance on underlying technologies (Wiki, HTML, mediawiki markup), and on a huge set of organisational systems, standards, practices, and solutions Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation have arrived at, were transformational. Though those too strongly resemble the largely equivalent or analogous practices of earlier encyclopaedic efforts dating back to at least Diderot, as well as other reference works (OED, see Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman).
(Note: updated to add 2nd 'graph beginning "I can see your point...")
Re: I Miss Microsoft Encarta
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
This basically sounds like WinHelp, which was a compiled format of RTF, prior to the availability of HTML.
Exactly what I was thinking. That was a pain - I think I ended up writing RTF by hand.
Authoring WinHelp files is a pain (and indeed better done by hand or via a convertor from a saner format), but from a user perspective WinHelp is IMO the best format - the only thing i'd like (assuming WinHelp was still distributed with Windows 10 - though you can copy it from a machine that has it and it'll work) is the contents sidebar from HTMLHelp (which is also nice, but a full blown browser engine is IMO overkill and it gets often abused with fancy CSS and javascript effects in some CHM files - WinHelp is too limited for that, though some programs did try to push things further than should be pushed).