Gabe

The Ultimate Smackdown: Wikipedia Vs. Britannica

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:44:30 PST

If you haven't heard of Wikipedia , you've probably been living under a rock for the past couple of years. But, here is the quick summary of what Wikipedia is: Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Sheep dung, Brittanica , oh my!

Now, you must be thinking what most of my teachers are thinking. That Wikipedia is an unreliable, hacker filled, pile of sheep dung. Well, that's what I thought when I first read about, and viewed various Wikipedia pages. But, later on in my life I have come to the conclusion that Wikipedia is a far better source of information than places like Encyclopedia Britannica, and InfoPlease, mainly because of a study that was recently conducted by Nature Magazine. This study showed that Wikipedia has 4 errors to Brittanica's 3 errors in the average science article. But here is the funny part, one of Wikipedia's errors came from a book that was written by a staunch anti-Wikipediaist. So that makes Wikipedia even with Britannica.

Truth vs. Fact

I really love this subtitle, "Truth vs. Fact" that makes almost no sense anyway you think about it. Yet, there is a very subtle difference between truth and fact. That difference is that facts are like mass, it will always be the same no matter what the force of gravity is. But truth is like weight, weight is dependant of factors like gravity to define its total.... wait for it... weight. So, basically my point here is that the people who write Encyclopedia Brittanica can all believe in one truth, even if that truth isn't really practical. For example, to the Nazi's Hitler was correct and truthful about the Jew's being the source of Germany's problems, yet the fact was that Germany was suffering because of the agreements that they made with the Allies after World War I. So, if you see something that is the truth, you can change it to the fact.

User Fixability

As a person who takes great pleasure from getting down in the dirt with beta's, alpha's, pretest's, and the likes of those, when I see that someone is calling the Phylum of an Amoeba "Crudeacrestantus" when it should be "Amoebozoa" I can't change that with school databases, or Encyclopedia Britannica. With Wikipedia it would take me all of 30 seconds that fix the classification of that poor little Amoeba. If you were to suggest a fix for Britannica, you would have to submit a formal error fix form, and back that up with proof, and then back that proof up with testimony from people in the profession. Then show that those people in the profession are actually in the profession. Finally you would have to wait a considerable amount of time before you would actually see the change. So several thousands of people would see it prior to it being fixed.

Community

I love communities. I love forums. I love chat rooms. They are places where I can sit down with a cup of grape juice and enjoy the technological company of others. Wikipedia offers this type of thing with Talk pages, Discussion Pages, and History Pages. But other encyclopedia (especially book copies ;-) ) lack these features. The main advantage of these pre-installed communities is that you can discuss and debate what should be in an article or not, but it is also a great place that you can kick back and chat about what has happened in real life.

Conclusion

So, if you want to get decent information from a reliable source, for free, that spans over 2,138,523 topics, Wikipedia is the way to go. But if you would rather cash out and splurge on boring old Britannica, with its aggrandizing words, complex phrases, formulas, and unhelpful errors, then shell out $69.95 for the online service (or a whooping $1,325.05 for the books!). Or, on a lighter note, if you prefer things that everyone has their say in then Wikipedia is the way to go.

File Hosts Reviewed

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:05:45 PST

File hosts are a nice way to easily share files with your family, friends, and pirate software. Mainly for the latter, but for us who don't wish to get fined thousands of dollars, file hosts can be an excellent way for us to spread various files.

But, if you do a Google search for "free file hosts" you'll get 4,980,000 results. So, you must think, which of these shall I use? Or maybe, you don't... but, none the less, if you want to share a large file, or a small one, you'll need a nice site to host your files.

Rapidshare

Rapidshare is a German company, that has been around for a while. The main advantage of using Rapidshare is that the average download speed (for a premium user) is about 1 megabytes per second. So, if you were to download a 100mb file it would take about 100 seconds. Not a bad deal if I may say so myself. But, there are 2 bad parts to this. The first, is that to download from Rapidshare effeciently you have to be a premium member, which costs about $50 for 6 months. The second, is that the maximum file size is 100mb. So you have to use "split-archives", which are basically compressed RAR archives that are split into multiple pieces that you have to have together to decompress. So overall, if you need to share that large powerpoint, or Halo 2, Rapidshare is one of the best ways to go.

Megashares

Megashares, I must say, is one of the coolest hosts I have ever seen. Megashares lets you upload a file that can be up to 10GB large (using the custom uploader), or 1.5GB large using the standard uploader. You can also purchase "link cards" that allow you to download files of any size, quickly. But without a link card, it takes forever to download a large file. But, Link Cards are cheap (about $20 for 6 months) so Megashares is a great option if you have a little extra cash hanging around. But the main disadvantage is that your files have to be downloaded at least once in 5 days, or 5 times in 25 days.

GigaSize

GigaSize is a fairly nice file host, without that many ads or strings attached. With a free account (it's free xD) you get to host 600mb per file, which isn't that bad. I could store my entire picture collection with that much space. Also, your files stay hosted for 90 days without a download, which is the same as Rapidshare, but you can only have up to 2 (with a free account) downloads at once. Which is ok, I guess. But the thing that really makes GigaSize a decent competitor is that it allows you to gain "GigaPoints" which you get 1 per each file download. After you get enough of those you can upgrade your account for a certain amount of time. Rapidshare has a similar service, but you need far less GigaPoints than Rapidshare Points to get a premium account.

Friendly Files | FileHo

When I first saw Friendly Files, I thought "Oh wow! Unlimited file size, sweet!". But then thats where my problems started... I tried uploading a 500kb file to the site, and it took about 3 hours to do so (yet my upload speed is about 512 kbps). So the only way I could get a file uploaded was to do it via FileHo.com. But then, after I went through all of that trouble. I found out that I would have to download it in Internet Explorer. And if that wasn't enough, I would also have to download and install a download manager called "ADS Technology", which I thought was a little much to ask for a 500kb file. So, I recommend against using Friendly Files, "cause it"s not that friendly.

So, if you need to share Crysis, or Halo 2, go with Megashares. If you need to share that photo of you and your nephew to your grandparents, use GigaSize. If you need to backup your software (or download other "software backups") use Rapidshare. And whatever you do, do not use Friendly Files/FileHo unless you plan on downloading things in Internet Explorer using an unknown download manager.

Bypassing Internet Censorship

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 02:13:17 PST

So, you were at a public place, or at work, or maybe even at a library. And you are browsing the Internet and you find this wonderful site that you must go to. But when you click on that link, instead of that glamorous website appearing you get an ugly error message stating that the page is blocked. You are aghast, because you must use this webpage. So you start looking for a way around these blocks, and you discover proxies!

Now, before I begin a little about proxies. What your computer does to retrieve information (in layman's terms) is get the information and pull it back to your computer. But when blocking software is installed (ex. WebSense) your computer has to get the information censored,and if it doesn't pass screening you get a block message instead of the webpage you want to do. So what a proxy does is basically this: You send request to proxy, proxy gets webpage, proxy brings webpage to you. They are sort of slow, but that is a small price to pay for getting access to that exquisite webpage that you must have access to.

Now, you could just go use any old proxy out there, and you'll find (not surprisingly) that proxies are blocked! This is where you can say "Oh, dear me." or you can use proxies that are providing by a non-profit organization called Peacefire. What Peacefire is is a group of people that will every few days buy a new domain name and host a new proxy on them. So, even after Proxy Apple gets blocked Proxy Tomato is still unblocked for you to use.

So, now your wondering what some of those proxies are. Well there are about 100 of them, but to increase the proxies life span Peacefire doesn't post the proxy's URL anywhere So you have 2 options to get the URL's, the first is to keep reading this article (highly recommended =D) or you could subscribe to Peacefire.org's mailing list. I recommend that you do both since this article won't be constantly updated with new information.

Some of the proxies that I am presently aware of are:

Welcome to the fight against Internet censorship.

Why You Should Use an Online Office Suite

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:18:07 PST

When I say “Office Suite” most people would think “Microsoft Office”. What if you could simply use an office suite, that wouldn't have to be installed on your computer, and is absolutely free (and has basically the same functionality as MS Office)?

What I am talking about is an Online Office Suite. So you can take it anywhere that you have internet access. My personal favorite is ThinkFree. I think ThinkFree is the best for several reasons, mainly that it has a similar interface to MS Office so there is no need to spend time trying to figure out how to insert a picture into a document.

ThinkFree gives you 1GB of space to store documents, spreadsheets, and even presentations! The main APP in this suite is ThinkFree Documents, but it also includes a spreadsheet APP similar to MS Excel, and a presentation program that appears to be a diluted form of PowerPoint. But ThinkFree does have its flaws, hosting to many presentation files can easily eat all of your space up very quickly.

Google Docs is another one of my favorite online office suites. Its interface is much likes Gmail's and it is simply simple! It doesn't have so many features as ThinkFree, but it allows you to get the job done quickly and simply. Google's spreadsheet program is very fast and simple just like Google Docs.