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You deleted a (longstanding) link to the TRUE history of spreadsheets (as I predicted about two years ago would eventually happen). You also deleted a new link I recently added - pointing to a YOUTUBE video personal testimony supporting the earlier link. You have now helped to entirely remove all references to the genuine history of spreadsheets on Wikipedia. This leaves the fictitious history of spreadsheets (from 1979 onwards) as the only information on Wikipedia - further adding to the public view that what is to be found on Wikipedia is not valid/true. Congratulations, Well done, Bravo ! Of course, if you now added back the links yourself, it would not be me that added them back (and so the links to my material published elsewhere on the web would presumably be OK!) It's your decision - truth or falsehood, fact or fiction. The truth will out eventually ken (talk) 09:28, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
Under the star... well hidden! But now I know where it is! Thanks. --FvdP (talk) 20:58, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
The paradox I was referring to was the fact that - since an OOP object is defined as "data plus its method(s)" - when those methods are no longer around (e.g. after serialization), they are still regarded as (distributed) "objects". Whether a class method (i.e. applying to all the objects in the class) or an instance method (applying to just one instance) has no bearing on the paradox. The method(s) that were hitherto regarded as an essential part of the object have disappeared. The ubiquitous "Timmie the dog" (or sometimes Lassie) carries his barks around with him and Colt45's carry their firing mechanism too. An iphone containing a friends phone number (the data) can be activated by pressing the "call" button. Once the phone number is written to a piece of paper, the method changes (find a phone box & insert money , find a landline or another mobile, type in the number). The data can be changed, burnt or thrown away - without invoking any of these new methods - and even the memory of the number fades over time.
To use your own line of reasoning, if class methods are the reason why serialization "abandons" methods - precisely what is it about these class methods that cannot be serialized along with their class objects? Is it that there is, as yet, no fully portable (i.e. platform, language and paradigm independent) method? Is it that serializing methods with data would cause down-the-line versioning problems? Or could it be simply that artificially combining data and methods is a bad idea in the first place (except in environments that persist and have real substance)?
Of course, I might be wrong to look at it this way, in which case, how should I look at it in your opinion?ken (talk) 07:51, 23 May 2010 (UTC)
Your NTFS edit is moving in the wrong direction. The sources quoted all use binary units KB, MB, GB (see discussion page). Also, Windows reports sizes using binary units, not decimal, making your change all the more inconsistent and distracting. Please make your changes consistent w/ WP:COMPUNITS. Thanks. Jeberle (talk) 19:00, 31 May 2010 (UTC)
Your neutral POV is appreciated. I will try to maintain the same.
Apologies for using your page to detail my own thinking. If there's a better forum for this, please let me know.
I too thought about this a while before responding. My argument can be boiled down to this. Byte units will always be ambiguous. Sometimes it's convenient to speak in terms of decimal units and sometimes it's convenient to speak in terms of binary units. I hope this is not too great an axiom to claim, so I'll spare you the details.
Somewhat OT, but I tracked down this illusion. Necker Cube. It's how I see the binary/decimal debate.
The question then is how to make clear what units one is using—how to disambiguate. The current WP:COMPUNITS is actually quite extreme, recommending explict 1000^n or 1024^n notation. I realize "no original work" is a part of the Wikipedia ethic. Nevertheless, here are examples of two simpler alternatives:
or perhaps:
The first example does not strike me as original work.
So why not use KiBs to disambiguate KBs as binary? It's an IEC standard after all. I offer three reasons:
To summarize:
Thanks for responding and for reading this. Jeberle (talk) 03:36, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your detailed reply. In theory, there is a better place to discuss this topic (Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers), see the archives B0-B17). However, this debate has been going on for five years now and there is very little hope that it will be resolved anytime in the foreseeable future. I haven't read all of it, but there seems to be a small core of people that stubbornly enforce their point of view. The fact that a IEC proponent keeps trolling doesn't exactly help the discussion either.
Note that I'm not saying that the IEC standard should be promoted or deprecated by a guideline (altough in my personal opinion, I prefer the binary prefices). All I'm saying is that there is no consensus among the Wikipedia community for either promotion or deprecation, and I think it is immediately obvious that this is the case (otherwise, your changes to the SI prefices wouldn't be reverted so fiercely by several editors). I find it outrageous that a small group of people dictates a guideline for all of Wikipedia when there is no consensus (as I mentioned before, guidelines are formed by consensus, not the other way around). If I could see any hope for resolving the issue, I would engage in the discussion; but as of now, I can find better ways to waste my time.
I won't change any SI prefices to IEC prefices, but I'll probably use the IEC prefices for new content I write. My guess is that the binary prefices will continue to gain acceptance in the future, as this debate will be obsolete at one point. Until then, I choose not to engage in edit wars, because if I think about it, the issue is really not that important, and there are much more productive ways to improve Wikipedia. I would be glad if you could agree with me on that.
Regarding your arguments: yes, I agree that sometimes binary bases are more convenient, and sometimes decimal ones are, and that the debate is only about how to label the numbers with a binary base.
Adrianwn (talk) 08:13, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
You are a very good writer. Thank you again for responding.
I won't drag this on very much more. There are better things to waste ones time on, as you said.
Here's what I was originally going to say:
Your arguments are well argued and reasoned, but you do not address the question of speech. You say that the metric system is over two centuries old, but spoken word is far older. Written word is relatively new in comparison. If you write something that cannot be spoken you have created graffiti.
You say that every little bit of KiB & GiB lightens a corner, and reduces ambiguity. I believe it does the exact opposite. It creates more ambiguity. Until the hard drive marketers of the 90's came along, there was virtually no ambiguity in the term "KB". Now, pile on the OSS movement (how they got this wrong is beyond me), and the seemingly complicit Wikipedia, and no one knows which way is up. Unless...
We could go back in time and right this terrible mistake. And rewrite all the books, magazines, and technical articles, etc. Right? And never use those nasty binary numbers, and get rid of Hexadecimal as well, because of those funny A-F numbers, and we can all live in a cushy base-10 world. And I'm sure, no one will mind the revisionist whitewashing along the way.
"KB" is an atomic word. It cannot be sliced into K & B. The fact that it uses the same Greek name is a convenience, not a flaw that needs correcting. We like these prefixes and we're keeping them. That is all.
Jeberle (talk) 05:12, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
I guess this issue is more subjective and much less clear than it appears at first glance. Your arguments made me realize this, yet they didn't convince me. I just hope that you won't get involved in edit wars over this, for your sanity's sake ;-) – Adrianwn (talk) 06:27, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
I'll stop here: COMPUNITS Suggestion
Much appreciated debate, BTW. This has been bothering me for quite some time, and really the last thing I expected was a well-reasoned discussion.
Cheers Jeberle (talk) 08:09, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
I saw your edit about tree graphs growing downward, replacing my previous edit there which Coasterlover1994 reverted. This is a good solution; I agree with you that the mention of natural trees isn't really necessary, and the distinction between tree data structures, as a vague abstraction, and the drawn graphs of trees (whether drawn on paper, on a video screen, or in one's imagination) is a good refinement—you subtly imply the point (maybe not with determined intent) that a tree as a pure abstraction does not grow or have spatial configuration at all, being merely an interconnection of notions, so to speak.
If you read my response on Coasterlover1994's talk page—oh, wait, I see that you did. Thanks for agreeing with me. (I know it was for rational reasons, not as any kind of a favor.) So, you saw that I admitted this is (was) a minor issue. Nonetheless, Nice work.
Also, thanks for supporting my reasoning in the forum when you found it to be valid. I agree with everything you said there, including that someone else might have come along and made another improvement on my edit. I always welcome further improvements, even if they completely replace and obliterate my work, just so long as they really are improvements. I admit that I would rather edit an article to sound bad but be correct and unambiguously understandable than to have it sound good but be wrong or unclear, and that I sometimes leave it to others to make it sound better, when I don't have time to roll up my sleeves and dig into editing to make a necessary fix fit well. I assume that any improvement is better than, and appreciated over, no improvement.
I've actually been editing Wikipedia for years, in the same on-the-fly, contributing-in-appreciation-for-free-use manner as I made this edit, but I never chose to register. I do know all the important policies and principles (Assume Good Faith, Verifiability, no OR, NPOV, 3RR, etc.), and I (now) remember to sign my posts (w/ 4 tildas) before the fact of posting them. If I had been a new user, today I would in fact have been discouraged from editing again; in fact, because this has happened to me before, this did at first make me doubt my enthusiasm for WP. I mean, who wants to spend time doing work that may be unappreciated and thrown away, when there are so many other things to do? I'd say over 90% of my edits are left alone, cooperatively improved, or even occasionally commended, but a few times, maybe several, I've had an edit reverted, once or twice with the "unconstructive" boilerplate. The most significant and probably most recent instance was on the article Post and lintel, in a matter of phrasing similar to this case—it was another of these semantic/linguistic things where I thought it was prone to misunderstanding and my reverter, well, didn't. We politely wrangled, finally reached an adequate agreement, and he made the change. The sentence currently reads, "The lintel will deform by sagging in the middle because the underside is under tension and the topside is under compression," which is probably unchanged from then. It's the last sentence in the article. I think the previous version was something like, "The lintel will deflect concave upward when the underside is under tension and the topside is under compression," which I objected to because it was unclear and even misleading about the causality--it seemed to make the tension and compression primary causes, when in fact the load on top, and the self-loading of weight of the beam, causes them--they are the forces that account for the rigidity of the beam to resist weight, and are a reaction to that loading. "When" also suggested that the tension and compression weren't necessary consequences of loading, which they are. In context, changing to the word "because" fixed these problems.
So, it seems that in most instances, justice is served for the Wikipedian whose intentions are pure and whose editorial reasoning is right. (Not, by a long shot, to say that I'm always right.) Which is an encouragement to stay in the game.
I'm posting a pointer to this comment on Coasterlover1994's talk page.
–Stephen 141.158.233.114 (talk) 10:18, 22 July 2010 (UTC)
Hi,
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