The re-entrant coder

The every excellent TechDirt blog had a nice writeup about whether or not Wikipedia should make the jump to adding ads in their site. As they state rather nicely:

Part of the genius of Wikipedia’s design is that its editing process self-selects for people who are passionate about designing a great encyclopedia. It has to, because if you don’t find editing Wikipedia enjoyable, there isn’t much else to draw you in. As a result, the senior Wikipedia editors tend to be strongly focused on making Wikipedia the best encyclopedia it can be, and while politics certainly happens, it’s a relatively minor aspect of the site’s operations.

Moving this model to a paid-by-advertising model means that although they receive large amounts of money (due to large numbers of pageview caused by Wikipedia high rankings within Google’s search engine) that would also bring along a number of editors that would become focussed on becoming senior executives in charge of that pile of money.

In Februari, Techdirt had another article on Wikipedia, sizing up Wikipedias chances against Google’s Knol offering. Although Knol is not yet open to the public, they indicate that because of Wikipedia’s permissive licensing a lot of their content may end up on Knol. Knol however can be monetized (via google ads). As it stands, Wikipedia will have a bit of a conundrum: either take the money using their own site, or idly stand by and watch that revenue go to authors who cut and past the content from Google and post it to Knol and reap the profits there.
At first, this looks like a tough problem for Wikipedia. I think this is not the case, though. First of all, Wikipedia is in the knowledge dissemination business, not in the money making business. Secondly, they always have the option of changing the license terms under which the content is disseminated in such a way that excludes the content from being incorporated in Google Knol. And last but not least: these are two different problems. It’s money flowing to Wikipedia or money flowing to the authors of the knols.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the future!

Well, we’re back from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I must say that it was quite the experience. Demoing our application went well, aside from the roaring fans of the demo machine itself. Intel could have warned us that we would be standing directly below the fans of that beast! Besides all my demos, I got a chance to have a look at all of the other companies that were demonstrating as well. I’m gonna try to catch the general themes that I found in the show.

Well, I had another one this time. I’m running a Home Theater PC at home based on the fantastic MythTV but recently it failed on me. I couldn’t get it to boot anymore. The PC would start, show the BIOS screen and show the attached discs and then… nothing. As written here, I have had several disk failures in this machine already so I was suspecting that something in the vicinity of my SATA controller had failed internally.
I had left the PC sitting for over a week as I didn’t have time to fix the issue but this Saturday I finally started to look at the problem. After opening up the BIOS and doing several checks if the disks were present I was just about to give up and buy a new motherboard for my PC (it was an old beast to start with). And then my eye fell on the boot order. For some reason, I had this set in the following order

1. boot from USB
2. boot from HD
3. boot from CD

And then the light struck… I had a memory card inserted in its USB adapter that was sitting snugly in the USB hub. I removed it and voila, the system booted! What I still don’t understand is why my BIOS didn’t give me an error that no OS could be found on the memory card…