With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by thom on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:46PM (#7880038)

Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the point, but clearly others feel differently.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by rodgerd on Thursday June 12, 2014 @03:45AM (#7882246)

History and talk pages can be very important.

When I saw that the film Defiance was based on a interesting-sounding real set of events, I looked at them on Wikipedia. The history and talk pages had an ongoing edit war with a sizable number of commentators who appeared to feel that the Bielskis should be treated as criminals and murderers rather than fêted as heroes, due to their killing of local Nazi sympathisers.

If you just stuck to the hashed-out Wikipedia page that was current, you'd be completely oblivious to the whole controversy.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:30PM (#7880250)

Yeah, you're probably right. But the history can be really important on certain pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671756 And images can make some of the math articles useful since they are too-often dense pages of formulas.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by valarauca1 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @10:32PM (#7881534)

Isn't most the math just latex? So it could be rendered client side?

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Thursday June 12, 2014 @08:30AM (#7882985)

I mean the formulas are not very good at explaining the concepts. Sometimes it's helpful to have a picture.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sixothree on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:31PM (#7880258)

I find that Wikipedia's text heavy presentation disappointing especially considering that the articles are almost exclusively what I would consider extremely terse. It's like the worst of both worlds.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by gyom on Thursday June 12, 2014 @10:19AM (#7883533)

I've never considered this, but the history of Wikipedia over the next 100 years might be an insanely valuable source of insight about culture.

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