today in class we had an assignment to compare encyclopedia and dictionary resources. so i looked in the microsoft-owned
encarta online encyclopedia and the open-source
wikipedia project. just to stack the deck a little, i looked at the entry for 'linux.' after i closed the pop-up ad windows, i found that encarta didn't have one at all, though there was a brief mention of it in the unix entry. wikipedia, by contrast, had a lengthy (albeit geeky) entry. funny thing about the encarta entry: they didn't mention that linux is free. in fact, no mention whatsoever of '
free,' '
open source,' '
GPL,' '
GNU,' et cetera. why, you'd almost think that microsoft's business interests influence their encyclopedia-writing.