Slashdot Mirror
The Failure of Tech Journalism
Belzebutt writes: "This is a great article that talks about something we already knew, but haven't paid that much attention to: most tech journalists are a bunch of corporate whores. It even mentions Slashdot, although not very favorably." Eh, we'll get over it. It's a good rant, something to consider as news sites fold left and right.
buh.
To read Slashdot, only the lack of intellectual fervor is standing between you and the nirvana of Linux. The fact that you need a million work arounds and training sessions to get it to function on the desktop is always downplayed. Mention this and you're a "luser who uses Windoze". Which is a mature, intelligent way to settle an argument among adults. Raise an objection: get flamed.
Did this guy cut & paste this from trolltalk? Wrong headline: tech journalists are a bunch of ripoff artists. That's our material!
Seriously though, I think he meant to say:
"raise an objection: get moderated as Flamebait"
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Jon Katz
s/Tech Journalism/Business Journalism/g
that talks about something we already knew, but haven't paid that much attention to: most tech journalists are a bunch of corporate whores.
Of course. Well, tech journalists are usually going to write for tech periodicals, which sell advertising to tech firms. Predictably, that makes them about as impartial as Car and Driver magazine.
So, the bigger point is this: which do I, as an informed and newsreading consumer, trust? Slashdot, which is an arm of VA Linux, or MSNBC?
Hmmm...
It even mentions Slashdot, although not very favorablyHe does hit home on an irritating issue. Much of the moderation here appears to be done based on whether or not the moderator personally agrees with you, regardless of how intelligent or relevent your comments may be. This is a subtle evolution of the "luser who uses Windoze" quote from the NetSlaves author. It's rare that Microsoft does something right, of course, but when it does, it's nice to be able to discuss it rationally. Meta-Moderation should address that, but as long as human beings are involved, impartiality will be unattainable.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The website is slashdotted, here is google's cached version.
That's one way to get bad press about Slashdot off the internet: hit them with a nice DDOS aka slashdot effect.
Mexican engineer? Is that "PC" term for construction laborers now?
Where do I insert my coin? I wanna play tech whore too. uhm that didn't sound right...
without prejudice
Ive noticed that posts I've placed regarding what the new Ximian Gnome 1.4 does to destroy the Red Hat menu's never get ran. Not to mention the lack of support from Ximian regarding this issue. I can only wonder how many Red Hat installs have been trashed that could have been avoided.
And hell, why not? If I was trying to sell a product I'd buy me a few reviewers.. By the way, if the Honda Corp is listening- Send me some cash and I'll change that to a positive review..
air and light and time and space
Now they are slashdotted. That'll teach 'em.
A linux company OWNS you.
You don't post squat about anything BUT linuxInternet Explorer 6.0 is released - no news
Mozilla .9.2.1.0.2.3.6.3.23843 build 29343 gets released and its front page!
If thinkgeek sells it, you think its cool
If amazon sells it, its corporate america after you!
:)
I could go on and on...
Ofcourse you aren't biased, you're just ignorant
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Turly an American icon.
I wonder if getting /.ed after posting uncomplimentary articles about /. is a failing of tech journalism? Anyone have a mirror of it?
BUT, that's what Slashdot, THE COMMUNITY, has decided to be. Those AREN'T journalists. It's not CmdrTaco who's coming down and flaming people. There even exists many legitimate criticisms of Slashdot and Slashdot's journalism. But this guy, in confusing the whole issue, just comes off as stupid.
If you're going to say Slashdot is harsh, say it in an article about the environment of weblog.
If you're going to say journalism is bad, get on them for the all the times they've been had by hoaxes and post press releases for companies submitted by people with the same username as the company.
But if you're going to criticize /., at least do it fairly and in the right forum. Otherwise, you come off seeming like an idiot who doesn't understand what, exactly, he's writing about or what his subject is.
I was photo editor at my college paper (dailly collegian!) So I hung out with many journalists. They make very little money so how can you expect someone who is knowledgable about computers to choose a career in journalism as opposed to a lucrative computer job.
/usenet is a usefull place to get computer information from people actually working and the web is so bad about reporting facts properly.
Thats why slashdot
The hardware review sites like Tom's Hardware and Anand Tech don't seem to fit into the category of tech sits described in this rant... Although I agree with the characterizations made, in general, and as they relate specifically to sites owned by C|Net (ZDNet, etc.). The hardware sites , however, don't seem to have the same incentive with regard to supporing a software product through download services, and tech tips, as, these types of support related content don't really apply to hardware (other than perhaps discussion boards per product). It still is critical for the hardware sites - as with the software sites - to keep focused on their primary business, but thet seem like they'd be less prone to the influences outlines in the rant (article, posting, whatever).
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
the era of specialists called "journalists" and "organisations purveying this product called "news" is drawing to a close.
the internet is like the invention of the bow/arrow when heavy clubs were supreme.
so start writing and stop complaining.
even if no one reads what you write.
looks like it is going to be a capitalism survival of fittest for so called journalists too.
for example, take a look at Media Whores Online
As they describe themselves: "The site that set out to bring the media to their knees - but found they were already there"
They stomp on everyone's toes.
good stuff
-
- - -
Radio Free Nation
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
come on baby
kick them daisys!
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
God out marijuana on this earth for all to use. Don't let some silly laws stop you from the blissful experience of smoking Gods marijuana!!!
:)
And, YES, I can install and have used Linux, can compile my own kernel, make it do all the crap it needs to do to get the job done.
... so I'll stop there
I disagree with the article about Slashdot being "biased" unfairly.
The fact of the matter is that Slashdot represents democratic journalism. The stories are there, but the commentary is generated by the community and ANYONE can post. True the community often prefers open source, but they are the MAJORITY and there is probably some reason for that somewhere, don't you think?
In truth Slashdot is good because it promotes free speech, ruled by the majority, just like the USA. (ideally) Just like we in America love to complain about our government, we love it for giving us the right to do so. To be biased means repressing some part of the story in favor of some other part, which is difficult in a democratic session. I mean damn, they posted a story against them. Do you think Micorsoft would do that? I mean come on!
Most online journalism fails for the same reason that you cannot get any reliable information from groups like greenpeace, peta and NORML. There is simply too much vested interest for anything but a completely biased opinion. This takes mainstream credibility away, and then there is no need to try and be unbiased. Under normal circumstances when this happens there will be few people willing to pay, but on the internet there will still be readership, and the crap will continue to be published.
Editorial control and unbias is what seperates real publications from the crap that is on the internet.
Why couldn't a site like slashdot or any other news / forum / infomation site produce a hardcopy magazine that its readers could order monthly.. I would love a Slashdot magazine that was published once a month or even once a week which brought together the months top stories and summarizied cleaver commentary and consensus from the slashdot community on them. I think that could work well. I would gladly pay money for a newletter / magazine like that.
Email me if you want to talk about the idea with me more...
Dan
Funny, I've never thought of Slashdot as "journalism". Who are the reporters? Where are the stories they write? Where is the pretense of objectivity?
Every ed will say straight out they have a pro-linux bias, there's no attempt to disguise it. The anti-MS atmosphere isn't "Slashdot's dirty secret" as mod-losers like to claim, it's just part of the deal. Slashdot is a conversation, not a newspaper. I don't see why people criticize it for not being something it has never pretended to be.
Kill, Tux, kill!
I dare say that most Internet new sites (mainstream ones anyway, ZD/CNet, InfoWorld, etc.) look like corporate whores because they get their news from wire services that are corporate whores. Reuters, Bloomberg, Associated Press, and Dow Jones Newswire. Now those are a bunch of independent thinking and incorruptable companies, eh?
I also dare say that most of the bankrupt news sites wouldn't be in so much trouble if they actually wrote their own news instead of using the same wire stories all their competitors use. Go to Yahoo News, Netscape News, MSN, ZDNet, and PCWeek. Reuters feeds on every one of them, often the same stories. And some sites just use the same reports with a few words changed around so they don't have to credit the original source (or pay for the story - or admit they don't have any competent writers on staff.)
Creative, independent, and different-thinking companies don't always survive - but at least people will care if they don't. I couldn't care less if some Reuters rehash "news" site goes under because I probably don't go to that site anyway. But on the other hand I would probably get teary if The Register, Aint It Cool, Tom's Hardware, Mac OS Rumors, BetaNews, or TheStandard.com (what remains of it) went away because they at least have the guts to be different.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
The number one reason technology is so badly covered starts with the technologists.
1. We have a tendency to assume that all tech media people are stupid or biased, so we give them "shorthand" and "for dummies" explanations that we wouldn't give to anyone we respected.
2. We allows the marketing droids and PR flacks to develop relationships with journalists, when we should be the ones extending ourselves to the industry media.
3. We don't like to contradict our managment when our management say "XYZ" and we know its pure bullshit. So we end supporting OUR corporation's position when we know its not true.
YES, there are plenty of hacks in tech media. But, as i have had a chance to meet and speak with some of the best regarded tech journalists. In my experiences with them, having been sourced a number of times and having contributed to a couple of biggish "scoops", there are also plenty who want to get the story right. But, if the only interface they have is the marketing dept or some project manager with his stock options on the line, they ain't ever gonna hear a discouraging word.
You can't accuse journalists like Dan Gillmor, Mary Jo Foley, Scott Petersen, Walter Mossberg, Peter Coffee, Dan Coursey, Michael Vizard, Jesse Berst, et al of excessive slanting. All of these journalists and the "analysts" like Dvorak have spent many years poking holes in tech corporations "walls of silence"...
Organizations are another thing.
It seems very clear to me, IMHO, that before the purchase of ZDNet by CNET, ZDNet was pretty tough on MS, and this was despite the fact that MS was a HUGE ADVERTISER on ZDNet!
CNET, on the other hand, has always seemed to me to be "softer" on its MS coverage than just about any other tech news hub.
Interestingly, since CNET's acquisition of ZDNet, it seems as though some major ZDNet anti-MS reporters such as Mary Jo Foley have gone away, and the overall tone of ZDNet on the subject of MS has softened considerably.
CNET also does not, and never has, seemed as Linux friendly as ZDNet, and I don't get the feeling that CNET wants to do anything to piss MS off.
I'd say it's "Caveat Emptor", i look at the byline. If i know/respect the journalist, i'll read it.
If it's some bozo who can't a monitor from "The Monitor", i'll skip it.
But, if we want more accurate coverage...We are going to have to start by avoiding trolling and flaming journalists who get it wrong, and start developing relationships with the ones who we know cover us fairly and accurately.
And we are going to have to go around our employers sometimes to do that, takes guts and involvement.
without those efforts on our part, you can expect that tech media coverage will remain driven by "Advertiser is King" coverage, until we change it.
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
And now some words from our friendly anti postercomment compression filter people. Ok that was it. Carry on.
i've seen posts censored by editors because of their nature (anti-the /. anime section). How do I know it was done by editors? i click to view a post and everything is @ 1 point, refresh the page after posting 30 secons later and that post and about 10 replies to it are all at -1, mods don't work that fast. and they usually don't go after ALL the replies.
that's censoring
Photos.
...because there's no such thing as an impartial investor in a news sight. This isn't an issue merely related to tech journalism.
You put money in hoping to get something back, right? Journalism has been used as a tool for those with ulterior motives for the longest time -- even back in the early days of the printing press and North American democracy, being a newspaper baron was often a prerequisite to becoming a politician. These days, though, the power resides with corporations, not the politicians, so you're going to find news sights that have content which mirrors the corporate interests of those who invest in them. And I'm not just talking about advertising or sponsorship -- I'm talking about things like Burston Marsteller doing PR for a newspaper and suppressing environmental news stories in that newspaper because it doesn't jive with a logging company, which also happens to be another PR client of theirs.
The best you can hope for is that enough warring corporations use the newspapers against each other, so that at least you'll have dissenting viewpoints on major issues. This is why it is important in principle to have dissent in public debate, regardless of what the dissenting opinion happens to be.
When there starts to be collusion between newspapers on opposing sides of an issue, THEN you really have to worry. Until then, we've got situations like Slashdot being a counter MSNBC. Neither is perfect, but the existence of both is a pretty good alternative.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Bashes ./ as biased (well, DUH! we are here because of Linux), but you can hear the crickets chirp as to their mention of Ziff-Davis sites.
ZD is by FAR the most biased, most useless source of tech information. I dumped my subscription to Computer Gaming World after 12 years when they bought it.
In a ZD article, you "coincidently" see and ad for a product around a positive review of it.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I mean, look what happens when a Howard Stern fan calls in during the OJ situation...you have this guy sounding as hickish as he possibly can, and making comments that don't make any sense, and Peter Jennings eats it up. 99% of the people on television are toast without a teleprompter.
For that matter, here's another pet peeve...how come the media always asks actors what their political views are. Why do the opinions of a guy who never has a thought in his mind, a guy who's job is to do and act and feel and say what someone else tells him to, why do they ask him?
All media is propaganda.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
Corporate whore assumes you are getting fucked by corporations for money - just from the semantics of it. In this case - many journalists ARE the corporation, and just act in their own interests. Not that it make it any better.
  ___
 //  7
(_,_/\
It seems like maybe the writer has some unresolved issues from his childhood. With his dislike of Linux users ... penis envy? :-P
Finding agnostic articles on anything is pretty difficult. Political issues? There are the Republican pages and the Democrat pages. Gun control? "Guns are evil" vs. "Guns are completely necessary" Trade issues? Unrestrained capitalism is the best thing ever vs. Communism.
It's very hard to find anything that tries to absorb both sides of an issue and come up with the truth (which, pretty much always, is somewhere in the middle). Even shows on TV or articles that claim to see "both sides" simply have on person spouting their side of the issue vs. another person spouting their side of the issue.
Actual discussions, actual investigations, resources that actually consider everyone's viewpoints are exceedly rare - people just love picking sides too much to actually try to find the best answer.
The article implies that until recently, journalists were ethical. How about George Will, who loves to pontificate about ethics on ABC's "This Week" program? Remember how badly he wanted Ronald Reagan to do well in a pre-election presidential debate? He coached Mr. Reagan secretly beforehand even though Mr. Will was going to serve as one of the debate's questioners! And this guy is still allowed to practice journalism and editorialize (about ethics, among other things).
Whoring journalists are nothing new. Being online just gives them better opportunities to pimp themselves.
Eh, we'll get over it.
That's the most disinterested, apathetic attitude I've seen in a long time. Get over it? Is that how you respond to valid criticisms?
Three years ago, Slashdot was "The Place" to go for computer news. Slashdot broke stories way before any other sites covered them. The message boards were lit up with intelligent conversation and discussion.
Today? Some articles are duplicated twice, even three times. Slashdot lags behind other news sites in stories, the postings are heavy on opinion instead of fact, and the site has a tremendous bias. Stories are submitted days, sometimes weeks in advance, and are rejected only to be posted much later by someone else's submission. Articles are posted without so much as a second thought to grammar and spelling.
What did you expect? Congratulations?
Obviously, a lot less care is being taken to make Slashdot the place it used to be.
And you'll just....eh....get over it? Instead of sulking in the corner and trying to "get over it", why not attempt to CHANGE the negative aspects that make people say "You suck!" Start listening to the valid complaints and criticisms people send you, and take action. Consider suggestions. Be a little proactive. Sure, code updates are good, but people DO care a lot about CONTENT as well.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
and it never claimed to be. it's a news weblog with reader comments... unless you call this, what I am doing now, journalism. bullshit. this corrected point of view reveals his entire rant on slashdot to be a load of steaming sensationalism. mention slashdot, especially in a negative way and it's instant traffic, just like the marketing department ordered.
Much of the moderation here appears to be done based on whether or not the moderator personally agrees with you, regardless of how intelligent or relevent your comments may be.
:)
I don't know how true this really is. I usually browse at +2, and slashdot is reasonably nice to read. And I see a moderate (heh) amount of slashdot/editor/moderator/linux bashing. Since unpopular opinions *do* get through the moderation process, I figured all was right in the world. But recently, I decided to see for myself how "censored" slashdot comments really are. I spend a week browsing at -1, flat.
It was nightmare.
Barely intelligible racial and sexual slurs. ASCII art (what is this? An 1980s bbs?) Offtopic rants about censorship that were modded <gasp> offtopic! Porn, violence, profanity, ad nauseum. One could list for days the horrors that go on (and on) in AC land. I won't bore anyone with the details. (But don't take my word for it, it's there for anyone with the courage to see.)
Sure, there was the occasion funny or insightful post that was labeled incorrectly by humourless or thick-headed moderators, but they were few. Nothing seemed to have been unjustly downgraded.
So thank you, unsung slashdot moderators. As much as the editors, story submitters, and insightful comment makers, *you* make slashdot a place worth visiting. Without your tireless efforts, I would have given up on this site full of teenage potty-mouths months ago. Keep up the good work!
Now I am returning to the relative safety of +2, threaded.
The same can be said of scientific journalism. Most science journalists are science whores. If they were doing their jobs, they would uncover that a lot of what passes itself as science, especially in the physics community, is really a bunch of chicken feather voodoo. A few things that come to mind are time travel, wormholes, multiple parallel universes, quantum computing (yes, a big fucking hoax that one is), time warps, dimensions that have sizes, dimensions that can be curled up into little tiny little balls, etc., etc...
It's truly fucking pathetic. Worst of all, most of the proponents of all this Star-Trek hocus pocus are big-time famous physicists like Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, David Deutsch, and the like, hiding behind a wall of obfuscations and thinking they are forever beyond public scrutiny. And all of it is supported by the public's money. Science journalists are ready to prostitute themselves to interview those charlatans. And they do.
So don't lay all the blame for what's wrong with journalism on tech journalists. It's all over the place. It's called bias and self-interest. As Feyarabend wrote, "it is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action."
Freedom of information = open source = open science. We, the public, don't need a condescending priesthood to look down on us while spending our money.
This is my rant. I've said what I had to say. You can mod me down now.
Heh. I used to be an analyst at one of those "companies." Regardless, this article goes too far in one direction. On one side, people should praise some analysts for sticking to their guns and writing about what really matters. I got massively flamed when I wrote a number of articles in 1999 that said Linux wasn't ready to be used as a mission critical OS.
;). I certainly, however, wouldn't go blaming the analysts, journalists, or editors for the problem entirely. Often the hype (aka 8 billion Linux and Mac articles) is driven by the likes of those who read and love places like /.
Also, remember that the analysts aren't the ones controlling the content and the direction articles get slanted many times. Think about having your work edited by an English major type who still, after reading thousands of articles, doesn't know the acronyms you use. Then think about what happens when this hits the copy desk and gets edited by someone even less competent who works off a style guideline sheet. Then think about the editor in chief who has no desire to do anything but follow the hype.
During 1999, we covered Linux more than we covered Netware, Windows NT/2000, OS/400, AIX, HPUX, or FreeBSD combined -- that was not by my choosing entirely. I liked to give Linux spots where it fit, but it was a common policy to put it in tests that it didn't belong in. That was partially my fault for liking Linux, not sticking to my guns and partially the fault of the editors on high.
I was no paragon of virtue as I did give Linux more than it deserved, but I still didn't like the slant things were taking, so I went into the porn industry (where I still am no paragon of virtue
Think about what the press did for Linux and other free OSes -- sometimes they were right, other times they were biased. Next time the chance for a cool product like Linux to get press comes around try helping the publishers to do a better job of covering it. Many of the problems today with Linux stocks and Linux viability as a mission critical OS were caused by people convincing the press that it was ready and capable of doing much more than it could at the time. The pressures of enthusiasts combined with bad journalism helped lead to the downfall of many publishing shops, Linux companies, and more -- I'm certain we haven't seen the last of it...
i know you're just trying to impress the 3133t linux d00ds but cmon now... don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
It seems to me that while OSDN brings in revenue, there is an unexplored opportunity for another branch to fill exactly the niche that the article is discussing. VA Linux is no longer in the hardware business. That makes them a completely neutral player relative to that business. And they have all that knowledgable talent.
I might be wrong but I doubt that people who were originally drawn to Linux were interested in corporate hype. Isn't this supposed to be a distinguished feature of the movement? And coming off of the 10 year anniversary, Linux doesn't need the evangelism anymore. Heck, the corporations such as IBM and HP will do all the evangelism required.
There is a natural niche for older knowledgable players in any industry, and that's to be lovable curmudgeons. They've already made their mark. They have good reputations. In other words, they're naturals for the type of journalists the article calls for.
Furthermore in order for VA Linux to succeed in their SourceForge endeavor, they have to find a way to reach people outside of the current Slashdot box. Slashdot doesn't complement VA Linux at all when it comes to the image the company needs to sell to people outside the community. As Eric Raymond wrote, the company's survival depends on selling products to people different from Slashdot's audience.
Linux will survive but VA Linux won't unless they do something drastically different from what their competitors offer. VA Linux is selling a product that in essence says that things are broken in current industry. But pure Linux advocacy is incapable of reaching the people that VA Linux needs to reach to make the sale. The message needs to be communicated in a different way, and the article shows a way to try this.
It's good to be strict on yourself and tolerant of others.
Hmm... Are you calling Robert X. Cringely, who uses the PBS web site paid for by my tax dollars to promote a Canadian company for which he sits on the board of directors and is paid to promote the company is a "corporate whore"??? Say it isn't so!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Similarly, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is funded by the Canadian federal government. And, similarly, they've managed an impressive record of impartiality to our government's ineptitude.
The CBC can be very biased. They did absolutely everything in their power to hype the Stockwell Day thing. This is just an observation, I agree with everything else you say (especially about PM Poutine slashing funding).
Does that make me special?
The guy didn't continue to compare the tech-journalism whores to the rest of the journalism whores. For some reason, he seems to think that most other journalists out there are honest and ethical. What a steaming pile of crap that is. How many anti-disney stories run on the ABCnews wires? How often does your local newspaper criticizes its parent or affiliate companies? Even if a jouranlist finds a problem with a parent company or major advertiser, there's no way in hell they'd be allowed to report it. The only reason non-tech-jouranlists get any bonus points is because they're in a field where they can cover things that don't upset their companies and advertisers. It's ridiculously easy to cover a war without stepping on any toes, so what? Tech-journalists are simply in a field where the scope of their coverage is equivalent to the scope of their advertising and holding influences. I still think everyone at CNN and NBC/ABC/CBS/any other company you care to name in 'journalism' are just as much whores as the dumbasses as PC Magazine.
.. dollar.
The simple fact is that journalism controlled by large companies has long since ceased to be objective or worthwhile in any sense. Just because Microsoft and NBC can afford the extra dollars to make their brainwashing and subliminal logo/advertisement branding much more subtle doesn't mean they're better. Just because they get to cover things which won't affect them one way or the other doesn't make them better. The fact of the matter is that when some fresh kid who finds out about the latest impropriety by a sponsor hands a story to their editor, their editor will give them a one-finger salute and files the report right into the incinerator, with an added note that if said fresh kid ever tries to pull any more shit like that he'll be back to copy-editing and filing.
Large companies are just like large governments, they lie, they cheat, they steal, and they cover up. And they feed off the disinterest and lack of enlightenment of the public like a leech who has attached itself to your neck. Just as when you are looking to buy something used, you don't simply blindly trust the seller anymore, you should not trust the large companies out there who want to spoon-feed you the news. You're only going to hear what they want you to hear, and see what they want you to see. And everything you read, or wear, or see on tv is a product begging for your
The solution? Somewhat of it is to read independant press, if you can stand the preachiness and one-sidedness of that, they at least don't have the professional training to skew facts. Beyond that, if you're really interested in something, do your own research. In the world of today all you can trust for sure are your own senses. Believe what you see, what you hear, what you feel, not what someone else shows you and plays for you and tells you to feel.
Am I paranoid? A little too untrusting? Maybe, but then, I'd rather be a little untrusting than too trusting and get fucked in the end.
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare
{rant mode one}
The scary thing is (at least here in the US) almost all news is turning to crap. I can't stand any of the major network evening news. The news magazines are shit on a stick (60 minutes is only dirt on a stick; better, but not great). The worst, though, has to be the local evening news.
Everything news wise here is a "cult of personality." Look at CNN. They had a huge purge because they thought they needed more "household names" to read the news. You know its bad when a news company thinks who's reading the news is more important than the news itself. And if I have to see one more shot of the interviewer "thoughtfully" shaking thier head and scratching thier chin while doing an interview I'm gonna go postal. Its getting to the point now where the the interviewer gets more airtime than the interviewee.
That's why I stick to print and the BBC.
{rant mode zero}
If tech journalists are corporate whores, then VA is guilty fo pimping their own whores with the worst of them. Some of you might recall this little story -- Linux.com's former Editor-In-Chief resigned from his post after VA tried to make him comprimise his professional ethics. In short, VA was going to their "business partners" and saying, "You pay us some money, and we'll make our editorial staff write something favorable about your product...We'll make it look like an unbiased editorial, and we'll pull one over on the whole Linux community in the process."
Real nice.
Anyway, Emmett basically told VA to fuck off, and walked away. And rightfully so--Anyone with half an ounce of professional integrity would have similarly told VA to do the same for trying to lie to the Linux community in the form of "unbiased editorials" that were little more than thinly veiled advertisements purchased by VA's business partners. Personal and professional integrity is worth way more than helping a desparate dot-bomb company postpone their death. You gotta have respect for a guy like that...Doing whats right and doing whats easy are often times two very different things. Emmett chose not to be a whore for VA, and he's doing fine. Can't say the same for VA these days..
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
... you lose alot more potential business than you are aware of by publishing tripe. As I tell the SF Chronicle week after week regarding their "free" daily when you pay for Sunday,
"You have no insights that aren't held by anyone else, why should I pay to read your overly popularized, heavily opinionated stories, when I can get that by speaking with a friend or looking at a website?"
When a truly honest publication appears, I suspect it could make a fat profit. I for one would pay, but I'm not going to pay for some crappy publication where all the stories rally around a single theme or viewpoint(usually whatever the latest PC dictates). BORING, STUPID, and DULL.
The million dollar idea for any one who cares to hear it:
TELL THE TRUTH. SPEAK THE TRUTH. GOD DAMN THE SPONSORS. Anything else is stinky, squishy, and brown. Not worth paying a dime for.
Show me an effect without cause and then I'll believe in chaos.
So...who does /. whore for, and ...are they any good? Know what I mean, nudge,nudge..wink,wink, Say No More!
Slashdot readers aren't Linux whores; they're more like Linux groupies.
Anarchists never rule
What about Jon Katz? Katz has been on the cutting edge of journalism since his days at Wired magazine. He has his fingers on the pulse of America's tech culture, and he's correct about everything, AND he is the most objective journalist I've ever seen!
Katz is the pinnacle of tech journalism, and he got totally ignored by the article. It's just really, really sad. Slashdot readers don't deserve him.
I read slashdot because here I can find the news that interest me - and that matches what You listed very well...
Slashdot is not suppose to make everyone happy and I don't see any indication that they ever intended to... Slashdot is for those who care more about mozilla than internet explorer and more about thinkgeek than amazon... I'm guessing there's lots of news sites that covers the other half of the field, right? I don't really know since I'm happy with slashdot...
In short - I never seen any reason to believe that the slashdot admins wants us to believe that they're telling us everything - quite the opposite! I think it's clear that they have very specific interests and that's the way it should be! Seek other news elsewhere...
/Daniel
-- No, no -- Not that one!
Sorry--the piece just isn't particularly insightful. His high praise for Dan Rather and "hard news" is mostly because that type of "news" is what we are all used to as news. The people cover politicians and other hard news do the same thing he is whinning about. HEADLINE: Senator has affair--my god washington journalists are shocked!!!
., MSNBC regurgitates news wire stories." (Actually I don't think he mentioned MSNBC.)
It however isn't actually an "article" it is a rant. An article covers an issue--his rant is that tech coverage isn't from some vestile virgin agnostic unbiased point of view. His solution--boo hoo "every thing sucks--slashdot sucks, salon is stupid, . .
What he lacks to realize is that all the sites/reporters he mentions are just tools. And as such they should be used for what they are good for as with any such tool. Anybody who blindly believes "tech" journalism or any other is an idiot. Anybody who actually works in "tech" should be able to tell the difference. The stuff he whines about--even slashdot--is written for mass consumption of some sort.
ACK
I'm a journalist working for IDGNet in New Zealand. We IT writers do come in for a lot of crap because of our seemingly loose ethical standards. We accept vendor-paid trips to conferences and events, lunches to "discuss" important issues (like desert), toys to "review" often on long-term basis and so on. Business reporters have a duty to report the truth in an unbiased manner and they often list their investments/involvements with the companies they write about. It IT we tend to miss out that step and not reveal our prejudices and that's wrong. But at the same time I know a lot of reporters who are very principled - more so than some of the plonkers we interview and write about. We dig the dirt out as and where we can - I remember being told it's a journalist's duty to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Don't know if it's true but we are required to be skeptical about as much as we possibly can, to view it from that other angle to see if what we're being told (and sold) stacks up... It's not as simple as reading the press release and calling the people listed and asking them to repeat what they've already said - leave that to TV thanks... online journalism has a long way to go before people will trust it implicitly but then so does newspaper, radio and TV journalism. I think we virtual reporters have the best job in the world - I get paid to play with things and keep up to date on something I care about.. it's fantastic. But there are dangers out there and this rant does point them out quite nicely.
Be skeptical - it's all that stands between us and the PR crap.
I am a leaf on the wind
Byte magazine... upwards of 200pp's of
:(
in depth material.
Popular Science... Used to be a killer magazine
with all kinds of projects and up to date tech info
Nowdays the "up to date" info they have is
usually old tech from 25 years ago that just
became un-classified.
It's ALL advertising now and no substance. *sigh*
I have yet to see a magazine in the last 5 years
that was more content than advertising.
what a rip
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
They have nothing bad to say about Slashdot at all, they just seem to be using Slashdot as an example of a popular advocacy site. All they seem to be saying is that sites that offer a more objective coverage of Linux would be welcome.
Jens Wessling
Wow, that's shocking. Those links look real, could this just be another hoax? If it's real, you better hope the editors don't see it. They'll delete it in order to cover their asses!
I've always had great respect for a few tech journals - Sun Expert (now S/W Expert) has always had excellent articles that seemed relevant to issues we were looking at at the time - maybe because the articles were written by regular users (sys admins, people who did software development for a living) rather than "journalists". "Software Development" seems to have similar integrity. But I guess that's not what this guy was ranting about...
Energy: time to change the picture.
After reading that, there's no way I'm ever visiting this site again. Goodbye.
Every new organization, be it on-line or print or radio or TV, has some "angle" that they are working. This has been going on since the rise of the newspapers.
Remember the "Spanish American War"? This war was manufactered by the major newspapers at the time. This was the time period when the term "Yellow Journalism" came into vogue. It's silly to think that the "new media" would be immune from this sort of thing.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
Methinks Dan Rather is about as objective as Bill Clinton is picky about women. This guy writes as if big media journalists are objective heroes courageously asking hard questions in the foxholes on every topic. That is bullshit. Big media is so full of corporate and political whores that they are at least in the same league as the trade rags. Fox News reported today that the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) have run 179 stories so far on Condit, and only 14 have mentioned his political affiliation. If he were a Republican, I doubt that 14 out of 179 wouldn't mention his party affiliation. In fact, many journalists, including one on C-Span, have fucked up and said that Condit is a Republican in their reports. Some even called him a very conservative Republican!
You need to read Tom's Hardware or Sharky Extreme. Even PC Computing (best for long flights, bird cages and darts). Tom's and Sharky's does the kind of detailed, intensive reporting that most magazines avoid.
Quite true. His article makes alot of sense, now if he had only included
The Register he would have rounded it out nicely. I can see that some posts are trying to take to task his portrayal of Slashdot as a Linux-Centric site. Come on. We all KNOW that this site is devoted to Linux Advocacy before tech journalism. There is nothing wrong with that. The main problem seems to be the rabid "knee jerk" reactions shown by the community in general here. (You only need to look at any story do do with Microsoft, and then read the comments therein.)
The authors comments towards the PC Mag Review are bang on. ZD net has always had a positive bias toward Microsoft products just as (as the author mentions) Macaddict has favorable review of Macs. Not much of a surprise there. The reason that ZD is still around is that it is very business oriented, and it's reader base is very much entrenched in the Microsoft world.
Maybe the net public realized this bias (or, perhaps I should say "lack of news") before the author did though. Myself and my friends frequently visit tech sites that are indepentant. In fact, in the list of independant sites we regularly visit we have noticed no layoffs of staff, or any change in the way they run their websites. If we the readers ignore the biased sites (and thus ignore the advertising) the site (which cannot now make any money sitting in their Aeron chairs) then the website dies.
I have not noticed that many of the "dotcoms" are dissapearing. This is probably because I realized long ago what was a good website, and what was not. I think most of us have.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
ohhh of course that excludes putting a desktop PC on almost every home users desk in the world right ? (if it wasn't for MS-Dos, their would be no PC-as-we-know-it)
Indeed. In fact, your quote of my original posting included the assertion that Microsoft has indeed has some practical uses.
And I will give Microsoft credit where it's due. Microsoft can be at least partially credited for standardizing the Intel x86 architecture, for one thing. IBM may have created it, but it was the clone makers selling it to run MS-DOS that standardized it. For sure, it was a dated kludge of an architecture even when it was introduced in 1981, but the fact that we don't have 18 different popular desktop platforms has terrifically simplified buying a computer. The adoption rate has been increased greatly as a result of Microsoft selling MS-DOS.
On the other hand, Microsoft did not invent Plug and Play. The Amiga had it in 1985, the Mac in 1984 and the TI-99/4 in 1979. They merely managed to make it work (sorta) on the Intel platform that IBM designed and they standardized.
Microsoft did not invent the Internet, did not invent TCP/IP, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, e-mail, etc. Hell, they didn't even invent MS-DOS.
So, what does Microsoft do well? Sell their products and implement standards. Not good standards, usually.
Like VHS winning over Beta, Microsoft usually pushes the technically inferior standard, of its own or someone else's creation. Just on sheer volume. And again, like VHS winning over Beta, a default operating system and platform sure makes it a lot easier to use your computer.
Anyone else here old enough to remember trying to mount DOS diskettes on an Amiga, or Amiga diskettes on a Mac, or Mac diskettes on a TI-99/4A? That's the only part of Microsoft which has been a blessing to the industry.
As with most other people who've got experience with more than one operating system (and, better still, several hardware and CPU platforms), I've seen enough variety of computers to know that Emperor Bill has no clothes.
VHS versus Beta? Beta's still very much alive, thank you. Consumers don't know quality, but TV stations sure do.
small minded ignorant linux smux, gotta love emI've yet to meet anyone with any degree of experience in multiple operating systems who still feels positively about Microsoft. If all you've ever driven is Hyundais, I guess it's pretty hard to understand how someone could like a Plymouth Superbird or a Porsche 959.
And, lemme tell you, Windows 2000 makes a nice daily driver. Disposable, just like a shiny new Hyundai Sonata.
Favorite linux user quote of the decade : "I can't get my modem working" hahahahahahahahahahahaha......True. It's so much better to have similarly incompetent people actually managing to get online, contract every dread e-mail virus known to man, and then continue to pollute *my* webserver (paid for with *my* money) through *their* idiocy, right?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
[Microsoft PR firm Waggener-Edstrom] tries to know editors nearly as well as it knows its own clients. To this end, it keeps a detailed database of media organizations and their employees. Dossiers on individual journalists might include assessments of their coverage of Microsoft and its products.
From http://www.zdnet.com/sp/columns/foley/980805.html
Free software, t-shirts and laptop bags aren't the way positive press coverage is rewarded in high-tech reporting. Access to officials and information is. Over the past few months, my access to top Microsoft brass has been curtailed. When I am "awarded" despite my "bad behavior" with audiences with execs, it's more often than not just for show. I can ask the exact same question of Microsoft that another reporter asks, yet receive a totally different--and usually vapid--answer.
From the article:
So the failure of the Mexican project is as surprising as college kids having unprotected sex in dorm rooms.
Shit! College kids are having unprotected sex in dorm rooms? Where the hell am I when this shit happens... why ain't I part of this group? Ah, fuck it... I'm gonna go recompile the kernel again.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
"Well, if you drop TV dinners over New Guinea, you'll kill people because the food will go bad because they will eat the melted, rotting food long before they getthe microwaves to cook it."
I didn't get it.
If they're eating the food, how is it rotting?
Everything else was pretty smooth, though.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
slashdot is crap anyway. I just click the links to go elsewhere and don't read the garbage that goes along with it, especially the comments. If your reading this, you should think, shouldn't I have something better to do?
IMHO, this highlighrts the need for peer yto peer journalism.
I have, however, MetaModerated, and right now I even have 4 golden mod points myself.
I am a slashdot user. Ya' know what? During the day I use Windows2000... and I've plenty of things to love and hate about it. There's some damn weird things about it, but for the most part, it gets things done... I fit in with my peers and everything...
I'm still against MS, in MANY ways. For example, we are in the process of deploying 900 hundred palms to first time freshmen. I work at USD and one of the software packages we are installing by default is "documents to go"... Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on a Palm!!! The insanity!!! I argued against this, but it made no difference.
People here post info on the web in .doc format... I've personally tracked these people down and told them that they are WRONG!!! PDF, at the least, and please, and HTML, RTF, and .TXT version is in order, also.
And... I'm in the process of converting my departments DB apps into all online apps. Based on CF and Oracle, and I had to fight touth and nail to not have Microsoft in this loop.
While I use and support users on MS products on a daily basis, I WILL find alternatives where possible. I'm happy as hell to be creating something that people here will use for years, that is not based on a microsoft product.
Which brings me to something ON TOPIC. I feel, from my readings, that I am a fairly average /. user. Most people here use MS products in one form or another (and Karma to those who DON'T have to).
My point being, I am happy to have slashdot... it gives me perspective and views I GET NO WHERE ELSE. I keeps my perspective of MS and other cooperate new releases in check... I use MS products, but out of necessity. I want to hear from those who don't.
Slashdot is raw, rouge, and it isn't necessarily resposible journalism, but I won't come here if it was. I don't want canned AP wired shit, I want /.
This place is like IndyMedia or CommonDreams. It's not about balance, it's about desire, love, insatiy, bias, and late night drug induced programming sessions. It's something that IS different, from the style of moderation to the type of stories posted.
That isPick up any tech publication these days, and you'll see this kind of thing. If you really want to see it, though, you should check out the gaming rags.
GamePro is a good one to check if you want to see the antithesis of reporting. They put out a magazine full of screenshots and one or two paragraph previews and reviews. EGM at least tries for some content. (Even if it is very industry-praising.)
In the PC market, if you want to see some really kiss-ass writing, grab any recent copy of PC Gamer. First, check the advertiser's index, and count the number of reviews for each company. Then check the review scores for said companies. See a correlation?
These online "breaking news" sites aren't much better. Blue's News , for instance, is a good place to go if you want to check out the current state of the gaming industry's PR department. I mean really, how many screenshots and developer's journals do they have to pump out before we finally get the point that oh, hey, they might actually be working on that game.. Anyone remember those Tribes 2 screenshots?
Speaking of screenshots, if I see one more "exclusive," I think I'm gonna puke.
VoodooExtreme 's not much better, but at least they don't have ads all over the place.. and they filter out most of the "we just fixed another bug" crap.
Ah well.. c'est la vie..
Glad someone finally spoke up about this. I can't even read the tech press anymore because it's become such a corporate circle jerk.
Proteus7
His whole point is that this particular sector is unethical in an unprecedented degree. If this guy was a real journalist, he would know that this goes on in all kinds of press, and is nothing new.
If he knew anything at all about journalism, he would know that the watergate expose is the exception, and not the rule.
Most industries have a few myths that are generally accepted as truths. Today Ben Stein posted an interesting article on thestreet.com, dissecting the myth about the high longterm yields of the stock market. He showed that it is a myth. However, 99% of financial reporters and analysts accept this myth as pure truth. Does that make reporters of the financial sector crooked, or cold it just be incompetence, and lack of foresight.
Every single industry has similar problems. Do you see many of the car magazines criticizing the industry, and the government for the SUV scandal?
Does body builder magazines publish critical articles on the dangers, and use of steroids?
When's the last time you saw one of the fashion magazones write that Kalvin Klein makes pretentious dozen ware, and DKNY makes ugly clothes?
When's the last time a D.C. newspaper did a deep and dirty expose on congress, senate or white house, that had anything to do with the politics? Nope, they're too busy to dig up sex stories, leaving the pols to do their business unaudited.
So I have to disagree with the author. Yes, there's a lot of crap in tech journalism, but that's not special. Crap journalism has been a readily available commodity for a long time, all over the place.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Ok from the reaction to this article and how discouraged everyone is by the modern "news". We all know there is a major problem the question is how to get around it. Frankly it's not as cut and dry as we'd like to think. It takes journalists to make articles rather good or bad. Someone has to pay for them. Online mags had huge venture capitalists that expect a payoff. It's much easier to take small pay-offs and "whore-out" if you will to make a modest initial return then make a hardhitting nonbias reporting and hope your company doesn't fall through the cracks before it becomes so popular that companies will pay for any reviews not just favorable ones. In other words you have to have a firm, establish company in comand of the market in order to have ethics on what your reporting, else you don't make enough money on normal advertising and are squashed by debts. What can we do?
My solution is to have a comunity site like slashdot only based upon moderating the article as opposed to discussing it. Where we see these comments it would be more of:
Red Herring line 3 para 2
he said blah blah blah that doesn't have todo with yada yada yada.
Thus as a comunity we define the actual integrity of articles. Of course I might be dreaming but you never know.
is like going to Bill Clinton for marital counseling and/or babysitting.
is like going to Phillip Morris executives for help to quit smoking.
C'mon people. If the journalists of this web site actually think of themselves as journalists, then I'm fucking George Lucas because I download movies off the net.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Slashdot is to journalism as a McNugget is to chicken.
Of course, thats just my opinion and I'm sure Katz thinks otherwise.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
But overall, this was a great article, and I liked realitycheck's comment that ./ is a forum, not journalism, while the guilty parties actually pretend to be journalists, which doesn't make them stupid, although it does make them whores.
Then again, I like vehement opinions delivered accurately and with both eloquence and profanity.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Of course. Well, tech journalists are usually going to write for tech periodicals, which sell advertising to tech firms. Predictably, that makes them about as impartial as Car and Driver magazine.
This is exactly the same thought I had. As with automobile "journalists," tech "journalists" are dependent on the companies they "report" on to send them the products to "report" on. If they want to get the next round of products to review, the "journalists" will give semi-favorable reviews to even the crappiest products. In the automobile industry, the only "journalists" who give truly bad reviews are the Car Talk guys who (rightfully) haven't given a good review to a GM product in 10+ years and haven't had a free GM vehicle to review in that time either.
Sure, tech and auto journalists can give you the basic numbers (benchmark tests/0-60 times) and a general impression of the reviewed item but to expect an impartial review from either type of "journalist" is a bit of a stretch.
People that bite the hand that feeds them don't get fed very often. How else can you explain the plethora of positive Microsoft press?!
Eric
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
Speaking of mission critical OS and all...can I be in one of the porn movies you are involved with?
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
jesus christ. that site was good a few years ago. they are just as bad as the rest of the damn industry. the entire site is one big damn gif animation. it disgusts me. i understand the need to make money... but if thats the price you pay to sell out, then why sell out? we are all clever people.. we can easily think of ways to make money than ANNOYING our damn audience. thanks.
Preach on, brother!
-- My comment is above.
Frankly, I'm surprised that you harsh on ./ editorial staff while ignoring the frequent technical disruptions that plague it. To me, they are both like watching a certain bartender at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge cough in his hand and then use the same hand to haul ice out of a tub into a glass that will shortly hold a drink. It's distasteful and horrible to look at, but if you are a regular, you can sense the goatse and you stick to the bottled beverages.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
The dot-com failures were more than a failure of tech journalism. They were a national failure.
Even after the dot-coms failed, the press did not bother to analyze what happened. There was a little analysis, but nothing in depth, either in the tech press or the business press.
The failures were a huge tragic loss of money and time. But the mood was, oh well, on to something else.
Bush's education improvements were
Just because Linux is a free OS does not make journalist advocacy any less unethical. Call them "non-profit whores" if you must. But no one is clean in this business. No one.
Advocacy.
Shilling.
While the author may think the racy expletives lend an edge to the article, it probably won't be read by enough people for mainstream processing of the message.
Ironically, this story at CNN from May 1999 has an interesting quote:
"I don't think there'll be a formation of [an IT] union until the bubble bursts -- [when] the Dow [Jones Industrial Average] drops, and IPOs sink," said Bill Lessard, a seven-year denizen of Silicon Alley. In December, he co-founded a Web site for disgruntled technologists called NetSlaves (www.netslaves.com).
So, a NetSlaves co-founder predicted the failure of the dot coms 2 years ago [psychic?], and a web site for disgruntled technologists publishes a rant about poor technical journalist ethics (mostly aimed at it's competition) by what appears to be a disgruntled technical journalist. Pretty fringe stuff actually.
Mr. Gilliard's article bespeaks a lot of technical journalism, especially about the article he wrote which takes no different approach than the journalists he blasts.
Now on the Slashdot matter; he clearly doesn't get it, as many don't. This is not journalism here. It's a fuckin' free-for-all intermixed with decent technical and other ecclectic discussions occasionally. Don't critique it as a journalism site: it's not. It won't ever be.
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
Sure, slashdot is gonna be biased towards Linux, the authors seem to like it, some of them use perl, their site uses many free or OS tools.
don't forget where slashdot came from. it started out of hobby. and i can probably make a safe assumption by saying that from the early days of slashdot to the present, microsoft or some of those other companies slashdot does not favor had little influence. and as far as SDot being whores of VA? I don;t see it, really. as long as there are sites like fuckedcompany or others, the people can keep their watchful eye on VA elsewhere. plus, on a whole stories about AOL leaking user data are much more important (and affect much more ppl) than VA letting go of employees or whatever 'scandelous' news can be found of them.
take SD for what it is. a hobby turned job by a group of people with their own interests. if it wasn't for them we may not have heard of many of the cool things we read about often here (like that hand held atari, various alternative OSs, etc.).
Yeah, most tech-jouralism consists of towing the corporate line in a futile quest for goodies. It fuckin' blows.
You have 'evangelists' who give only one one side of any issue and if the truth gets bent, well, so what? Eh?
AOL buys NetScape at a fire sale and M$'s lawyers declare than the domain is "vibrant and alive." Yeah. With maggots and blow-flies feeding off the corpse of another ex-competitor.
The software field needs a few "Deep Throats" in Redmond, Cupertino and everywhere else you get suck-dick regurgication of press releases. I want to see a Ralph Nader with a huge hard-on bashing these lying cock-suckers in the head with cinder-blocks.
All we get to read are articles of faith written by the uneducated and underpaid to deceive, obfuscate and distort the qualifications of the pageant contestants. "She got great measurements does't she?" Yeah. I'm supposed to LIKE a girl with three tits and multiple rows teeth like a shark's? That blows but she won't... She'd better not ever try.
Tech manuals aren't much better than hard-copy of the man pages. Choke and puke until you feel like a baby bird. You end up with a sour taste in your mouth (not your own) and screw all left in your wallet at $39.95 to fuck knows how much a pop, for some out-dated hunk of dead tree.
Nobody writes how to USE anything because they don't have a clue what any crap is used for or by whom or how or when and certainly not why. They're liberal arts majors and write on Underwood manual typewriters. (I KNOW some okay?)
I'm going to start a wiki on my site dedicated to everything that's WRONG with this shit. I'll flame the shit out of every ass-hole who cobbles some crap together without a clue as to what its for of how its used or why.
They'll hate me. I don't give a crap.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Why would anyone waste mod points on you either way? Without listing any specifics about why you dislike all those theories you just come off as whiny (or a really bad troll). Perhaps some of them are voodoo, but why do YOU think so?
You might as well be saying that we'd be all better off eating pickles for breakfast, for all the interest you raise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ben Stein dissected no myths, he merely made a few superficial comments on the idea. It was an opinion piece which Stein acknowledged as such - why are you misrepresenting it so?
Louis Armstrong, trumpet player and Jazz pioneer, died yesterday morning in his Los Angeles home. He was 71. Armstrong's last performance was at James Madison University's Convocation Center on March 24, 2001, where he played to a standing room only 5,000. Armstrong was helped off the stage by his wife of 20 years, and he later told a reporter for the campus newspaper "I don't know how much longer I can do this. This may be one of my last shows." His final song was his biggest hit, Hello Dolly! He is survived by his wife, 3 children and 6 grandchildren.
I was just curious to know more about your example of "Car and Driver" magazine not being impartial. I've read C/D for quite a while, and have found that this magazine contains the most fair and unbiased, uninfluenced views in automotive journalism. I don't even know of any publication that I've felt comes close to their level or journalistic integrity. They tend to apologize for false statements in the magazine when written to, and even print extremely criticizing letters from readers in every issue.
As an example, there was a small-car comparo a few months back where they slammed Toyota, one of their largest advertisers, calling their new Echo: "Something entirely new from Toyota: a big mistake."
I just don't see why you would have used C/D as your example, why not Motor Trend, who can't say anything bad about any car, and is roughly equivalent to PC Magazine in this regard.
This is honestly just curiousity, I don't mean to flame, and my apologies to the parents of idiot moderators who will denounce this as offtopic, even though the SUBJECT already says so.
Having written some articles in a past life for a now defunct technical/multi-media journal, I remember getting in particularly hot water. Something to do with PC MIDI cards, one in particular that was fresh, revolutionary, offered SMPTE, and didn't cut corners like some other companies.
... and my head on a stick.
... then died an unnoticed death.
And though in my review, I was technically correct, and even though I did NOT mention any competitors, UBETCHA, one of these companies, particularly the one which took out several half page ads, demanded from the editors a retraction
Needless to say, the magazine didn't ask me to write any further articles. Needless to say, as other, competent writers were also stifled for telling the truth, that the magazine languished in limbo for almost a year
It was fun to write articles, but I noticed alot of authors in it for the conventions and parties that came along with the press pass. I also began to notice several other editors who sucked up to advertising clients, even when the technology begged otherwise.
I also noticed that many such magazines are short-lived.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
It's a story about and article about online journalism and we're commenting on it. And someone else will moderate those comments and anybody can moderate those moderations.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Interesting, when I do a Google Search for "Open Source Journalism" and Slashdot I get a few dozen hits. One of which leads to the OSDN Media Kit which describes Slashdot as
Now you can argue whether Slashdot's editorials are actually Open Source or not but to claim that CmdrTaco and crew providing you with news and their opinions on the news isn't journalism is quite frankly, rather incorrect.
Journalism in general is dead.
It was replaced by "entertainment" and "advocacy" a long time asgo.
In an entire 4 year "Journbalism degree" my alma mater had not one section of one course on "Journalism ethics."
Journalism is dead, greed and stupidity killed it. Its enterred a mass grave with such things as "politics" and "community spirit".
So it goes.
Let us isolate some of his specific allegations and see if they are, on balance, true:
Linux skepticism is long overdue, but the missionary ideologues jump on your back and kick you in the balls. The kind of independent tech journalism needed to cover Linux doesn't exist.
If Oracle could run MS into the ground today, they would do it. Taking sides in such a battle is a core betrayal of everything journalism should stand for.
Consumer Reports has the right idea, but they are so stodgy that they are nearly useless to the average consumer.
Take Windows ME. What a piece of crash-daily crap. ME was a horrible OS. It barely worked...
Many dotmags were as ethically challenged as a Mexican policeman.
Now the San Jose Mercury News ... is run by some of the most gutless people ever to call themselves journalists
The reality is that everyone had their heads up their asses because they thought they were going to be rich.
Hell, there would be no Microsoft without the feds investing trillions in technology.
Do these statements sound like neutral and detached coverage that he extolls? Given the hyperbole, are his conclusions likely to be sound?
His point seems to be: The one lesson that all these online rags never got is that if you are a pimp today, when things get shitty, people will turn on you.
What perhaps he should explain is why the market place sometimes punishes the publications he calls unreliable and sometimes it doesn't.
And I can't let this overwrought assertion pass: Journalism is a noble profession when done right. And people get killed doing it every year.
Nobody gets killed writing about technology either truthfully and not. The worst that happens is that they get their backs jumped on or kicked in the balls by Linux zealots, who are a notoriously mean and ornery bunch.
Those nasty tech journals have dragged the precious name of journalism through the mud.
Despite the fact that that inane sock puppets get segments on morning news shows.
Despite the fact that this is America's second favorite newspaper.
Despite the fact that this paper has any chance of gaining respectability, and has lost circulation because the mainstream media now covers what it's been covering for years.
Despite the fact that this guy is let anywhere near a camera, even though he is blatenly biased and seems to have fabricated data in one of his reports.
Look. If you're reading slashdot to get an unbiased opinion of the world you live in, you need to have your head examined. I read it to find out when Linus has another baby or what the latest crazy thing that ESR or RMS has said. I believe that for various reasons, a lot of tech journals have very little in the way of ethics, and that software and hardware reviews are often favorablewhen the shouldn't be.
OTOH, I challenge you to pick up Cosmopolitan and find an article taht says "Such-and-such lip moisturiser is crap" or "Most designer fashions aren't worth the extra money." Why? Partly ad revenues, and partly that plugging products sells magazines, and panning them doesn't. Do you think that car magazines would sell vey well if they had "2002: A mediocre year for cars" splashed on the front cover?
The tech magazine boom has opened up a lot of information to the average reader, but this has come at a price. We all have to evaluate the truthfulness or slant of what we read. This isn't a new problem, in fact it's a very old problem Now there's just more of it.
If Slashdot ever became *RELEVANT* again, I'd ditch my troll nick in a flash and be back in the game. Hell, I basically hope most of the Open Source/Free Software world implodes for that exact reason. :-(
/. crowd should be against.
It used to be cool to discuss the neat developments, technolgies, and possibilites.
The the militancy kicked in and it's downright Nazi-like here now. Free Software ueber alles!
I don't even bother using my "real" login for real replies, because moderation is such a lot of *&^^%$#@! sh*t. It's censorship and useless - things the
But alas, these days you suck the Linux/Free Software dick, or get modded down to -1...
-- Trolled...you WILL be === Yoda
Spare the flaming, but the article makes quit a few good points. As much as Linux is a decent OS for coders, it will never become mainstream (as it is right now). The averge Joe could never understand it. Most users have trouble understanding Windoze as it is. What the public needs is an OS with a good GUI (i shutter) combined with a stable, functional OS.
Treating Slashdot as though it was a Linux version of ZDNet misses the whole point as far as I'm concerned as a rhetorician.
Slashdot is a FORUM. Ranting about all the MS loving talking heads like Dvorak or the Salon whores is perfectly justified though petty and borish. But when you extend the definition of journalism to include a forum like Slashdot that is closer to a newsgroup than an on-line magazine you've passed into incoherent rambling and I am forced to virtually bitch slap you back into reality.
He brings up some very good points -- and the sort of backhand at Slashdot isn't anything that hasn't been said and nodded at by everyone here, and yeah, I'm sure we'll all get over it. Where he runs into a problem, though, is in his amusing assertion that the "legitimate" media [characterization is mine, not a quote] have and adhere to these standards of ethics. That's laughable. I wish I could find the references now, but I don't remember whether it was in the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Francisco Bay Guardian that I read about the publishing policy at the Los Angeles Times a few years ago -- where the publisher overruled the editorial staff and declared that no articles that were antagonistic to the advertisers would be run.
It's true of every news organ that the subscription fees (if any) do not even come close to financing the business. News outlets, whether they're radio, television, print, or online, are not actually in business for the reader. It's the same old story, guys: Follow the Money. The people who are actually making these "news" organs into profitable businesses are the advertisers, and don't think that the editorial and publishing staffs don't know this. They know exactly who their customers are. The customers are the advertisers. And their product is their subscriber base. The way they manufacture their product is to spew forth infotainment designed to keep their product's infamously short attention span focused on the medium long enough to score an ad impression.
The only part of this article that I really disagree with is his holier-than-thou attitude. Yeah right, offline media have ethics. Go watch The Insider and look at how 60 Minutes -- big guns in traditional media, I'd say -- sucked up to tobacco.
If you're in journalism, you're a whore. So what? We're mostly not down on prostitution around here, so long as we get our share. Here's fifty bucks; suck on this.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
If your definition of "maintain" is "moronically install stuff until the hard drive is full, then re-install Windows when I start having problems with the OS" and your definition of maintaining Linux is "hacking the kernel not from source, but with a hex editor" then yeah, Windows is much easier to maintain.
I'm not sure who you're trying to impress...I guess the "smart" people who switched back to Windows when they couldn't get Red Hat to work on their Presarios. Sad for them, sad for you. No, no, don't learn more about Linux and certainly don't help get support for your machines; dump Linux for being "crap" and go with the platform that "r00lz". j00r such l33t d00dZ!
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
It doesn't take a "million workarounds" or "130 IQ"... it's called Mandrake people, It's Linux for average people. It's probably easier to install than Windows.
Go Lakers!
though they are pretty well on the ball with Slashdot, they aren't with LinUx, and this seems to be nothing more than a raspberry to all the companies who are out of money. "Look at us stick our tongues out to all of you "journalists" now on the welfare line." Not very professional if you ask me, but then who would expect that from a "journalist" who uses the word "fucking" and "ass" in the same "news piece." I like "qoutes."
________________________________________________
That's because three years ago (before the tech slump), there was tons of computer news to harvest. Now we have to reach. As a result, we recap what other people are reporting, and repost stories accidentally.
We do have to work on our article submission system. There needs to be some sort of volunteer "slashdot council" who screens the material. It would be better than the people who run the weblog whose decisions are guided by what they think will keep their readers.
As for the moderation? I think it is a fair system, in that a better system would be far more complex (and require a rewrite of many parts of slashcode).
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
please, looks sell, marketers know that, manufactures know that, the unbelievable thing is that it took them damn near 20 years to realize we didn't all want beige computers. I mean, damn, look at the success of iMac, and pcmods and that will prove it. I can hear them patting their backs from here.
________________________________________________
"Why would you respect any news outlet that has reporters, not editorialists, who are anti- or pro- anything? I thought their job was to report"
HUH?
there is no sentient being alive without some form of bias....
in the anti-MS crowd (since you included MaryJoFoley), there are journalists who seemed to tell it straight, that is with an obvious anti-MS bias, but who seemed to basically report facts, and journalists (Nicholas Petreley, for just one example) who seem to turn every bit of reporting into "Get M$!"
i respect Nicholas and his Linux work enormously, think he a great contributor to the community, but when he starts in on M$, i turn off, because he is so rabidly (read "irrationally") anti-M$, a flamer par excellence......
Jesse Berst, when at "Anchor Desk", never had a problem with "Here's what I think Company X did that was wrong and why"
Straight reportage is virtually impossible in the tech community, because readers want to know more than just the straight facts, they want some analysis included with the feature.
There is no way anyone can avoid bias in reportage, intelligent human beings will naturally use their intelligence to come to conclusions and those conclusions will color their future judgements about that subject. This bias just needs to up front and understood.
That was my point about CNET. Their reportage is straightforward enough. It's what they don't cover and what they don't provide analysis on. Or who they choose to do a particular analysis that can in a very subtle fashion "steer" the story
That's how the major media filters everything, by subtle steering in a given direction and maintaining the pretense that their is such a thing as "objective journalism".
when ***EVERYTHING*** in reportage is just a question of SPIN, how much and what direction
"Objective Journalism" has all the reality of; The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, "My First Mortgage is Assumable", "It's only a cold sore." and "My reproductive facilitator will not conclude in your nutritive access subsystem."
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
The author states "Despite these concerns, PC Magazine gave Windows ME a four out of five rating. The users who rated it gave it a 1 out of five rating. Even with the grumpy gus factor, the original review should have been much less laudatory based on the words in the review." I agree, and very often a writer will create a review which accurately reflects the product. But in our USA Today mentality in everything we read, the text of the review is far less important than the coveted stars.
I have written a number of reviews for industry magazines, issuing fair reviews and 3 or even 2 out of 5 stars, only to have an editor "suggest" that the rating should be higher. If a magazine can give a company the ability to say "5 stars from Magazine X," then both the reviewed and the magazine win as the reviewed company's marketing arm swings into action, requesting reprints of articles and full page ad space to accompany favorable reviews.
The 'impartial' industry analysts are no better. Forrester, Gartner, Giga, et al base their rankings not on the best product, but on who is going to provide them with the most collateral press and money.
But at the end of the day, THERE IS NO IMPARTIAL JOURNALISM. Disney owns ABC - how many unfavorable Disney stories will appear on that network. Time-Warner/AOL owns CNN. Moneyed interests control even the PBS entries. As long as magazines sell ad space, television has commercials, and corporations own both the creation of content, the content itself, and the delivery of the content, we will need to continue to read between the lines.
When eurodisney was doing crappy a while ago (AFAIK they still are) they spent a lot of advertising money. You know what they did? They bought an entire issue of a German magazine. Nothing to do with high tech, but every article in the magazine was about disney.
Next time you watch the news, and you see something that doesn't really seem like news ask yourself the following questions:
The magazines, all of them, know who their customers are: The advertisers. If you're dealing with a for profit publication that advertises, you can pretty much throw out the notion of integrity.
If you're dealing with a group of people that have a common interest they will certainly be biased.
'Nuff said.
I agree 100% with this article, is a big dose of reality
I dunno, I kinda liked your sig better when it was "Unix users?". Old skool and all.
Heh. You know, actually, that's not what it was meant to say, at all. I changed it mostly because most people were misreading it - there's only so much you can do in a .sig.
"UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised. Savages."
It was getting me flamed. Lots of it was the predictable (and funny!) "I was robbed at birth, don't make fun" stuff. You know, balding 23-year-olds who watch anime and blame their social maladjustment on the absence of a piece of skin. (Sorry if I just described anyone, this wasn't meant to be offensive.)
But the majority of the flames were coming from people who were reading the .sig differently from the way I intended. One day, my e-mail box was full of people calling me names for implying that there was anything better than UNIX. Of course, UNIX and its derivatives (Linux) are without question the best general purpose operating system for servers and Big Iron.
The old sig was a play on "UNIX" sounding like "eunuchs". Eunuchs, of course, are castrated men.
Note the question mark after UNIX in the original .sig. The question, from the unseen (and unquoted) other speaker could have been any number of things... "Do they know UNIX?", "Can they write a shell script in UNIX?", "Does microsoft.com use UNIX webservers?"...
So, it was more a suggestion of a lack of civility among those who would approve of the [clearing throat with disdain] other operating system which claims to be ready for the big times. You know, the one which evolved from desktop to datacenter as a mish-mash of patched-on features, versus the alternatives which had their origins on robust time-sharing systems.
Unfortunately, while I thought I'd worded it in such a way that everyone would get it (and my test audience of 4 people *did* get it), I discovered the bug. You know, the kind that requires a quick patch. For the longest time, though, I thought the hate messages were from people who consider microsoft.os.windows.advocacy to be a well-informed bunch, or people who were unhappy that they couldn't accumulate smegma. The first message I got from someone literate enough to actually describe his contempt, I changed the .sig and explained what I'd been meaning.
When the Code Red bug came along, it seemed like a great opportunity to plug my website. Nothing quite so controversial there, I merely added the "IIS Users?" link to it, and there it is.
(Oh boy, am I gonna take a karma hit for what's coming...)
Finally, a more personal explanation, lest you find the latter half of my .sig to be offensive. I went to a drunken kegger party with a bunch of U of M engineering students in Ann Arbor MI. As the token Canadian, I was expected to bring a good Canadian beer - "You know, Lawrence, not the formulaic Molson and Labatt stuff!". I brought a 24 of a beer whose translated French name means "The Damned". It's a little strong, so it wasn't very popular with anyone but me. 18 of them later, and my ?third? ?fourth? bathroom break of the evening, it happened.
To paraphrase the line from There's Something About Mary, I managed to get the beans above the frank.
Nothing sobers you up faster than that. Legend has it that the scream could be heard as far away as State Street.
A stumble from the dorms to the hospital ensued, and though the doctor was able to extricate the tissue from the zipper on my Levis, it was totalled. As totalled as a Honda Civic at a monster truck show. As shredded as a garbage bag caught in a snowblower. Fortunately, the contents were unscathed, a circumcision was performed, and my only regret is that I didn't have that accident sooner.
So, as one of the few who has actually had sex both with and without a foreskin, I can assure you that all you miss out on is having a dick which looks like the business end of an anteater. Sex is actually better *after* than before, which basically erases all rational arguments against the procedure. I'm quite a proponent now (privacy and advocacy seldom go hand in hand). And each of the five years since, I've sent a Hannukah card to the good Doc who did it.
If you want more details on before and after sexual and daily living comparisons to sate any questions, e-mail me.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
And of course they didn't show up, it's HTML. What was I thinking. Bitch slap for me too.
Well, there are already 300 comments but I don't think anyone has addressed this yet so here goes:
(from the article)
Try and find an agnostic view of Linux or MacOS. The sites which cover them are in the business of preaching to the converted. While Mac evangelism is as silly as worshiping a dead Sci-fi writer, Linux evangelism seems to expect everyone to rely on the belief of miracles with no further evidence needed.
The author complains nobody is agnostic about macs & linux. Two sentences later, he is taking a very non-agnostic view himself. I think when he says he wishes people would take an "agnostic" view about platforms he doesn't like, he means they should agree with him. And he's not agnostic about it at all, obviously.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Take a look at this. It claims to be a "Report" but is obviously whoring for va-linux, who happens to own Newsforge.
Initially it tries to be critical but towards the end we get this wonderful commercial for sourceforge.
Detailed, objective benchmarking has its place especially since most industry wide benchmarks such as megahertz have become ill relevant. However, more consideration should be placed on an analysis of the technology itself.
For example, do we really need to buy a new version of windows every two years when little has been added to the Os? What is the real impact of piracy in the software business and are corporations at the head of the distribution channel? What are the major trends in the industry and can they be related to pass trends that failed (For example, wintv == XBOX)?
Also one thing that I believe the article misses is that journalism can have its place as a promotional endeavor when the stuff it promotes are things of quality and innovation and not the products of an advertiser or friend.Like A new type of game that doesn't fit into one of Pc Gamers five categories or pointing out that while a new Gforce3 may be able to give you 120fps in quake3 it is impossible to tell the difference over 60 fps and that perhaps buying a older cheaper card would be better since you are not paying a premium for new technology.
I got the impression that the this guys defination of whore was anyone who attempted to promote a product.
Linux's popularity gave birth to many benefits to the IT world, but at the same time spawned a bastard child that is religious fervor.
Religious angles in any type of stories creates a problematic burden on the editorial process. You can't really deny it completely, yet at the same time you can't encourage it and get swept up yourself in the rhetoric. The most neutral way to cover this is to just downplay it and acknowledge its existence, never veering from the facts.
However, the difficulty of such discipline coupled with the sheer force of the Linux zealots resulted in more damage to Linux than anything the Microserfs have done.
I've been following the progress of Linux from 1994. The warmth, thoughtfulness and sincerity that the Linux community exuded at the time was real, and they helped to make real milestones.
Equally real are the Linux converts turned preachers who will spit venom at anyone who criticizes anything related to Linux. The ridiculously sudden rise and then even a more sudden downfall of Linux companies are testimonies of the proliferation of the zealots.
Yesterday in the Dutch newspaper 'NRC Handelsblad' (about the IBM-linux deal with NYSE): "The Finnish company Linux..."
:)
I mean... if you don't have a clue as a reporter, stay away from the keyboard... please..
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
"Most tech journalists are corporate whores!"
This is news? Jesus, I knew this back in the days of "Compute!," back when they still published BASIC programs on paper. Bias towards one's advertisers is nothing new. Hell, this isn't even a restriction on tech journalists, as most mainstream journalists are also corporate whores.
The fact of the matter is that if you piss off the people who buy your advertising, there isn't a very high likelihood that they'll continue to buy the advertising that pays your bills. Using Dan Rather and the white house as an example of this is horrible. Of course the White House never paid Dan Rather's wages. That was done by Charmin.
Basically, all that's happened in this article is that yet another idiot has finally figured out what they should have known from the age of 10 - that the media is a big fucking sham and that none of it is to be believed. Get over it already and take it all with a big lump of salt.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
c't magazine is one of the largest computer magazines in Germany (or maybe the largest? whatever!) and I don't think they are influenced by the advertisements. So it's possible.
OTOH, I do know that it's difficult. We have a heap of badly-done magazines here as well that are heavily biased towards MS. It makes me appreciate c't only more...
To quote Steve Gilliard, from the site...
/. is simply traffic-whoring. Well let's ban all critical analysis right now! The multiple references to PC Magazine were obviously an attempt to get listed in Google searches by clueless newbies too.
I never said Slashdot was neutral. Neither is News Forge. They are advocates. My question was why are there no neutral sites.
According to the previous comment, merely mentioning
slashdot is not journalism and it never claimed to be.
News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. It might not be journalism, but it is biased Tech News. Which is the point.
Even Slashdot.
.com domain.
Ninety-nine percent of these journo's and news editors ARE a bunch of corporate whores.
I told them - the authorities know solution to trademark and domain problems. The jouro's help them, by keeping this fact hidden.
Big business are breaking 'unfair competition' laws - they abuse the power of trademarks on the Internet.
The United States Department of Commerce are helping them - violating the First Amendment.
I believe ICANN, WIPO and US DoC must be corrupt - they know the solution.
They help corporations like Sun Microsystems claim world rights to the word 'SUN'.
The solution is at WIPO.org.uk - please visit.
Quote from NY Times link above: Sun Makes Claims on Domain Names
But among the names on the list are generic terms like "enterprise" and "ultra" -- and for that matter, "sun" -- that could be claimed by other businesses. Indeed, a main reason for introducing new extensions, referred to as top-level domains, is to increase the pool of names available to individuals and businesses and to relieve crowding in the
I think that this CNET article asks some probing questions of a Microsoft high muckety muck.
It keeps getting worse. Try to find really negative reviews in a current issue. Even sites like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware find more flaws in the reviewed products. The only rants they manage to publish are about competing media, like the one about price comparison websites (afraid of losing some advertising Marks? It's too bad that some other large magazine publishers in Germany already have price comparison websites and heise doesn't ...). I used to buy every issue, but stopped about 2 years ago.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
grandmother on it" neglecting to mention they have 130 IQ's and are computer professionals. Oops.
130 doesn't seem like that high an IQ to me. What IS the average anyway?
You have publications who have clearly taken
a side and then stick to it.
Which is how most magazine style journalism is written, and most online tech news sites are some sort of magazine-style journalism. True, it may be an every day type magazine, but it's still magazine style writing. In the case of 'SLASHDOT' which is more of a FORUM than a news site, the people have some control over the direction of the site. True of course that the final decision makers are CmdrTaco, the current moderators, and the OSDN.
The reality is that the tech companies and their employees are selfish beasts.
and you my friend are somehow better than everyone else? Kind of preachy and self-rightous now aren't we?
Oh, iMacs are so
pretty, and Ghandi would have used one.
Well, for a single mom with two kids, pretty is not on the agenda. It could look like it escaped from the mind of R.L. Stine if it worked. Cheap and
functional are the things which should count here, not pretty and cool. Besides, what are we, 16 year olds? Cool is for people with nearly unlimited
disposable incomes
Now I myself am not a fan of the Macintosh computer, however if I remember properly, one can get a pretty decent IMAC for a sub 1000$US price can't they?
Many dotmags were as ethically challenged as a Mexican policeman.
There sure do seem like there are a lot of comments reffering to people of Mexican decent throughout this that are not good ones and are kind of slanderous....
I guess that this guy is right in saying that Tech Journalism is in fact laid back, but it's also magazine journalism style. Like all publications it's going to have to take SOME side, and most likely it is going to take one of the ones that is going to make money. I think that this author should think differently before he slanders the ENTIRE INDUSTRY about what he wants to write. To me it seems like he is whining and complaining just like the people that he is whining and complaining about in the first part of his story.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
From Section 5 of the article:
The one thing that a reader expects is for you to be honest. (Speaking of the media outlets.)
This doesn't quite cover everything. It might be the FIRST thing that readers expect, but as anyone who has taken Journalism 101 would know, your readers also expect:
1) Timely reporting or, if you are not a daily/weekly publication, new angles on older topics.
2) An attempt to be objective. To expect every reporter to be completely unbiased is rather naive - reporters are people, people have biases and are subjective by nature. This is different from the concept of 'honesty' discussed in the article! You can be completely honest about the fact that your magazine receives its add money from M$ or Apple or whoever and still be unobjective simply because you didn't do your research.
3) Fairness and a willingness to mention and discuss (if only briefly) both sides to the story. Personally I think that this causes bigger problems for most media outlets (online & other) than biases installed by their advertizers. It just takes longer to do a story if you have to research both sides and lots of reporters seem to take the (lazy, easy, whatever) way out!
This list can go on and on. Of course the article is right that honesty but realistically a newspaper can lose trust through dishonesty and then just gain it back as long as they fall on their sword later. Don't think so? How about using the Washington Post as an example:
Do you remember the Janet Cooke fiasco of 1981 when the Pulizer prize committee had to rescind the award given to a Washington Post reporter? All she did was wrote a series of fake stories about a nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict, called "Jimmy's World", all of which appeared on the front page of the Post. Journalistic failings and scandals don't come much bigger than this: a reporter decided to just fake an entire series in one of the largest newspapers in the country, her editors didn't check up on her, the Pulizer committee didn't catch anything - it was only much later that the story started to fall apart. The Post got (rightfully) hammered for being dishonest and not having enough internal checks to prevent this crap from happening and they moved on. Do folks today still care or remember? Nah.
I'd say this is just my $.02, but this is long enough that it's probably more like my $2.00....
Cheers.
We do have to work on our article submission system. There needs to be some sort of volunteer "slashdot council" who screens the material.
You mean like Kuro5hin, where YOU choose the stories.
Yes, I'm anticipating the obligatory jokes about Pseudo_Intellectual
Will I retire or break 10K?
When's the last time a D.C. newspaper did a deep and dirty expose on congress, senate or white house, that had anything to do with the politics? Nope, they're too busy to dig up sex stories, leaving the pols to do their business unaudited.
You probably meant s/too busy to dig up/too busy digging up/, but case in point: many thought of the conflict in Kosovo as a coverup for Clinton's sex scandals. Turns out the sex scandals were themselves a coverup; without them, Congress would never have got away with passing the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by a freaking voice vote.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In the late 1980s and first few years of the 1990s, UNIX was on its way out. There was a feeling of "this was good, but it is looking pretty bad compared to the way windowed home computer OSes, especially the Mac and Amiga, have been developing." Then two things happened: (1) a free UNIX-like OS appeared, and (2) those home computer OSes either disappeared (Amiga) or severely lost focus (Mac, and later Windows 95). "Linux is the greatest OS ever!" was not one of the reasons.
What has happened in the last ten years is that some people have deluded themselves into thinking that Linux is the end-all, be-all of operating systems, and not just UNIX-variant (I realize some purists hate it when Linux is compared to UNIX, but let's be realistic about it). This does not mean that Linux is bad. It simply means that Linux should not be immune to criticism, and criticism should not be met with a wall of defensiveness. Heck, there's some good open source software out there, and there's also quite a bit from angry college students without any software engineering experience. Certainly that latter shouldn't be hailed as brilliant simply because it is free as in speech.
90% of the time journalists parrot some press release.
Why do you think the news in just about any area (especially tech and politics) is one sided?
I get a press release from source A. I rewrite/summarize the press release and put it in a newspaper. Have I even attempted to get two or three outside sources (pro and con) to discuss/comment on it? Usually No.
Lazy journalists.
Slashdot rant aside, he does raise a valid point, and it goes further than just tech journalism. It seems the object of modern journalists is not to present an unbiased report, but rather one that seems unbiased. Consider this: After the 1992 presidential election, journalists were polled regarding their voting preference. 92% responded that they voted for Bill Clinton. Now think about the ramifications of such an overwhelming preference for one candidate. All of the issues surrounding that political faction (abortion, religion, taxes, social programs, government spending, etc...)are now extremely lopsided. This effect is passed on to joe sixpack, who gets his ideas and beliefs from the screen that he stares at for 2-3 hours per day...The results of this can be seen in such events as the OJ trial, the government budget shutdown a few years back, and the total media circus of this past election...
Someone criticizes Slashdot.
:p
Slashdot links to them.
Slashdot Slashdots them.
They both go broke paying for the bandwidth consumed and have a dead site from all of the visitors.
Instant cure for bad publicity.
(joking)
Do you like German cars?
Yes, in fact I am sure that is the case. 'Pheh' comes from a the Greek 'Phehkebab' which loosely translates to 'a whole lot of disappointments on a stick and with some tzaziki'. In the future, please make an effort to spell your words of disgust correctly.
Agreed. The article holds mainstream news journalism up in high regard, but I would argue it is even worse than tech journalism. If you've spent any time at all abroad you'll understand.
/. especially recently. Until someone starts a better service, lets do what we can and moderate this one better.
All of our news coverage is horribly American-centric. A cat getting rescued from a tree in some suburb always beats out global conflicts, civil wars, or humanitarian disasters. When a foriegn story is aired, loaded terms such as "terrorist" or "gunman" are used without much reason or explanation. Reporters are always live at photo-op places at inopportune times when investigative reporting would be better done elsewhere. Sound-bites are the order of the day.
Yes, tech journalism could be better. But all journalism should be better. Journalism is biased sound-bites because that's what consumers want. We should constantly demand and reward higher standards. Yes, I have been disappointed with
Lies about crimes
Steve gilliard is suffering from the BLUB paradox. Read this article by Paul Graham for a good discussion of BLUB.
t
http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/sec.tx
...in journalism (tech or otherwise), despite the current state of affairs.
It's unfortunate this discussion has devolved into a bunch of flames about the least interesting part of this article (the rant on /.) because the question of media whoredom is far more interesting. The most fascinating part of such pimping of advertisers products is that it doesn't serve the advertisers. After the first time a reader buys a lousy product after seeing an ad and a review in a magazine, he will assume all products advertised there are just as worthless.
An excellent recent example can be found in David Coursey's column about Blackcomb, MS's first truly .Net OS release. Coursey explains that Blackcomb will be delayed, suggesting: "[A]s Blackcomb waits, there's talk that Microsoft will add a refresher release of Windows XP (supposedly code-named Longhorn) in the 2003 time frame, as a means of rolling out some new technology before the Blackcomb release."
The ZDNet pimp continues with the warning, "Microsoft should consider this carefully, as its most trouble-prone Windows release came to be in just this manner. Windows Me, it should be remembered, was an interim release brought out after Windows XP was delayed for a year. Win Me seems to have caused at least as many problems as it solved. Perhaps Microsoft will remember this before it updates Windows XP just because it needs a revenue hit while Blackcomb is delayed."
Now go to ZDNet's reviews of Windows ME and try to find anything that let readers know it was the "most trouble-prone Windows release" which "caused at least as many problems as it solved." It just isn't there in the reviews. It seems that ZDNet was only willing to tell this to readers because Windows XP is now out, so its advertiser is now urging users to update from WinME to something else.
It is quite disturbing how often this is the case. When I started my company, I was not in a position to test systems myself so I read the industry press which seemed to be in complete agreement that NT 4.0 was going to finally be a stable network operating system from Microsoft and that Access was an excellent database for small business. I put all my money in a sales program written with Access and came very close to losing it all -- my business, all my money, even my house.
This led me to be suspicious of the tech press on NT, which was fortunate because they didn't admit 4.0 was a dog until 5.0 (or Win 2000, if you prefer) came out actually delivering what the industry press said 4.0 had. We chose Linux for our web server, which worked so well that we are now using Linux as our network OS.
I now get my Windows news from ArsTechnica, although there is a bit of a bias even there.
If you want to understand the reasons for pimping in tech press, compare the journals written for doctors with those written for lawyers. Doctors are used to getting everything for free, including their professional publications. Lawyers are used to paying for everything and passing it along (in "library use" charges) to their clients. The result is that lawyers' journals are highly informative, while doctors' journals (not JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine, but periodicals directed specifically to practicing physicians in various specialties like Cap/Cities Medical News Group) imagine themselves to be captives of the drug companies which buy most of their advertising space.
I say "imagine" because the drug companies are neither well served by nor particularly interested in magazines which deceive doctors in their interest. The editors, who are often corporate whores without the ability to conceive of a drug company which is not just as unethical as they are, just assume they are. A case in point is the reporting on the side effects of early birth-control pills:
The reporters sent to professional gatherings where the side effects were announced by researchers wrote stories for their editors' OB-GYN magazines. The drug companies were not trying to hide these results. Often their researchers were the ones doing the announcing. Often they had come up with alternatives which were safer, which they wanted the subscribers to these magazines to prescribe to their patients. But the editors steadfastly refused to publish the information on the grounds that side effects might scare people from using drug company products.
The long-term result was that more people were harmed by side effects, birth-control pills got a bad name at precisely the time when they had become much more safe. The corrupt editors had actually harmed drug-company profits, even though the companies themselves had never asked for the dishonest coverage.
Now the question should be: How much of the current tech downturn is the result of tech-media pimps failing to serve their advertisers by failing to serve their readers?
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Just two examples, from one issue of a PC magazine, that makes my blood boil.
I bought this mag, because it had a review of the notebook that I was seriously considering purchasing at the time (Dell Inspiron 8000).
I'll leave the best till last and start with Pg.79, "Platypus QikDRIVE2":
David Lin, is reviewing a PCI card that can hold up to 2Gb of standard PC100 ECC SDRAM in a battery backed setup that interfaces to the PC through a built in SCSI controller as a super quick hard drive (which does not support booting, I guess due to a limited SCSI design. No BIOS?).
Now I agree, that this product could be neato in some situations, like having OS' load really fast, if it were not so brain dead that it cannot boot.
Bear in mind, that as reviewed, this product is $6,000 for 1Gb of battery backed RAM accessable as a SCSI disk. At the moment, in Sydney I can purchase 1Gb of non ECC PC133 SDRAM for $288 inc tax.
He sees the value of this product like this...
"VERDICT Expensive but satisfying new lease of life on I/O bottlenecks, particularly for high volume transaction servers."
It even supports "Free BSDi".
"Where the QikDRIVE is designed to be most effective is in application specific-instances where rapid I/O is required."
He then makes out that this is great for a Win9x machine so you can place your swap file on it! To "scientifically" prove the worth of this product, he compares a Windows 2000 machine with only 128Mb RAM, with and without the severely hampered 1Gb SDRAM, finds that it delivers a 266 times improvement for 2kb transactions, 40 times for 64k streaming write transactions and over 100 times improvement for web server transactions.
I wish I could have been there to pull that RAM off the card and put it into the bloody motherboard to see his results and face then! When the swap file should hardly be required, and his scientific results lurch upwards even more now that this RAM is no longer slowed by about 10 times by the PCI bus and more still by SCSI itself, which is designed to improve inherently slow disks rather than impact the performance of extremely fast (by comparison) RAM.
He then continues with a file copy test, that yields seemingly amazing results (to him at least)! ; ) He copies 120Mb worth of compressed files from the hard disk (ATA/66) to the QikDRIVE in 5 seconds, yielding a 24Mb/s transfer. Wow he thinks with this, "While these sorts of benchmark readings can be pie in the sky lies, just a simple copy and paste exercise demonstrates the speed of the QikDRIVE2".
Ahhhh, Dave, you just witnessed the speed of your hard drive, not the speed of the QikDRIVE. And whats more, did you previously compare a "cut and paste" from and to the same hard drive to compare? An IDE drive at that!?!?!
If he tried a raw read from the QikDRIVE, he may have seen around 80Mb/s or so. Hell, I can copy 120Mb from one drive to another in Linux (not comparing OS', merely what I use) in 5 seconds also!
It amuzes me that it says in the verdict, that this is a "new lease of life on I/O bottlenecks", whilst describing 1Gb of SDRAM, restrained by the PCI bottleneck and slowed by SCSI!
At the end, in typical UK mag style, they give it some completely meaningless ratings. In this case 6 exclamation marks out of 6 for performance! 5/6 for features, 5/6 for value for money and 5/6 overall.
HUH!? 5/6 for value for money, for 1Gb SDRAM costing SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS!? How much was the bloody battery!?
"What a difference a bundle of RAM on a PCI card can make to a server!" ; )
And now here's something I hope you'll really like, Pg.180, "Duplex conundrum revisited Just how much bandwidth should you be getting through your network?":
Now this guy is very aptly described (by the editor?) near a little B&W photo of himself as, "Steve Cassidy Can be found pretending he knows what he's doing with networks, from San Tropez to a factory in Dallas. He can be reached at scassidy@pcauthority.com.au"
Our mate Steve seems to also have trouble understanding the ins and outs of bottlenecks and throughput, but that does'nt stop him from belittling his users who are "curiously unqualified to comment upon"! Hey? Because they are just "users", they are not qualified to speak about this dickheads badly performing network? Even though they can most likely speak comparatively.
I can't be bothered to quote too much of this guys crap, but he's having some troubles with 100Mbit full-duplex with IPX/Netware. He watches how the machines set to half-duplex perform to his trained eye, faster than the F-D PC's whilst going through a Netware login script. "This is the type of skill that network managers develop without even knowing that it sets them apart from the users they're trying to support", God I'm going to vomit soon.
"it's a bit like knowing enough about modems that you can hear a bad X2 or V.90 entrain sequence, even while the machine is trying to connect." Thats retrain Steve. My mother knows when her modem does'nt complete it's connect sequence!
"When `the network goes slow' it requires considerable people-management skill to explain to them whats going on", ahh better yet, why not use some technical skill to fix the network?
"When someone asked me recently just what throughput he should expect from a 100Mbits/sec LAN, I was struck somewhat dumb. Should I tell him what I was seeing here, or at those clients who spent their hard-earned money on HP managed hubs? Might I be revealing rather too much if I came up with a throughput number that was lower than his?" Why not give him the math and then explain ethernet and ipx protocol overhead coming into play on your shared bandwidth hubs.
"In the end, I decided to publish and be damned, and presented him the numbers I see from my regular tape backup jobs, using a wide range of kit in all manner of odd network configurations". Sounds like weird science to me!
"A basic Pentium/166 sitting inside a very venerable Compaq ProLiant backing up to DLT manages just over 90Mb per minute, working locally - any limitation caused by the slow CPU is offset by the fact that the communication is local and it's still at the lower end of the range of tape backup speeds." Slow CPU? Huh? This guys rekons that a Pentium/166 is starts to show it's limits at around 12Mbits/sec? This guy is an "authority" in computer science networking, bottlenecks and throughput? Hell Steve, the PCI bus is 1064Mbit/sec! I mean fuck, my old 340Mb Western Digital Caviar EIDE drive can transfer data at that rate with my i486DX-33, not that the CPU is relevant in this case or yours!
"Most modern kit can manage to hit the 95Mb to 110Mb per minute bracket when backing up over a gigabyte of stuff", the tape drives perhaps, but thats not a measure of 100Mbit capabilities.
" So, the short answer is that a 100Mb file moving to or from a server on a 100Mbits/sec LAN should move in around a minute. Any slower and you should suspect that something's hogging your bandwidth, or disracting the processors at either end, or your ethernet cards have a personality clash with your hub" Ahh haaa, oh-kay. 100Mbit=13.3Mbit, yeah, makes complete sense. On my 100Mbit network, 100Mbytes copies, across a dedicated connection around a bit under 10 seconds.
"Don't worry about how the maths can lead from what should be 6 billion bits in 60 seconds down to one hundred million eight-bit bytes moving in the same period - this is the real world and those are real-world numbers, recorded over about three months of nights in backup log files (I must confess that I have these systems set to print out at job-end, and junior staff encouraged to file those print-outs in antedilivian ring-binders.) Lots of you evidently want to be able to attach practical numbers to the very smoke-and-mirrors estimates from the industry, so there's a practical figure to start thinking about." Can you beleive this moron? I think he actually thinks he is a networking guru!
I love this one... "In a spirit of perversity, I installed the Netgear dual-Gigabit Ethernet 618 switch here and dropped the matching copper gigabit cards into my ancient dual-Pentium Pro/200 ALR server. On paper, even though the ALR has LVD disks, there should have been no headroom available from those poor old CPU's to perk up LAN performance in the gigabit environment - how could a system bus running at 66MHz cope with data travelling at one billion bits/sec? " Take your MHz and multiply by bus width Steve. A 33MHz PCI bus runs that quick!
But this takes the cake!... "But it is quicker: trust me, I'm a nerd."
Morons like this, should NOT be writing about technical aspects of anything! If someone was learning about this stuff and did'nt know any better, they might beleive the crap that comes from this guy, who rekons he's a bit of a propeller head.
A typical moron working in IT who's trying to fool everyone that he knows his shit and everyone else around him does not. The scarey thing is, that this arsehole probably has all the ridiculous certification that the idiotic industry holds in such high regard.
Morons hiring morons.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Most of what I'm going to say, somebody else said first. That's because I'm a journalist at heart. There is very little fact checking here, because I fancy myself a tech journalist. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." (Hassan i Sabbah?) I didn't even know that applied to journalism as much as it does to politics and religion, but after working a bit in the field and doing a bunch of reading I found that journalism is exactly like reality. It is flawed, fuzzy, and hard to define.
/. with rubbish is much more fun.
When was the last time you read a story online where there were more than two sources? It has been awhile hasn't it? That is becase 90% of the stories you read are press releases anyway. No need to check facts, it's a press release. If there is a story with some hard-hitting quote, the quote usually comes from an anonymous source. Is it because the sources are cowards, or the writers and editors are weak? It is probably the latter.
Slashdot is a journalistic endeavor. It brings information to its readers. The only differences are that its readers can respond instantly to what they read, and the rag divulges its sources to complete the story. Slashdot must stick to the same standards as print journalists: accuracy, accuracy, accuracy!
It's a crappy job. Be accurate, but be aware that there is no truth. That's why we drink so much. That is also why they teach us in school to get 10 sources for every story, and back up every fact with two sources. How many "tech journalists" went to school to ply their trade, I wonder.
What troubles me most about tech journalism is that the writing just sucks. It consists of bad spelling, poor editing, rampant use of the passive voice, and the deliberate mis-use of grammar in an attempt so make a point. It fails. Click to view a satirical portrayal of what I describe.
This is much more important. If you want to understand a journalist's mentality in the face of a crumbling infrastructure, read The rum diary By Hunter S. Thompson (who by the way would make a great tech journalist: paranoid, incoherent, greedy). ISBN: 0684856476
Journalists have low self esteem. We hide it by trying to become pundits. But really all we have is good words and no real aim to apply them. Otherwise we'd be politicians.
We're the pilot fish scavenging the scraps of big business. They throw us parties because they know we'll come. We come because we know there will be booze, and maybe girls. The writing is just the price we have to pay to get the goods.
Anyway I'm supposed to be writing a book right now, but it's all fact and no fabrication (and no parties). Needless to say bombarding
This, was one of the most interesting comments about a sig that I have read in a long time... interesting or disgusting at points, Im not sure which really.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
It's not like it's a paean to the goodness of M$. Is
I am no fan of Gates & co. I just thought my fellow geeks would actually be interested in discussing the successor to Windoze XP. Apparently the
Facinating. I read it all wrong, assuming that you were one of those old VMS or AS/400 farts that was still shaking his head that that half-done New Jersey Unix shit had actually taken over the world. (Given that there is something savage and primal about Unix that seems to attract it's users, like some postmodern recasting of the frontier mythology inside of a VT100, with Linux being the raping and pillaging of the '49 gold rush that concluded that epoc, with everyone finding the disillusionment that the old octopus of WASP capital [Microsoft in this analogy] had emerged stronger and more entrenched than before.)
Anyway, welcome to the club.
One bit of trivia about ZDnet (at least) that Gilliard seems to have missed is that ZDLabs also does outsourced QA for the tech companies that send them products that they review. Often the same people that do the QA do the technical evaluations of the products.
That's right, the "reviewers" of products on ZDNet are actually EMPLOYEES of the companies whose products they review.
For some reason, the ZDNet folks don't disclose this bit of info.