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When a Tech 'Breakthrough' Isn't Really
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "'More than 8,600 press releases have been issued over the years with "breakthrough" in the headline, a majority of them by computer and electronics companies,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. He examines whether hyperbole and hype has robbed the term of much of its meaning, focusing on a recently announced 'breakthrough' by Intel involving optical computing. From the article: 'Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous.'"
I was so excited when I RTFA that I immediately had to post a comment saying that this is simply the BEST article that I have ever read on Slashdot and it will probably be seen as THE breakthrough in human-to-human communications that we have all been waiting for.
I am not exaggerating
When it has two wheels and will cause cities to be redesigned.
The word 'breakthrough' is definitely used too much.
I'm always skeptical when it's used in a present tense. For example, "The Segway is a breakthrough in transportation technology."
When the Segway first premiered, I heard this. Yet, it has been anything but a 'breakthrough' nor has it changed my life in anyway (with the exception of some humor at the Segway's expense).
My point is that you can only really use the term in the past tense when something really did signal a breakthrough. Like the invention of solid state transistors. At the time, did they really realize how big it was? Maybe, but that's not always the case.
Breakthroughs are also sometimes relative, for instance Srgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band might have been a musical breakthrough for rock but mean little to computer scientists. Likewise, proving Fermat's last theorem might have been a breakthrough for mathematics but meant little or nothing to a musician.
So, in the end, I think 'breakthrough' is used prematurely but it also is used relative to fields a lot. I don't think the author bothered to look at the thousands of uses of the word to see if it was followed by "for physicists" or "for medicine" in which case they might have been genuine breakthroughs in that sense. The difficult breakthroughs are the ones that do affect everyone (like the transistor or radio) but they are becoming harder to pinpoint as many inventions these days aren't actual inventions but instead integration of already existing inventions to form a new utility for those devices.
My work here is dung.
To an MBA, a "breakthrough" is anything that will make them more money (or in the case of marketing, anything that they *hope* will make them more money).
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Most people read mainstream news stories, not press releases directly. So as long as reporters do their job and use the term "breakthrough" appropriately it won't lose its meaning.
Developers: We can use your help.
Breakthrough: any significant or sudden advance, development, achievement, or increase, as in scientific knowledge or diplomacy, that removes a barrier to progress.
As long as there are barriers to progress (and they never seem to run out) we will have breakthroughs. As the saying goes: "If the Shoe Fits..."
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
The word "breakthrough" is actually no breakthrough itself. For years companies have used keywords to attract attention in consummer aspects. It was done years ago when companies used the word "Extreme" in absolutely everything that was being released to the public. (I wonder where Billy got his inspiration for W!ndows XP). By the end of the 90s everyone was using words like "Millenium" (LOL) and numbers like 2000; Example: "PruductName 2000! Out this Fall". And so the word "breakthrough" is nothing more than a marketing decision for some companies today.
The FA is stating that we overuse the "breakthrough" word to advertize a tech that is still years away from market, and of course editors are happy to show us another great story.
As technology helps make new technology, it is expected for progress to hasten. So major milestones are reached more often and more quickly. Using press releases as a litmus test to measure claims of "breakthroughs" is a little much to ask, IMO. I expect a press release to be biased and grandiose - there's no surprise there. So while maybe the term "breakthrough" is being used a little liberally by corporations looking for investment, I fully expect to see major milestones reached at an accelerating pace.
There are two sides to this...
First off, more breakthroughs than ever are being made these days. Our technological advances are being made at an almost "silly" rate. We have made so many more in the past century than in the millenium that preceeded it. Why? Better education, greater body of knowledge, and of course computing doesn't hurt. So yes, there are alot of breakthroughts taking place.
However, the term is also used as marketing hype. It still has a buzz to it after all these years of being misused, so I don't think companies will stop using it as a marketing scheme.
In reference to IBM in the article... they certainly use the term "breakthrough", and much of what they do deserves recognition as such as they have pushed the envelope with their R&D. Of course Intel has also done a fantastic job. Some of what these companies do isn't necessary ground breaking work, as it has been done before. So I find it difficult to determine if the term should be used still since the work has been done before, but the difference is that when one of these large companies does it, it is so much more likely to succeed.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
If the headline "This isn't a breakthrough" were used, it'd still show up in the list of headlines with the word breakthrough, right? :)
Banu
True visionaries and engineers like Dave Packard and Will Hewlett would be puking their guts out after seeing the sort of MBA bullshit that some of the most respectable high technology companies have resorted to (including their own) as of late. And with their open-door policy, everyone would have been able to see their partially digested lunch all over the place.
According to one of my college instructor, most technologies have been around for at least ten years before the public becomes aware of it. The internet is a great example of a technology developed in 1969 that didn't become widely available to the public until 1995. So a technological breakthrough is all relative.
The problem is that the word "breakthrough" has more than one meaning.
1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A military offensive that penetrates an enemy's lines of defense.
3. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.
(From www.answers.com)
Press release writers can legitimately use the word to mean the first definition (a solution to a problem), while implying the third (emotive, hyperbolic) definition even if it doesn't actually mean it. As such, it is a very useful word to make your company look like it is leaping ahead of the competition and deserving of funding, whereas a press release which sticks to practical unemotive language and doesn't "big-up" the company is wasting an opportunity to generate interest and investment.
No wonder it's an overused word - it makes your company money.
This is the wrong crowd to preach that to ("isn't linux awesomely innovative and new? UNIX? no, never heard of it")
I actually do research in optical computing, but the problems aren't unique to that field. I'm always getting pressured to use words/phrases like "novel", "highly accurate", "unique", etc (basically just non quantitative positive adjectives) to make the titles of my talks or publications more sexy or provocative.
It's annoying becuase they are just noise words. If something is really unique, a breakthrough, etc, those adjectives will be applied to your product (research, idea technology, choose your noun here) by others. Your job as an engineer or scientist should be to report the facts on your (noun here) in an unbiased and neutral fashion, giving meaningful benchmark figures regarding what it allows you to do. It's okay to focus on the strengths, but provide quantitative data, not meaningless adjectives and buzzwords. Fortunately more and more journals are stating not to use such meaningless drivel in their guidelines.
In my research, whenever I see phrases like "good/excellent agreement with...", instead of "this shows a standard deviation of X%", I automatically assume someone is just putting a shine on lame results. This prejudice is pretty accurate, but of course not 100% so. I'd estimate 90% or so.
The problem of course is the overly strong influence marketing has on us. Richard Feynman had a pretty good rant about this stuff. We really need to start punishing people/institutions for insulting our intelligence with this noise. He was more concerned with advertising campaigns which insult our intelligence, but the same trend has broadened itself.
In the end, I think it's important we become more cognisant, thus more resistant, to transparent marketing techniques. When an institution is singing its own praises, be skeptical.
On a tangent, if someone tells you "this is a quantum leap in XXX!", reply "so you mean to say it's the smallest possible change you can make?"
Not just the word "Breakthrough", but "Controversial", I hear that EVERY STPID EPISODE OF BONES THAT FOX MAKES. "Next week, on a controversial new Bones."
It's like, what? Did you run out of otherwise reasonably descriptive words to describe this episode, because you use it so much, I can't hardly imagine that "Bones" would be watched by anyone unless immediately after they feel an intense need to call their best friend and discuss at length the moral issues involved with creating a 3D CG representation of a dead person based on the bones. I mean, clay worked fine, but when you have to solve crimes on a deadline, I suppose CG would let you get it done faster.
This reminds me actually of in College, I had a friend, and we talked about how there are certain words that only advertisers use. Like "Hearty", when was the last time you heard anything but soup in a commercial described as "Hearty"?
"MMm... this Captain Crunch is really hearty today, Mom!"
No, it doesn't happen. Advertising people just learned some derived language of English I think. (My apologies to anyone on Slashdot who might be an advertising person, but... come on, hopefully you aren't coming up with this stupid stuff.)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
So we will be getting more and more "breakthroughs" measured by last century's scientific performance, every day.
Here for a description of the Technological Singularity in Wikipedia.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Can we also add "Revolutionary" to the list?
Gluing InP on top of silicon may be crafty but it is just sweeping the dust under the rug... not much better then moulding the two together into same epoxy blob. It seriously lacks ease of manufacturability.
Making an entirely silicon (planar technology) coherent light source would be completely another story.
Besides, can you seriously power other devices over fiber? Oh, I tought so...
The reporters talk to researchers. Naturally, the researchers are excited about what they're doing, and the vision they have of what could happen. I think the reporters get caught up in that.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
A breakthrough is
1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.
While optical computing is a neato thing and it will probably make a splash in the computer world by enabling high performance systems to basically do things faster, is it really going to change the way we do computing? I mean, over the years, we have changed the way we do computing from a hardware standpoint. Things have advanced, technologies have come and gone and we have seen great strides in manufacturing techniques that have given us very small systems that you can carry in your pocket. But have we really changed the way we do the computing or are we just advancing hardware?
Optical computing isn't really a breakthrough in the sense that it will make such a difference that we will have to rethink how we program systems to utilize this technology the best that we can. Then again, much of the things being listed as breakthroughs really aren't.
What would it take to make a breakthrough? Well, cars that drive themselves safely and reliably. That would be a breakthrough because it would defintly change habits for people. Cheap, affordable space travel would be a breakthrough because it would change how we traverse the globe and even open space. Those are just a couple of things that would make an impact that could be considered a breakthrough. They would not only change the way we do things but they would also progress technology by making it available to a general consumer. That means profit margins which bring dollars for R&D to continually improve the technology.
Optical computing is, again, a nice advancement but a breakthough, unlikely. It's not changing how we do something, it's just offering a different approach and it won't advance anything until it gets cheaper but, by then, it'll be eclipsed by the next "breakthrough". In the same line of thought, the biggest blunder of a breakthrough in recent history is the Segway. While yeah it is a neat idea, it's not going to change anything. It amounts to nothing more than a scooter with a gyroscope in it and if the idea was so great to begin with, wouldn't we be using scooters already? There are just inherent problems with the idea because there are sacrifices and concessions that need to be made just to make the statement that the Segway will change cities forever. Where is the incentive to make that change? A Segway isn't a breakthrough because it's answering a question that nobody asked.
Cure cancer, that's a breakthrough. Solve traffic congestion, big deal. It will be a temporary fix until more people get Segways and just move the congestion to a different area. Along the same lines, find a way to use a different sepectrum of light to build a laser that at least triples the density of media storage space, that's a breakthrough. It changed everything from how we watch movies to how we store pictures of little Jimmy and little Sally on thier first day of school. It also advanced technology forcing the rest of the industry to find ways to use that technology to the best of its ability. It also changed other industries because now people have the ability to store large amounts of data. That changed everything from DVD players to digital cameras and we are seeing gear that is not afraid to use large amounts of space to provide much more content because there is media out there that can handle it. Finding a way to make a computer run faster, that's not necessarily a breakthrough. All the major chip manufacturers have been doing that for decades. Using optics is just a different way, not a breakthrough.
Imagine it is 1947...
"A Bell spokesman says the development of the transistor is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world electronic circuity can be made with germanium. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before personal computing becomes ubiquitous.'"
The real breakthroughs do not have any direct, short-term effect on our lives. Instead, they happen in a theoretical setting and they eventually lead to giant shifts in real world technology. Apple moving to a 60GB iPod which is slighty smaller is not a breakthrough. But a practical way to build optical circuitry? That sounds like one of the few times the word truly should be applied.
I gues nowadays more breakthroughs are needed to produce something new...
"As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
Thoreau, of course, was a technologist and business entrepreneur whose process for combining clay with graphite was a breakthrough in the development of pencil "lead..."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Isn't "hype" just an abbreviation of "hyperbole" ? In which case, the phrase "hyperbole and hype" is just unnecessarily re-stating the same thing again more than once without need in a tautological fashion.
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of abuse of the Queen's English going on. To some extent it's understandable. The world has more "newspapers" (real and virtual) than ever before, but stuff is happening at pretty much the same rate as ever; which means that, in order to fill more papers, the news being reported is going to be less interesting. But people are only interested in headlines and soundbites, so everything has to be exaggerated to make it sound more interesting.
One thing I have noticed is that in English, we put the modifier before the modified word (adjective before noun, adverb before verb &c.) and we also put the given name before the family name. Therefore, the second word of a phrase tends to be the important one. Repeat a phrase such as "binge drinking" or "illegal immigrant" often enough, and pretty soon the second word will start automatically bringing to mind the first -- in other words, when you hear "drinking" you will associate it with "binge drinking", when you hear "immigrant" you will think "illegal immigrant" and so on.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It's the same as "Thriller" for a movie.
It used to mean that, well, a movie "thrilled."
It's become so overused now that it can only be taken to mean a genre of movie, and not as an adjective describing it.
-------------
Web Thinkers Congregate here
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
There are some genuine breakthroughs amongst those 8000 press releases:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ah/dish.gif
People seems to use too many words without really considering what they are, what they mean and where they come from. Breakthrough is just one more example.
Borrowing from another example, lets go back to the solid state transistors. At the time, there was a barrier for semiconductor based technology. Transistors made it possible to (here we go) break through that barrier. Not just some concept, or exciting tecnology or invention.
I don't know how much of a barrier this (borrowing again) semiconductor laser from Intel is breaking. I for one have been hearing about second order optical polymers for quite a few years (10+ years at least), and even saw some in action. It really didn't break any real barriers into optical computing (we need 3rd order optical polymers for that) so, again, I'm a little skeptic about this being a "breakthrough". What king of "new horizons" does it open for us ? Yes, it made things easier, for sure, but a breakthrough ? Please, show me the barrier.
I, for one, has stopped hoping reporters and PR people to use the language correctly a long time ago. Which is really said. You expect IT people to use computers (their tool of work) correctly.
morcego
How many times have I seen people describe themselves as "intelligent", "successful", "ambitious", "funny", "creative", "outgoing", "easy going"? And here's the best part: on dating platforms, they're all 'looking for bf/gf just like me'.
Puh lease.
If you have a problem that lots of people are working on, and nobody is making consistent progress solving, and then someone does, that person has broken through a developmental bottleneck. That's a breakthrough. But, like the evolution/creation fight over what 'theory' means, there's a popular-advertising/research fight over what a 'breakthrough' is, insofar as they happen all the time, at an increasing rate, as technology advances, but the word is still regarded by the public as being something monumental. It IS monumental, to the people in that very specific field of study, but since there are so many more areas of active research these days, it is much less monumental to the world as a whole than a breakthrough was 50 years ago, or 100.
Languages change, culture changes, connotations of individual words change. Otherwise I would have to drive a chariot -- sorry, coegi plaustrum -- to work every day.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Doesn't everyone tend to just skim past this kind of verbal garbage these days? Even non-marketing/advertising people talk like that now. Sometimes, I think it is a company directive to use certain language in describing the company's product or processes.
I remember LOL at a radio interview a few years ago of a Microsoft Office project manager talking about making changes to their document format, ostensibly to make improvements, but mostly just to keep OpenOffice users from opening word documents. The quote: "We want to be able continue to innovate our document format." Holy hyperbole! Now "innovate" means merely "improve" or, more accurately here, "change"?
"I forgot my mantra."
A journalist is complaining about hyperbole?
Remember the Maine.
Yeah. There's a long list of words that have been completely raped by marketing types:
Usage (for "use")
Impact (for "affect")
Innovate (for "gratuitously change")
Open (meaning "published, but unusable")
I'd keep going, but my increased keyboard usage has adversely impacted my ability to innovate.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Every one of those 8400 breakthroughs got front page billing.
On slashdot, breakthroughs are lauded no matter how trivial. It is considered a breakthrough for the space elevator when they reach a consensus on what muzak will be playing over the elevators speakers.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Amen for hilarious. I remember buying a Michael Moore book that was described all over the back cover as hilarious and generally the biggest barrel of laughs ever. (I'm not American, I had no idea who the fuck he is. Must be some humourist, I figured.) Turned out it was non-stop bitter political whine that, far from getting me rolling on the floor laughing, just got tiresome after a while. Like whine usually does.
Now I don't know, maybe he even has a point. I'm not an American, so I can't tell. I can even relate to some of his peeves with the Bush administration, as it's basically the same things that got us in the rest of the world worried. But hilarious? Hmm...
I figure, either it was a retarded editor, or the Americans are _really_ a cheerful and easily amused folk if that counts as hilarious. Or maybe over there the meaning of "hilarious" has changed to mean something completely different. To this day, I have no idea which. Maybe an American wants to enlighten me.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I know the companies need to get word out about their projects to get investments, but you get jaded when they say these technologies are coming, but 3 years later you look back and it never happened. Give me news on things that are really happening, not what might happen.
Actually in my opinion we haven't really made much progress in the recent decade at all.
1942 manhattan project
1945 first a-bomb, + hiroshima & nagasaki
1947 transistor invented
1949 Comet (passenger jet) Unveiled
1951 electricity from nuclear power plant
1952 US Airforce orders B52
1955 U2 Tested
1956 first O/S
1957 silicon wafer, FORTRAN, sputnik
1958-59 first IC, ALGOL, LISP
1961 VTOL, first man in space, CTSS
1962 spacewar computer game
1964 computer mouse & windows
1968 Douglas Engelbart demos the above, hypertext, collaborative computing and more
1969 feb Jumbo jet (747) first flight
1969 apr concorde first Mach 2 passenger jet first flight
1969 apr QE 2 ship first voyage
1969 Jul first man on moon
1969 Multics
1971 intel 4004
1972 C
1973 skylab, ethernet, UNIX, work on TCP/IP started
1974 Altair and Scelbi
1975 apollo & soyuz dock
1976 viking landings on Mars, Apple I, ethernet launched
1977 voyager 2 launched, Apple II, commodore
1978 visicalc, vi
1979 wordstar
1980 TCP/IP RFCs
1981 space shuttle, IBM PC
1982 BSD gets TCP/IP
1983 Apple Lisa
1983 "Unix Review compares six Unix-compatibles for IBM PCs"
1983 GNU project
1984 Apple Mac, X Windows
1985 Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Microsoft Windows
#Stagnation starts
1986 chernobyl, challenger blow up
1988 stealth fighter
1989 stealth bomber
1990 WWW (hypertext revisited)
1991 Linux started (UNIX rehash)
1992 Windows NT, NetBSD, FreeBSD
1993 Mosaic
1994 webcrawler
1995 Windows 95, Altavista
1996 pathfinder mars rover/lander (viking rehash)
1997 google (good but not really a great leap )
2003 spirit+opportunity mars rovers
Looking at the past 10-20 years I can say there really hasn't been as many leaps. Most are just rehashes of the same thing done before. Some not actually done better just more popular. Linux is just UNIX revisited. Just go look at the video of Douglas Engelbart's demo in 1968 and you'll see we haven't really made that many advances in the computing fields.
As for aerospace:
All NASA can do is try to stop the space shuttles from blowing up.
They're talking about going to the Moon again (so 1960s). Then there was all that fuss about sending probes to mars. Oh wow, like wasn't that done in 1976?
Then there's the supersonic jetliner and big passenger jet... Heck the 747 design is still being used to this day (and it works pretty well too).
Only thing new so far is the space tourism innovation by the Russians. Where on a regular schedule anyone reasonably fit and healthy with USD20 million bucks can go to space.
Automobile tech? No breakthroughs. Now if there's practical gasoline/hydrocarbon fuel cell+filter that'll be a breakthrough.
Nuclear fusion/fission? No significant progress at all.
They've already spent billions and decades on hot fusion with not much to show for it, maybe they should just spend a bit more time and money investigating the cold fusion stuff - even if it isn't fusion, there's evidence that it could be an interesting phenomena. Or just spend some billions to make fission better.
AI has been a field for bullshit artists.
But medical tech has had some advances. You can now actually implement brain augmentation, telepathy and telekinesis with current communications/computing and medical technology. But the DMCA, RIAA and MPAA etc may hold the progress back in that field (they'll want a penny for your^H^H^H^H_their_ thoughts or more). And then there's the threat of lawsuits of course.
Still TB and many other diseases seem to be threatening to make a comeback, so it's not been that great either.
Lifespans are up mainly because infant mortality is down, and ER treatment is much better.
Now, tell me of something really innovative in the past 10 years. No hypersonic jetliner to be seen. When the Concorde came out it was definitely not a rehash. The first man on the moon in 1969 was not
They just don't make genuine breakthroughs like they used to.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Articles with buzzwords like "breakthrough" are written to get attention. Do you blame them? That is the PR person's job.
If the article headline was "Intel Tries Something with Optical Computing" then it wouldn't catch as many eyeballs.
People love to blame the media for their overuse of buzzwords, exaggeration of truths, and focusing on petty things like celebrity's lives. But remember it is us who read/buy/click based on their headlines, and sadly it works.
If they didn't do it, we wouldn't read/buy/click, and that media outlet would struggle while all the others succeed.
-David
Good lord, you'd think the submitter would have at least TRIED to obfuscate his direct connection to the author.
I realize it's a horrible breach of etiquette to actually read the article in its entirety, but did anyone else notice that SUN's Dtrace was lauded as an actual breakthrough in a sea of pretenders?
Now, if we can just change the word "priority" to be useful again.
Have you read my journal today?
That's funny. Ha ha... err... you _are_ kidding, right?
Reporters nowadays do the exact opposite, to the extent where they practically (A) _created_ a whole class of bullshit pseudo-science, and (B) spawned a whole wave of distrust in science as a whole.
Reporters want sensational stuff, they want headlines that sell, they want "breakthroughs", "controversy", etc, to the point where they'll even create one if one doesn't exist. Reporters can't seem to even report something like "Scientist A says he's installed a distributed computing screensaver that searches for a cure for cancer", without turning it into some sensationalist headline like "BREAKTHROUGH IN CANCER TREATMENT!" That's the kind of headlines that sells. Heck, it doesn't even take a scientist or expert. I've seen bogus opinions by quacks, snake oil vendors, conspiracy theorists or lobbies chewed by the press and shit in the form of "BREAKTHROUGH DISCOVERY IN DOMAIN X!"
Or they can't just publish something like "Scientist B says more testing will be needed to determine the new antibiotic's effectiveness in treating MRSA" without turning it into some bogus sensationalist story, along the lines of "MAJOR CONTROVERSY ABOUT NEW MRSA CURE!!!"
Especially controversies are easy to manufacture, and fit neatly with most newspapers' and TV stations sick and twisted idea of "impartiality" and "objectivity". Namely that you're impartial and objective as long as you have two people arguing opposite points of view... even if you had to find an unqualified quack to argue one of the sides. Or both, for that matter. They could host a debate on global warming where one side claims that trees produce most CO2, and the other side claims that global warming is caused by little green aliens with a big magnifying glass, and feel satisfied that they have fulfilled their obligation to be impartial and objective. They had their opposing points of view (even if both are bogus), they didn't take sides, they didn't give one side more space than the other, so it's all perfectly good journalism. Right?
So to wrap this long rant up, expecting journalists to behave responsibly and abstain from sensationalist bullshit... heh. It ranks up there with belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"You keep using sat word. I don sink it means what you sink it means."
-- Inigo Montoya
While I'm at it, another one:
"A word means what I say it means. Nothing more and nothing less."
--Tweedledum
Face it, folks, between politics and marketing, nothing really "means" anything anymore.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
Awesome products rarely inspire much actual awe. Gigantic things are rarely of adequate size for giants. Fantastic holidays never seem much like a trip to some kind of fantasy land to me. Massive is often applied to things without mass, such as savings on sale items.
It's actually hard to express yourself when you really need to evoke some kind of extra-ordinary image with an adjective.
I have noticed that a lot of companies are no longer satisfied with supplying you with a simple product any more either. They feel the need to give you an "experience", or make everything an "event". Well, the experience of shaving with your razor was pleasant enough but I was really just looking for something to trim my beard thanks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous. An Intel spokesman says the laser chip is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon.
Has anyone else noticed how lazy and sloppy people have gotten with writing because of the internet? I keep seeing "stream of consciousness" posts and NEWS ARTICLES that are grammatical and spelling nightmares simply because the writer figures the reader will "get the idea."
This is a WSJ columnist who apparently couldn't be bothered to read though his article after writing it. It would be one thing if this was some sort of breaking news and he wanted the scoop (internet news reporting is a minute-to-minute effort) - but this article is by no means time sensitive.
What does this mean for the future of proper writing? If actual paid journalists are sounding more and more like posters on a Paris Hilton fansite forum, we are in big trouble.
- GPS
- nanotech
- cloning
- lasik eye surgery (one of the greatest inventions in the world if you previously had poor eyesight)
- global finance
- advances in manufacturing materials (polymers, alloys, etc.)
- You seem to ignore the internet as a whole. While the bits and pieces examined by themselves are not technological breakthroughs, the system as a whole has COMPLETELY changed the way in which our world communicates and does business. To ignore the impact it has had is shortsighted.
- the Patriot missle system
- Wordstar...you included a damn word processor on your freaking list!! I understand it was popular at the time but come on man! I believe all the medical breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years trumps that silly word processor. Oh that's right, you live inside a small bubble consisting of space and computers. Nothing EVER happens outside of those two subjects.
Whens its posted on slashdot
Why are journalists so concerned about corporate PR? According to market every latest product is ground-breaking, amazing, innovative, and a breakthrough if not a veritable triumph of the human spirit. Its not the journalists job to figure out what is a breakthrough or not. Let the market sort it out.
I never purchase products, described as "breakthrough", "revolutionary", "amazing" and "miracle". These words are the warning sings of crap.