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Saving Journalism With Flash and Java

An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"

7 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. i for one... by Sfing_ter · · Score: 3, Funny

    I welcome our new ASCII overlords, wait, it's New York Magazaine, I welcome our new AXCII overlords.

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    1. Re:i for one... by idontgno · · Score: 4, Funny

      No one as used ASCII in years,

      At least ASCII has the letter "h".

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    2. Re:i for one... by cjb658 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Isn't it time we dumped ASCII and moved over to Unicode?

      Nay, it's time we dump all other languages and move over to English!

    3. Re:i for one... by MBCook · · Score: 3, Funny

      At least ASCII has the letter "h".

      I'm sorry, but I can't seem to read your post.

      Did you forget to use UTF-8?

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  2. AIDS, promiscuity, and flash by philspear · · Score: 4, Funny

    The article focused on a hypothetical heterosexual world in which all the men but only a few of the women were promiscuous. In this situation, the promiscuous women quickly caught the virus and became a sort of viral clearinghouse, spreading HIV to every man with whom they had contact. The men, in turn, brought it home to their wives. If the number of promiscuous women increased, the Landsburg-Kremer model posited, each man would be less likely to find an infected woman in his nightly wanderings, and the spread of HIV would slow.

    Not sure of the link to flash (only skimmed TFA), but flash has apperantly cured AIDS AND made women more willing to sleep with me. Either one really would have made up for all the annoyances, both together? Can we declare Flash a saint?

  3. Re:Short answer: by alexj33 · · Score: 5, Funny

    With the power of Java applets, we will discover a brand new dimension of "breaking news".

  4. Re:saving is not the right adjective by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's real progress when many web developers don't know about the BLINK tag anymore. Oh god... it still haunts my dreams.

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