Wake up bro, science always follows fiction. Think of an endeavour or a discovery and you'll be able to find someone who fantasised about it at sometime.
Leonardo Da Vinci, HG Wells, Jules Verne, George Orwell... need I go on? Helicopters, men on the moon, deep sea exploration, dystopian societies and whatever else you care to mention have all been "predicted" by dreamers way before they became reality.
Tad Williams (brilliant author though he is) would hardly be the first writer to find part of his fiction had become fact.
I was trying to reinforce the fact that I find attacks on minority groups to be offensive, even if I'm not a member of that minority group.
I very comfortable with my own sexuality and definitely wasn't trying to say "I'm not one of them". Indeed, to one or two of the people who I've encountered I've expressed the sentiment that I'd rather be gay than ignorant and bigoted.
Sorry but how is this off-topic? The subject being discussed is female gamers, and why there are so few of them. My post outlines one of the reasons why that's the case.
So, tell me how it's off-topic please? Did the person wielding the mod points even bother to read the whole post?
The sad thing is that homophobic (gay, fag, queer), racist (jew, nigger, coon), and/or other inoffensive language (rape, cocksucker) seem to be a standard part of the lexicon for a large percentage gamers.
Frankly, I find this unacceptable. I'm not homosexual but I do find homophobic language offensive, and the same goes for the other, less acceptable language that crop up on almost every public gaming service.
I find it both funny and sad that these kids (and most of the people who resort to such language are kids) think nothing of using language that they wouldn't dare use at the dinner table or to a someone they bumped into at the mall to sound "cool" and "macho" online.
And it's amazing how far they'll take it: I've had people threaten to track me down in real life and kill me and my family, rape our corpses and then rip our heads off and shit down our necks. If it wasn't so laughable at the time then I would have been well within my rights to report the matter to the relevant authorities. I'd love to see some 13 year-old sat down on the couch with his parents and a pair of law enforcement officers explaining that he regularly sent death threats to people just because they outclassed him in a game.
The fact is that as long as this sort of behaviour is accepted or even tolerated by the majority of online gaming communities then those communities will remain the domain of teenagers who have bigger mouths and egos than brains.
There's no doubt in my mind that, whilst most men would shrug their shoulders, dismiss the idiots as part of life and just carry on gaming, most women will not tolerate such stuff.
As my girlfriend put it when she saw some of the stuff that gets spewed out by some of these people, "What idiot would say that kind of stuff and why would you want to spend your free time listening to it?"
James Spader's role in The Practice is not the same as his role in Secretary, as someone previously suggested here. And I doubt he's had to sign a contract that commits him for one season and has an option that secures his rights for two, three or four more seasons after that, potentially tying him down for a long time.
Rob Lowe was sold on The West Wing because he thought he was going to be its star. Initially, the show was going to literally focus on the West Wing of the White House, with only the occasional guest appearance by President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, which is how they managed to snag his signature on the dotted line too.
So Lowe was coming to a series in which he was the star, and Sheen originally signed up to do a guest appearance here and there but things changed. You'll note that Lowe left the show because he didn't feel that he was being adequately compensated.
Keither Sutherland, Michael J. Fox and Charlie Sheen are all the undesputed stars of the shows that you mention, and are compensated accordingly. In other words, their TV gigs earn them as much money if not more than they could command in the movie business.
You'll note that Sutherland's movie career was seriously waning before 24 came along (he's a long way from his previous The Lost Boys/Young Guns/Flatliners peak) and he got a very nice career boost from being in something as successful as 24. The same is true for Fox and Sheen, with both being a decade or so away from their best film work. Fox's health issues may have contributed to him deciding to take a TV role: living on a movie set in a trailer is a lot less forgiving than living in your own home and going into a studio to work. You'll note that his work post-Spin City has mostly been voice acting, further evidence that his Parkinson's disease is probably more debilitating than most people imagine.
HA! I can already do this without leaving home...
on
Flash Mob Supercomputer?
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· Score: 3, Funny
I'm getting tired of this now. You accuse me of not addressing issues directly but when I do you call me a liar. You're either the best troll I've ever seen or incapable of accepting that perhaps the world doesn't exactly match your view of it.
I've given you examples of how publications have told vendors to go take a running jump, clear evidence that they aren't in the back pockets of the people who pay for the ads. I've shown how the people who do one thing have nothing to do with the people that do the other thing. Yet you're still insistent that that's not true.
Tell me, what proof have you supplied that Ziff-Davis or any other IT publisher tailors its content to suit its advertisers? What first-hand knowledge do you have that publications and journalists are little more than obedient sheep that do what they're told?
Frankly, I'm bored of providing rational, considered responses to your questions only to have you say "hmm, that's nice, but you didn't answer the way I wanted you to answer and, by the way, you're a liar".
I was hoping that you were going to provide me of examples of TV advertising money directly influencing content but you chose not to do that. Ho hum. I'll give you my personal opinion of the points that you've chosen to raise.
1. I still fundamentally disagree with you (because, after initially questioning me on this, it's later become clear that you had made up your mind about it beforehand) on ad buyers/sellers. A bad product is a bad product, and won't suddenly become a good product just because an advertiser buys an extra six pages.
If you don't believe me on this, so be it. If I haven't convinced you already that there's a Chinese wall between editorial and ad sales teams then there's clearly nothing more that I can do to change your mind and I'm not going to bother even trying. What I will say is that it irks me (in a small way) that you started this conversation with an open question but a closed mind.
2. The article (which seems so distant now) isn't about the merits of SCO's case, it's about indemnification. This isn't an article weighing up the pros and cons of SCO's position (although the author does touch on those briefly, and he does say that SCO's case is shaky to say the least), it's about what a business can do to indemnify itself from any risk whatsoever no matter how small that risk might be.
Countless other articles have talked about how flimsy SCO's position is, etc, and this article doesn't pretend to be yet another one of those. It's a discussion about how a business can mitigate the risks a business might face if SCO's case is legally found to have merit. No more, no less.
A lot of people have written a lot of stuff here about the article, yet most of them seemed to have missed that salient point.
Personally, I think SCO is up shit creek without a paddle, but I'm not a judge in this matter, so my opinion is worth jack shit. But, hey, feel free to quote me on that.
3. A lot of column inches have been written about the security (or lack thereof) of Microsoft's software and, to a certain extent, Microsoft does have a valid point when it says that it's software is targetted more because it's more popular. If the C64 was the most popular platform on the planet and Windows was a niche OS then I'd expect to see a lot more C64 viruses and exploits than Windows ones: wouldn't you?
Of course, Windows' popularity and market share isn't the whole story but given the other factors concerned (that Microsoft's OSes are easy targets, especially when you consider how unsecure an out-of-the-box installation is), what other feeble defence is going to mount?
How many times do you want people to write the same thing over and over again, that Microsoft's products aren't as secure as they could be? And you forget that trojans, etc don't descriminate: we aren't just talking about servers, we're talking about desktops too. Any PC that's connected to the internet is a potential target, not just servers. So why waste time comparing the total number of Windows installations to the total number of Apache and BSD installations?
4. Don't ask me. Xerox was the one that had the ball and fumbled it. Ask them.
I'm sure at some point in time a group of Xerox company lawyers have sat down, discussed the same things and decided that they either didn't have a case or at least that their case was too weak to fight. Suffice to say that there's a long list of things that Xerox could have or should have done but didn't.
Please, do give examples. I'm being sincere when I say I'd like to see them. I have been 100 percent honest throughout this thread, and I'm being so now when I say I want to hear why you're so cynical (as you describe yourself).
You started this conversation by asking me questions. I tried to give you answers but apparently not to your satisfaction. From some of your posts it's clear that, in your mind, you already were convinced of the answers before I even started to reply. Now when I'm asking a question you decide not only not to answer but to assume that whatever you say that I'll disagree with it regardless of its merits which, more than anything, I find to be a real shame. So I'll ask again, please, share your examples.
When a movie magazine or a newspaper review trashes, say, a Universal film, Universal doesn't retaliate by pulling advertising across the board from that publication. If it worked that way, then movie magazines and newspapers would have zero ads from movie studios: clearly, that's not the case.
So, a bad review doesn't mean losing advertising, which means that the editorial independence of movie reviewers is respected by the studios. It's true in the movie business and it's true in the IT business too. Rank and file journalists don't worry about who's buying the ad space because they don't know about who's buying the ad space: that's someone else's job. Journalists just get on with their own stuff.
Contrary to popular belief, journalists don't kow-tow easily and they don't always write what vendors would like them to write. Just like other publishers, ZD does and has taken a stand when faced with unscrupulous vendors, The graphics card manufacturer that produced drivers that had code designed to detect ZD's Winbench benchmark software running and execute portions of it from memory rather than actually executing it live found that out when ZD confronted them about it and gave them the opportunity to present new, more honest drivers for review or have the scam revealed. When the vendor refused, ZD published. The vendor withdrew their ads and, surprisingly, their reputation quickly tanked once their cheating became common knowledge.
You seem to be saying that advertisers get their way with regards to content on TV. Well, perhaps they do, but rarely do they pull their ads because of something that's aired about them. From my limited knowledge (limited because it's not a common practice here in the UK; it seems to be a US phenomenon), advertisers shy away from controversy, and any association that could portray their products in a negative light.
Often, this isn't done proactively, it's done reactively, after some moralistic group or another becomes offended at a TV programme and then actively seeks to get it taken off the air by thinly veiled threats of boycotts, etc to those advertisers whose products are featured in the ad breaks. Politically Incorrect got taken off the air not because it was disparaging about any advertiser but because, post-September 11, advertisers were over-sensitive about associating their products with a show that didn't swallow all the rhetoric, that dared to ask important questions and, above all, state unpopular but honest truths.
If you can give me some examples of how a comment on a TV show led to a loss of advertising or how investigative programming like, say, 60 Minutes goes out of its way to avoid offending advertisers then I'd be very interested and grateful.
I find it hilarious that two people modded this post up yet failed to notice BerntB's second reply to the grandparent post, made only 20 minutes later, in which his message is completely different.
When I replied to that second message, neither post had been modded, so it's interesting that people have selectively chosen to moderate a message that's negative upwards and leave a postive one that's by the same author unchanged. If there's any indicator of people showing bias or pushing an agenda then that selective moderation is it.
Big advertisers are going to advertise with you regardless of what you say. Dell advertises inside the front cover of every non-Apple magazine that I know of, Microsoft does the same, etc.
Don't forget, these are big companies who outsource both their public/press relations and their ad buying. The people responsible for public/press relations will be a press agency, and the people responsible for ad buying will be a media agency. Although they might sound the same, two aren't related, and ad buying has nothing to do with editorial coverage and vice versa.
As I mentioned before, a negative review will occasionally have a vendor throwing a tantrum, but they'll cut off an editorial team before they think about ditching their ads. After all, ads are how they send their controlled message ("buy this because blah, blah, blah") and stopping advertising is pretty much a case of cutting of your nose to spite your face, as its counter-productive to them.
So, the black-and-white short answer is "no", but given what I've said previously about not all publications holding themselves to the same high standards, the shades-of-grey short answer is "maybe".
1. Most freelancers get paid by the word, so why use two words when fifty will do?
Seriously though, the reason why I didn't give a straightforward answer to your question is because there isn't one. All publications aren't equal, and some hold themselves to higher standards than others. The same is true of individual journalists: most and very professional and value their integrity above all else but, as the recent debacle at the New York Times showed, not all journalists respect the power they wield.
2. I see as much banner/box advertising on Slashdot by Microsoft as I do by any other vendor. Does Microsoft's ad spend make a difference to the editorial coverage it receives here? No, not at all. The same is true in print.
What can potentially make a difference is the relationship a journalist has with a vendor's press officers. It's a press officer's job to get a journalist what he needs and to keep a journalist happy. This doesn't mean envelopes full of cash or anything so seedy but it does mean occasional socialising (for example, at product launches). The vendor's hope that this buys them some influence. To a certain extent, it can (note, I said "can", not "does") but a bad product is still a bad product.
Again, a good journalist keeps things professional. Just because someone buys you a drink it doesn't mean that they've bought anything more than that.
3. The reason why Apple journalists didn't hesitate to pull punches when Microsoft produced a less than stellar version of Word was because it was from Microsoft: in a way, it was anti-Microsoft bias in action.
Most Apple journalists aren't shy about hiding their feelings about Microsoft. From the "look-and-feel" trials to the Apple vs Windows battle for the desktop, they've got few reasons to sing Microsoft's praises. Their readers usually feel the same way too. So when Microsoft released a bad product, most Apple journalists weren't too slow to bring it to their readers' attention.
That's perhaps an over-simplification, but it's a pretty accurate one.
If you haven't noticed, PC Magazine is a labs-based publication, and it concentrates on reviews above and beyond anything else. It's pretty hard to review products that don't exist, isn't it?
Look, there are two parties to blame for the death of OS/2 on the desktop: IBM, for failing to market it enough and for trusting Microsoft to do the right thing, and Microsoft for sticking in the knife and twisting it as much as it could. Blaming a magazine for it is laughable.
If PC Magazine really was part of some "kill OS/2" conspiracy then those letters you read would never have been printed. On the contrary, you could argue that by printing them PC Magazine was showing potential OS/2 developers that there was a market for their products.
Most publications use standard benchmarks, which means that their results can be independently verified. In those circumstances, it's hard to see how you could think that the size of someone's ad budget would be related to how they fared in hardware reviews. Frankly, if that really was the case then Dell would win every review under the Sun, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that's not the case.
Software reviews are different, in that they involve a greater degree of subjectivity. Nevertheless, reviewers judge products on their merits (what they can and can't do) rather than which vendor they are from.
Unfortunately, when it comes to reviewing new software releases (and this is true of hardware to some extent) you have to trust the vendor to some extent, especially if you're reviewing late beta code rather than gold (or shipping) code. If the vendor tells you that the shipping product will have this bug or that bug removed then you have to take that on trust, and not focus on it so much. Of course, a good reviewer will mention these things and point out that they should be gone in the box product but that's not always the case: magazines sometimes hide the fact that they're not reviewing gold code by not broaching the subject at all. It goes without saying that those magazines that refuse to review beta code have the right approach.
The one luxury that you don't always have as a journalist (and this is true regardless of your particular field) is time. It's hard to scratch beneath the surface of a product in the time you've got to turn around a review (two or three days is typical for an upgrade review) and, of course, this means that some major faults pass everyone by first time around.
Of course, brutal honesty is sometimes a luxury too: even when you're fairly certain that a product has a major flaw your pen is tempered by the need to avoid labelling it the next Windows ME just in case you're the one that's screwed up, rather than the vendor. (Most journalists are used to running beta software on top of beta software, so when things do go wrong, it's not always easy to put your finger on the problem right away.) Hence the need to err on the side of caution and give the vendor the benefit of the doubt.
Having said that I can think of at least one publication that fell out with a vendor so badly over a review that the vendor concerned refused to provide them with review copies in future. The publication concerned refused to retract the critical review despite heavy pressure and resorted to buying future releases from that vendor off the shelf so that it could carry on reviewing them. It's not the first time that a vendor's been told to get lost and it won't be the last either.
Frankly, if I had to give you one bit of advice about what you read (online or in print) it's to always read between the lines and never put your faith in just one opinion.
I'm sorry, I didn't realise that PC Magazine or any other publication was responsible for the success of Windows 3.1 and the (relative) failure of OS/2.
Perhaps the marketplace had something to do with it? You know, the fact that there was a severe lack of native OS/2 applications and little incentive for developers to write them when OS/2 itself was capable of running the applications that they had already written for Windows? Or that IBM was less aggressive than Microsoft in selling its OS vision to not just the press but also vendors and end-users?
PC Magazine didn't bury and ignore OS/2 back in the early 90's: the marketplace did.
How is my post a "rant" any more than the original post to which I was replying to or, indeed, your own post? Do I fly off the handle attacking people? Am I derogatory because something or someone is at odds with my views? Am I pushing an agenda down people's throats? Or am I merely making observations based upon both first-hand and common experience?
In short, is every comment or opinion that you disagree with a rant?
Please, feel free to debate the level of ZD's bias towards Microsoft (real or imaginary). But please show me the same courtesy as I've shown the original poster by responding to my comments in a rational manner without resorting to snide remarks just because you don't like what my I have to say.
As someone with more familiarity with Ziff-Davis than the average person (hint: in my time I've done more than just read what they've got to say), I can honestly tell you that the overwhelming majority of ZD staffers are less than enamoured by Microsoft and its business practices.
However, living in the real world, it's a bit difficult to run a series of IT publications without writing about Microsoft and its products given their dominance in both the enterprise and the consumer markets. ZD (or CNet, IDG, VNU, etc) ignoring Microsoft would be about as sensible as a mainstream movie magazine ignoring any Hollywood productions.
Frankly, I'm fed up with this "Ziff-Davis is a Microsoft shill" line. ZD has spent the last two decades writing about Microsoft (and other) products that run on Microsoft operating systems because that's what sells magazines. If Joe Average had wanted magazines about Unix instead then they would have written about Unix instead, but they didn't, so get over it.
And, finally, why you would be surprised that the editor of a publication called Windows Sources would "push for exclusive coverage of Windows NT for business users" is a mystery to me - would it make more sense to you to devote large chunks of coverage to other OSes in a magazine that's devoted purely to Windows? I guess you'll be demanding that Apple magazines now cover Linux too.
Yes they can, but TV stars won't earn big bucks unless they are big names or the show concerned is a massive hit.
When Friends started out, the cast weren't making $1 million per episode each: they've only started making that sort of money relatively recently. In fact, I remember them threatening to strike around the time of the third or fourth series if their salaries weren't increased to $100,000 each.
The same principle is true in the case of Cheers, Frasier, Sienfeld, ER and just about any other show you care to mention. Until the audience is there, there's no way that anyone is going to earn big bucks.
Of course, certain actors pretty much guarantee ratings and success: Bill Cosby, for example, which is why he earns big money up front.
Coming back to SG-1, there's no way that anyone could have guaranteed that the show would be a hit, just as they couldn't guarantee the same for any of the other shows mentioned above. $500,000 per episode (to use the figure I took an educated guess at previously) is a lot of money to pay someone for a TV show that might be canned after a few weeks.
I think you'll find that TV stars getting as well paid as movie stars are the exception rather than the rule. Even then, none of them make the kind of money that the Brad Pitts, Tom Cruises and Julia Roberts of this world can make in a year: two, maybe three $20 million-salary movies plus a cut of the gross on each for co-producing, etc.
Getting Kurt Russell to sign his name on the dotted line, assuming he was willing to sign his name on the dotted line at all, probably would have cost upwards of $500,000 per episode just to compensate him at the kind of level he'd expect to earn making movies. I don't know how much the key cast members were being paid when they signed up, but I doubt that any of them were making that kind of money when the show first started. I also don't know the budget of the show, but I doubt that it kicked of with the kind of money that, say, the various Star Trek shows have at their disposal.
Secondly, as I mentioned before, getting an actor such as Russell to commit to a contract that had options for future series would have been nigh on impossible. No actor still (just) in his prime earning years is going to tie himself down for two, three, four or more years doing one thing, especially if that thing is going to get him typecast as that character (as sci-fi roles often do).
You seem to forget that to Russell, Stargate was just another acting job. Expecting him to reprise that movie role in a TV series is as dumb as expecting him to play one of the Fabulous Baker Boys for seven years. You say that the producers were "obviously not willing to pay for Russell": the likelyhood is that he wasn't available at any (reasonable) price.
Lastly, I fail to see how Russell not being in the TV series "deceived" you. Are you that incapable of accepting anyone but the original actor in a role? In that case, I suggest you avoid all post-Sean Connery James Bond movies, the Batman, Superman and Mission: Impossible films, the film adaptations of Lost In Space, Charlie's Angels, Scooby Doo, Starsky And Hutch, the new Harry Potter films, etc, etc.
Kurt Russell is a big-name movie actor, he's not going to appear in a regular TV series. It was inevitable that both him and James Spader, another big-name movie actor, wouldn't appear in the spin-off TV series, just as it was inevitable that James Caan wouldn't appear in the spin-off TV series of Alien Nation.
I find it incredible that people seriously believe that getting an actor who's made it in movies (a medium within which an actor is better paid, less worked and more able to cherry pick his roles) would tie himself down to a TV show for one or more years. Sorry, but the real world just doesn't work that way.
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Wake up bro, science always follows fiction. Think of an endeavour or a discovery and you'll be able to find someone who fantasised about it at sometime.
Leonardo Da Vinci, HG Wells, Jules Verne, George Orwell... need I go on? Helicopters, men on the moon, deep sea exploration, dystopian societies and whatever else you care to mention have all been "predicted" by dreamers way before they became reality.
Tad Williams (brilliant author though he is) would hardly be the first writer to find part of his fiction had become fact.
I was trying to reinforce the fact that I find attacks on minority groups to be offensive, even if I'm not a member of that minority group.
I very comfortable with my own sexuality and definitely wasn't trying to say "I'm not one of them". Indeed, to one or two of the people who I've encountered I've expressed the sentiment that I'd rather be gay than ignorant and bigoted.
Sorry but how is this off-topic? The subject being discussed is female gamers, and why there are so few of them. My post outlines one of the reasons why that's the case.
So, tell me how it's off-topic please? Did the person wielding the mod points even bother to read the whole post?
The sad thing is that homophobic (gay, fag, queer), racist (jew, nigger, coon), and/or other inoffensive language (rape, cocksucker) seem to be a standard part of the lexicon for a large percentage gamers.
Frankly, I find this unacceptable. I'm not homosexual but I do find homophobic language offensive, and the same goes for the other, less acceptable language that crop up on almost every public gaming service.
I find it both funny and sad that these kids (and most of the people who resort to such language are kids) think nothing of using language that they wouldn't dare use at the dinner table or to a someone they bumped into at the mall to sound "cool" and "macho" online.
And it's amazing how far they'll take it: I've had people threaten to track me down in real life and kill me and my family, rape our corpses and then rip our heads off and shit down our necks. If it wasn't so laughable at the time then I would have been well within my rights to report the matter to the relevant authorities. I'd love to see some 13 year-old sat down on the couch with his parents and a pair of law enforcement officers explaining that he regularly sent death threats to people just because they outclassed him in a game.
The fact is that as long as this sort of behaviour is accepted or even tolerated by the majority of online gaming communities then those communities will remain the domain of teenagers who have bigger mouths and egos than brains.
There's no doubt in my mind that, whilst most men would shrug their shoulders, dismiss the idiots as part of life and just carry on gaming, most women will not tolerate such stuff.
As my girlfriend put it when she saw some of the stuff that gets spewed out by some of these people, "What idiot would say that kind of stuff and why would you want to spend your free time listening to it?"
James Spader's role in The Practice is not the same as his role in Secretary, as someone previously suggested here. And I doubt he's had to sign a contract that commits him for one season and has an option that secures his rights for two, three or four more seasons after that, potentially tying him down for a long time.
Rob Lowe was sold on The West Wing because he thought he was going to be its star. Initially, the show was going to literally focus on the West Wing of the White House, with only the occasional guest appearance by President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, which is how they managed to snag his signature on the dotted line too.
So Lowe was coming to a series in which he was the star, and Sheen originally signed up to do a guest appearance here and there but things changed. You'll note that Lowe left the show because he didn't feel that he was being adequately compensated.
Keither Sutherland, Michael J. Fox and Charlie Sheen are all the undesputed stars of the shows that you mention, and are compensated accordingly. In other words, their TV gigs earn them as much money if not more than they could command in the movie business.
You'll note that Sutherland's movie career was seriously waning before 24 came along (he's a long way from his previous The Lost Boys/Young Guns/Flatliners peak) and he got a very nice career boost from being in something as successful as 24. The same is true for Fox and Sheen, with both being a decade or so away from their best film work. Fox's health issues may have contributed to him deciding to take a TV role: living on a movie set in a trailer is a lot less forgiving than living in your own home and going into a studio to work. You'll note that his work post-Spin City has mostly been voice acting, further evidence that his Parkinson's disease is probably more debilitating than most people imagine.
It's called the internet. D'oh!
I'm getting tired of this now. You accuse me of not addressing issues directly but when I do you call me a liar. You're either the best troll I've ever seen or incapable of accepting that perhaps the world doesn't exactly match your view of it.
I've given you examples of how publications have told vendors to go take a running jump, clear evidence that they aren't in the back pockets of the people who pay for the ads. I've shown how the people who do one thing have nothing to do with the people that do the other thing. Yet you're still insistent that that's not true.
Tell me, what proof have you supplied that Ziff-Davis or any other IT publisher tailors its content to suit its advertisers? What first-hand knowledge do you have that publications and journalists are little more than obedient sheep that do what they're told?
Frankly, I'm bored of providing rational, considered responses to your questions only to have you say "hmm, that's nice, but you didn't answer the way I wanted you to answer and, by the way, you're a liar".
I was hoping that you were going to provide me of examples of TV advertising money directly influencing content but you chose not to do that. Ho hum. I'll give you my personal opinion of the points that you've chosen to raise.
1. I still fundamentally disagree with you (because, after initially questioning me on this, it's later become clear that you had made up your mind about it beforehand) on ad buyers/sellers. A bad product is a bad product, and won't suddenly become a good product just because an advertiser buys an extra six pages.
If you don't believe me on this, so be it. If I haven't convinced you already that there's a Chinese wall between editorial and ad sales teams then there's clearly nothing more that I can do to change your mind and I'm not going to bother even trying. What I will say is that it irks me (in a small way) that you started this conversation with an open question but a closed mind.
2. The article (which seems so distant now) isn't about the merits of SCO's case, it's about indemnification. This isn't an article weighing up the pros and cons of SCO's position (although the author does touch on those briefly, and he does say that SCO's case is shaky to say the least), it's about what a business can do to indemnify itself from any risk whatsoever no matter how small that risk might be.
Countless other articles have talked about how flimsy SCO's position is, etc, and this article doesn't pretend to be yet another one of those. It's a discussion about how a business can mitigate the risks a business might face if SCO's case is legally found to have merit. No more, no less.
A lot of people have written a lot of stuff here about the article, yet most of them seemed to have missed that salient point.
Personally, I think SCO is up shit creek without a paddle, but I'm not a judge in this matter, so my opinion is worth jack shit. But, hey, feel free to quote me on that.
3. A lot of column inches have been written about the security (or lack thereof) of Microsoft's software and, to a certain extent, Microsoft does have a valid point when it says that it's software is targetted more because it's more popular. If the C64 was the most popular platform on the planet and Windows was a niche OS then I'd expect to see a lot more C64 viruses and exploits than Windows ones: wouldn't you?
Of course, Windows' popularity and market share isn't the whole story but given the other factors concerned (that Microsoft's OSes are easy targets, especially when you consider how unsecure an out-of-the-box installation is), what other feeble defence is going to mount?
How many times do you want people to write the same thing over and over again, that Microsoft's products aren't as secure as they could be?
And you forget that trojans, etc don't descriminate: we aren't just talking about servers, we're talking about desktops too. Any PC that's connected to the internet is a potential target, not just servers. So why waste time comparing the total number of Windows installations to the total number of Apache and BSD installations?
4. Don't ask me. Xerox was the one that had the ball and fumbled it. Ask them.
I'm sure at some point in time a group of Xerox company lawyers have sat down, discussed the same things and decided that they either didn't have a case or at least that their case was too weak to fight. Suffice to say that there's a long list of things that Xerox could have or should have done but didn't.
Please, do give examples. I'm being sincere when I say I'd like to see them. I have been 100 percent honest throughout this thread, and I'm being so now when I say I want to hear why you're so cynical (as you describe yourself).
You started this conversation by asking me questions. I tried to give you answers but apparently not to your satisfaction. From some of your posts it's clear that, in your mind, you already were convinced of the answers before I even started to reply. Now when I'm asking a question you decide not only not to answer but to assume that whatever you say that I'll disagree with it regardless of its merits which, more than anything, I find to be a real shame. So I'll ask again, please, share your examples.
Oh, I see, politely asking someone some questions and requesting common courtesies is now "flamebait".
Perhaps the person who moderated this as such would care to look up the meaning of the word.
When a movie magazine or a newspaper review trashes, say, a Universal film, Universal doesn't retaliate by pulling advertising across the board from that publication. If it worked that way, then movie magazines and newspapers would have zero ads from movie studios: clearly, that's not the case.
So, a bad review doesn't mean losing advertising, which means that the editorial independence of movie reviewers is respected by the studios. It's true in the movie business and it's true in the IT business too. Rank and file journalists don't worry about who's buying the ad space because they don't know about who's buying the ad space: that's someone else's job. Journalists just get on with their own stuff.
Contrary to popular belief, journalists don't kow-tow easily and they don't always write what vendors would like them to write. Just like other publishers, ZD does and has taken a stand when faced with unscrupulous vendors, The graphics card manufacturer that produced drivers that had code designed to detect ZD's Winbench benchmark software running and execute portions of it from memory rather than actually executing it live found that out when ZD confronted them about it and gave them the opportunity to present new, more honest drivers for review or have the scam revealed. When the vendor refused, ZD published. The vendor withdrew their ads and, surprisingly, their reputation quickly tanked once their cheating became common knowledge.
You seem to be saying that advertisers get their way with regards to content on TV. Well, perhaps they do, but rarely do they pull their ads because of something that's aired about them. From my limited knowledge (limited because it's not a common practice here in the UK; it seems to be a US phenomenon), advertisers shy away from controversy, and any association that could portray their products in a negative light.
Often, this isn't done proactively, it's done reactively, after some moralistic group or another becomes offended at a TV programme and then actively seeks to get it taken off the air by thinly veiled threats of boycotts, etc to those advertisers whose products are featured in the ad breaks. Politically Incorrect got taken off the air not because it was disparaging about any advertiser but because, post-September 11, advertisers were over-sensitive about associating their products with a show that didn't swallow all the rhetoric, that dared to ask important questions and, above all, state unpopular but honest truths.
If you can give me some examples of how a comment on a TV show led to a loss of advertising or how investigative programming like, say, 60 Minutes goes out of its way to avoid offending advertisers then I'd be very interested and grateful.
I find it hilarious that two people modded this post up yet failed to notice BerntB's second reply to the grandparent post, made only 20 minutes later, in which his message is completely different.
When I replied to that second message, neither post had been modded, so it's interesting that people have selectively chosen to moderate a message that's negative upwards and leave a postive one that's by the same author unchanged. If there's any indicator of people showing bias or pushing an agenda then that selective moderation is it.
Big advertisers are going to advertise with you regardless of what you say. Dell advertises inside the front cover of every non-Apple magazine that I know of, Microsoft does the same, etc.
Don't forget, these are big companies who outsource both their public/press relations and their ad buying. The people responsible for public/press relations will be a press agency, and the people responsible for ad buying will be a media agency. Although they might sound the same, two aren't related, and ad buying has nothing to do with editorial coverage and vice versa.
As I mentioned before, a negative review will occasionally have a vendor throwing a tantrum, but they'll cut off an editorial team before they think about ditching their ads. After all, ads are how they send their controlled message ("buy this because blah, blah, blah") and stopping advertising is pretty much a case of cutting of your nose to spite your face, as its counter-productive to them.
So, the black-and-white short answer is "no", but given what I've said previously about not all publications holding themselves to the same high standards, the shades-of-grey short answer is "maybe".
1. Most freelancers get paid by the word, so why use two words when fifty will do?
Seriously though, the reason why I didn't give a straightforward answer to your question is because there isn't one. All publications aren't equal, and some hold themselves to higher standards than others. The same is true of individual journalists: most and very professional and value their integrity above all else but, as the recent debacle at the New York Times showed, not all journalists respect the power they wield.
2. I see as much banner/box advertising on Slashdot by Microsoft as I do by any other vendor. Does Microsoft's ad spend make a difference to the editorial coverage it receives here? No, not at all. The same is true in print.
What can potentially make a difference is the relationship a journalist has with a vendor's press officers. It's a press officer's job to get a journalist what he needs and to keep a journalist happy. This doesn't mean envelopes full of cash or anything so seedy but it does mean occasional socialising (for example, at product launches). The vendor's hope that this buys them some influence. To a certain extent, it can (note, I said "can", not "does") but a bad product is still a bad product.
Again, a good journalist keeps things professional. Just because someone buys you a drink it doesn't mean that they've bought anything more than that.
3. The reason why Apple journalists didn't hesitate to pull punches when Microsoft produced a less than stellar version of Word was because it was from Microsoft: in a way, it was anti-Microsoft bias in action.
Most Apple journalists aren't shy about hiding their feelings about Microsoft. From the "look-and-feel" trials to the Apple vs Windows battle for the desktop, they've got few reasons to sing Microsoft's praises. Their readers usually feel the same way too. So when Microsoft released a bad product, most Apple journalists weren't too slow to bring it to their readers' attention.
That's perhaps an over-simplification, but it's a pretty accurate one.
If you haven't noticed, PC Magazine is a labs-based publication, and it concentrates on reviews above and beyond anything else. It's pretty hard to review products that don't exist, isn't it?
Look, there are two parties to blame for the death of OS/2 on the desktop: IBM, for failing to market it enough and for trusting Microsoft to do the right thing, and Microsoft for sticking in the knife and twisting it as much as it could. Blaming a magazine for it is laughable.
If PC Magazine really was part of some "kill OS/2" conspiracy then those letters you read would never have been printed. On the contrary, you could argue that by printing them PC Magazine was showing potential OS/2 developers that there was a market for their products.
Most publications use standard benchmarks, which means that their results can be independently verified. In those circumstances, it's hard to see how you could think that the size of someone's ad budget would be related to how they fared in hardware reviews. Frankly, if that really was the case then Dell would win every review under the Sun, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed that's not the case.
Software reviews are different, in that they involve a greater degree of subjectivity. Nevertheless, reviewers judge products on their merits (what they can and can't do) rather than which vendor they are from.
Unfortunately, when it comes to reviewing new software releases (and this is true of hardware to some extent) you have to trust the vendor to some extent, especially if you're reviewing late beta code rather than gold (or shipping) code. If the vendor tells you that the shipping product will have this bug or that bug removed then you have to take that on trust, and not focus on it so much. Of course, a good reviewer will mention these things and point out that they should be gone in the box product but that's not always the case: magazines sometimes hide the fact that they're not reviewing gold code by not broaching the subject at all. It goes without saying that those magazines that refuse to review beta code have the right approach.
The one luxury that you don't always have as a journalist (and this is true regardless of your particular field) is time. It's hard to scratch beneath the surface of a product in the time you've got to turn around a review (two or three days is typical for an upgrade review) and, of course, this means that some major faults pass everyone by first time around.
Of course, brutal honesty is sometimes a luxury too: even when you're fairly certain that a product has a major flaw your pen is tempered by the need to avoid labelling it the next Windows ME just in case you're the one that's screwed up, rather than the vendor. (Most journalists are used to running beta software on top of beta software, so when things do go wrong, it's not always easy to put your finger on the problem right away.) Hence the need to err on the side of caution and give the vendor the benefit of the doubt.
Having said that I can think of at least one publication that fell out with a vendor so badly over a review that the vendor concerned refused to provide them with review copies in future. The publication concerned refused to retract the critical review despite heavy pressure and resorted to buying future releases from that vendor off the shelf so that it could carry on reviewing them. It's not the first time that a vendor's been told to get lost and it won't be the last either.
Frankly, if I had to give you one bit of advice about what you read (online or in print) it's to always read between the lines and never put your faith in just one opinion.
I'm sorry, I didn't realise that PC Magazine or any other publication was responsible for the success of Windows 3.1 and the (relative) failure of OS/2.
Perhaps the marketplace had something to do with it? You know, the fact that there was a severe lack of native OS/2 applications and little incentive for developers to write them when OS/2 itself was capable of running the applications that they had already written for Windows? Or that IBM was less aggressive than Microsoft in selling its OS vision to not just the press but also vendors and end-users?
PC Magazine didn't bury and ignore OS/2 back in the early 90's: the marketplace did.
How is my post a "rant" any more than the original post to which I was replying to or, indeed, your own post? Do I fly off the handle attacking people? Am I derogatory because something or someone is at odds with my views? Am I pushing an agenda down people's throats? Or am I merely making observations based upon both first-hand and common experience?
In short, is every comment or opinion that you disagree with a rant?
Please, feel free to debate the level of ZD's bias towards Microsoft (real or imaginary). But please show me the same courtesy as I've shown the original poster by responding to my comments in a rational manner without resorting to snide remarks just because you don't like what my I have to say.
As someone with more familiarity with Ziff-Davis than the average person (hint: in my time I've done more than just read what they've got to say), I can honestly tell you that the overwhelming majority of ZD staffers are less than enamoured by Microsoft and its business practices.
However, living in the real world, it's a bit difficult to run a series of IT publications without writing about Microsoft and its products given their dominance in both the enterprise and the consumer markets. ZD (or CNet, IDG, VNU, etc) ignoring Microsoft would be about as sensible as a mainstream movie magazine ignoring any Hollywood productions.
Frankly, I'm fed up with this "Ziff-Davis is a Microsoft shill" line. ZD has spent the last two decades writing about Microsoft (and other) products that run on Microsoft operating systems because that's what sells magazines. If Joe Average had wanted magazines about Unix instead then they would have written about Unix instead, but they didn't, so get over it.
And, finally, why you would be surprised that the editor of a publication called Windows Sources would "push for exclusive coverage of Windows NT for business users" is a mystery to me - would it make more sense to you to devote large chunks of coverage to other OSes in a magazine that's devoted purely to Windows? I guess you'll be demanding that Apple magazines now cover Linux too.
I was just about to make the same comment: registration does not mean paid-for content.
Slashdot, for example, has hundreds of thousands of registered users, but not all of them buy subscriptions.
Your's and everyone else's then.
Yes they can, but TV stars won't earn big bucks unless they are big names or the show concerned is a massive hit.
When Friends started out, the cast weren't making $1 million per episode each: they've only started making that sort of money relatively recently. In fact, I remember them threatening to strike around the time of the third or fourth series if their salaries weren't increased to $100,000 each.
The same principle is true in the case of Cheers, Frasier, Sienfeld, ER and just about any other show you care to mention. Until the audience is there, there's no way that anyone is going to earn big bucks.
Of course, certain actors pretty much guarantee ratings and success: Bill Cosby, for example, which is why he earns big money up front.
Coming back to SG-1, there's no way that anyone could have guaranteed that the show would be a hit, just as they couldn't guarantee the same for any of the other shows mentioned above. $500,000 per episode (to use the figure I took an educated guess at previously) is a lot of money to pay someone for a TV show that might be canned after a few weeks.
I think you'll find that TV stars getting as well paid as movie stars are the exception rather than the rule. Even then, none of them make the kind of money that the Brad Pitts, Tom Cruises and Julia Roberts of this world can make in a year: two, maybe three $20 million-salary movies plus a cut of the gross on each for co-producing, etc.
Yeah, be on the lookout for a black guy with the worst cockney accent ever.
I love Don Cheadle, but his vocal performance in that film was so damn bad it was almost painful to listen to.
Getting Kurt Russell to sign his name on the dotted line, assuming he was willing to sign his name on the dotted line at all, probably would have cost upwards of $500,000 per episode just to compensate him at the kind of level he'd expect to earn making movies. I don't know how much the key cast members were being paid when they signed up, but I doubt that any of them were making that kind of money when the show first started. I also don't know the budget of the show, but I doubt that it kicked of with the kind of money that, say, the various Star Trek shows have at their disposal.
Secondly, as I mentioned before, getting an actor such as Russell to commit to a contract that had options for future series would have been nigh on impossible. No actor still (just) in his prime earning years is going to tie himself down for two, three, four or more years doing one thing, especially if that thing is going to get him typecast as that character (as sci-fi roles often do).
You seem to forget that to Russell, Stargate was just another acting job. Expecting him to reprise that movie role in a TV series is as dumb as expecting him to play one of the Fabulous Baker Boys for seven years. You say that the producers were "obviously not willing to pay for Russell": the likelyhood is that he wasn't available at any (reasonable) price.
Lastly, I fail to see how Russell not being in the TV series "deceived" you. Are you that incapable of accepting anyone but the original actor in a role? In that case, I suggest you avoid all post-Sean Connery James Bond movies, the Batman, Superman and Mission: Impossible films, the film adaptations of Lost In Space, Charlie's Angels, Scooby Doo, Starsky And Hutch, the new Harry Potter films, etc, etc.
Kurt Russell is a big-name movie actor, he's not going to appear in a regular TV series. It was inevitable that both him and James Spader, another big-name movie actor, wouldn't appear in the spin-off TV series, just as it was inevitable that James Caan wouldn't appear in the spin-off TV series of Alien Nation.
I find it incredible that people seriously believe that getting an actor who's made it in movies (a medium within which an actor is better paid, less worked and more able to cherry pick his roles) would tie himself down to a TV show for one or more years. Sorry, but the real world just doesn't work that way.