I wrote a Slashdot story called Online News Stories that Change Behind Your Back about this. It's a major problem with news on the Web -- as long as you think in newspaper terms. When you look at Web news compared to TV, you see it in a different light. As several people I interviewed while writing that story pointed out, a 5 p.m. TV newscast and a 6 p.m. one on the same station may have entirely different stories about the same topic, but we don't scream about the difference between the two the way we do on the Internet.
Do we have lower accuracy expectations for TV news?
Do we simply *notice* version differences more easily on the Internet?
I believe in old-school "first rough draft of history" journalism that says the errors and misinformation in an initial, breaking news story are a valuable record in and of themselves, and that subsequent "corrected" versions should be clearly identified and the originals should be available for comparison. Note that Slashdot does it the way I think it should be done. This is not an accident. Part of my job around here (OSDN) is to think about things like how to handle story updates and corrections. And, warts and all, we have a very good and concerned crew on Slashdot that wants to get things as right as possible as often as possible.
A lot of protocols and ethical standards for online news are still under development. It'll be interesting to watch the changes over the next few years in what is and is not considered an acceptable practice.
I'm questioning whether all the current production tricks and mixing and remixing make better music, period. I mean, I've heard some damn powerful Billie Holliday recordings that were made in small Baltimore clubs with two microphones and no postproduction at all.
In my unhumble opinion, taking each drum beat and each note apart and trying to fit it into the musical whole "better than" it originally came out of an instrument or a singer's mouth takes much of the heart out of the music. I'd rather put up with a few flaws here and there than have pseudo-perfection. Music is (ideally) made by people for other people to enjoy, and people are imperfect by definition. If the bass player tends to jump the beat a bit, then that's the way he plays, and "correcting" his work takes something away from it.
Perhaps the grunge band shouldn't be "mixed" as much as "recorded faithfully." If their music and lyrics are tight, I'll enjoy their unedited output without a producer adding his or her two cents.
Hip hop master F is another story. He probably needs lots of studio help to make his yelling coherent at all, and may need to have lots of unoriginal... I mean "sampled"...background material to cover up the fact that he's too untalented to sing or play an instrument or write decent lyrics. In that case, a skilled producer is needed and the producer's fees should be high -- and in an ideal world hop F would get far less than said producer because he is only a small part of the finished product.
Perhaps I am hung up on the difference between "art" and "product" here. I like musical artists and buy their work, just as I buy original paintings now and then. But I tend to avoid music "products" as much as I avoid mass-produced "art" sold in JC Penney's furniture department.
Jokes abut Phil Spector-type producers grabbing cute-but-useless boys and girls off the street and making them into "recording stars" for a record or two were big in Mad magazine in the mid-60s. Even then we saw music moving from art to product, and I must say that even in those times, as a child, I was able to tell the difference, and I appreciated musicians with talent more than the "song factory" lyricist + "one-hit-wonder star" + "producer with a distinctive style" manufactured pap that dominated pop music radio long before Clear Channel et al decided that was *all* we should hear.
So you know, at this very moment I am listening to an extremely obscure, eclectic streaming "net radio" station I support with donations -- that doesn't play any RIAA-style mass hits at all.:)
I've served as a Baltimore City election judge (Republican - in a Democratic-majority jurisdiction) a couple of times, plus I've observed (and reported on) all phases of the vote-counting process at one point or another in my career.
Based on my experience and observations, the mechanical voting machines used in Baltimore were far more cumbersome and caused more problems than any conceivable "pen and paper" hand-count system.
I am not anti-computer. (Note that I am not using pen and paper to post this comment.) But I believe the voting process in a country that claims to have a freely elected government should be as open and obvious as possible to all citizens, even those who choose not to become familiar with complicated mechanical or electronic systems.
Besides, as others have pointed out, it's probably cheaper to pay a bunch of people to count votes every couple of years than to buy a bunch of expensive machines that sit in warehouses gathering dust 990 days out of 1000.
And suddenly, with machines - either mechanical or electronic - volunteer poll watchers can't just be anyone who can read, write, and do basic arithmetic. To be effective, they must understand how the machines work, so your pool of potential poll-watchers suddenly shrinks to the point where you are unlikely to have qualified ones at all polling places.
The only way I will be truly happy with computer-based voting is if I *and anyone else who wants to* can download every bit of data from every point in the process, from the number of votes cast in real-time at each polling place on election day to every number involved after the polls close.
A comparison between the electronically-generated "number of votes cast" figure and a physical count of people voting would serve as a rough checksum. After polls close, vote tally feeds from the polling places that went not only to an official office but also to outside organizations would help give me confidence that accurate numbers were being submitted. From the raw polling place data, political parties, news organizations, and interested individuals could perform their own vote counts, and woe unto the election authority whose figures didn't match those of the independent auditors!
A paper audit trail would also be good.
Or maybe, just do pencil/paper ballots... so cheap and simple... it wouldn't kill us to wait until the next morning to get election results, really it wouldn't.:)
When I see some of the album cost production figures today, I shake my head. I was reading (don't ask why) an interview with Queen Latifah in a magazine called "Sister to Sister" and she was talking about $2 million to record and produce one album.
I doubt that Berry Gordy (Motown founder/producer) spent that much on studio time and production for all the Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye albums he produced added together.
Has all the expensive "modern" digital studio retracking and remixing made the music we get any better? I don't think so. Maybe record companies should start cutting costs on the production end at the same time they try to figure what to do with the distribution side of the business.
Hmmm... this patent looks suspiciously like the bid-based ad placement system my friend Dmitri Ereshenko has been using on his ispcheck.com site for at least 5 years now...
I almost sent him your question, since I think serialization is a plague on the novel-publishing industry, and that franchising an author's work (as Larry Niven, Tom Clancy, and others have done) is a sick marketing tactic that produces bad writing almost every time. (Even Robert Parker's attempt at completing a Raymond Chandler novel stunk -- and Parker is a plenty fine writer himself.)
This is a question I think we should ask a book editor or marketing person. Maybe Baen... he'd make a nice Slashdot interview guest, wouldn't he?
Please sumbit the same question when you see us grab Jim Baen or another publishing person. Or maybe Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog, who may have a better grasp of science fiction as a whole than anyone.
You could have read the whole paragraph instead of getting into a high dudgeon over what you perceived as a slight toward people who make too much or too little money. I don't choose my friends by their income levels.
I'm just tired of the idjit "You must be getting paid off by Microsoft!!!" accusations we get every time we so much as mention that company's name. It has been especially fierce lately because of their presence at LinuxWorld and the fact that we (gasp!) have dared to write about it.
My point (which you apparently didn't notice as it flew over your head) was not to play holy over income or lack thereof, but to slam in the idea that no, we are not only not paid by Microsoft to write about them, but that we don't have enough financial need to be susceptible to bribery if they offered, which they haven't.
Not that I expect you to believe any of this, since this is exactly what you'd expect a paid Microsoft flog to say, isn't it?
Whoops! Gotta go! I had more to say, but Chairman Bill is paging me. Maybe he wants to pay me $20,000 to write an article about how Microsoft's SQL server is so much more secure than PostGres.
(The preceding paragraph is a JOKE. I say this in case any Slashdot readers forgot to wear their aluminum foil deflector beanies today and have had their senses of humor deactivated by CIA mind control rays.)
Sometimes I launch my sailboat off the beach instead of a launch ramp. Okay, I don't need 4WD to *launch* it, but more than once it's helped me get the boat *back on* the trailer -- not only on beaches but on steep or unmaintained launch ramps.
I also take my photographer/artist wife to scenic places it's hard and/or impossible to go with a street car (or minivan). Yes, I know *you* would pack in the equipment because you're tough and strong, but we're 50 years old and I'm not in good health. My days of being an active member of the Sierra Club 100 Peaks Section are over, sorry.
Now the funny part: I didn't buy an "SUV." I bought a modest, 6-cylinder, 4X4 Jeep Cherokee with a heavy-duty suspension and tow rig back before every suburban mommy needed a giant vehicle to go to the grocery store. Then one day I woke up and instead of having a 4X4 used primarly for outdoor actvities (and not for commuting; I work at home), suddenly I owned an EVIL SUV!
In other words, I had my Jeep before all those giant Cadillac and Lincoln SUVs clogged the roads, and since it only has 152,000 miles on it and I don't drive more than 10,000 miles per year in it these days, I'll probably still have it after most of the "fad" SUVs have been sold overseas or scrapped. And if I'm still alive when my Jeep wears out or some idjit (probably driving a minivan -- or worse, a Volvo) runs into it and messes it up too badly to fix, I'll go buy another Jeep (Wrangler or Cherokee) because, in my outdoor-oriented life, 4WD is good to have.:)
Michael's question was modded up by normal moderators. If I use an editor-written question in an interview that does not get chosen by the same system as all other questions, it is clearly marked as a "bonus question from [editor]" or some such.
This has only happened once or twice in over three years' worth of Slashdot reader-generated interviews, BTW.
You are getting the Simpsons' house confused with Timothy Lord's family's house.
I have been to Timothy's house and I will tell you, they obey the laws of *physics* there, and he and his family are not cartoons. (Except maybe his brother.)
"Redistribute" is the key word. If you make changes to GPL software and only use those changes inhouse, you have no obligation to share them with anyone. It is only when you start to *distribute* the modified software that you are obligated to provide source code, not just binaries.
Yep. My wife and I have our WAP plugged into the UPS that once gave us 10 minutes (shut down time) for two desktops. Now the UPS only needs to power a cable modem and the WAP. It's good for at least two hours, and that's as long as the laptop batteries will last anyway.
It was not an audio interview. I have a copy of the emailed reply right here on my hard drive.
Slashdot interviews are almost always email, and are always posted verbatim except for HTML formatting.
Come to think of it, the next one is going to be verbatim *including* the interviewee's own markup, since it's about handicapped site usability and he used XHTML as part of his point.
Hook me up with an EU lawyer and we'll do a separate interview or interview-based story. Larry Rosen is a lawyer who practices in the U.S., and he was commenting on a U.S. case.
- Robin
(I assume yoiu can find my email address; every spammer in the world certainly has...)
Oh, come on. These court decisions often go up on unlinked servers before the formal release. The ones the Alert Slashdot Reader noticed (above) are not the only ones, either. There are some others that are known to (smart) DC-area reporters and some lobbyists that hardly anyone else ever finds. (And no, I am not going to post them here.)
But a hint: The District of Columbia mirrors a *lot* of Federal Court decisons... ditto, more often than not, other jurisdictions that have a stake in a given case...
As a working taxpayer who subsidizes my state's university system, I ought to be as eligible for that discount as the profs and students who benefit from my generosity, right?
Exactly. My wife has a small Internet-based business, DebbieCentral.com. She accepts payments through PayPal (although most of her clients pay by check), and has a separate bank account for PayPal and other online transactions.
I signed up for a PayPal account when they were first getting started, and I have never been able to close it. I have, however, closed the bank account it was connected to (for other reasons, not because of PayPal), so I'm fairly safe.
- Robin "Roblimo" Miller
Personal site: http://roblimo.com
Re:Not like the libraries I know back home
on
Libraries Are 31337
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Or maybe you and I frequent different Internets?:)
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a Slashdot story called Online News Stories that Change Behind Your Back about this. It's a major problem with news on the Web -- as long as you think in newspaper terms. When you look at Web news compared to TV, you see it in a different light. As several people I interviewed while writing that story pointed out, a 5 p.m. TV newscast and a 6 p.m. one on the same station may have entirely different stories about the same topic, but we don't scream about the difference between the two the way we do on the Internet.
Do we have lower accuracy expectations for TV news?
Do we simply *notice* version differences more easily on the Internet?
I believe in old-school "first rough draft of history" journalism that says the errors and misinformation in an initial, breaking news story are a valuable record in and of themselves, and that subsequent "corrected" versions should be clearly identified and the originals should be available for comparison. Note that Slashdot does it the way I think it should be done. This is not an accident. Part of my job around here (OSDN) is to think about things like how to handle story updates and corrections. And, warts and all, we have a very good and concerned crew on Slashdot that wants to get things as right as possible as often as possible.
A lot of protocols and ethical standards for online news are still under development. It'll be interesting to watch the changes over the next few years in what is and is not considered an acceptable practice.
- Robin
I'm questioning whether all the current production tricks and mixing and remixing make better music, period. I mean, I've heard some damn powerful Billie Holliday recordings that were made in small Baltimore clubs with two microphones and no postproduction at all.
...background material to cover up the fact that he's too untalented to sing or play an instrument or write decent lyrics. In that case, a skilled producer is needed and the producer's fees should be high -- and in an ideal world hop F would get far less than said producer because he is only a small part of the finished product.
:)
In my unhumble opinion, taking each drum beat and each note apart and trying to fit it into the musical whole "better than" it originally came out of an instrument or a singer's mouth takes much of the heart out of the music. I'd rather put up with a few flaws here and there than have pseudo-perfection. Music is (ideally) made by people for other people to enjoy, and people are imperfect by definition. If the bass player tends to jump the beat a bit, then that's the way he plays, and "correcting" his work takes something away from it.
Perhaps the grunge band shouldn't be "mixed" as much as "recorded faithfully." If their music and lyrics are tight, I'll enjoy their unedited output without a producer adding his or her two cents.
Hip hop master F is another story. He probably needs lots of studio help to make his yelling coherent at all, and may need to have lots of unoriginal... I mean "sampled"
Perhaps I am hung up on the difference between "art" and "product" here. I like musical artists and buy their work, just as I buy original paintings now and then. But I tend to avoid music "products" as much as I avoid mass-produced "art" sold in JC Penney's furniture department.
Jokes abut Phil Spector-type producers grabbing cute-but-useless boys and girls off the street and making them into "recording stars" for a record or two were big in Mad magazine in the mid-60s. Even then we saw music moving from art to product, and I must say that even in those times, as a child, I was able to tell the difference, and I appreciated musicians with talent more than the "song factory" lyricist + "one-hit-wonder star" + "producer with a distinctive style" manufactured pap that dominated pop music radio long before Clear Channel et al decided that was *all* we should hear.
So you know, at this very moment I am listening to an extremely obscure, eclectic streaming "net radio" station I support with donations -- that doesn't play any RIAA-style mass hits at all.
- Robin
I've served as a Baltimore City election judge (Republican - in a Democratic-majority jurisdiction) a couple of times, plus I've observed (and reported on) all phases of the vote-counting process at one point or another in my career.
:)
Based on my experience and observations, the mechanical voting machines used in Baltimore were far more cumbersome and caused more problems than any conceivable "pen and paper" hand-count system.
I am not anti-computer. (Note that I am not using pen and paper to post this comment.) But I believe the voting process in a country that claims to have a freely elected government should be as open and obvious as possible to all citizens, even those who choose not to become familiar with complicated mechanical or electronic systems.
Besides, as others have pointed out, it's probably cheaper to pay a bunch of people to count votes every couple of years than to buy a bunch of expensive machines that sit in warehouses gathering dust 990 days out of 1000.
And suddenly, with machines - either mechanical or electronic - volunteer poll watchers can't just be anyone who can read, write, and do basic arithmetic. To be effective, they must understand how the machines work, so your pool of potential poll-watchers suddenly shrinks to the point where you are unlikely to have qualified ones at all polling places.
The only way I will be truly happy with computer-based voting is if I *and anyone else who wants to* can download every bit of data from every point in the process, from the number of votes cast in real-time at each polling place on election day to every number involved after the polls close.
A comparison between the electronically-generated "number of votes cast" figure and a physical count of people voting would serve as a rough checksum. After polls close, vote tally feeds from the polling places that went not only to an official office but also to outside organizations would help give me confidence that accurate numbers were being submitted. From the raw polling place data, political parties, news organizations, and interested individuals could perform their own vote counts, and woe unto the election authority whose figures didn't match those of the independent auditors!
A paper audit trail would also be good.
Or maybe, just do pencil/paper ballots... so cheap and simple... it wouldn't kill us to wait until the next morning to get election results, really it wouldn't.
- Robin
When I see some of the album cost production figures today, I shake my head. I was reading (don't ask why) an interview with Queen Latifah in a magazine called "Sister to Sister" and she was talking about $2 million to record and produce one album.
I doubt that Berry Gordy (Motown founder/producer) spent that much on studio time and production for all the Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye albums he produced added together.
Has all the expensive "modern" digital studio retracking and remixing made the music we get any better? I don't think so. Maybe record companies should start cutting costs on the production end at the same time they try to figure what to do with the distribution side of the business.
- Robin
Thanks for noticing. Corrected.
- Robin
Hmmm... this patent looks suspiciously like the bid-based ad placement system my friend Dmitri Ereshenko has been using on his ispcheck.com site for at least 5 years now...
- Robin
I almost sent him your question, since I think serialization is a plague on the novel-publishing industry, and that franchising an author's work (as Larry Niven, Tom Clancy, and others have done) is a sick marketing tactic that produces bad writing almost every time. (Even Robert Parker's attempt at completing a Raymond Chandler novel stunk -- and Parker is a plenty fine writer himself.)
This is a question I think we should ask a book editor or marketing person. Maybe Baen... he'd make a nice Slashdot interview guest, wouldn't he?
Please sumbit the same question when you see us grab Jim Baen or another publishing person. Or maybe Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog, who may have a better grasp of science fiction as a whole than anyone.
- Robin
I don't know about MS Word, but it's easy to save an MS Word document in OpenOffice (in .doc format) without all the changes it's been through.
- Robin
Macrovision. Corrected. Thanks.
- Robin
You could have read the whole paragraph instead of getting into a high dudgeon over what you perceived as a slight toward people who make too much or too little money. I don't choose my friends by their income levels.
I'm just tired of the idjit "You must be getting paid off by Microsoft!!!" accusations we get every time we so much as mention that company's name. It has been especially fierce lately because of their presence at LinuxWorld and the fact that we (gasp!) have dared to write about it.
My point (which you apparently didn't notice as it flew over your head) was not to play holy over income or lack thereof, but to slam in the idea that no, we are not only not paid by Microsoft to write about them, but that we don't have enough financial need to be susceptible to bribery if they offered, which they haven't.
Not that I expect you to believe any of this, since this is exactly what you'd expect a paid Microsoft flog to say, isn't it?
Whoops! Gotta go! I had more to say, but Chairman Bill is paging me. Maybe he wants to pay me $20,000 to write an article about how Microsoft's SQL server is so much more secure than PostGres.
(The preceding paragraph is a JOKE. I say this in case any Slashdot readers forgot to wear their aluminum foil deflector beanies today and have had their senses of humor deactivated by CIA mind control rays.)
- Robin
Today is Sunday in the U.S. It is not Monday or Tuesday. I will post those answers Monday or Tuesday.
(sigh)
- Robin
Sometimes I launch my sailboat off the beach instead of a launch ramp. Okay, I don't need 4WD to *launch* it, but more than once it's helped me get the boat *back on* the trailer -- not only on beaches but on steep or unmaintained launch ramps.
:)
I also take my photographer/artist wife to scenic places it's hard and/or impossible to go with a street car (or minivan). Yes, I know *you* would pack in the equipment because you're tough and strong, but we're 50 years old and I'm not in good health. My days of being an active member of the Sierra Club 100 Peaks Section are over, sorry.
Now the funny part: I didn't buy an "SUV." I bought a modest, 6-cylinder, 4X4 Jeep Cherokee with a heavy-duty suspension and tow rig back before every suburban mommy needed a giant vehicle to go to the grocery store. Then one day I woke up and instead of having a 4X4 used primarly for outdoor actvities (and not for commuting; I work at home), suddenly I owned an EVIL SUV!
In other words, I had my Jeep before all those giant Cadillac and Lincoln SUVs clogged the roads, and since it only has 152,000 miles on it and I don't drive more than 10,000 miles per year in it these days, I'll probably still have it after most of the "fad" SUVs have been sold overseas or scrapped. And if I'm still alive when my Jeep wears out or some idjit (probably driving a minivan -- or worse, a Volvo) runs into it and messes it up too badly to fix, I'll go buy another Jeep (Wrangler or Cherokee) because, in my outdoor-oriented life, 4WD is good to have.
- Robin
Well, you never know. I just found out that a Massachussetts state Rep is trying to make "6" the official Mass. state number.
m )
(http://www.state.ma.us/legis/history/h01304.ht
Coincidence? Or has Michael used his *Slashdot powers* to make this happen?
If were a conspiracy person whose aluminum foil hat was on crooked, I would certainly wonder about this...
- Robin
Michael's question was modded up by normal moderators. If I use an editor-written question in an interview that does not get chosen by the same system as all other questions, it is clearly marked as a "bonus question from [editor]" or some such.
This has only happened once or twice in over three years' worth of Slashdot reader-generated interviews, BTW.
- Robin
You are getting the Simpsons' house confused with Timothy Lord's family's house.
I have been to Timothy's house and I will tell you, they obey the laws of *physics* there, and he and his family are not cartoons. (Except maybe his brother.)
- Robin
Yep. Apparently Gael Duval was not entirely truthful with us. See today's NewsForge story about MandrakeSoft.
- Robin
"Redistribute" is the key word. If you make changes to GPL software and only use those changes inhouse, you have no obligation to share them with anyone. It is only when you start to *distribute* the modified software that you are obligated to provide source code, not just binaries.
- Robin
Yep. My wife and I have our WAP plugged into the UPS that once gave us 10 minutes (shut down time) for two desktops. Now the UPS only needs to power a cable modem and the WAP. It's good for at least two hours, and that's as long as the laptop batteries will last anyway.
- Robin
It was not an audio interview. I have a copy of the emailed reply right here on my hard drive.
Slashdot interviews are almost always email, and are always posted verbatim except for HTML formatting.
Come to think of it, the next one is going to be verbatim *including* the interviewee's own markup, since it's about handicapped site usability and he used XHTML as part of his point.
- Robin
Hook me up with an EU lawyer and we'll do a separate interview or interview-based story. Larry Rosen is a lawyer who practices in the U.S., and he was commenting on a U.S. case.
- Robin
(I assume yoiu can find my email address; every spammer in the world certainly has...)
Oh, come on. These court decisions often go up on unlinked servers before the formal release. The ones the Alert Slashdot Reader noticed (above) are not the only ones, either. There are some others that are known to (smart) DC-area reporters and some lobbyists that hardly anyone else ever finds. (And no, I am not going to post them here.)
But a hint: The District of Columbia mirrors a *lot* of Federal Court decisons... ditto, more often than not, other jurisdictions that have a stake in a given case...
- Robin
As a working taxpayer who subsidizes my state's university system, I ought to be as eligible for that discount as the profs and students who benefit from my generosity, right?
- Robin
Dan travels like mad. I got a "be patient, I haven't forgotten" email from him.
- Robin
Exactly. My wife has a small Internet-based business, DebbieCentral.com. She accepts payments through PayPal (although most of her clients pay by check), and has a separate bank account for PayPal and other online transactions.
I signed up for a PayPal account when they were first getting started, and I have never been able to close it. I have, however, closed the bank account it was connected to (for other reasons, not because of PayPal), so I'm fairly safe.
- Robin "Roblimo" Miller
Personal site: http://roblimo.com
Or maybe you and I frequent different Internets? :)
- Robin