Actually I quite like the HP 50g, and if you look at the main product page you'll see it has just eight one- and two-star reviews versus 183 four- and five-star reviews.
I agree. I'd like to see them drop the pointless web search and advertising focus. Yes, this means giving Google a practical monopoly. But:
1) Microsoft has spent BILLIONS on this, and is barely any better-off than they were before, and
2) Microsoft is simply no good at it. But that's ok, you can be no good at things! Just accept it and move on.
I believe one aim of Microsoft's online focus is simply to dilute the market. If Microsoft does what Google does (offer online services and advertising networks) but Google doesn't do what Microsoft does (sell applications for desktop PCs) then Microsoft is the one with a differentiating advantage. Microsoft doesn't need to do a better job than Google at the online stuff. It just needs to be seen as offering equivalent products/services; then its salespeople can go to work. Even if Microsoft doesn't win the contracts, customers are still confused and likely to move more slowly. Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps selling Windows and Office, gambling that Google will eventually make serious missteps.
It also seems likely to accelerate infighting. What manager is going to support another manager's efforts when his own job is on the line in the short term? Each division is going to spend half its energy trying to cut the other divisions' throats.
Lolita, on its own, is a great loss. That is an amazing book. It's really too bad publishers want to put totally creepy photos on the cover so everyone thinks you're a pedophile when you read it. Nabokov works wonders with the English language (and it wasn't even his native tongue)! I recommend this book to absolutely everyone.
The only thing I don't like about this is the Amazon exclusivity.
The "only thing"? I'm practically screaming about it!
I have a Nook. It's a superior e-reader to the Kindle. (YMMV.) What this deal is saying is that I may not read any of the affected books on my Nook, period. If I prefer to read on my Nook, then POOF! These books are lost to me. Apparently, permanently. I do not understand how these authors (or their heirs) can sit still for that.
And I know the Slashdot audience tends to read mostly fantasy and sci-fi books, but for the literature-minded among you, Jesus titty-fucking Christ! These are indeed modern classics, lost to Amazon's DRM. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Ellison's Invisible Man? London Fields? The Naked and the Dead? These are great books... and now I may not read them in a digital edition unless I give $199 + $10 to Amazon. Fuck me.
No, man, the same rules apply for every company. When you're starting out, you may feel like you have to slit throats to get your foot in the door. But I'm dead serious: The last throat to get slit will be yours. And the person who put the heads on the blocks was you, because you felt like it was more important to get your foot in the door than to work in an industry that paid people for their work. It's hard to convince young people of this, but eventually, everybody learns.
At some point, customers will expect product in the first meeting. No product, no customer. They set the terms, not you. They are the customer, not you. You can carry on all you want about quality, but every dead industry in the US has yelped about quality and cheap foreign (or local) competition. It happens just before they die.
But that's what I mean about professionalism. If you're a professional, you respect the profession. You compete; you don't go cutting your competitors' throats, because even though you might be the last one standing, your throat gets cut in the end.
No, the customer doesn't get to tell us what we bring to a pitch, because that's not how we do business. We don't do business that way, Fred doesn't do business that way, and John down the street doesn't do business that way, because we are in business. This is our profession. Whether I'm a software developer, an IT guy, an interior decorator, or a landscape designer, I don't work for free, even just to get my foot in the door, because to do so demeans the entire profession. If you're so desperate that you can't put food on the table without charging less than fair market rate, you need to be in a different line of business. You're not succeeding.
Welllll, what you say is sort of true, to an extent. You're viewing design work on an excessively etherial level, I think.
YES, it is true that a mid-level designer might have just as easily come up with the AT&T logo. But when AT&T contracts out a brand redesign, what it wants is probably not merely a logo. It wants a brand system that's going to include everything from business cards to stationery to the graphics on the sides of the trucks it rolls out to fix the phone lines. It probably wants one version of the logo for color printing and it needs an alternate system in one color for cases where color printing is not economical. It probably needs elements of the logo to scale to different sizes so that it can fit on different form factors and the type is still legible. It might need designs for for the boxes it ships out DSL modems in. It might need designs for uniforms. There might be considerations for global markets. All this happens before AT&T even talks about advertising materials, which will probably be someone else's responsibility, but all of it needs to be on deadline so it can be rolled out simultaneously. And all of it has different requirements -- four color process, spot color, silk screening, etc. -- and someone needs to go out to press checks to make sure everything looks OK, and so on.
Just wait until wannabe designers in low-wage nations like India, China, Brazil, etc (using cracked copies of design software) start entering into the process. $269 will seem overpriced.
I'm very curious about this. I worked for a packaging design firm for a while, and my company was very interested in cracking the India market. There seemed to be a huge opportunity in packaged goods there, as a new affluent class gradually trended toward American-style consumerism.
The problem? Graphic design is ultimately about communication -- often in very subtle, even subliminal ways -- and we, as Americans, simply didn't understand how the Indian mindset worked. We got someone to scour some shelves in India and bring back some successful Indian products, and their packaging was pretty much baffling to our designers. Who was this character pictured on the front of the box? What values did he represent to the consumer? Why this choice of typeface? It was in Indian script, but was this type modern or classical? Why use English here, but not here? Why would a tube of toothpaste be completely colored green -- did green have some special significance to Indians that we didn't understand? And so on.
I can't help but wonder whether graphic designers who had spent their entire lives in India or China would struggle with designing for American markets in the same way.
It's worth noting that in many other industries where the criteria for determining the product quality is very subjective, bids will often take the form of nearly complete projects.
That's known as "working on spec." I used to work for a very prominent, very expensive packaging design firm in San Francisco, and our firm never, ever, ever did any work on spec. We showed up at a client meeting with nothing for them but a few vague ideas about the power of their brand, their customer base, and their market. No suggestions about color, about package shapes, nothing. You hired us based on the strength of our presentation and our past work and that was all.
Did our competitors ever try to undercut us by showing up with finished package designs before they had even landed the contract? Yes they did, especially as the market tightened. The real old timers found that way of doing business to be completely contemptible, and they attributed it to the young kids entering the field who had no respect for professionalism, etc. etc. But such is life -- times and practices change.
At the same time, many companies respected our track record and the strength of our creative staff enough that they would hire us, without seeing any specific designs, despite the fact that our rates were among the highest in the business. And, frankly, those were the jobs we wanted -- not because they were suckers, but because their jobs gave us the opportunity to continue to build a portfolio of respectable, quality work. There was no point in taking little piecemeal jobs that would pad out our portfolio with junk that looked like the same boring, unimaginative stuff everybody else was doing. We might as well have closed up shop. That would be no way to run a business -- and this 99designs.com, while it didn't exist back then, is evidence of that.
As in almost any field, there's a big difference between hackwork and high-end, professional work. People who want the latter will pay for the latter. In the case of graphic design, they're usually willing to pay for it because they recognize that graphic design is merely a tool to get them what they really want, which is a successful business, and a successful business is something worth investing in.
That's a fine idea... the problem is that I've read most of the "classics" that I really wanted to, and while I've downloaded more, the fact remains I want to read what I want to read an won't limit myself to 100 year old stuff.
Then allow me to recommend you stick with the Nook, rather than the Kindle. The big difference is that the Nook supports the EPUB format, which is rapidly becoming the standard for e-books. The Nook even supports EPUB files that have been encrypted with Adobe DRM, which means I can use my Nook to read e-books that I have checked out from my local public library. You can't do that with a Kindle.
My library (the San Francisco Public Library) actually has a pretty good range of e-books available, too, including recent bestsellers and genre fiction. So far I've checked out two books, both published in 2010. One was published in hardcover as recently as May.
Your mileage may vary, because your local library needs to purchase digital editions before it can offer them for lending, and your library may not be as committed to the e-book format as mine seems to be. Most libraries seem to be serviced by a company called OverDrive that provides the Web site and DRM infrastructure, however, so it may start happening at your library sooner than you think.
"Fox is an incredibly disciplined organization. CNN is much less disciplined. It's part of the reason why CNN's a better journalism organization. It doesn't have the kind of top-down discipline that Fox has. But in a competitive race, Fox knows exactly what its audience wants. It's been one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in television: no matter what the story is, no matter what the circumstances are, if it's not what the audience wants, they will walk away from the story." [Emphasis mine]
Everyone says newspapers are dying. If that's true, then the Web is what will replace them -- and if that's the case, we really, really don't need Web publishers following the example of TV news.
This isn't like TV or newspaper, where advertisements play whether people are watching it or not.
Now you're getting Zen. If an ad is printed in a newspaper, but the newspaper gets shredded and used to line a bird cage, does the ad "play"?
Paying for each time a page loads is why we're in this predicament. Advertisers want to pay for stories that get seen by the largest number of people. They don't want to pay for obscure or convoluted stories that don't get easy airplay. But the stories that people want to read are not necessarily the most important stories, let alone the best examples of journalism.
You see the trend toward sensationalism, celebrity news, lurid dramas, etc., in almost every news outlet. Allowing advertisers to pay based on the individual story, rather than the reputation of the newsroom, exacerbates this trend. Eventually, it creates a hard divide: Stories that people feel like reading get all the ad money. Difficult stories don't get paid for.
Thus, you end up with what TFA describes: Reporters scrambling to find any little angle that someone else might not have mentioned, any way to spin a story so it gets noticed, so their hamster wheels keep turning the little generators that keep the lights on.
It's the advertising model that's to blame. And the publishers are the ones who agreed to play this way, so you can point the finger there.
In the old days, a publication would go to advertisers and say, "We have a brand that's recognized blah-de-blah and we have a daily/weekly/monthly circulation of dee-da-dee, here are some studies that show who our average reader is, this is their purchasing power, do you want to advertise with us or not?" And if you were the New York Times, they would. No further questions asked.
I come from the world of trade publishing. You know those magazines like Information Week where you can fill out a survey and you get the subscriptions for free? That survey is what's paying for your subscription. That survey is what we take to advertisers to explain to them exactly who our readers are and how advertisers can expect to reach people in IT with purchasing power if they advertise in our pages. These "qualified circulation" magazines can often charge advertisers more than a regular, pay-for-subscription magazine can, because we know more about our readers (assuming the readers tell the truth, but ignoring that is a little game the entire industry agrees to play). Again, it's not about who the advertiser reached with an ad. It's about who they could reach.
That was the past.
Now, in a desperate bid to ignite the online advertising market, publishers have made a devil's bargain. Now they agree to turn over reams of Web logs for every page view they serve. The advertiser wants to know: Exactly how many times did you serve our ad? For what content? Who saw it? When was it served on a story that did well and when was it served on a story that nobody saw? How can we stop putting our ad on your boring stories and only put it on the stories that people like?
That last sentence is the kicker. You can see where it leads. More and more, the publication is compelled to stop running stories that aren't hits and only try to run stories that will be "viral" blockbusters. This pressure is incredibly difficult to ignore, but it's insidious. It erodes the judgment of the editorial department at any publication. It leads to the kind of story-chasing described in TFA.
And don't think blogs are going to save the industry this time. It's even worse at some unknown blog -- how are you ever going to get your voice heard if nobody visits your blog? So you need a headline. You need a sensational story. You'll do it just this one time, and everybody will keep coming back for all your other scintillating insights that aren't quite so sensational... sorry, Charlie. It won't work. You'll end up doing it too.
The only way to fix it is for publishers to turn off the faucet. You want to see an exact breakdown of our Web logs and how your ads are skewing with what story, when and how? Fuck you. That's proprietary information that we don't release to our clients. Suffice it to say that we are a leading publication in our field. Take or leave.
If you want to trot the world, see strange places and break that AWESOME story, then, well, you're going to have to take some risks. Get out from behind the desk. Actually see the world and... GASP... FIND SOME FUCKING NEWS TO REPORT ON OF YOUR OWN.
And that's what you do, right? Because it's just that easy. Grab your passport, get some plane tickets, fly your way to Myanmar, buy your way into the inner circle of government, then fly back to Los Angeles and write your exposé on corruption in the Myanmar dictatorship and sell it to the Los Angeles Times for, oh, let's say $1,000. Rinse and repeat. Right?
They should hire people who are qualified in the first place and this would not happen.
Who's "qualified"? Is there a certificate you can get for that?
You've posted a lot of posts to this thread now, and all I get out of any of them is that you think you're the world's biggest tough guy with brass balls the size of cantaloupes. What I get out of them, on the other hand, is you have an obnoxious need to brag about your lack of empathy as mask to conceal your insecurities. You'd probably be terrible at this job.
Does John Q. Public really care all that much about file sharing? It doesn't seem to hold much sway (in either direction) outside of the geek/teenager/record-label-executive world.
I don't know what kind of people you hang around with, but I don't know anyone under the age of 35 who doesn't know about BitTorrent, or at the very least some other means of downloading non-free music for free. Years ago I had a 35-year-old single mom from Detroit tell me she hasn't bought any music in a long time, because she just downloads it. My musician friends are some of the most avid consumers of music I've ever met, and since they can't afford to buy every CD they want to hear, they generally get everything they want to hear from torrents before buying some of it. (And yes, they would also like people to buy their own CDs, but they all accept the way the modern music world is.) Other friends spend whole weekends at home watching entire seasons of HBO TV shows, because they download them one torrent at a time. If you don't hear much about the "file sharing controversy," I'd say it's because that ship has long since sailed.
Actually, humans spend the nine months in utero in a completely bacteria-free environment. However, babies born vaginally pick up their first dose of bacteria immediately as they emerge from their mother's birth canal, and even babies born via Caeserian section are bacteria magnets. The natural birth babies generally get a big dose of lactobacillus, while C-section babies tend to pick up strains found on the skin and the general hospital environment. Or so they say. But the bacteria are hardly "built into the body," which is why identical twins will have different gut flora.
Still, you may notice that TFA is about viruses, not bacteria.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I quite like the HP 50g, and if you look at the main product page you'll see it has just eight one- and two-star reviews versus 183 four- and five-star reviews.
So, the reason they examine it in the first place is to know whether or not they need to set specific values that are supported by the Sun/Oracle JVM.
...and if they can't determine the answer for sure, the correct procedure is to terminate with an out of memory exception?
Magnetic
If they actually achieved that, it would be a miracle.
I agree. I'd like to see them drop the pointless web search and advertising focus. Yes, this means giving Google a practical monopoly. But:
1) Microsoft has spent BILLIONS on this, and is barely any better-off than they were before, and
2) Microsoft is simply no good at it. But that's ok, you can be no good at things! Just accept it and move on.
I believe one aim of Microsoft's online focus is simply to dilute the market. If Microsoft does what Google does (offer online services and advertising networks) but Google doesn't do what Microsoft does (sell applications for desktop PCs) then Microsoft is the one with a differentiating advantage. Microsoft doesn't need to do a better job than Google at the online stuff. It just needs to be seen as offering equivalent products/services; then its salespeople can go to work. Even if Microsoft doesn't win the contracts, customers are still confused and likely to move more slowly. Meanwhile, Microsoft keeps selling Windows and Office, gambling that Google will eventually make serious missteps.
It also seems likely to accelerate infighting. What manager is going to support another manager's efforts when his own job is on the line in the short term? Each division is going to spend half its energy trying to cut the other divisions' throats.
Lolita, on its own, is a great loss. That is an amazing book. It's really too bad publishers want to put totally creepy photos on the cover so everyone thinks you're a pedophile when you read it. Nabokov works wonders with the English language (and it wasn't even his native tongue)! I recommend this book to absolutely everyone.
The only thing I don't like about this is the Amazon exclusivity.
The "only thing"? I'm practically screaming about it!
I have a Nook. It's a superior e-reader to the Kindle. (YMMV.) What this deal is saying is that I may not read any of the affected books on my Nook, period. If I prefer to read on my Nook, then POOF! These books are lost to me. Apparently, permanently. I do not understand how these authors (or their heirs) can sit still for that.
And I know the Slashdot audience tends to read mostly fantasy and sci-fi books, but for the literature-minded among you, Jesus titty-fucking Christ! These are indeed modern classics, lost to Amazon's DRM. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Ellison's Invisible Man? London Fields? The Naked and the Dead? These are great books... and now I may not read them in a digital edition unless I give $199 + $10 to Amazon. Fuck me.
You're saying this as an established company.
No, man, the same rules apply for every company. When you're starting out, you may feel like you have to slit throats to get your foot in the door. But I'm dead serious: The last throat to get slit will be yours. And the person who put the heads on the blocks was you, because you felt like it was more important to get your foot in the door than to work in an industry that paid people for their work. It's hard to convince young people of this, but eventually, everybody learns.
At some point, customers will expect product in the first meeting. No product, no customer. They set the terms, not you. They are the customer, not you. You can carry on all you want about quality, but every dead industry in the US has yelped about quality and cheap foreign (or local) competition. It happens just before they die.
But that's what I mean about professionalism. If you're a professional, you respect the profession. You compete; you don't go cutting your competitors' throats, because even though you might be the last one standing, your throat gets cut in the end.
No, the customer doesn't get to tell us what we bring to a pitch, because that's not how we do business. We don't do business that way, Fred doesn't do business that way, and John down the street doesn't do business that way, because we are in business. This is our profession. Whether I'm a software developer, an IT guy, an interior decorator, or a landscape designer, I don't work for free, even just to get my foot in the door, because to do so demeans the entire profession. If you're so desperate that you can't put food on the table without charging less than fair market rate, you need to be in a different line of business. You're not succeeding.
(and probably more, in fact)
Welllll, what you say is sort of true, to an extent. You're viewing design work on an excessively etherial level, I think.
YES, it is true that a mid-level designer might have just as easily come up with the AT&T logo. But when AT&T contracts out a brand redesign, what it wants is probably not merely a logo. It wants a brand system that's going to include everything from business cards to stationery to the graphics on the sides of the trucks it rolls out to fix the phone lines. It probably wants one version of the logo for color printing and it needs an alternate system in one color for cases where color printing is not economical. It probably needs elements of the logo to scale to different sizes so that it can fit on different form factors and the type is still legible. It might need designs for for the boxes it ships out DSL modems in. It might need designs for uniforms. There might be considerations for global markets. All this happens before AT&T even talks about advertising materials, which will probably be someone else's responsibility, but all of it needs to be on deadline so it can be rolled out simultaneously. And all of it has different requirements -- four color process, spot color, silk screening, etc. -- and someone needs to go out to press checks to make sure everything looks OK, and so on.
That's why it costs $50,000.
Just wait until wannabe designers in low-wage nations like India, China, Brazil, etc (using cracked copies of design software) start entering into the process. $269 will seem overpriced.
I'm very curious about this. I worked for a packaging design firm for a while, and my company was very interested in cracking the India market. There seemed to be a huge opportunity in packaged goods there, as a new affluent class gradually trended toward American-style consumerism.
The problem? Graphic design is ultimately about communication -- often in very subtle, even subliminal ways -- and we, as Americans, simply didn't understand how the Indian mindset worked. We got someone to scour some shelves in India and bring back some successful Indian products, and their packaging was pretty much baffling to our designers. Who was this character pictured on the front of the box? What values did he represent to the consumer? Why this choice of typeface? It was in Indian script, but was this type modern or classical? Why use English here, but not here? Why would a tube of toothpaste be completely colored green -- did green have some special significance to Indians that we didn't understand? And so on.
I can't help but wonder whether graphic designers who had spent their entire lives in India or China would struggle with designing for American markets in the same way.
It's worth noting that in many other industries where the criteria for determining the product quality is very subjective, bids will often take the form of nearly complete projects.
That's known as "working on spec." I used to work for a very prominent, very expensive packaging design firm in San Francisco, and our firm never, ever, ever did any work on spec. We showed up at a client meeting with nothing for them but a few vague ideas about the power of their brand, their customer base, and their market. No suggestions about color, about package shapes, nothing. You hired us based on the strength of our presentation and our past work and that was all.
Did our competitors ever try to undercut us by showing up with finished package designs before they had even landed the contract? Yes they did, especially as the market tightened. The real old timers found that way of doing business to be completely contemptible, and they attributed it to the young kids entering the field who had no respect for professionalism, etc. etc. But such is life -- times and practices change.
At the same time, many companies respected our track record and the strength of our creative staff enough that they would hire us, without seeing any specific designs, despite the fact that our rates were among the highest in the business. And, frankly, those were the jobs we wanted -- not because they were suckers, but because their jobs gave us the opportunity to continue to build a portfolio of respectable, quality work. There was no point in taking little piecemeal jobs that would pad out our portfolio with junk that looked like the same boring, unimaginative stuff everybody else was doing. We might as well have closed up shop. That would be no way to run a business -- and this 99designs.com, while it didn't exist back then, is evidence of that.
As in almost any field, there's a big difference between hackwork and high-end, professional work. People who want the latter will pay for the latter. In the case of graphic design, they're usually willing to pay for it because they recognize that graphic design is merely a tool to get them what they really want, which is a successful business, and a successful business is something worth investing in.
They're angry because they're established. Expensive suits. Exquisitely designed suites to work in.
Haha, have you ever even met a graphic designer?
Here's a nerd tip for ya: Some of them are fun to date.
Oddly enough, they implemented this a few days ago. Try the link, above.
That's a fine idea... the problem is that I've read most of the "classics" that I really wanted to, and while I've downloaded more, the fact remains I want to read what I want to read an won't limit myself to 100 year old stuff.
Then allow me to recommend you stick with the Nook, rather than the Kindle. The big difference is that the Nook supports the EPUB format, which is rapidly becoming the standard for e-books. The Nook even supports EPUB files that have been encrypted with Adobe DRM, which means I can use my Nook to read e-books that I have checked out from my local public library. You can't do that with a Kindle.
My library (the San Francisco Public Library) actually has a pretty good range of e-books available, too, including recent bestsellers and genre fiction. So far I've checked out two books, both published in 2010. One was published in hardcover as recently as May.
Your mileage may vary, because your local library needs to purchase digital editions before it can offer them for lending, and your library may not be as committed to the e-book format as mine seems to be. Most libraries seem to be serviced by a company called OverDrive that provides the Web site and DRM infrastructure, however, so it may start happening at your library sooner than you think.
There are entire channels revolving around news.
And you don't have to look very far to see examples of precisely what I'm talking about. Quote from the article:
"Fox is an incredibly disciplined organization. CNN is much less disciplined. It's part of the reason why CNN's a better journalism organization. It doesn't have the kind of top-down discipline that Fox has. But in a competitive race, Fox knows exactly what its audience wants. It's been one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen in television: no matter what the story is, no matter what the circumstances are, if it's not what the audience wants, they will walk away from the story." [Emphasis mine]
Everyone says newspapers are dying. If that's true, then the Web is what will replace them -- and if that's the case, we really, really don't need Web publishers following the example of TV news.
The difference is we're talking about journalism, not entertainment.
What would you say it is about television that produces good journalism?
Sorry, but you've missed the point completely.
This isn't like TV or newspaper, where advertisements play whether people are watching it or not.
Now you're getting Zen. If an ad is printed in a newspaper, but the newspaper gets shredded and used to line a bird cage, does the ad "play"?
Paying for each time a page loads is why we're in this predicament. Advertisers want to pay for stories that get seen by the largest number of people. They don't want to pay for obscure or convoluted stories that don't get easy airplay. But the stories that people want to read are not necessarily the most important stories, let alone the best examples of journalism.
You see the trend toward sensationalism, celebrity news, lurid dramas, etc., in almost every news outlet. Allowing advertisers to pay based on the individual story, rather than the reputation of the newsroom, exacerbates this trend. Eventually, it creates a hard divide: Stories that people feel like reading get all the ad money. Difficult stories don't get paid for.
Thus, you end up with what TFA describes: Reporters scrambling to find any little angle that someone else might not have mentioned, any way to spin a story so it gets noticed, so their hamster wheels keep turning the little generators that keep the lights on.
It's the advertising model that's to blame. And the publishers are the ones who agreed to play this way, so you can point the finger there.
In the old days, a publication would go to advertisers and say, "We have a brand that's recognized blah-de-blah and we have a daily/weekly/monthly circulation of dee-da-dee, here are some studies that show who our average reader is, this is their purchasing power, do you want to advertise with us or not?" And if you were the New York Times, they would. No further questions asked.
I come from the world of trade publishing. You know those magazines like Information Week where you can fill out a survey and you get the subscriptions for free? That survey is what's paying for your subscription. That survey is what we take to advertisers to explain to them exactly who our readers are and how advertisers can expect to reach people in IT with purchasing power if they advertise in our pages. These "qualified circulation" magazines can often charge advertisers more than a regular, pay-for-subscription magazine can, because we know more about our readers (assuming the readers tell the truth, but ignoring that is a little game the entire industry agrees to play). Again, it's not about who the advertiser reached with an ad. It's about who they could reach.
That was the past.
Now, in a desperate bid to ignite the online advertising market, publishers have made a devil's bargain. Now they agree to turn over reams of Web logs for every page view they serve. The advertiser wants to know: Exactly how many times did you serve our ad? For what content? Who saw it? When was it served on a story that did well and when was it served on a story that nobody saw? How can we stop putting our ad on your boring stories and only put it on the stories that people like?
That last sentence is the kicker. You can see where it leads. More and more, the publication is compelled to stop running stories that aren't hits and only try to run stories that will be "viral" blockbusters. This pressure is incredibly difficult to ignore, but it's insidious. It erodes the judgment of the editorial department at any publication. It leads to the kind of story-chasing described in TFA.
And don't think blogs are going to save the industry this time. It's even worse at some unknown blog -- how are you ever going to get your voice heard if nobody visits your blog? So you need a headline. You need a sensational story. You'll do it just this one time, and everybody will keep coming back for all your other scintillating insights that aren't quite so sensational ... sorry, Charlie. It won't work. You'll end up doing it too.
The only way to fix it is for publishers to turn off the faucet. You want to see an exact breakdown of our Web logs and how your ads are skewing with what story, when and how? Fuck you. That's proprietary information that we don't release to our clients. Suffice it to say that we are a leading publication in our field. Take or leave.
But how likely is that?
If you want to trot the world, see strange places and break that AWESOME story, then, well, you're going to have to take some risks. Get out from behind the desk. Actually see the world and ... GASP ... FIND SOME FUCKING NEWS TO REPORT ON OF YOUR OWN.
And that's what you do, right? Because it's just that easy. Grab your passport, get some plane tickets, fly your way to Myanmar, buy your way into the inner circle of government, then fly back to Los Angeles and write your exposé on corruption in the Myanmar dictatorship and sell it to the Los Angeles Times for, oh, let's say $1,000. Rinse and repeat. Right?
They should hire people who are qualified in the first place and this would not happen.
Who's "qualified"? Is there a certificate you can get for that?
You've posted a lot of posts to this thread now, and all I get out of any of them is that you think you're the world's biggest tough guy with brass balls the size of cantaloupes. What I get out of them, on the other hand, is you have an obnoxious need to brag about your lack of empathy as mask to conceal your insecurities. You'd probably be terrible at this job.
Does John Q. Public really care all that much about file sharing? It doesn't seem to hold much sway (in either direction) outside of the geek/teenager/record-label-executive world.
I don't know what kind of people you hang around with, but I don't know anyone under the age of 35 who doesn't know about BitTorrent, or at the very least some other means of downloading non-free music for free. Years ago I had a 35-year-old single mom from Detroit tell me she hasn't bought any music in a long time, because she just downloads it. My musician friends are some of the most avid consumers of music I've ever met, and since they can't afford to buy every CD they want to hear, they generally get everything they want to hear from torrents before buying some of it. (And yes, they would also like people to buy their own CDs, but they all accept the way the modern music world is.) Other friends spend whole weekends at home watching entire seasons of HBO TV shows, because they download them one torrent at a time. If you don't hear much about the "file sharing controversy," I'd say it's because that ship has long since sailed.
Actually, humans spend the nine months in utero in a completely bacteria-free environment. However, babies born vaginally pick up their first dose of bacteria immediately as they emerge from their mother's birth canal, and even babies born via Caeserian section are bacteria magnets. The natural birth babies generally get a big dose of lactobacillus, while C-section babies tend to pick up strains found on the skin and the general hospital environment. Or so they say. But the bacteria are hardly "built into the body," which is why identical twins will have different gut flora.
Still, you may notice that TFA is about viruses, not bacteria.
the murderer must be the guy's brother
so they let him loose and track down brother after brother, sample his dna, and it turns out to be yet another brother.
Typical. Always try to pin it on a brother.