This is exactly the point of my post--the newspaper cannot print dozens of high resolution color photos of the game in the dead tree version of the paper, but for next-to-zero costs, they can post them all on the website and that's what's drawing reader attention.
Newspapers and tv stations who have websites must begin to think of their websites differetnly than they think of their other business. Newpapers must become more like tv stations, for one. They are going to have to have constantly updated news stories and richer content if they are going to compete online.
Thanks for continuing this. To take it a bit further, though, my intent in pointing out the popularity of the football gallery was to highlight the fact that scarce resources will follow the readership to a greater or lesser extent, and that migration of resources has consequences for what you're proposing.
You say "[Newspapers] are going to have to have constantly updated news stories and richer content if they are going to compete online." Fair enough, but the two points I was (poorly) attempting to illustrate are 1) if newsroom resources are going toward football photo galleries, they can't be used to post minute of city council meetings, reporters notes, full text of interviews, and other compelling content that can't fit in print; and 2) it's doubtful that a significant percentage of readers even want that level of complexity for most stories. Hence the popularity of easy-to-digest photo galleries: quick to consume, visually- stimulating, exclusive content that people can enjoy on their way to the football message boards.
I may be misunderstanding the thrust of your argument, though--if you're suggesting that it's photos that are going to draw attention, then you'll get no argument from me. Some of my colleagues in the newsroom often joke that we should simply abandon the whole "news" thing in favor of photo galleries and college sports. That's fine if all we wish to do is serve readers exactly what they want, but I think a lot of editors are of the opinion that a very real part of the newspaper's job is to provide news that, in the opinion of the editorial board, the audience needs to know.
One thing is for sure: newspapers, both individually and as an industry, feel the pressure, and are scrambling to come up with models that allow them to survive. Case in point, a colleague attended a conference last week where one of the panels was titled, "News 2010: Who will lead the way as newspapers die?"
This at a convention heavily attended by newspaper online editors.
On the internet there are no constraints on how long an article or new clip can be, no limit on the number of photos, no reason you can't post raw video or audio along with the typical edited clips so that people who are interested in a subject can see more indepth coverage.
[Disclaimer: I work for a metro newspaper in the online department, and these opinions are mine, not necessarily reflective of any editorial policies, etc, etc.]
When I first started at the newspaper, I believed exactly as you did--no reason you can't post the entire story, with lots of extra content that couldn't make it into the paper, but there are actually a number of practical limits that make that infeasible:
Longer stories take more of a reporter's time to craft. As with most organizations, the single biggest expense a newspaper has is payroll
Even "raw" video, photos, etc. take some resources to process: time & bandwidth being chief among them
One of the benefits any news organization brings to its readership is editorial decision-making: This is what we think is important today. Yes, it's inherently biased and favors certain types of stories over others. But as has been proven time and again, if information wants to be free, it will be posted, and if people find it important and relevant, that information will be read.
But the single biggest eye-opener for me, and one that cured me of thinking "just post it all!" was our readership numbers. The online features that draw the biggest readership numbers are web-exclusive photo galleries of our local college football team. Top viewed stories every day during football season? Stories relating to that team. Admittedly, I live in Texas, where football is the state religion, but the readers vote with their mice, and the mice are saying "Give us pretty pictures of football, please!"
Newspapers are one part community service and one part business. If the community is obviously overwhelmingly interested in a certain kind of content, then more resources will gravitate toward providing that content.
You realize that you can't be an agnostic and an atheist, right?
A common misconception. Theism and atheism simply refer to a person's belief or disbelief in the existence of a god, while gnostic and agnostic refer to the certainty of that knowledge. So, there are four possible classes:
* Agnostic Atheist: I believe that there is no god, but I do not believe that it can be proven
* Agnostic Theist: I believe that there is a god, but I do not believe that it can be proven
* Gnostic Atheist: I believe that there is no god, and I believe that it can be (or has been) proven
* Gnostic Theist: I believe that there is a god, and I believe that it can be or has been proven
When I was hiring a web technical person, I directed 2nd round candidates to a website to answer a series of screening questions: Typical web & Perl stuff like "The intent of this Perl script is to do . What are some security problems, and how could you fix them"... that kind of thing.
As "extra credit", I posted 4 hidden questions in the source:
<!-- QUESTION 6: vi or Emacs? --> <!-- QUESTION 7: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? --> <!-- QUESTION 8: Do you speak Bocce? --> <!-- QUESTION 9: Do you know the way to San Jose? -->
Unfortunately, only one candidate found them, and he ended up not being interested in the job.
Sorry, personal interest topic. Mental health issues are not widely understood, so let me say that I'm not sure Sony (or any other company, for that matter) would be classified as "bipolar". In psychological terms, "bipolar" means
Aragorn. Aragorn was probably my second favorite character in the book (next to Faramir), and I didn't like the way he was portrayed as bearing a family "weakness". He isn't really supposed to be a "weak" character that needs to prove himself.
I'm not entirely sure that's irreconcilable with the book, though--check out the voluminous Appendices, and you'll see that Elrond told Aragorn, basically, "You can't have Arwen because she's the daughter of an elf lord". Elrond had sent Aragorn on numerous quests, IIRC, before he finally consented to allow Aragorn to woo Arwen, and he never was too happy with Arwen's decision to forsake the Grey Havens.
Disclaimer, I haven't seen the movie yet, so I could be missing some completely obvious bit of filmmaking that just screams, "Uh oh, Aragorn's got a *bad* case of the 'Gotta live up to Daddy's expectations'".:-)
Another FPS which had a good immersive story line was Who Wants To Live Forever. More tongue-in-cheek than violent. Shouldn't be too expensive now either.
If you're talking about "The Operative: No One Lives Forever", I agree--a mostly fun, mission based FPS. The best thing about this game is the enemy dialog. When you're stealthily creeping along a balcony, listening to two German-accented criminals discuss correlation vs. causality vis-a-vis beer drinking and criminal behavior...just priceless.
A great many computers on the Internet don't have their patches up to date; there are many examples of systems being broken into using vulnerabilities that should have been patched. I don't fault the sysadmins for this; there are just too many patches, and many of them are sloppily written and poorly tested.
I do fault the sysadmins: It's our job to maintain systems as securely as we are able. It's part of the cost of doing business.
We should maintain continual pressure on the vendors to improve their initial software quality, to improve their security vulnerabilities especially, and to improve their patching experience to make it easier to apply secure patches with some degree of confidence (which would be an outflow of improving their software quality in the first place--the same processes apply to patches as to a full-fledged app).
However, we should never use a vendor's failings as an excuse for not maintaining due diligence on security matters.
A company's management makes a decision--rational or not--to use a system. Part of that decision includes total cost of ownership. If total cost of ownership outweighs the total benefit derived from a system, don't use the system.
Now, most of us aren't in a position to make a final decision on systems, so we must influence the decision by making sure TCO includes the cost of maintaining security patches.
No, the threat to Linux is that its most fanatical proponents will not be satisfied until Linux takes over the desktop world in the same way MS has done.
Most of the Linux community is content to use the tool appropriate to the job. The Linux-or-death fringe, however, won't accept that MS can find a place in the world. An odd thing about it is that a significant portion of Linux's functionality is devoted to emulating MS features.
I can just picture the scenario: The year is 2025. Windows BS (Brainstem Edition) has been released to tremendous fanfare. Now, WBE has the feature of being able to use your wetware to supplement floating-point processing. Never mind that chips are doing it faster...BS has it, and before too long, so does Linux, for no other reason than to enable them to say "Who needs Windows? Linux does the same thing, better."
If the new service uses POP3, how can they stop you from using a POP3-compliant email client? Some kind of MS-specific extensions?
Re:One 2600 meeting does not a sample make.
on
Babbage, A Look Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Like any culture, our culture needs to be taught!
Hear, hear! But a meme needs a route to propagate. Who's going to do it?
Universities aren't interested just in "educating" future academics; they've got a vested interest in crafting a workforce. Their funding derives in large part from donations from business leaders, and those leaders want employees who can program, not employees who have an appreciation for Babbage. An analogy would be to business schools: Graduates are expected to solve "real-world" (as academia sees it) problems, not be able to discourse on the history of efficiency experts. B-Schools aren't so much interested in giving their students a full and complete history of business methods as they are in providing a little bit of context to their graduates, who move on to become employees, who move on to become "leaders", who--they hope--move on to become future corporate alumni donors.
So who educates the next generation (or the current generation; I'm painfully aware of my own ignorance in these matters)? Well, where did you learn about Babbage? Some of us probably learned about him in an academic setting, but I'm guessing that informal channels played a much more important role for most technophiles--if for no other reason then the aggressively informal culture of high-tech in general. I wasn't attracted to computers because there was such a rich history of thought and intellectual culture behind them. I was jazzed by bells, whistles and blinkenlights. Once I got involved, it was an informal network of peers, books, net sites, and conversations that led to expanding my knowledge into historical considerations.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for continuing this. To take it a bit further, though, my intent in pointing out the popularity of the football gallery was to highlight the fact that scarce resources will follow the readership to a greater or lesser extent, and that migration of resources has consequences for what you're proposing.
You say "[Newspapers] are going to have to have constantly updated news stories and richer content if they are going to compete online." Fair enough, but the two points I was (poorly) attempting to illustrate are 1) if newsroom resources are going toward football photo galleries, they can't be used to post minute of city council meetings, reporters notes, full text of interviews, and other compelling content that can't fit in print; and 2) it's doubtful that a significant percentage of readers even want that level of complexity for most stories. Hence the popularity of easy-to-digest photo galleries: quick to consume, visually- stimulating, exclusive content that people can enjoy on their way to the football message boards.
I may be misunderstanding the thrust of your argument, though--if you're suggesting that it's photos that are going to draw attention, then you'll get no argument from me. Some of my colleagues in the newsroom often joke that we should simply abandon the whole "news" thing in favor of photo galleries and college sports. That's fine if all we wish to do is serve readers exactly what they want, but I think a lot of editors are of the opinion that a very real part of the newspaper's job is to provide news that, in the opinion of the editorial board, the audience needs to know.
One thing is for sure: newspapers, both individually and as an industry, feel the pressure, and are scrambling to come up with models that allow them to survive. Case in point, a colleague attended a conference last week where one of the panels was titled, "News 2010: Who will lead the way as newspapers die?"
This at a convention heavily attended by newspaper online editors.
When I first started at the newspaper, I believed exactly as you did--no reason you can't post the entire story, with lots of extra content that couldn't make it into the paper, but there are actually a number of practical limits that make that infeasible:
But the single biggest eye-opener for me, and one that cured me of thinking "just post it all!" was our readership numbers. The online features that draw the biggest readership numbers are web-exclusive photo galleries of our local college football team. Top viewed stories every day during football season? Stories relating to that team. Admittedly, I live in Texas, where football is the state religion, but the readers vote with their mice, and the mice are saying "Give us pretty pictures of football, please!"
Newspapers are one part community service and one part business. If the community is obviously overwhelmingly interested in a certain kind of content, then more resources will gravitate toward providing that content.
How about Consumer Reports?
Also, in Windows Fx, at least, Alt- takes you backwards in the tab's history; Alt- takes you forwards in the tab's history.
As always, TMTOWTDI.
...that chips in ID documents are a good idea, then why not allow data sharing between friendly governments?
The bigger question, in my mind, is "Are RFID chips in ID documents a good idea?" My feeling is, "Probably not."
A common misconception. Theism and atheism simply refer to a person's belief or disbelief in the existence of a god, while gnostic and agnostic refer to the certainty of that knowledge. So, there are four possible classes:
* Agnostic Atheist: I believe that there is no god, but I do not believe that it can be proven
* Agnostic Theist: I believe that there is a god, but I do not believe that it can be proven
* Gnostic Atheist: I believe that there is no god, and I believe that it can be (or has been) proven
* Gnostic Theist: I believe that there is a god, and I believe that it can be or has been proven
--Tim, gnostic atheist
When I was hiring a web technical person, I directed 2nd round candidates to a website to answer a series of screening questions: Typical web & Perl stuff like "The intent of this Perl script is to do . What are some security problems, and how could you fix them"... that kind of thing.
As "extra credit", I posted 4 hidden questions in the source:
<!-- QUESTION 6: vi or Emacs? -->
<!-- QUESTION 7: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? -->
<!-- QUESTION 8: Do you speak Bocce? -->
<!-- QUESTION 9: Do you know the way to San Jose? -->
Unfortunately, only one candidate found them, and he ended up not being interested in the job.
Sorry, personal interest topic. Mental health issues are not widely understood, so let me say that I'm not sure Sony (or any other company, for that matter) would be classified as "bipolar". In psychological terms, "bipolar" means
In other words, "manic-depressive". I don't see Sony as ever being depressive in its actions against Aibo hackers... :-)
You probably want some variation of: Dissociative Identity Disorder, or "Multiple Personality Disorder".
Better check your fortune program again:
fortune -m ketchup
That being said... *CHOMP* Mmmmm, tasty!
--TI'm not entirely sure that's irreconcilable with the book, though--check out the voluminous Appendices, and you'll see that Elrond told Aragorn, basically, "You can't have Arwen because she's the daughter of an elf lord". Elrond had sent Aragorn on numerous quests, IIRC, before he finally consented to allow Aragorn to woo Arwen, and he never was too happy with Arwen's decision to forsake the Grey Havens.
Disclaimer, I haven't seen the movie yet, so I could be missing some completely obvious bit of filmmaking that just screams, "Uh oh, Aragorn's got a *bad* case of the 'Gotta live up to Daddy's expectations'". :-)
If you're talking about "The Operative: No One Lives Forever", I agree--a mostly fun, mission based FPS. The best thing about this game is the enemy dialog. When you're stealthily creeping along a balcony, listening to two German-accented criminals discuss correlation vs. causality vis-a-vis beer drinking and criminal behavior...just priceless.
From the article:
I do fault the sysadmins: It's our job to maintain systems as securely as we are able. It's part of the cost of doing business.
We should maintain continual pressure on the vendors to improve their initial software quality, to improve their security vulnerabilities especially, and to improve their patching experience to make it easier to apply secure patches with some degree of confidence (which would be an outflow of improving their software quality in the first place--the same processes apply to patches as to a full-fledged app).
However, we should never use a vendor's failings as an excuse for not maintaining due diligence on security matters.
A company's management makes a decision--rational or not--to use a system. Part of that decision includes total cost of ownership. If total cost of ownership outweighs the total benefit derived from a system, don't use the system.
Now, most of us aren't in a position to make a final decision on systems, so we must influence the decision by making sure TCO includes the cost of maintaining security patches.
No, the threat to Linux is that its most fanatical proponents will not be satisfied until Linux takes over the desktop world in the same way MS has done.
Most of the Linux community is content to use the tool appropriate to the job. The Linux-or-death fringe, however, won't accept that MS can find a place in the world. An odd thing about it is that a significant portion of Linux's functionality is devoted to emulating MS features.
I can just picture the scenario: The year is 2025. Windows BS (Brainstem Edition) has been released to tremendous fanfare. Now, WBE has the feature of being able to use your wetware to supplement floating-point processing. Never mind that chips are doing it faster...BS has it, and before too long, so does Linux, for no other reason than to enable them to say "Who needs Windows? Linux does the same thing, better."
Result? Linux bloats as badly as WinBS.
It's good to see people taking up an interest in Australia again.
"Good" is relative. Here are the dirty little secrets the Australian media conspiracy "neglected" to mention:
If the new service uses POP3, how can they stop you from using a POP3-compliant email client? Some kind of MS-specific extensions?
Hear, hear! But a meme needs a route to propagate. Who's going to do it?
Universities aren't interested just in "educating" future academics; they've got a vested interest in crafting a workforce. Their funding derives in large part from donations from business leaders, and those leaders want employees who can program, not employees who have an appreciation for Babbage. An analogy would be to business schools: Graduates are expected to solve "real-world" (as academia sees it) problems, not be able to discourse on the history of efficiency experts. B-Schools aren't so much interested in giving their students a full and complete history of business methods as they are in providing a little bit of context to their graduates, who move on to become employees, who move on to become "leaders", who--they hope--move on to become future corporate alumni donors.
So who educates the next generation (or the current generation; I'm painfully aware of my own ignorance in these matters)? Well, where did you learn about Babbage? Some of us probably learned about him in an academic setting, but I'm guessing that informal channels played a much more important role for most technophiles--if for no other reason then the aggressively informal culture of high-tech in general. I wasn't attracted to computers because there was such a rich history of thought and intellectual culture behind them. I was jazzed by bells, whistles and blinkenlights. Once I got involved, it was an informal network of peers, books, net sites, and conversations that led to expanding my knowledge into historical considerations.