I don't like MS products and many of its business practices. That's a reasonable position to take, although you're free to your own apparent disagreement. But if you are stupid enough to lump everyone who has legitimate problems with MS together with those who just bash reflexively for no good reason, you're probably past any hope of reasoning. But it's TRULY goofy to make your questionable point as a reply to a post where I'm actually defending MS.
No, but just because people here happen to be ignorant about the way the PR business works doesn't make it unethical, either. Don't put words into my mouth.
The burden is on proving that it's unethical, and people here tend to be jumping to the conclusion that it's unethical because it seems strange and foreign to them. I haven't seen anybody make a reasoned argument as to how it could be reasonably and professionally handled in a different way.
I'm sorry, but this AC is just clueless. PR can be dishonest, just like most things can, but there is nothing dishonest in having someone write a quote for someone else. If that's dishonest, then it's dishonest anytime someone else writes another person's words. A person who gives a speech written by a speechwriter would be dishonest by that standard. What about an actor? He rarely writes his own words.
Some CEOs ARE clueless and stupid about their own products, but the practice of having a writer show how to pitch an idea which is being sold to the public is not dishonest. To say it is shows a gross misunderstanding of how ideas are sold in EVERY part of life.
I detest MS both for its business practices and products, but this is one instance in which bashing them is just plain ignorant.
I looked at the all the samples in the first page of the story, and I have to say that I didn't see anything that didn't look like normal editing decisions being made by writers and editors in the PR business. I was a newspaper journalist for years and I'm a political consultant now. I've received and written tons of news releases over the years. Unless there is some horrid "smoking gun" hidden on one of the interior pages, there is nothing sinister or unusual in the least about what the guy found.
What I saw looked more like examples from a PR writing textbook about how things are changed to reflect an editor's preferences to soften a story or to change its focus. Quotes are almost ALWAYS written by PR people and then approved by the person being quoted. In some cases, the quote is used as is. In others, the person will say that he prefers to say something different. The quotes as written give everyone an idea of the TYPE of quote needed for a certain spot in order to fall into line with the rest of the piece.
Ultimately, this is no different than anything else which is written and then changed along the way. New information comes along. There are differences in opinion about how something should be "spun." Editors use judgment about what will work best. A ton of things happen, but that is normal.
As I said, I can't stand MS and I think the company is blatantly dishonest in many of its practices, but these seem to be reasonably innocent examples of PR people attempting to do their jobs. If you understand how PR works, you will know that there is nothing unusual here.
In discussing a U.S. court case, I didn't find it necessary to point out that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily deal with it the same way. I'm sorry if you find that offensive, but I thought the context was plain enough.
In libel and slander cases, truth is an absolute defense. If the information if true, the man will NOT win, unless there is some MAJORLY huge change in legal interpretation from the U.S. Supreme Court. Based on what I know about libel and slander law, I don't think the guy stands a chance -- and he shouldn't win, of course.
Here is a story from The Register (from two years ago) talking about MS's ongoing problems in switching from BSD to Windows. Of course, this story was from December 2001, so I assume it's changed since then.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23348.ht ml
I don't know how Apple works volume discounts, but I remember the people at Virginia Tech saying that they didn't get any discounts over the regular educational discounts when they bought 1,100 Power Mac G5s. I would be willing to bet that Pixar didn't get a deal any better than what any customer buying a similar number of computers would have gotten.
It's not even close to reasonable to assume that Jobs (as CEO of one public company) would give a break to another company of which he is a substantial stockholder. That would open him up to all sorts of lawsuits, especially in today's legal environment. I would be willing to bet that he stayed as far away from this deal as he could, other than approving someone else's recommendation (as Pixar CEO). Jobs may be a lot of things, but he's not stupid.
If you are truly stupid enough to change your decision about your next computer purchase because of an anonymous Slashdot post, you are truly a moron. Buy whatever suits your actual needs and not what someone's agenda (ANYONE's agenda) tells you, especially when you don't know whether the information is true or not.
It's not the University of Virginia, but rather Virginia Tech, that built the G5-based supercomputer. They're fiercely competitive universities, not the same thing.:-)
I used to read Apple Recon (if that was the free portion of his service), and I've wondered whatever happened to the guy. I wasn't sure whether he was totally accurate or not, but he was always entertaining.
I can't disagree with the specifics of what you're saying, because I've never heard that story. (I'd be interested in where you got the information, though, because I've tried to follow it pretty closely.) Either way, though, the person I was replying to was completely wrong in claiming that MS owns a piece of Apple today.
(Of course, the people who modded me as off-topic presumably didn't see the post I was replying to, because it's currently at -1.)
About six or seven years ago, MS bought a small amount of Apple preferred stock (which means non-voting shares). It was intended as a public show of confidence in Apple's future. Apple's stock price went up quite a bit in the time after that, so MS sold the stock for a nice profit. MS never had ANY control over Apple, contrary to what people mistakenly repeat.
Look, YOU are the moron who claimed that price is ALL that matters to MOST people. I just pointed out that it wasn't the case. The fact that you can come up with a couple of examples where price MATTERS -- and not even cases in which it's the ONLY issue -- doesn't begin to address how wrong you were. And now you don't have the guts to admit you were wrong, even though I asked you if you'd like to revise your wrong statement.
Why are you changing the subject? I pointed out an obvious and clear example of why you're wrong, and you just blindly go off in another direction. I'm sure you're hoping that throwing in the bit about "free as in freedom" will help you on here, but it has nothing to do with the statement you made that was so much in error.
You must get a REAL kick out of those morons who buy $30,000 cars because they actually like to have cars that last and are comfortable to drive. If we were all smart like you, we could be getting new cars for about $8,000 or so.
It's hard to know whether it's worth replying to an anonymous moron who can't understand the point of a post. But just in case there are any other children out there who also missed the point, the guy I was responding to quoted a price for the least expensive Mac that was 50 percent higher than the real price. THAT was my point. The poster was displaying gross ignorance about what Macs cost. And if you are stupid enough to believe that a $300 white box from Uncle Fred's Computer and Taxidermy Shop is the equivalent of buying a Mac, you're displaying vast ignorance, too, but just of a different kind.
That would be news to the vast majority of businesses out there -- who do NOT compete solely on price. If your statement were true, most people would be driving a bunch of Korean compact cars. I don't see the majority driving Kias yet. Would you care to revise your simplistic and and obviously wrong statement?
Contrary to what you think, the least expensive Mac is the entry-level eMac, which costs $799. Check it out for yourself.
Ignorance like yours -- particularly to compare a $300 Intel box with a Mac -- is a huge reason for Apple's lack of market share. Apple has made a LOT of mistakes on its own, but people like you who THINK they know something about Macs are just as big a source of the problem.
Assuming what you're saying is accurate -- and I have no reason to doubt you -- you're absolutely proving my point, so thanks for chiming in. This computer system might be the best thing since sliced bread, but to attribute a huge drop in crime stats to it alone seems ludicrous, especially without further evidence. Your anecdotal evidence tends to make me think that the computer system is a good tool that happened to come along at the same time as other things which really are the primary cause of the improvement. If the improvement is real (and not just a statistical illusion), my congratulations to your wife's uncle and the people who work for him.
Without a LOT of serious work, you CANNOT draw the conclusion that this new system was the ONLY changed variable. The real world is messy. There are dozens of factors that might influence the crime statistics, some of them related to reality and some of them related to the politics of the statistics.
As a newspaper reporter and later editor, I saw public officials spin such figures all the time. If ANY statistic showed something positive, it was THEIR actions which caused it. If a statistic showed something bad, it was their evil opponents who always were the fault. As a political consultant over the last 12 years or so, I've been a part of the same spin. Politicians will sit in meetings and acknowledge that they have no idea what causes most things (either for good or bad), but they are willing to take credit or assign blame in whatever way is good for them.
I have no opinion about whether this system is a good thing or not in its present form. I don't even have any opinion about whether the money could have been better spent elsewhere. The only thing I'm pointing out is that there is no honest, hard evidence that this thing possibly could have reduced crime by 16 percent -- unless this system gives police the power to predict who's going to commit crimes and arrest them ahead of time.
This post assumes that the 16 percent drop in crime in Chicago is a result of the new system. Why? Where is the evidence for that? I slept late yesterday and it rained. I got up early today and it didn't rain. So does that mean that rain is caused by me sleeping late? Absurd. Correlation does not necessarily equal casusation.
I don't know if real crime in Chicago was down or not. Such "official statistics" are very easily manipulated, either by design as the data are being gathered or afterwards as they're being interpreted. Unless there is MUCH better evidence of a link between the statistical drop in crime and this new computer system, the poster's conclusion is completely unwarranted. It's POSSIBLE that the system does indeed reduce crime, but the assumption isn't supported at this point.
To be honest, if you can't find more to talk about with an absent girlfriend for more than three minutes, your relationship has far worse problems than what kind of game to play. If you don't have enough interest in really talking with her about things that matter, lack of an idea about an online game is going to be the least of your concerns. She's going to be gone before long if your question is really indicative of your communication with her.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like MS products and many of its business practices. That's a reasonable position to take, although you're free to your own apparent disagreement. But if you are stupid enough to lump everyone who has legitimate problems with MS together with those who just bash reflexively for no good reason, you're probably past any hope of reasoning. But it's TRULY goofy to make your questionable point as a reply to a post where I'm actually defending MS.
No, but just because people here happen to be ignorant about the way the PR business works doesn't make it unethical, either. Don't put words into my mouth.
The burden is on proving that it's unethical, and people here tend to be jumping to the conclusion that it's unethical because it seems strange and foreign to them. I haven't seen anybody make a reasoned argument as to how it could be reasonably and professionally handled in a different way.
I'm sorry, but this AC is just clueless. PR can be dishonest, just like most things can, but there is nothing dishonest in having someone write a quote for someone else. If that's dishonest, then it's dishonest anytime someone else writes another person's words. A person who gives a speech written by a speechwriter would be dishonest by that standard. What about an actor? He rarely writes his own words.
Some CEOs ARE clueless and stupid about their own products, but the practice of having a writer show how to pitch an idea which is being sold to the public is not dishonest. To say it is shows a gross misunderstanding of how ideas are sold in EVERY part of life.
I detest MS both for its business practices and products, but this is one instance in which bashing them is just plain ignorant.
I looked at the all the samples in the first page of the story, and I have to say that I didn't see anything that didn't look like normal editing decisions being made by writers and editors in the PR business. I was a newspaper journalist for years and I'm a political consultant now. I've received and written tons of news releases over the years. Unless there is some horrid "smoking gun" hidden on one of the interior pages, there is nothing sinister or unusual in the least about what the guy found.
What I saw looked more like examples from a PR writing textbook about how things are changed to reflect an editor's preferences to soften a story or to change its focus. Quotes are almost ALWAYS written by PR people and then approved by the person being quoted. In some cases, the quote is used as is. In others, the person will say that he prefers to say something different. The quotes as written give everyone an idea of the TYPE of quote needed for a certain spot in order to fall into line with the rest of the piece.
Ultimately, this is no different than anything else which is written and then changed along the way. New information comes along. There are differences in opinion about how something should be "spun." Editors use judgment about what will work best. A ton of things happen, but that is normal.
As I said, I can't stand MS and I think the company is blatantly dishonest in many of its practices, but these seem to be reasonably innocent examples of PR people attempting to do their jobs. If you understand how PR works, you will know that there is nothing unusual here.
In discussing a U.S. court case, I didn't find it necessary to point out that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily deal with it the same way. I'm sorry if you find that offensive, but I thought the context was plain enough.
In libel and slander cases, truth is an absolute defense. If the information if true, the man will NOT win, unless there is some MAJORLY huge change in legal interpretation from the U.S. Supreme Court. Based on what I know about libel and slander law, I don't think the guy stands a chance -- and he shouldn't win, of course.
Here is a story from The Register (from two years ago) talking about MS's ongoing problems in switching from BSD to Windows. Of course, this story was from December 2001, so I assume it's changed since then.
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/23348.h
I don't know how Apple works volume discounts, but I remember the people at Virginia Tech saying that they didn't get any discounts over the regular educational discounts when they bought 1,100 Power Mac G5s. I would be willing to bet that Pixar didn't get a deal any better than what any customer buying a similar number of computers would have gotten.
It's not even close to reasonable to assume that Jobs (as CEO of one public company) would give a break to another company of which he is a substantial stockholder. That would open him up to all sorts of lawsuits, especially in today's legal environment. I would be willing to bet that he stayed as far away from this deal as he could, other than approving someone else's recommendation (as Pixar CEO). Jobs may be a lot of things, but he's not stupid.
If you are truly stupid enough to change your decision about your next computer purchase because of an anonymous Slashdot post, you are truly a moron. Buy whatever suits your actual needs and not what someone's agenda (ANYONE's agenda) tells you, especially when you don't know whether the information is true or not.
It's not the University of Virginia, but rather Virginia Tech, that built the G5-based supercomputer. They're fiercely competitive universities, not the same thing. :-)
I used to read Apple Recon (if that was the free portion of his service), and I've wondered whatever happened to the guy. I wasn't sure whether he was totally accurate or not, but he was always entertaining.
I can't disagree with the specifics of what you're saying, because I've never heard that story. (I'd be interested in where you got the information, though, because I've tried to follow it pretty closely.) Either way, though, the person I was replying to was completely wrong in claiming that MS owns a piece of Apple today.
(Of course, the people who modded me as off-topic presumably didn't see the post I was replying to, because it's currently at -1.)
About six or seven years ago, MS bought a small amount of Apple preferred stock (which means non-voting shares). It was intended as a public show of confidence in Apple's future. Apple's stock price went up quite a bit in the time after that, so MS sold the stock for a nice profit. MS never had ANY control over Apple, contrary to what people mistakenly repeat.
Look, YOU are the moron who claimed that price is ALL that matters to MOST people. I just pointed out that it wasn't the case. The fact that you can come up with a couple of examples where price MATTERS -- and not even cases in which it's the ONLY issue -- doesn't begin to address how wrong you were. And now you don't have the guts to admit you were wrong, even though I asked you if you'd like to revise your wrong statement.
Why are you changing the subject? I pointed out an obvious and clear example of why you're wrong, and you just blindly go off in another direction. I'm sure you're hoping that throwing in the bit about "free as in freedom" will help you on here, but it has nothing to do with the statement you made that was so much in error.
You must get a REAL kick out of those morons who buy $30,000 cars because they actually like to have cars that last and are comfortable to drive. If we were all smart like you, we could be getting new cars for about $8,000 or so.
It's hard to know whether it's worth replying to an anonymous moron who can't understand the point of a post. But just in case there are any other children out there who also missed the point, the guy I was responding to quoted a price for the least expensive Mac that was 50 percent higher than the real price. THAT was my point. The poster was displaying gross ignorance about what Macs cost. And if you are stupid enough to believe that a $300 white box from Uncle Fred's Computer and Taxidermy Shop is the equivalent of buying a Mac, you're displaying vast ignorance, too, but just of a different kind.
That would be news to the vast majority of businesses out there -- who do NOT compete solely on price. If your statement were true, most people would be driving a bunch of Korean compact cars. I don't see the majority driving Kias yet. Would you care to revise your simplistic and and obviously wrong statement?
Contrary to what you think, the least expensive Mac is the entry-level eMac, which costs $799. Check it out for yourself.
Ignorance like yours -- particularly to compare a $300 Intel box with a Mac -- is a huge reason for Apple's lack of market share. Apple has made a LOT of mistakes on its own, but people like you who THINK they know something about Macs are just as big a source of the problem.
Assuming what you're saying is accurate -- and I have no reason to doubt you -- you're absolutely proving my point, so thanks for chiming in. This computer system might be the best thing since sliced bread, but to attribute a huge drop in crime stats to it alone seems ludicrous, especially without further evidence. Your anecdotal evidence tends to make me think that the computer system is a good tool that happened to come along at the same time as other things which really are the primary cause of the improvement. If the improvement is real (and not just a statistical illusion), my congratulations to your wife's uncle and the people who work for him.
Without a LOT of serious work, you CANNOT draw the conclusion that this new system was the ONLY changed variable. The real world is messy. There are dozens of factors that might influence the crime statistics, some of them related to reality and some of them related to the politics of the statistics.
As a newspaper reporter and later editor, I saw public officials spin such figures all the time. If ANY statistic showed something positive, it was THEIR actions which caused it. If a statistic showed something bad, it was their evil opponents who always were the fault. As a political consultant over the last 12 years or so, I've been a part of the same spin. Politicians will sit in meetings and acknowledge that they have no idea what causes most things (either for good or bad), but they are willing to take credit or assign blame in whatever way is good for them.
I have no opinion about whether this system is a good thing or not in its present form. I don't even have any opinion about whether the money could have been better spent elsewhere. The only thing I'm pointing out is that there is no honest, hard evidence that this thing possibly could have reduced crime by 16 percent -- unless this system gives police the power to predict who's going to commit crimes and arrest them ahead of time.
This post assumes that the 16 percent drop in crime in Chicago is a result of the new system. Why? Where is the evidence for that? I slept late yesterday and it rained. I got up early today and it didn't rain. So does that mean that rain is caused by me sleeping late? Absurd. Correlation does not necessarily equal casusation.
I don't know if real crime in Chicago was down or not. Such "official statistics" are very easily manipulated, either by design as the data are being gathered or afterwards as they're being interpreted. Unless there is MUCH better evidence of a link between the statistical drop in crime and this new computer system, the poster's conclusion is completely unwarranted. It's POSSIBLE that the system does indeed reduce crime, but the assumption isn't supported at this point.
Memo to the banks:
;-)
Set the money free. We want to be given what isn't ours.
To be honest, if you can't find more to talk about with an absent girlfriend for more than three minutes, your relationship has far worse problems than what kind of game to play. If you don't have enough interest in really talking with her about things that matter, lack of an idea about an online game is going to be the least of your concerns. She's going to be gone before long if your question is really indicative of your communication with her.