Sorry everybody, but I couldn’t resist to post another link to this wonderful post: http://clintonforbes.blogspot.com/2007/03/microsoft-insider-15-of-windows-vista.html
This is a fake story the author invented for fun (explained in more details in a following post: http://clintonforbes.blogspot.com/2007/03/funnily-enough-apple-fans-dont-always.html ). Look how many people reported the “story” without even a clue it was a just joke: http://www.google.com/search?q=vista+intercal
twisti said, “You can’t check every piece of information yourself, you have to decide to trust certain sources.” I have to disagree, especially if you are writing an informational blog. If you, as a blogger, are putting information out to your readers, you can and should check every piece of information as I believe the blogger has that responsibility.
The blogger that doesn’t check out his information will soon lose readers. It is as Michael Graham Richard adds up above, “But when you follow blogs for a while, you end up knowing which ones are reliable and which ones aren’t (the cream rises to the top).” The blogger is either putting out an informational blog that will soon be quoted with confidence or they are writing a blog that will rapidly gain a reputation for unsubstantiated opinion.
We’re living in an age where this is common practice regardless of medium. Last week during the VT shootings, the identity of the shooter (incorrect) was released on a blog, then picked up by Fox, then NBC lifts it from Fox, then CNN. It took almost 4 hours before they found out the accused person was alive and well, and had managed to avoid the shootings.
Blogs are (in general) only an eyelash away from forum posts.
I do my best not to blindly “buy into” anything I read.
@john Pirie:
You get what you pay for. Anyone who blindly trusts a media source that is not only free, but is often creating revenue based on number of readers it attracts, deserves whatever they get.
Unfortunately, given that such knuckleheads are allowed to vote, we all get the result. Poll taxes were eliminated, for good reason. May haps we need a minimum IQ requirement?
You get what you pay for. Anyone who blindly trusts a media source that is not only free, but is often creating revenue based on number of readers it attracts, deserves whatever they get.
Circa 1998:
I recall getting into arguments with our search team that the search application could not handle multi-host configurations, and that even tech support said it doesn’t do it.
The search team member asked me to point out where in the documentation it says it couldn’t be done? All I could point to were examples that DIDN’T show a multi-host config.
3 days later the search team member had a prototype 3 server config running with unmodified binaries. We eventually grew that system to over 70 servers and it performed wonderfully.
Turns out we were the first customer of theirs to consider commodity hardware and a multi-host config.
Sometimes software can do MORE than the documentation as long as you are open minded enough.
Come to think of it, we started doing oddball things with load balancers too, but that is another story.
Um, maybe I’m being dense here, but I don’t see how the Downloader object addresses the issues in the original post. Not being able to do data binding or consume SOAP services are different from simply downloading data over HTTP … right? Is there an “Uploader” that lets you push data changes back to such a service? (“Downloader” really sounds one way. And if it’s one way, that counts as “not being able to communicate with the outside world” in my book.)
Of course, I don’t know anything about all of this. I’m just asking.
I appreciated the references to the article I wrote “Blame Vista”. a href="http://www.fastsilicon.com/content/view/141/27/"http://www.fastsilicon.com/content/view/141/27//a
It’s one thing to have legitimate issues with a platform, SDK, OS, what have you. These are the sorts of things that reasonable people (emphasis on reasonable) can have reasonable debates on. Through this sort of process, people can learn, discover, and often reach consensus. One of the problems in blogging, and publishing in general, is that often people use such mediums to merely prove a conclusion they’ve already come to. Thus blogging or publishing becomes an agenda rather than an actual story or op/ed piece.
In the example of my article/rebuttal to Dr. Gutmann, I felt compelled to take issue with his longwinded diatribe on the evils of Vista, because so many people were believing his nonsense without actually doing any sort of investigation. This included some rather good and normally upstanding publications that I used to have a great deal of respect for.
If you’re going to deride something, at least do so for legitimate reasons that can withstand scrutiny. Enough rant. Great thread btw. 
“i can’t believe it” based on common sense should be implemented by bloggers to avoid biased premises and wrong judgements. common sense is often enough to save one from embarrassment.
a weblog is a user generated content and a blog about a new technology would be the personal understanding of the individual who wrote it. we shouldn’t act so surprised when someone gets it wrong. the majority of people who read technology blogs, i assume, are technology savvy and as such it’s our responsibility to verify the source. even if the opinion is echoed on several other websites or weblogs, it’s always good to do some research.
Jeff, sorry about the OT post, but: You’ve apparently changed the font on your blog site. YMMV, but on my screen, in my FireFox browser under Windows XP, the font looks terrible. It’s small but fat letters, and the system seems to be making an attempt to anti-alias it, with the effect that the letters are not of uniform darkness and width.
Please choose a better supported font; or better yet, let the browser choose the font! The more you try to control the pixels on my screen, the more you violate the spirit of HTML.
even professional journalists sometimes don’t research about the subject they’re writing about. at least, they’ve studied journalism, so they’re supposed to do so, which seems to be your point
the bad thing is, you often see “professional” journalists doing the same error 
Jeff, I’d have to echo the growing chorus here: Journalists simply aren’t that responsible these days…assuming they ever were. I suspect it was always more of an ideal than a standard. A lengthy, researched story on a particular topic might be highly accurate; but what journalist bothers to do the necessary fact-checking on a breaking news item? By the time he does that, the competition has reported it and the world has moved on.
I’m not saying this situation is right. But just as it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, journalists have discovered that it’s easier to retract than to verify.
If you’re not a regular reader of 21st Century Smalltalk (or have not chosen to check the background to the blog post thoroughly ;- ), it may be escaped your attention that, having fallen foul of a paranoid WGA, he couldn’t install the runtime to check for himself, so has to rely on other people’s comments on what MS is up to:
Because, WGA now thinks that the XP machine has pirated software, I couldn’t install IE7 or the WinFX 3.0 libraries.
…
However, when I tried testing the software that I wrote in Flash, on the same machine, everything worked perfectly!!
http://vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com/2007/04/06/how-microsoft-is-losing-its-way/
I liked your use of the definition of journalism.
Too many people in the media are stenographers,
not fact-checkers. A great pbs documentary on this:
VIDEO:
a href="http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html"http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html/a
Nice Post!
I agree that most Weblogs aren’t reliable, and for me they just give hint of what can be correct and what can not, I validate information every time for myself. With the kind of information dynamics offered by internet today, it’s almost impossible to identify and control the information flows with conventional access tools and techniques.
Sad we lack basic responsibilities of authenticating our point of views…
Indeed, multiple independent sources should always be used. But, in this age of fast information, how bothers do put time into that?
We believe what we read, just like we believe most things that are on TV and in the newspapers. But since more people (and professionals) read those, the errors are caught quicker offcourse.
Luckily we have Coding Horror
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/01/21/berk_essy.html
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Bloggers vs. journalists is over. I don’t think anyone will mourn its passing. There were plenty who hated the debate in the first place, and openly ridiculed its pretensions and terms. But events are what did the thing in at the end. In the final weeks of its run, we were getting bulletins from journalists like this one from John Schwartz of the New York Times, Dec. 28: “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.”
And so we know they’re journalism— sometimes. They’re even capable, at times, and perhaps only in special circumstances, of beating Big Journalism at its own game. Schwartz said so. The tsunami story is the biggest humanitarian disaster ever in the lifetimes of most career journalists and the blogs were somehow right there with them.