Glib beats insightful
Paul Graham’s essay, Hackers and Painters, is very popular with some programmers. I just found a hilarious refutation of it, called Dabblers and Blowhards.
The interesting thing for me is that Paul Graham’s audience are just as enthusiastic (if not more so) when he writes rubbish about things he knows nothing about, as when he writes insightfully about things he is an expert on. (more…)
Wired’s open source myth
Wired has an interesting twist on the tired old myth that “open source is developed by volunteers”, that has been. The new twist is that it reverses the usual myth that it is not possible to make money from open source: instead the wrong people will make the money and it will all fall apart. Unsurprisingly this flies in the face of the facts.
Incompetence from The Economist
at 9:28 am on Wednesday, 6 February 2008
The Economist’s coverage of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has apparently been written by someone who thinks that Yahoo is primarily a search engine. It has been written in complete ignorance of both the competition concerns and the major difficulties of integrating the businesses. (more…)
The myth of environmental myths
at 5:24 am on Tuesday, 14 August 2007
Time for another sample of incompetent journalism, this time from The Times. The headline claims that walking to the shops damages the planet more than going by car. Of course this is not even remotely true, and a few seconds thought is enough to tear the argument apart. (more…)
The end of academic publishing
at 7:20 am on Thursday, 26 July 2007
It has been clear to many analysts (including myself) for years that publishers of academic journals were facing the slow death of their business. Despite the view of publishers and the more optimistic analysts that peer reviews journals were irreplaceable, the evidence continues to emerge for a slow, but certain, decline. (more…)
My favourite terrorists
The terrorists responsible for the London and Glasgow airport “car bombs” are my favourite kind: bumbling idiots who could not explode a jar of nitroglycerine. I feel a lot safer,knowing how incompetent they are. My main worry is that some of the suspects are doctors: if they planned this, how did they get through medical school? (more…)
Nortel demonstrates how not to do PR
Nortel has prevented a former subsidiary, Blade, from buying from a rival. The resulting publicity is far more damaging to Nortel than the original, far less widely read coverage, of Blade’s choice of a PBX from Fonality (based on the open source Asterisk) over Nortels own products. (more…)
Innumerate Polly
Anyone even vague numerate reading this article by Polly Toynbee would would have probably spotted where it went wrong. It is very hard to read it without thinking “surely that £5bn must be a reccuring annual amount whereas as she is comparing it to one off amounts”. David Smith confirms that this is the case. (more…)
The amazing Slashdot dupes
IT website Slashdot, is well known for repeatedly posting the same stories. Most readers no longer even comment on this — or even notice. I am therefore keep an online record of the worst examples . (more…)
Wrong again, BBC
I have blogged about this before, but the BBC were good enough to give me a superb example to technology journalists getting things wrong. (more…)
