The Wall Street Journal seems to have been completely fooled by telecoms spin-doctors into claiming that Google, and other prominent advocates of net neutrality, have changed their views.
Wrong
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
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. Continue reading
The myth of environmental myths
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. Continue reading
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? Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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 . Continue reading
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. Continue reading
Vodafone’s loss that wasn’t
According to most of the press Vodafone made a £15bn loss in the 2005/6 financial year. The largest loss ever made by a British company. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the company made a real profit but an accounting loss. Continue reading
Volunteers? No.
I have noticed that the media make serious factual mistakes when covering any topic about which I have any real knowledge. This applies even to supposedly quality media. I can only assume that what I read about topics/countries/issues that I have no particular knowledge is equally wrong. Continue reading