Mistakes That Live On
from the for-at-least-some-time dept
The story of the miners who died in West Virginia, after a "miscommunication" had everyone saying they had survived has resulted in an interesting situation. A News.com reporter has noticed that if you do a search on Google News, you still can see a ton of stories saying the miners survived. This shows one of the limitations of a scanning and scraping model for aggregation, rather than a ping-based model that would let sites update an aggregator when the news had changed (dramatically, in this case). Of course, pinging has its own problems (mostly with overloading servers). So, is the lag associated with scanning acceptable or is there a better solution? Update: Of course, the situation is worse in print, where many newspapers had already printed the survival story before the truth came out. Update: And some interesting stories about newspapers who trashed copies with the wrong story to print up corrected papers.
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
Thankfully, Web servers and the HTTP protocol have this kind of facility built in. It's just that nobody tends to use it. You can query just the header of an HTML page and get back information about the size of the page itself (not including images), last modified date, and other salient info. This is the stuff your browser uses in combination with your cache settings to determine whether it should load the entire page all over again or not.
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Re: No Subject Given
What about reverse DNS - "PTR" records? CNAMEs, NX, TXT etc?
Please, leave your ignorance at home.
DNS has been used for many things, it's far more than name to IP lookup.
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It was really bad on TV
After the debacle in Florida in 2000, we knew the media would never jump the gun on Election night. Now they'd rather wait until absolutely sure to call a state. This time it wasn't a terribly important news story in the grand scheme of things, but it was one the entire media had been milking for days straight. And they F'ed it up big time at the end. Its nobody's fault but their own.
Add this to the growing list of times the media runs with a story that is not sourced or fact-checked. Way to go.
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Re: It was really bad on TV
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Wishful Thinking
Isn't everyone guilty of wishful thinking, though? The IT industry is full of absurd theories that free markets will somehow solve all the world's problems, or that technology is somehow going to make all our problems go away. It's an industry full of adult Star Trek and LOR fans, who have never gotten over their 12-year-old boy fantasy phase.
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Re: Wishful Thinking
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Whatever
People make mistakes. It's people like you and me who run the Command Center. They make mistakes just like you do. Time to move on from this.
This is yet another of thousands of stories that get blown out of proportion, when what we should really be discussing are issues that actually matter to society, such as global warming, poverty, the homeless and the war on terror.
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Re: Whatever
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Re: Whatever
Lol. One of these things is not like the other.. One of these things just doesn't belong..
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Re: Whatever
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No Subject Given
My local paper (which I don't pay for) still has the "12 Survivors" headline blazed across the front page.
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