ChasingTheFlow

This is just bizarre. As NBC continues its screwed up process of broadcasting the Olympics by delaying the actual telecast of important events until prime time, apparently a bunch of folks are pissed off that real news sources are reporting on what’s actually happened. They’re targeting the wrong thing, of course. If they’re upset that the news is being reported before it’s being shown on TV, the real problem is NBC’s decision not to show stuff live on TV or to webcast it for those who would prefer to see it live. But people are taking out their anger on newspapers who are giving live reports of what’s actually happening:

“Could you please ask the editor of the front Web page to not name the winners within the headlines/sub-headlines?” asked Ken Waters of Phoenix. Matt Gooch of Harrisonburg, Va. said he was disappointed when The Times reported the results of the men’s downhill before NBC showed the event. “This is not Taliban news, nor TARP news, or even Paula Jones type news,” Gooch said. “There is no meaning to this except the anticipation and suspense that sports viewers feel watching the event live. Please help me understand why your organization needs to spoil the experience.”

Other news organizations are hearing similar complaints. Liz Spayd, managing editor of The Washington Post, told a reader who asked for a spoiler alert yesterday that, “It’s an issue we’re trying to evaluate right now.” She said that it’s a tricky question “for a news site whose greatest value is to break news. We don’t want to be the game spoilers, but when big news happens — an unexpected gold for the U.S., for example, we want it prominently visible on the site.”

Thankfully, the NY Times “has no intention of changing its approach,” recognizing that it’s a news organization, rather than a business to prop up NBC’s ridiculous broadcast scheduling choices.

(Continue reading on TechDirt)

Ah, for the love of puffery. A few years ago, we were among those who noticed that pretty much every mobile operator in the US had commercials making some sort of claim about how they were the “best” network out there, whether it was “most reliable,” “most powerful,” or “fewest dropped calls.” The whole thing is a joke and I doubt anyone takes those sorts of claims very seriously. But soon afterwards, the lawyers got involved, and lawsuits were filed over who could claim what about their networks in commercials. Even the Better Business Bureau felt the need to weigh in.

Now, it looks like a similar battle is playing out up north. Rob Hyndman points us to the news that there are a series of lawsuits in Canada over similar claims concerning broadband internet access, with one company being upset that another company has commercials claiming to have the “fastest and most reliable” broadband offering.

Here’s an idea: rather than wasting money suing each other over these sorts of claims, why not invest some money into actually improving the network?

(Via TechDirt)

Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM’s regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap.

(Via LLVM Blog)