The New York Times reports that CBS used digital technology to insert a fake billboard into their live coverage of New Years eve in Times Square. They covered up real Budweiser and NBC billboards with a digitally created CBS billboard and inserted it into the live feed. As far as I’m concerned, inserting fake stuff into news video is an ethical no-no. I think that when you see Dan Rather broadcasting live from an event, it’s reasonable to expect that the stuff you see on camera is real. Perhaps they could solve this problem by just superimposing the phrase, “Some of this stuff is fake” on the bottom of the screen. That should clear things up.
One thing I never understood was the difference between configuration management and version control in software development. Now that I’ve read the FAQ for the comp.software.config-mgm newsgroup, I do.
Excuse me while I stop for a moment to mock Steve Perlman wildly for naming his new venture after a company from an Ayn Rand book. We now continue with our regularly scheduled programming.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states can’t sell driver’s license information to marketers. Needless to say, I’m very glad that getting personal identification (something you’re required to have to function in society) doesn’t expose me to having my name sold to every junk mail company on the block.
Sometimes poor technology journalism really drives me nuts. Take this News.com story about Red Hat’s new CTO for example. It contains this brilliant sentence: “Because Linux is such a technology-focused product, chief technology officers at Linux companies typically wield a great deal of influence over product direction and strategy.” Aren’t all software products, especially operating systems, techology focused? The writer also places the word “compiler” in quotation marks, as though that’s just a name that he made up for that type of software. Can you imagine reading a sentence that reads: “Microsoft develops “word processor” software”?