

Success Is Official: Russian Team Breaches Buried Antarctic Lake - tlogan
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=russian-team-breaches-buried-antarctic-lake

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yason
This is totally off-topic but why, oh why, must publishers still break the
stories over to 2-5 pages? Why is this ancient optimization still such a
common and seemingly ever-continuing practice?

I understood it in the 1990's when bandwidth was scarce and downloading a 5KB
beginning of an article made sense instead of downloading a 30KB complete text
before you could evaluate if it's a good article or a bad article. But these
days the text body is still few kilobytes but it is decorated with hundreds of
kilobytes of images, advertisements, and scripting while the broadband could
suck up even a lot more. So we actually end up using a lot more bandwidth
because we have to essentially load the same article several times, at
different sections.

Printable versions and Readability do help but it's still a nuisance. Who
would lose and lose what if the articles were generally offered on a single
page?

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benjiweber
> But these days the text body is still few kilobytes but it is decorated with
> hundreds of kilobytes of images, advertisements

Multiple page views for a single article means multiple advertisement
impressions, which often means more money for the publishers.

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oulous
Hmm Russians Americans and Brits with 2 out of 3 using state of the art
equipment. Looking for oil under the cover of science?

