
Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death - ingve
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/09/09/10556049.aspx
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AshleysBrain
This is a technical mis-reporting which I can understand, but it worries me a
lot more that in the wider press this level of mis-reporting occurs over other
issues (finance, healthcare, politics, social change, foreign events etc.) and
I don't understand enough about them to notice the mis-reporting.

~~~
maaku
I used to love reading _The Economist_. It was the only printed
newpaper/magazine I bothered to read. I always thought they were so insightful
about topics I wanted to learn about but knew very little.

Then they ran two articles on topics I _did_ know something about: space tech
and bitcoin. And it became plainly obvious that the authors and the editors
had absolutely no clue about the subject matter and were merely repeating
already debunked pseudo-intellectual arguments from the popular press.

I canceled my subscription, and have basically stopped reading news, except
the headlines here. If sometime really peaks my interest I'll take the time to
research it myself thank you.

~~~
anigbrowl
A shallow response. It's unrealistic to expect news suorces to be right all
the time, especially about abtruse technical topics (it's the _Economist_ not
the _Scientist_ ). But you can easily rate how good their coverage is overall
over time, by comparing the quality of information received with subsequent
historical developments and seeing whether the one would have helped you you
predict the other.

Also, interest is piqued, occasionally in fits.

~~~
R_Edward
Although, if one's interest level were continuously poked into a particular
memory location every time it changed, you might find that if you peeked when
it piqued you would find that it also peaked.

On an unrelated note, I was writing an article for a travel magazine, and
found a very well-conceived online database of recommended places to visit.
Sadly, I couldn't use it in my article, because I couldn't figure out how to
cite the sight site.

------
mikeash
I hope these people are suitably ashamed of themselves.

I wrote an article a year ago about the use of an ARM64 CPU in the iPhone 5S
and what it meant. In the introduction, I called out several poorly researched
articles for getting lots of things wrong. I actually got an e-mail from one
of the authors basically whining at me for calling him out in public rather
than sending him corrections directly. I was feeling generous, so I went
through his article and gave him point-by-point corrections. It ended up being
longer than his original article, and nearly every sentence was wrong. I never
heard from him again, and the article was never corrected.

It's a struggle to get visibility for good information. Meanwhile bad
information spreads seemingly faster than the speed of light.

~~~
kaoD
I'm interested in reading the crappy article if you have the URL around :)

~~~
mikeash
I linked four such articles in the introduction paragraph here:

[https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-
yo...](https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html)

They're links on individual words, so you have to look a bit more closely than
usual.

------
josefresco
This story was essentially tech news junk food, filler for a slow news day.
While it's amusing to see how much they got wrong, this was not a topic you
spend any time researching as it's simply not that important or relevant.

It's like breaking down a tabloid article or one of those _shocking_ viral
posts that are shared on social media.

A blog post that ties Ballmer (+1) to the blue screen of death (+1) is
linkbait 101, not exactly hard news that deserves scrutiny.

~~~
Someone1234
Agreed.

Plus all of the places running it incorrectly are well known for being
tabloids. Engadget used to be respectable years ago, but not really now, and
The Register, DailyTech, Gizmodo/Lifehacker (same company, Gawker Media) are
all pure tabloids of the worst kind.

But in general Tech' is full of garbage news sites. They just seem to make
more money since they can attract more views for spurious stories.

------
peeters
Wow, this is incredible how many tech authors were victim to such an obvious
oversight. It really shows how much of modern news reporting is just a giant
game of Telephone, with very few people willing to actually go to the source
independently.

~~~
yen223
The best part is that if someone said Steve Ballmer wrote the BSOD message,
people will believe him because he could cite _10_ sources, not knowing that
those sources all stemmed from the same incorrect source.

~~~
m_myers
Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/978/](http://xkcd.com/978/) "Citogenesis"

Wikipedia touches briefly on this problem in "Reliability of Wikipedia":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Infor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia#Information_loop)

~~~
notahacker
The most entertaining example is arguably the Coati, which due to a widely-
picked-up piece of wikivandalism arguably now _is_ "also known as the
Brazilian Aardvark"... _except_ , after editorial discussion, on Wikipedia
where the name was coined
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Coati](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Coati)

------
egeozcan
How many errors in a simple article a tech writer/blog can get away with is
shocking. On the other hand, I don't think they have too much incentive to be
correct than sensational these days, as with the power of social media,
something sensational would bring much more revenue than something rather
accurate. Also, even if the facts are later disputed, the short-lived nature
of the medium significantly decreases the costs of such humiliation and
shortened links do not tell too much about your credibility while click-bait
titles are more than enough to bring attention (and therefore ad-revenue).

I don't know much about online publishing though. These are just my
observations as a reader.

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bitJericho
I had not heard that anybody claimed Steve Ballmer wrote the BSOD, but I did
read the cntl-alt-del article. I guess that shows HN works to filter out the
BS :)

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davidgerard
On the other hand, anything that gets more people reading Raymond Chen's blog
is a fundamentally good thing.

~~~
nether
Off topic, but are you this guy?
[https://encyclopediadramatica.es/David_Gerard](https://encyclopediadramatica.es/David_Gerard)

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mindslight
It's quite obvious that if Steve Ballmer had written the "blue screen of
death", it would have involved actual death.

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wfjackson
This shows that blog spam is worse than useless, it actively contorts the real
news itself. It's always better to link to the original source itself, but
those tend not to have the catchy headlines that the blogspam articles
provide.

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mooneater
minutia

