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Success Is Official: Russian Team Breaches Buried Antarctic Lake (scientificamerican.com)
12 points by tlogan on Feb 10, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



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?


> 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.


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




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