Elbereth's Journal: No good articles

I can't find a decent article to read. After you strip out the duplicate stories, obvious flamebait, editorials, television and movie fanboy stuff, and YRO crap, you end up with watered down, boring tech stories that sound like they came from Reuters or the AP. Oh wait, they did! Blah! Like I care about that crap. I get enough of it from My Yahoo. I'm not sure why I even bother to read the Reuters and AP stories any more. They do a fair job at covering political and social issues while staying mostly neutral (or a little liberal, depending on the story), but you should never depend on anyone to tell you your tech, except for engineers. Nobody can tell you anything interesting about IBM, Motorola, Intel, Rambus, or Micron unless they have an engineering degree.

"Today, Intel rolled out a new CPU -- the brains of a computer -- that will be faster than anything previously released. It runs at 3 billion cycles per second, a new landmark in desktop performance. Intel reps say that it will be used mostly in high end computing tasks, such as desktop publishing, imaging, video editing, and state-of-the-art games. New systems based on the chip are expected to be sold in late Q4 this year. Shares of Intel were down three percent in trading today, though industry analysts predict a small increase in revenue during the holiday season, a time traditionally very good to Intel."

You know what? I just wrote that paragraph of fluff right now, off the top of my head. But this is EXACTLY what the Reuters and AP copy is going to look like when Intel announces the 3 GHz P4! Just wait. You'll see. Word for word.

You wanna know what the Slashdot submission is going to look like? I'll write that one for you, too.

Intel: New 3GHz P4
[ Intel ] Posted by CmdrTaco on 03:30pm, October 20, 2002
from the even-faster-yet dept
Anonymous Coward writes, "After losing the race to 1ghz, Intel has won races to both 2ghz and 3ghz. The new P4 is reviewed at all the usual places. It will be shipping to OEMs late Q4, which means early Q1 2003, probably. I can't wait." And I'm still poking along at 800 MHz."

UGH! Is there anyone else absolutely sick and tired of the crappy submissions, none of which are edited at all? This shit is really pissing me off now. Stop making every damn word a link. It's both bad HTML writing and bad grammar. If you need to make a list of links, make each individual link descriptive of where it goes, not a generic word that doesn't describe anything about the link. This is how you do it properly:

I will be visiting Tom's, Anandtech, Ars Technica, and others in order to find out information on Intel's newest CPU, a 3GHz P4.

Is it that hard? No. Just use a little thought. Try to remember back to nineth and tenth grade English (some of you may still be in middle school. I don't know.) Of course, if your native language is not English, all your sins are forgiven. I'm feeling generous at the moment.

Don't make prepositions (of, in, around, above), definite articles (the, that), or other "useless" words links. They don't tell the reader anything, nor do they tell search engines anything useful about your links. This is especially important for large sites that Google indexes.

It's not so much this that annoys me so much. It's the ignorance. Damn, but I hate ignorance.

I don't even remember what I was ranting about originally. Boring articles, wasn't it? Well, they annoy me, too.

wish I could mod a journal up

[pjgeer]

because this one should be read. I'd submit it for a story except that everyone will say it's old news. I surf in Lite mode, threaded, with all Funny comments boosted +5 and everything else hidden, since the articles need not be read. Just the jokes please. Half the time those are lame too, but lame jokes are good to tell the boss since they're the only ones he'll get.