karen, while you make your point well in this post, may i suggest a couple of points you overlooked?
first of all y2knewswire is a combination service: free access and subscriber access.
i am NOT a subscriber. i figured anything someone wants to charge me for y2k information isn't worth my funding as the internet will get ahold of most of it and fling it far and wide for free, even if it is only sepearated in dissemination time by a few hours.
my point: as a freeloader to their occasional alerts, i recognize the references in all 3 of your posted, 'shakey reporting' examples as referring to thoroughly documented previous articles.
so i concur, newswire is to be faulted as per your examples for using an ineffective form of 'insider/subscriber shorthand,' which carried to the 3 extremes as you pointed out it is indeed lacking in supportive credibility. no where said glaring assumption more apparent than to newcomers to the 'y2k newswire alert.'
let illustrate:
the 50% story that you mentioned is insider speak reference to the well publicized Bell South study of their vendors, who lied to them about being compliant, and yet when Bell South went to do site checks or paid for independent verification of y2k compliancy of said vendors, discovered and MADE PUBLIC THEIR FINDINGS, that over 50% of their vendors had lied to them.
while significant that Bell South's name was attached to said 50% falsification report simply due to their household word recognition,
that particular report has been extrapolated to mean EVERYONE, i.e., every 'technology guy' is being lied to at least 50% of the time.
that, of course is false. it could be higher (grin)
it would be akin to taking the widely publicized UK electric utility failure affecting 25% of meter users in the affected group and extrapolating that ConEdison has a 25% failure rate that they Don't know about yet, because they are also a utility.
there are similar historical 'insider/subscriber speak' references in your other two examples.
the NERC story is another historical reference to a series of articles they did when they discovered the boilerplate of which you speak as being industry standard.
the redefining of complaint to just "mission critical compliant" is a little tougher to nail down a specific previous story there, because that redefinition process in order to issue more glowing reports of 'yeah, we're almost done' is so widely documented inside and outside every industry you can think of, it is hard for me to even provide the 'index case' to use Center for Disease Control 'speak'.
obviously what is mission critical is to a small lumbermill for example would be sawing device, that isn't embedded chip dependent. however to make the stretch that a mission critical definition to the irs is a sawing device is an absurd stretch.
however, it IS my observation that many companies, which have been odiously plastered on this si thread in particular, consider mission critical to be the billing department first and making sure their product or service can still contribute to GNP/GDP is way down the line somewhere because compliancy there would cause 're-tooling' minimally, which is expensive.
so, as my kids used to say, the emPHASis has been on the wrong syLLABle in darn near every industry that has swung into microcosmic view for review by us lowly consumers, end users.
one terrific illustration after another of this emPHASis problem shows up, time and time again, and gets documented by the likes of the rarebirds, the kens, the c.k.houstons, the john hunts, etc., ad nauseum on these and other threads.
the above is shared in support of fuller referencing to be sure, but do yourself a service and don't turn all conclusions by other speakers off without at least asking for the source of their summations, by the time you join the cocktail chatter. deal?
no one will put you down for asking the source.
but just because every 'y2k newswire' story doesn't give a complete click through url to each previous documented out the yingyang story doesn't mean it deserves to be chucked as having no probative value. it simply could be that they are understaffed and overwhelmed by the enormity of the story they are 're'breaking that the temptation to use 'insider/subscriber speak' is their poor substitute for what you would like to see, hear, read. |
