The Publishing Process
I remember taking a publishing class many moons ago. It covered the following.
Creation: Some hack vomits forth dribble and declares it a masterpiece.
Editing: The process of stabbing the creator and twisting the knife.
Revision: Whipping the creator until they fix the chicken-scratch. Changing it into a work of art.
Marketing: Telling people they need what you have.
Printing: Something about paper and inc and sleeping in the back room of a print house until the middle of the night to make sure they don't mess it up.
I was trying to find some better information on OOP (Object Oriented Programming) for Visual Basic 6 this morning. Of all the things people look for on the net, you would think you could find something helpful on this topic. I ran across all kinds of poorly written forum entries and a ton of listings and reviews for books that are no longer in print. Simply put, no one really knows how to explain this stuff. You have to do it for a while to get it. While reading several unhelpful online instructions, I realized, none of these people were forced to go through the publishing process. The publishers would have told them they were nuts and the useless information would have been, thankfully, lost forever. The Internet is grate if you are just looking. When you are looking for something specific, you have to dig. When you are looking for something useful you have to sift. When you are trying to change things, forget it. No one will listen. Your plea is lost in the universe of babble.
Someone once asked how, in the 1860s, Civil War soldiers could write such brilliant pros on the battlefield. 1) They didn't have cable. 2) Stupid people dropped out and did something else. I bet literacy was only about 20% among working class whites in the South in those days. 3) If they wrote crappy diary entries, they didn't get published.
On a side note, the professor I had in this publishing class went nuts the next semester. She showed up with purple hair, acting very strange. I'm not sure if someone showed up with a big butterfly net, but I understand they had to cancel her classes. I never did hear what became of her.

The Fools!

The Department of Homeland Security has named Claria, an adware maker that online publishers once dubbed a "parasite," to a federal privacy advisory board. An executive from Claria, formerly called Gator, will be one of 20 members of the committee, the department said Wednesday. "This committee will provide the department with important recommendations on how to further the department's mission while protecting the privacy of personally identifiable information of citizens and visitors of the United States," Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the department's chief privacy officer, said in a statement. Claria bundles its pop-up advertising software with ad-supported networks such as Kazaa. Recently, the privately held company has been trying to seek credibility by following stricter privacy guidelines and offering behavioral profiling services to its partners. CNet

Talk about putting the fox in charge of the hen house.