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Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

People (some/many) believe what they read. Some CEOs in some corners of the planet will rush to their CIO and tell them "I don't know what this mp3 is but lets switch to aac A-S-A-P!!!". Then the poor CTO (if he/she has a technical background) will have to take 15mins to explain to the CEO that "mp3 is not dead, the patent is gone so not it's absolutely free, while for aac we'll have to be paying ABC amount for our XYZ product/service".

I guess the current aac patent holders are smiling now :)

Confuse & conquer!!!

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The real shame, IMO, is not that some CEO or other non technical person is confused, but that reputable news outlets reported it that way. (For some value of reputable).

If you look at the three links that Marco posted in the first sentence, they lead to articles by Gizmodo, Engadget and NPR, all of which completely got the story wrong. That's shocking, if you ask me.

Gizmodo and Engadget are not "reputable news outlets", but junk blogs for users of browser toolbars with announcements for each chinese tablet. I never seen any half-decent article on such sites. It's even stupidier than clickbait, there are no sensationalism and attention manipulation, these sites are just content fillers, their authors just compose words randomly.

Is there even a reputable techinical news outlet? TechCrunch is too very clickbaity and editorilized, although gets linked here all the time

Ars Technica, perhaps?

No. Absolutely not. After they were acquired by Conde Nast, it has been downhill at an amazing pace.

They were downhill well before Conde Nast. Almost every article they ever did on LEDs was horribly out of date, using information that was true maybe a decade ago.

Eh, it's been a long time since I read it. Maybe it was for the better.

I have always found Ars to have relevant and well written content. Conde Nast has a lot of good writers at their various properties.

Despite other comments here, I'm as happy as ever with Ars, and I've been reading it for many years. They're the only tech news site I read anymore (besides here of course).

I've generally seen people get on the wagon of bashing Ars then not having anything better as a replacement suggestion. Like yeah I know the actual blog source is better but I don't know every tech blog on the internet.

I used to frequent Anandtech, Digital Foundry and ExtremeTech as they all had pretty good articles that sometimes went quite deep into the matter at hand. Anandtech its quality has gone down a lot, ExtremeTech is full of ads, ZergNet links and a constantly running JS script (probably a tracker?), and Digital Foundry its deep dives have become a lot less frequent. Only Ars Technica remains :/

http://techmeme.com

It's an aggregator, and you need to resist the urge to click on the links. But the headlines and blurb are often informative enough that you usually don't need to click.

> you need to resist the urge to click on the links

Why?

Techmeme heading/summary:

"Fraunhofer, the major contributor to MP3, shut down its licensing program in April as MP3 patents expired — Red Hat has announced that Fedora will include official MP3 decoding and encoding. The reason is that MP3 is now patent free - as far as anyone can tell."

First linked (Engadget) article: "MP3 is dead, long live AAC. Its creators have abandoned licenses to the format, signing its death sentence."

Not clicking would have both saved you time and left you better informed.

Anandtech is still very good imo. I haven't really found any website that compares.

Well they are not famous for their news articles but their technical reviews. If you are looking for a laptop or a phone, then gizmodo and engadgets are really good sources. My guess is that they had to expend (investors probably asked for it), so they did news (badly). But their core skill is still very good.

I stopped reading Engadget the moment I saw this tag used for the Nikon D810A DSLR for astrophotography in 2015 [1]: "Astrology". <facepalm/>

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2015/02/09/nikon-d810a-astrophotogr...

Clearly a typo, probably due to autocompletion in the tag selector widget since : https://www.engadget.com/tag/Astrology/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/articles/39934257

It's not just Engadget and ilk. The difference between being end-of-life as a product for Fraunhofer, and obsolete as a format, is a distinction not many outlets have made.

Convincing a reasonable CEO that news sources can be garbage should not be difficult.

>the poor CTO (if he/she has a technical background)

A CTO without technical background is indeed in a very poor state

The aac patent holders are the same who wrote that mp3 announcement — mpst of the patents on aac are held by Fraunhofer again ;)

Fraunhofer is, conveniently, one of the AAC patient holders.

big companies have "we need licences for everything" people.

There was one on Australian national TV this morning saying we will have to start using something more modern like mpeg.

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