Sorry for the exclamation point in the headline, but my inner media critic, who is taking over for the second half of this post, insisted on it. It’s there for a reason, which I’ll get to shortly, I promise. [Update: My inner media critic is laughing out loud at the people who completely missed this reference and posted TalkBack comments complaining about the headline. “See,” he says, “you should have used FOUR exclamation points. Then maybe they would have figured out the headline was deliberately sensational, to make a point about how important headlines and opening pages are to media coverage.”] Our technical press, like the mainstream media, sometimes has a hard time letting go of an idea it’s been pushing. That’s true even when new facts show that the old story wasn’t, strictly speaking, accurate. Or when facts on the ground have changed and maybe it’s time to alert your readers to the new realities. Today’s case in point: I just got through reading ExtremeTech’s recent lab-based head-to-head comparison of gaming performance in Windows Vista SP1 and XP SP3. The conclusion was quite a surprise.