Slashdot Mirror

The evangelists were charged with proselytizing as many independent software developers as possible to write for Windows, not OS/2. IBM had a corporate policy at the time that barred any IBM employee from disparaging a competitor's product. Microsoft had no such restriction and exploited the situation masterfully. "We took maximum advantage of it," says Rick Segal, who led a 15-member evangelical team. As his group lobbied the developers and the forums, IBM had no idea of the strategic importance of these groups, he says, and the behemoth was vulnerable to the evangelists' attacks. "The issue that mattered most to me was how to make sure OS/2 never got a foothold to take over our operating system, our franchise."

But where will it all lead? It's possibly worth remembering at this juncture that Mr Tony himself is a complete, self-confessed and unabashed technoklutz. He is, furthermore, total jail-bait when it comes to photo-opps with the rich and famous. Which is a disastrous and expensive combination when it runs up against Bill Gates at the head of Microsoft's government sales Spetsnaz.

Microsoft "bend[s] the ear of those people at the top of the press chain, the people who have the least amount of technical knowledge," says Petreley, now an InfoWorld contributing editor. The company "presents its case as strongly as possible at that level, and works its way down, and [tries] to get its results that way. It's very clever."

The business press (local, national and international) has traditionally been very nice to companies that are currently on top, but the kind of 100% criticism-free reporting that Microsoft gets is just astounding.

No business reporter ever got fired for kissing Microsoft's butt, I guess. This article from Brill's Content describes what happens to reporters who don't toe the M$ line.

As a matter of fact, it's well documented that MSFT does "stooge" much smaller on-line forums. From Brill's Content, Sept 1998:

In 1992, the Microsoft evangelists began paying attention to on-line bulletin boards. "All of a sudden, press people started hanging out on CompuServe [home of the influential Canopus forum], and started using the forums as sources of information," says Segal, who monitored about 25 forums. Identifying themselves as Microsoft employees, Segal says, he and his colleagues would post retorts to anything they saw that portrayed Windows or Microsoft in a bad light.

IBM began to understand what was going on, and it appointed a lone OS/2 evangelist, David Whittle. He gamely joined the fray, posting items on the Canopus forum, which Microsoft now regarded as a hotbed of anti-Windows, pro-OS/2 sentiment, says Segal. The evangelists jumped on the outgunned Whittle. "It's outrageous how IBM sent him in with a pea shooter," recalls Segal. "We were going to cream him, pick him apart, slaughter him."

The CompuServe OS/2 forum probably had a much smaller readership (and influence) than Slashdot has today.

MSFT has paid for newspaper ads nominally authored by and independent 3rd party.

On April 10, 1999 the Los Angeles Times reported that Microsoft "has secretly been planning a massive media campaign designed to influence state investigators by creating the appearance of a groundswell of public support for the company". Plans for the campaign included planting articles, and commissioning letters to the editor and opinion pieces written by Microsoft media handlers, but presented as "spontaneous testimonials."

So, yes, I seriously do think that MSFT "stooges" Slashdot. MSFT has such a track record that I believe any pro-MSFT opinion expressed in a public forum has to be viewed with a fair amount of suspicion.

Try some of the publications that dedicate themselves to exposing poor reporting, or at least making a living doing good reporting that the other ones miss: Salon Magazine might just pick this /. story up on their own... Romenesko's Media News... Brill's Content... Reason Online... USC's Online Journalism Review... FAIR

Drudge Report Down?
I've been trying to dredge up THE DRUDGE REPORT since this morning. It's been 12 hours so far. What's up with that? Anybody else able to get in?
He's been bragging all week about how he's going to be posting exit polls as they become available, even if the polls are still open. Slate tried the same thing during the primaries until they were threatened with a law suit by Voter News Service and changed their minds.
Friend Jonah Goldberg is quoted as saying,"I would be shocked, knowing Drudge like I do, if he doesn't do it -- particularly if it pisses people off."
Could DRUDGE be server swamped? DOS'ed? Technical difficulties? chickened out?

Steven Brill, so-called "media watchdog"

"so-called"? Maybe our kneejerk cynicism is getting a little out of hand. While I don't agree with everything he does, Brill's Content is one of the few magazines I find worth reading. It's also one of the few places where you can get a good, hard look at how the media operates, and probably the only such place that would qualify as mainstream press (as in you can find it in most well-equipped bookstores).
--

Too bad the article Katz basically rehashed here wasn't simply quoted in toto instead of, well, rehashed. It was clearer, more concise. . . . less Katzian. And it's been up for a week.

Rafe

V^^^^V

Another group, the private company Alexa, has also engaged in internet archiving. A couple of years ago Alexa donated an archive to the Library of Congress. It was written up in Brill's Content last November (article text not online, alas).

(Alexa's normal business involves a browser plug-in that is What's Related on steroids.)
----

There is an article in this month's Brill's Content about slash fiction. The title of the article is "X-Rated Files". It discusses several of these issues too. The article discusses slash fiction from the perspective of its being a grass-roots effort to for interactive involvement with media, mainly video, that is otherwise one-way. IT doesn't deal with shows incorporating elements of fan fiction.

In general the studios don't try too hard to supress slash fiction. The article mentions Lucas in particular. According to Brill's, Lucas said he would take action against erotic or lewd literature, but not otherwise.

Heh, this month's Brill's Content had an article on the phenomenon, specifically how female writers were approaching it, complete with an illustration of Spock and Kirk making out. <SHUDDER> I haven't read it yet, so I don't know if it's an entertaining read or not, but it's on their web site here (http://www.brillscontent.com/features/slash_0500. html).

Actually, he was arrested for speeding and driving without having a license on him. I saw a URL with a copy of the police report once, and if I still had the URL, I'd post it here. Meanwhile, this is the closest I can come:

http://www.brillscontent.com/f eatures/bill_0998.html


=================================

The Suzuki litigation includes a sworn statement from Ronald Denison, a former test-facility employee for the magazine, who alleges that on the day the Suzuki Samurai was being tested in 1988, he heard Irwin Landau, the magazine's editorial director at the time, tell an engineer, "If you can't find someone to roll this car, I will." Landau said in his deposition that he would never have said such a thing, except in jest.

CU has expressed the opinion that SUVs are frivolous, gas-hungry, clumsy and wasteful. As a motorcycle rider in SUV-saturated Atlanta, I am inclined to agree with their assessment (and add further opinion on the typical driving abilities of their owners), but if there is a hidden editorial agenda which is influencing their testing methods, this is clearly cause for concern.

Is this a SLAPP suit? Sales of the Isuzu Trooper, which several contemporary offroad and 4WD magazines praised, suffered horribly after the Consumer Reports article. But it's worth noting what the Isuzu/Suzuki lawsuit tries hard to ignore--while the Trooper and Sidekick failed the lane-swerve test by rolling, that the Chevrolet Tahoe, Nissan Pathfinder, and Toyota 4Runner in the same article all passed the test acceptibly.

--

The Suzuki litigation includes a sworn statement from Ronald Denison, a former test-facility employee for the magazine, who alleges that on the day the Suzuki Samurai was being tested in 1988, he heard Irwin Landau, the magazine's editorial director at the time, tell an engineer, "If you can't find someone to roll this car, I will." Landau said in his deposition that he would never have said such a thing, except in jest.

CU has expressed the opinion that SUVs are frivolous, gas-hungry, clumsy and wasteful. As a motorcycle rider in SUV-saturated Atlanta, I am inclined to agree with their assessment (and add further opinion on the typical driving abilities of their owners), but if there is a hidden editorial agenda which is influencing their testing methods, this is clearly cause for concern.

Is this a SLAPP suit? Sales of the Isuzu Trooper, which several contemporary offroad and 4WD magazines praised, suffered horribly after the Consumer Reports article. But it's worth noting what the Isuzu/Suzuki lawsuit tries hard to ignore--while the Trooper and Sidekick failed the lane-swerve test by rolling, that the Chevrolet Tahoe, Nissan Pathfinder, and Toyota 4Runner in the same article all passed the test acceptibly.

--

I'd be surprised if VA did. They'd be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Most newspapers, believe it or not, are not family-owned or staff-owned ventures. They're part of larger media conglomerates: Hollinger/Southam, News Co, Thompson, for example. All the US's major TV networks are owned by conglomerates. These conglomerates frequently have business interests elsewhere.

Some media sources have owners that have an active involvement in day-to-day activities. Look at Conrad Black and his pet newspaper (and money sink), the National Post. Some networks blunt coverage of their parent conglomerates, like CBS did when news about pedophiles working at Disney surfaced (see the Brill's Content Mouse-ke-fear issue). Some newspapers run scared from hometown corporations, like the Cincinatti Enquirer did after it ran, then withdrew, a major expose on Chiquita. And some just leave their newspapers alone.

I think, since I have no reason to think otherwise, that VA is going to leave Slashdot alone. They have no media experience and they really have no interest in using Slashdot as a major advertising vessel quite yet. Remember that their equity valuation is largely based on a hugely successful stock offering, not on an especially large market share.

They might be tempted, but even the slightest hint of interference would destroy Slashdot's credibility outright. Things like this have a way of coming up, no matter how deeply buried they are.

If you want to keep up with media watching, get a subscription to Brill's Content or another media magazine, like Adbusters. Be conscious of your media.

--

...no credible news/media organization is not going to report negative press about their parent company.

Whoa, define "credible" for me; check out this Brill's Content story about how ABC backed off of a damning story about their parent company Disney... (Not the only example that leaps to mind, but the most recent that I could find a link to in a hurry.)

http://www.brillscontent.c om/features/bigmedia_1299.html

This merger may not be a monopoly, but it's another step towards the consolidation of creative culture into the hands of a select few companies. Where it may not matter so much if two meat-packing concerns join forces, when two companies that control media content merge, it removes a point of view from the available choices of consumers. And that's a bad thing.

In this case, the merger of AOL and Time Warner potentially removes the point of view of non-Time Warner content from the choices of AOL Users. And if mainstream America follows its normal course, the vast majority of those users won't even notice their loss.

These first two points may possibly be construed as nitpicky.

1.) I always thought the Fates were female. At the beginning of your article, you refer to them in the masculine, then abruptly switch gender referents near the end. Are you confused, did you not proofread, or am I missing something more significant?

2.) There is no Palm IV. There is III, IIIx, V, and VII.

These two simply make you look silly, Mr. Katz. The following is a more serious consideration:

3.) You use the word "Luddite" in a way that broadly categorizes Luddites in a negative manner. I thought Slashdot was supposed to be a place of tolerance? Actual Luddites may find your offhand dismissal and casual use of their sect name offensive. (I'm not usually the PC police, but I think this deserves serious consideration.) You are a writer, Mr. Katz. Words are your weapons. Don't toss them about so carelessly -- when you do, you're not doing your job.

I hope that "Luddite" does not become another easy buzzword pigeonhole that appears in 90% of your articles, along with:
Geek
AI
God/Religion
Cyber*
... etc.

Please think more carefully about your choice of words in the future. Also, I would suggest having other people proofread your work before you post it. It would save you embarrassment. Surely you don't let the editors at Brill's Content do all your revision for you?

Because Linux doesn't need a commercial following to keep doing what it does, there's no reason for Linus to take this manipulative approach. Hopefully, the "journalists" will stop bugging Linus for stupid sound bites and start bugging the likes of Bob Young. I think Mr. Young would be much more receptive, after all, Red Hat does have a commercial interest.

By the way, for a good summary of the technology involved in producing the Cassini probe (and why you shouldn't panic about the plutonium on board), check out this letter on Brill's Content. It was written (by a friend - go Chris go!) in reaction to one of the many paranoia inducing articles that's been circulating about the probe.

http://www.brillscontent.com/f eatures/bill_0998.html Brill's Content Article entitled "Making Bill" at http://www.brillscontent.com/features/bill_0998.ht ml

--

A couple of months ago, Matt Drudge was the cover story of Brill's Content (magazine about journalism standards) and they named several stories that Drudge either got wrong or could never prove.

If you really care anout the quality of the hype you read, I strongly recommend Brill's Contnet:

http://www.brillscontent.com/