From the article, on the FCC's ownership regulation relaxation: -- "Second, the decision cites the "diversity-enhancing value of the Internet." The FCC is confusing diversity with variety. The top 20 Internet news sites are owned by the same media conglomerates that control the broadcast and cable networks. Sure, a hundred-person choir gives you a choice of voices, but they're all singing the same song." --
Slate and Slashdot may be useful outlets for some angst-filled steam but I agree with Turner that they have not radically changed the market anymore than the Village Voice or the NYPress have.
The fact that the vast vast majority of media coverage for the vast vast majority of Americans is controled by an increasingly small number of corporations and that the coverage of news and the production of original content has suffered as a result seems to be a clear one.
How much coverage of the war in Iraq, or almost any news story, did internet news sources get from their own sources and how much of it is, as Turner says in the article, more outlets for the same corporate funded journalists in the field?
As much as we can comment on and rail against the news coverage, much of our efforts only increase our myopia, focusing us in ever-tighter on the limited perspectives and issues presented us by the media conglomerates? Besides "ask slashdot" we should all be aware that the only way news gets on this site is by first being covered somewhere else.
I agree that the centralized control of airwave spectrum is greatly limiting people's ability to communicate with one another as well as gather information about the world at large.
I wonder if the issue is currently one of human nature of broadcast technology. If we were all running on Ethernet networks we could, as currently happens daily on college campuses across the country, distribute TV shows through very fast file transfers. If the audience for such transfers were large enough, people would produce and distribute original content over it rather than just copying material produced for tv. If you look at a college campus you can see the early form of this already replacing normal tv watching for large numbers of students, and they are some of the high consumption media viewers.
If the network spreads, does this model spread with it, and if it does do we still face the same limitations of centralized self-censorship found in the spectrum clutches at the moment?
The parent of this post was modded up "funny" but it it actually makes an interesting point. The most interesting comment on Mac v. Windows security issues, or just mac security more generally, was at
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_windows
Addressing the common line about mac's being more secure only because no one uses them He had the following to say:
"------ The reason this argument is so popular with Windows apologists is that it's a convenient bit of rhetoric. They say it's so, we say it's not. You can't get past this argument, because it can't be disproven without the Mac OS actually attaining a Windows-like market share.
So, let's concede the point, just for the sake of argument: OK, fine, if the Mac had the same market share as Windows, the tables would be turned and there'd be just as many Mac security exploits as there are Windows exploits today.
Now what? Given that the Mac is never going to attain a monopoly share of the operating systems market -- that merely expanding its share to, say, 10 percent would be universally hailed as an almost-too-good-to-be-true success -- isn't it thus only logical to conclude that the Mac is forever "doomed" to be significantly more secure than Windows? ------"
Of course you would be hard pressed to find someone to grant in reality the points he grants for argument's sake, but it is an interesting comment on the argument itself.
I was rather swayed by this piece (with the most interesting point summarized below for the mentally slashdoted)
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_k on fabulator
--- "Konfabulator = (Custom XML format) + (Custom JavaScript engine)
Dashboard, on the other hand, is based on WebCore, the underlying open source layout and scripting engine behind Safari. Dashboard gadgets are indeed scripted using JavaScript, the same language used by Konfabulator, but Dashboard uses the JavaScript engine that's built into the system. And for UI layout, Dashboard gadgets are specified using HTML and CSS -- using the same rendering engine as Safari. . .. Do you see how huge this is? How it opens the door to gadget development to anyone with web design experience? Indeed, I've read the preliminary Dashboard developer documentation (generously provided by a source attending WWDC), and it is outstanding from the perspective of making gadgets easy-to-create.
The idea that Dashboard is derivative because it's scripted via JavaScript is missing the point. Dashboard isn't using JavaScript just to use JavaScript -- it's using JavaScript because Dashboard gadgets are little floating Web Kit views." ---
The article also argues, and offers documentation in support of the position, that you can trace the idea for such widgets all the way back to the first "desk accessories" like the puzzle and calculator from 1984. Then combines both points to paint Dashboard as a natural outgrowth of fundmental Apple ideas.
While Konfabulator is an implementation of similar concepts, they were not the inventors of them and their chosen means of implementation makes their software practically useless to Apple from the buy-and-incorporate perspective.
Would this system of ownership tokens raise as many lawyer's eyebrows if it were scaled back from "own every cd" to smaller groups?
You could have universities with their own group ownership servers or genre specific collections based around appropriate music websites.
Even just the ability to set this up for a group of friends who all have large music collections would be rather interesting, especially if the token system could follow individual tracks as well as whole cds.
I think that Red Carpet shows exactly how it is possible to have one distro that is easy, powerfull, and flexible; no one is saying get rid of the command line, we just want a GUI that wraps around the command line so well that we never have to know it exists. That way if I need to do more than my GUI program has pull down menus for I can just use the command line or disable the "start X at boot" option but if I don't have the knowledge to get Linux running and no inclination or time to learn that knowledge I can just boot up Gnome and have is work from day one.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article, on the FCC's ownership regulation relaxation:
--
"Second, the decision cites the "diversity-enhancing value of the Internet." The FCC is confusing diversity with variety. The top 20 Internet news sites are owned by the same media conglomerates that control the broadcast and cable networks. Sure, a hundred-person choir gives you a choice of voices, but they're all singing the same song."
--
Slate and Slashdot may be useful outlets for some angst-filled steam but I agree with Turner that they have not radically changed the market anymore than the Village Voice or the NYPress have.
The fact that the vast vast majority of media coverage for the vast vast majority of Americans is controled by an increasingly small number of corporations and that the coverage of news and the production of original content has suffered as a result seems to be a clear one.
How much coverage of the war in Iraq, or almost any news story, did internet news sources get from their own sources and how much of it is, as Turner says in the article, more outlets for the same corporate funded journalists in the field?
As much as we can comment on and rail against the news coverage, much of our efforts only increase our myopia, focusing us in ever-tighter on the limited perspectives and issues presented us by the media conglomerates? Besides "ask slashdot" we should all be aware that the only way news gets on this site is by first being covered somewhere else.
I agree that the centralized control of airwave spectrum is greatly limiting people's ability to communicate with one another as well as gather information about the world at large.
I wonder if the issue is currently one of human nature of broadcast technology. If we were all running on Ethernet networks we could, as currently happens daily on college campuses across the country, distribute TV shows through very fast file transfers. If the audience for such transfers were large enough, people would produce and distribute original content over it rather than just copying material produced for tv. If you look at a college campus you can see the early form of this already replacing normal tv watching for large numbers of students, and they are some of the high consumption media viewers.
If the network spreads, does this model spread with it, and if it does do we still face the same limitations of centralized self-censorship found in the spectrum clutches at the moment?
The parent of this post was modded up "funny" but it it actually makes an interesting point. The most interesting comment on Mac v. Windows security issues, or just mac security more generally, was at
s
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/broken_window
Addressing the common line about mac's being more secure only because no one uses them He had the following to say:
"------
The reason this argument is so popular with Windows apologists is that it's a convenient bit of rhetoric. They say it's so, we say it's not. You can't get past this argument, because it can't be disproven without the Mac OS actually attaining a Windows-like market share.
So, let's concede the point, just for the sake of argument: OK, fine, if the Mac had the same market share as Windows, the tables would be turned and there'd be just as many Mac security exploits as there are Windows exploits today.
Now what? Given that the Mac is never going to attain a monopoly share of the operating systems market -- that merely expanding its share to, say, 10 percent would be universally hailed as an almost-too-good-to-be-true success -- isn't it thus only logical to conclude that the Mac is forever "doomed" to be significantly more secure than Windows?
------"
Of course you would be hard pressed to find someone to grant in reality the points he grants for argument's sake, but it is an interesting comment on the argument itself.
I was rather swayed by this piece (with the most interesting point summarized below for the mentally slashdoted)
k on fabulator
.
http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_
---
"Konfabulator = (Custom XML format) + (Custom JavaScript engine)
Dashboard, on the other hand, is based on WebCore, the underlying open source layout and scripting engine behind Safari. Dashboard gadgets are indeed scripted using JavaScript, the same language used by Konfabulator, but Dashboard uses the JavaScript engine that's built into the system. And for UI layout, Dashboard gadgets are specified using HTML and CSS -- using the same rendering engine as Safari.
. .
Do you see how huge this is? How it opens the door to gadget development to anyone with web design experience? Indeed, I've read the preliminary Dashboard developer documentation (generously provided by a source attending WWDC), and it is outstanding from the perspective of making gadgets easy-to-create.
The idea that Dashboard is derivative because it's scripted via JavaScript is missing the point. Dashboard isn't using JavaScript just to use JavaScript -- it's using JavaScript because Dashboard gadgets are little floating Web Kit views."
---
The article also argues, and offers documentation in support of the position, that you can trace the idea for such widgets all the way back to the first "desk accessories" like the puzzle and calculator from 1984. Then combines both points to paint Dashboard as a natural outgrowth of fundmental Apple ideas.
While Konfabulator is an implementation of similar concepts, they were not the inventors of them and their chosen means of implementation makes their software practically useless to Apple from the buy-and-incorporate perspective.
Would this system of ownership tokens raise as many lawyer's eyebrows if it were scaled back from "own every cd" to smaller groups?
You could have universities with their own group ownership servers or genre specific collections based around appropriate music websites.
Even just the ability to set this up for a group of friends who all have large music collections would be rather interesting, especially if the token system could follow individual tracks as well as whole cds.
If locks are so useless against the determined, why do the same companies that pay these crawlers spend so much money on DRM?
--
>Oh yeah, Harry Potter does not have CSS.
Obviously it'll only sell one copy and the entire world will download it; how will the author eat?
--
I think that Red Carpet shows exactly how it is possible to have one distro that is easy, powerfull, and flexible; no one is saying get rid of the command line, we just want a GUI that wraps around the command line so well that we never have to know it exists. That way if I need to do more than my GUI program has pull down menus for I can just use the command line or disable the "start X at boot" option but if I don't have the knowledge to get Linux running and no inclination or time to learn that knowledge I can just boot up Gnome and have is work from day one.