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| Thursday, September 6, 2001 |
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Who knows what evil lurks under innocent browser windows? 
| | Want to take a stand against pop-uner ads? Consider joining forces with Joe Jennett. He explains why here. |
Let's just replace the SCAN button with SCREW
| | Thanks to Tom for pointing us to Radiohead.com, which cannot be fully appreciated without a fast Net connection (even through two hubs and other gear I'm still getting 2-3mb on the download side from Cox Cable) — and to the jihad from hell that is Clear Channel, a nasty outfit run by Randy Michaels that now owns 1170 radio stations and takes in one out of every five dollars spent on radio advertising. What we have with Michaels, and Clear Channel — and what's left of commercial broadcasting — is the wreckage wrought by deregulation in its most delusional form. |
| | For decades broadcasting powerhouses like CBS and NBC were allowed to own no more than one AM, FM and TV station each in up to seven metropolitain areas. That was it. The reasons were both good and obvious, even to the most Republican lawmakers and regulators. Then, starting in the Reagan administration, broadcasting was hitched to the deregulation bandwagon, and hell began to break loose. The new conventional wisdom held that broadcasting, along with transportation, trade and everything else, should be deregulated because "the market" would know better what to do with it than some government agency. |
| | The problem was, and still is, that the business of broadcasting happens almost entirely between stations and advertisers. Listeners, who pay nothing for what they hear, have almost no influence at all. Even if they want to pay for what they hear on commercial radio, they can't. The business isn't wired that way. Even equipment makers (e.g. Motorola), for all their lobbying clout, have relatively little influence on the business of broadcasting. |
| | With the term "market" so broadly defined that it overlooked the confined nature of the broadcasting business, deregulators forgot that the public's only means of expressing an interest in broadcasting was the democratic and political one expressed by regulation. These same deregulators also forgot that there are a finite number of broadcast outlets that sit on a total of about 200 AM and FM channels, all of which constitute a resource no less publicly owned and controlled than national parks, forests and military bases. |
| | So while the deregulators "let the market decide" what to do with commercial broadcasting, the public had nothing to do with the results. Dials that had been Main streets in towns from cities were turned over to used car lots and mobile home dealers. Hey, that's what "the market" wanted, no? |
| | Well, no. We wanted what we used to get from people who cared about music, news, public affairs and other things with relevance to the lives we lived in our cars, households and local communities. Yeah, some of us liked to hear rants from Rush Limbaugh and sarcastic guys screaming about sports, but we also wanted to hear something else besides the same voices, styles, slogans, songs and promotions from coast to coast. |
| | Public radio is another matter. Listeners pay the stations to hear programming the stations produce on their own or buy from NPR, PRI and other sources. In other words, the stations' listeners are also their customers. They don't have "consumers." That's one big reason why the audiences for Morning Edition, A Prairie Home Companion and All things Considered each dwarfs the audiences for CNN and most other cable TV channels. And why you never hear about it on commercial radio or TV. The Arbitron ratings, which are still the fundamental means by which advertising prices are set, have always excluded public stations from the listings, as if they didn't exist, or didn't matter. |
| | Ironically, a lot of deregultors in congress don't understand that the only "market forces" that involve the public in radio are the ones that sustain — surprise! — public radio. |
| | Commercial radio is sustained by advertisers who have less and less choice about who they'll buy their time from, and what they'll pay for it. And if Randy Michaels has his way, their choices will go nowhere but down. |
| | And pretty much everything north of 92 on the FM band will suck more than ever. |
Show me where it says so in pixels
| | Dylan Tweeney is one of the most solid journalists in both the worlds of ink and pixels. I first met him when he was writing for Infoworld and wanted to know more about Cluetrain. Over the last year or so he's been writing a pile of stuff for eCompany Now (which recently acquired and morphed into Business 2.0). Off and on over that time he's been writing for other pubs, plus his own online journal, The Tweeney Report. In the latest edition, he gives us his usual sober perspective: "The funny thing is, even though the dot-com bubble has burst, there's still too much hype in most technology coverage. This time, however, the hype is a negative sort. " More significantly, he lets us in on a decision that — to me at least — has profound implications: |
| | From now on, as these articles appear, I'll send them out in the tweney report, occasionally as full text but more often as links back to the web site where they are being published. If I've got additional information that didn't make it into the published story, I'll add that to the newsletter -- as a tweney report exclusive. |
| | As I read this, Dylan's saying he'll publish on the Web at the same time as he publishes in print, and use the Web for advantages not available to print alone, such as links, additional information, easily-made additions and corrections, and all ther rest of it. |
| | This isn't new. Lots of us have been doing the same in various ways for as long as the Web has been available to us. (Most of my Linux Journal editorials are either on the Linux Journal site or at LinuxForSuits.com.) What's significant here is that a leading journalist is proclaiming a policy of writing and publishing in both media, together, as a matter of procedural policy. |
| | What he's also saying is that the fundamental window in which we write is a browser, not a word processor. Where we come from is pixels, not ink. In the world of pixels, our context is a linked one. |
| | And there's something about the linked nature of hypertext that makes the concept of "content" — with its implications of commoditized cargo — distasteful and repellant. |
| | The Web isn't a medium. It's a place. And no matter what you're writing, it's looking more and more like the best place to start. |
Thus Verizon continues to deserve its Iceberg Award
| | According to a report in The Register, alert hackers have found a huge security hole in the vastly disinterested Verizon customer service appraratus. Clueing Verizon about the matter, however, wasn't fast or easy: "Verizon is more forceful than most companies in making it very difficult to get in touch with anyone useful," the report says. |
Your tax dollars at rest
| | Looks like the Bush administration is letting Microsoft off the hook. |
| | Was justice bought? Good question. |
Some Flash doesn't suck
| | I've pointed to this site before, but now it's apparently got some momentum going. |
Hazards of Punditry, Part X
| | Looking through back mail, I just discovered a link from Eric Norlin to this exquisite back-taunt against the source of a 100-proof dumb quote that showed up in an L.A. Times piece a few weeks ago: |
| | The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn¹t excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws...The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn¹t have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government. |
Two to tango
| | A lot of people (me included) have held for some time that the real story isn't Linux vs. Windows, but Linux + Windows. Because that's what customers, and vendors, are choosing. |
| | Now BusinessWeek suggests that this is exactly what will happen when HP/Compaq in its compressed state gets rid of all those other OSes not many folks want. |
Hand holding
| | Want to develop a new hand-held? A point-of-sale device? A net-connected vibrator? Then you need one of these. |
| | Just curious: does this kind of stuff rev anybody's jets? |
Up and crawling
| | Both the Titanium and the G3/400 (Joyce's laptop) are working wirelessly, except here in my office, although that will also be corrected soon by a second base station. |
| | The hub-to-hub problem was bad wiring. The previous owner apparently only used the cable to print or something. Not clear how it worked, because the four pairs in the Cat-5 cable were wired wrong at both ends. Ron, my new local tech guy, came out with a cable testing system and isolated the problem. After he put new plugs on the cable, we were rocking. The only box that failed to get on the net was the G4/500. It can see the router and ping anything on the local network, but can't get out on the Net. Ron thinks it's an OS X issue present in the 10.0.4 version (which I have) but absent in 10.1, of which he has a beta. |
| | The next impasse is embedded AC wiring infrastructure. |
| | When I plug in the newer of my two Linux boxes, the voltage on the circuit drops from 120 to 80. Then it takes a few mintues before it gets back up to 120 again, and even then it's not stable. Not sure what that's means other than too much drag on the circuit and a breaker that doesn't quite throw. Oddly, when I turn off all but the Titanium, the Linux box still brings down the voltage. The same thing happened with the G4 at first, but then the problem went away. Right now everything is asleep and all the lights are off, so all that's running at full power are the Titanium and a fan in the window that varies its speed with the voltage, so I can hear the voltage go up and down in the tones made by the fan's white noise. At the moment it's 120.1 volts. Now 120.2. And whoosh: it's 114.5 for a few seconds, then back up to 120.2. |
| | Yeah, creeps me out too. We're having a helluva time finding an electrician (or someone like him) too. |
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