Month: June 2002

KUOW had a segment on internet radio and what it means for artists. I have thought for years artists got a bad deal from record companies and with mp3 so much in the news, it’s done nothing to change my opinion. People who listen to mp3 files buy music, more than those who don’t, so any method of getting music out where it can be heard seems to me to be a Good Thing.

The formats and playlists of commercial radio stations are so restrictive, it’s hard to hear good new music. The individuality of a DJ with an ear for something innovative has been replaced by progammers who tailor the music around the demographic the advertisers want to reach. Internet radio restores this individuality to music and the music industry’s opposition to it speaks volumes about the real revenue engine behind the radio industry.

Also, I find that internet radio sites do a good job of promoting the artists they play, in terms of links, options to buy the music they play, etc. They have a direct relationship with their listeners, rather than using the listeners as the bait for advertising dollars. I sent an email to the show, included below.

Historically, each new medium has simply mimicked the dominant medium until it found its own strengths. Radio broadcast newspaper stories until it leveraged its immediacy, TV added pictures to radio as well as broadcasting plays until it worked out how best to do original programming, like game shows and other “innovations.” Likewise the web has added reach to newspapers and news organizations of all sizes. If you’ve been following the net since the mid-90s, you’ve seen the web try to be television, newspapers, and now radio. We’ll have to see what the internet is really good at, I suppose, but I’d look at what the big corporations are scared of as a good indicator.

This is an instructive read.

94.9 KUOW: Seattle’s NPR News and Information Station

Morning,

I listen to Internet radio because I like the programming: it’s usually less restrictive than over the air broadcasting.

But I am not hearing about the real business of broadcasting. Mr Navarro claimed that the music was the commodity being sold in his analysis. What’s actually being sold is the attention span of the audience that likes that programming. I pay nothing to KMTT or any other station but time spent listening to messages paid for by advertisers. If they stop playing music I and others care for, the audience drops off, and advertisers go away and the station’s revenue drops.

Ad-supported media is based on this “attention economy” and always has been.

Going forward, the day may come when we can subscribe to a service that plays music we will like and an acceptable revenue model will evolve to make it viable.

Also, this is a very hot topic in tv broadcasting: the CEO of Turner Broadcasting has claimed that viewers who skip commercials, either by well-timed bathroom breaks or technology, are in violation of an implicit contract.

A few days ago, I made reference to a paper released by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute at the behest of everyone’s favorite innovative software house, Microsoft.

It turns out the paper was released, retracted, revised, and re-released with no mention of the revisions.

Linux and Main – Anthony Awtrey: The Changing AdTI Documents

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) just released two versions of a white paper entitled ‘Opening the Open Source Debate’. The first was retracted for a time and the second one seemed suspiciously different in my casual reading.

To verify this, I converted each of the PDF files to text files using ‘pdftotext’ (a very handy GPL’d utility) and compared the differences using ‘diff’ (another very handy GPL’d utility). The two articles were substantially different.

The revisions were substantive and cast some light on the inroads Open Source has made in government, how the GPL is misunderstood and misrepresented, as well as demonstrating how weak the paper is, in either version.

Google Search: “unencumbered source”

The Open Source vs Free Software squabble is a distraction: it really boils down to pragmatism vs principle. This is not to claim the pragmatists are unprincipled or that the adherents to principle lack pragmatism, but instead to refer to them by their focus.

I’d like to see a new term that encompasses both, if I thought it would serve to stop the squabbling. There are more similarities than differences, after all.

OfB.biz: Open for Business – What’s Gnu: RMS on UnitedLinux, Free Software

RMS: We developed the GNU operating system, a compatible replacement for Unix, so users could be free to share and change it. Unix was not free software; it was available under restrictive licenses. It was not unusual for it to be licensed per computer, or even according to the number of users who could log in.

In 1991, the last gap in GNU was the kernel; Linus Torvalds then wrote a free kernel, Linux, and released it under the GNU General Public License. Adding Linux to GNU produced a free operating system, the GNU/Linux system. (Many users believe that the whole system is Linux, and the companies that package the system spread this mistake.)

The fact of the matter is, HURD was the kernel that RMS had in mind to fit for the GNU distribution. But it was never ready. Linux filled the gap but not by design as RMS implies: no one imagined Linux would become what it has. As for HURD, you can see the latest status: read this and tell me if you would call this a “UNIX-compatiible operating system:”

The Hurd, together with the GNU Mach microkernel, the GNU C Library and the other GNU programs, provides a rather complete and usable operating system today. It is not ready for production use, as there are still many bugs and missing features. However, it should be a good base for further development and non-critical application usage.

GNU/Hurd is completely self-contained (you can compile all parts of the Hurd system from GNU/Hurd itself). You can run several GNU/Hurd systems in parallel, and debug even critical servers in another GNU/Hurd with gdb. You can run the X window system, applications that use it, and advanced server applications like the Apache webserver.

On the negative side, the support for character devices (like sound cards) and other hardware is mostly missing. Although the POSIX interface is provided, some additional interfaces like POSIX threads, shared memories or semaphores are still under development.

This all sounds suspiciously like a desperate claim to appear to be relevant, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

If you wanted to work on a kernel, you could choose any of the BSD flavors, Linux, or Darwin (also a Mach microkernel). Any of these are more fully baked than HURD appears to be.

Over 90 degrees today: unusual, true, also hard to deal with. It’s still 80 degrees at 10 PM at Boeing Field (according to gkrellmweather).

A couple of my Wallowaters fell over: I guess they got too hot to hold their shape. When I found them and dumped the remaining water out, I was struck by how hot it was: hotter than I would use in the shower.

Supposed to be back to highs of 75 tomorrow . . . . a relief.

Jim Moy: Mac OS-X

The default installation of OS-X comes with Apache and Perl, already installed and running. Instead of turning on the internal toy web server like it used to, clicking the Start button for Web Sharing now fires up Apache. “Look, httpd.conf, wonderful!” The collective wisdom of Unix, and the happy Mac face up front, very nice.