Great piece by Frank Rich on how US media conglomerates ensure that the US public lives in ignorance of everything except what they define as the agenda

Quote:

“But the media giants that wield such clout don’t always put it to such frivolous use. We are not just plugged into their matrix to be sold movies and other entertainment products. These companies can also plug the nation into news narratives as ubiquitous and lightweight as “The Matrix Reloaded,” but with more damaging side effects.

This is what has happened consistently during America’s struggle with Osama bin Laden. During the years when Al Qaeda’s terrorists were gearing up for 9/11, the media giants were in overdrive selling escapist fare like the Clinton scandals, Gary Condit’s sex life and shark attacks. They were all legitimate stories. But just as “The Matrix Reloaded,” playing on a record 8,517 screens, crowded most other movies out of the marketplace last weekend, so those entertaining melodramas drove any reports of threatening developments beyond our shores to the periphery of the mass-media news culture.

The media giants took the same tack in banding together to push the administration-dictated narrative of Saddam Hussein ? and with the same results. The networks’ various productions of “Countdown: Iraq,” though as ponderous as “The Matrix Reloaded,” were so effective that by the time we went to war, 51 percent of the country, according to a Knight-Ridder poll, believed that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. It took the bloody re-emergence of Qaeda terrorists in Riyadh two weeks ago to recover the repressed memory that none of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis and that most of them were Saudis. And whatever happened to Saddam’s arsenal, all those advanced nuclear weapons programs and biological poisons that George W. Bush kept citing as the justification for going to war? Well, sarin today, gone tomorrow. That laundry list of terrors, none of them yet found, vanished from the national consciousness as soon as the cable outlets of AOL Time Warner, Fox and NBC put their muscle behind The Laci Peterson Murder.”[More]

Is the music industry finally getting the Apple Music Store message?

Could it be that the music industry has finally got the message about online distribution? See this report that Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group are to sell their brain-dead online service, Pressplay, to Roxio. “The marketplace has changed,” Sony Music executive VP Robert Bowlin says. “We are in the content business. We don’t have to own the highway necessarily unless it is strategic to do so.”

Well, well… And isn’t it ironic that Roxio owns the Napster brand name?

WiFi users reduced to the status of ‘trailer trash’

Wired reports:

“In a move to generate extra cash and attract new patrons, a growing number of upscale RV parks are rolling out networks that allow users to connect throughout their facilities using Wi-Fi technology.

“A lot of parks are realizing that Wi-Fi is not only a luxury, it’s also a necessity,” said Randy Hendrickson, general manager of Destiny RV Resorts, which operates parks in Dallas, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Blythe, California. He said he believes offering Wi-Fi will help the parks draw a younger and more tech-oriented set of patrons.

“We have people who are actually working full time from their computer on the road,” he said. “And we need to offer a service that’s attractive to them.”

AOL Time Warner: the perpetual motion machine

Guess what? Steve Case — architect of the AOL Time Warner merger — is talking about undoing the marriage and spinning off AOL. Or so the NYT claims: “Stephen M. Case, mastermind of America Online’s record-breaking acquisition of Time Warner, has begun to talk favorably of undoing the deal by spinning off AOL, according to two senior company officials who have spoken with him”.

How to provide an RSS feed from your site

Useful guide from Wired.

A summary of Edward Tufte’s devastating critique of PowerPoint

Very good outline by Aaron Swartz. Done as a PowerPoint presentation, too — nice piece of self-referential irony. But it brought me up sharp with the thought: why are our schools teaching this bullshit to our children as a substitute for teaching them real ‘presentation’ skills?

Wireless broadband via barrage balloons. Eh?

A BBC report claims that a Yorkshire company is proposing to offer broadband via a set of balloons tethered 1.5km above the earth’s surface. And it would only require 18 balloons to cover the entire UK. And in case you think this is just hot air, you’re wrong. The balloons are filled with Helium.

How to build a supercomputer for less than $50k

Answer: buy 70 PlayStation 2s and hook them up via a Hewlett-Packard switch. NCSA engineers have just done it, and it works. “It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these things out of the plastic packaging,” said Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the center, who is one of four scientists working part time on the project. According to the Times report, the NCSA scientists “are taking advantage of a standard component of the Sony video-game console that was originally intended to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. The chip is not the PlayStation 2’s MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second.”

But now comes the really interesting bit. Why did they choose the Playstation? Answer: “The supercomputing center scientists said they had chosen the PlayStation 2 because Sony sells a special Linux module that includes a high-speed network connection and a disk drive.

By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to install the Linux system on Microsoft’s Xbox game console.

Using a network of machines is not a new concept in the supercomputing world. Linux, which plays a major role in that world, has been used to assemble high-performance parallel computers built largely out of commodity hardware components. These machines are generally called Beowulf clusters.”

Modern Manners: No. 428

Overheard by a colleague in a Cambridge supermarket the other day. A mother admonishing her young son for swearing said:

“You don’t say ‘Jesus Christ’, you say ‘Cor blimey’ ” !!

Next target for Microsoft’s strategic largesse: the non-profit sector

According to the NYT , Redmond is significantly increasing its donation of software to the nation’s nonprofit organizations, to a level that may approach $1 billion annually in the next three to four years. Why the sudden outbreak of generosity on the company‘s part (remember it’s Gates as an individual who gives to the wholly-excellent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)? Answer: “critics say they believe Microsoft is using a giveaway strategy to undercut the so-called free software movement in the potentially promising nonprofit market”. Well, I never….