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Commercial vs. Independent Content: Human and Financial Resources |
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Concerning their human and financial resources commercial media and independent content provider are an extremely unequal pair. While the 1998 revenues of the world's leading media conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom and the News Corporation) amounted to US$ 91,144,000,000 provider of independent content usually act on a non-profit basis and to a considerable extent depend on donations and contributions.
Also the human resources they have at their disposal quite differ. Viacom for example employs 112,000 people. Alternative media conversely are mostly run by a small group of activists, most of them volunteers. Moreover the majority of the commercial media giants has a multitude of subsidiaries (Bertelsmann for instance has operations in 53 countries), while independent content provider in some cases do not even have proper office spaces. Asked about their offices number of square meters Frank Guerrero from RTMark comments "We have no square meters at all, because we are only on the web. I guess if you add up all of our servers and computers we would take up about one or two square meters."
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Punch card, 1801
Invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, an engineer and architect in Lyon, France, the punch cards laid the ground for automatic information processing. For the first time information was stored in binary format on perforated cardboard cards. In 1890 Hermann Hollerith used Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punch card technology for processing statistical data retrieved from the US census in 1890, thus speeding up data analysis from eight to three years. His application of Jacquard's invention was also used for programming computers and data processing until electronic data processing was introduced in the 1960's. - As with  writing and calculating, administrative purposes account for the beginning of modern automatic data processing.
Paper tapes are a medium similar to Jacquard's punch cards. In 1857 Sir Charles Wheatstone applied them as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data for the first time. By their means, telegraph messages could be prepared off-line, sent ten times quicker (up to 400 words per minute), and stored. Later similar paper tapes were used for programming computers.
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