January 2005 Archives
Apple just announced their new PowerBooks. No big changes, a modest processor speed bump, more options included in standard configurations (like AirPort and Bluetooth) and a price reduction.
It sounds like Apple is struggling with the next generation, not sure what to choose between dual core G4 or G5, and is buying some time in extending the life of an otherwise good but quite old (by computing standards) product line. It feels like they have bought six months, but that's about it.
I was expecting much more than that, but as Apple is constantly pushing the limits of technology, I bet their technical struggle with putting the G5 in a PowerBook is a seriously challenging one (as evidenced by simply taking a look at a G5, and its radiator, in a PowerMac!).
Boing Boing reports the money extortion practices of Intuit -- which apparently is confident that Quicken 2005 is so good that people will flock in droves to buy it -- is disabling features in Quicken 2002 and threatening banks to prevent data transfer between versions if they don't pay a big license fee to a brand new format.
I find it a compelling example of why it is bad to store your data in a proprietary format. If I were a client of Intuit, I would right now be actively searching for a replacement of all their software to dump them for good.
A while ago, the blogosphere bragged about Kryptonite. I wonder if Intuit's cosmos will have a similar effect on the company disastrous business practices.
For months I've been surprised, and somehow a bit concerned, to seethis obscure entry on printers cartridges come very high in my stats. Actually it's been in the top ten visited pages for nine months, and I hadn't a clue why, until the following comment came in today:
i want to be a gay porn star..what can i do?!?!
please help me!
At first, it seemed strange (although quite funny) that my blog would be the best place to ask for such advice, moreover on this specific entry. Then I took a look at the entry again, only to realize that its first comment was a huge comment spam with tons of interesting keywords such as, you bet: gay, porn and star among others that were not exclusively limited to human sexuality (don't look for it, I've deleted it). Now I think I know why the traffic, but also why lots of visitors keep entering quite stunning search phrases in my search box.
Aside from the fun, there is one lesson here. The ref="nofollow" trick will have a detrimental effect on the PageRank of spammers, however if they succeed in placing their keywords on a site that has a reasonably interesting PR (mine floats between 6 and 7), then this site will come up in Google and alike. And that, apparently, does attract eyeballs. Hence the importance of cleaning up after spammers on your own sites, in addition to keeping their rankings low in search engines.
Boeing's VP of Marketing, Randy Baseler, has a "web journal". Nice, except... it has no permalinks, no RSS feed, no comments -- I can't even find an email address for emailing the guy, who's asking questions such as "So how do you want to fly?" but can't be bothered to listen to the "flying public" -- and the style is, sorry to say, corporate marketing speech where the airlines world is painted in black and white. ("Do you want hubs with that A380?") Currently all posts I see are meant to paint Airbus in a corner just when they released what looks like the replacement of the 747.
Nice try, awful execution. Get a crash course on blogs Randy, or yours isn't going to fly!
[Update July 18, 2005] Since my original post, Randy Baseler's Journal has seen the addition of RSS and Atom feeds, as well as comments. However the comments are not treated as they should be. Firstly they are apparently still moderated a priori -- the real guys who don't fear the public conversation do it a posteriori ;-) (to be fair, it's their decision, but one can compare the degree of openness in this exercise). Secondly they are relegated to the right-hand side navigation box, so you can't really get a grasp of the conversation that's going on since they are completely out of the context of a post. To fix this, the comments should be listed below the post where they were made (that is a fairly common and expected design on blogs). Still no TrackBacks, but in the past six months I've been convinced that those are too much a burden on bloggers because of spammers and the lack of efficient TrackBack-spam filtering in most blogging tools. It also seems to me that the writing is getting slightly more engaged, though it still sometimes reads like corporate sanitized communication.
Six Apart just released a bug fix to Movable Type, to plug a quite serious "vulnerability in the mail sending packages for all Movable Type versions which allows malicious users to send email through the application to any number of arbitrary users" (read: that can be used by spammers to send e-mail spam from an MT installation.)
An exploit was reported yesterday on the Six Apart Professional Network and 6A got a patch out overnight! Kudos to them.
Since this vulnerability has been present in all versions since 1.0, all MT users are strongly encouraged to either upgrade to version 3.15 or install a plugin that fixes it (see the announcement and instructions.)
The software patents' lobby is playing dirty again, but it's latest coup has failed, again. Slashdot hints that the EU patent directive has been postponed today, and here too we have to thank Poland for preventing this stupid piece to pass at a Council of Agriculture and Fisheries without discussion nor any democratic support of the parliament. Poland was able to get a one week delay, but I hope that this cat and mouse game stops for good and this directive gets back in front of the parliament which, if the representatives stick to their previous stance, will get rid of it.
My intuition is that there is a tremendous economical opportunity in NOT getting into software patents in Europe. While the USPTO will play the game of the big players to burry all competition, we would have a fantastic chance to (re)build a rich and level software business. It's not a surprise that professional open source players (like MySQL AB in Sweden) are clearly against SW patents.
LAMP server stack! LOFT Desktop stack?:
There's Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl as the server stack. (If you're not running that, what are you running? Get with the program!).Is there Linux, Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird as the desktop stack? Hopefully. Maybe we need an instant messaging client that begins with the letter "Y" and then it becomes the LOFTY desktop stack.
You heard this hear first just in case Linspire wants to take credit for the "L" in LOFT.
Me I've been MOST for some time, as in Mac OS X + Office (the MS one, by corporate demand) + Safari + Thunderbird, but as I found Thunderbird 1.0 not up to par with Apple Mail, I'm now MOSM for personal use and MOSE (E for Entourage, which IMHO is still better on some aspects than Apple Mail) for corporate use. I gave a try to Open Office, but it's not very appealing on Mac OS X and the latest news on a native UI for Oo don't make me optimistic about that one. I guess Apple will get some ground with Pages and Keynote.
On the server side, I'm LAMP for corporate use and FAMP for this site, F as in FreeBSD, yet another great server OS (also better than Linux for web servers IMHO, and the core base of Mac OS X). I guess I have to do things slightly differently than most folks ;-).
I don't need to see who's written an article on blogs at The Register to recognize Orlowski's personal style: piling up anything, including sheer stupidities, provided they support his anti-blog stance. The latest installment, aimed at dissing the move of Google and consorts to introduce the rel="nofollow" link attribute is typical.
Comment spam has increased exponentially since last November. (We'll explain why later this week). Like email spam, it's a classic tragedy of the commons. But other options are available, which have more predictable conseqeunces (sic). One such is verifying the user via a "Captcha", a challenge-response system which presents the user with a graphic of a distorted word or sequence of letters, which a human can interpret but a bot generally cannot.
Not a word on the usability issues that Captchas introduce, nor on the fact that spammers have found efficient ways to circumvent them easily.
He then follows by copying/pasting a few, carefully selected comments on this forum thread of people who voice negative concerns about the nofollow mechanism. Last time I checked, there were more positive comments than negative ones there, but let's substanciate this a bit rather than counting points selectively as Orlowski does.
"This will do very little to cull comment spam," notes ThreadWatch's Nick W. "Spammers will just redouble their efforts to hit blogs without the plugin... It could skew the web."
Well, first of all Google is not the web. And I think the spammers skewed Google's view of the web quite a bit, but more on that later.
"Am I the only one to think that a search engine actively trying to encourage people to hide their content from it, isn't going to flaw their main aims?" observes one member of the Search Engine Watch Forum."If such a tag were used widespread against comments and trackbacks, then wouldn't this end up kneecaping blogs, by killing their intricate networks of interlinks?" he adds.
Stupid. None of the search engines are trying to do that. Besides, the aptly named robots exclusion protocol is one example of a concerted way to allow content publishers to tell search engines what to index or not. And this is the point: control to the sites owners. Now I can decide, at a link level, what I value. Me, not Google, not Orlowski, not any perfect stranger who decides to leave a link or a TrackBack here. It's always been like this with the robots exclusion protocol, now it's the same thing, just more fine grained. And who said this method could not be used in ways that allow legitimate links to be valued, like blogrolls? This method perfectly allows to decide, for example, that only unmoderated comments get the nofollow ban, while others are treated normally.
But the real irony of this is that this is the same Orlowski who keeps complaining that blogs screwed Google results because Google values them, their comments, and their TrackBacks too much. He's also the same who constantly complains that the blogosphere runs incestuously, linking to itself all the time. What this nofollow attribute may cause, if widely applied to cut off all comments and TBs from indexes, is simply to shift those indexes to content originally produced by the blogs authors, and the links they publish within their posts. The result of this apocalypse? A Google index that is closer to Orlowski's wet dream: the good old index that existed before the blogs. But it won't be his first contradiction...
Other forum members renew the call for blogs themselves to be removed from the main index and placed in a separate part of Google, like Usenet forms Google Groups. The idea was first floated by a reader more than two years ago, and is very a popular solution amongst regular Google users. That would ensure the main content of Google consisted of material edited by humans, rather than the wasteland of abandoned sites wide open to spammers, that spammers naturally abuse.
Words fail me. Is it my English or some people think that blogs are not edited by humans? Plus, how shortsighted is that? Blogs are web sites. I wonder how long it will take for people to realize that. Who's going to dictate what's a blog and what's not? Would you flag Zeldman.com as a blog because it looks like a web journal (he's been crafting his web site by hand for a tad longer than blogs and Orlowski hit the web)? What would you say about Stopdesign (a perfect integration of a blog as part of a professional designer's site)? Or Boxes and Arrows (which uses a blog software as a content management system)? Or The Register itself with its URLs that look suspiciously like WordPress ones? Oh, sorry about that last one, it's one that should be relegated only to Google News, now that someone has decided that there is a "main content" and that the rest of us must be ghettoized somewhere else. This is the same guy who complains that Google helps to balkanize the web. hold on, didn't he fancied that a while ago? Oh irony, contradictions...
What can we say about this article? Hasty copy/paste of random and/or erroneous comments picked on forums and blogs to support a long standing personal hate of the writer against the subject at hand, assembled without any fact nor substance, offering no dissenting point of view and published as quickly as possible on a web journal. The only logical conclusion, and that's probably the best kept secret of The Register, is that Orlowski is not a journalist, he's a typical blogger!
Too bad they don't have comments and TrackBacks on El Reg, that's so last century mass media...
Hinted to a few days ago, it's now official: Google has done something to prevent comment spam and they're being followed by MSN Search, Yahoo!, Six Apart and more than ten blog software editors. At last some real response to this plague!
How does this works? You just have to add an attribute rel="nofollow" to untrusted links, like this:
Visit my <a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount pharmaceuticals</a> site.
With this attribute, search engines will not value this link and it will have no influence whatsoever on its ranking, effectively removing all incentive for spammers to leave links on your site.
For Movable Type, you can download the 'nofollow' plugin to implement this automatically in your MT blog. TypePad will be updated tomorrow followed by LiveJournal (no ETA though).
A few thoughts:
- this will have an interesting side effect on the ranking of blogs in Google and alike. Those blogs that have gained PageRank only via links into comments will loose it. I bet some people will like it this way, others won't, but some of the criticism that blogs are over ranked in search engines will be void
- this method is not just for blogs, consider it a new thing in your webmaster arsenal that can be applied anywhere it makes sense (web sites, wikis, forums, guestboards, whatever...)
- this will be effective only when a vast majority of sites will have applied this method. OTHO big blogs farms such as LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger and MSN Spaces will roll it out asap and this will have a quick impact
- watch for people seeking for SE rank to start asking for "valid links" on your blog!
- I don't find it clear* from the post on Google Blog if Google does not follow the link or simply drops any PageRank value in the journey. If the latter, the semantic of this tag is misleading as it is the contrary of the
META nofollowrule that can be applied to a page and effectively prevents SE to follow all links on the page
(*) From Google:
when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results
This just tells us that no PageRank is transferred then, but we don't know if Google follows the link or not.
Q: Should I put rel="nofollow" on the link to my comments page?
A: Probably not, because lots of interesting discussion can happen there.
This tends to suggest that Google would not follow a link with rel="nofollow", which would be the correct behavior, frankly. Google should update their post to clarify this point.
MacWorld UK and CNet are both reporting that European Mac fans are upset by the price of the Mac mini on this side of the Atlantic. MacWorld does a better job than CNet in noting that the UK price does include a 17.5% VAT while the $499 US price does not, so contrary of what CNet pretends, the UK price equivalent would not be £268 but £313, i.e. £26 less than the actual price tag of £339. In the Euroland, the price is 499€ VAT included, which in France with its 19.6% VAT translates into 417€ without VAT, which is $545 at today's rate of $1.3065 for 1€. So, for me, the Mac mini is overpriced by Apple by about 9.2%.
Compared to the previous study of Apple European prices I did one year ago, the cushion that Apple adds to protect itself against the currency exchange risks is significantly lower for the hardware than it used to be. However, it's worth noticing that the markup is now higher for software, moving up from 6% to 9%. Looking at the quite wide currency exchange variations, I think those guys are fighting a lost battle. Apple is unlikely to get below 9% to cover for this risk, especially with a product which margin, I reckon, must be ridiculous.
Keep in mind an important cultural difference in price tags between the US and Europe. In the US, where taxes are set by states, price tags never include taxes. In Europe, where VAT is actually a tax mandated by the EU, price tags of all products that are offered to individuals must include VAT -- i.e. advertising a price without VAT to individual consumers is illegal in Europe, while it is the norm in the US. Comparing price tags without adjusting for VAT is stupid, companies are not responsible for the local taxes imposed by states and countries.
I have been looking forward to that for quite some time. It seems that, at last, Google is about to provide a quick fix to reduce link spam, which will eventually (but not for sure and certainly not overnight) remove the incentive from blog comment spamming. Evidence at Simon Willison's, Dave Winer's and Winer's again. Simon cracks Winer's teasers:
Google are soon to announce that they won't be calculating PageRank for links with a rel="nofollow" attribute. Finally, an official way of fighting the economics of comment spam by denying PageRank on user-submitted link content. Sam Ruby points to Mark Pilgrim's prediction that spammers won't care - they'll spam anyway, on the offchance that they hit somewhere undefended. I'm optimistic - if the major weblog (and wiki) vendors get behind this one it could help stem the tide.
Peter Van Dijck thinks that Google will simply not follow links tagged this way. I agree with him that this is semantically more correct, and I'd rather to see this behavior.
Let's hope that Yahoo! follows suit.
On the other hand, coincidentally, I ran today on worrying reports of long-standing bugs in Google's PageRank that allow spammers to highjack sites PR with a simple redirect. Not pretty. Jeremy Zawodny may be right when saying that PageRank is broken.
This is a detail of the emblem -- exactly its blazon (blason) or heraldry -- of the city of Paris that ornates the main door of the city hall. It embodies the city's motto: fluctuat nec mergitur, which means "fluctuates but does not sink".
The whole emblem is pictured on the right and includes a crown on the top, an oak branch on the left and a laurel branch on the right. I believe the ship has always been part of the many variations of the emblem over the centuries, which you can find all over the city (I think the city hall itself sports half a dozen different ones.) 
Paris has seen a strong commercial activity on the river la Seine since Tiberus, and the first sign of use of the common merchant ship as an emblem dates back to 1210. In the 13th century, by signing all sorts of public and private acts, the merchants transmitted their emblem to the city. The following drawing dates back to 1412 -- except for the three decorations below it which have been added in 1900 (Légion d'honneur, middle), 1919 (la Croix de guerre, right) and 1945 (la Croix de la Libération, left) -- and it is believed to have the most accurate version of what was the original ship of Paris. 
Now if you take a look at this site's icon (if your browser supports those), you'll find that it is a styled version of this ship. More precisely, it is a crop of the official logo of the city council.
[Source : les armoiries de la ville]
Sweet response from a Swedish site, The Pirate Bay (self-proclaimed "The world's largest BitTorrent tracker"), to Dreamworks' lawyer threatening them with the DMCA:
As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here. For your information, no Swedish law is being violated.Please be assured that any further contact with us, regardless of medium,
will result in
a) a suit being filed for harassment
b) a formal complaint lodged with the bar of your legal counsel, for
sending frivolous legal threats.It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are fucking morons, and
that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
I can already feel the love for P2P growing at DreamWorks SKG ;-).
Harry Rider on OsOpinion tries to match Apple's Mac mini with a comparable PC and finds out that the Mac mini price is significantly less than a DIY PC. The Mac mini runs at $499 while a DIY PC will cost you $505 for the hardware alone and $1,022 for hardware plus software.
Regardless, to appease those that only look at hardware, I ran the figures both ways. The Apple hardware comes out less in both scenarios. The price comparison reiterates that Apple doesn't charge the supposed 'premium' that is often equated with their systems. Can we finally do away with the fallacy that implies that Apple charges a premium for their computers?
A mini overview (emphasis mine):
Apple’s Challenge. It’s clear that Apple used the design and engineering skills that have crammed lots of computer power into the iMac G5, Apple’s laptops, and the iPod to make the Mac mini a solid block of a system. But to hear Apple representatives tell it, the company’s real goal was not just to make a tiny Mac, or a low-cost Mac. It was, to paraphrase one Apple executive, to solve the problem of how to make a $499 computer without it being a piece of junk.
Good point.
I still can't stop thinking about ways to turn the Mac mini into a DVR. May be some third party will soon come out with an add-on to do just that, until Apple decides it's time to release the best media center ever. They will do it.
Connect. Plug. Play.
Mac mini works with both Mac and PC-compatible peripherals, so it’s easy to upgrade from an older Mac or PC system. Simply connect your USB mouse and keyboard, then hook up your DVI or VGA display (adapter included).
I can already see two funny support issues coming:
-- "I connected my PC keyboard but I can't find this key with an apple on it"
-- "No, you cannot place your 23' monitor on top of the Mac mini. Yes, we know it's tempting, but no."
By the way, thanks to the weak dollar, the Mac mini is priced at 499€ here, 19.6% VAT included. This represents about 15% markup on currency exchange, which is less than Apple's traditional policy on hardware, though the software is now much more expensive (at 79€ for iWork, it's almost three times the usual markup on currency exchange).
Brent Simmons, à propos of FeedBurner's report on RSS Market Share ranking NetNewsWire at the second place with 17% of all the agregators sniffed by FeedBurner:
I'm stunned by this. I know that NetNewsWire is popular (I see the sales figures, after all) -- but for a *Mac* app to rank so high here is just plain wild. It says an awful lot about Mac users.
Indeed.
It's quite a challenge to find out how many blogs and bloggers are out there. Let's see... (figures fresh from today when available)
- Technorati: 5,790,155 weblogs watched
- BSentinel: 502,679 weblogs counted (come on Stéphane, you can do better than that! ;-) )
- NITLE Blog Census: 2,108,226 visited sites we think are weblogs
- PEW Internet & American Life Project: (report) 8 million American adults say they have created blogs
- LiveJournal stats: Total accounts: 5,703,540... active in some way: 2,460,062
- Skyblog (France): 1,358,564 Skyblogs
- The Blog Herald: Blog numbers are closer to 34.5 million wordwide
Compare this to the January 2005 Netcraft Web Survey: 58,194,836 sites and 26,405,729 active sites. (Before you mention it, according to their methodology, Netcraft would see all domains such as LiveJournal.com and TypePad's blogs.com as one site, because of their focus on domain names and web servers.)
I know it's difficult to draw the line between a blog and a personal site, it's even more difficult to split active vs. inactive blogs (I contend that a blog which hasn't been updated in a while is inactive, unless you forget about its visitors activity and the value of archived content). I'm doubtful about most americano-centric tools which are not following very well what's out of the Anglo-Saxon blogosphere. I find Technorati's figures dubious -- e.g. Zeldman would probably not define his site as a blog, Adaptive Path has a site that uses MT as a CMS and my corporate Capgemini site is certainly not a blog, but those three are in Technorati's index (how does Technorati count blogs, what is their methodology? Same questions for all other indexes.) May be the Blog Herald is closer to the truth, however if you match their figures with the (unsubstantiated) figure of 70 million web sites that I keep seeing or hearing here and there, that would mean that half the sites are blogs. It doesn't make sense.
Do you know of other sources to refine those figures?
Netcraft thinks that infrastructure is a driver in the Six Apart-LiveJournal Deal:
So how does Six Apart benefit? LiveJournal has 93,000 paid accounts, which are priced at $25 a year - around $2 a month, or about $190K in monthly revenue. That number is more impressive when infrastructure costs are included. LJ's revenue stream is focused in 3.8 percent of its active accounts (which number 2.44 million, rather than the oft-quoted 5.6 million figure, which includes inactive accounts). Those paid accounts essentially subsidize the other 96 percent of users - thus the importance of LiveJournal's experience in scaling its architecture, which is based on Perl, as are TypePad and Movable Type.A recent overview of LiveJournal's backend said it was serving 50 million pageviews a day from "100+" Linux servers running Apache. Even using the low-end figure of 860,000 weblogs updated weekly, that suggests thousands of active accounts per server.
Most hosting services allocate a set amount of disk storage space per account - TypePad, for example, offers 50MB of space with its $4.95 a month account. LiveJournal doesn't state bandwidth or storage minimums beyond a limit of 15 photos per account. That makes it possible to house a much larger number of accounts on each server than traditional hosting companies. In that environment, even a modest number of "free will" upgrades from free to paid LJ accounts will boost the bottom line.
Interesting view. I think the know-how of LJ will benefit Six Apart (the contrary with TypePad benefiting somehow to LJ would not surprise me, that would be a balanced win-win deal indeed). I just doubt it's the only driver, since the infrastructure costs of a hundred servers may not be the first budget line of the new company. It's key to have a highly efficient infrastructure though, especially when you support 96% of 2.5 million accounts for free!
"Then did St. Steve raise on high the Holy G5 of Cupertino, saying, 'Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine Dell enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the renderings of lambs and toads and tree sloths and fruit bats and orangutans and lickable icons.... Now did the Lord say, 'Thou in 12 months, thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the GHz and the number of the GHz shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two-point-five, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the GHz, be reached, then thine will be great and powerful in my sight, however if thou shall have more than one button on thou mouse, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff thine's life.'"
Apple meets Wired News' 8th annual Vaporware Awards for not shipping G5 Chips at 3 GHz within a year, as promised by Steve Jobs 18 months ago. I found the above quote (inspired, as I guess, from the Saint Grenade passage from the Monty Pythons) too hilarious to not blog it.
And connoisseurs of this award will appreciate this other quote: ""If Microsoft keeps on pushing back the dates for Longhorn and removing features from it, they might as well just promise to bundle Duke Nukem Forever with the OS."
Bill Gates improves the already top notch reputation of reliability of Microsoft's products during a keynote speech at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show:
[...] while promoting what he calls the "digital lifestyle," Gates showed how vulnerable all consumers even the world's richest man are to hardware and software bugs.During a demonstration of digital photography with a soon-to-be-released Nikon camera, a Windows Media Center PC froze and wouldn't respond to Gates' pushing of the remote control.
Later in the 90-minute presentation, a product manager demonstrated the ostensible user-friendliness of a video game expected to hit retail stores in April, Forza Motor Sport. But instead of configuring a custom-designed race car, the computer monitor displayed the dreaded "blue screen of death" and warned, "out of system memory."
The errors which came during what's usually an ode to Microsoft's dominance of the software industry and its increasing control of consumer electronics prompted the celebrity host, NBC comedian Conan O'Brien, to quip, "Who's in charge of Microsoft, anyway?"
Gates, who was sitting next to O'Brien on a set staged to look like NBC's Late Night set, smiled dryly and continued with his discussion.
Give Bill a seat in your den and, you too, enjoy the blue screen of death on your TV.
Ah, ah!
Bill Gates wants a seat in your den. And he doesn't like commoners (emphasis' mine):
Q: In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, "We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights." What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed? A: No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.
Bill Gates is a total (intellectual) disappointment for Larry Lessig:
If I had the time, and the money, I'd do the deep analysis that it would take to explain to myself why it is I constantly hope to be surprised by Mr. Gates. Yet I never am. Here's BoingBoing reporting the red-baiting of Mr. Gates.It's one thing to read this sort of thing from a studio exec, or head of a record label -- surrounded as they are by the sort that surround them. But the people I've met at Microsoft are miles beyond this sort of silliness. Does Mr. Gates not even talk to them?
So, as Boing-Boing puts it, for Bill Gates: Free Culture advocates = Commies.
Enjoy some more Creative Commies propaganda, and for the irony, an entry I posted two years ago on Eldred and Commons:
When I wrote about Creative Commons I pointed to this idea that we miss the equivalent of environmentalism for encompassing the concepts of commons and public domain. For strictly etymologic concerns I had one word in mind... communism. Too bad the word has such a heavy history, we need to be more creative.
As Adam reminds me, 2005 is the Year of the Cock.
Of course, culturally, this may have some interesting results. Speaking of which, do you know why the rooster is the best French mascot?
Happy New Year my friends!
