Year 2009
Defend the Open 'Net
Oracle Buys Sun. Sigh.
This is probably one of the worst conclusions to a saga that lasted for several years and was followed closely by so many people; yes, it’s true that Sun has been slowly, but steadily, disappearing from the radar as a major player in this industry, but it has also continued to innovate all the while […]
Nokia is The Past. Welcome to the Future.
I have written about Nokia and the need for the company to reinvent itself several times in the past. When the iPhone was announced in early 2007, I was lukewarm and slightly frustrated that the Mac, Apple’s former, at times sole and by far most important strategic product was complemented by a formidable ‘opponent’. I […]
Roommating.
Conceptual clutter of the Bad Kind.
If there’s anything like Good Clutter. Have you ever used Ubiquity for Firefox? It’s quite nice, yet somewhat inaccessible for most people. The idea is that with an easy key combination on your keyboard you can bring up a text field that can understand a large number of commands and bring you information related to […]
One in Ten Thousand.
We love Radiohead, but we're not sure if the band realizes they're superstars, and the normal rules don't apply to them anymore. The band's "pay what you want" idea for the In Rainbows album may have been successful, but for every one Radiohead there's ten thousand would-be rock stars selling CDs out of the trunks of their car (or MP3s on some little-visited web site) and starving.So, one Radiohead per ten thousand would-be rock stars. Apparently the authors ignore that this is exactly the status quo that the RIAA nurtured in decades past, exactly what the internet, mp3, file sharing and indeed Radiohead's testimony help change: total control over music promotion, repertoire selection, bias in favour of genres/artists by a few multinational corporations aimed at nothing more than profit maximisation. Put another way: A small minority of artists getting all the exposure [and some of them going bankrupt despite the megacorps' multi-million contracts], while millions more being unable to promote their music, make money, live off it. Those same approaches that have led to a just few hundred artists getting millions and the rest starving. If anything, testifying against the RIAA, especially if you've attained superstar status, goes against that. Lastly, Radiohead --- whether you like or dislike their music --- have proven their artistic integrity as well as their popularity time and again, most certainly without RIAAs help. There's no doubt that the interests of musicians around the world should be protected; RIAA never did that and most probably never will.
That's not how Western democracies work
Dealing with illegal file-sharing is a job for the police. It is their job to enforce the law. Now we have given private corporations the legal right to go after our civilians. That's not how Western democracies work.[...] In a study, 80% of people thought we shouldn't go after file-sharers. But ask them how they feel about taking money out of the pockets of musicians, authors or artists and that number falls by a significant amount. Ultimately we have to change peoples perception on file-sharing.Indeed we do. But most importantly we have to change executives' in those media multinationals perception on culture, art, freedom of communication and privacy as well as protect our liberties from unbounded profit and greed. If file sharing did anything, besides rendering the status quo obsolete, it was to bring to the spotlight on how slanted and unfair the media industry is: favouring less than 1% of the artists globally, fixing prices to maximise profit, compromising on our very own cultural foundations through the systematic, condescending promotion of junk while at the same time making thousands of executives rich for no reason whatsoever. There's no doubt that stealing is bad, although I'm not so sure that not-for-profit sharing of digital copies is. What I am sure about is that what the industry is accustomed to doing --- and keeps trying to achieve, now through the institutions --- is worse.
Το Στοίχημα της Πληροφορίας.
Σύμφωνα με εκτιμήσεις, μέσα στο 2009 θα ‘παραχθούν’ 4-5 exabytes — δηλαδή τέσσερα με πέντε εκατομμύρια terabytes — νεας, μοναδικής πληροφορίας παγκοσμίως από ιδιώτες και επιχειρήσεις, εξαιρώντας αυτή που παράγεται σε μεγάλα επιστημονικά κέντρα στα πλαίσια ερευνητικών προγραμμάτων (βλ. CERN) ή κυβερνήσεων. Στην εποχή των πολλαπλών διαθέσιμων Terabytes για οικιακή χρήση στην Ευρώπη, τις ΗΠΑ […]