Milena Popova

Website: elmyra.livejournal.com

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Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@alys: You know what? I hadn't even heard of the Metallica apology. Clearly it wasn't as public as their previous outpourings on the subject. If you're a public figure (which they have been for - what - 30 years now?)...
Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@Braden: Thanks for pointing me at that, I hadn't seen it before....
Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@dfjdejulio: Both good points - the market does have a way to translate information about people's preferences into financial incentives. However, the one thing I have an issue with is your use of the word "fair" in relation to markets....
Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@heteromeles: Lots of interesting thoughts there. The topic of science funding is very dear to my heart as my partner is a nuclear physicist (nuclear physics funding in the UK at the moment is less than Winter Olympics funding, which...
Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@Donald: I'm incredibly flattered. Do you mind dropping me an email to talk details please? elmyra at rockus dot at. :-)...
Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@Chris M: An insidious effect of IP piracy is the change in the perceived value of said content. Rather than piracy being a minor infraction, zero pricing becomes the expectation. That's precisely what I mean when I say our relationship...
Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@Nestor: Well, it's not so much wishful thinking to be honest. I quite like, say, Lost and would like people to still be able to make shows like it in the future. The big question is whether the funding/profit incentives...
Commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
@ingulf: Just watched the Flattr video and I (personally) love it. Thanks for pointing me at it. It'll be interesting to see it develop....
Posted Why Content Is a Public Good to Charlie's Diary
Hi there! I'm Mili. I released a little thought of mine into the wild that is my LiveJournal the other night, and Charlie found it and liked it and very kindly invited me to repost it here. This post has...
Posted Adventures with formatting to Charlie's Diary Test Bed
Right. Let's try from formatting. Can I do HTML markup or do I need to use the buttons here? Also, how do I do paragraphs? Rival: (Wikipedia seems to call this "rivalrous", but when I were a young economist lass we used to call it rival so I'll stick with that.) A good is rival if my consumption of it diminishes the amount of the good that you can consume. Say we had 10 apples, and I ate one. There would now be 9 apples left which you could eat. If we had one apple and I ate all of...
Posted Eeep? to Charlie's Diary Test Bed
Okay. This should be the sandbox, and this is a test, and OMG Movable Type! ;-) *runs & hides*...

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sabik.eta commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
In various forms, this consensus has been around for about 25 years now, with items migrating from list "B" into list "A" as time goes on. It's possible, of course, that this trend will now stop; but it would be rather surprising. Do you have any reason to believe so? I'm unaware of any such trend. Open source has always been good at providing shared solutions for software engineers (or the companies that employ them) to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Linux, Apache, GCC and so on allow companies to share the cost of developing the spadework bits and concentrate on...
zopemaven commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
"Compared to these, is the desktop really fundamentally more difficult?" The short answer is no, it isn't. The longer version is that the barriers are in this case non-technical again, but rather than being external, they are largely cultural barriers within the FOSS community. Specifically, the notion that good design of user experiences strongly benefits from the 'benevolent dictator' model, in much the same way as good design in other aspects of software does (such as APIs), and that user experience considerations should actually trump technical ones, is very hard for the FOSS community to accept. And yet, we are...
zopemaven commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
"The elephant in the room is of course that content is excludable as hell before it's released. No one's getting at that unpublished novel in Charlie's desk until he releases it." True. You might find the 'Street Performer Protocol' of some interest as an interesting solution that treats this as a feature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system Kickstarter is one of several current attempts at implementing SPP in some form: http://www.kickstarter.com/...
sabik.eta commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
If it takes five years to (arguably) catch up to Windows then OS X is over the horizon and goodbye. Not really. A lot of that was a question of building up momentum and putting together the technical and institutional infrastructure. All that remains now is to sustain the momentum and to keep on fixing the myriad tiny details that make up usability, like going through all the programs that use the system tray and making them all consistent (to give a current example). The comparison with Windows usability is not so much a goal to achieve as a rough...
zopemaven commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
Note that it took Ubuntu five years to catch up with where Windows is now, not where it was five years ago, and the project is definitely not slowing down or resting on it's laurels. The next (10.04) release due in a few days will see another dramatic improvement....

Responses to Comments from Milena Popova

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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