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Comment Threads

• sabik.eta commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
  After some consideration (about twenty years) I have also come to reject the "arts are like software" analogy. [...] If you've ever seen a publisher's slushpile you'd begin to have some idea of the magnitude of the problem; This should apply to all non-software material on the Internet, though, shouldn't it? There should be slush-quality blog posts, incoherent Wikipedia articles, terrible terrible YouTube clips and Flickr photos... For the most part, however, the Internet (or maybe Google) seems to do an okay job of filtering; perhaps not a great one, and sometimes it fails altogether (the already-mentioned spam), but it...
• Milena Popova 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?) then you do run the risk that some of what you say may be misrepresented, or not given the fair coverage you might want it to. If they've seen the error of their ways, then good for them. FWIW, I did go to see them live last year, and they absolutely rocked (and I probably lost a not-insignificant part of...
• Charlie Stross commented on Why Content Is a Public Good
  Andy: Not sure they get it at all! I think this reply clearly indicates that they do get it -- but what they get is not what you want them to get. The give-away is the repeated use of the term "Creative industries". See also: rent-seeking, large commercial organizations, etc....
• 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...
• 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...