PlasticBoy

An interview with Jim Griffin on the Future of Music

Actuarial economics will replace actual control, but that is difficult if not impossible to achieve without some degree of compulsion. Like automobile insurance or health insurance or similar actuarial concepts, they work best when spread across as wide a group as possible and fail when they tend to adverse, voluntary groups. I favor imposing involuntary fees across network users such that the fees become so low they are hardly worth complaining about. Worldwide, the average per capita spending on music is well under a dollar per month, likely under a quarter.

Nice in-depth review of the state of desktop Linux.

Nat Friedman of Ximian gave the most compelling and enlightening perspective on the desktop. What Nat failed to tell the audience still remains untold. Ximian could easily have every bell and whistle to surpass both the Apple Mac OS X desktop and Microsft XP. The only reason they don’t own the desktop space relates to underfunding. That began with their original Venture Capitalists and extends to Novell. If Novell gives these guys the resources they need, Linux will ramp up faster that Mac OS X did.

Yesterday’s Fresh Air interview with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog is hilarious. It’s even funnier if you’ve heard the interview with Bill O’Reilly.

A worthy cause if ever there was one: Put the Saruman scene back into the Return of the King Petition.

FoxTrot has a strip today that only the Linux users are likely to get. Or does OS X have kernel panics?

Bruce Perens is creating a desktop-oriented linux distro. He claims to have millions of dollars in corporate backing.

Sorry about the lack of posts, I’ve been having some net connection troubles.

Wired on Paul Graham’s proposal to make spam filters fight back by spidering URLs in suspected spams, effectively creating a denial-of-service attack against spammers’ websites.

Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire Leading Enterprise Linux Technology Company SUSE LINUX.