dsandler.org/wp

Finally, Slashdot has
the Be settlement story. And, most excellently,
the accepted story was submitted by ewhac (Leo Schwab, another has-Been).

S₁ P₃ A₁ N₁ K₅ E₁ D₂

Given this board configuration:

Erin dropped a single well-placed tile for a whopping 46 points:

2 × ( A₁ +
X₁₀ )
+
2 ×
( A₁ +
X₁₀ +
E₁ )
=
Ow.

Ex-Be employee/community blog coverage of settlement links: mine, Scot Hacker, Adam
Haberlach, Frank Boosman
(ex-Be VP). (more links as I find them)

Big news for a Friday night: Microsoft
settles with Be for $23.25 million (AP newswire). Microsoft issued
a press
release. OSNews has the story
too, ending on a melodramatic note: “And that folks, is the
end of the legendary Be, Inc.” Other details of the settlement, besides the lack of admission
of wrongdoing by Microsoft (fully expected), are confidential. By all
accounts, this is a lowball figure, but Be’s attorneys must have been
keen to take anything at all. I still have a few shares from my time at Be, so we’ll have to see how
much of the settlement makes its way to shareholders.

Just got my first “Networks, Economics, and Culture” list
mailing, an essay from Clay Shirky, and
it’s a hum-dinger for someone who watches the online content space
(specifically comics) as I do.

In Fame vs Fortune:
Micropayments and Free Content, Shirky decries micropayment systems:

Like the salami slicing exploit in computer
crime, micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money
can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the
overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something
significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice,
because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs
create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by
lowering the dollar cost of goods.

He goes on to conclude that
empowering creators to distribute directly to consumers “does not
make them publishers;” rather, it merely offers the (admittedly
quite revolutionary) ability for creators to reach a large audience for
free. (Now you understand the “vs” in the essay’s title.)

It’s a pretty solid essay, but I have a gripe with one of the premises:

Analog publishing generates per-unit costs — each book or magazine requires a
certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs.
Digital publishing doesn’t. Once you have a computer and internet access, you
can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand,
without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front
costs by the number of readers means that content gets cheaper as it gets more
popular, the opposite of analog regimes.

Almost, but not entirely, true. Just ask the proprietors of a highly-popular
website (e.g. the Penny-Arcade guys, or Tom Tomorrow, or anyone who’s
ever
been linked from slashdot) about that first
Over Allotted Bandwidth notice. If you’re footing your own hosting costs (as
many of these sites are), that hosting bill will kill you. The cost in
providing free content is not limited to the fixed expense of the creator’s
time and effort — the expense of providing the content varies with the
audience size, and is decidedly nonzero.

On the topic of Wesley Clark (Salon had a front-page
piece on him today), Kos
(sensible lefties, are you reading this yet?) had this to say a
few days ago: It’s Already
Too Late For Clark.

Blue Wizard
Is About To Die: “Prose, Poems, and Emoto-Versatronic
Expressionist Pieces About Video Games (1980-2003).”