Month: January 2009

I don’t want a right to see my MP’s expenses

I don’t agree with my MP about much, but I want to treat him as an adult. I’d like to extend to him approximately the level of trust I extend to my work colleagues and friends. I don’t want to probe and inspect him. I don’t want him to live in a climate of small-minded,… Continue reading I don’t want a right to see my MP’s expenses

A parable of sorts (about the music business, I feel obliged to point out)

The year is 1823. Nathaniel Burrell, sheep farmer, has stumbled upon a method for duplicating sheep. To cut a long story short, after years of essentially random cross-breeding he now can produce new sheep on demand at no cost. A quick twist of the tail of one of his miraculous cross-bred sheep and you’ve got… Continue reading A parable of sorts (about the music business, I feel obliged to point out)

Michael Grade whistling to keep his spirits up

The inner workings of the BBC news operation are a mystery to me (although I did get a peep into the newsroom a while ago which was very exciting) so I find myself wondering about the orgins of this item on yesterday’s Today programme. The premise is that Saturday evening primetime TV in Britain is… Continue reading Michael Grade whistling to keep his spirits up

Measuring the health of the open source economy

Here’s a fascinating thing. A really detailed analysis of a single very important open source project, Open Office.org (OO.o). The author, Michael Meeks, a prominent Open Office hacker, has tabulated and analysed the application’s CVS logs (CVS is the system that stores and organises the code contributed to the project by its many developers). What… Continue reading Measuring the health of the open source economy

Filter it or lose it: free speech on the net depends on good filters.

Geeks and Internet industry types like to say that Andy Burnham, our Minister for Culture, doesn’t get the Internet. They’re wrong. He gets the Internet all right. He just doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like its pretensions to autonomy and ungovernability and in particular he doesn’t like its inability to protect kids from stuff they… Continue reading Filter it or lose it: free speech on the net depends on good filters.