richardcadler's blog

Stowe Boyd notes a hopeful trend:

Calling the author a skeptic of the Long Tail isn't the half of it. Stefan Goldmann sees the current environment as being a serious step down for both artists and their fans/listeners:

Well, it's not like Twitter ever claimed to be open source. But still, this article doesn't make for happy reading if you're a happy Tweetdeck user.

As always the reasons boil down to the same old story: "controlling the user experience."

The thing about this article by historian Robert Darnton is that he's not incorrect about any of these five points, but that they don't go as far as he seems to think they do. Given the quality of the work he creates in his own specialty, one wishes he would push himself to dig deeper.

"The new chips—made by a startup called Tabula—are a cheaper, more powerful competitor to an existing type of reprogrammable chip known as a field programmable gate array (FPGA). FPGAs are sometimes shipped in finished devices when that is cheaper than building a new chip from scratch—usually things that are expensive and sell in low volumes such as CT scanners. More commonly, FPGAs simply provide a way to prototype a design before making a conventional fixed microchip."