Kindling a Conflagration

There's one of Steven Levy's finer big pieces in Newsweek about Amazon's new Kindle e-book device. It all sounds pretty cool, but for me the real showstopper is the following:

Publishers are resisting the idea of charging less for e-books. "I'm not going along with it," says Penguin's Peter Shanks of Amazon's low price for best sellers. (He seemed startled when I told him that the Alan Greenspan book he publishes is for sale at that price, since he offered no special discount.) Amazon is clearly taking a loss on such books. But Bezos says that he can sustain this scheme indefinitely. "We have a lot of experience in low-margin and high-volume sale—you just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced items] works." Nonetheless the major publishers (all of whom are on the Kindle bandwagon) should loosen up. If you're about to get on a plane, you may buy the new Eric Clapton biography on a whim for $10—certainly for $5!—but if it costs more than $20, you may wind up scanning the magazine racks.

What planet are these people on? Amazon is shipping electrons - well known for being rather cheap (here, take a few trillion for free). When you buy a book, you're buying mashed-up trees that cost something (which in fact cost rather more than you pay). E-books will never take off until publishers are prepared to throw their analogue business models on the fire.

Update: Almost needless to say, Kindle is powered by GNU/Linux.

The Penguin Goes to Redmond

Well, to Redmond Magazine, that is....

Virtual Mouse Brain is Penguin-Powered

One of GNU/Linux's unique properties is its ability to run on dozens of platforms (whereas Windows runs on precisely one, that of Intel's processors). GNU/Linux can power anything from an embedded processor in a tiny industrial device, through mobile phones, PCs, minicomputers, mainframes right up to massively-parallel supercomputers.

One of these, IBM's Blue Gene/L, has recently been used to model part of a mouse brain in near-real-time. Which means that GNU/Linux has just added a platform, albeit as an emulation. (Via Jamais Cascio.)

A Million Penguins: Novel or Not?

Well, it had to happen:

So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour - the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months.

At least they chose a good title.

Touchez Pas au Pingouin

Now here's a daft idea:

if Linux wants to be taken seriously by the business desktop market, it has to first take itself more seriously. What do I mean by that? Basically, kill the penguin and all of the marketing cuteness!

GNU/Linux does not "want" to be taken seriously by the business desktop market: if it is, well and good, but the outcome will have little effect on the course of free software. I've already suggested elsewhere that the transition to an open source desktop is happening, but not in the way you might think.

The whole point about GNU/Linux is that it is different; trying to accommodate the business market by betraying its own nature would be a huge mistake. Don't touch the penguin.