Suddenly all talk is of financial and ‘economic’ crisis. Being an economist I am repeatedly being asked for my views on this recent turn of events. I’m not an expert in this area so I’m rather hesitant to give an opinion: my instinctive response is to point out that if I really knew what was [...]
I’ve just put out an updated version of my paper on Search Engines entitled: “Is Google the next Microsoft? Competition, Welfare and Regulation in Internet Searchâ€, the original version of which went up in June. The revised version is available either from SSRN:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1265521
or from here:
http://rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/search_engines.pdf
AbstractInternet search (or [...]
7/10. Katyn, Andrzej Wajda’s latest film, takes as its subject the massacre by the USSR of several thousand Polish officer POWs in April 1940. While the film ends with a very graphic rendition of the killings, for almost all of its two hours the focus is on the fate of those left behind, with most [...]
One of the active Open Knowledge Foundation projects is Open Economics. A substantial part of that effort ends up being data acquisition and ‘cleaning’: getting hold of economic data, parsing it into (computer) usable form and adding it to the Store. (Wouldn’t it be nice if that data was already nicely Continue Reading →
7/10. Extensive in its imagination but losing some of its power by this very fact as the stories start to blur and something of its early intensity is lost as we head into the closing sections. Overall a very dark (and probably correct) vision of the immigrant experience in the US: all prejudice, death and [...]
Interesting, disarmingly honest, but not, ultimately, entirely convincing that ‘self-organized criticality’ is the key to “How Nature Works”.
4/10. Started well but faded badly. Its equation of redundancy programmes in multinationals with the “Final Solution” was simultaneously facile and pretentious.
For large data centres a big industry player estimated costs of £22 / GB / Month = £250k / TB / Year. Majority of this was hardware and energy costs (not costs of human sysadmins). This seems quite a lot. However, Amazon S3 quote for Europe (cheaper for US):
Storage $0.18 per GB-Month of storage [...]7/10. Funny, ‘blasphemous’ and affecting. This coming-of-age story is nicely done and has some very sharp moments. The hero grows on us throughout the film largely thanks to his (for want of a better term) simple decency. (This runs deep. Even his dope dealing has a heavy air of decent all-American/Puritan capitalism about it: he’s [...]
About
Dr. Rufus Pollock is co-Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge.
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