Comments on: Some more on those ‘ecological’ public goods

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 07:58:59 +0000

Yes, a bit spooky.

But leave the mortgage products to me!

By: johng

johng — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:21:08 +0000

Do I get the impression of musical chairs here? David (Gruen) is involved in Andrew (Leigh) getting a secondment to Treasury. Nicholas (Gruen) then steps into Andrew’s vacant spot at the AFR. Nothing improper I’m sure, but if you put it in a novel it would be seen as implausible.
Perhaps the circle could be completed by David arranging for the David in the Future Fund to sell innovative mortgage products?

By: Francis Xavier Holden

Francis Xavier Holden — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:02:08 +0000

I’m still having posting problems here

By: Francis Xavier Holden

Francis Xavier Holden — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:01:48 +0000

I’ve always reckoned the low hanging fruit here is that governments should insist on Open Sourcing most commissioned software and most importantly placing discontinued or finished code in escrow for future users to build upon instead of starting anew each time some state wants a car registration system f’rinstance.

I don’t know but I’m willing to bet we have at least 6 different proprietory car rego software systems in Australia all recording essentially the same information and all paid for as if they were unique and built from scratch. The current e-conveyancing debacle wouldn’t exist if this stuff was Open Sourced.

By: Francis Xavier Holden

Francis Xavier Holden — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:01:25 +0000

Following Michael - I think P2P could work for the long tail podcasts but it would require either nerdy savvy ABC downloaders/uploaders or the ABC forcing a peer to peer down/up load client onto people. Both of which are unlikely.

P2P also depends, to a certain extent, on the assumption that up traffic is free or near too. IIRC our old friend Telstra charges, not unlike a male bovine severely injured and bleeding, for up traffic. I’d bet a majority of ABC, and we are really talking RN here, listeners use bigpond.

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:57:50 +0000

Thx for the pointer Michael.

By: Michael S

Michael S — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:43:18 +0000

I mean ‘Virtually eliminate the cost’

By: Michael S

Michael S — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:40:38 +0000

Likewise, if the ABC needed a few extra pennies to meet the bandwidth costs of keeping all its podcasts up on its site as a permanent archive, they should get it (though peer to peer distribution could virtually eliminate all its hosting costs for podcasts!).

That’s probably a bit optimistic.

Peer to peer works great for ‘hot’ new services where there are a lot of people sharing it (Bittorrent is especially good at this).

For a large archive of material that would not be constantly being downloaded The ABC would still have to be acting as the ‘Seed’ to distribute it.

It woiuld dramatically reduce the cost, but probably not ‘virtually eliminate’

Tha said if ‘Phoenix’ ever finds it’s way into distribution other than as content sales I’ll be the first to have my hands on it.

By: Bill Cushing

Bill Cushing — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:54:59 +0000

‘That makes up for the $5 million of revenue foregone’.

But not, I fear, for the $22 million mindlessly lopped off the ABS budget as an ‘efficiency dividend’ (aka ‘across the board cut’)by Tanner’s half-baked razor gang.

By: Francis Xavier Holden

Francis Xavier Holden — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:19:54 +0000

Now if we could only sort Telstra out.