Yet again, I’m late to the ball. It seems iStockphoto.com has been building a royalty-free stock image (and sound and code and illustration…) bank. Normally that wouldn’t be news. Normally, I’d be lumping them in with all the rest of the bastards who prey on poor, unaware photographers, paying a ludicrously low fee to license (or, worse, buy) their photographs and then sell them over and over and over without cutting the creator in on the cabbage.
But I’m rambling. Royalty-free stock takes advantage of the photographer. It’s an old story.
iStockphoto.com breaks that standard. They don’t pay you for uploading your stuff, but they will pay you when someone downloads it. The system is totally micropaments in action: 25 cents per download. The originator gets a nickel. You’re not going to get rich doing this, but that’s not the point. The designer in me sees a catalog of images available immediately for practically no money — a considerable improvement over the $5 to $30 I’d pay a regular stock house. Pay a quarter, d-load the image, use it.
The downside of it is that this is a community fed system, so there’s not much fltering for quality. Some of the stuff is kinda cheesy. But there’s a lot of nice images in there, you just gotta sift through some dreck to find ‘em.
Bruce Sterling spoke at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting last night. Golly but he’s a formiddable intellect. He just rambled about what he’s been up to lately. The connectons he makes across all these disparate fields are just amazing.
He’s blogging a collection of bizarre stuff at infinitematrix.net. It’s a pretty heavy duty collection of out there stuff.
And the real reason that I worship him? He’s the father of the Viridian Design movement. Futuristic _and_ environmentally aware… doesn’t it just make sense that we won’t _have_ a future if we remake the earth as a toxic waste dump?
I find myself watching Kieran like some obsessed researcher. “Why’s he playing like that? What’s he thinking? What’s going on inside that brain of his when the expressions roll across his face one after another?” I’ve forgotten how mobile a face can be.
Just spent the last coupla hours backing up the data I want to save from my BeOS partition on the Intel box. It’s a damn shame things didn’t work out for Be ’cause that OS just totally _rocks_. Fast, slick, easy to use. Throws media around like nobody’s business. Backing up/archiving the mail was just a matter of putting the “mail” folder in a zip file. See, instead of being hidden away (read: trapped) in a mail client database, your emails are individual text files in BeOS. Just zip ‘em up and carry ‘em away. Readable on any system.
It was (still is, really) a beautiful OS and now it’s been relegated to the ‘puting backwater to moulder with the Amiga and the Ataris.
Sigh.