Rare and wonderful things

I don't go all that often to Weird Stuff; maybe once every month or two. But it's usually worthwhile. Today I scored three IBM keyboards for $2.50 each. Two were missing their (proprietary) cables, but since they're replacements I don't mind.

For those who appreciate such things, these are the pre-Windows-95 keyboards with the indistinguishable-from-Selectric key action. My first one cost me $100, and it was worth it.

Worth a read: The high price of cheap

Clay Shirky's article, Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content. The basic idea is that the mental transaction cost (among other things) of micropayment systems is going to kill them in the competition with free content. Most content is going to stay free. This is especially true of text, since the value of text increases considerably when it can be found by text engines.

Sorry, folks; artists are just going to have to find some other way to get paid.