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$$ profit isn't the only profit that a business can go after. The balanced score card approach lets you select what you think is important and balance out the demands of your business to promote your goals. Here are a few books about it. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/103-1114922-0828644?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Balanced+score+card&x=0&y=0

Thanks for all the great comments, though I suspect many of you didn't ready anything more than the brief extract posted here at Slashdot. :-) Because certain themes keep coming up again and again, I thought I'd address them in a single post (I also posted this over at my website).

Here's a response to the main themes that I see coming up there.

The Dead Sea effect isn't unique to IT. True enough, though I could say the same thing about just about any project management issue regarding IT. What is unusual about IT (shared with other engineering disciplines) is the degree to which individual talent and other factors affect productivity and quality. And what is unique about IT (as opposed to, say, civil / mechanical / chemical engineers, architects, etc.) is that there is no standard (state-run) professional certification, so there is no assurance of minimum education and competency.

This is obvious/common sense/trivial. So are most of the problems in IT. Fred Brooks and Jerry Weinberg pretty much nailed down all the essential issues in IT project and personnel management more than 30 years ago; yet, amazingly, the problems haven't all gone away! There is a profound lack of professional and institutional memory in IT; almost everyone who writes about IT project/personnel management (myself included) is looking for new ways to cast or explain the core issues in a touching hope that maybe this time someone will actually listen and fix them.

The Dead Sea effect is just the Peter Principal (or a corollary thereof). No, it isn't. The Peter Principal is that a given person rises to her/his level of incompetence (I'm actually old enough to remember when 'the Peter Principal' first came out). This has nothing to do with promotion within the IT organization; it has to do with self-selected removal from that IT organization, not due to a lack of promotion or opportunity, but just because there are greener pastures elsewhere.

Not all IT shops are like this . I would certainly hope so. In fact, there are IT organizations where just the opposite occurs; the quality of the IT engineers is quite high, and engineers who are mediocre or disruptive either don't get hired or don't last long if they are. I worked in one such IT group (Pages Software) for five years. During that time, we had only one voluntary departure (the network admin); we had two others who were dismissed due to problems, and a few others who were (painfully) cut in downsizing.

Not everyone 'left behind' is incompetent . Again, this syndrome doesn't apply to all IT groups, and it doesn't apply to the same extent to all IT groups. Turnover in IT personnel is common (though it can be reduced by intelligent management), and just because good engineers have left a given IT group doesn't mean that the rest are, in fact, residue. What I'm talking about here is a very real syndrome, typically found in large corporations and government organizations, but it's certainly not universal.

The IT hiring process is broken. Amen. Not only is the IT hiring process broken in many organizations, the entire approach to IT is often broken. It is rife with empire-building, 'heroic' project management, and an 'interchangeable code monkeys' mindset. As mentioned in the comments

Thanks for all the great comments, though I suspect many of you didn't ready anything more than the brief extract posted here at Slashdot. :-) Because certain themes keep coming up again and again, I thought I'd address them in a single post (I also posted this over at my website).

Here's a response to the main themes that I see coming up there.

The Dead Sea effect isn't unique to IT. True enough, though I could say the same thing about just about any project management issue regarding IT. What is unusual about IT (shared with other engineering disciplines) is the degree to which individual talent and other factors affect productivity and quality. And what is unique about IT (as opposed to, say, civil / mechanical / chemical engineers, architects, etc.) is that there is no standard (state-run) professional certification, so there is no assurance of minimum education and competency.

This is obvious/common sense/trivial. So are most of the problems in IT. Fred Brooks and Jerry Weinberg pretty much nailed down all the essential issues in IT project and personnel management more than 30 years ago; yet, amazingly, the problems haven't all gone away! There is a profound lack of professional and institutional memory in IT; almost everyone who writes about IT project/personnel management (myself included) is looking for new ways to cast or explain the core issues in a touching hope that maybe this time someone will actually listen and fix them.

The Dead Sea effect is just the Peter Principal (or a corollary thereof). No, it isn't. The Peter Principal is that a given person rises to her/his level of incompetence (I'm actually old enough to remember when 'the Peter Principal' first came out). This has nothing to do with promotion within the IT organization; it has to do with self-selected removal from that IT organization, not due to a lack of promotion or opportunity, but just because there are greener pastures elsewhere.

Not all IT shops are like this . I would certainly hope so. In fact, there are IT organizations where just the opposite occurs; the quality of the IT engineers is quite high, and engineers who are mediocre or disruptive either don't get hired or don't last long if they are. I worked in one such IT group (Pages Software) for five years. During that time, we had only one voluntary departure (the network admin); we had two others who were dismissed due to problems, and a few others who were (painfully) cut in downsizing.

Not everyone 'left behind' is incompetent . Again, this syndrome doesn't apply to all IT groups, and it doesn't apply to the same extent to all IT groups. Turnover in IT personnel is common (though it can be reduced by intelligent management), and just because good engineers have left a given IT group doesn't mean that the rest are, in fact, residue. What I'm talking about here is a very real syndrome, typically found in large corporations and government organizations, but it's certainly not universal.

The IT hiring process is broken. Amen. Not only is the IT hiring process broken in many organizations, the entire approach to IT is often broken. It is rife with empire-building, 'heroic' project management, and an 'interchangeable code monkeys' mindset. As mentioned in the comments

In his early Known Space stories collected in Tales of Known Space Larry Niven forsaw a future 1975 (ha) where the brains of people managled in car accidents are integrated into spacecraft for guidance, allowing them to continue contributing to society even if their bodies are gone. This entire idea of "brain in a jar" science fiction seems to have faded out with the 1970s.

When IBM and MS were talking about the future of OSs' both knew 16-bit code was at an end, so they decided that something new was in order, it needed to support DOS and Posix since the government just mandated that new systems had to support Posix.

IBM was in the middle of the OS/2 2.x ship cycle and didnâ(TM)t want to distract too many of their engineers with a new project just yet, so they handed off the new kernel design to MS.

DEC at the time was being DEC and canceled DaveCâ(TM)s project called Prisim. DaveC gave his team a month or so off before letting them go. BillG caught wind of the project being cancelled and invited DaveC to a meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting BillG agreed to pick-up DaveC and his team including the hardware guys to design the next generation kernel that OS/2 3.x was to be based.

For the next year the software guys spent their time designing the new kernel and the hardware guys were designing the new hardware (MIPS) that would run the new kernel. DaveC wanted to ensure that the kernel was portable and wanted to use the systems as a forcing function to make sure the devs didnâ(TM)t start using inline assembly.

The original kernel design doc can be seen here:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=124
I had fun at the party MS threw when the Smithsonian wanted the design doc.

NT has more in common with the VAX OS than with OS/2 1.x+.

Bottom line here is that MS designed the NT kernel and all they had to do was provide subsystems for running OS/2 1.x, OS/2 2.x, Posix, and DOS applications, when they parted company MS dropped OS/2 2.x and added the Win16 and Win32 subsystems.

----- Rom

Good references for NT history are:
Inside Wndows NT by Helen Custer
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-Network-CUSTER/dp/155615481X
Show Stopper by G. Pascal Zachary
http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207943287&sr=1-2

When IBM and MS were talking about the future of OSs' both knew 16-bit code was at an end, so they decided that something new was in order, it needed to support DOS and Posix since the government just mandated that new systems had to support Posix.

IBM was in the middle of the OS/2 2.x ship cycle and didnâ(TM)t want to distract too many of their engineers with a new project just yet, so they handed off the new kernel design to MS.

DEC at the time was being DEC and canceled DaveCâ(TM)s project called Prisim. DaveC gave his team a month or so off before letting them go. BillG caught wind of the project being cancelled and invited DaveC to a meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting BillG agreed to pick-up DaveC and his team including the hardware guys to design the next generation kernel that OS/2 3.x was to be based.

For the next year the software guys spent their time designing the new kernel and the hardware guys were designing the new hardware (MIPS) that would run the new kernel. DaveC wanted to ensure that the kernel was portable and wanted to use the systems as a forcing function to make sure the devs didnâ(TM)t start using inline assembly.

The original kernel design doc can be seen here:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=124
I had fun at the party MS threw when the Smithsonian wanted the design doc.

NT has more in common with the VAX OS than with OS/2 1.x+.

Bottom line here is that MS designed the NT kernel and all they had to do was provide subsystems for running OS/2 1.x, OS/2 2.x, Posix, and DOS applications, when they parted company MS dropped OS/2 2.x and added the Win16 and Win32 subsystems.

----- Rom

Good references for NT history are:
Inside Wndows NT by Helen Custer
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-Network-CUSTER/dp/155615481X
Show Stopper by G. Pascal Zachary
http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207943287&sr=1-2

It's chilling to think that with vaccines it's like Carson's Silent Spring all over again, except this time instead of damaging birds we're hurting our own children.

Makes me glad the author of the book (above), Rob Beckstrom, was appointed to the newly created department of Cyber Security. He'll probably be able to help the President sync his iPod as well.

"His employers constitute the third order, that of those who live by profit. it is the stock that is employed for the sake of profit, which puts into motion the greater part of the useful labor of every society. The plans and projects of the employers of stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labor, and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin...

"Their superiority over the country gentleman is, not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his. It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction, that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always in the interest of the dealers...

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this oder, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order or men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Excepted from Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chap. XI, Part III, "Rent of Land: Conclusion".

If you want an interesting re-reading of Smith, which counters a great deal of the neoliberal/libertarian propaganda about Smith, see (I think) Chapter 2 of Adam Smith in Beijing by Giovanni Arrighi. No need to buy the whole book, just find it at Barnes & Noble and sit down and read the relevant chapter on Smith.

Amen, brother.

And if my fellow /.'ers hate spam as much as the parent poster and I, check out my book. It's well worth a read.

Ok, I kid, I kid.

I agree that it's not grinding if there is challenge present. I lost count of the number of hardcore characters I took through Diablo 2

It's interesting that you define "grind" as something that's simply "not challenging". I've always assumed "grind", in the context of MMO's, meant having to do something repeatedly, independent of difficulty settings.

However, since I see so many people passionately talking about MMO's and the designs behind them, I would like to encourage everyone to pick up the massively big book Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle, one of the "fathers" of virtual wolrds (aka MMO's).

In that book, Richard will talk at great length about the history of MMO's and how they started out as MUD's and where the term MUD came from. He'll go into his famous "Explorer, Achiever, Killer, Socializer" paradigm, and he'll explain why games like WoW are as popular as they are and why there isn't as many games as so many people on these boards "think" should be made. He even covers "perma-death", why it's not popular with the majority, and why companies don't make these types of games en masse.

Long story short, current MMO's like WoW, EQ, EQ2, AC, AO, DAoC, etc. all fall into the same quadrant of a MMO design box, that based on DikuMUD, which is more action based than anything else. However, back in the day of MUD's there existed all kinds of games that went from the fairly static world like WoW, to worlds where people could control every aspect of it. A new city/house/building could pop up anywhere. Trees could be planted and cut down and the landscape entirely changed.

If you're really interested in MMO design, I'd recommend this book and I have many times on /. Warcraft threads. I own it. I've never gotten through it, but it's really fascinating.

My guess - most of the big players are more than happy to watch PayPal as an experiment and only come in when most of the risk has been eliminated through experience by PayPal. A good example is the long running battle that PayPal has faced not to be considered a bank and therefore under (quite burdensome) banking laws.

Other services do exist - Google Checkout, Amazon DevPay - but they seem like they are deliberately constrained. Perhaps they are waiting in the wings for a future battle that no side wants to initiate right now.

No choice http://www.amazon.com/Money-home-page/b/ref=gw_m_b_si?ie=UTF8&node=3309511

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS) is what you are thinking of. Link to information: http://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Payments-Service-AWS/b/ref=sc_fe_l_3?ie=UTF8&node=342430011&no=3440661

Amazon has been my choice for selling since I departed eBay: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=1161232

Marketplace items list for free, but a 6 to 15 percent commission, a variable closing fee, and a $0.99 per-transaction fee are applied when a sale occurs. I'm happy to pay this as I'm getting value for money. Buyers pay Amazon; Amazon pays seller. Non of this "PayPal in the middle" nonscense which is far too easy for the unscrupulous to scam.

Here's the HP
HP security notice. This was discovered in January/February, according to HP, but not announced by them until April.

Where's the recall notice? HP should be recalling these items. Failure to do so immediately is willful negligence.

Here are the part numbers:

• Part # 442084-B21 HP 256MB USB 2.0 Floppy Drive Key
• Part # 442085-B21 HP 1GB USB 2.0 Floppy Drive Key

They're still for sale on Amazon, for example.

In a situation like this, HP should recall the product and reissue a replacement product with a new part number to distinguish old product from new product.

Here's the HP HP security notice. This was discovered in January/February, according to HP, but not announced by them until April.

Where's the recall notice? HP should be recalling these items. Failure to do so immediately is willful negligence.

Here are the part numbers:

• Part # 442084-B21 HP 256MB USB 2.0 Floppy Drive Key
• Part # 442085-B21 HP 1GB USB 2.0 Floppy Drive Key

They're still for sale on Amazon, for example.

In a situation like this, HP should recall the product and reissue a replacement product with a new part number to distinguish old product from new product.

It looks very similar to Amazon's EC2 hosted server service. They even have a simplified database system much like EC2. That in itself is enough to scare a lot of people away due to the pain of future migration.

However, the free 500MB worth of storage is really attrative for anyone who wants to try a few things out online. I wish it supported more than Python, but they say they are working on it now. Getting a few more programming languages supported will make this much more flexible.

I'm signing up for a block. Who knows what I'll do with it. But at no cost, what do I really have to lose?

Amazon has everything!

http://www.amazon.com/JL421-Badonkadonk-Land-Cruiser-Tank/dp/B00067F1CE

While Wicked Cool PHP seems useful, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of O'Reilly's PHP Cookbook . I just wish they would release a new, expanded edition. O'Reilly's cookbook series are really a pleasure to use, giving you just the info you need and not wasting space trying to be funny or zany like far too many CS books out now.

The rest of us can go ahead and buy the $20k Badonkadonk Land Cruiser mini Star Wars version of this on Amazon(!).

But hey, it has an optional flamethrower! Nice!

New World Symphony is the first frigging one! One of the other posters was right. You should turn in your nick and get a new one. "Lazy Good For Nothing Waste of Skin" sounds like an appropriate one.

I used to have a Creepy Hand Bank! :-)

If, as wacky futurists like Ray Kurzweil in his The Singularity is Near human beings will increasingly maintain portions of their conscious in computer networks, is there even a place for introversion in the future? Eventually once all of mankind is networked, it'll be harder and hard to tune out.

I'm OK with this. Maybe this will see an end to the self-published garbage that has flooded the marketplace lately. Editors exist for a reason: most writers can't edit their own copy. How many self published books are worth reading? One in fifty? MAYBE?

Think I'm being harsh? Try this on for size:

http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Day-Planet-Earth/dp/1425906958/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207568585&sr=8-1

A couple years ago, Amazon started allowing third party sellers to create product pages (what Amazon calls detail pages) on the Amazon site. More recently, Amazon started allowing sellers to create pages for pre-ISBN books (books that were published before the ISBN system became standard).

I.e. many of the books that don't have an Amazon presence would not be listed on the site otherwise, because the book itself is out of print and Amazon can't get copies from the publisher.

I'd be interested in seeing an example product where there is no indication that the product is not from Amazon. That sounds like a bug. The usual experience is like http://www.amazon.com/Webkinz-Black-White-Panda-Plush/dp/B000HPNK6Y/ -- note that it clear says "Ships from and sold by ABCTOY4me" above the Add to Cart button.

This whole exclusive POD thing is odd in that it is a restriction on *buyers* more than on sellers. Sellers can still sell POD on Amazon, but now the buyer has to jump through an extra hoop to make the purchase. How does that help Amazon? Third party sales offer Amazon a 15% commission without any manufacturing liability. What makes the Booksurge sales more valuable than that? Also, will Amazon actually sell copies of these items? Or are they just chasing selection off of their site?

I have long been a fan of the ideas presented in the book Genetic Takeover, but it always seems the science media is all about meteorites and Mars; I'm not sure if this is a product of the book being dated or the science media being no better than the regular media.

In the past there was always products sold by amazon, and then a link to 'used & new' which I never touched because when I go to amazon, I'm looking specifically to by a NEW item from amazon themselves, and for amazon to take direct responsibility if there are any fuck ups.

That's funny, because I always go straight for the "Used and new listings". For CDs, third-party sellers like Caiman or NEWBURYCOMICS are better value than than Amazon itself. To give an example appropriate for this week, Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise is over $10 cheaper by choosing Caiman than ordering from Amazon itself. Yet, the product is exactly the same: a nicely wrapped, brand-new CD (and Caiman doesn't ship cut-outs).

If I could deal directly with these third-party sellers and cut out Amazon, I would, and maybe I'd save a dollar more. But getting them from Amazon is convenient. And if you are worried about a third-party seller screwing you over, from the community feedback you can get a good idea is the third-party seller is reputable. For CDs, I've never had any problems with either Caiman or NEWBURYCOMICS, while a couple of minor sellers have disappointed me on occasion.

For books, the high cost of shipping from third-party sellers often cancels out the savings, unfortunately.

Barebone notebooks exist, but most of them are pretty close to complete notebooks, missing just the parts that are pretty easy to change out anyway like the memory and harddrive. But it might be worth checking out if you need more customizability than what Dell, etc. offers. Newegg doesn't carry them (I think), but here's one I found with a quick search (at Amazon, of all places):
http://www.amazon.com/MSI-1637-B001US-15-4-Barebones-Notebook/dp/B000RZFKGW

Out of all the adaptations of Matheson's novel I am Legend , Heston's The Omega Man was probably the most entertaining. It certainly stands tall above the dreck Will Smith starred in last year.

In the old days it takes a long time for a book (or other work) to get from an author to people (takes time for people to get to know about the book, and for payment to reach the author etc). Now I believe it should be much faster if you are doing things right.

In much writing things are still going to take a while. Peer review takes time, because peer reviewers have busy lives. Doing fine typesetting is still a laborious task (yes, computers help, but you still have to painstakingly tweak their output).

Still, for some forms of entertainment, things do move fast, and once things are out they can be quickly duplicated. But in fact, they have always moved fast and copyright was an unnatural innovation forced into the the market only a few hundred years ago. In Ancient Rome, for instance, people would transcribe poetry recitals, have copies mass-produced by a team of amanuenses, and then sell it in the marketplace. No one seems to have had a problem with this lightning-speed duplication and sale of material. In his Epigrams , the poet Martial complains only that someone else was putting his own name on his poems, but he had no problem with people profiting from the poetry itself, even if he didn't see a dime. The arts flourished even without copyright.

The digital era has brought nothing new in many respects. Art just fine existed before copyright, and we should dismantle it now because it will exist after copyright.

This particular strain of nihilism gets on my nerves after a while. There is no clear inference from "it's been tried before". Not even if you multiply by a million times, or a million wannabe losers all with the same wannabe dream.

When substantial progress is made on a long-standing problem, generally there are three situations: the new approach was never tried before (because all the losers were looking under the same wrong rock), or the approach requires deep theoretical insight and skill (which losers rarely possess), or it was tried a million times already, but even so, none of the losers managed to do it quite right, until now.

All three categories are well represented. By entirely blotting out the "it's been tried before" category on general principle (if a sneer can be referred to as a principle), one wipes out a substantial chunk of the pie of new results worth knowing.

I guess some of us assign a low weight to mistakenly discarding genius, and place a higher priority on correctly labeling losers, which is the only thing the "it's been tried before" inference is any good at.

To sift out the rare occasion of genius you actually have to RTFA and evaluate on merit. You can't pass judgments based on background noise such as "it's been tried before" with a broad sweep of the hand toward the loser parade.

Reminds me of a book reviewed the paper I read at the coffee shop today:

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

I noted that the illustration of the human mind in that newspaper review left out the center for "having to pee" which I suspect is extensively shared with the center for heckling other primates on slim cause.

I wonder if that book is any good.

This dates back to the days of Telegraph when individual telegraph operators could be identified by the way they type. They used to use it as a means of identification during WWII to see if they could find impostors. This book talks about it a little bit. I highly recommend it even otherwise - it's a very good read.

Also check out Keystroke Dynamics on Wikipedia.

If you are interested in the history of the personal computer, I enjoyed What the Dormouse said by John Markoff. Some aren't fans of John due to the whole Mitnick thing.. but his writing is decent and the subject material holds its own.

Throughout the heyday of personal encryption, when Zimmerman was maintaining PGP and Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography was released, we kept hearing about how it would take thousands or millions of years to crack just one PGP message. Now we hear that computers that could break these messages might be relatively just around the corner. It's got to be a real disappointment and source of worry to people who did use PGP to encode the secrets that they are desparate to hide.

One have to love people who don't read the provided links. Quoting:

"For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents ... to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

- David Rockefeller, "Memoirs" autobiography (2002, Random House publishers), page 405

PS.: Amazon is your friend.

Check out GNU Octave, there are even books on both.

This is similar to a major plot device in Neal Stephenson's Interface (don't worry, no referral).

In the book the people backing the lead character's bid for the presidency have a virtual "focus group" of people across the nation that watch his speeches. They are able to make adjustments to the speeches in real time by monitoring the reactions of the focus group's vitals.

I, for one, think that truth is not only stranger than fiction, but quickly becoming creepier as well.

"A real engineer would not be an asset to a terror-seeking team. If it is terror driven by religion, I can guarantee you that the engineer will always be the odd man out that won't want to stick to the rules, be it scheduling of prayers or that pork rinds are not acceptable, etc."

"A real engineer would not be an asset to a terror-seeking team. If it is terror driven by religion, I can guarantee you that the engineer will always be the odd man out that won't want to stick to the rules, be it scheduling of prayers or that pork rinds are not acceptable, etc."

Check out GNU Octave, there are even books on both.

Ok, let's assume we're talking about a very long flac file. Most of mine are less than 100 megs, so let's be generous and assume 100 megs. To make the math easier, let's assume that's a tenth of a gig.

A quick glance at Amazon S3, and assuming a worst-case scenario -- that Apple hasn't broken the 10 TB/mo limit -- and that the song only makes one sale in an entire year:

• 18 cents to host the song for a year.
• 1.8 cents for the one download.
• 1 cent for the upload.
• Approximately a thousanth of a cent for the PUT request. I'll ignore this.
• Approximately one ten-thousanth of a cent for the GET request -- if you're generous, maybe another for a HEAD request. I'll ignore this too.

Rounding up, that's 22 cents out of a song that's been up for a year and is only sold once. That might make sense, especially if the credit card fees are bad -- and especially if Apple doesn't consolidate multiple purchases into one charge.

But that doesn't seem likely, for most music. Assume a song makes, oh, ten sales per year -- then the initial upload and hosting cost for the year is about 2 cents per sale. Adding it up, hosting and distribution now costs a little less than 4 cents per sale. At 100 songs, it's about 2 cents, and approaching that 1.8 cents for purely bandwidth -- which becomes 1.6 cents after Apple transfers 10 TB (total, across ALL music, and anything else they put on S3...)

That's assuming a 100 meg flac -- which would usually be distributed as a 10 or 20 meg MP3.

So, Apple's $0.29 cut seems a bit high.

MIT professors Ed Thorpe (later of UCI) and Claude Shannon were developing blackjack strategies. Talk about shoulders of giants... Shannon of course is the famed father of information theory. Besides blackjack, these guys figured out how to gain an edge in roulette using some tricky electronics. Thorpe later made a fortune by founding one of the original hedge funds (this book is a fascinating account).

The rights that are spelled on in law, dumbass.

Do you truly believe law defines morality?

That's right -- it's illegal to eat onions in certain cities and at certain hours. I assert that I have the right to eat onions whenever the fuck I want.

How about we talk about rights, and not laws?

Here is some more reading for you:

Ah, yes, that would be this right. Specifically:

(c) Prohibition on Circumvention of the System. No person shall import, manufacture, or distribute any device, or offer or perform any service, the primary purpose or effect of which is to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent any program or circuit which implements, in whole or in part, a system described in subsection (a).

Is that the "right" you're defending? The right to require that no one ever circumvent your copy protection, no matter what the reason? Does it ever occur to you that there might be a legitimate reason?

What does preventing me from ripping a DVD to an iPod have to do with "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? Sounds to me like it does exactly the opposite, which is why people actually creating content (instead of trolling on Slashdot) are signing up with Amazon MP3.

Looks to me like I read what you linked to, but you didn't even give what I linked to a chance. Try again.