Slashdot Mirror

I was working at home on 9/11, and yes: CNN was down until they put up a no-graphics static page. Slashdot was up and running just fine.

Slashdot traffic ranking: 800
CNN traffic ranking: 24

During a big news event slashdot's traffic might quadruple, but CNN's would be off the chart. CNN could slashdot slashdot (and most other sites).

Of the top ten google searches on 9/11 the only one that beat World Trade Center was CNN. 6000 users per minute were using google to find CNN.
Effects of 9/11 on Google

Liberals even swear everything was their original idea !! Internet == Al Gore....

And today's "conservatives" seem to parrot what they hear without even knowing or understanding it. Al Gore never said that he "invented the internet".

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/wiggin s/

In general, the quality of the education suffers considerably.

Furthermore, as others have pointed out, lack of contact with professors essentially kills your chance of getting into graduate school.

If you're just interested in it as a certificate, I again second the advice of others, you should get it from a real university's online program.

My mother got a Master of Science Education from the Univ. of Montana, which had a big online component (about half of the courses). BUT, it was not *entirely* online, there were significant summer courses. Nonetheless, she liked the program greatly overall.

Read this before you enroll, though. David noble's anti-technology stance is a little extreme for my taste, but he makes excellent points regarding the weakness (and distasteful history) of correspondence-based education. It's out-dated

Thanks

Bruce

Well, actually, that's not such a bad way of going about it as might first seem. (Before I get flamed, that's randomly choosing people to spot check I'm talking about - not randomly choosing to give 12-hour detentions for people for whom the spot check failed to turn up anything incriminating, and not shooting people in the head; and only in the context of it being an alternative to using a fixed set of profiling rules to distribute the same number of spot checks). As Bruce Schneier said: "Whenever you design a security system with two ways through -- an easy way and a hard way -- you invite the attacker to take the easy way. Profile for young Arab males, and you'll get terrorists that are old non-Arab females."

You should read "Content is not King" by Andrew Odlyzko who was as AT&T at the time (2001).

pdf : http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.commun ications2.pdf

html : http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko /

I think you'd be surprised at what researchers can consider interesting. If MMOG's exhibit unusual or emergent new uses of language, then linguists might very well be interested in players' experiences. Games are common human activities after all, and countless monographs have been written on physiological and social aspects of sports, chess, NASCAR, and yes, video games.

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/wiggin s/ has a good amount of information including exactly what Gore did or didn't do for the internet.

Hint internet was publically available in 1985, and even earlier for schools. And he started in the senate when he started really getting into the Internet in 1985... Interesting.

Even more interesting there's a Vinton Cerf excerpt near the bottom about "who" created the internet.

Of course Gore wants the internet, no sane person will say it's a bad thing (I'm speaking to you RIAA and MPAA) but I can't honestly say he did much more then just vote for it.

Do you really expect people to send you $X with no guarantee or even necessarily a liklihood that the project (or, in the case of Mrs. Spears, the CD) will ever actually be released?

Yes. See The Street Performer Protocol. To address your fear of what happens if the bounty is never completed, see also Fundable.

You left out the rest of this quote:

Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.

This quote was published in 1965. The Wikipedia article continues:

In 1975, Moore projected a doubling only every two years. He is adamant that he himself never said "every 18 months", but that is how it has been quoted.

An article linked from the Wikipedia article examines the historical growth of transistor counts in Intel processors since 1971:

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/inde x.html#t4

There are three groups of data points, in which the number of transistors double every 22, then 33, then 54 months. But, this data ends at the Pentium II, after which Intel stopped publishing transistor counts.

However, the transistor counts in subsequent chips have clearly increased rapidly, mostly due to larger cache memories.

It's already been shown that the record industry is not losing money because of p2p. That's accepted as fact by everyone who's looked at the numbers except the RIAA, because admitting that efffectively admits that they were wrong in the first place. Regardless, I believe in the inherent goodness of most people and that people will pay for what they feel is worth their money. I don't download music via p2p very often but when I do, it's to decide whether or not I want to buy music or not. I've purchased many CDs recently directly because of songs I downloaded and liked.

"The RIAA wants just as much control over U.S. universities as the Spanish equivalent already has over theirs."

they DO have that much control.

They just use it differently.

They use it to force universities to censor their internet connections like communist china, blocking ALL p2p, legitimate or otherwise, regardless of the fact that the argument over p2p is close in nature to the argument over abortion in that not everyone agrees it's harmful to these industries.

(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/gei st /index.html)

They also use it to force universities to become sales and marketing agents cramming mandatory fees down students throats for DRM'ed music services which may not even work with their computers, effectively forcing them to pay kickbacks to the RIAA for the "right" to gain a college degree.

I can't imagine that A.A. Milne would have been very enthusiastic if he'd known that Winnie the Pooh was going to be buggered for decades by the Disney Corp.

No worries there, then. Milne wrote the first Pooh book in 1926, and sold off the merchandising rights quite rapidly. The big to-do of late was between Disney and the widow of the man Milne sold his rights to -- so he evidently didn't care about the long term profits from other uses of the characters.

'Course, with a 25 year copyright, it would've lapsed before Disney took an interest in 1961 and began putting out their own Pooh works in 1966.

I personally am trying to sell a book to publishers at the moment. I would not bother if part of the deal involved Peter Jackson getting his hands on it and doing to it what he did to LotR. After I'm dead, well, I'm not so worried.

Well, make it part of the deal then. That's fine with me. But since the law is neutral as to artistic quality (some people like what PJ did, others don't, for example) it wouldn't bother me if your copyright expired during your life and someone made a movie based on it. They can't overly associate you with it, but they would get to do their take. And, given that it's just as valid as yours, why not? You would've had time to try yourself, without competition.

Open any newspaper every day of the week: it seems to be happening quite often.

Hm. I don't suppose you saw the study discussing how few artists can support themselves from their copyrights.

Publishers manage to make more money by taking bigger risks than the artists (entitling them to a larger part of the reward) and by betting on a lot of works. Usually only a couple pay off, but the payoff can be quite a lot.

Whatever way you cut it, I'm not going to agree that it would be right for an author to create a popular work which makes perhaps billions for some media corp. while his kids get nothing simply because he got run over the day after it was published.

I'm against tying terms to life -- I think it should be a fixed term of years, so that it's highly predictable.

Besides, what you describe is pretty unusual. What normally happens is that the artist doesn't create a popular work, and his kids get nothing because he just wasn't commercially successful. Artists hardly ever are, at least with regards to royalties. Selling actual pieces, or working for money, usually work better.

nor has the public interest

The public interest has everything to do with it. Why else would the public tolerate copyright? We usually don't like monopolies on commodity goods otherwise, as the efficiencies in a competitive market are desirable.

Artists themselves aren't expected to be charitable, though. They're expected to be greedy, so that they can be exploited. I.e. if an artist wants to make money, dangle the possibility of money in front of him to get him to create things. He immediately serves his own interests, but the public only engages in the exercise to serve its interest.

The Canadian system works. People get music, musicians get money. There's no "thievery" involved.

Oh, that's priceless.

Oh, that's priceless.

-Don

"Could you please back up your claim that: "just about all bands make negative money from their first contract. This is important, if you sign with a label, you will end up in debt"."

Here's the Kretschmer report.

" Sorry, it is kind of hard to find Royalty who will pay you to simply sit around and compose for them.

Music subsidies don't work today like then did then. Also not everyone with a family can just pick up and tour."

Isn't it odd, then, that both in the US and Europe musicians earn their keep (and pay off their huge debts to the recording companies) through performing and teaching?

Producer Steve Albini: "The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."

Professor of Information Jurisprudence Martin Kretschmer: "Only a small minority of artists reaches ordinary living standards from copyright income. [...] Earnings from non-copyright, and even non-artistic activities, are an important source of income for most creators."

Al Gore said, "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." This is true. On the other hand, when Bush disclaimed his timber business write-off during the televised debates in 2004, that was a lie.

Your (and my) posting on the Internet today is attributable to the role Gore played in creating the Internet when he was in the U.S. Congress.

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.

As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.

As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Today, approximately 95% of our nation's schools are on the Internet. Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driv

[How stupid is it to demand information should be free, then pay someone else to get it?]

Not stupid at all. You pay for the distribution and other assorted services, not for the information.

For the record, this is not much different from what you do when you buy a CD from the record store. For the first hundred thousands of copies of any given CD, 100% goes to the intermediaries. (At first sight, this may seem to be a peculiarity of the US system, but the same appears to be true for Germany and the UK.)

At least with Open Source Software you CAN maintain it if necessary.

Sort of ... kind of ...

There comes a point where, particularly without design documentation, the bar is raised so high that the effort involved in maintaining something is more than that involved in moving to a new product. There's a scaling problem here. What works with small, simple direct programs doesn't work with large, complex or indirect programs.

And some OSS code is simply completely undocumented, not even a comment -- apart from the licence. Something I discovered wandering through the XFree86 XKB code.

See http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/ index.html for a discussion some of the weaknesses of the open source model when it comes to program comprehension.

> I conclude that most people download for personal
> gain, to the detriment of the copyright holder.

I'd agree with the first part of that (well, it's hardly a "conclusion" as you put it - more like a no-brainer!), but the second needs clarifying: in almost all cases it's to the detriment of the copyright PUBLISHER.

The fact that most IP rights are transferred to publishers, who then collect fees for use of the work, is at the heart of this whole debate. If you think it's "stealing" from the artist, you're (usually) wrong. In general, the publisher charges buyers of the work large fees for it, takes a big bite of the cash, and give a (really tiny) amount to the artist. Don't believe me?

If P2P and other systems like collaborative filtering erode the role of the publisher, while they're unlikely to make the publishing go away, they may well start to redress this balance in favour of the artist, and put the publishing industry back where it belongs as a service, and not the master, of the artist.

Now how do you feel about copyright "theft"?

> I've always been under the impression that the
> typical person who makes money off of IP has a
> rather modest income.

And why do you think that is?

Boing Boing had a link the other day to a German survey of musician's earnings showing that in 1994, PRS income distribution of its 15,500 writer members showed that only 204 made more than US$38,000 that year. Ten (10) made over US$187,000.

Now, I'd guess that there were more than a couple of hundred music executives, middle management and other staff in the German music publishing industry that made over US$38,000 that year. And they made their money from the music that those people wrote.

Whether or not you think that's fair, moral or anything else, it's an interesting fact, don't you think? I'd say that on those figures, any assertion that copyright exists to protect the earnings of artists is at best inaccurate, and at worst a big fucking lie.

As I daid and am tired of saying:

censorship bears the legacy of copyright. For example, the custom of printers and authors to have their name listed with their creations began as a law demanding this practice, not to ensure the originator due credit, but in order for the king to keep track of disobedient writers. Brendan Scott (2000)

In the end free/open software will triumph, Raymond attests; "[...] because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem" The high innovation rate of free software has been stressed by many others and is one reason for recent interest by companies in the movement (DiBona et al., 1999).

This is part of the power of Open Source: it creates this kind of unifying pressure to conform to a common reference point - in effect, an open standard - and removes the intellectual property barriers that would otherwise inhibit this convergence"43. (Young in DiBona et al., 1999, p. 124.)

Taken from here.

I think its more creating non tech-savvy groups than appealing to the non tech-savvy:

Excludability is the power to prevent usage of a desirable utility, and is required for the property holder to force payment of the user (extract exchange-value). ..."The contradiction that lies at the heart of the political economy of intellectual property is between the low to non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of knowledge and its treatment as scarce property"[23].

23. May, 2000, p. 42.

A technology supporting the property regime must build a black box not comprehensible to the smartest user, and convenient to operate for users with the lowest possible skill. Users must be deprived of their technological knowledge that grants them control over the product, or else they will bypass the security systems [34].

34. Operation Sundevil, a nationwide law enforcement campaign in U.S., directed against the hacker community (Sterling, 1994), should be seen in this light. However, direct repression against highly skilled users plays only a minor though complementary part in the agenda of securing the system from independent subjects. Its real momentum lies in lessening the skill level demanded of the average user, as is expressed in the deceitful phrase 'user-friendly technology'.

Yes I do lean towards marxism and no, this is not a anti-capitalism rant although this article does point out the obvious (for some) that we have moved from feudalism to capitalism and are GRADUALLY moving towards something else. It doesnt matter how much money companies like Microsoft make. In order to change with the time, the company and otheres like it will change significantly towards the open model. They will still have allot of money but just money as long as they dont change. That is because Information Technology and the software organisations that grow on them are not manufacturing dependent or dependent on central control...and therefore cannot be conform logically to the analogue of property..

Two interesting symptoms have developed in the case of Microsoft in the way of differential pricing depending on the buyer's ability to pay. If the market makes it possible to do differential pricing, then it is more profitable for a company to do it. It is possible for Microsoft to use differential pricing and it is doing so.

To a small extent Microsoft does this in the domestic U.S. educational market (where the "get them accustomed to product X now so they'll buy it later" is an added long-term advantage) but moreso overseas where

1. Implicit tolerance of piracy accomplishes the same goals as educational discounts in the industrialized world by allowing people to become attached to their products before they are willing to pay the going price.
2. Explicit creation of things like Windows XP Lite for Thailand which are not substantially different than the product sold in the industrialized world, but has some deliberate crippling mechanisms added to turn off full functionality that would cost them less to leave in.

The "one market price for a product" model has been practically exhausted by a company that owns over 90% of the desktop OS market and office productivity suite market, so new ways of increasing sales by extending into new markets, pushing customers into more frequent upgrades or a subscription service model (all 3 much discussed here) and using novel techniques like differential pricing are ways for Microsoft to grow.

And, yes, DRM (TCPA) will give them more fine-grain control over differntial pricing techniques than they have now. Expect the existing unfixed rampant computer security problems to be used to sell DRM to customers.

Anytime a large number of geeks have free time on their collective hands is good for the Linux kernel. Though, that shouldn't be a suprise to many here...

Sorry, but that's just parsing the credits file and doing some DNS lookups for the IP adresses. This might be considered a fun project on sourceforge but not serious research. You might ask now why I'm bitching about this. But that's really an important issue. Dead tree journals are getting more and more expensive and serious scientists are trying to biuld up a royality-free alternative. When self acclaimed "peer-reviewed" electronic journals like First Monday are publishing such human insterest stuff as "research" then they are harming the reputation of all electronic scientific journals and especially the projects to create a royalty-free peer-reviewed publication chain. And thus they are in fact harming science. Slashdot should in no way encourage such behavior.

Now it's time to catch up with distros that are way easier to use than XP and have interfaces that also do much more:

• Knoppix boots just about anything.
• Mepis does the same and gives you an install GUI. The new version gives you KDE 3.2, which kicks any proprietary interface's ass, and was used to make this post.
• Feather Linux nice for older computers and dead easy to use.

The Free and Open source comments quoted were true when they were written, but are not anymore. People really have gotten into the works enough to make many usable and easy interfaces. Like other "Free software will never do X" arguments, this one was false.

The gentle reader may remember these famous predictions. Free Software will never:

• make a kernel
• be useful in the Enterprise
• make anyone any money
• be able to work devices

As free software generated billions of dollars for big and small companies alike, runs on all manner of hardware for all kinds of companies that demand scalability and stability, we could be sure easy to use, polished interfaces were right around the conner. They are here and available to anyone with a good network connection.

Michelle, download and run Mepis today.

I heartily agree. (Mod parent up!) Repeatedly using the word "fundamental" to mean "major" makes her look a bit illiterate. It is nearly as annoying as people using "exponential" when they just mean "rapid".

I also think it's pretty damn funny for her to quote ESR
describing hackers as "unfortunately intolerant and bigoted".

It's also kind of amusing for a pseudo-socialist to talk about religious blindness causing people to ignore working solutions.

This kind of rant has occurred so many times before: the bits that were good weren't original, and the bits that were original weren't good. In fact the bad bits aren't particularly original either.

In conclusion, to Michelle: shut up and code. (Or write docs or file UI bugs, that's good too. Stop whining.)

First off, First Monday touts itself as a peer-reviewed journal. I have to say, that this is probably the shittiest article I have ever read in a peer-reviewed journal (related to serious technical material---most soft science journal are essentially worthless). First Monday just got added to my list of journals to not waste my time reading

These same 5 attributes exist in the closed source world. I'm sure many of you have used closed source software with poor UI's, documentation, feature-centric, etc. These problems are present in all software. Perhaps they are more prevalent in open source software, but that argument would have to be well-researched to be convincing, unlike the slop in this article.

Just do a "s/open source/closed source/g" on the article, and it still makes sense. Even the part about religious blindness is applicable to closed source developers!

Fundamental issues with open source software development by Michelle Levesque

Despite the growing success of the Open Source movement, most of the general public continues to feel that Open Source software is inaccessible to them. This paper discusses five fundamental problems with the current Open Source software development trend, explores why these issues are holding the movement back, and offers solutions that might help overcome these problems. The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary softwares more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to lack the complete and accessible documentation that retains users. Developers focus on features in their software, rather than ensuring that they have a solid core. Open Source programmers also tend to program with themselves as an intended audience, rather than the general public. Lastly, there is a widely known stubbornness by Open Source programmers in refusing to learn from what lessons proprietary software has to offer. If Open Source software wishes to become widely used and embraced by the general public, all five of these issues will have to be overcome.

Contents

Introduction
User interface design
Documentation
Feature-centric development
Programming for the self
Religious blindness
Concluding remarks

Introduction

Its my Open Source project and Ill code what I want to.

Over the past few months, Ive found myself charged with the task of taking an existing Open Source project (to avoid pointing fingers, lets just call it Project X) and customizing it for academic use. Though I wont claim to be an expert in the realm of all Open Source software programming trends, I have a lot of exposure to it: I consistently try to use Open Source technology whenever possible (I fully support the sociology behind the movement), Ive been a major player in a few small Open Source projects still in development, and I now have the experience of a few months of working on Project X. So despite not being an expert, I believe my opinion can stand as a relatively well-informed one.

I have five major complaints about Open Source [1] software development, but in advance I would like to clarify two things. First of all, there will always be exceptions to every rule. For example, I believe that relatively few complaints listed here apply to the Open Source browser Firefox [2] which continues to surpass my expectations. Im discussing general trends that Ive noticed, not specific cases. Secondly, I dont think that these are unresolvable problems. The purpose of this document is to raise awareness -- not to mindlessly complain -- in hopes that the Open Source community may begin to change their mind-set about some of these issues and work towards improving them.

That being said, Ive found the five most important flaws with Open Source software development to be as follows:

1. User interface design
2. Documentation
3. Feature-centric development
4. Programming for the self
5. Religious blindness

User interface design

Project X comes with a neat interactive calendar. Just as youd expect, you can schedule events, share events with others, and resolve conflicts. However no one will ever know about it, because in order to see the calendar module, you have to know the URL of the module in advance: there are no links to it, aside from one that's buried several pages deep. Project Xs user interface is a nightmare. There are

The open-source movement is a communist affront to capitalism and should not be allowed to interfere in the profitable business of proprietary software. He thereby implies that it is un-American to support the open-source movement.

This is one of the most stupid thing I've ever read!

Did this guy ever read Alexis deTocqueville about the union of people for their common interest in the beginning of the USA?

Did McBride ever read what Eric Raymond think about communism? HEY MCBRIDE, READ THAT LINK: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_11/raymon d/index.html

Did he only knows what communism IS?
br> Did he knows that democracy is a matter of choice?

Please, Mr McBride, if you want to tell these things, come to the "Just for Laugh" festival here in Montreal, i'm sure you'll fit right in!

There is a significant body of knowledge around this subject that was developed by librarians. See this article for an introduction.

Another example: Jef Raskin's Canon Cat information appliance eschewed files completely. You located a document by typing words that are in it, in efect making the whole document its own filename.

The approach I find most powerful is set-oriented. I use an app called IMatch to manage my digital photos. Its sophisticated set-oriented category system makes it very easy to locate an image. That is what Microsoft is attempting with Longhorn's unified data store, or in more forward-looking projects like MyLifeBits.

There was nothing conventional about it when the work was done... it is quite unreasonable to ask for examples that are less than a couple of decades old

That's great. A few decades ago, they did something unconventional. But what have they done now? I don't care if the policies have or have not been implemented, what are they doing now to question the established standards? You linked me to osdn.com, btw, but I found the proper site and checked it out. While it is interesting stuff, and pertinent to our existence, it doesn't try to answer the Big Question. The freshest thing on that website was "Equilibrium Selection and Public-good Provision: The Development of Open-source Software", although that has already been beaten to death.

A theoretical prediction was made that if more money was spent on R&D then the economy would grow at a faster rate.

You initially said: One of their predictions was that intellectual goods were being under-produced. You cannot predict that which is currently happening, that is not in step with the definition of the word. You could, however, hypothesize. Although my knowledge of economist-speak is limited, so maybe in their world you can use 'predict' in such manner (but if so, they are wrong).

Different issue - increased spending on research produced more growth - whether changes in IP laws helped is another question entirely.

If you were speaking of increased spending, and not IP law, then why did you say: Sure it now looks like they were too enthusiastic about strengthening intellectual property law, but in other ways their predictions have turned out to be accurate. Did you throw that in there specifically to confuse me? [insert comment about how dumb I am for not understanding]

Perhaps what you meant to say was: True, economists have promoted the strengthening of IP laws beyond reason. But this doesn't mean they aren't doing anything useful. A few decades ago, they encouraged greater expenditures in public and private R&D, which increased our output of intellectual goods. This is considered one of the primary causes of our recent economic growth.

If that was the case, I wouldn't disagree. I would wonder why you mentioned it, however, because I wanted to know what they have done recently to challenge conventional wisdom, not how they created it a few decades back. And for chrissakes, do you really need a degree in economics to conclude that increased R&D results in increased IP goods? I learned that in StarCraft...

I seem to recall debates about this from a long time back (probably on NetNews, or something) where two important issues were discussed. 1) The government contracts with commercial entities to record and publish the case law as it emerges from the courts (one or both of these companies was mentioned, IIRC), and 2) people were trying to work on creating public databases not encumbered by IP ownership. Anybody have any references to this, or know what has happened?

It seems to me that if the raw data is technically public domain, that it would be legal to obtain copies from commercial sources (or even 'borrow' them), and extract the raw data by stripping out all the page numbers, indexes and other proprietary content. Logically, you should now have something that is completely "public domain", and be able to do what you want with it. This would be the same thing as taking a published book where the copyright to the original work is expired, and scanning it, re-typesetting it (i.e. changing all the fonts, layout, page numbering, removing later forwards, etc.). AFAIK, this would be completely legal since you are only copying the parts not under any copyright restriction.

I was recently reading some article from First Monday on the general topic of the erosion of the public space in science in this issue. The "privatization" of science is a very disturbing trend, and I claim it threatens to do long term dammage to future prosperity and freedom. This story is just another visible aspect of the "Architectures of Control" that threaten the emergence of Free and Open societies based on widespread sharing of information.

I seem to recall debates about this from a long time back (probably on NetNews, or something) where two important issues were discussed. 1) The government contracts with commercial entities to record and publish the case law as it emerges from the courts (one or both of these companies was mentioned, IIRC), and 2) people were trying to work on creating public databases not encumbered by IP ownership. Anybody have any references to this, or know what has happened?

It seems to me that if the raw data is technically public domain, that it would be legal to obtain copies from commercial sources (or even 'borrow' them), and extract the raw data by stripping out all the page numbers, indexes and other proprietary content. Logically, you should now have something that is completely "public domain", and be able to do what you want with it. This would be the same thing as taking a published book where the copyright to the original work is expired, and scanning it, re-typesetting it (i.e. changing all the fonts, layout, page numbering, removing later forwards, etc.). AFAIK, this would be completely legal since you are only copying the parts not under any copyright restriction.

I was recently reading some article from First Monday on the general topic of the erosion of the public space in science in this issue. The "privatization" of science is a very disturbing trend, and I claim it threatens to do long term dammage to future prosperity and freedom. This story is just another visible aspect of the "Architectures of Control" that threaten the emergence of Free and Open societies based on widespread sharing of information.

The Lives and Death of Moore's Law by Ilkka Tuomi

Moore's Law has been an important benchmark for developments in microelectronics and information processing for over three decades. During this time, its applications and interpretations have proliferated and expanded, often far beyond the validity of the original assumptions made by Moore. Technical considerations of optimal chip manufacturing costs have been expanded to processor performance, economics of computing, and social development. It is therefore useful to review the various interpretations of Moore's Law and empirical evidence that could support them.

Such an analysis reveals that semiconductor technology has evolved during the last four decades under very special economic conditions. In particular, the rapid development of microelectronics implies that economic and social demand has played a limited role in this industry. Contrary to popular claims, it appears that the common versions of Moore's Law have not been valid during the last decades. As semiconductors are becoming important in economy and society, Moore's Law is now becoming an increasingly misleading predictor of future developments.

You are absolutely right.

To say that Moore's Law is dead is complete bullshit. (sorry, but this has to be made clear) The point is that computing power increases exponentially, and that it does, even though the writers of the article didn't get it.

Have a deep, long look at Figure 5 in the article.

What do you see?
Straight lines with positive slope, so what?
What are the axes?
MIPS vs. Time, not very impressive.
Look closer, dammit!
Oh, the MIPS scale is a log (0.1, 1, 10, 100).
What is a straight line with positive slope in log representation?
AN EXPONENTIALLY INCREASING CURVE [f(x)=a^x]!

To make it clear, I made a page with Mathematica with linear axes, it can be found here [ssh server is down]. I also used their data to "predict" the singularity (when computers become as fast as the human brain): 2044

People interested in this might also be interested in, "Covert Channels in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite".

Read Content is Not King. Understand it. Note that it is written by a real economist. Think carefully about what you do online and what you spend money on.

Then you will understand why content is and shall remain a small fraction of infrastructure. And why, dreams of meglomania notwithstanding, the content tail shouldn't waste its energy trying to wag the infrastructure dog.

until you read In Oldenburg's Long Shadow (For those who miss the reference, Henry Oldenburg is the man created the first peer reviewed journal.)

It is long, but it leads through how the Science Citation index has been used as a tool by unscrupulous publishers to first create a locked in academic market, and then milk it for all the revenue that they can get. It also discusses possible alternatives, and various approaches that are being tried to break free of this stranglehold.

Oh right. And if you want to see what online peer reviewed journals might look like, look at First Monday. Be warned that you may spend some time browsing through past articles.

social network analysis began in 1934 when the first sociogram was drawn by hand. the field grew in the 60s and 70s when mainframes began to crunch matrices to find cliques and figure out who was best connected. with a pc you can now do network visualization and network analysis in your bedroom using data from the web:

First Monday

for academic papers on social network analysis see their journal:

Connections

yes, it has been done since 1934 when the first 'sociogram' was drawn by hand. the field grew in the 60s and 70s when mainframes began to crunch matrices to figure out who was best connected. with a pc you can now do this in your bedroom using data from the web: First Monday for academic readings on this topic see: Connections

Starting with Eric Raymond's groundbreaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Yet, given the nature of software programs, one also hears of developers with no lives that work very hard to achieve great product results. In this paper, I sought empirical evidence that would help us understand which is more common - the cave (i.e., lone producer) or the community. Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge, I find a few surprising things. First, most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1 - numbers much lower than previous numbers reported for highly successful projects! Second, most OSS programs do not generate a lot of discussion. Third, products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more often. Fourth, the number of developers associated with a project was positively correlated to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of project administrators.

Starting with Eric Raymond's ground-breaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Ghosh's cooking pot markets, similarly, point to a communal product development system. Certainly, this is a good label for some OSS products that have been featured prominently in the news. For instance, Moon and Sproull point out that by July 2000, about 350 contributors to LINUX were acknowledged in a credits list in the source code of the kernel.

However, my goal in this paper is to ask if the community-based model of product development holds as a general descriptor of the average OSS product. I systematically look at the actual number of developers involved in the production of one hundred mature OSS products. What I found is more consistent with the lone developer (or cave) model of production rather than a community model (with a few glaring exceptions, of course).

This is not to say that there is no community in the OSS movement. For instance, the findings of Butler, Kiesler, Sproull and Kraut (2002) point to participation by individuals other than the creators of OSS-program-related mailing lists. My contention is only that communities do things other than produce the actual product - e.g. provide feature suggestions, try products out as lead users, answer questions etc. Formally separating software production from other steps in the development of OSS programs will provide greater clarity to the discussion of the OSS phenomenon.

Starting with Eric Raymond's groundbreaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Yet, given the nature of software programs, one also hears of developers with no lives that work very hard to achieve great product results. In this paper, I sought empirical evidence that would help us understand which is more common - the cave (i.e., lone producer) or the community. Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge, I find a few surprising things. First, most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1 - numbers much lower than previous numbers reported for highly successful projects! Second, most OSS programs do not generate a lot of discussion. Third, products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more often. Fourth, the number of developers associated with a project was positively correlated to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of project administrators.

Starting with Eric Raymond's ground-breaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Ghosh's cooking pot markets, similarly, point to a communal product development system. Certainly, this is a good label for some OSS products that have been featured prominently in the news. For instance, Moon and Sproull point out that by July 2000, about 350 contributors to LINUX were acknowledged in a credits list in the source code of the kernel.

However, my goal in this paper is to ask if the community-based model of product development holds as a general descriptor of the average OSS product. I systematically look at the actual number of developers involved in the production of one hundred mature OSS products. What I found is more consistent with the lone developer (or cave) model of production rather than a community model (with a few glaring exceptions, of course).

This is not to say that there is no community in the OSS movement. For instance, the findings of Butler, Kiesler, Sproull and Kraut (2002) point to participation by individuals other than the creators of OSS-program-related mailing lists. My contention is only that communities do things other than produce the actual product - e.g. provide feature suggestions, try products out as lead users, answer questions etc. Formally separating software production from other steps in the development of OSS programs will provide greater clarity to the discussion of the OSS phenomenon.

Starting with Eric Raymond's groundbreaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Yet, given the nature of software programs, one also hears of developers with no lives that work very hard to achieve great product results. In this paper, I sought empirical evidence that would help us understand which is more common - the cave (i.e., lone producer) or the community. Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge, I find a few surprising things. First, most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1 - numbers much lower than previous numbers reported for highly successful projects! Second, most OSS programs do not generate a lot of discussion. Third, products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more often. Fourth, the number of developers associated with a project was positively correlated to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of project administrators.

Starting with Eric Raymond's ground-breaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Ghosh's cooking pot markets, similarly, point to a communal product development system. Certainly, this is a good label for some OSS products that have been featured prominently in the news. For instance, Moon and Sproull point out that by July 2000, about 350 contributors to LINUX were acknowledged in a credits list in the source code of the kernel.

However, my goal in this paper is to ask if the community-based model of product development holds as a general descriptor of the average OSS product. I systematically look at the actual number of developers involved in the production of one hundred mature OSS products. What I found is more consistent with the lone developer (or cave) model of production rather than a community model (with a few glaring exceptions, of course).

This is not to say that there is no community in the OSS movement. For instance, the findings of Butler, Kiesler, Sproull and Kraut (2002) point to participation by individuals other than the creators of OSS-program-related mailing lists. My contention is only that communities do things other than produce the actual product - e.g. provide feature suggestions, try products out as lead users, answer questions etc. Formally separating software production from other steps in the development of OSS programs will provide greater clarity to the discussion of the OSS phenomenon.

They don't need to. Check out this article , which says: almost 70% of Gnutella users share no files, and nearly 50% of all responses are returned by the top 1% of sharing hosts They just need to lower the profile slightly to crop out the major players. Now - if we assume that the article is correct, what I have to ask is, why doesn't the RIAA start serving glitchy copies of their music as a superpeer? Given the low proportion of uploaders, they should find it easy to either flood a network with crap or at least incrase the search costs to the degree that people can't be bothered with using it. Like Gresham's law that bad money drives out good, or Akerlof's Lemons principle.