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But you're acting against a force of nature here. What's going to happen when people can transfer data wireless ad-hoc, encrypted over long distances? Or through their skin when they brush up against each other in a crowded train? How will the police protect you and your copyright monopoly then?

We are actually developing a training product. I can't say whether it will be like yours or not, because you don't give enough details, but it'll be distributed on CD and sold for £20 or so. This is because the market we are trying to capture (SMEs) still values stuff they can hold and they pay for. If people copy it and share it, you know what, I really don't care. It's a loss leader for us, designed to get us into the SME market which is absolutely the hardest place to be (so many of them, requires massive marketing budgets normally). It's designed to get us lots of small consulting contracts that we can mostly automate.

Sorry, but the world has changed.

Rich.

That's the leader's advantage.

q.v. Power Law

Ah yes, I *want* to spend my day thinking "hmm... is it worth 2 cents to me to read this article? Here's one over here for just a penny..." You should read this: the best article about micropayments ever written, and another one just in case. The problem with micropayments is *not* the technology. It's that nobody wants them. Period. (OK, maybe not "nobody." But, say, 99%+ of the world. Close enough.)

There's an interesting article on Clay Shirky's site, that deals with this very topic:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html or via Google
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22A+Group+is+its+O wn+Worst+Enemy%22
How there's some difficulty in separating the wheat from the chaff :)

While the idea of the semantic web has been legitimately lambasted, I think it's a bit far from DOA. While I agree that it's not exactly practical, I think that if you get enough sites displaying their content in such a manner, you'll eventually reach a point at which others will do the same.

I mean, think about it this way - while laziness or inertia might initially win out, once someone's competitors start to explore the idea of the semantic web, interest will start to be shown in it, especially once it becomes either profitable to do so.

The Stanford research is interesting, but I'm still trying to make up my mind about the Semantic Web, learning about RDF, and whether I need to bake in ways of handling these kinds of assertions in my web app. The Stanford group writes, "Our hope is that our search application spurs development of the Semantic Web, and leads to sites publishing their data in this format so that we don't have to." It obviously takes more work to encode such information and getting user contributions auto-marked for the semantic web. For a counter viewpoint, take a look at some of Clay Shirky's work -- in particular:

• The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview written in Nov 2003.
• His excellent talk "Ontology is Overrated" in downloadable spoken audio

Will the semantic web be supported by future versions of Drupal, phpBB, and other grass-roots content management web apps? Not sure. Since a lot of the content is visitor generated, you would have to build in ways of providing easy markup. Would be interested to hear /. thoughts on the matter.

Designed in the 1970s, the RDBMS has nevertheless proven to be the cornerstone of Web development three decades later. Thanks to systems like MySQL deployments are surely at record levels.

Essayist Clay Shirky has gone to far as to suggest that MySQL is at the center of a whole new software movement.

In my experience with Web applicaions the chief problem with the RDBMS seems to be that it does not do text indexing and search very well, so I have to keep a second store of data in something like Lucene.

The other major problem is the level of skill required to tune the database to achieve high-performance SQL queries, so hopefully the RDBMS will evolve with more self-configuration capability.

The article, which I only skimmed, actually addresses these two concerns but seems to pooh-pooh the notion of simply refining the existing RDBMS systems. Instead it says " Old-style database systems solve old-style problems; we need new-style databases to solve new-style problems. "

The paper seems awfully squishy on what this means. The clearest I found was a call to "produce a storage engine that is more configurable so that it can be tuned to the requirements of individual applications."

But this call for new highly modular/configurable storage "engines" seems to me to require at least as much fussy care and feeding as a traditional RDBMS. You're just replacing one DBA with another. And throwing out decades of refinement in the process.

The raison d'etre of the RDBMS is to allow the programmer to treat storage as a black box while gaining nifty ACID features. Extending this to text indexing seems logical.

The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

"metadata is just data with unstandard interfaces"; read, write, and hierarchical file namespaces rule

"Zipf's Law (which again is just a rough empirical rule) says that if we order some large collection by size or popularity, the 2nd one will be about half of the first one in the measure we are using, the 3rd one will be about one third of the first one, and in general the one ranked k-th will be about 1/k of the first one.

"Now let us suppose that the incremental value that a person gets from other people being part of a network varies as Zipf's Law predicts. Let's further assume that for most people their most valuable communications are with friends and family, and the value of those communications is relatively fixed - it is set by the medium and our makeup as social beings. Then each member of a network with n participants derives value proportional to log(n), for n log(n) total value."

...iirc, you can derive Zipf's law mathematically if you assume that "the rich get richer"...eg, the more people link to a site, the more people discover the site and link to it themselves. (Here's a claim that weblog popularity obeys this distribution.)

You should read a bit on group behaviour.
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

"The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies."

They are used to fear and terror and will be distrustful of your attempts to get work done. A few can defend against rogue attempts to illicit secure information, but most will just be jerks about it and everybody hurts.

More on this subject: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. It's about how groups and individuals work. A good read actually.

The reason that crypto can never really be made 100% convenient is Zooko's triangle: you want the name by which you refer to your correspondant to be memorable, globally unique, and free from centralized control, but you can't have all three (see also Clay Shirky's restatement of this idea). So if you want to use email addresses, someone has to be the centralized authority from which is ultimately derived your right to state that you are the legitimate recipient of a certain email.

If we had DNSSEC - if domain authorities routinely certified DNSSEC public keys with the same authority by which they allow name server records to change - then this would mean the central authority was at least doing their job properly and we could use it to build an email infrastructure. But then people wouldn't pay Verisign for certificates, so that would never do.

Hehe, excellent. Alternatively, you could try to eat the fish jell-o, like Clay Shirky did:

http://www.shirky.com/writings/lutefisk.html

Now that suprnova.org is offline, the following are the best torrent sites to visit. However, no single website has yet risen to the rank of Suprnova successor (as power law dictates).

http://www.tvtorrents.tv
http://www.orbdesign.n et/
http://www.btefnet.net
http://www.fulldls.co m
http://www.tv-swarm.com
http://www.bi-torrent. com
http://isohunt.com
http://torrentspy.com
ht tp://thepiratebay.org
http://torrentreactor.net
http://filelist.org
http://newtorrents.info
http ://elitetorrents.org
http://lokitorrent.com
http ://www.lickmytaint.com/bt.html
http://www.420join t.com/bt/
http://www.torrentsearch.com
http://ww w.bitconsole.com/
#BT-GM on EFnet
http://www.nswhub.com
http://www.torrentsp y.com

- They made back their development costs in under a year (which is a stupid amount of money).
- The average amount of time spent by a player online is 80 hours per month. That's a part-time job. And that's only the average (there are some crazy people out there).
- Almost everyone checked in at least once a month. So there were very few people who were just holding onto accounts because they didn't want their characters to go away.
- He said that he thought that if they'd charged $20/month, people would have paid up (actually, he seemed a little bitter that they hadn't).

I think that for the big games, it doesn't really make sense - they're on the big end of a fat paycheck, and there's just not a lot of incentive for them to choose a different model. Also, they're trying to develop a core group of hardcore fans. The people who're only stopping by for a couple of hours a week are the aberrations, not their core audience. And by developing a pay-per-play system they'd actually be punishing the exact people they're trying to attract.

Clay Shirky had an interesting op-ed piece on micropayments and why they wouldn't work. I don't know if he's right, but I don't think that the pay-as-you-go model makes a whole lot of sense.

daniel

One of the things I've missed from reading replies, and the topic itself, are the varied contexts of "side job." Permit me to illuminate the whole "side job" thing," in my limited experience.

First, many people take 'em for different reasons. I reject many offers because 1)My boss treats me pretty well (I won't compete) and 2)A lot of people who want side work want x-tra $aving$, so get mad when you tell 'em you can't save 'em as much as they thought because of some unforseen problem that a pro will need to resolve at pro pricing. What it comes down to is do you really want to work for someone that's willing to pay your boss full freight for the big stuff but want's to cut corners on a repair and THEN has the gall to bitch because it wasn't such a small, inexpensive job after all?

So, most people take the occasional side job for extra bucks, and want little hassle. They usually pick their jobs pretty well, which means if you were a jerk on the job (the howeowner) then chances are good that you'll get rejected. I've done it with tile and computer services. (I'm branching out to other endeavors--"Making $$ with my hobby!" [grin].)

Now the other side jobber is the one that's building a business. The honorable ones tend not to 'steal' their boss's customers. They might do some side work, even some large jobs, but the purpose (besides extra ching) is reputation building. Or, for you corporate entities, brand building. These people tend to contract outside of their boss's circle, also, to avoid ill will.

"one day" the side jobber will go out on his own. If the old boss was an asshole, or if the jobber is 'dishonorable' toward a decent guy, he might take a sizeable chunk of his former employer's clientele with him.

Or, if your old boss can't keep up (as what happened to me) one of your old boss's clients will run into you at the convienience store, tell you how terrible that guy has been and "will you please pick up some slack, i'll pay well."

In the end, those wanting to start their own business will more than likely come cheaper on 'side jobs', than a "regular" company because in the contracting business it's all about reputation. Unlike Software coding, brick and mortar builders are liable for their product, whether or not that liability is backed by legal threat. If my product fails my name goes on that asshole list. Enough failures will ruin my business.(Are you listening, Bill?)

Know what that means? A side job is still work! That's right, whenever you are committing time and effort for financial gain, you are working and sometimes that can interfere with your "other life." So, the saavy side jobber takes into account the cyclical nature of "crunch times." We'll turn down jobs we suspect will clash with our "reglular job.

[tip] For example, did you know the best time to seek someone like me for "side work" might be the time between New year's and Taxes? People hold off on major projects until after their taxes and holidays are reconciled, so a lot of guys are laid off until spring

The whole point of this post is two fold: to head of some misconceptions, mainly the implied one that "side work" is "easy Money." It's not, nor should it be. Above all else it should be rewarding, else why do it? If you can't make ends meet then maybe something else needs adjustment?

...And I really want to encourage people who work in I.T. -and especially those that evangelize open source and other I.P. issues- to get out there and and do something to bring it out to public life. There's a pile of cash to be made on situated programming

besides, you know what they say, right? "Fix a computer, it's fixed for a day. Teach the guy how to use it and it's fixed for life...well, almost.

The article you provided was very insightful. There are some good points for designing software to support groups. It's often difficult to think as a group would think, but once you acknowledge the new perspective you start to see how things could be improved.

http://www.shirky.com
Look at this site if you want to read some interesting essays.
"Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet
Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source"
You'll find essays about blogs.
The link come from the article itself.

I found this on the java forums, it provides interesting insight into online communities. basically breaks down some interesting psychological points on them

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html/

Clay Shirky has written an excellent article about why the Semantic Web ain't gonna work. I don't agree with everything he says, but it's a thought-provoking read nevertheless.

Whenever I see something about the semantic web, I go back to Clay Shirky's critique of it.

A useful antidote to the hype.

And, mentioned at the time, was Clay Shirky's dissenting view, which makes for much better reading than TFA in this case.

If you'd like an opposing view, make sure to read Clay Shirky's take on the semantic web.

This is basically wrong - I will try and explain, or at least give some examples...

"...In VoIP, the burden is already being paid for by the backbone ISPs who provide overseas network connections over their fat pipes."

Wrong - you pay for the network which you are running VoIP on. No Telco or ISP pays for you, because if they did they would be out of business.

The real difference between VoIP and POTS is the charging model:

> POTS is distance based

> VoIP is not distance based (VoIP is a free service, supported by an underlying packet switching network which is not distance charged).

This difference is the core of the paradigm shift that is taking place.

"A general rise in prices charged to ISPs will find their way down to the end subscriber and all those pennies saved using VoIP vanish in a puff of logic"

Rubbish - for loads of reasons, including...

Telcos are regulated, and exist in a competitive market - they cannot just hike the price of bandwidth to cover the loss in POTS revenue.

A large cost of POTS is having to individually price each call a customer makes, then invoice them, collect the money, provide call centres, provision switches ...etc.

Broadband (which is driving VoIP) is a significantly simpler model, for example one fixed recurrent charge every month (and no complex infrastructure).

What is far more likely to happen is that the Telcos will either change voluntarily, or be brought out and forced to change, or go bust, be brought up at a yard sale, and change.

"Add to this that once consumer groups figure out that the burden of *your* high VoIP usage is borne by *all* subscribers, they will start demanding tiered service and your delightfully cheap long distance calls will suddenly be just as expensive as they were on the old POTS program"

This doesnt actually make any sense - A consumer group that lobbies for higher prices for everyone?

VoIP, at the most simple level, is not even detectable by the telco. They supply a broadband connection to you. What you do with it is up to you. Take a long hard look at Skype and their business model (www.Skype.com).

Also - what does it matter for you how much I am using VoIP, if you are paying a fixed monthly fee for your broadband?

I shall stop going on about this as I should be working. Here are some interesting articles which might help...

"Rise of the stupid network" by David Isenberg

http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html

"Customer-owned Networks" by Clay Shirky

http://shirky.com/writings/zapmail.html

If this new economy behaves like other network phenominae, i.e. following a power law then it will produce a bevy of Billionaires.

Now, I dont have any problem with Billionaires or even Millionaires, but think about it in this way; which of the "root bloggers" or internet celebrities would you select to be the first multi Brillionaire of this new economy if you had the choice?

More to the point, which one would you trust to have that much power? They would not only have the cash, but they would also dominate this new economy, and being first movers, it would be VERY difficult to find a place let alone compete effectively.

Then again, if it is more fair than the real world economy, it may act like a frictionless meritocracy. That would be ideal; take paypal out of the equation and replace it with Chaumian e-cash and then we might finally achieve "detachment" (spontaneous, mass independence from regulation).

Which would really change everything.

Clay Shirky has just posted his essay, The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good . It starts with mentioning that the FCC is considering opening up additional spectrum for unlicensed uses -- "the same kind of regulatory change that gave rise to Wifi" -- and points out that "The 2.4Ghz spectrum is not treated as property, with the FCC in the ungainly role of a 'No Trespassing" enforcer; instead, it is being treated as a public good, with regulations in place to require devices to be good neighbors, but with no caps or other restrictions on deployment or use."

Good reading all 'round.

(mysteriously available already)

No kidding, not only is it available this side of the decade, it's been online for two years and was even linked from a comment on this very site.

Well, the dotcom world hasn't moved that much since then, but by the same token, the semantic web hasn't really made much progress either.
Clay Shirky has some wisely pessimistic views on the subject. For example, he cites the W3C's own example in promoting the semantic web:

Q: How do you buy a book over the Semantic Web?

A: You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want. You add information to the Semantic Web saying that you accept the offer and giving details (your name, shipping address, credit card information, etc). Of course you add it (1) with access control so only you and seller can see it, and (2) you store it in a place where the seller can easily get it, perhaps the seller's own server, (3) you notify the seller about it. You wait or query for confirmation that the seller has received your acceptance, and perhaps (later) for shipping information, etc. [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/semweb/]

As Shirky observes, One doubts Jeff Bezos is losing sleep.

• Metacrap
• Shirky: The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview

I have no problem with people using copyright to charge for their software - it seems to me both parties get something from the deal. But it has to happen in a free market, and in the free market the price of information has fallen and can't get up.

As Shirky says: The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Nor should we. Industrialization wiped out the weavers' guilds, most of the farming population and the horse-cart manufacturers - and we're better off for it. The winds of change are blowing again. Let's tear down the windbreaks and build windmills instead.

Have you considered the webbrowser? Its like skinning on top of a braindead set of controls, with all the power of your local machine stripped away in favor of... What exactly?

Roughly, this: In Praise of Evolvable Systems.

Clay Shirky makes a strong case why micropayments haven't taken off, and probably won't in the forseeable future. In short, the difference between "free" and "only $0.005" is much larger than only half a cent - it's a change in the mindset of the reader. The article also references more academic papers describing the weaknesses of micropayments.

Clay Shirky makes a strong case why micropayments haven't taken off, and probably won't in the forseeable future. In short, the difference between "free" and "only $0.005" is much larger than only half a cent - it's a change in the mindset of the reader. The article also references more academic papers describing the weaknesses of micropayments.

I check in from time to time, but Rusty transfered DNS and email management (as well as unix adimining stuff) away from me one-piece at a time over the course of 3 years. In the beginning, I was doing everything that wasn't Scoop. Around fall 2003, it was down to DNS and email service. I switched from one provider to another, but has having troubles with it as my day job kept interfering with getting the network going (I was working 10 hour days and always burnt out), so Rusty moved that away too.

At that point, the only thing I had on K5 has my account, which is still there. I revised the FAQ a little, and checked into some of the new admin stuff (abuse reporting and handling), but the site content itself went downhill around the same time.

It's funny.. I run my own site, and have been doing this and that there in my spare time (right now I'm back in university and working on top of it, so this time is little), and nothing I've ever mentioned on it in 5 years of updates has ever gotten me in trouble, but one diary entry on K5 3 years ago got me thrown out of a computer programming contest run by some religious freaks.

I have something lined up that might be cool, but it's strictly video game related. I'm hoping to combine the best of several sites into one, and ditch the paid-for inflated review structure :) Once I have finished my degree, though, I may try and figure out a better way to model social structure in software, learning from previous lessons... I'm not sure if there's anything scalable in the way I want it to be, though, without hiding a lot of stuff ala Livejournal.

I'm talking about the Semantic Web, which is an attempt to deal with the IMO biggest problem with the web, and especially searching the web for information: you can only search according to syntax. Words, regexes, etc. is really the best you can do right now. ... An example: searching for "a yellow car for sale in $CITY, with a cost between $VAL1 and $VAL2." would not give a lot of unusable results today, but the semantic web would return what is actually asked for.

The "Semantic Web" is mostly an academic pipe dream, and here's a great explanation why:

Many networked projects, including things like business-to-business markets and Web Services, have started with the unobjectionable hypothesis that communication would be easier if everyone described things the same way. From there, it is a short but fatal leap to conclude that a particular brand of unifying description will therefore be broadly and swiftly adopted (the "this will work because it would be good if it did" fallacy.) Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data describes a worldview.
--Clay Shirky

While I think that Shirky is taking a bit of an extremist stance, I do believe that the web as we know has been successful for the very same reasons that the standards brigade finds it frustrating. A profoundly easy learning curve, a well-defined though flexible standard, and few requirements for semantic correctness all go a long way. The success of google is proof that useful meaning can be strained from a sufficiently large corpus of disorganized data, and I think it's generally the right approach: provide a few obvious places for semantic meta-information to go (title tags, hyperlinks, headers), and let the masses decide how far to take it. The entire SEO field is based on providing economic rationales for good meta-data, but it's not a pre-requisite.

• Intelligent search engines that produce much better results than Google etc. because they can index the meaning of documents, not the words they contain.
  
• Agent technology that can retrieve information for you, price compare items you are shopping for and automate a number of interesting processes.
  
• Automatic clustering of website around subjects of interest to create much richer knowledge-oriented navigation.
  

Is it elitist to require that engineers who build bridges know the physics behind bridge building? Would you go to a doctor that didn't know the science of human physiology?

Well, no. But I'm not building a bridge; I'm building a shed for my lawn tools. And maybe I don't need open-heart surgery; maybe I just have a headache, and need a painkiller.

It is incredibly elitist to suggest that we need engineers for sheds and doctors for headaches, because it ensures that only those who can afford an engineer for every shed or a doctor for every headache will be able to have sheds or pain-free heads at all.

Similarly, not everyone who uses data needs to be a professional.

The linked article itself links to a piece by Clay Shirky which, basically, says the same thing. You should read it.

Like it or not, MySQL is highly successful because it was (historically) oriented towards non-professional use in a way no other database was. Everyone likes to point out all the shortcomings of MySQL, but no one seems to be doing the same for "professional" databases, and why MySQL has beaten them in the popularity department.

If DBAs don't want to go the way of blacksmiths, they had better start.

I stream most of my music like radio now - couldn't be bothered to actually download mp3s (free or not) - and I can't wait to see something like peercast p2p radio combined with a "people-who-like-this-also-like-this" collaborative filter.

--

Federal Express CEO Fred Smith made a huge investment in FAX over a private satellite network called Zapmail. The idea being they could do better than next day delivery by getting documents there in the next few hours.

Unfortunately for them high-speed FAX machines using dial-up phone lines became cheap and common and ZapMail was abandoned in a year.

Inserting the word "magically" into an assertion doesn't automatically make it dumb.

You're right, it's pretty fucking retarded all by itself with no insertion of words necessary.

Software sales generally come from people who meet both of the following criteria: "want the software," and "don't already have the software." If you pirated a game, you obviously met the first criterion, but you've removed yourself from the second one. That's one potential sale down the drain. The company has lost value. Not $20, but some percentage of it.

So if I remove myself from the second criteria, then it's like I never existed at all. See? If some strange holocaust killed all software pirates, it wouldn't change the revenue of software companies at all.

You need to add one more criteria: "willing to pirate software". There are people who are willing to pirate, there are people who will only use software they have acquired legally. There are probably a whole lot MORE legitimate users than pirates, not because users are particularly scrupulous, but because pirating executable code is more inconvenient and dangerous than pirating music or movies.

And looking at the sales figures, there are fantastically more legitimate users today than there ever were at any time in the past.

Not if production costs are increasing faster.

Right, something other than piracy is the source of independent developer's woe. You could blame the increasing costs of production--though I'm not sure that's really true. It costs a whole lot more to make the state of art 3d shooter than it cost to make a 2d platform game back in the day, but it's way the heck easier/cheaper to make a 2d platform game today then it has ever been in the past. I suspect that as time goes on, making 3d games is going to be easier and cheaper. 3D models will always be more expensive to build than 2D sprites, but the diminishing marginal returns of 3D graphics are starting to kick in, as games displayed on televisions and computer monitors aren't going to be able to look too much better than they do now. Which means that games using cheap, easy to use pre-packaged 3d engines will become visually indistinguishable from games developed with expensive 3d programmers.

You could blame users for growing sick of the desktop computer as a gaming platform--consoles are a much larger percentage of the marketplace than they used to be, but are vastly less friendly to independent developers. (The web is more friendly to indies, but users aren't as willing to pay.)

You could blame the thousands and thousands of available classic titles, usually available at low cost somewhere or another. Whether I choose to pirate Warcraft III or keep playing my old copy of Command and Conquer Red Alert, I'm definitely not going to buy your new independent strategy game.

You could blame the power law. As the number of users and developers increases, it's just plain natural for a small set of powerful developers to make most of the sales.

Or you could blame users again for wanting big, complicated games, instead of small innovative games.

You could realize that computer software is what microeconomics textbooks call "a natural monopoly"--the marginal costs of producing new copies is near zero, so the market gravitates toward a few dominant players.

That's not to say that a pirate shouldn't think twice about stealing an indy game they like if they'd like to see more of that sort of game in the future. But that's no more true today than it was in the past, and piracy is definitely not the reason large game developers are winning.

No, piracy takes money out of the pockets of developers through thoroughly non-magical means. Inserting the word "magically" into an assertion doesn't automatically make it dumb. You're right, it's pretty fucking retarded all by itself with no insertion of words necessary. Software sales generally come from people who meet both of the following criteria: "want the software," and "don't already have the software." If you pirated a game, you obviously met the first criterion, but you've removed yourself from the second one. That's one potential sale down the drain. The company has lost value. Not $20, but some percentage of it. So if I remove myself from the second criteria, then it's like I never existed at all. See? If some strange holocaust killed all software pirates, it wouldn't change the revenue of software companies at all. You need to add one more criteria: "willing to pirate software". There are people who are willing to pirate, there are people who will only use software they have acquired legally. There are probably a whole lot MORE legitimate users than pirates, not because users are particularly scrupulous, but because pirating executable code is more inconvenient and dangerous than pirating music or movies. And looking at the sales figures, there are fantastically more legitimate users today than there ever were at any time in the past. Not if production costs are increasing faster. Right, something other than piracy is the source of independent developer's woe. You could blame the increasing costs of production--though I'm not sure that's really true. It costs a whole lot more to make the state of art 3d shooter than it cost to make a 2d platform game back in the day, but it's way the heck easier/cheaper to make a 2d platform game today then it has ever been in the past. I suspect that as time goes on, making 3d games is going to be easier and cheaper. 3D models will always be more expensive to build than 2D sprites, but the diminishing marginal returns of 3D graphics are starting to kick in, as games displayed on televisions and computer monitors aren't going to be able to look too much better than they do now. Which means that games using cheap, easy to use pre-packaged 3d engines will become visually indistinguishable from games developed with expensive 3d programmers. You could blame users for growing sick of the desktop computer as a gaming platform--consoles are a much larger percentage of the marketplace than they used to be, but are vastly less friendly to independent developers. (The web is more friendly to indies, but users aren't as willing to pay.) You could blame the thousands and thousands of available classic titles, usually available at low cost somewhere or another. Whether I choose to pirate Warcraft III or keep playing my old copy of Command and Conquer Red Alert, I'm definitely not going to buy your new independent strategy game. You could blame the power law. As the number of users and developers increases, it's just plain natural for a small set of powerful developers to make most of the sales. Or you could blame users again for wanting big, complicated games, instead of small innovative games. That's not to say that a pirate shouldn't think twice about stealing an indy game they like if they'd like to see more of that sort of game in the future. But that's no more true today than it was in the past, and piracy is definitely not the reason large game developers are winning.

Check out iRATE for example.

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Clay Shirky has an excellent article on his site about how online groups are their own worst enemy. Basically, he states that in any online community there will eventually come hordes of people who miss the point and spoil the fun for everybody. It's a great read for anybody who's ever been player-killed, trolled or flamed on the 'net.

I might add one exception I've found; puzzle pirates. When I tried this game during the beta testing, I thought I'd accidentally connected to the wrong internet or something. In general the users are helpful and benign, and there's hardly a mention of 'I w1ll 0wnz0r j00 f4gg0t!!'.

It's a consequence of Zooko's Triangle. See also Clay Shirky's
Domain Names: Memorable, Global, Non-political? In summary, there are three properties you want from a naming scheme:

* memorable names
* globally unique names
* names free from centralized control

Of these properties, you can have any two.

There's a nice commentary on how it is difficult to separate social from technical concerns. [link]. Perhaps that should be extended to the economic space as well.

What Verisign is trying to do is simple, enclose the entire DNS space. One solution in rejecting their governance is to support alternative domains ([AlterNIC]) but in some ways this is akin to a poison pill defense in that you're likely to get instability until an oliopoly forms.

Practically I doubt whether profit-oriented entity is willing to give up their fee from the assignment of names. I just hope an enlightened successor to Postel steps forward.

LL

When I first read about "the semantic web", my first thoughts were "how the hell is this useful?"

About a year later, I noticed that Clay Shirkey had written an interesting article on the Semantic Web...

It's a bit of a long read, but it does sum up the issues with it quite handily.

Why depend on a single employee for an answer to that question when you can query millions of people for a much better answer using collaborative filtering?

When this collaborative filtering is finally embraced (much more than it is now) record stores and labels will truly be useless relics. What are they needed for again?:

• physical distribution? nope - the net is cheaper and more efficient.
• production? nope - anybody can produce studio quality music on the cheap.
• marketing? nope - bottom-up collaborative filtering will eventually drown owt the traditional top-down advertising tactics that used to dictate the flavor of the month (mtv/clearchannel/etc).

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I agree with you there; Collaborative Filtering and "smart mobs" are the way things will increasingly be done. It will take a while to get there though because it conflicts with the current money being made in top-down Command & Control mode vs. bottom-up, self-organizing emergence mode.

iRATE radio is a great example of this. It adapts to your tastes in music over time, with no ClearChannel dictating the flavor of the month.

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I think Cal Shirky said it best.

shirky clay has an interesting article on why he thinks that micropayments won't work. the main gist is that it's not a question of technology, but rather that users don't want to have to be constantly making decisions about whether or not to buy something, irrespective of the amount.

Shirky has some interesting things to say about this.