The paper predicts that novels wouldn't do well, and I'd extend that to music.
Here's an excerpt from the paper:
"This suggests that peer-production will thrive where projects have three characteristics. First, they must be modular. That is, they can be broken up into variously sized components, each of which can be produced independently of the production of the others. This enables people with different levels of motivation to collaborate by contributing variously-sized contributions, consistent with their level of motivation. Second, modules must be relatively fine-grained. That is, the smallest-grained contributions need to be relatively small, so as to capture contributions from very large numbers of contributors whose motivation level will not sustain anything more than quite small efforts towards the project. Novels, for example, at least those that look like our current conception of a novel, are likely to prove resistant to peer-production. Third, and finally, the cost of integrating the contribution needs to be relatively low. If the cost of integration is too high, integration will either fail or will force the integrator to appropriate the residual value of the common project- usually leading to a dissipation of the motivations ex ante. Where the cost of integration is sufficiently low, or where integration itself can be iteratively peer-produced, as where free software is used to integrate the peer-production effort, integration need not appropriately the residual category, and the peer-production enterprise can succeed and sustain itself." (page 8)
So the three requirements are modularity, fine-grained smallest modules, and low cost of integration.
Organizing communication by topic, like on Slashdot or K5 clearly meets these three requirements. DMOZ clearly meets the requirements. Free Software projects clearly meet the requirements.
Music production, however, does not.
Making music modular is difficult. Sure, music comes in tracks, but those are hardly fine-grained modules, and they are very tightly coupled- so tightly, that I would say that they are a cohesive unit, and not really modules at all.
This is the same difficulty with novels, alluded to before.
In the far future, we may have a modular description of music and novels,. Imagine that you paint a novel with a toolkit of styles, characters, events, messages, etc.,. I think it might be possible, but I also think that's a looong ways off.
I am saying that I think books are a superior educational method than rolling video.
Actually, Scott McCloud has good ideas on how you could make a "better book" with an easy to use computer screen that you could treat like a book. You could have infinitely large pages, and hyperlink between them. This IS different than the web, because the web only goes DOWN, not left/right up/down very easily. Also can't write on it- keep notes on the side.
But anyways, YES. I am saying that the book (or, more generally, static text&images) is better than having a movie play by. FAR better, in fact.
You can read text/image faster than you can listen to a person talk. You can search text faster than you can search a video. You can perform minute fast forwards and rewinds with much greater speed than you can through a video- just move your eye, rather than fiddling with a UI. I could go on for some time with this.
There are only 4 Ranma videos. You can forget Urusei Yatsura. (Oh wait- they have Beautiful Dreamer; Who doesn't?) At least they have SOME of Tenchi. Ah My Goddess? Not a one. Mononoke Hime is their sole Miyazaki- nary a Totoro even.
DDR is definitely a workout -- at least when you're doing the 3 or higher level songs.
The degree of the workout per song depends on your skill. I play Trick 6/7, and a Basic 3 or 4 doesn't work me up at all.
People who are just starting will work up a sweat on a Basic 2 song like Abyss or age 17.
I've seen Maniac players that Doxy hardly affects, so... Your milage varies with your skill.
That said, we tend to play songs that challenge us. Good players bring water with them, pace themselves, and can easily be at the arcade for an hour or two rotating with others. It's CERTAINLY a workout for all.
I believe they have, what; 1/2 of the population of the entire US in the space of California?
In the US, we'd have to put tracks EVERYWHERE to get an equivelent connection to what Japan has.
(Hm... Or, we could just move EVERYBODY to Washington, Oregon, and California, set the rest aside for public parks and farming, and THEN build our cool train system...)
Ah, now that's what we need- rigid hardline adherance to a legalistic code that tells us who is acceptable, and who is to be rejected.
Yes, it's a problem that people don't care much about each other. Yes, it's a problem that people hide behind "everything's okay".
But no, the solution is not to become hard-line 50's conformists that keep the rules of accept/do-not-accept in their head.
I think that we, as a society, should aim toward a Stoic set of values, but an understanding, and accepting, set of values as well. Otherwise, you end up like Ms. Manners, full of perfection and an absense of humility- only the show of it.
Something based on Harry Potter wouldn't be half bad.
The Fourier book is not lacking content-wise. It is quite an extraordinary book.
Your argument seems to be essentially: "It is important that we make bad books, because if we didn't, people wouldn't be able to read bad books, and that'd be bad, because bad books would be inaccessible to those people." I disagree entirely. A lot of the reason that we *have* bad books is because people have almost never seen a good book.
Its very rare that I've seen a block of text that couldn't be supported with a diagram of some sort.
Japanese documentation is vastly superior to US documentation; I believe it's because of the influence of manga in their culture. They are expert in communicating with pictures, and a culture that not only tolerates it, but expects it. (In the United States, pictures are held with suspicion, and a sign of a lack of knowledge.)
Read some good Japanese documentation to understand what I am talking about:
the DNA Adventure (aka "What is DNA?", or "Where is DNA?")
The first is translated into English, the second hasn't been translated yet. The first book explains Fourier, starting with basic trig.
In the US, our educational material is very poor. Pictures are either not present when they should be, or present when they shouldn't be. Marketting tastes usually move people towards glossy pictures over iconic representations that do a much better job of abstracting the message (read Chapter 2 of Understanding Comics to understand this well). Many technical people know that the images in our books are not there to help explain things, but rather, to sell books, and thus hold pictures in contempt. "Just give me the text symbols, and leave out the nonsense cute pictures. AraRararrARarr!" is a common attitude here, and it harms us, because we are not open to diagrams when they will help us.
I have seen many other examples of Japanese documentation, but I don't own them, so I can't list them here. Go to your local Japanese communities bookstore, though, and look for Linux documentation or educational materials. (They seem to think the Penguin is kawaii.) They are quite different than ours- beyond just different types of characters.
I was arguing against the notion that programmers must have business skills (ie, understanding business concepts, helping out with orders, following the ways of marketting) in order to program.
Sure, you have to know a little, (hell, just being alive, you soak in some of this), but it's not going to be a major discriminating factor (generally speaking).
I never even implied what you are talking about. Check the context.
Do you have some evidence, or is this just anti-union propaganda, ever popular with the employing class? (You can actually find books out there for employers, telling how to provide said propaganda to employees.)
No, there's no astroturfing. Here's what happened.
Programmers realized that Ayn Rand was a fool, and dumped anarcho-capitalism as a philosophy.
Programmers lost their inflated sense of importance. That inflated sense came from two sources: Employers telling them that they were the most beautiful darlings in the world, would-be programmers envying them their rich lives, and propaganda everywhere telling people that Science and Knowledge are Power, when the actual source of power is and has always been MONEY.
Programmers became aware of the ideals of a Free world, thanks to Richard Stallman and company.
Programmers learned about the suffering beyond their own industry through a combination of being laid off, and being aware of a larger world online. Programmers have been collectively, as a class, been living in a dream world, and we have realized the falsehood of our ways and beliefs.
There's no astro-turfing going on here. It's called waking up.
If unions serve no purpose other than extracting money from the common worker, than why are unions so hated by the employing class? If unions serve no purpose other than extracting money from the common worker, than why do the most repressive countries have strict anti-union laws? Why is being a union organizer lethal in anarcho-capitalist Colombia? Why do I see the unions at all of the idealistic marches that I go to? Why do many (but unfortunately, not all) unions have a much more democratic structure and power distribution than government agencies and companies?
Let's ask it the other way around: Why do programmers have no spines? Why do companies put the burden of education on the programmers? (In the IBEW, your education is free, both classes and apprenticeship, while you make a great wage. And if you want to study something outside of Electrician work, you are Free & free to do so; You can take carpentry classes for all they care.) Think about it: Why are employers so reluctant to train employees? Because they fear that they might go elsewhere. The unions have overcome this problem. You could take classes in all the latest programming languages, paradigms, tools, etc., etc.,. Your employer is never going to pay for it, unless you unionize.
The idea that there would be more Electricians, better paid, if there were no unions, is completely laughable, and is nothing more than anti-union propaganda.
For all you know, it's the best work they can get. Fuck you for judging them off hand.
If you have to choose between doing unethical work, or doing no work at all, you choose no work.
In these cases, the most ethical thing you can do may quite possibly be to take the money from the people who are going to turn other people into accomplices in crime with it.
You don't help your enemy, you sabatoge your enemy.
When people Unionize, it's much easier for them to stand by their ideals. They have the support of their coworkers, and power both within and without the work place.
Idealistic Unions succeed every day in this Real world.
No. Actually, there is huge unemployment in the software industry.
Here in SEATTLE, the progammers job fairs are devoid of employers, but full of would-be employees. The last one featured only two employers, one of which was Microsoft, and they just showed up to maintain a presence, not because there were actually any openings.
I've been programming since I was 7, and have 4 years of professional programming experience. All but 5 people, 3 of which were programmers (if I recall correctly) were laid off at the company I used to work for. There were 25-30 employees there, 15-20 of which were programmers.
I see local Unions (IBEW 46 & 77, Teamsters) out in the streets doing great things for people very frequently. They let other groups use their space, and are a great source of social and economic justice activism.
Unions go far in helping people build spines that they otherwise don't develop when they believe that their life is tied to a cruel system.
How can you even QUESTION for a moment commiting to the oath? I can't believe you all. "If I don't do evil, somebody else will."
What the hell kind of justification is that? Are you a machine or a person?
I quit my job when I was told to change the privacy policy statement on our web page. Were we going to notify people? Yeah, eventually they did- opt out policy, of course.
Check this out- they decided they wanted to sell as much personal information as possible. But they had to get peoples "consent". So they sent out two test 'notification' messages, one allowing people to opt-in, and one allowing people to opt-out, 5,000 people each. In both cases, they got only 5% response, either from people saying "yes, it's okay" or "no, it's not okay (FUCK YOU WE HATE YOU NOW)". I remember the Customer Service ladies joking about the hate mail we got back, as if these people were loonies for not wanting us to do this. (Oh yes, btw- we were truste approved..) When they found what everyone already knew- that people didn't respond either way, they said, "Oh, well, we'll just do opt-out", and sent out the notification. We got a lot of angry email after that, but it changed nothing.
I argued with my PM, who relayed my "concern" to our CTO. The CTO is an aristocrat and sees the wealthy as the custodians of society. It's right for him to do this, because the money will be used towards "proper" ends.
I left the company.
I shun all those who remained.
I shun all of the PMs who sat back and made up justifications for their transgressions. I shun the CTO's and investors who view themselves as the managers of the world.
Always have a back-up store of money, so that you aren't tempted to do evil in order to live.
Pussies who say that capitalism is good, but then violate the Golden Rule ("They're slackers anyways; They should read the contracts more carefully") drive me up the wall. Coworkers that claim that "If I don't, someone else will" drive me up the wall. The folks making the decisions saw it as their duty to guide the human race; They were manipulating people for their own good, and the sake of progress.
Slashdot Mirror
The paper predicts that novels wouldn't do well, and I'd extend that to music.
Here's an excerpt from the paper:
"This suggests that peer-production will thrive where projects have three characteristics. First, they must be modular. That is, they can be broken up into variously sized components, each of which can be produced independently of the production of the others. This enables people with different levels of motivation to collaborate by contributing variously-sized contributions, consistent with their level of motivation. Second, modules must be relatively fine-grained. That is, the smallest-grained contributions need to be relatively small, so as to capture contributions from very large numbers of contributors whose motivation level will not sustain anything more than quite small efforts towards the project. Novels, for example, at least those that look like our current conception of a novel, are likely to prove resistant to peer-production. Third, and finally, the cost of integrating the contribution needs to be relatively low. If the cost of integration is too high, integration will either fail or will force the integrator to appropriate the residual value of the common project- usually leading to a dissipation of the motivations ex ante. Where the cost of integration is sufficiently low, or where integration itself can be iteratively peer-produced, as where free software is used to integrate the peer-production effort, integration need not appropriately the residual category, and the peer-production enterprise can succeed and sustain itself." (page 8)
So the three requirements are modularity, fine-grained smallest modules, and low cost of integration.
Organizing communication by topic, like on Slashdot or K5 clearly meets these three requirements. DMOZ clearly meets the requirements. Free Software projects clearly meet the requirements.
Music production, however, does not.
Making music modular is difficult. Sure, music comes in tracks, but those are hardly fine-grained modules, and they are very tightly coupled- so tightly, that I would say that they are a cohesive unit, and not really modules at all.
This is the same difficulty with novels, alluded to before.
In the far future, we may have a modular description of music and novels,. Imagine that you paint a novel with a toolkit of styles, characters, events, messages, etc.,. I think it might be possible, but I also think that's a looong ways off.
Absolutely fascinating. I see no reason why it shouldn't work. I'll have to try it.
That said, control over indexing is critical, and you can index much faster with your eye than with a forward/rewind pair.
But I'll definitely try what you have recommended at some point. I had never heard of that before.
Give me a single example.
And- I forgot to add- not very popular with technophiles.
Technophiles are inclined to believe that the more gears and bits you put into a thing, the better it is.
"How dare you suggest your little pocket notebook is better than my PDA? It doesn't even have batteries? Luddite!"
As a programmer for 18 years so far, I have no difficulty ignoring such people.
When the PDA's are significantly better, I will use them. Until then, the pocket notebook is just fine for my needs.
Yes, that is exactly what I mean.
I am saying that I think books are a superior educational method than rolling video.
Actually, Scott McCloud has good ideas on how you could make a "better book" with an easy to use computer screen that you could treat like a book. You could have infinitely large pages, and hyperlink between them. This IS different than the web, because the web only goes DOWN, not left/right up/down very easily. Also can't write on it- keep notes on the side.
But anyways, YES. I am saying that the book (or, more generally, static text&images) is better than having a movie play by. FAR better, in fact.
You can read text/image faster than you can listen to a person talk. You can search text faster than you can search a video. You can perform minute fast forwards and rewinds with much greater speed than you can through a video- just move your eye, rather than fiddling with a UI. I could go on for some time with this.
Their anime selection is terrible.
There are only 4 Ranma videos. You can forget Urusei Yatsura. (Oh wait- they have Beautiful Dreamer; Who doesn't?) At least they have SOME of Tenchi. Ah My Goddess? Not a one. Mononoke Hime is their sole Miyazaki- nary a Totoro even.
Talk about poor selection...
NOOOoooooooo!!!
The degree of the workout per song depends on your skill. I play Trick 6/7, and a Basic 3 or 4 doesn't work me up at all.
People who are just starting will work up a sweat on a Basic 2 song like Abyss or age 17.
I've seen Maniac players that Doxy hardly affects, so... Your milage varies with your skill.
That said, we tend to play songs that challenge us. Good players bring water with them, pace themselves, and can easily be at the arcade for an hour or two rotating with others. It's CERTAINLY a workout for all.
I believe they have, what; 1/2 of the population of the entire US in the space of California?
In the US, we'd have to put tracks EVERYWHERE to get an equivelent connection to what Japan has.
(Hm... Or, we could just move EVERYBODY to Washington, Oregon, and California, set the rest aside for public parks and farming, and THEN build our cool train system...)
Yes, it's a problem that people don't care much about each other. Yes, it's a problem that people hide behind "everything's okay".
But no, the solution is not to become hard-line 50's conformists that keep the rules of accept/do-not-accept in their head.
I think that we, as a society, should aim toward a Stoic set of values, but an understanding, and accepting, set of values as well. Otherwise, you end up like Ms. Manners, full of perfection and an absense of humility- only the show of it.
Something based on Harry Potter wouldn't be half bad.
I agree with JimBobJoe.
The Fourier book is not lacking content-wise. It is quite an extraordinary book.
Your argument seems to be essentially: "It is important that we make bad books, because if we didn't, people wouldn't be able to read bad books, and that'd be bad, because bad books would be inaccessible to those people." I disagree entirely. A lot of the reason that we *have* bad books is because people have almost never seen a good book.
Its very rare that I've seen a block of text that couldn't be supported with a diagram of some sort.
Read some good Japanese documentation to understand what I am talking about:
The first is translated into English, the second hasn't been translated yet. The first book explains Fourier, starting with basic trig.
In the US, our educational material is very poor. Pictures are either not present when they should be, or present when they shouldn't be. Marketting tastes usually move people towards glossy pictures over iconic representations that do a much better job of abstracting the message (read Chapter 2 of Understanding Comics to understand this well). Many technical people know that the images in our books are not there to help explain things, but rather, to sell books, and thus hold pictures in contempt. "Just give me the text symbols, and leave out the nonsense cute pictures. AraRararrARarr!" is a common attitude here, and it harms us, because we are not open to diagrams when they will help us.
I have seen many other examples of Japanese documentation, but I don't own them, so I can't list them here. Go to your local Japanese communities bookstore, though, and look for Linux documentation or educational materials. (They seem to think the Penguin is kawaii.) They are quite different than ours- beyond just different types of characters.
Sure, but that's not what I was arguing against.
I was arguing against the notion that programmers must have business skills (ie, understanding business concepts, helping out with orders, following the ways of marketting) in order to program.
Sure, you have to know a little, (hell, just being alive, you soak in some of this), but it's not going to be a major discriminating factor (generally speaking).
I never even implied what you are talking about. Check the context.
What are the relevant differences in context?
Yeah, actually it is clear cut. I HAVE A FAMILY.
And if people are using you to do dirty deeds, and using the fact that you have a family to try and pressure you to do them, all the more insidious.
There are many many many ways of making money, and a few of them are even ethical. You can find those ways.
And how exactly does a union create artificial scarcety?
Can a union stop you from programming, and being able to program?
Hm. Interesting. Tell it to an Electrician.
Do you have some evidence, or is this just anti-union propaganda, ever popular with the employing class? (You can actually find books out there for employers, telling how to provide said propaganda to employees.)
No, there's no astroturfing. Here's what happened.
There's no astro-turfing going on here. It's called waking up.
If unions serve no purpose other than extracting money from the common worker, than why are unions so hated by the employing class? If unions serve no purpose other than extracting money from the common worker, than why do the most repressive countries have strict anti-union laws? Why is being a union organizer lethal in anarcho-capitalist Colombia? Why do I see the unions at all of the idealistic marches that I go to? Why do many (but unfortunately, not all) unions have a much more democratic structure and power distribution than government agencies and companies?
Let's ask it the other way around: Why do programmers have no spines? Why do companies put the burden of education on the programmers? (In the IBEW, your education is free, both classes and apprenticeship, while you make a great wage. And if you want to study something outside of Electrician work, you are Free & free to do so; You can take carpentry classes for all they care.) Think about it: Why are employers so reluctant to train employees? Because they fear that they might go elsewhere. The unions have overcome this problem. You could take classes in all the latest programming languages, paradigms, tools, etc., etc.,. Your employer is never going to pay for it, unless you unionize.
The idea that there would be more Electricians, better paid, if there were no unions, is completely laughable, and is nothing more than anti-union propaganda.
I know; I realized that later on, but it hadn't occured to me at the time.
I posted about that elsewhere, though I used the word "sabatoge" instead.
I don't think I'd go quite as far as you recommended, but there is plenty that can be done.
If you have to choose between doing unethical work, or doing no work at all, you choose no work.
In these cases, the most ethical thing you can do may quite possibly be to take the money from the people who are going to turn other people into accomplices in crime with it.
You don't help your enemy, you sabatoge your enemy.
When people Unionize, it's much easier for them to stand by their ideals. They have the support of their coworkers, and power both within and without the work place.
Idealistic Unions succeed every day in this Real world.
It sounds like what you need are Real Ethics.
No. Actually, there is huge unemployment in the software industry.
Here in SEATTLE, the progammers job fairs are devoid of employers, but full of would-be employees. The last one featured only two employers, one of which was Microsoft, and they just showed up to maintain a presence, not because there were actually any openings.
I've been programming since I was 7, and have 4 years of professional programming experience. All but 5 people, 3 of which were programmers (if I recall correctly) were laid off at the company I used to work for. There were 25-30 employees there, 15-20 of which were programmers.
I agree 100%.
I see local Unions (IBEW 46 & 77, Teamsters) out in the streets doing great things for people very frequently. They let other groups use their space, and are a great source of social and economic justice activism.
Unions go far in helping people build spines that they otherwise don't develop when they believe that their life is tied to a cruel system.
How can you even QUESTION for a moment commiting to the oath? I can't believe you all. "If I don't do evil, somebody else will."
What the hell kind of justification is that? Are you a machine or a person?
I quit my job when I was told to change the privacy policy statement on our web page. Were we going to notify people? Yeah, eventually they did- opt out policy, of course.
Check this out- they decided they wanted to sell as much personal information as possible. But they had to get peoples "consent". So they sent out two test 'notification' messages, one allowing people to opt-in, and one allowing people to opt-out, 5,000 people each. In both cases, they got only 5% response, either from people saying "yes, it's okay" or "no, it's not okay (FUCK YOU WE HATE YOU NOW)". I remember the Customer Service ladies joking about the hate mail we got back, as if these people were loonies for not wanting us to do this. (Oh yes, btw- we were truste approved..) When they found what everyone already knew- that people didn't respond either way, they said, "Oh, well, we'll just do opt-out", and sent out the notification. We got a lot of angry email after that, but it changed nothing.
I argued with my PM, who relayed my "concern" to our CTO. The CTO is an aristocrat and sees the wealthy as the custodians of society. It's right for him to do this, because the money will be used towards "proper" ends.
I left the company.
I shun all those who remained.
I shun all of the PMs who sat back and made up justifications for their transgressions. I shun the CTO's and investors who view themselves as the managers of the world.
Always have a back-up store of money, so that you aren't tempted to do evil in order to live.
Pussies who say that capitalism is good, but then violate the Golden Rule ("They're slackers anyways; They should read the contracts more carefully") drive me up the wall. Coworkers that claim that "If I don't, someone else will" drive me up the wall. The folks making the decisions saw it as their duty to guide the human race; They were manipulating people for their own good, and the sake of progress.
Fucking bastards.
Bee Ay eS Tee Ay aRe Dee eSs.
BASTARDS!
Shame on you!