I've used LaTeX (specifically TeXShop) lately for my latest books ( Translucent Databases , Disappearing Cryptography , and Policing Online Games . It does a remarkably good job with handling equations and it's easy to understand --- if you think like a programmer. You can just insert macro codes whenever you feel and you can also redefine the markup language whenever it strikes your fancy.
That being said, it takes some time to understand because errors in one section can trigger error messages in very different places. You need to think like a programmer to find them.
I've also used CVS to store the various versions of the document. LaTeX uses pure text files and so most of the features of CVS/SVN cross over.
I can say that I've used InDesign and come away impressed. You may also consider using MS Word because the copy editors and others who work with you on the project will probably insist that it's the only word processor that they know how to use. Sigh.
2) Search inside the book is a bad solution for anyone who writes a book that might be used as a reference. I regularly find that Google or Amazon lets me read 10-20 pages of a book and get everything I need.
One day there might a solution that lets us sell books by the page, but that has its own problems.
In general, an information transaction can't be reversed like the purchase of a car. You can't return the information and say, "Gosh, it's not exactly what I wanted." Even if you try desperately to get something out of your brain, it's nearly impossible. Try not to think of bananas. Try really, really hard not to think of bananas. Did you succeed?
The book is very cheap in the scheme of things. It's far from perfect--I can enumerate a number of flaws-- but it would take you more than $30 of your time to reassemble the same information. Even at minimum wage. I dare say it's a good deal for a peasant making $1/day.
3) Feel free to write me with any questions. p3 aaattt wayner.org.
No cloud service should be judged by how much engineering this requires, because it's not their responsibility.
Yes, I agree with you, but I don't think that everyone knows this yet. I interviewed several users who seemed very annoyed that they had to backup their MySQL databases themselves.
Why? Here's a quote from Google AppEngine's front page:
Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
Amazon is a bit more guarded on their front page, but I still think an optimistic programmer could get the wrong impression:
your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
It's easy to forget that it's your job to make the "automatically" apply successfully. I think a number of people will continue to be disappointed to learn what you already know so well.
While you may be right about the general odds of prosecution, I can tell you that the odds increase dramatically if you trumpet what you're doing in a newspaper that prints more than a million copies in a day.:-)
But it's more complicated than that. The press enjoys what few protections it has left when it doesn't break laws. So most reporters try to break as few laws as they can.
Finally, it gave me an excuse to discuss an interesting aspect that isn't covered that often.
It occurs to me that a good analogy is to the GCC compiler. It may be open source and it may use code templates that are open source, but you get to own the copyright of what you create with it. This was a smart move by Stallman way back when and I think it's a good analogy for Lego blocks or Legos or whatever you call them.
They might have a case if I duplicated individual blocks. But the spaceship design was my own and there's no way to disassemble it into the pieces. Furthermore, the construction mechanism effectively stripped away large parts of each individual piece because it didn't duplicate the hidden surfaces. I probably didn't duplicate more than 20% of the surface of the average piece-- and I didn't duplicate any of the functional parts that helped the pieces grip each other.
I did consider using modeling clay, but I'm not a great artist.
Yes, you're right. The cost is prohibitive when compared with mass production with molded ABS. But there are many areas where I imagine it might catch on. I wouldn't be surprised if the model railroad community develops an open source collection of STL files. Anyone can download homes, train stations or what not for building out their train layout. In these areas, the price and advantage of customization will be competitive.
One of the reasons I wrote the piece is because things are getting pretty cheap. Not Game Boy cheap, but something that's in line with the historical cost of photography. We're not at the introductory price of a Kodak Brownie (supposedly $1 in 1900), but we're near the price of early cameras when adjusted for inflation. The NextEngine costs $2500 new and the print shops will build items for about $70-$200.
We're getting near affordability for the "prosumer" who might want a hobby. I can imagine that these devices might be very useful to model train hobbiests, artists, and others. One artist I know builds Joseph Cornell-like boxes filled with historical scenes. They're great, really.
There are a wide variety of technologies in the marketplace and each have their advantages. Alas, I couldn't write a survey. The Z Corp models look flashy in the pictures because they're in full color, but they're probably not the strongest.
Some of the other systems from companies like Dimension or Stratasys use stronger plastics but can't produce multicolored items.
Some can produce fully working items right from the printer . They deposit two types of material: one soluable and one insoluable. After the thing is printed, you wash away the soluable stuff and the gaps open up. It's amazing. I've played with fully adjustable crescent wrenches that are built with almost the same precision as the ones from Sears. The plastic isn't as durable as metal, but you can certainly build things with the wrench. I'm told one of the cooler demonstration items is a bicycle chain that's fully assembled after the wash.
In some sense, these pre-assembled machines are better than traditional manufacturing techniques because you can build working items inside of sealed shells. There's no ship-in-a-bottle paradox because everything is built from the bottom up.
Does Britannica think of itself as a secondary source or a tertiary source? Perhaps both. Employing experts for their expertise with primary (and secondary materials) makes it seem more like a secondary source to me. This is all rather nebulous and not worth debating because most papers are a mixture. Many scientific papers in referreed journals are primary sources and only refer to other works to put their original work in context. But then they switch over to secondary for sections and even become tertiary sources themselves.
It's also impossible to debate whether Wikipedia claims to be anything because I edited some page to make the claims I wanted. Someone reverted it but I'll fix it back in a second.:-) Seriously, many fans of wikipedia make many claims about it as they revel in what's been accomplished. And you even say that it's replacing Google for you-- something that should give the boys in Mountain View pause. But I'm more interested in the end game, after the CB Radio honeymoon. There is a very real possibility that the Encyclopedia Brittanica and many many other reference books will be killed off by the wikipedia. This may be great for many reasons, but it's important to understand the downsides as we snort the hype.
My guess is the logical inconsistency depends upon whether you believe that the Wikipedia can stand above and apart from the regular body of knowledge. If it is separate, you can maintain the logical consistency. But what happens when people who print books or scientific journal articles use Wikipedia with or without citing it? Now, can a Wikipedia article be based upon that printed work? What happens after these facts get repeated through several cycles? There's a real possibility that the general quality of the Wikipedia will make it a default reference work in many fields-- something that's probably going to happen as more graduate students grow up trusting it. But this is only a general quality and it shifts with the intellectual tides.
Ultimately, these points can also be made about the old dead-tree realm. The scale is just bigger now and the speed is dramatically quicker. And given that the dead-tree world has given us many printed equivalents to 1=0, I'm see no reason to believe that the Wikipedia will be any different.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
Can you give me an example of a situation where a product was well liked by the public but was taken away from the market (aka "market failure")?
There are many cases, but they're not the cases you want to hear about. Companies go out of business all of the time. They end product lines. In most of these cases, the companies have some customers, but usually they don't have enough customers to make it worth their while to continue or sell/give the business to someone else.
You're going to say something like, "Oh but the consumers were able to make do with something else that was produced by another company more efficiently." And so the market succeeded. I'm going to say, "But maybe it wasn't the same thing. And maybe making do wasn't good enough. Maybe they were still sad."
We're really arguing from different points of view and so there will never be any convergence. You'll look at the local stores driven out of business by the big box stores and say, "Wow. Everything is so much more efficient now." I'll say, "But look at the reduction of choice from a merchant that knows little about local differences."
And so I think we've reached an impasse. I'm going to have to sign off now because of a pressing deadline.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
My question was "wrong according to who?". I don't know what your answer means in this context.
I'm using the same weighted average of society to measure good as you are. I'm not assuming that there's some central force. That's just your assumption because I'm complaining about market failure.
Here's another way of articulating how the free economy is different from the micropayment. In other words, this is how a price of zero is different from epsilon pennies.
When an information producer creates and sells something for n cents, then every consumer sends a message back to the producer when they pay n cents. That is how the consumers communicate with the producers. This is how the market helps producers discover what the world as a whole wants.
When you have free information, that feedback loop is broken. The consumers don't send a message back to the producer when they consume it. Oh, maybe the producer can gain some information from log files, but that doesn't happen in a P2P world. The consumer stops driving the production of knowledge. The consumer's definition of "good" becomes less influential. The game changes.
I think I did a better job of explaining this in my talk.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
Again, wrong according to whom? Do you see a pattern here? You are deciding what is 'good' and what is 'bad'. And guess what? These 'quasi-governments' exist at the mercy of the market - the real governments do not. Everyone here in Chicago thought Sears was king and no one could beat them - Walmart and Kmart gave ppl what they wanted and Sears is (almost) history. And if enough people feel that Walmart is evil and stop shopping there, they are gone. Would that happen with govt?
I never said that. I just said that the internet's bias toward free information makes it difficult for people to producers to collect from consumers. I never said anything about some central force controlling anything. It's alll about whether the mass collection of producers can connect and collection from consumers.
You're missing my point. While the Wikipedia may position itself as a tertiary source and enforce a policy of NOR, but the rest of the world doesn't pick up on this. Nor does the Wikipedia push this effort outside of internal discussion boards. In the famous comparison with Encyclopedia Britanica, the Wikipedia folks seemed pretty happy to be placed on par with the famous rival. There was little public correction saying, "No. We're not in Britannica's league. We don't allow experts to synthesize information for us. That's for the secondary sources. We're just a tertiary source." Until there's more public self-deprecation, I'm going to stick with my categorization.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
Here's another way of looking at it. Certainly zero is just an epsilon away from.0001 cents and a bit more away from $10. But the world is often discontinuous. One of the bigger hurdles to micropayments on the Internet is the cost of a transaction.So this has stopped many experiments dead in their tracks. So free has a big advantage over 1 penny, one dime or even one quarter. It's fair to say that it's cheaper to give something away over the internet than to charge 10 to 25 cents. (Google Checkout's effect on this will be interesting because it has a pretty low threshold.)
Think about running a store in NYC. If the cheapest storefront costs $n/month, then you can't run a store in NYC unless you make $n or get $n from your parents.
You're quite right that the news about Britney and Tara is theoretically just as valid as any other. My larger point is that the cheap information drives out the dear. There are hidden subsidies and they're not just from the government. Free information is often dominated by spam and PR astroturfing. Google, for instance, won't index sites behind registration walls and that's a disincentive. You might argue that they're subsidizing the free information with this decision. While Google is not technically part of the government, they have a great deal of power that approaches that of a government. One of the biggest problems with the libertarian embrace of the marketplace is that quasi-govenrments can evolve when marketplaces evolve in the wrong way.
Now on to explaining what I mean by both ways:
Way 1: Markets serve consumers and provide choices because Ferrari hasn't been destroyed by cheap competitors.
Way 2: Markets serve consumers by destroying the choices that weren't produced efficiently.
We're arguing for different things. If you want a world where everything is produced efficiently at the lowest possible price, than there's nothing wrong with this view. But if you want to maximize choice, then Way 2 is a problem. And my point is only that the explosion of cheap goods is destroying some choices. That's good if you want efficiency, but bad if you want something else.
This is a good idea, but it only changes the speed not the overall dynamics. If there aren't enough people out there willing to earn the good editor score, the overall percentage of dreck will explode.
And is it even worth gathering to bolster the point? As you say, it's just an opinion, but any long-term participant with the wiki process should know it's true. It's just some folks see the destruction of information as a social good. It provides clarity and editing. Others don't.
Look, for instance, at the article on Dustin Thorton held up for ridicule on Slashdot. Perhaps it's not valuable to 99.9999% of the world, something that may make it non-notable to you and whomever marks it for deletion. But what if things change? What he grows up to be president? We're missing large amounts of data about what was called the Negro Baseball Leagues precisely because of this kind of attitude toward "notability" governed the record keepers of the past. Diskspace is cheap.
Re:slashdot become marketing troll
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
As someone who writes these reviews from time to time, I can tell you that it's all quite rational:
* Books that get lower scores aren't worth reviewing.
* Assigning higher scores opens yourself to criticism. Look at the folks who reflexively use "fanboi" if they see something positive.
So that's the information economy at work.
In Hollywood they pay interns $75-$100 to "cover" a script and provide an honest opinion. I'm sure they have more divergence in scores.
This is another good example of the limitations of free information.
Re:slashdot become marketing troll
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
First, I've never spoken to the two authors.
Second, I know how much traffic the buried link will drive to my site. It's minimal.
I wrote the review to, as the open source world says, "scratch an itch." It's clear that the wonderful, eclectic folks who used to write reviews around here aren't feeling as itchy these days.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
Wait, you can't have it both ways. What if I like the products from the inefficient producers? What if there's some civic good in having a newspaper send an independent reporter to the city council meeting? If that reporter can't compete for ad dollars with, say, gossip about Britney or Tara, then who knows what could go on at that meeting.
Consider this from another perspective. What if I said "government subsidized producers" instead of "free information producers"? Does this change the equation? Can you see how a subsidy can distort the marketplace and provide unfair competition?
This is a good illustration of the problem. Many of the people who put time and energy into the wikipedia are the people like "dustin" who are probably writing about themselves. They have an incentive and a self-interest. The selfless editors are volunteers and I wouldn't be surprised if they get more and more tired of the sheer cost of success. It will be fascinating to watch this evolve because it will probably be a good example of a "tipping point" in action. If humanity has a certain amount of selflessness, the wikipedia will continue to evolve into greatness. If humanity is basically self-interested, it will devolve into ads that are thinly veiled at best.
Re:Wrong comparison - money and information
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
downloading my Free copy over my university's bandwidth that my parents pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used LaTeX (specifically TeXShop) lately for my latest books ( Translucent Databases , Disappearing Cryptography , and Policing Online Games . It does a remarkably good job with handling equations and it's easy to understand --- if you think like a programmer. You can just insert macro codes whenever you feel and you can also redefine the markup language whenever it strikes your fancy.
That being said, it takes some time to understand because errors in one section can trigger error messages in very different places. You need to think like a programmer to find them.
I've also used CVS to store the various versions of the document. LaTeX uses pure text files and so most of the features of CVS/SVN cross over.
I can say that I've used InDesign and come away impressed. You may also consider using MS Word because the copy editors and others who work with you on the project will probably insist that it's the only word processor that they know how to use. Sigh.
1) If you click through to the site supporting the book, you'll see a table of contents and an FAQ:
http://www.wayner.org/books/pog/
2) Search inside the book is a bad solution for anyone who writes a book that might be used as a reference. I regularly find that Google or Amazon lets me read 10-20 pages of a book and get everything I need.
One day there might a solution that lets us sell books by the page, but that has its own problems.
In general, an information transaction can't be reversed like the purchase of a car. You can't return the information and say, "Gosh, it's not exactly what I wanted." Even if you try desperately to get something out of your brain, it's nearly impossible. Try not to think of bananas. Try really, really hard not to think of bananas. Did you succeed?
The book is very cheap in the scheme of things. It's far from perfect--I can enumerate a number of flaws-- but it would take you more than $30 of your time to reassemble the same information. Even at minimum wage. I dare say it's a good deal for a peasant making $1/day.
3) Feel free to write me with any questions. p3 aaattt wayner.org.
Indeed there are. I wrote a book on this:
Policing Online Games
It's far from the last word.
For more information:
http://www.wayner.org/books/pog/
To look up on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0967584426/myhomepage0bc
No cloud service should be judged by how much engineering this requires, because it's not their responsibility.
Yes, I agree with you, but I don't think that everyone knows this yet. I interviewed several users who seemed very annoyed that they had to backup their MySQL databases themselves.
Why? Here's a quote from Google AppEngine's front page:
Amazon is a bit more guarded on their front page, but I still think an optimistic programmer could get the wrong impression:
It's easy to forget that it's your job to make the "automatically" apply successfully. I think a number of people will continue to be disappointed to learn what you already know so well.
While you may be right about the general odds of prosecution, I can tell you that the odds increase dramatically if you trumpet what you're doing in a newspaper that prints more than a million copies in a day. :-)
But it's more complicated than that. The press enjoys what few protections it has left when it doesn't break laws. So most reporters try to break as few laws as they can.
Finally, it gave me an excuse to discuss an interesting aspect that isn't covered that often.
It occurs to me that a good analogy is to the GCC compiler. It may be open source and it may use code templates that are open source, but you get to own the copyright of what you create with it. This was a smart move by Stallman way back when and I think it's a good analogy for Lego blocks or Legos or whatever you call them.
They might have a case if I duplicated individual blocks. But the spaceship design was my own and there's no way to disassemble it into the pieces. Furthermore, the construction mechanism effectively stripped away large parts of each individual piece because it didn't duplicate the hidden surfaces. I probably didn't duplicate more than 20% of the surface of the average piece-- and I didn't duplicate any of the functional parts that helped the pieces grip each other.
I did consider using modeling clay, but I'm not a great artist.
Yes, you're right. The cost is prohibitive when compared with mass production with molded ABS. But there are many areas where I imagine it might catch on. I wouldn't be surprised if the model railroad community develops an open source collection of STL files. Anyone can download homes, train stations or what not for building out their train layout. In these areas, the price and advantage of customization will be competitive.
One of the reasons I wrote the piece is because things are getting pretty cheap. Not Game Boy cheap, but something that's in line with the historical cost of photography. We're not at the introductory price of a Kodak Brownie (supposedly $1 in 1900), but we're near the price of early cameras when adjusted for inflation. The NextEngine costs $2500 new and the print shops will build items for about $70-$200.
We're getting near affordability for the "prosumer" who might want a hobby. I can imagine that these devices might be very useful to model train hobbiests, artists, and others. One artist I know builds Joseph Cornell-like boxes filled with historical scenes. They're great, really.
There are a wide variety of technologies in the marketplace and each have their advantages. Alas, I couldn't write a survey. The Z Corp models look flashy in the pictures because they're in full color, but they're probably not the strongest.
Some of the other systems from companies like Dimension or Stratasys use stronger plastics but can't produce multicolored items.
Some can produce fully working items right from the printer . They deposit two types of material: one soluable and one insoluable. After the thing is printed, you wash away the soluable stuff and the gaps open up. It's amazing. I've played with fully adjustable crescent wrenches that are built with almost the same precision as the ones from Sears. The plastic isn't as durable as metal, but you can certainly build things with the wrench. I'm told one of the cooler demonstration items is a bicycle chain that's fully assembled after the wash.
In some sense, these pre-assembled machines are better than traditional manufacturing techniques because you can build working items inside of sealed shells. There's no ship-in-a-bottle paradox because everything is built from the bottom up.
Those engineers.What will they think of next? Rust never sleeps.
I hope it doesn't degrade while it's sitting in my pocket. There's more oxygen in my pants than in a landfill.
-Peter
Does Britannica think of itself as a secondary source or a tertiary source? Perhaps both. Employing experts for their expertise with primary (and secondary materials) makes it seem more like a secondary source to me. This is all rather nebulous and not worth debating because most papers are a mixture. Many scientific papers in referreed journals are primary sources and only refer to other works to put their original work in context. But then they switch over to secondary for sections and even become tertiary sources themselves.
:-) Seriously, many fans of wikipedia make many claims about it as they revel in what's been accomplished. And you even say that it's replacing Google for you-- something that should give the boys in Mountain View pause. But I'm more interested in the end game, after the CB Radio honeymoon. There is a very real possibility that the Encyclopedia Brittanica and many many other reference books will be killed off by the wikipedia. This may be great for many reasons, but it's important to understand the downsides as we snort the hype.
It's also impossible to debate whether Wikipedia claims to be anything because I edited some page to make the claims I wanted. Someone reverted it but I'll fix it back in a second.
My guess is the logical inconsistency depends upon whether you believe that the Wikipedia can stand above and apart from the regular body of knowledge. If it is separate, you can maintain the logical consistency. But what happens when people who print books or scientific journal articles use Wikipedia with or without citing it? Now, can a Wikipedia article be based upon that printed work? What happens after these facts get repeated through several cycles? There's a real possibility that the general quality of the Wikipedia will make it a default reference work in many fields-- something that's probably going to happen as more graduate students grow up trusting it. But this is only a general quality and it shifts with the intellectual tides.
Ultimately, these points can also be made about the old dead-tree realm. The scale is just bigger now and the speed is dramatically quicker. And given that the dead-tree world has given us many printed equivalents to 1=0, I'm see no reason to believe that the Wikipedia will be any different.
Can you give me an example of a situation where a product was well liked by the public but was taken away from the market (aka "market failure")?
There are many cases, but they're not the cases you want to hear about. Companies go out of business all of the time. They end product lines. In most of these cases, the companies have some customers, but usually they don't have enough customers to make it worth their while to continue or sell/give the business to someone else.
You're going to say something like, "Oh but the consumers were able to make do with something else that was produced by another company more efficiently." And so the market succeeded. I'm going to say, "But maybe it wasn't the same thing. And maybe making do wasn't good enough. Maybe they were still sad."
We're really arguing from different points of view and so there will never be any convergence. You'll look at the local stores driven out of business by the big box stores and say, "Wow. Everything is so much more efficient now." I'll say, "But look at the reduction of choice from a merchant that knows little about local differences."
And so I think we've reached an impasse. I'm going to have to sign off now because of a pressing deadline.
My question was "wrong according to who?". I don't know what your answer means in this context.
I'm using the same weighted average of society to measure good as you are. I'm not assuming that there's some central force. That's just your assumption because I'm complaining about market failure.
Here's another way of articulating how the free economy is different from the micropayment. In other words, this is how a price of zero is different from epsilon pennies.
When an information producer creates and sells something for n cents, then every consumer sends a message back to the producer when they pay n cents. That is how the consumers communicate with the producers. This is how the market helps producers discover what the world as a whole wants.
When you have free information, that feedback loop is broken. The consumers don't send a message back to the producer when they consume it. Oh, maybe the producer can gain some information from log files, but that doesn't happen in a P2P world. The consumer stops driving the production of knowledge. The consumer's definition of "good" becomes less influential. The game changes.
I think I did a better job of explaining this in my talk.
Again, wrong according to whom? Do you see a pattern here? You are deciding what is 'good' and what is 'bad'. And guess what? These 'quasi-governments' exist at the mercy of the market - the real governments do not. Everyone here in Chicago thought Sears was king and no one could beat them - Walmart and Kmart gave ppl what they wanted and Sears is (almost) history. And if enough people feel that Walmart is evil and stop shopping there, they are gone. Would that happen with govt?
I never said that. I just said that the internet's bias toward free information makes it difficult for people to producers to collect from consumers. I never said anything about some central force controlling anything. It's alll about whether the mass collection of producers can connect and collection from consumers.
You're missing my point. While the Wikipedia may position itself as a tertiary source and enforce a policy of NOR, but the rest of the world doesn't pick up on this. Nor does the Wikipedia push this effort outside of internal discussion boards. In the famous comparison with Encyclopedia Britanica, the Wikipedia folks seemed pretty happy to be placed on par with the famous rival. There was little public correction saying, "No. We're not in Britannica's league. We don't allow experts to synthesize information for us. That's for the secondary sources. We're just a tertiary source." Until there's more public self-deprecation, I'm going to stick with my categorization.
Here's another way of looking at it. Certainly zero is just an epsilon away from .0001 cents and a bit more away from $10. But the world is often discontinuous. One of the bigger hurdles to micropayments on the Internet is the cost of a transaction.So this has stopped many experiments dead in their tracks. So free has a big advantage over 1 penny, one dime or even one quarter. It's fair to say that it's cheaper to give something away over the internet than to charge 10 to 25 cents. (Google Checkout's effect on this will be interesting because it has a pretty low threshold.)
Think about running a store in NYC. If the cheapest storefront costs $n/month, then you can't run a store in NYC unless you make $n or get $n from your parents.
You're quite right that the news about Britney and Tara is theoretically just as valid as any other. My larger point is that the cheap information drives out the dear. There are hidden subsidies and they're not just from the government. Free information is often dominated by spam and PR astroturfing. Google, for instance, won't index sites behind registration walls and that's a disincentive. You might argue that they're subsidizing the free information with this decision. While Google is not technically part of the government, they have a great deal of power that approaches that of a government. One of the biggest problems with the libertarian embrace of the marketplace is that quasi-govenrments can evolve when marketplaces evolve in the wrong way.
Now on to explaining what I mean by both ways:
Way 1: Markets serve consumers and provide choices because Ferrari hasn't been destroyed by cheap competitors.
Way 2: Markets serve consumers by destroying the choices that weren't produced efficiently.
We're arguing for different things. If you want a world where everything is produced efficiently at the lowest possible price, than there's nothing wrong with this view. But if you want to maximize choice, then Way 2 is a problem. And my point is only that the explosion of cheap goods is destroying some choices. That's good if you want efficiency, but bad if you want something else.
This is a good idea, but it only changes the speed not the overall dynamics. If there aren't enough people out there willing to earn the good editor score, the overall percentage of dreck will explode.
What sort of evidence would be sufficient?
And is it even worth gathering to bolster the point? As you say, it's just an opinion, but any long-term participant with the wiki process should know it's true. It's just some folks see the destruction of information as a social good. It provides clarity and editing. Others don't.
Look, for instance, at the article on Dustin Thorton held up for ridicule on Slashdot. Perhaps it's not valuable to 99.9999% of the world, something that may make it non-notable to you and whomever marks it for deletion. But what if things change? What he grows up to be president? We're missing large amounts of data about what was called the Negro Baseball Leagues precisely because of this kind of attitude toward "notability" governed the record keepers of the past. Diskspace is cheap.
As someone who writes these reviews from time to time, I can tell you that it's all quite rational:
* Books that get lower scores aren't worth reviewing.
* Assigning higher scores opens yourself to criticism. Look at the folks who reflexively use "fanboi" if they see something positive.
So that's the information economy at work.
In Hollywood they pay interns $75-$100 to "cover" a script and provide an honest opinion. I'm sure they have more divergence in scores.
This is another good example of the limitations of free information.
First, I've never spoken to the two authors.
Second, I know how much traffic the buried link will drive to my site. It's minimal.
I wrote the review to, as the open source world says, "scratch an itch." It's clear that the wonderful, eclectic folks who used to write reviews around here aren't feeling as itchy these days.
Wait, you can't have it both ways. What if I like the products from the inefficient producers? What if there's some civic good in having a newspaper send an independent reporter to the city council meeting? If that reporter can't compete for ad dollars with, say, gossip about Britney or Tara, then who knows what could go on at that meeting.
Consider this from another perspective. What if I said "government subsidized producers" instead of "free information producers"? Does this change the equation? Can you see how a subsidy can distort the marketplace and provide unfair competition?
This is a good illustration of the problem. Many of the people who put time and energy into the wikipedia are the people like "dustin" who are probably writing about themselves. They have an incentive and a self-interest. The selfless editors are volunteers and I wouldn't be surprised if they get more and more tired of the sheer cost of success. It will be fascinating to watch this evolve because it will probably be a good example of a "tipping point" in action. If humanity has a certain amount of selflessness, the wikipedia will continue to evolve into greatness. If humanity is basically self-interested, it will devolve into ads that are thinly veiled at best.
downloading my Free copy over my university's bandwidth that my parents pay for.
Ah yes. DRM, but DRM by the bursar's office.