I am excited by this research, but sadly I must agree.
For example, the author of the study does not even *mention* the effect of the switch from LPs to CDs. When records went nearly extinct in the 80s, people rushed to re-buy their favorite old music, essentially giving pre-CD artists twice the hits they might otherwise have. I think this reflects in the author's analysis. Also, I'm going to take a stab at "analysis" here and say that multiplying the number of millions time the number of years since release is radically biased towards... OLDER ALBUMS! What you really need to do is look at sales figures year after year and compare those.
I was also disappointed to not see the names of any of these "sporatically important" 90's acts. When he mentioned earlier on slashdot that he was conducting this research, I looked up sales figures of Nirvana's Nevermind myself out of curiousity. Nevermind has sold 10 million copies, with the latest in 1999 (you can check this for yourself). This demonstrates that some artists 90s artists can continue to sell records after they stop being promoted.
However, aside from Nirvana, it's really hard for me to think of a pure-90's group who will still be relevant in 5 or 10 years (disclaimer: I don't listen to rap music, so maybe the story is different there).
Another alternative might be to publish under a pseudonym. The Student's T-test is named after the statistician Gossett who published in the name "Student". Student worked for the Guinness brewery, but they didn't allow publication to be associated with the brewery. (The "drink guiness makes you smart" slogan didn't go down well:-)
Heh! We just talked about that in my probability and statistics class. According to my professor, Gossett published as "Student" because the brewery considered his results akin to a trade secret -- they were using his math to help with quality control, and didn't want other brewery's (presumibly) to find out.
Don't know if that's really true or not, but it does seem oddly fitting when you look at this Princeton paper.
If you read Philip's book, that is sort of like what he wanted to do (it was his friend's idea). The company would be composed of teams, located where ever, of about 5 people. They would do client projects, keep half the money to split between themselves, and give the other half to the company to support product development. When a developer got experienced enough, he could start his own team and the process would continue.
Obviously, they decided not to go that route. I'm be interested to hear of any companies that did. It sounds like a decent revenue model that allows for autonomy with growth.
There was a good article on Kuro5hin a while ago entitled Website profitability: an economic analysis which discussed how a website's popularity can crush it if its bandwidth costs exceed its revenue from banner ads. Basically the author tackles your suggestion to lighten up pages with some hard math. It also had a really good discussion.
I imagine the aD Prize will go on. The new management canceled it, but community pressure forced them to give out the Prize for one more year, at least.
Maybe you're right. I don't work there. But answer these questions:
Why has the company been silent about this? Why wasn't the community told for nearly 6 months that Philip was gone? Why weren't we told that he'd been forced out? Why was the community so upset when they found out he'd been forced out (see: the "Where's Philip" bboard thread)?
Why do none of you vaunted "software engineers" post on the bboards? Why don't you interact with the community? If you look at the statistics for the bboards, you'll notice that the largest number of posts are from old developers who have since left the company. Why did they leave? Does ArsDigita's changed outlook have anything to do with it?
Why doesn't your company show any support for the community of software developers which has grown up around your product?
Why is your company's website full of crap? Why are your IT programmers so pathetically weak that your pages learn what section of the website they are in via GET variables instead of from a database? Why does your site show no concern for Human Computer Interface? Why did I have to beg one of your web programmers to add a link to the bboards on the front page?
Maybe the if you answer some of these questions, you'll notice a patern -- external developers (like, say, me) were drawn to your company's product by a VISION. And that vision was not "Open for E-Business" (which has to be the most vacuously stupid motto I've ever heard...how much did your management pay for it?). That VISION was Philip's: that collaborative software could do a lot of good for the internet, and hey, maybe we could make some cash doing it.
Maybe Philip really is an asshole. I don't know, I haven't met him. But he had something that people liked, that people were drawn to. I think customers were, too. How many customers did ArsDigita get because of Philip's book? I know for a fact that the World Bank was drawn in by recommendation of someone who'd read the book. The new management does NOT have this, and they furthermore have NO idea how to support a developer community. External developers are money in the company's product (hello, they PROGRAM for FREE!), yet the company treats them like dirt.
In short: Maybe Philip's not the best manager, but the CEO massively fucked up by handling him like this. It seems to me that your company is screwed.
Difference being: Ybos provides decent software written by actual engineers with many more features than slash, on top of a *real* database (aka, NOT MySQL), and develops the site for you.
Their heirs? For 70 YEARS? That's 3 GENERATIONS of people who will benifit because their great-great-grandfather wrote a catchy tune. Why do they deserve a penny? What the hell did they do to help create the work?
Screw that.
Copyright was invented to help the widow of a dead artist survive...and when in America, the first term was 14 years. That's enough.
I think getting a fat paycheck for over 100 years is a DISINCENTIVE to work hard at creating art. Once you succeed, you never have to work again (or so the theory goes).
When I was studying Latin in high school, I learned that what archeologists are most interested in is the way people lived in those times -- things which were so common that no one thought to write them down, or save the writings. They were taken for granted. Thus, the essential task of the archeologist is to not only read the works of ancient people, but to go digging up their houses and garbage pits to discover what their lives were REALLY like. They need to uncover the things about the cultures which were so ubiquitous that they were never recorded.
Having a series of backups of the Internet would help future archeologists tremendiously, I think. It would give a true record of what our society was like. We can't consciously record what future generations will want to know about us, because we don't know how they will be different from us, how our values and customs will differ.
Of course, we're still writing plenty of books which will tell future generations a lot about our culture (if they don't all disintegrate first -- beware the paperback book!). And, lord knows, we are throwing away plenty of garbage to root through!
Iceland had a similar system in the middle ages. Citizens were able to choose their chieftain (gothar). Gothar were able to vote in the council, and could transfer their authority as they wished. Citizens were able to choose the gothar they were allied to with few obligations. For more on Medieval Iceland, see David Friedman's writings. His article
Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: a Historical Case is a little dense (as a journal article) but readable. You can also check out some usenet responses he wrote at
http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Libertarian/My_Posts/Ice land_Anarch_FAQ1_reply.html. Also, Danny Yee has a review of the book Medieval Iceland.
P. E. de Puydt suggested a similar system of government in the 1800s, which he called "panarchy". De Puydt envisioned a system of non-physical political divisions which people could "emigrate" between without changing physical location. De Puydt was suggesting a blueprint for the government of Belgium. You can read his tract "Panarchy" online (also here. You can read introductions by contemporary authors here and here. Roderick Long of the Free Nation Foundation wrote a piece on Virtual Cantons influenced by panarchy and the Swiss government.
In case you're wondering, I would love such a system! I wish I could vote for Mr. Boucher.
I'd have to agree. MySQL is pretty fast for basic stuff, but try to do anything more than a 3-way join on a decent-sized table, and you can go get yourself a cup of coffee while you wait for the results...*sigh*...I know this from experience.
PostgreSQL 7.1 is supposed to be all that, though. Anyone know if it has seperate tablespaces yet?
I think that would make a funny show. Don't fill in real words though, that would ruin it.
Penny Arcade did a strip like this a long time ago. I'd link to it but their archive sucks so much that I'd have to look at like 200 strips to find it...
The joke was that they set up cardboard cutouts of themselves so they could go to the beach:
Tycho: Informative news tidbit
Gabe: Veiled or direct insult
Nikos (everyone calls him Nikos because his name is impossible to pronounce) is an awesome guy. I've had him for algorithms and data structures, and more interestingly, computer vision. The computer vision class really made me appreciate how hard this field is!
Here at the University of Minnesota, this was a pretty big deal last year. The ranger/scout robots are probably the most advanced ones we have.
Congrads to one of my favorite professors getting slashdotted!
Changing a _single_ bit in the input results in an MD5 checksum that is completely different from the original (same for SHA-1). This is what makes them "cryptographically secure hashes" (though MD5 is not as secure as once thought -- most developers are switching to SHA-1.).
This means that it is trival to defeat matching based on MD5 comparison, without ruining the song, or changing it in any noticible way.
The text matching Napster is using is harder to defeat, but also stomps all over simarliy named songs from other artists which may not be illegal.
Yeah, I noticed Google was on the list, too. A lot of people put the canned HTML code that Google provides on their pages to provide search capability. That includes an image, but it doesn't mean Google is tracking users. I think this survey needs more meat. I shouldn't be whether a page includes images from another domain, but only if cookies from other domains are going to the user from a page.
I could probably whip up a Perl script to do this with libwww pretty easily. I can't believe whoever did this survey didn't!
I know this is a troll, so I won't berate you fro not reading the article.
I will berate the moderators who modded this up. Read the article -- the worm has nothing to do with the open source nature of gnutella. It just monitors the search queries and posts itself as a result. The article even speculates the same could be done with Napster.
I don't know if the average bit of Python code is cleaner than the average bit of Perl code. I don't know. I don't read Python.
However, saying that the average Python programmer is better than the average Perl programmer is totally biased. There is no proof, and if there were, I doubt it'd have anything at all to do with the cleandliness of either language. If anything, the "average" Perl programmer is less of a programmer than the average Python programmer only because the Perl programming community is so much larger, and Perl is so much more widely used. It's like saying the average Windows user is dumber than the average Linux user.
Slashdot Mirror
I am excited by this research, but sadly I must agree.
... OLDER ALBUMS! What you really need to do is look at sales figures year after year and compare those.
For example, the author of the study does not even *mention* the effect of the switch from LPs to CDs. When records went nearly extinct in the 80s, people rushed to re-buy their favorite old music, essentially giving pre-CD artists twice the hits they might otherwise have. I think this reflects in the author's analysis. Also, I'm going to take a stab at "analysis" here and say that multiplying the number of millions time the number of years since release is radically biased towards
I was also disappointed to not see the names of any of these "sporatically important" 90's acts. When he mentioned earlier on slashdot that he was conducting this research, I looked up sales figures of Nirvana's Nevermind myself out of curiousity. Nevermind has sold 10 million copies, with the latest in 1999 (you can check this for yourself). This demonstrates that some artists 90s artists can continue to sell records after they stop being promoted.
I believe this sort of software is also called 'fuckware'. I believe the meaning is clear.
There are at least some bands from the 90s which have kept selling though. From anntecdotal evidence, I've heard Nirvana's Nevermind is still selling at a decent pace. So I checked it out with the link you gave before. Here's the results: http://www.riaa.com/Gold-Search_Results.cfm?start= 26&title=&artist=nirvana&label=&format=&category=& type=&award=&startMonth=1&startYear=1958&endMonth= 1&endYear=2001&before=off&after=off&sort=Artist&se nse=ASC
(This is the second page of the results). As you can see, Nevermind achieved "10.0 multi-platium" level in 1999. I believe that's 10 million records.
However, aside from Nirvana, it's really hard for me to think of a pure-90's group who will still be relevant in 5 or 10 years (disclaimer: I don't listen to rap music, so maybe the story is different there).
Heh! We just talked about that in my probability and statistics class. According to my professor, Gossett published as "Student" because the brewery considered his results akin to a trade secret -- they were using his math to help with quality control, and didn't want other brewery's (presumibly) to find out.
Don't know if that's really true or not, but it does seem oddly fitting when you look at this Princeton paper.
Go to hell, RIAA!
If you read Philip's book, that is sort of like what he wanted to do (it was his friend's idea). The company would be composed of teams, located where ever, of about 5 people. They would do client projects, keep half the money to split between themselves, and give the other half to the company to support product development. When a developer got experienced enough, he could start his own team and the process would continue.
Obviously, they decided not to go that route. I'm be interested to hear of any companies that did. It sounds like a decent revenue model that allows for autonomy with growth.
There was a good article on Kuro5hin a while ago entitled Website profitability: an economic analysis which discussed how a website's popularity can crush it if its bandwidth costs exceed its revenue from banner ads. Basically the author tackles your suggestion to lighten up pages with some hard math. It also had a really good discussion.
I imagine the aD Prize will go on. The new management canceled it, but community pressure forced them to give out the Prize for one more year, at least.
Move lawyers, for great profits!
Maybe you're right. I don't work there. But answer these questions:
Why has the company been silent about this? Why wasn't the community told for nearly 6 months that Philip was gone? Why weren't we told that he'd been forced out? Why was the community so upset when they found out he'd been forced out (see: the "Where's Philip" bboard thread)?
Why do none of you vaunted "software engineers" post on the bboards? Why don't you interact with the community? If you look at the statistics for the bboards, you'll notice that the largest number of posts are from old developers who have since left the company. Why did they leave? Does ArsDigita's changed outlook have anything to do with it?
Why doesn't your company show any support for the community of software developers which has grown up around your product?
Why is your company's website full of crap? Why are your IT programmers so pathetically weak that your pages learn what section of the website they are in via GET variables instead of from a database? Why does your site show no concern for Human Computer Interface? Why did I have to beg one of your web programmers to add a link to the bboards on the front page?
Maybe the if you answer some of these questions, you'll notice a patern -- external developers (like, say, me) were drawn to your company's product by a VISION. And that vision was not "Open for E-Business" (which has to be the most vacuously stupid motto I've ever heard...how much did your management pay for it?). That VISION was Philip's: that collaborative software could do a lot of good for the internet, and hey, maybe we could make some cash doing it.
Maybe Philip really is an asshole. I don't know, I haven't met him. But he had something that people liked, that people were drawn to. I think customers were, too. How many customers did ArsDigita get because of Philip's book? I know for a fact that the World Bank was drawn in by recommendation of someone who'd read the book. The new management does NOT have this, and they furthermore have NO idea how to support a developer community. External developers are money in the company's product (hello, they PROGRAM for FREE!), yet the company treats them like dirt.
In short: Maybe Philip's not the best manager, but the CEO massively fucked up by handling him like this. It seems to me that your company is screwed.
Fake link alert.
Difference being: Ybos provides decent software written by actual engineers with many more features than slash, on top of a *real* database (aka, NOT MySQL), and develops the site for you.
Their heirs? For 70 YEARS? That's 3 GENERATIONS of people who will benifit because their great-great-grandfather wrote a catchy tune. Why do they deserve a penny? What the hell did they do to help create the work?
Screw that.
Copyright was invented to help the widow of a dead artist survive...and when in America, the first term was 14 years. That's enough.
I think getting a fat paycheck for over 100 years is a DISINCENTIVE to work hard at creating art. Once you succeed, you never have to work again (or so the theory goes).
When I was studying Latin in high school, I learned that what archeologists are most interested in is the way people lived in those times -- things which were so common that no one thought to write them down, or save the writings. They were taken for granted. Thus, the essential task of the archeologist is to not only read the works of ancient people, but to go digging up their houses and garbage pits to discover what their lives were REALLY like. They need to uncover the things about the cultures which were so ubiquitous that they were never recorded.
Having a series of backups of the Internet would help future archeologists tremendiously, I think. It would give a true record of what our society was like. We can't consciously record what future generations will want to know about us, because we don't know how they will be different from us, how our values and customs will differ.
Of course, we're still writing plenty of books which will tell future generations a lot about our culture (if they don't all disintegrate first -- beware the paperback book!). And, lord knows, we are throwing away plenty of garbage to root through!
But what about my uptime, dude!
On the KTHI tower --
When I lived in North Dakota, I read that the KTHI tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world. I never made it out to see it, though.
I also heard something about it falling down in a storm. Not sure if that's true.
Iceland had a similar system in the middle ages. Citizens were able to choose their chieftain (gothar). Gothar were able to vote in the council, and could transfer their authority as they wished. Citizens were able to choose the gothar they were allied to with few obligations. For more on Medieval Iceland, see David Friedman's writings. His article Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: a Historical Case is a little dense (as a journal article) but readable. You can also check out some usenet responses he wrote at http://www.best.com/~ddfr/Libertarian/My_Posts/Ice land_Anarch_FAQ1_reply.html. Also, Danny Yee has a review of the book Medieval Iceland.
P. E. de Puydt suggested a similar system of government in the 1800s, which he called "panarchy". De Puydt envisioned a system of non-physical political divisions which people could "emigrate" between without changing physical location. De Puydt was suggesting a blueprint for the government of Belgium. You can read his tract "Panarchy" online (also here. You can read introductions by contemporary authors here and here. Roderick Long of the Free Nation Foundation wrote a piece on Virtual Cantons influenced by panarchy and the Swiss government.
In case you're wondering, I would love such a system! I wish I could vote for Mr. Boucher.
I'd have to agree. MySQL is pretty fast for basic stuff, but try to do anything more than a 3-way join on a decent-sized table, and you can go get yourself a cup of coffee while you wait for the results...*sigh*...I know this from experience.
PostgreSQL 7.1 is supposed to be all that, though. Anyone know if it has seperate tablespaces yet?
I think that would make a funny show. Don't fill in real words though, that would ruin it.
Penny Arcade did a strip like this a long time ago. I'd link to it but their archive sucks so much that I'd have to look at like 200 strips to find it...
The joke was that they set up cardboard cutouts of themselves so they could go to the beach:
Tycho: Informative news tidbit
Gabe: Veiled or direct insult
...ect.
Damn, this is one of the most lucid Anonymous Coward posts I've ever seen -- regardless if you agree or disagree.
Bravo!
Nikos (everyone calls him Nikos because his name is impossible to pronounce) is an awesome guy. I've had him for algorithms and data structures, and more interestingly, computer vision. The computer vision class really made me appreciate how hard this field is!
Here at the University of Minnesota, this was a pretty big deal last year. The ranger/scout robots are probably the most advanced ones we have.
Congrads to one of my favorite professors getting slashdotted!
Changing a _single_ bit in the input results in an MD5 checksum that is completely different from the original (same for SHA-1). This is what makes them "cryptographically secure hashes" (though MD5 is not as secure as once thought -- most developers are switching to SHA-1.).
This means that it is trival to defeat matching based on MD5 comparison, without ruining the song, or changing it in any noticible way.
The text matching Napster is using is harder to defeat, but also stomps all over simarliy named songs from other artists which may not be illegal.
Unfortunately, Dave considers this "freedom from editorial control" and the future of journalism (uneditted weblogs, that is).
Yeah, I noticed Google was on the list, too. A lot of people put the canned HTML code that Google provides on their pages to provide search capability. That includes an image, but it doesn't mean Google is tracking users. I think this survey needs more meat. I shouldn't be whether a page includes images from another domain, but only if cookies from other domains are going to the user from a page.
I could probably whip up a Perl script to do this with libwww pretty easily. I can't believe whoever did this survey didn't!
Wow, nice troll. Got modded all the way to five.
I know this is a troll, so I won't berate you fro not reading the article.
I will berate the moderators who modded this up. Read the article -- the worm has nothing to do with the open source nature of gnutella. It just monitors the search queries and posts itself as a result. The article even speculates the same could be done with Napster.
I don't know if the average bit of Python code is cleaner than the average bit of Perl code. I don't know. I don't read Python.
However, saying that the average Python programmer is better than the average Perl programmer is totally biased. There is no proof, and if there were, I doubt it'd have anything at all to do with the cleandliness of either language. If anything, the "average" Perl programmer is less of a programmer than the average Python programmer only because the Perl programming community is so much larger, and Perl is so much more widely used. It's like saying the average Windows user is dumber than the average Linux user.