O'Reilly Digital Media

Related link: http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/knowledge_goods/records.pdf

Stories on filesharing in the salaried press usually mention a drop in recorded music sales during 2001. The size of the drop, though, varies wildly. I have seen numbers as low as 2% and as high as 10%. Record Sales, MP3 Downloads, and the Annihilation Hypothesis by Stan Liebowitz explains the variation:

“In 2001 sales fell by 2%, 4%, 7%, or 10%, depending on which classification one chooses as the basis for comparisons. CD revenues fell the least, total units fell the most. It is not surprising that the RIAA chose total units as the measurement trumpeted in its headlines, experiencing about a ten percent drop in sales that year, since that is a far more impressive a drop than the two percent fall in CD revenues.”

Cassettes and singles were in a well-documented death spiral before Napster came along. The 7% and 10% numbers are padded by including cassette sales and singles. If you stick to album-length CDs, revenues fell 2% and units fell 4%.

It bothers me to see that 10% number in a story.

Salaried reporters have a conflict of interest whenever they talk about the upheaval in intellectual property, since they are in a content industry. A conflict of interest isn’t the same as corruption — I also make my living on intellectual property — but it does mean that reporters need to question their own motives. At the least they have to be skeptical about RIAA press releases when the facts seem to be slanted.

Most likely reporters who use the ten percent figure do it because they are pressed for time, not because they have an agenda. But that doesn’t make the situation any better, since a reporter who doesn’t understand the 10% number should not be using it.

Either way, a story which puts MP3s in the context of a 7-10% drop in the music industry during 2001 has no credibility. You know instantly that the reporter is clueless.

I thought “The Fellowship of the Ring” was a great movie. I thought the filmmakers made excellent use of the medium, so it was easy to excuse the deviations from the book. I thought the movie’s approach really complemented the book and thought Elijah Wood’s portrayal of Frodo was severely underrated.

Last weekend I read “The Two Towers” in preparation for the release of the second movie and suggest you do the same. I just came back from the late showing on opening night. Unfortunately, it was mildly disappointing. Now, I know it is hard for any sequel except Godfather II to live up to its predecessor, but this movie could have been better. That isn’t to say it is without merit. It is a sweeping epic and a great cinematic challenge, but I think Peter Jackson took artistic license too far. Diehard fans will want to see it once but not twice. The uninitiated will be totally lost, IMNSHO.

First the good points. The movie does a good job of interleaving the multiple story lines. In the book, Frodo is absent for the first few hundred pages but you won’t have to wait long for his appearance in the movie. All the actors continued to play their roles well, although Frodo’s character wasn’t explored nearly as well in this movie as in the first. Some of the visual effects are astounding and their cumulative weight recreates Middle Earth convincingly. It seems like no expense was spared, but the movie doesn’t get caught up in the special effects themselves. They remain transparent and believable, which is no easy feat. The siege at Helm’s Deep is portrayed astoundingly well. Although this episode is darker in parts, there is also quite a bit of unexpected (intentional) humor.

So what’s not to like? My main complaint is the rather dramatic deviation from the book at multiple points. Some of the deviations are justifiable and even add to the story, but others change the characters in inexcusable ways. I could barely sit through the Liv Tyler scenes (she plays Arwen, who doesn’t even appear in the second book) but the handling of the Ents and Boromir’s brother were most disappointing. Jackson lavished inexplicable attention on lesser or invented scenes while omitting two vitally important ones from the book. I won’t give anything away, but I suspect one of these will reappear in the third installment.

I remember precisely this same feeling after watching “The Empire Strikes Back.” It wasn’t without merit, but it wasn’t as good as the first one. Peter Jackson is on record saying the movie makes no attempt to bring you up to speed if you didn’t see the first episode. Fair enough. Anyone I know who didn’t see the first one is renting it on DVD before going to the second one. I suspect most movie-goers have read the books, but anyone who hasn’t read them recently will have trouble following the multi-pronged plot. Furthermore, movie omits the opening scene of the book, which is jolting if you don’t remember precisely where the last movie left off. That said, the opening few minutes is breath-taking, as are many other parts of the movie, so you don’t want to get there late. If this review is a little scattered, it is because the movie is a bit scattered as well. Parts of it were top-notch, but it wasn’t as coherent or satisfying as the first episode.

I’d give it 7.5 out of 10 stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

Which was better, “Fellowship of the Ring” or “The Two Towers”?

A friendnet is a network topology where every TCP/IP connection is
backed up by a meatspace connection. If you have a connection which
is downloading a lot but refusing uploads, you call them on the
telephone. If your pal has a modem and you have DSL, you swap
proxying or caching services for help with your car. If you upload a
file and your ISP subsequently gets a lawyergram from the RIAA, your
friend has lost a friend. If you can’t install the software, your
friend who has already done it comes over to troubleshoot. A
friendnet builds overlay networks on social topology.

Friendnet connections are hard to come by but extremely durable. Hard
to come by because not all your friends will be interested in running
some dumb software just to swap files with you. Durable because
connection lifetime is measured in months rather than minutes. That’s
not to say that there’s a persistent TCP socket open the whole time,
rather that you reconnect persistently, day after day. The network
grows slowly and decays slowly.

Unlike automated reputation systems like Advogato, the Slashdot
moderation system, eBay seller ratings, and MojoNation, reputation
management in a friendnet is a manual operation. This is a good
thing: humans are good at fuzzy reasoning and computers aren’t. The
only reputation tools that friendnet implementations need to provide
are accounting data: “you still haven’t responded to a request”;
“Jennifer was extremely generous with bytes last week”; “perhaps you
should mention to your friend that the file she gave you is
truncated”, etc.
Reputation is the engine of a friendnet.

Unlike open networks like Gnutella, a friendnet is private. Every
breach of privacy is traceable to a real person and will damage a real
relationship. The difficulty of achieving a single breach of privacy
applies to every transitive link in the chain between an attacker and
a target. Unlike anonymous networks like Freenet, a friendnet is not
confidential, so a friendnet is a lousy place for porn. Friendnets
are private but not confidential.

Zooko

Justin Chapweske

Kyle Hasselbacher

Jim Nachlin



(Image courtesy of Barry’s free clipart server.)

Related link: http://www.artima.com/intv/tunable.html

Artima.com has published Part VI of an interview with Martin Fowler in which he discusses balancing maintainability and efficiency, creating tunable software, the role of patterns, and the Agile Software Manifesto.

Here’s an excerpt:

So you could make a performance optimization in one VM, and then bring in Hotspot, and it will actually slow Hotspot down. You’ve got to be very wary of that. Object pooling is a good example. A lot of people are very enamored with object pooling, yet half the time people are not measuring to that to find out whether object pooling is any good. Object pooling was very important in the early days of Java, because garbage collection wasn’t terribly good. When you’ve got generational garbage collection, object pooling becomes a lot less effective, because short-lived objects can be collected very cheaply. It’s the long-lived objects, such as ones you might pool, that are expensive to garbage collect.

So the rules keep changing. That’s why you’ve got to be very careful to profile. If you think you can predict from the source code what the machine is doing, you’ve got no chance. When you’re in a world of optimizing compilers and VMs, you have to profile, because the compilers and VMs are doing things that you can’t even imagine. So don’t predict, just measure.

Related link: http://public-net.blogspot.com

I’ve started a blog to capture developments related to DMCA, copyright, patents/open source, etc. I call it public.net because it’s about the Net as a public resource. Input, etc: rkoman@attbi.com.

When FatWallet.com and other consumer-to-consumer shopping sites posted leaks on post-Thanksgiving sales, they received letters from Wal-Mart and other retailers that they were violating copyright and could be prosecuted under DMCA. The retailers argued that their sale information was copyright content, and thus protected under DMCA. Wal-Mart went further, demanding that FatWallet.com turn over the identity of the scallywag who leaked the information.

On Monday, FatWallet fought back, demanding that Wal-Mart drop this demand to name names — since the Supreme Court had ruled that a compendium of facts cannot by copyrighted. Today, I got a press release from FatWallet’s lawyers, announcing that Wal-Mart has dropped the demand for a name, and that FatWallet was asking for damages for Wal-Mart’s knowingly false invocation of DMCA.

Still, FatWallet pres Tim Storm said in the press release: “The use
of the DMCA to remove factual information about prices that retailers charge consumers
is just wrong. We stand by our belief that consumers have the right to share the
factual shopping information required to be a smart consumer.”

A victory against McCarthy-esque tactics, but illegal quashing of data goes unchallenged.

Related link: http://www.artima.com/intv/testdriven.html

Artima.com has published Part V of an interview in which Martin Fowler discusses the unhurried quality of test-first design, defines monological thinking, and distinguishes between unit and functional testing.

Here’s an excerpt:

The thing I like about taking small steps and writing tests first is that it gives me a simple to do list of the things I’ve got to do. At each end point I have a certain amount of closure. I say, OK, this stuff works. Check it in. It’s all there. It does what it does and it does it correctly.

There’s an impossible-to-express quality about test- first design that gives you a sense of unhurriedness. You are actually moving very quickly, but there’s an unhurriedness because you are creating little micro-goals for yourself and satisfying them. At each point you know you are doing one micro-goal piece of work, and it’s done when the test passes. That is a very calming thing. It reduces the scope of what you have to think about. You don’t have to think about everything you have to do in the class. You just have to think about one little piece of responsibility. You make that work and then you refactor it so everything is very nicely designed. Then you add in the next piece of responsibility. I previously used the kind of approach you describe. I’d ask, “What’s the interface of this?” I’ve now switched and I much more prefer incremental design.