hank777

actually the courts have explicitly said that the DMCA can't be used to prevent interoperability. This is a well known case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._....

anybody have any idea how this might compare to mysql inno or myisam?

I agree 100%. His response doesn't make sense from the entrepreneur's perspective. Using his strategy, no one would ever make cold calls because they are annoying to the recipient. But the bottom line is they work enough time to make it worth the effort. In this case there is no downside to the asker. I have no idea if asking for such a referral would ever work but it seems to me this is a good example of nothing ventured nothing gained.

Indeed. I commented on something and only discovered accidentally that my comment could only be seen be me, which is a horrible way for things to work. Your comment is hidden and you have no idea. I emailed the contact email (cant remember the address) and never got an answer. It really made me never want to comment again and seemed totally capricious.

This is incorrect. The difference is that lazlo and flex are tools that build fixed binaries. They are the equivalent of a c++ compiler. This is designed to be like html. That means that you can, from a web server, create pages on the fly. You cannot modify or change code on the fly in lazlo or flex. In html, you can dynamically create a page based on information in the database or other state related info. This is a fundamentally different model (and one that most of you should be familiar with) and entirely different than flex (which most of you are not familiar with).

As far as swfmill goes, that is an entirely orthogonal concept as is haxe. swfmill is a tool for organizing assets, and haxe is a compiler. That is like comparing an apple pie to a shoe.

if you can "modify" the server side and the client side, you can "modify" the need to pay.

what a whacko. I should allow you to access my servers and services for free? I should allow you to control how you use my resources in a way that guarantees I loose money? Stallman is a digital socialist. The idea of services (or anything other than direct labor) that people charge for offends him. That offends me.

I see. I wonder if this philosophy works at Apple. Do you really think apple products would be better if Steve Jobs always deferred to his staff by saying "you're the expert." Ridiculous. All of this stuff is very situation specific. I am sure that is what he does at Pixar (probably less) and not at all what he does at Apple, and rightly so.

I disagree. He bases his argument on the idea that rent control causes high rents as demonstrated in places like NY. This is patently false in my opinion, but my opinion is not what counts. The reason I say it is unsubstantiated and therefore insane, is that he provided no argument for the idea that there is a causation between high rents and rent control. The author falls into the all too common trap of mapping a correlation to a causation. That may be a good strategy to throw red meat to right wingers, but it is not a well constructed argument.

lol.I am not going to opine about their entire body of work. But if you think they never have the problem of which I speak then clearly you didnt read the rent control article which explains new york's and other big cities high rents on rent control. Whether you agree with rent control or not, this is an insane unsubstantiated assertion.

Based on the article posted here on rent control the other day,it does indeed seem as though greenspun uses the same unsubstantiated assertion strategy for building arguments as does the cato institute. I guess I have to give him credit for being no worse than folks that get paid to write this crap.

These are nothing but assertions of fact which are really unsubstantiated opinions. It is striking to watch people engage in this level of intellectual onanism.

I dont mind people making arguments that are reasoned and carefully successively built. But to just start with one opinion, pretend it is a fact, and then build another assertion on top of that is a bit much. I do not believe that you have to have a degree in economics to opine about economics, but whatever your arguments are, at least make them as arguments as opposed to "I am smart so everything I say must be true" style pronouncements.

according to readwriteweb it will include js,html, and silverlight, as one would expect.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_office_comes_...

Well, perhaps, but really it is one of the apps that, when it came out, helped define the term. So one would have to call it retrospectively silly. In my mind any terms can be silly depending on how you look at things. But it seems to me no more silly to call digg web 2.0 than gmail. I will agree that most of the apps that have been called web 2.0 have been social, but most of the apps of any kind have been social, which is, as I see it, part of the problem. social != $$$$.

That is one axis. But would you say that, for example, gmail is a web 1.0 app since it is not at all about social media or collective intelligence?

No, I am not taking Apple to task for anything. And I am, I hope, not ranting. I am simply saying that people should not over-estimate what will come of Grand Central, or any multi-core abstraction layers, or multi-core as a broadly helpful performance increasing strategy.

From one of my other commenters:

Multicore is definitely over-promised. I agree with what you wrote and recommend what Donald Knuth had to say on this topic:(http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856)

"I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!"

Yes, but I dont think the blogging systems have this since every blogger would have to have his/her own TOS and could not be covered by a blanket wordpress or typepad TOS.

"The rights afforded artists under copyright laws are not natural rights"

There are no such thing as "natural rights" - only rights that we as society agree are beneficial. IP rights are no different than the rights for you to own your shoes or your house. They are just social contracts.

"you can be economically successful as a band without selling a single record."

hmmm... good luck with that.

Yes. You are absolutely right. I view everything through the lens of economics. My view of success is making money. I don't think anyone has yet been able to make money without first selling records. That may come, but it has not yet.

You are right. But sometimes authority and experience are relevant. I cant help that I really do know what I am talking about on this matter. I guess I could go out and interview some other people about how this part of the industry works so that I would be relying on someone else's authority and not mine, but we don't all have equivalent knowledge on everything. I have been involved in music for a long time and know how this part of the business works.

I am not sure how, other than expressing that, that I can explain this. This is not really a judgment issue but about explaining the dynamics of an existing market. If you would prefer to believe that I don't know what I am talking about that is fine. But at minimum I would suggest, if you are really interested in how artists today become successful that you do a little independent (and therefore not tainted by my bias) investigation from people that are really in the biz. The funny part is that there really is nothing to argue about here. No one in music will tell you that concert promoters create demand for artists. It feels a little surreal to even be arguing the point.

Myspace is indeed effective in getting artists signed. The internet is a primary tool today for labels to find artists to sign. It is the primary A&R mechanism. That said, the definition of success here is "getting signed". They did not sell much of anything until they were signed. After they were signed they went to #1 in UK. I can tell you I never heard of the Arctic Monkeys in 2004 for example.

Also you may not have said the arctic monkeys give away their music, but you were refuting my article, and my point is about giving away music on the internet. So if we are not discussing giving away music, then you are not really being responsive to the subject of the article and your disagreement is seemingly misguided.

specifically, the relevant paragraph is as follows:

"Second, there is no evidence at all that free music on the Internet is an effective (i.e. successful career building) marketing tool. There have been no blockbuster successes that have come from, for example Garageband availability. I don't think you could even count more than a handful – if that – Internet-based artists making a living from music."

The arctic monkeys are not "internet based" and they certainly are not giving away their music.

I am not sure exactly why, but it just doesnt work. The numbers are very clear. With very young artists, free music can get them exposed enough to get a record deal, but not enough to sell performance tickets. You can of course always fall back on the "well it hasnt worked but it will" argument, but as of today, it has not worked. There is no argument at all about this. The statistics are very clear. Of course I cannot see the future, but there is little reason after quite a few years of the internet, for me to believe the economics and behavioral dynamics are going to change. Of course anything can happen but it doesn't seem like a good bet.

I am very familiar with how this works so I promise you I am not "looking at it the wrong way" but describing how things actually work. I am not making this up.

Labels create band demand. Concert promoters do not. I promise you this is causation and not correlation. People go see shows because they have the record and know the band. I am sure you have never gone (willingly) to see a show from a band whose music you didnt already have and/or or know pretty well. The band marketing (the label) created the market environment for you to know and like their music. People do not go see artists because they saw some add in a local paper advertising an artist. It doesnt happen. Promoters only provide awareness so that if you are a fan you will know that this band you like is in town.

One other thing...

"The loss of the record industry will almost certainly have no huge effect on the concert industry."

Name a successful touring artist that has not had a successful, label based, recording career.

I am the article author. Actually, the arctic monkeys do not give away their music free on their website or on myspace. Second, the group is successful because along with making great music, they have a great, very hard working 15 year old label called Domino, who also have for example, Franz Ferdinand. So Arctic monkeys is not internet based despite what you may think, has a real record label that puts money and marketing efforts behind them, and doesn't give their music away free. I am not saying that artists that have websites or myspace pages cant succeed obviously. Almost all artists have myspace pages so that would be silly. I am saying you cant just put your stuff up on the net, do nothing else, and expect to make a living -- particularly if you are giving away your music which is where Arrington thinks everything should go.

I addressed this in another answer here but happy to do it again. The way shard splitting works is that the initial shard keeps working while the new shard is being built. During this time, all messages to the old shard are written to the old shard and the new shard, so, unless I don't understand your question I dont see there being a backlog.

Regarding EC2, latency isnt really an issue because Twitter is far from real-time. That said, haven't really noticed any problems with EC2 connection latency, but we are not live yet so I would defer to you on that.

I don't understand your correction, but my lack of understanding is really immaterial. I actually agree that twitter has a problem with economics if they cant sell anything. Whether it is worth solving the scalability problem is a good question. Certainly if they keep growing with no revenue, at some point it is definitely an economic problem. Indeed I posted a while ago about the community taking over twitter as a distributed public service (like email). I do think that there is an upper limit to the amount of messages the average user will send.

Yeah, certainly at the small scale there can be a myriad of reasons why a system doesn't perform. At a large scale its hard to imagine real world scenarios where storage has not been the bottleneck. Regarding whether twitter should be using a database, unless they dont want to store there data they need a "database". Does that mean sql? No. It just means storage. As paul Graham has demonstrated a file system can be a great database. But it still a database.

Well perhaps its a matter of staring at something so long it becomes simple. But I really don't think what I am suggesting is that hard. The main thing that requires some thought is shard splitting. That is not a big piece of code, but it does admittedly take some thought to get right. Aside from that everything else is provided out of the box by someone else like amazon web services or terracotta. I am not sure how I could have been more precise without source code.

It is certainly reasonable to suggest that Twitter is good enough as it is because people still use it, though the grumbling in the market suggests that that may not be something they can bank on forever.