That's a cute writeup, but the author overlooked some important bits of history.
For example, the original use of APL (before it was called APL and before anyone had implemented it as a programming language -- the reason Iverson joined IBM) was to specify the IBM 370 machine architecture.
In other words, it was being used to document how the CPU worked. And it was impressively successful there, distilling a large body of documentation into 2 pages.
This reduction in cognitive load, describing machine structure, is what made it popular back then. And this is what motivated the effort to implement it as a programming language.
(Also, if I understand correctly, there's also a relatively short and direct step from APL to the initial implementation of SQL.)
The original use was to "to implement the world's first graduate program in "automatic data processing"" at Harvard; Fred Brookes volunteered to join in and "It was in this period that Iverson developed notation for describing and analyzing various topics in data processing, for teaching classes, and for writing (with Brooks) Automatic Data Processing. He was "appalled" to find that conventional mathematical notation failed to fill his needs, and began work on extensions to the notation that were more suitable."
Then "Iverson joined IBM Research in 1960 [...] he was allowed to finish and publish A Programming Language and (with Brooks) Automatic Data Processing, two books that described and used the notation developed at Harvard. [...] At IBM, Iverson soon met Adin Falkoff [...] Chapter 2 of A Programming Language used Iverson's notation to describe the IBM 7090 computer. In early 1963 Falkoff [...] proceeded to use the notation to produce a formal description of the IBM System/360 computer then under design."
That survey feels like the sort of thing I've filled out to get a temporary free trade publication subscription.
But what's interesting to me is that my current situation has enough twists to it that I literally could validly answer with several different conflicting choices on a number of those questions.
So... I'm not going to fill that out - doing so would induce too much stress against my internal need to be accurate in my answers.
You can shard RDBMS relatively easily -- basically you wind up pushing a part of your database structure into your clients, so your clients can decide which shard to use.
The cost, though, is that you wind up having a difficult time doing some things that MongoDB can't do. (For example: Renormalizing your database... Does that even mean anything for MongoDB?)
There's something to be said, of course, for simplifying your design. But it's probably a good idea also to make sure your design reflects your requirements.
Indeed you can distribute data to multiple independent RDBMS, but balancing when new nodes are added is probably a manual process (or a lot of custom code) that is likely to require downtime. To avoid downtime, your application would need to write to both chunks while it is balancing/migrating (and then delete the old data/chunks once it is migrated to a the RDBMS). Essentially, you would need to write what is already in MongoDB.
You would also have to write a parallel query engine.
I too am a fan of simple designs, but I think rolling your own sharding on top of a RDBMS would likely be a massive chunk of time.
There are really expensive commercial products working on horizontally scaling RDBMS... but personally, I prefer open source and document oriented databases :-)
I'd venture to say that for a blind non-participant the difference isn't necessarily that large.
Meanwhile, aggression covers a lot of ground, which includes clubbing someone over the head, and generally being a jerk. But the fact that someone uses this word with two "g"s and two "s"s to describe some part of the process of building a happy family does not mean that other people are going to automatically know how to build a happy family after having read the paragraph that uses those words...
Once upon a time, computer programming was a job for women, and not for men. So, based on that period of history, we can equivalently suggest: Maybe we don't need more men in software?
(I do not believe either suggestion, not for a second. And I am disturbed that people are so ignorant of history. Both the women subject to stereotype threat and the men suggesting it's a non-issue are making this same kind of mistake. So, instead, I'd like to point out that women are awesomely smart. So deal with it. Please.)
Anyways, my experience is that all languages will get people criticizing them. And, in my experience, those kinds of criticisms should almost always be categorized as "does not want to talk about language FOO" and a proper response is probably something like "if you don't want to give that subject the respect it deserves, let's change the subject to something you find interesting".
I think this article is interesting, because it casts some shadows that help me see some of the current intellectual property issues, and the associated "creative value" issues.
For example: copyright currently is horribly flawed, from a "USA Constitution" point of view. A constitutional copyright would expire after a few years. Current copyright law explicitly states that copyright lasts longer than a human life time. But copyright is a social thing -- each community of media has its own concepts for what is acceptable use of copyright, and these issues get written into law and respected by courts. The copyright rules for theatre performance are different from the copyright rules for an industrial faucet design. And I think that this kind of variation is necessary, because copyright is protecting symbolism, and symbols are at least partially a construct of the mind. So, anyways, when the rules become outrageous the communities need to structure their behavior so they can still function...
But, on the legal front, copyright laws are based on treaties, where numerous countries have agreed to implement the same laws. So changing copyright law is a Big Deal, and not something that can happen quickly.
But, back on the social front -- when the laws are outrageous, this devalues the laws themselves. Either people ignore the laws, or laws get enforced which causes damage to the country and its communities and economies.
Copyright itself doesn't expire, this causes problems, but it's dealing with symbols, so people either ignore the copyright or abandon those symbols or whatever else.
(And then there's patents which have a different "guilty until proven innocent" problem, which in the U.S. favors patent trolls.)
So, anyways, back to music... copyright creates problems for people, and it does not have enough good going for it to make up for those problems, and we see various communities doing things to ignore copyrighted works. Some of this is piracy, but the economy has had a lot of problems recently and people have been changing their spending habits as a result. This is important because if you fix the wrong problem you do not get good results.
Another issue has to do with how music achieves value. And, with why music needs to have value. In simplistic form: Musicians need to eat. So music needs to make the lives of people who provide food better. So, how does this happen?
One mechanism used to be: people would create lp records, and singles, composed of tracks that are several minutes in length. Some of these would be broadcast, which let people know about them (and which had its own financial arrangements) and people that liked records would buy them (which was a different financial stream). This was great for people with the right connections.
Nowadays, that system's inefficiencies are creating opportunities for new arrangements. This leads to different financial arrangements. Youtube is the rough analog of radio (but distribution costs are much lower now, so radio financing models do not work). Bandcamp, Apple Store, and band websites and so on are the rough equivalent of record labels -- but, again, the details are much different now.
The decreased risks mentioned here correspond to decreased costs. Decreased costs correspond to broader potential audiences, but also correspond to increased competition.
Anyways, my long-winded point here is that yes the things being talked about in this article are real, but they are not purely copyright issues -- there are other problems also. And, I think that the copyright issues are, to some degree, caused by the current copyright laws. Copyrights are a bigger sledgehammer in a situation where we need sharper needles.
If I were designing copyright law, I would give some initial period of free coverage, but after a certain point I would bake fees into the copyright. Those fees would go up over time, and would be collected by both the government where the copyright holder lives and the government where the copy recipient lives. Copyright would also have increased costs based on the copyright value being sold.
The idea here is that we want to encourage small scale use of copyright, but we do not want copyright to be any kind of permanent or long-term condition. And, at some point the cost of maintaining copyright will exceed the value of copyright and the content becomes public domain.
This of course would create a whole new set of problems (especially the end state -- that needs a better design than what I have describe here -- but it's an essential part of the plan -- the end state is the justification for this plan.)
So my plan is a bad one, but if copyright is the problem then copyright is going to have to change.
The "Constitutional problem" copyright seems to create with respect to music is "inability to listen to newly-released songs by favorite musicians without paying for them".
Bandcamp and the iTunes Music Store are not the 2012 equivalent of record labels. Lowery spent a good deal of time trying to dispel exactly that misconception. The record labels financed albums. They provided advance payments to artists. They accepted the lion's share of the downside risk of investing in a music recording: if the music didn't sell, they were left holding the bag. As Lowery is at pains to point out: for most musicians, the labels never made a satisfactory return on their investment. Things only worked out in the aggregate.
iTMS does none of this. iTMS doesn't pay artists to record albums. iTMS accepts albums fully-formed from artists, holds no inventory, is exposed to no downside risk, and collects 30% (and forces musicians to incur 9% fees to "aggregators").
And for the nteenth time: Lowery is not upset about iTMS. He points out that the economics don't make much sense, but he understands how the market works (perhaps better than you do, since he's a musician, a music industry veteran, and a former quant). But iTMS (a) isn't the whole story of the tech industry, and (b) for damned sure isn't replacing record labels.
It's the mentality of this comment --- "Copyright, Constitution, Copyright, Youtube is the Radio, Copyright bad, iTMS is the record label now, it's Copyright's fault" --- that spurred Lowery's rant. The whole point of it is that once you dig deeper into those claims, the whole story falls apart: businesses are getting something for nothing, consumers are getting something for nothing, and artists are getting nothing at all in return for substantial investments of time and actual capital. How can we stand for this? It seems so amoral.
Because, in a single concept, these are nonrival goods. We would want there to be excess value created over what they cost to produce.
All we need to do is cover the costs of sufficient production. But then we should use the produce freely as much as we want. Because that way we all gain.
If musicians (etc.), overall, are unable to afford to produce, so everyone is, in general, short of music, then we need to address the matter somehow. But the article did not seem to prove that problem actually existed.
If musicians (etc.), overall, are unable to afford to produce, so everyone is, in general, short of music, then we need to address the matter somehow. But the article did not seem to prove that problem actually existed.
I fix:
Musicians (etc.), overall, are unable to afford to produce, so everyone will soon be, in general, short of music, so we need to address the matter somehow.
You said:
But the article did not seem to prove that problem actually existed.
The article went into great detail about how:
* Revenue to musicians is down industrywide over 60%
* The economic models that supposedly offset the decline in recording revenues are counterfeit, in that they were present before the drop in revenue, never accounted for the majority of most musician's revenue, and in many cases are equally susceptible to piracy. Specifically: this article states that bands earn less than $200/night for playing concerts.
* The studies that suggest the contrary are misleading, use cherry picked examples, and even in those cases discuss professionals earning less than managers at fast food chains.
* After a very brief period of opportunity for direct sales revenue on the Internet, musicians (not labels, musicians) got squeezed out of the picture by Facebook and Google - specifically: their audience has been captured by Youtube and Facebook and with it their opportunity to build customer relationships and conduct financial transactions with them.
* He knows professional musicians who are living out of their vans and eating out of dumpsters.
I'm trying to figure out how that last sentence of yours could not be willfully obtuse. The only explanation I can come up with is that you think he's baldly lying.
Because whether various people think they are being paid as much as they should, and how much is actually being produced, are different things.
If you are asking for special provisions from the public, prove the public gets a good deal. How much should the public give? Simply as much as you say? No, that does not work. The public cares about the end result: how much is produced (and available). That is the point.
There has been significant -- or to some, rampant -- 'piracy', and huge 'losses', for a decade: that is what we have been told. But where is the devestation to the amount of production? Where is the terrible shortage of new music being made? That does not seem to be happening.
> everyone will soon be, in general, short of music
So, you admit it has not happened, and is not currently happening.
You will forgive people for being cautious about claims from the general direction of the music industry, and instead expecting good evidence. Everyone likes music, but we should not be giving away money simply because someone else says they should get it.
If <<The "Constitutional problem" copyright seems to create with respect to music is "inability to listen to newly-released songs by favorite musicians without paying for them".>> was the idea you got from my writeup, I clearly failed to present my concepts adequately.
Ok, yes, it's true that this can be an issue for some people. But that does not make it a constitutional problem.
The constitutional problems have to do with the purpose of copyright (it is supposed to foster creativity) and its character (it is supposed to last for a limited time). [And, if you are going to try to bring up Eldred v. Ashcroft, note that the facts of that case included no mention of human lifespan and the court does not rule on facts which are not contested. But there are other complications also, and we should be demanding Congress to write better laws... if only we could figure out what those laws would be.]
Anyways, I was commenting on what might be some reasons for widespread adoption of the mentality you are talking about. (And note also that I believe I said nothing in opposition to iTunes Music Store.)
For example, the original use of APL (before it was called APL and before anyone had implemented it as a programming language -- the reason Iverson joined IBM) was to specify the IBM 370 machine architecture.
In other words, it was being used to document how the CPU worked. And it was impressively successful there, distilling a large body of documentation into 2 pages.
This reduction in cognitive load, describing machine structure, is what made it popular back then. And this is what motivated the effort to implement it as a programming language.
(Also, if I understand correctly, there's also a relatively short and direct step from APL to the initial implementation of SQL.)