The Atlantic covered this story much better (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...) and their coverage included two additional charts. One corresponds to your criticism of adjusting for titles vs versions. In that chart, the drop off in the mid 20th century is still evident but not as extreme. In the second chart, they account for differences in the number of books published per decade using third party sources. In that version, the divergance is actually much worse.
I don't think there were any responses to your criticism of the categories.
Thanks for the pointer! I think you're right that The Atlantic piece is more fair.
On the "adjusted" chart you reference, my thought was the adjustment makes that chart not hugely useful to the copyright debate. In other words, the debate has one side people who say "copyright encourages creative output" and on the other people who say "copyright actually limits the spread of creative output." By showing books available as a percentage of total books published, rather than showing absolute output, the adjusted chart is useless for the question "might strong copyright encourage greater output," instead measuring only the answer to the question "does copyright tend to limit distribution." Both sides in the debate agree the answer to the latter question is "yes." They do disagree on the scope of the problem so I suppose the adjusted chart addresses that point but it seems like a minor and muddled bit of data. You look at it and might think "ah copyright is really holding down the distribution of media" but when you realize it's basically a percentage chart (based on a small and not necessarily representative sample) and then realize book output has hugely grown it's hard to see the differences in the chart as particularly consequential for the debate. At least IMHO.
I would like to see that same chart adjusted for population growth.
It's a lot cheaper to write and print a book now than in the 1800's, the population is much larger, and autors are often far more prolific. So, really your better off looking at the years before and after copywrite law changed vs the overall trend.
I had the same experience with my Incredible 1. It was wonderful for about 6 months until it became absolutely unusable. Random bugs all over the place. Updates not coming in. So much lagginess in the UI that the interface became basically unusable.
Ugh. Yeah. Got to that point in the article and closed the tab. It's a good article, but, sadly, that's the only thing I remember now about the article.
The attraction and collision demos are both doing collision detection, which means N! calculations (for each particle check the location of all the other particles that have not been checked relative to this one). Whereas the chain, cloth and I can't recall the name of the third one, are on the order of N calculations (constant interaction with only a fixed number of other particles).
He's right actually if the code is written sensibly. Well it should really be (N-1)! but close enough. Think about it in terms of 3 balls. I check ball1 against ball2 and ball3 then move to ball2. It gains me nothing to re-check ball2 against ball1 so I just check it against ball3. When I reach ball3, I have already checked everything and I'm done.
The loop should look like this:
for (i = 0; i < n; ++i)
for (j = i + 1; j < n; ++j)
I think you need to revisit your understand of complexity. It is O(N^2). If you want the exact count, it is N(N-1)/2. N! is an exceedingly large number even for very small N.
Yep I'm wrong. Mixed up factorial just like mistercow said. Thanks for the corrections. And here I was worrying that someone would complain that my loop wouldn't address the issues of collision response necessitating more checks, thus making a recursive solution necessary.
This reminds me of Zappa.js (http://zappajs.org/), one of my favorite CoffeeScript implementations of a web server on Node (although it's mostly just a wrapper for express). I'd be curious, though what advantages there are in creating a totally new web server (this approach) from Zappa's backwards compatible with Express.js's approach.
I tried Blekko for a bit this past fall and was not terribly impressed. I, frankly, don't understand what the /slash notation is doing. is it a filter? Is it a specific type of search?
However, I have been using DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for the past 2 months and I'm not sure that I'll be going back anytime soon. DDG is touted as being for the privacy conscious, but I can't say that was my primary motivation in switching. I have been increasingly unhappy with Google's 'bubbling' and my searches there increasingly felt like I was running in circles through crappy mailing list archives and spam sites and all their new 'features.'
DDG brought back memories of what drew me to Google in the first place, over a decade ago. It is clean, straightforward, and relevant. Yeah, I know it's running on Yahoo Search APIs which are running on Bing, but it's still a drastically different search experience.
Finally, doing a bit of research into DDGs extras and the !bang notation pages kind of sealed the deal for me. Want to know your IP address? just search "ip" Want lorem ipsum text, just search for that. Want to search the python documentation? Just use !python. Want to re-run your last search in Google? Just add !g Those features alone are enough to make it a true power user's search engine.
--> Your public IP address is 123.456.789.>256? - Learn more
>Want lorem ipsum text, just search for that
Ok that's pretty cool.
>Want to search the python documentation
For me this is a language other than python, but I have queries in chrome/opera that search by keyword. C++ is c<space>stuff, java is j<space> stuff. As an added benefit, for any internal documentation I can have keywords going directly to internal stuff.
>Want to re-run your last search in Google
Ditto with bing b<space>, amazon a<space>, etc.
As a 'power user' my needs go way beyond what any search engine does. Web browser, scripts, etc pick up the slack.
Also, am I missing something here? Everyone keeps mentioning that DDG runs off of Bing. Do they do anything in the interim to your queries, or do you get the same results by going to bing.com? And if so, is everyone just arguing that bing's results are better than Google's now? (Could be, I dunno).
It is kinda cool that you get wolfram results, etc (wherever they pulled lorem ipsum from for example) all compiled for you instead of having to keyword everything I guess.
Hmmm I wasn't too impressed with DDG results in the past. I just tried it again with "efficient self organising maps implementation". The DDG results are completely useless nevermind almost totally irrelevant to my query. Then I remembered American English spelling and tried again with "organizing". DDG results improved, but the fact I have to remember such details is annoying (I don't with Google, Yahoo or Bing).
Having run the query on the other engines, Google & Bing are on par (I use Google exclusively but should probably check Bing from time to time), Yahoo 2nd most useful (somewhat generic results, though), DDG 3rd (student projects in the search results vs. published papers in the other engine results, results that are overly broad) and Blekko the worst (it seems to just pump out results with one or two of the words I queried, no concept of relevance).
Slashtags are a way to build specific search domains. The easiest way to understand one is to build one for yourself.
Example: I built myself a /objc slashtag that includes Apple's docs, Stackoverflow, Cocoadev.com, Mike Ash's blog, and a few other sources.
Now, when I go to blekko and search, say, "calendars /objc", I get only info about calendars in objective-c from those sources, and no noise.
Edit: I find this rather more useful than DDGs ! Syntax in that it's user-extensible, and lets me aggregate many site searches into one slashtag, rather than just punting me to a specific site's engine.
Some slashtags are filters. Other ones are a specific type of search. DDG uses ! in a somewhat similar fashion to /; for
example, on blekko, adding /google does your search on google. Adding /python does your search on a list of 136 important Python websites. And you can volunteer to help edit the /python slashtag.
Fascinating article, but I'd still like to know more about that 8th figure on the inflation model. We are told that the y-axis represents energy, but what is the x-axis? It clearly isn't time because it's being measured in phi over something measured in GeV.
Do screen readers parse CSS in their reading? I would think this would avoid that problem by using the :before pseudo classes rather than injecting it into the dom directly.
The Atlantic covered this story much better (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...) and their coverage included two additional charts. One corresponds to your criticism of adjusting for titles vs versions. In that chart, the drop off in the mid 20th century is still evident but not as extreme. In the second chart, they account for differences in the number of books published per decade using third party sources. In that version, the divergance is actually much worse.
I don't think there were any responses to your criticism of the categories.