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% -- but most mentions are high rather than low. Record Sales, MP3 Downloads, and the Annihilation Hypothesis by Stan Liebowitz explains the variation.

Will LOTR: The Two Towers be lord of the box office?

A friendnet is a network topology where every TCP/IP connection is backed up by a meatspace connection.

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.

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.

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.

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.