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! I won't be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Titanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific--until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I've written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can't think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.

How many programmers do you know who are enthusiastic about these promised machines of the future? I hear almost nothing but grief from software people, although the hardware folks in our department assure me that I'm wrong.

I know that important applications for parallelism exist--rendering graphics, breaking codes, scanning images, simulating physical and biological processes, etc. But all these applications require dedicated code and special-purpose

Second, his statement

Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.

"I hear almost nothing but grief from software people," Knuth says, but this is just because we haven't yet found clean, effective methods to write, test and debug multithreaded software at large scale. This doesn't mean it's bad, it just means we haven't figured out how to use it properly. And, worst case scenario, you can always write your software as services connected through a thin layer of communication (based on anything from IPC to RMI to REST) that can then run as multiple processes happily on a multicore machine.

He also rues that literate programming hasn't been embraced by the millions, but this is also only partly true. Java and other languages have been using Literate Programming concepts for years, and it has been a major advantage in productivity when using good IDEs like IDEA, Netbeans, or Eclipse.

Not that this invalidates anything that Knuth has done. :) The TeXbook and the Art of of Computer Programming are still gems that I end up perusing frequently. They may not be multicore-enabled, but they're still as relevant as ever.

A few Ning networks, viewed as graphs

Then today VentureBeat broke the news of our recent investment round. Marc has more details. As he says, VentureBeat found a mandatory SEC filing and put out news that we'd otherwise not have talked about, since there isn't a clear reason to be doing it. The reasons for the round, as Marc says:

We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don't need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it's good to be conservative with these things.

A lot done, still more to do. :-)

Sometimes it's hard not to wish that Hollywood would get its act together and produce some actual entertainment instead of drivel, or rather, not hand it out just one movie a year at a time. This year definitely looks like an outlier. The list so far:

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Come on, admit it. You've been waiting for this for the last ten years. Yeah. Me too.
• Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr., one of the best actors of his generation, and what looks like a killer action movie.
• The Dark Knight. Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, once more directed by Christopher Nolan. After the spectacularly good Batman Begins, I have little doubt this one will be the one that finally, finally, let us Batman fans forget about what Joel Schumacher did to the character with Batman and Robin.
• Wall-e. The latest from Pixar. I'd be surprised if the movie isn't as hilarious as the trailer. Fun to watch for the CG tricks alone.
• The Incredible Hulk. Second try at getting the big green man on the big screen. The first try wasn't great but it had some good moments. This time Bruce Banner is Ed Norton, which can summon enough intensity to turn green all by himself (just remember American History X). High hopes for this one.
• Righteous Kill. Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. Need I say more?
• Forbidden Kingdom. Jackie Chan and Jet Li go Kung-Fuing. Much fun is to be had by all.
• Get Smart. Part of what was funny about the TV series was the crappy faux-James Bond tech, but this time it looks like the effects make it perhaps a little too slick. Steve Carell definitely looks like the natural heir for the part.
• Bangkok Dangerous. Nick Cage tries the long-hair-weirdo-distanced-from-society thing again (last time it was Next), as a professional assassin who apparently grows a conscience. Might be a bomb, but willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
• Hancock. Will Smith goes superhero with an attitude, is (apparently) also a bum. What can possibly go wrong?
• Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. After the spectacularly good Hellboy, I hope this one doesn't succumb to sequel-syndrome.
• Wanted. Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman teach some dude that he can curve the trajectory of bullets. A premise this insane has to lead to a fun movie.

Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Comscore, all have measures of "Rankings" or "Popularity" that put sites relative to others. These rankings, in general are a more-or-less accurate relative description of how a site is doing.

The keyword here, though, is relative, and, more specifically, relative to how the service in question measures other sites. Comparing a Quantcast ranking to a Compete ranking to an Alexa ranking for any given site is useless, and no one even attempts that.

Rankings for each site are widely understood to be relative within its own index, and no one has a problem with that. So far so good.

The real problem start when we put their measures of Visitors (Alexa calls that "Reach" as far as I know) and Visits. So some news publication may take a comscore measurement and say "such and such a site has 1,000,000 visits", inevitably prompting discussion of whether it's true or not and (generally) silent fuming on the part of the site that sees in their logs, every day, different data.

This is the problem. The use of a heavily overloaded term like "Visitors" or "Visits" or "Pageviews" or even "Reach" causes the confusion. None of these sites claim that they have the ultimate truth at their disposal, but by using common terms, this is exactly what happens. After all, everyone knows what a 'Visitor' is, right? Well, maybe. Maybe everyone does know what a Visitor or a Visit is, but no one agrees on the definition.

Even if everyone did agree on the definition, you could still lose data unless you're looking at the logfiles for a service. Why? Several reasons, but the three key ones are:

1. The services extrapolate traffic based on measures they choose. Try a site that has low traffic, and the services give up. "Not enough data." Yep.
2. Not only that, the services extrapolate based on previously filtered data. The raw log data for a year for any of the top 1,000 sites can be counted in the petabytes, if not exabytes. None of these services have enough compute power or storage at their disposal to process that, clearly. So they are pre-filtering information, which is then extrapolated. The prefiltering presumably eliminates bots. What if a new bot shows up? How do they count it?
3. Domain mapping. Consider Ning. Suppose we agreed on what a pageview or a visit is. Would Alexa or Compete get the right numbers? No. Because they key on domains to define what is traffic to a service. In our case (as in many others) the service allows you to do domain mapping of your site, which means the services think that the traffic is going somewhere else, even though it's going to Ning. That's why I can assert without hesitation that the visits/visitors traffic reported by these services doesn't cover a good portion of the traffic Ning handles, and when on top of that you add uncertainty as to what is a visit, and what is a visitor (is it an IP? a cookie? A combination? What about internet cafes? and so on), then the actual absolute value for those things is pretty much meaningless.

Now, what the services do track correctly in a lot of cases is trends, especially over several months (again, in the case of Ning the fact that they miss domain-mapped networks is a big problem, but the data we have for non-domain mapped networks shows similar, and I say again, similar shapes and trajectories).

My take is that if these services stopped calling what they measure "visits" or "visitors" and just said these were some sort of generic "[servicename] traffic measure" or something, then they would get a lot more respect, something they deserve since they do provide a valuable service, and they should get credit for that.

Have a great 2008!

Well.

As it happens, I own -and use although less than I want to, for reasons I'll explain later- a PRS-500 (the first generation, the photo that Russ has in his post is of the PRS-505).

Here's a photo of the PRS-500 next to a paperback book under natural light that I just took a few minutes ago (sorry for the quality, but image sharpness is not the goal here).

Is the paperback black-on-white? No.
Is the eink display darker than the book? Yes.
But is the difference enough to "turn me off" from reading? Absolutely not.

Keep in mind this is a first-gen device, a year old (it was first shown publicly at CES on January 2006, and released in the Fall), and that the new PRS-505 has more levels of grayscale (8, vs. 4 in the original) and even higher contrast.

The difference is, in fact, negligible. Under direct light, which is how most of us read, there is basically no difference at all. In any case, books are not Black on white -- the best background is a brownish-light-gray and if you pick up any book and look at the background you'll see that they rarely have pure white background (tech and academic books being the main exception).

Another red herring that people that "use" the device for 30 seconds at a store mention is how you can see the screen "flipping" the page, which is definitely a little disconcerting at first. When you're actually reading for extended periods, this becomes completely a non-issue.

So, if not because of the screen, why haven't these readers taken off yet?

First, choice -- there aren't many products like this. There's basically the Sony Reader and I think one more random manufacturer selling one (I seem to remember seeing it, but can't really say for sure, which means I probably made it up). This means there's no competition in the market, and in particular lower volumes for a new technology like eInk which keep component prices high.

Second, price. $300-400 is nothing to sneeze at, but crucially the price of books for these devices is just ridiculous. They cost the same as the physical versions and they come with DRM which limits where you can use them. The book publishers are facing the same problem as the music companies and movie studios and they're reacting the same way, trying to fight digital instead of embracing it (and the lower distribution costs it entails) instead plunging their heads in the sand and hoping that the storm will pass. Yeah, that's not gonna work.

Finally, uploading arbitrary text content sucks. This one is a bit more subtle and in my mind perhaps the one that gets to be close to a "deal breaker". Say I have a PDF of something that I'd like to throw into the device to read. I have to fight with the software, which in the case of Sony is a pathetic iTunes knock-off that looks as if it was put together by a bunch of 5-year olds with crayons (yeah, it's that bad, also Windows-only), but more importantly, the reader is not smart enough to do the right thing with arbitrary PDF. It scales the PDF down until the whole page is visible, margins and all, which means, in 99% of the cases, that a PDF created for letter-sized paper gets shrunk down to paperback. Not very usable. Exporting the thing as text and then uploading that works marginally better, but you end up with sentences broken in the wrong places as well as a lot of extraneous content such as page headers showing up in the middle of a page (lots of Project Gutenberg files are like this). Similarly, converting webpages, etc, is a massive pain. Ideally I'd just take web content and drop it on the device for reading later, but that's not how it works, and it completely gets in the way of me using it more often. (As an aside, being able to take notes is something I find myself wanting to do all the time, I do that with post-its on real books, so a solution for that would be nice as well).

If books where cheaper, and I mean significantly, than they are today, and if taking web/other content to the device was a no-brainer, then we'd be much closer to seeing these portable readers become accepted and used by many more users.