Lots of folks who follow the music space are aware of CD Baby, who has helped independent artists sell their music for years. It basically was a one stop shop for many independent artists, getting their music available in a variety of different places, for either download or physical CD sale. Earlier this week, the company was bought out by Disc Makers, the aptly named company that manufactures CDs and DVDs for independent musicians and filmmakers. The two companies had worked together as partners for many years. Still, what strikes me as most interesting about this is that Disc Makers clearly is recognizing that relying on the physical disc reproducing business to keep growing is a likely to be a losing bet. So, it appears to have come up with a decent plan for positioning itself for the changing market. If only other businesses were willing to do that.

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At this point it shouldn't be a surprise that various systems that shouldn't be are quite easily hacked, but that doesn't make it any less disturbing. Over at this years Black Hat event there was a demonstration of just how easy it is to hack the automatic toll devices used at most bridges and toll roads throughout the country. The stunning part is that it appears that the folks who created these transponders did almost nothing to keep them secure. They're constantly broadcasting and they include no encryption. And this is a device that often connects directly to a registered credit card. Sense a potential problem? The researchers who showed this pointed out that it wouldn't be difficult for someone to clone your transponder and make you start paying for their tolls. Alternatively, it could be used to create an alibi for someone planning to commit a crime -- since police have used toll crossing data to establish where someone is.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, an investigation has found that the chips in the supposedly "fakeproof" e-passports are easily cloned, manipulated and passed through the checking machine -- which is especially worrisome given that 3,000 blank e-passports were stolen just last week. Of course, people have talked about the possibility of such hacks for years -- even before they were put in place -- to show how silly it was to think they were secure. And, of course, the best response comes from the UK gov't. After being presented with the fact that the chips can be changed or modified, the statement from the government was: "No one has yet been able to demonstrate that they are able to modify, change or alter data within the chip. If any data were to be changed, modified or altered it would be immediately obvious to the electronic reader." If you keep saying it, maybe you can pretend it's true.

In both cases, though, the striking thing is that these aren't "surprise" vulnerabilities. They should have been somewhat obvious to those who crafted these systems in the first place. Both are now working on "patches" to deal with the problems, but it's pretty difficult to completely patch a system that's so widespread -- and either way it will take some time. So why weren't these systems designed with better security in the first place?

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There's a class of folks (you know who you are!) who are well known in any kind of written forum/blog/email list etc. It's the infamous "Grammar Nazi." There are nice Grammar Nazis -- and we appreciate those -- and then there are the obnoxious Grammar Nazis who like to imply that you are the stupidest person to ever touch a keyboard because you mixed up affect and effect. From my perspective, I certainly appreciate the folks who point out the grammatical errors we make (we try to fix them quickly, if it makes sense), though I often find it silly to get bogged down in some of the minutiae of certain grammar rules that for all intents and purposes are almost universally ignored.

Either way, whether you're the nice kind of Grammar Nazi (who usually emails us privately) or the obnoxious kind (who always, always, always posts their comments publicly), you'll probably appreciate that the NY Times' internal Grammar Nazi (okay, technically, the Times' deputy news editor who is also in charge of The Times' style manual, Philip B. Corbett) is now publishing that papers' "weekly critique" publicly for all to see (found via Romenesko). In it, he highlights some of the common grammatical or usage problems that he's spotted regularly in the paper, with the intent of bringing it to the writers' attention for future efforts.

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Slashdot points us to the latest absurd patent to get approval from the USPTO. IBM has been granted a patent on the concept of storing your packaging preference information on your customer card. Yes, basically, the act of storing whether or not you like paper or plastic bags on your customer loyalty card is considered such an original idea that it deserves a monopoly.

We've been having some debates over the last few days in the comments on the question of "obviousness." This patent hopefully demonstrates the point that many of us are trying to make. The defenders of the patent system will claim that this is a perfectly reasonable patent because no one has done it before (where's the prior art, etc?). But that doesn't get into whether or not this is actually obvious. Customer cards store all sorts of information. Should we give someone a patent on each and every one? The implementation isn't hard at all. If you were to ask your average (or, even below average) techie, how they would go about storing and retrieving such information, they would do so in an instant. It simply makes no sense to award a long-term monopoly on adding just another bit of info to your customer card. And, yet, that's the system we have these days.

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Could there be anything better for the NBA ?

The more NBA players in Europe the better. The movement of players is taking away the stigma and fear that younger players perceive when they are asked to play in Europe before signing an NBA contract. Knowing that they will be competing against Josh Childress, Earl Boykins, Carlos Arroyo, et al, and getting a chance to get real minutes, AND make good money is a win for everyone.

I know a lot of people think a team that loses a player could get really hurt by the move. In reality, if a team truly has a good handle on your skill level and ability to contribute to the team, they will pay to that level. If they arent sure, then the player going to Europe is a huge win. The player gets paid, but more importantly, the team gets to further evaluate the player in a high pressure situation.

High pressure ? Absolutely. When you are the highest paid American player on your team overseas, you better be a star that produces, on a team that wins. If as a player, you improve your game (and the 2 a day practices over there give you that opportunity), then you can come back to the states after a shorter season and your value will have improved. If you are a player that went over to be the star and didnt star... Well, you probably will have a long career in another country.

From the NBA team's perspective, not only do we get additional evaluation time, but we still retain the same rights we had the day before you left, and I dont want to speak for any other team, but the hardest part of a player leaving is his going to a team you compete with and having to see him and read about it all the time. When a player defects overseas and you still hold the same rights, its not nearly that bad.

And one last question thats been getting asked a lot. What about a guy getting far more overseas than he could get paid in the NBA ? Yes, yes, yes. Nothing better than competition for the NBA.

With the exchange rate, 25mm a year paid in Euros is the equivalent of about 12mm paid in Euros just a few years ago. So NBA players look like bargains. If we lose a few players, thats not a bad thing. in fact a couple All Stars going over there is a GREAT GREAT thing.

Let me explain why. Lets say for the sake of example a couple players got 25mm, 50mm or whatever a year pay and they play on teams that just dominate. They rip apart every team they face. What happens next ? People wonder who the best teams in the world are. When that discussion becomes serious, the NBA and those winning overseas teams get paid.

European Soccer has done a phenomenal job of inventing tournaments that drive huge revenues and TV dollars. This would allow the NBA to do the same thing. Take a Christmas break, or do it in the summer , where the top 6 records in the league play the top 6 teams over there , with the revenues from the event being split primarily among the participant teams rather than equally among all NBA teams. Not only would that be a great revenue source for all the teams involved, but it would create a huge economic incentive for the other 24NBA teams and all overseas team to become top tier teams.

Then of course we could create our own World Cup type tournament every 4 years.

ALl of this could open the door to create more NBA owned competition. I'm not saying it would be easy or automatic. Quite a few parties that dont always see eye to eye would have to come to agreement, But the timing for all of that is right and its an amazing opportunity for players, leagues and teams alike.

Who would have ever thunk that the combination of Josh and the drop in the dollar could create such a wonderful opportunity.

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I never liked the idea of the “for Dummies” or the “complete idiot’s guide to” book series’, but their sales success have certainly demonstrated that plenty of people identify with being a dummy or a complete idiot. Self-deprecation is fine, just realize that there’s a dear line between embracing your own ignorance and ensuring a prophesy of certainty.

This extends well beyond the kind of books you’re buying. I’ve met far too many people who seem so certain of their lack of abilities that they curb their chances of success before they’ve walked the first step. While there are probably plenty of geniuses out there, most of the interesting people I’ve talked to are of average intelligence, but above-average aspiration. Stop believing in the myth of triple-A people as a different kind.

Just because you don’t know how to program or design or lead or do anything doesn’t make you a dummy or an idiot. Mastery is probably closer than you think.

I didn’t start programming for real until I was 20-something. Rails was my first project in Ruby. Jason didn’t train to be a designer, but got a degree in finance. The world is filled with people who didn’t know jack not too long ago about whatever it is that they’re doing and are now highly regarded in their fields.

If there’s something you don’t currently know how to do, please decide not to be a dummy or an idiot. You’re as smart as you always were, you’re just looking to learn something new. Set your ambition to that of equality: There’s no reason I couldn’t be as good as that guy or girl doing what I want.

We were just talking about how copyright law has been unable to keep up with technology changes, but that's not the only law that rapidly changing technology is already impacting. As the pace of technology innovation continues to increase, things are only going to get even more troublesome -- leading to all sorts of legal conundrums to deal with. Parker Mason alerts us to a post at Science Fiction blog io9, which tries to predict five future lawsuits that are likely to come about as a result of certain technology advances. These involve questions about things from the liability of artificial intelligence to the privacy of your thoughts due to brain scanning. If you want one sure thing, it's that there will be no shortage of work for lawyers.

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In 9th grade, my social studies teacher taught me that the greatest marketing slogan ever were the words "rinse and repeat " that they put on shampoo bottles. There is absolutely no reason to wash your hair twice, but if anyone does, they are that much closer to buying another bottle.

A simple, and maybe as effective option for video ? Allow for downloads.

I was watching video on a news site and wanted to keep a copy of the video. This was original video to the station, so there were no copyright issues. So there was no reason for them not to allow a download.

The crazy part is that since they were using flash, it was progressive download. The video is there on the hard drive, its just a matter of making it easy for the end user to rewatch the video. Again and again and again..


Many of the major video sites have added this option, but its amazing that newspaper, TV and other sites that have recently added video, for the most part do not.

With online video, maybe adding the word "Save" to Share & Replay might not double viewing, but every additional local view not only can increase revenue, but it can eliminate paying for bandwidth for those users who go back to the original link and stream the video again.

Im just saying..

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And here they go again. Despite the fact that the games Guitar Hero and Rock Band have breathed new life into various musical acts and helped pump up sales of certain artists, the recording industry is starting to complain. It seems unable to recognize how something that promotes its music or makes that music more valuable is beneficial -- instead freaking out that it's somehow being ripped off. Proving, once again, that they overvalue content and undervalue the service that makes that content valuable, Warner Music's Edgar Bronfman is bitching and complaining that Rock Band and Guitar Hero aren't paying enough for music:

"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though their games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small."

Fine. This is the point at which both of those video games should stop using any Warner Music content, and see how Bronfman feels when everyone else is jamming to content from his competitors, increasing the attention and sales that they get -- while Warner musicians are left out in the cold. Once again, we're seeing how Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s supposed epiphany about the digital age of music was no such thing.

The industry simply assumes that, if something makes use of their content, all of the value is in the content. That's incorrect. Yes, the content is a part of the value, but it's the game that's making that content valuable. This is the same thing that's been true of so many other services that the industry has freaked out about -- from Napster to YouTube to Seeqpod and many others. Until the recording industry recognizes that this isn't a zero sum game, and someone out there promoting your content is helping to make it more valuable, the industry is never going to figure out how to really adapt.

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It's no secret that I tend to think folks who worry about plagiarism quite often blow the issue out of proportion. Luckily, over the last few years, we've seen more and more folks start to recognize that plagiarism isn't always so bad. In fact, quite often, the plagiarists do something more interesting with your content, sometimes taking plagiarism to a new level of artform. The more you look at it, there's a pretty fine line between plagiarism and inspiration. Also, in other contexts, "plagiarism" is quite similar to everyday collaboration. Yes, the failure to properly credit the original author is a bit sleazy, but if you can get beyond that issue, plagiarism is an interesting phenomenon to observe.

Over at Slate, writer Jody Rosen is discussing what he believes may be one of the "biggest" cases of plagiarism ever discovered: an entire Texas-based free alternative weekly newspaper that appears to have an awful lot of plagiarized content. Rosen only discovered it when someone pointed out to him that one of his own columns appeared (in part) in the newspaper, The Bulletin. As he looked into it, he realized that the article actually mashed up three separate articles written by others, making very minor changes and not even doing much to hide the very different writing styles.

The more he looked, the more plagiarism he found. He eventually got his hands on the latest paper issue of the newspaper, and worked out that every single article, other than some short blurbs about local events, appeared to be plagiarized in this manner. Even the letters to the editor were plagiarized from elsewhere. And while he does sound a little bit ticked off at having his work used in this way, he seems more amused by the whole thing. And while the following paragraph is almost certainly meant sarcastically, there's a point to it:

But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trend--or even ahead of its time. The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator. Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media: publishing the Napster of newspapers.

Or there may be a better description: it's the mashup or mixtape of newspapers. Most of the plagiarized articles (all of which have been taken off the web since Slate published Rosen's article) involve bits and pieces from other articles, trying to craft (weakly, from the sound of it), a new article of sorts. And yes, it's sleazy for the (tiny) Bulletin staff to have pretended to write these articles themselves, but is it all that different than what Girl Talk does with music -- which people celebrate (though, to be fair, Girl Talk's mashups are actually good, which makes a difference).

Either way, this is not to condone what The Bulletin has done. It's definitely underhanded and scammy -- and, hopefully thanks to this expose, the folks behind the paper find their reputation deservedly knocked down a few pegs. But, from a cultural standpoint, it's quite interesting. Matt Mason posits that such mashups are often a sign of an unmet market need in his book The Pirate's Dilemma. He points to many similar "mashups" in other fields that later resulted in legitimate enterprises. So, perhaps all this really tells us is that there's a market for taking good content from all over the place, and "mashing" it all up together in a useful manner -- which is exactly what some aggregator sites already do.

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Digital cameras are the gadget that baffle most Britons, according a consumer survey by Reevoo.com. The research revealed that more than a quarter of us have no idea how to use our cameras properly and do not bother to read the manuals either. Hmm...

Some new features are sexy. They come with shiny new interfaces, extra buttons, more power. These are obvious and easy to spot. They are fun to develop and fun to release.

However, there’s another side to improving a product that doesn’t get as much respect. It’s the optimization. Nothing new, but everything better. Small tweaks here, hardware upgrades there. Everything runs more smoothly but you don’t really notice it. You feel it, but there’s nothing pretty to point to as evidence of the hard work.

The speed initiative

We want to treat speed as a feature. It should be one of our best features. So, for the past few months Jeremy and Mark have been working hard on speeding up our apps through software optimizations, caching, and network and hardware improvements. They deserve a huge round of applause for the results. They’ve made a big difference.

Let’s talk about Basecamp

We’re rolling these optimizations out to different 37signals products at different times, but let’s start with Basecamp, our most popular product. Basecamp gets used a lot by a lot of people. It’s also the type of product that people are in and out of all day long so speed is a critical factor. We rolled out a series of optimizations this week.

Some data

Here are some charts generated by New Relic that shine a light on the results of the hard work.

These charts compare an hour of traffic this morning with the same hour last week. As you can see, the changes we’ve implemented have made a dramatic difference. Our overall response time was cut very nearly in half, meaning that pages are loading roughly twice as fast as they were for the same time period last week. At the same time, we’ve managed to cut CPU usage by about a third and database time by about half.

How we did it

These gains were achieved using a variety of techniques including:

• Analysis: We relied heavily on New Relic’s outstanding RPM performance management suite to give us insight about the parts of Basecamp that were accessed the most as well as those that were most in need of improvement.
• Caching: We’ve begun using Memcached in a variety of spots. Caching can be tricky with dynamic apps like Basecamp since different people often see different things, but we’ve implemented it carefully where it could be used to its best advantage.
• MySQL optimizations: We’ve been working with a MySQL performance consultant to help us optimize our database calls and queries. We’re still early in the process but we’ve learned a lot so far.
• Hardware upgrades: We recently made some significant upgrades to our database servers. We went from servers with 2 x Dual Core 2GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and 6×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives to servers with 2 x Quad Core 3GHz processors, 128GB of RAM, and 8×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives. We’ve also upgraded our load balancers and have new switches coming soon as well.

Change you can feel

While you may not immediately notice speed increases like you’d notice a big new feature, we think that over time you’ll see your productivity increase due to these speed increases. Less time for pages to load, less waiting for results. Everything’s just smoother. It’s change you can feel. The more you use Basecamp the more you’ll feel it.

We asked our new payroll service if they could mail paystubs to employees. The company rep’s response:

No, but each stub is stuffed in an envelope and sealed. If you put a stamp on it, it could be mailed easily. That is what most of my clients do, when they payroll reports and envelopes arrive, they just stick a stamp on them and drop em in the mail, pretty easy.

Great tone to that reply. Friendly and personal. And, best of all, it’s a “No, but…” When it comes to customer service, a “No, but you could…” is miles better than just a flat “No.”

Update: Jud from Paychex explains why the stubs are mailed.

I've got about one and a half weeks before I start the roadtrip to Denver, and in that time I want to do some prep, if there's interest, with other bloggers who will be there, or people who are covering the convention remotely, or are just interested in what's happening there.

I have a great toolkit, code that can connect all the blogging and micro-blogging environments, Twitter, Identi.ca, FriendFeed and RSS of course, and probably most other kinds of connections you can think of.

I want to do photos, audio and video.

I'll have two computers with me, a 17-inch MacBook Pro, fully loaded; and an Asus Eee PC.

I'll be driving to and fro, with stops Salt Lake and Boulder. I'm going to try to stay on the grid the whole way, let's see if it works. Last time I made this trip, in 2003, Sprint didn't have much coverage except in the cities.

I'll be staying in downtown Denver, very close to the Pepsi Center.

I'd love to meet as many people interested in technology and politics as possible. I was at the 2004 convention in Boston, when all this was very new, and that trip was mostly awe -- amazement at being there, amazement at the spectacle and the incredible post-9/11 security. My guess is that the security will be tight this time as well, but we'll still have fun!

Let me bring back your wishes from the political blogosphere to TechLand. I'm hoping to come back brimming with ideas and positive energy.

I've found the hash tags people were putting on their twits really annoying, never thought they would catch on, until a few days ago I started hearing about #dontgo -- and until this morning I didn't know what it was about.

Read this e.politics post, it explains.

Republicans have been using Twitter to organize.

An innovation that came from the tech community is being used by the political bloggers on Twitter.

I love how Barack Obama picked up the ball and threw it back in the Republican's faces. Indeed, they do annoy with their ignorance, they're not really that stupid, but they delight in provoking a reaction.

It's not even smart politics as Maureen Dowd pointed out yesterday in her eloque