> 1) Every artist who's made an online release of their content in a desirable format (without DRM, etc) has seen sales in proportion to their general popularity. Every single one, without even one exception.
That's not true. Radiohead pulled the plug on their In Rainbows experiment after only 3 months in 2007. They decided to go the more traditional route instead. Why would they (an incredibly popular band) do something like that if sales were truly in proportion to their popularity?
Radiohead tried a similar experiment to Louis C.K.'s back in 2007 with their album In Rainbows. But after 3 months they decided that the online sales weren't working out and that they should pursue the more traditional avenue of selling CD's out of retail stores. Two similar stories with vastly different outcomes.
I say that it's similar because both are well established acts in the entertainment industry, releasing their work unencumbered by DRM (or other encryption) via a website. As I see it, the main differences are (in very general terms):
- Radiohead said that fans could pay whatever they wanted for the album, Louis C.K. charged $5
- Radiohead are a band, Louis C.K. is a comedian
- Radiohead tried it in 2007, Louis C.K. in 2011
Of these 3, the most significant difference that I see is that Radiohead didn't set any price tag on their work while Louis C.K did. By some estimates more than half of the people who downloaded In Rainbows did so without paying a penny for it. Louis C.K., on the other hand, charged $5 right up front. The price tag was so low that it was a pretty easy decision for most who bought it, but it was there nonetheless.
I think that speaks volumes about setting customer's expectations appropriately, an area in which the software industry traditionally shoots itself in the foot. Ask your customers to pay something. If you have something of value, they will.
"If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying."
This comment from the article gets at the heart of what the author is trying to say. Behind the desire to single out women as a group that needs a special invitation to pursue a career doing startups are two assumptions: 1) that women actually want a career doing startups and 2) that they do not feel empowered to pursue that course on their own.
The author simply isn't comfortable making those assumptions, which point of view is completely valid given the subjectivity of the topic.
Been thinking a lot about this statement, but still not sure exactly what he means by it. I could interpret it a few different ways, and I'm probably over-thinking it. How do you interpret this?
This is a very well-written article. I really enjoyed the "What it is", "Why I like it", "How I'd use it" format. It is much more helpful than a simple list of features.
It's not the main point of the article, but I just thought I'd point out that node already does have a WSGI/Rack-style library for folks who like that kind of thing. It's called Strata (http://stratajs.org). Disclaimer: I'm the author.
Even so, this breaks down with JSGI middleware that depends on running in a Java environment. For example, JSGI's gzip middleware uses Java's byte buffers.
Connect/Express do little more than set up a callback chain for you that passes along the request and response objects it received from node's request listener.
Strata gives you a sane environment modeled after the WSGI/Rack/CGI model, which has been the backbone of web servers for years.
Also, Strata's API matches the WSGI/Rack model. This may seem small, but in practice it's a significant benefit.
Add to that the list of features cited in the release email, including native support for streams in node 0.4.
First, go:
Secondly, node.js:
Not only does go serve the traffic more quickly, but it also has a much lower standard deviation between slow and long requests. Impressive.