I’ve always been intrigued by our process for allowing creative content, such as songs or movies, to become public domain. A common usage for public domain might be to create a short family video and, seeking a peppy and familiar piece of background music, you settle on “The Entertainer”, by Scott Joplin. (If you’ve never heard of it, listen here. You’ll recognize it.) Since the music is past the 75 year limit of copyright protection, it is now public domain – meaning that you don’t have to pay or seek permission to use it for your family home video.
Now, it seems that many old media companies are deliberately destroying great old celluloid video footage rather than allow it to become public domain. Of course, there’s plenty of old TV programming that don’t have a single living fan, but we’re talkin’ about classics here like Jack Benny and the BBC’s Dr Who. Read this news story and this one for an example.
So, what do you think? Is this a misuse of private ownership of aging IP? Is this just another example of old media putting their finger in the dike of digital entertainment for the sake of a dying business model?
I find this to be particularly ironic since old media companies are the first to exploit public domain material for their own uses. Case in point, what’s the last Disney animated film you’ve seen (no, not Pixar – Disney) that wasn’t adapted from an age old story?
Before I jump onto the Goals and Themeword meme started by my buddy, Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter), I decided I’d spend a few minutes looking back on both the year 2009. (From a personal standpoint, the 00’s were my most difficult decade yet. Major problems of every stripe beset me on all sides and with alarming frequency throughout the decade. I was all “Good Riddance” and “Don’t let the door hit y’ass on the way out, 2009!” as the ball dropped in Times Square.)
Rather than spend a lot of time cooking up my own top 10 lists, I reckoned (that’s Southern for “thought”, btw) I’d recap a few others top X lists that are in the ballpark of my own personal opinion. I couldn’t resist putting together my own list at the end, which I’d love to hear your thoughts on. In addition, I want to hear about your Top 10 (or 5 or 3) for 2009!
Their Lists
Time Magazine’s list of Top 10 of Everything 2009 was a pretty good recap for the year on big ol’ cultural touch points like movies and music. I found at least one thing to agree with in each of their pop culture lists: movies – The Hurt Locker – check; TV shows – my personal favorite for its brilliant cohesive multiyear storyline and excellent character studies, Lost – check; album – I and Love and You by the Avett Brothers – check; books (sigh – if only I had more time) included the wonderful The Age of Wonders by Richard Holmes.
Lifehacker’s Top 5 Hive Topics of 2009 is a very interesting list covering lots of topics and pointing out a lot of interesting tools that I hadn’t encountered before. My personal favorite among them was the Top 5 Alternative File Copiers, since the Windows Explorer copy feature reminds me of hungrily awaiting my food in the microwave and just as the counter gets to the T-10 countdown, it goes back up to 30, then down to 8, then back up to 42, then down to 14.
I’m not sure if they meant to be funny but Digg’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2009 is hilarious, much in the same way that Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and I were when we put on an unintentionally hilarious performance at the PASS 2009 Summit Quiz bowl. Go ahead – ask Colin Stasiuk (blog | twitter) what he thought of our performance…
Impressed by Our Quiz Bowl Performance?
Speaking of unintentionally funny, have you seen Yahoo’s Top 10 Searches of 2009? Evidently, the median Internet user (at least from their metrics) is hormone-laden, teenage redneck with a thing for fast cars (Nascar), Hollywood hotties (Megan Fox), and an unassailable but secret love for Mormon-influenced Vampires (Twilight).
My List
I usually try to blog at least once per week and, when I can, even more. I still have this deep down urge to post lots of small blog posts of just a couple paragraphs. But for some reason, I always seem to come out with these big ol’ epistles. Despite my verbosity, y’all still read what I write and for that I’m very thankful. Over the last year, these were my top ten blog posts according to your interest:
Looking for Good DMV Database Admin Queries, where you can find just about every good DMV query ever written except those other really good ones that are posted here in the comments.
Things You Know Now, a semi-successful meme I started where I asked participants to tells us about stuff they’d do differently if they knew it way back in the day.
I excluded a few posts that were numerically in the top ten because, well, they’re my blog posts and I didn’t want them in the top ten. So there! But those that I excluded were things like reposting an interview done by another blogger or maybe a product or book that I plugged for some reason or an other.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my blogging and found it valuable. Tomorrow, I’m jumping on the themeword and goals meme. In fact, I’m crashin’ the party because none of my peeps called on me. [pout]
In the Sequels for SQL series, I point you to sites where you can go beyond the nose-to-the-grindstone resources that we see every day as SQL Server professionals. (My favorite resource for pan-SQL Server pointers is Steve Jone’s Database Weekly email newsletter.) These are the story that comes after and outside (the sequels) of our daily working lives (the other SQL). Let’s broaden our horizons together. If you hit on an interesting but overlooked topic, I’d like to hear from you.
SQL Server: We live it. We love it.
When Jimmy May talks, I listen. Not just because he’s a personal friend, but also because he knows what’s what, if you’ll pardon the expression. So when Jimmy says “I believe xPerf will fundamentally change the way I do my job”, then I want to know what the heck this free xPerf management tool is and how I can best leverage it. Check out Jimmy’s blog entry on xPerf here.
Devices & Gadgets: Usually making our lives better, sometimes not so much.
Ever wonder what’s inside one of those tiny USB hard drives? No? Not even a little bit?!? When I started in IT, hard drives where as big as washing machines and cost $60,000 running at speeds in the 100’s of RPMs. My how times have changed. Here’s a fun hack of a USB hard drive – http://www.dansworkshop.com/electricity-and-electronics/usb-hard-drive-hack.htm.
Futurewatch: Important issues just over the horizon.
There are a lot of standard elements of society being rebranded as the “2.0″ version of itself. The 2.0 moniker was first put forward by visionary Tim O’Reilly (blog | twitter), of the eponymous media company. Whenever you see the 2.0 moniker added to the end of something, most famously Web 2.0, then you know that it will include the characteristics of collaboration, interoperability, and user-centered designs. So, whereas the first go at the web in the mid- to late-1990’s was about enabling information retrieval such as transforming printed catalogs into on-line catalogs, Web 2.0 enables all of its participants to comment on, review, rate, and otherwise participating with each other in the use of such a catalog. In the last FutureWatch blurb, I pointed out work on Grid 2.0, centered on efforts to update the USA’s electricity grid. I’m going to do a much more detailed post in the near future about emerging 2.0 efforts, but one to point out now is Gov 2.0. Under this broad set of initiatives, governments from the lowest to highest levels of responsibility are opening up their public databases for consumption by the public. An example of Gov 2.0 in action comes with the President’s SAVE Award, in which the public is invited to vote on their pick for the best money saving tip put forward by federal government workers. Read all about this year’s SAVE Award here.
Humor: I haz da funny.
Weird products in Japan have their own name – chindogu. Most of these are crackpot inventions that everyone knows will never see the light of day, such as these these featured here. However, some of these products DO get marketed and, more amazingly, purchased. Check out the product reviews of this totally bizarro chindogu here at Overstock.com.
Professional Development: Because there are two words in “database professional”.
There are mountains of great websites with tips on how to be a better speaker. Some day, I’ll write a long blog post about my favorite sites for learning how to improve your oration. But if you’re in a hurry, and who isn’t these days, then this blog post at TechRepublic succinctly sums up the advice you’ll find from many other web sites, articles, and blogs.
Society: Important issues to discuss with your friends and family.
One of the most remarkable things about the USA, as a rather biased citizen, is our ability to suck up our pride, admit a mistake, and try to prevent it from happening again. One way that the USA tries to prevent future occurrences is to convene a commission of some kind. I found this analysis by David Leinweber, a Haas Fellow in Finance and Founding Director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at UC Berkeley, on the commission studying banking market reform in the USA to be quite intriguing and, frankly, upsetting.
WorldView: If James Bond knows that the world is not enough, then so should I.
I’m always on the lookout for issues related to safe and clean water. If you think people can be grumpy when oil is in short supply, imagine what it’s like when there’s not enough drinking water for everyone. See how India is dealing with enormous water issues in this revealing article from the Economist. And I’d be interested to hear what our Indian blogger friends thoughts are on this topic, folks like Rushabh Mehta, Jacob Sebastian, and Pinal Dave. (Water issues have remained one of my passions ever since my years working for NASA developing the water recycling systems for the International Space Station, in which we made water of the H20 that passes through the human body re-drinkable. And it tastes good. Incidentally, all of the technology we developed for this project, as with all non-classified government projects, became public domain. ECLSS technology is now used in hundreds of commercial products ranging from household detergents to commercial solvents to filtration systems.)
I’m starting a new series called Sequels for SQL Server. In this series, I point you to sites where you can go beyond the nose-to-the-grindstone resources that we see every day as SQL Server professionals. These are the story that comes after and outside (the sequels) of our daily working lives (the other SQL). Let’s broaden our horizons together. If you hit on an interesting but overlooked topic, I’d like to hear from you.
Professional Development: Because there are two words in “database professional”.
Peter Drucker, one of the greats in management thought-leadership, would’ve turned 100 last week were he alive today. Check out these top 20 quotes from the man who revolutionized management theory.
Society: Important issues to discuss with your friends and family.
Quoting the Motley Fool, “We spent the latter half of 2008 feeling the wrath of “too big to fail.” Today, banks are bigger than ever. We need to end that. Now.” It’s Time to End “Too Big to Fail”. Read this thought-provoking article soon.
WorldView: If James Bond knows that the world is not enough, then so should I.
The smartest analyst on international issues out there, Fareed Zakari, discusses US and Indian relations in this insightful article from Newsweek.
I was happy to hear that the magazine Database Trends and Applications had recently relaunched their website. While I’d been a columnist there for a quite a while, I’d never been able to easily find my own articles nor check to see if they’d generated any interest. DBTA has changed all of that with their relaunch. I was also surprised, upon closer examination, that I’d been writing there for more than a year. Check to see if any of these articles are of interest to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The November article just went live this week. The site traffic is 79% North America, with India and the UK as the next largets readership markets. It was heartening to see a relatively high level of interest in the “Code of Ethics for DBA’s” among other topics.
If you are perceiving a trend or overarching issue in the SQL Server world, I’d love to hear your input. Drop me a note here or use one of the methods available on http://KevinEKline.com/Contact/ to get in touch with me directly.
The Economist, my favorite news and analysis magazine, published an outstanding briefing and analysis on the coming wars of ascendancy between the major vendors of cloud computing technology and services. When a technological shift bubbles up into the mainstream news media, the technology has gone through a significant, society-altering right of passage. As technologists, we all know that the “outside world” doesn’t really get what we do. It doesn’t click for grandma that you’re doing difficult and important work because it’s hard to wrap your head around low-level technological work. And, unfortunately, most technologists can’t explain what they do on a daily basis without a lot of jargon and techie-speak. So when a major news magazine that speaks to a large number of CEOs and gray-haired types whose closest contact to email is having their admin send a message for them, it’s important to the world at large. Really important.
You can read the briefing here. (Be sure to read the comments. You’ll get some great insight into why cloud computing is a society-altering technology.)
You can read the full multi-page story, for subscribers only, here.
I’ve been rather publicly skeptical about the uptake of cloud computing (though not its significance), compared to some very optimistic prognostications, such as that by my friend and fellow MVP Paul Nielsen. (For a good generalized discussion about SQL Server in the cloud, take a look at Brent Ozar’s posts here.) The important thing I think that is being widely overlooked by we in the trenches is that the biggest issues around who will dominate cloud computing and how those specifications will bubble to the top. We all know and love and work with SQL on a daily basis, yet we forget that databases went through a decades long period in which SQL had no standard. Similarly, I think many of us are beginning to map our minds around cloud computing in the “this is the ways things are” sort of mind frame, instead of the “this is the new Wild West where anything goes” sort of mind frame. The closest analogy that comes to mind is that of the serial bus on my venerable Intel 286 PC. Any time I wanted to connect a product from a new vendor to that serial bus, I had a lot of work ahead. The USB adapter made everyone’s life better, but it was painful getting there.
Something similar is now being played out in the cloud between Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. We can begin to study what sort of applications to deploy in the cloud and how to support them, but if we choose the wrong “serial adapter” we’ll have even more work to do in the future. One or more of these vendors (and their preferred standards and specifications) will rise to the top. But until a leader emerges, you can be that I’ll be hedging my bets by building and deploying applications on internal infrastructures and database platforms.
