Charles Connell writes: "What makes a programmer highly productive? Is it lines of code per day? Lines of good code? In this article, I examine the concept of software productivity. I look at some of the standard definitions for productivity and show why they are wrong. I then propose a new definition that captures what programming really is about." Read on for Connell's stab at a better way of evaluating the worth of programmer time.

Do they think we're so stupid that we are going to take media/celebrity ethics lectures from a movie made and owned by AOL/Time-Warner? (Of course they do.) Add Showtime to that long list of movies that could have so easily been better. This film is confused: On the one hand, it wants to be a movie about media obsession with celebrity and violence, and also a spoof of vigilante and cop movies and a dis on reality shows. It also wants to rag on its two stars, Robert DeNiro and Eddie Murphy. And then, inexplicably, it wants to be a cop movie, crammed with chases, fistfights, machine-gun blasts, car crack-ups, spent shells, fires and explosions. You can't have it every which way, guys. The end result is a mish-mash film that is sometimes funny -- especially when Murphy and DeNiro are going at one another -- but is mostly boring and lame. It always comes down to the writing, doesn't it?

rossjudson writes: "There's a little war going on in your computer; it's a war that you might be aware of if you're an experienced computer user. If you're new to the game, there's very little chance you know about it, but it affects you, and it gets worse, not better. The battleground in this war is your CPU, your disk space, and your system's stability." He's got a particular beef with NEW.NET, but lays out (in the article below) what he thinks is a workable, generalized code of conduct for software installation.

Along with the Rio Central we reviewed here yesterday, SonicBlue sent us a Rio Receiver for review. This is a bare bones audio terminal: no local storage. Instead it feeds from either your windows PC, or from the Rio Central. It aims to let you put your tunes wherever you have HPNA or Ethernet. And unlike its expensive big brother, this thing is priced to reasonably for people who want either multizone audio, or just to stream audio from their PC to stereo.

Some of us have long argued that culture isn't being destroyed in cyberspace, but is actually being reborn here. Many journalists, politicians and educators still haven't grasped this, perhaps because they rarely visit or report on sites like The Company Therapist. The public still often thinks of the Net in terms of thievery, retailing, pornography, and hacking and cracking, but the arts are rapidly moving online, sometimes in quite revolutionary ways. This hi-tech story-telling experiment, which turns storytelling upside down and uses hypertext to create a collaborative narrative, is a terrific case in point.

Bruce Sterling is the sort of writer who invites his audience to an open house with "anyone they'd like and anything they can carry." He's also busy in his non-writing life keeping up with the resurrection and commemoration of dead media and not-dead-yet online freedoms. Fellow online agitator and decorated science fiction writer Cory Doctorow seems more of an Ernster Mensch; Doctorow points out that he's a writer second, activist first. When these two started a freewheeling discussion ("intellectual cyber riffing," as Sterling described it) on The Death of Scarcity Tuesday afternoon, the quotable quotes were everywhere. Read on for the ones I jotted down, and a link to some more.

Cory Doctorow has a article on oreillynet called "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon," which begins "How much ass does Google kick? All of it." (We linked to it a few days ago.) Reader Richard Seltzer writes with a reaction to Doctorow's article, below. Your results may vary, but this kind of skepticism can only make the competing search engines better.

My ongoing quest to find the perfect MP3 playing stereo component continues this week with the Rio Central. This is a $1500 box with a 40 gig hard drive that aims to do everything audio, from feeding reciever units, burning CDs, and populating portables, and of course, providing an interface to manage your tunes and play them on your stereo. And it's built on Linux- a USB keyboard is all you need to get to a command line!

Despite the proliferation of tech toys and work devices in people's lives, the gap between the tech-savvy and the techno-confused keeps growing, a monumental failure of our arrogant and elitist tech industries. It's hard to recall any industry which has so abused, neglected and exploited its customers and survived. But it is interesting to track -- as a brand-new survey does -- just how wide the gap is, and how differently Americans cope with it, by age, ethnicity and geography. Why, for example, would midwesterners grasp technology so much better than northeasterners? We are still, at heart, a fix-it country, given the chance, something much of the tech world seems to have forgotten.

We should all be immensely grateful to the British social class system. It inspired some of the greatest fantasy and sci-fi writers in modern literature, from Mary Shelley and Jules Verne to H.G. Wells. In addition to sounding the alarm about life in England, these tales delivered powerful moral messages about technological hubris. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings did great justice to J.R. Tolkien's war and class-conscious trilogy, but Simon Wells' new version of The Time Machine, while it offers some stunning special affects and shining moments, lacks heart, soul and coherence. Spoilage warning: plot is discussed, not ending, which everybody probably knows.

gevmage (Craig Steffen) writes with the review below of the new DVD boxed set of Tron, which he says is a "must-have for any science fiction fan." So whether Tron brings back fond memories, or only serves to show you what movies before your birth, read on for his take on the set. If you're not familiar with Tron at this late stage, beware of a few spoilers within.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has become the most successful, intelligent, improbable and geekiest drama on commercial network TV. Considering its setting -- Las Vegas -- and its subject matter - decomposing pigs, corpse-sucking larvae, transgender serial killers, serial killer make-up artists, murderous and skate-wielding hockey fiends -- and its near total absence of traditional TV fare like sex or shoot-em-ups, this show shatters conventional wisdom about what people want to see on TV. A year ago, CSI seemed promising. Now it's great and getting steadily better. And as CSI has become more successful, its production values have soared. At times, it's beautifully shot, a cross between the old Miami Vice and the early days of The X-Files, from which it borrows heavily.

Here's the great irony: There's more censorship -- all kinds, everywhere, involving more media and culture -- than ever before. But it's doomed to fail. As the Net and Web become more commercial, and as parents, government, schools, politicians, churches and corporations have belatedly grown interested in controlling networked computing and the speech and intellectual property therein, battles over censorship and content -- from school blocking filters to music wars to efforts to curb sexual imagery -- have raged throughout cyberspace. That's why Chicago artist Antonio Muntadas' website "The File Room" may be one of the most significant sites ever created on the Web. Despite relentless efforts to curb art, speech, software, writing, thinking and the free flow of ideas, censorship as a contemporary idea is virtually impossible. The Net killed it, and now the Web is becoming a living, global archive of ideas people want to kill.

Sure, we are being lied to by bloated, corporatized media all the time. What else is new? The great promise of the Net and Web has always been more truth: a great, hyper-linked network of diverse, individual expression, a vast, linked alternative subculture. There is hope. You can go to the Disinformation Web Site to see that idea in action, despite the AOL-ing and MSN-ing of cyberspace. This trove -- its content ranges from "The X-Men" and "Space Mutation" to "The Matrix" to pieces on the Real Jesus and Radiohead -- is what the Web is really about. It offers perspectives you definitely won't find anywhere in the mass media. Don't miss Marty Beckerman's "Death to all Cheerleaders 1." (Marty, whose piece became a book, was canned from a daily newspaper for observing that cheerleaders were "a urine stain on the toilet seat of America.")

Culture is being re-defined right before our eyes. For centuries, art and technology have been considered separate parts of culture. Now, because we live in an information society, they may be be coming together. We are, say some people who study such things, at a critical place in history, where it's sometimes impossible to distinguish between techno-scientific research and art. The creation, movement and analysis of ideas is increasingly the center of our cultural, social and economic life. And that's why a startling (and hefty) new book calls itself "Information Arts" -- because the art such a culture produces has to deal with information if it's going to remain central. So this is the first part of a series -- inspired by "Information Arts," edited by Stephen Wilson and published by the MIT Press -- which deals with the new intersection of art, science and technology. This book is onto an enormous idea, exploring the science and art from algorithms, robotics, quantum physics, coding, nanotechnologies, genetic and kinetic art to electrical music, telecommunications and A.I.

The post-9/11 action/terrorism movie is now a genre all of its own. If this movie is interesting at all, it's through the prism of September 11, a day that changed culture as much as it did politics. Our perceptions of Black Hawk Down, Behind Enemy Lines, and now, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage are shaped - nearly haunted - by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the subsequent military operations in Afghanistan. Some movies - Black Hawk Down - are greatly enhanced by 9/11. Because it was true and well done, it hits us between the eyes. But for poor aging action-pioneer Schwarzenegger, whose movie was postponed for three months by his nervous studio, the opposite is true. This movie comes from another time, not enlivened by reality but diminished by it. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.

From the beginning, the Net has always seemed to have a heart - a locus, a center of activity. At first the academics and defense researchers who'd created and patched together its architecture were its pulse. Then hackers in suburban bedrooms all over the country became the epicenter, followed by the free music and intellectual property guerrillas; the open source, online rights activists and advocates; the Wired magazine gurus and visionaries, and the Web creators, programmers and designers. After that, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the dot.com capitalists took over. This culture is becoming increasingly diverse, commercial and subterranean. Where's the heart of the Net now? A.I. or AOL?

In the wake of the dot-com washout, a lot people nearly wrote off cyberspace as a retailing wasteland. But last week, Amazon reported that it had finally turned a profit, something most of us thought we'd never see, and preliminary figures show a sharp upturn in online sales despite the mild recession. Some other interesting post-Christmas tidbits are popping up, too: for the first time, more women than men are buying things online, a landmark barometer of a bright digital retailing future. Beyond that, in case you haven't noticed, online retailers are getting a lot smarter. The arrogant, customer-abusive tech world could learn a lot from these people, who offer steep discounts, stand behind their products, and actually offer real and free customer support.

Well, some of you warned me, and you were right. Kung Pow - Enter the Fist had a great premise and the trailers were tantalizing. Steve Oedekerk borrowed from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? to make a Kung Fu spoof patched together from a little known 1976 karate film Tiger and Crane Fists. But the result is anything but funny. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.

Do media/entertainment technologies connect or disconnect people? That Americans have become increasingly disconnected from one another and the social capital that binds people since the rise of TV and the Net is an idea much debated since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community two years ago (the book is now out in paperback). The Net -- ironically the world' s most connective medium -- could be radically advancing that trend. Putnam cites numerous surveys that show that interaction with family, friends, and neighbors, and participation in social activities -- from joining civic groups and bowling leagues to voting -- has declined as Americans find more reasons to stay at home. Online, fragmentation abounds. People turn increasingly inward. The big open spaces of the Net have either been corporatized, flamed to death or shut down, and communications steadily turned to exclusive p2p "me media," the fragmented, often self-censored, personalized and specialized weblogs, IM programs and mailing lists that dominate much of online communications.