On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Scott Schmucker wrote:
I would agree that choosing 1991 as a starting point for a Moore's Law relation on Project Gutenberg production is arbitrary.
Arbitary refers to the choice of something without any particular reason for the decision and there are two very non-arbitary reasons for choosing 1991 that have been mentioned quite thoroughly without being refuted by any better model. Once other models were shown to have been chosen to reflect points from which large deviations from both our goals and from reality were predicted [i.e. proven to be false] the argument changed from picking a different year to picking no year at all. [snipped semiconductor history]
The point, of course, is that Moore's Law serves to indicate an exponential growth rate over whatever time frame you choose to apply it. Regardless of where it starts, it gives a pretty good idea of this. Do I think that it is particularly applicable to Project Gutenberg production? No, not really. But it is a term that the public is familiar with, and thus Michael finds that it is a useful term to use in advertising just how much work PG has been doing over the past decade (and a half). Can we really think in terms of "keeping up with Moore's Law?" Probably not, it doesn't make much sense, though the semiconductor industry does it every day, and going back to the very beginning, they are much farther away from Moore's Law than we are.
So. . .when it comes down to it, Moore's Law applies better in our case than in the case of semiconductors. However, I should again point out that here it is just being used as a goal and a reference point, and has been for 15 years now. It would appeare that as long as we were always well ahead of Moore's Law for each of our projections, that no one was going to complain a lot, but now that a year has been reported that fell short, even of the previous year, much less of the previous 18 months, then the noise level increases. If there were truly an aversion to using Moore's Law for these purposes, this aversion would likely have been brought up quite often from the 1991 to the present. Of course, you are welcome to apply any techniques to your own history of Project Gutenberg, and run them up our flagpole for testing. Michael