Entries Tagged 'Random' ↓

The front page of Techmeme has an article from Zunerama about, say, difficulties sharing songs between Zunes (Zune is the Microsoft answer to the iPod, and one of its exclusive features is the ability to wirelessly send songs to another Zune). It seems that the owners of the rights to some songs — the most popular ones, apparently — decided that they should not be shared between customers, even if the shared copy can only be played three times and expires in a few days.

Now, the famous response from Steve Jobs to this “sharing” feature of the Zune is that, by the time you manage to try to send a song to a girl, she’s already gone; it’s much better to get close to her and share the earphones instead (preferably with an iPod).

So… any bets on how long until record companies try to outlaw the sharing of earphones?

Or, tales from a 3^rd world economy.

The recently deceased American economist Milton Friedman was one of the strongest defenders of free market economies, with very limited (or no) participation of the government in economic matters. Free economies are essential to guarantee political and social freedom for the population and to solve social problems that are not addressed, or are made worse, by other systems.

Latin America is frequently used by detractors of the free market and liberalism as a “counter-example”, or almost as a disproof of Friedman’s theories. According to critics, the failure of Latin American countries to generate and distribute wealth proves that liberal policies do not work to benefit the population as a whole. This argument is wrong and is based on a very severe fallacy. Let me tell you a story.

In Brazil, bread is commonly bought from bakeries in the form of small 50-gram French rolls; it’s also more commonly bought from the local corner bakery than from large supermarkets or bakery chains. This is such a regular staple that bakeries were, until recently, required by law to sell 50-gram rolls; the price of bread was also regulated until not too long ago.

If you think about it, you’ll agree that there’s not a visually appreciable difference between a 50-gram roll and, say, a 45-gram roll (or, for that matter, a 55-gram one). Bakers will undoubtedly notice that as well. There are two opposing economic incentives working to make sure that rolls, on average, will weigh approximately 50 grams: heavier rolls will cause the baker to lose money, and lighter ones will eventually get him fined by the local equivalent of the Consumer Affairs office (and possibly gain him a reputation among his neighbours of being cheaters). If you are familiar with the way Brazil works, you’ll notice that one of these incentives is much stronger than the other: the chance that any particular baker will get fined for underselling bread is very, very small.

The result of that was, of course, that a fair number of bakers would sell bread that was under the 50-gram weight limit. There were complaints, fines were given, but the problem was more or less endemic (apparently). Regular audits were finding rolls that were up to 8% (4 grams) lighter that they should. The government decided it was time to act, and it did. Not, as one might expect, by increasing the resources used to audit bakeries, or by imposing heavier fines; the solution that was adopted was to require all bakeries to sell bread by weight, not by unit, and to weigh the bread in front of the customer.

Now, even if you exclude the possibility of a cheating baker, a 50-gram roll will very rarely weigh exactly 50 grams. Without any testing, I would expect the weights to fall on a bell curve (a normal distribution) centred somewhat close to 50 grams and extending some 10% in either direction. Also, as honest bakers would usually get the bread to be slightly above 50 grams to avoid problems with auditors (and customers), the centre of the curve would actually sit somewhat above 50 grams.

What is the result of that? Well, the immediate result is that now customers don’t know beforehand how much they will pay for bread (because, you see, bakers will not cut bread to fit the weight required by the customer; customers will still ask for the number of rolls they want, and will only afterwards be told the price). A secondary result is that the economic incentives affecting bakers have changed: they now have a strong incentive to make bread rolls that are heavier than 50 grams, because that will make them more money (and will cost consumers more money, of course). This would cause the average weight of the rolls to go up, and the average expenditure to get a given number of rolls to also go up (and this has actually happened). A side-effect is that customers who shop from honest bakers will, in effect, have to start paying for a weight excess they were getting for free.

And, of course, customers are complaining. Public opinion polls made before the change said that 70% of the customers would prefer the new method, but now that it’s been in use for a month 89% of them want the old way back (yes, there’s a lesson here somewhere). The louder complaints refer to the impossibility of going to the bakery with the exact change to get bread, of course; that is a common problem for lower-income customers, who may not even have any more cash to pay for heavier rolls. But there’s an interesting complaint that I don’t think anyone expected: warm (recently baked) bread is heavier, because the rolls lose water by evaporation as they cool down. And I don’t think requiring bakers to only sell cold bread would be a popular move.

I’m pretty sure many bakeries would like to cater to what customers want and offer both possibilities (by weight or by unit), but now that would be illegal and subject to a R$50,000 (A$30,300) fine, even if the choice was given to the customer. However, due to the outcry, Senate is now considering a bill to require bakeries to offer both options. Of course, why allow an option when force works so much better?

So, there you go. Next time someone mentions Latin America as a proof that liberalism and free markets do not work, tell them this story and ask: if you can’t even sell bread without the Senate getting involved, can you really call this a liberal economy?

As I said, I started watching BSG somewhat late; I finished season 1 just after Channel Ten started showing season 2, and have been catching up with the episodes since. And this weekend I did it: I watched the sixth episode of the third season (“Torn”), and had a very weird feeling afterwards: there were no episodes left to watch! (until next week, that is) That’s a first for me.

About the latest episodes (possible spoilers ahead): the start of season 3 redeems any problems from the end of season 2. Episode 4 (“Exodus pt 2″), in particular, is probably the single best TV episode of any genre of the last several years. Although… it’s a bit odd that, at the end of episode 5, we’re almost back to the middle of season 2: Laura is the president, there’s only one battlestar, Adama Jr. is the CAG, Thigh is drunk… even the number of survivors is sharply down from the peak reached right after the Pegasus showed up. At least Thigh’s very annoying wife is gone.

The “cylon disease” plot shows some promise; I still can’t quite figure out what Baltar plans to do, but probably the best guide is what Lt Gaeta (is he still an official?) said: his ability for self-preservation has no match. He may now be about to realise that staying with the cylons is not the best way to do that.

Waiting for the next episode…

I got “addicted” to the new version of Battlestar Galactica somewhat late; I watched the miniseries on DVD a few months ago, and then ran through the whole of the first and second seasons as fast as I could (which was not that fast; I just finished season two this weekend, and I’m already four episodes behind in season 3). The rest of this post may contain spoilers to anyone who has not finished watching season 2 yet; in Australia, the last episode broadcast on Channel Ten was 2-12, “Resurrection Ship, Part 2″, with eight episodes left to the end of the season.

For those who don’t watch it: the story is basically a war between humans and intelligent robotic assistants created by them, known as cylons, who rebelled against their creators; the humans don’t live on Earth, but on twelve planets known as the “twelve colonies”, with Earth being a mythological thirteenth colony. As the miniseries starts, a truce is in effect and humans and cylons live in separate solar systems in relative peace; the cylons break the truce with a surprise attack and manage to kill almost every single human being on the twelve colonies. The few remaining ones (mostly people who were in transit between planets at the time of the attack), protected by the only remaining military ship (Battlestar Galactica) flee their solar system and are pursued. The rest of the series follows what happens next; at the end of the second season, there are just over 47,000 humans left.

One thing that is interesting about this series is that there are no “role models” among the characters; there’s not a single one of them that is not significantly flawed in some way (or, to put it in another way, the characters are human). One could say that the “villains”, the cylons, are usually more admirable than the remaining humans, but the fact that they did kill 20 billion people makes them hard to recommend as role models.

I also like the way in which the human society is not shown as “utopic”; it is depicted more realistically, with dissenters, strikers, criminals, terrorists, religious fanatics, corrupt government officials etc. One particular episode deals with the black market that comes to life across the surviving ships; other, with whether abortion should be outlawed in a society that desperately needs people to reproduce. A recurring theme is whether captured enemies should be treated as prisoners or as “equipment” (they are not human, but machines).

The second season has much less “action” that the first, but it’s much more entertaining exactly because it deals in more interesting themes. I liked all episodes (some more than others… 2-14, “Black Market”, was not particularly good in my opinion), except what happens in the season final after the text “One year later” appears on the screen. It’s not that the rest of the episode is bad… it was more the general feeling of “o how the mighty have fallen”… and the webisodes that advanced the plot before the start of season 3 keep the same feeling going.

Speaking of the final of season 2: Gaius was exactly the kind of president I would expect him to be, but I was left with a few questions (which won’t make sense to people who are not following the series):

• how come Adama (the father) accepted Gaius’s orders so readily? he was always ready to confront the former president and to go against her orders when they did not make sense militarily, but he sets out to do what Baltar tells him with no argument, even after the nuclear explosion that destroyed Cloud 9; why is that? it seemed very much out of character
• how does the cylon occupation of New Caprica fit with the message delivered by the cylon “preacher” and the apparent de-occupation of the original Caprica (and, supposedly, the other eleven colonies)?
• the original Caprica is not exactly a “nuclear wasteland”, as mentioned by the then president Rosslyn; haven’t the rescue-party members (or the rescued people, for that matter) related back about how habitable is the planet?

Maybe some of these are answered in the first episodes of the third season… time to start working on them!

This weekend I stayed up to watch the Japanese F1 Grand Prix, as I usually do (note to those outside Australia: F1 GPs are shown in Australia late at night on Sundays, regardless of when they actually happen, except for the Australian GP, which is shown live; that broadcast time is approximately the right one for the European GPs, but the Asian ones are severely delayed – the American ones are shown approximately live early on Monday mornings). The GP was exciting up to the point when Schumacher’s car broke down, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

There’s an ad for Mobil oil that, as far as I know, is only shown during the F1 transmissions, and it’s driving me crazy. It tells of a “drive around the world” expedition that used Mobil oil to protect the cars’ engines from the environment: dust, mud, water, smog etc. The ad ends with a member of the expedition standing knee-dep on mud, lifting his ruined shoe and saying, and I quote, “too bad everything wasn’t protected by Mobil oil”. NO! That’s wrong! If the expression “everything wasn’t protected” makes any sense — and I don’t think it does —, it means that not a single thing was protected, and what would be the point of making an ad then? What the guy should have said is “too bad not everything was protected by Mobil oil”.

There. I had to vent. Back to the regular programming, now.

And, in another Hitchhiker-themed post… The Guardian has an article on the intelligence of dolphins that, honestly, left me speechless (I saw the article mentioned in Jeremy Zawodny’s blog). It starts by describing how dolphins trained to clean their own pools “game the system” by, first, handing litter out to trainers in small portions and, latter, capturing gulls to trade for fish (that’s how an economy starts…). It goes on to describe the behaviour of “wild” dolphins using tools to hunt and to protect themselves.

As the author says, it seems that the more we study dolphins, the smarter they prove to be. If they all go missing at some point in the future, start to worry.

The first I went to New York was in 1995, and that’s when I took the picture you see here. It was taken from the ferry to Liberty Island. At the time, I was on a business trip to Connecticut, and in a free day I took the train down to Manhattan; in that single day I went to the top of the Empire State Building, the top of the WTC, Liberty Island, Wall Street, Chinatown… it was a very busy day. And no, this picture was not photoshoped; I guess the colours are a result of the Sun being almost directly behind me at the time.

I’ve been to NY a few times since then, but I never went up to the top of the WTC again. The last time I was there was in early 1999. Still, NY is a kind of a “magical” place; the events of 2001 touched everyone who has been there, even those of us who were not directly affected.

Today, five years later, is a good time to remember what happened, and to think of those who suffered with the attacks, both in NY and DC.

Great article: Faith Based Programming.

I think I know some people who practice it.

The Long Tail
Chris Anderson

This book emerged from an article published in Wired in October 2004, which followed onto a blog while the book was being written (and the blog goes on, of course). The main point, as described in the original article, is that the digital economy and the amazing increase in the amount of choice offered to consumers are ending the era of “hits” and “blockbusters” and allowing consumers to have their most unusual tastes satisfied. This is where the subtitle of the book (“Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More”) comes from: instead of selling large numbers of units of a few “hit” products, businesses are increasingly selling less and less units of more and more different products.

The main examples centre around entertainment, as this is an “easily digitised” industry. For example, the amount of music tracks available on iTunes or Rhapsody is much, much larger than what is offered by Wal-Mart, and every single track sells – even if only once or twice a quarter. It may look like selling one unit of a product every three months is not much of a business advantage (especially if you’re not selling 767s, but a product that costs $0.99); but, when you have close to a million different “products”, the amount of money you make on hits will be seriously challenged by the money you make on “non-hits”. Wal-Mart can’t offer this many tracks because it costs too much: each track (actually, each CD) has to earn enough to pay for the space it uses in stores and distribution centres, and thus only the hits get displayed. A digital business does not have this problem.

The book contains several case studies of “long tail” companies (Amazon, Google, Rhapsody, among others), and goes to lengths to show that consumers like choice; every one has non-mainstream tastes, and these are usually not catered for by “normal” retailers. “Long tail” businesses do cater to all tastes, but an important point is made: choice is useless – harmful, even – if the consumer has no way of finding what he wants and assessing its relative quality. Hence the success of recommendation engines such as found in, for example, Amazon.

Chris Anderson, of course, does a much better job of talking about this than I do. The book is very well written, very entertaining and filled with well presented and well analysed data. Like Anil Dash, I had read the original article and had been following the blog, so I was a bit worried that reading this book would simply give me more of the same (or just plain the same); that’s not so. The book nicely complements both the article and the blog, and is essential reading to anyone involved with/interested in business – digital or not.

The guys at Progressive Boink have collected (a while ago) their 25 favourite Calvin & Hobbes strips in a single page, with comments. I’m not too sure my personal favourites would be the same, but some of them certainly are there; the raccoon storyline, for example, and anything involving snowmen and Calvin’s dad.

Worth a look before they get their cease-and-desist letters.

This is probably old news in most of the rest of the world (or at least in Britain), but… Doctor Who is back on the air! The new series, with the new doctor, will start on ABC this Saturday (tomorrow, 08 July) at 7:30pm.

It’s a bit sad that they had to change doctors after just one season; I hope the new one manages to keep the series entertaining.

Today is Towel Day. Do you know where your towel is?

6.30pm, phone rings at home. I answer. A girl with a very strong Indian accent is on the other side:

Girl: Hello, sir. I’m calling on behalf of [some telecom company I had never heard of]. How are you?
Me: I’m fine, thanks.
Girl: I’m calling to offer you a great deal on your home phone line. I can offer you a monthly fee of only X dollars, and I can give you a 10-dollar sign-in bonus. So, would you like to save money on your phone line?
Me: Hmmm, I already pay less than X a month.
Girl: Say again, sir?
Me: I already spend less than you are offering me.
Girl: How much do you pay a month, sir?
Me: X-4 dollars.
[pause]
Girl: Hmmm, yes, it looks like you already have a better deal. Thanks for your attention, sir. <click>

Apparently her script didn’t have an answer for that.

This is probably not new, but I just noticed it… if your search query to Google contains words spelled in the British way, Google will search for both spellings:

But it doesn’t work the other way around:

Does this mean that those of us who spell things in the British way are getting more complete results from Google?

(the word “search” is in the query just to give slightly better results; if you search just for “color” or “colour” you will notice the same effect; also, try “license” and “licence” etc.; Yahoo! doesn’t seem to do the same)

As I write this, the person working on a spare desk in my office is Wietse Venema. He’s here for SecureCon, where he’ll make the keynote speech and a presentation on Postfix.