Blue Sky On Mars

A few years ago, I clued Vincent Flanders in on a few outrageous websites. One of Vincent’s big categories of site suckage is Mystery Meat Navigation, where the site provides unlabeled pictures as a navigational “aid”. Today I came across Fuddruckers : World’s Greatest Hamburgers. Here’s my message to Vincent:

To their credit, they do provide non-mysterious links at the bottom. The part that really got me, though, was the giant picture of a hamburger. Apparently, their restaurants are the mystery meat. Their menu is a little cheesy. Their jobs are spicy. And their franchise opportunities give you bad breath.

For all of those things that are handy to keep track of in a flat database, JCards looks like a good, cross-platform fit. You can even store passwords in it, because you can save the file in a Blowfish-encrypted format.

The tool designed to return fair use rights to iTunes songs is back online, thanks to FSF India: hymn — Hear Your Music aNywhere. Available for many platforms, and including a drag-and-drop GUI for the Mac.

Jon Tirsen has a neat tip for doing Undo in AspectJ. I’m actually already using AspectJ for field modification interception and hadn’t thought of implementing undo like this. A method like this could indeed save a lot of code.

The Market According to GARP says:

The experts say this is a stock picker’s market. By that they mean the market could move sideways for some time, and offer its biggest rewards to those investors who know how to select good stocks.

I definitely believe that we’re going into a sideways market. Even the term “sideways” makes things sound somewhat pleasant. Stocks will move down, then up, then down, then up until we finally reach the “hey things have moved sideways” point. With that setup, the article goes on to say:

Reams of research show that long-term investors who keep their money on autopilot in low-cost index funds will beat most stockpickers and market timers over the long haul.

I think there’s a disconnect here. A “sideways” market, by definition, produces no return. Rather than going up or down, it just goes sideways. So, for the next few years, those index funds will go up and down, ultimately producing no return at all. I, for one, don’t plan to let my money sit around in stocks earning 0% for several years, when I could just move it into a money market account to earn something. Series I US Savings Bonds are very nice as well.

I’m content, though, with large groups continuing to leave their money in indexes. It just provides less competition for other investments…

Losing memory? Running into GC lag? Check out jvmstat (free from Sun!)

Tim Bray helped to create the Sun Policy on Public Discourse. This is an interesting document and is probably a good fit for nearly any company. Some of it seems like common sense, but it’s often better to explicitly state such things, if you’re going to bother to write a policy about it.

As more companies deal with bloggers and the effect bloggers can have on the public perception of the company, a policy like this can make a good template for others to think about when creating their own.

After seeing a bit of press about it, I decided to check out the Russian ALLOFMP3 music service. AllOfMP3 is run by a Russian company called, generically enough, MediaServices.

If you’re not familiar with it, AllOfMP3 is notable for having pretty much any current hit I could find (unlike any other service I’ve seen). It’s also notable for offering downloads in basically whatever format you choose (MP3, AAC, WMA, lossless FLAC, etc.). That’s a really cool feature. And, no DRM! By the music and use it as you would any music you bought on CD.

There are a couple UI nits I would have: it’s too hard to download a bunch of songs. It would be nice to zip a bunch of songs up together, so I can download one bundle.

Otherwise, AllOfMP3 is a great service, and it’s a shame that the RIAA doesn’t let American companies do things similarly. Someday, they may learn that DRM is more annoying than useful.

AllOfMP3 can’t be mentioned without mentioning the price. They charge per GB of download. $10 will buy you 1GB of transfer. Since a typical decent MP3 file is 5MB, that’s about $0.05 per song!

How can they offer a price like that?

There are a couple reasons, I believe… First of all, there’s the ruble. They can’t charge $15 for an album in Russia, because no one would be able to afford it. Apparently, albums typically cost $3 there. It’s not uncommon for certain types of goods to be sold for different prices in different countries. Clearly, goods like that are not being sold at prices relative to distribution costs. They’re being sold at prices that the creators hope will pay for their costs of development (”sunk costs”). The creators of these things expect Americans, Europeans and Japanese to foot the bill for the rest of the world.

The internet, of course, knows no boundaries. A Russian song file sounds just as good as an American one. This certainly makes global pricing a challenge.

The other reason that AllOfMP3 is able to sell so cheaply is that the rights organization in Russia allows them to. Good for them! At least they’re not holding back progress, as the RIAA and MPAA do here at home.

What makes 5 cents a song “challenging” is that this kind price completely changes the dynamics of the music business. At 5 cents a song, people can afford to (and probably would) buy a lot of music. I hear a lot of music on the radio that I certainly wouldn’t cough up $17 to buy on CD, and wouldn’t even pay $0.99 for a download. However, at 5 cents I may very well purchase it.

This type of service is global in scope. You could have a song sell 100 million copies, producing $5 million in revenue. I’m sure that the RIAA would say “$5 million for 100 million copies??? No way!” But, the fact of the matter is that they would never have sold 100 million copies at current going prices.

In a global market, you might find lesser known artists selling a million copies of a song. That’s only $50,000, though, so you need to be sure you didn’t spend $100,000 producing the song (and yes, people can spend that much or more) and another $100,000 in promotion.

I’m sure five cents a song scares the bejeezus out of most record labels, but it’s really uncharted territory. It would be exceedingly difficult to predict what exactly would happen if a lot of music was conveniently, globally available at such a price. We may start finding out, though… all thanks to a company in Russia.

There’s been a lot of positive press for Super Size Me. I haven’t seen the movie, and it may very well be a well-made, entertaining documentary. That aside, the subject matter seems so obvious that it doesn’t warrant creating a movie about it.

The movie tracks the filmmaker’s (Morgan Spurlock) month of eating nothing but McDonald’s food. Obviously, he wasn’t eating McDonald’s salads every day, because he gained 25 pounds and got rather sick. Gee, big news there…

He could have just as easily done an expose on how your grocery store is a deathtrap, what with all of the cheeseburgers and fries you can make with ingredients from there, topped off with a Hostess Ho Ho for dessert. In fact, check out the quote from the NY Times critic that mentions that Super Size Me is a statement of the obvious.

While I can appreciate the sacrifice the filmmaker made for his art, I really have to wonder if he had any other expectation going into this.

By many accounts the movie is a very entertaining view. That’s great… but for me the whole notion of watching a documentary based on the premise that eating unhealthy food all the time is bad for you just doesn’t sound like a great use of my time.

It’s so nice when things warm up after a long Michigan winter. Crysania is taking her time in crawling, which makes her a bit more amenable to things like going out to eat. So, we did!

As you can see from the photo below, we weren’t the only parents there at the restaurant. The geese below were dining courtesy of a couple of kids at a nearby table.