The sovereign nation of MySpace

Myspace is becoming a virtual country of its own. With 75 million users, it has more users than all but 15 countries. That is an amazing number. MySpace could literally fill a country on its own. Consider the amount of time an average MySpace user puts into MySpace… And consider the mantra that “time is money”. The economic potential of the time MySpace users put into the site is measurable in tens of billions of dollars per year.

Techcrunch has called MySpace MySpace, The 27.4 Billion Pound Gorilla. In many ways MySpace is the 24.7 Billion Pound gorilla. However would you displace them? Competing head-to-head does not really work since a very important aspect of a social network is the users themselves. MySpace will win hands down in that category. There is speculation that MySpace will crash and burn because it will become ‘uncool’. Critics constantly cite Frienster as having become uncool. However, there are alot of reasons why that happened, alot of those being because Friendster did not respond well to its users. Though the forthcoming failure of MySpace is overhyped, it is certainly possible. However, it will not happen on its own (because MySpace is no longer cool). It will be due to a competitor coming up with a better paradigm for social networking or due to MySpace changing how it acts towards its users.

WTF

Czech Republic loses to Ghana 0-2. what the hell. I expected the Czech’s to win handedly. Group E looks like they’ll have the most interesting last games as anyone can qualify for next round and none is guaranteed to qualify.

Italy qualifies with a win or a tie. If they lose to the Czech Republic, then they can be eliminated if Ghana wins against the USA or if the USA wins and beats their goal difference.

Czech Republic qualifies if they win against Italy or if they tie Italy and Ghana and USA also tie. They also qualify if they tie Italy and Ghana loses to the USA by less than 4 goals. A loss eliminates them.

Ghana qualifies if they win or if they tie and the Czech Republic loses. A loss eliminates them.

USA needs to win to qualify and for some other things to happen. They also need Italy to win or for Italy and Czech Republic tie and beat Czech Republic’s goal difference or for Italy to lose and they beat Italy’s goal difference. These last 2 scenarios are unlikely as USA’s goal difference is -3, Czech Republic’s is +1, and Italy’s is +2.

[Investing] Aggressiveness

Investing is taking a series of bets. How aggressively (the amount of risk in the bet) you invest is directly proportional to your confidence in your ability to predict the outcome of investment. If you have absolutely no confidence in your ability, you should take a bet in which the risk is not tied at all to your ability. This is passive investing and in the case of the stock market this means buying shares of ETF’s… such as SPY, whose return reflects the return of the S&P500.

A common way to objectively measure past performance of ability is using an ex-post information ratio which measures the correlation of the return of non-passive investments against the risk of those non-passive investments.

I’ve started to take a variety of investment bets with varying risks depending on my level of confidence. I do this since I have investment ability primarily in very specific fields (in technology and software) and that is where I take more confident (ie, risky) bets. I obviously do not want to have all my investments in software, but I do not have as great of confidence elsewhere.

I made a mistake earlier of only betting in 3 individual stocks (each was the market leader in its field) and they are the 3 worst performing blue chip stocks since I bought them. One is liquidated and the other two are undervalued. They’re solid long term bets. One of them is seriously doing a wall street limbo (how low can it go?).

[Random] 2205

I grew up at 2205 Placid Way and now I have 2205 unread messages in my inbox. This is a once in a lifetime moment and a cause for celebration.

I will never read those 2205 messages. It’s just too much, most of it’s distribution lists, and I don’t have the time. I’m guessing One month from now I will have ~2500 unread messages in my inbox.

[Software] Solving the connectivity issues of web applications

I have issues with this article. A little background: A major limitation to acceptance of web applications is that you need a connection to the server hosting the web application in order to use it. There are situations, ie, when traveling, where you would want to use some application but wouldn’t have an internet connection. A web application is useless in these scenarios. The author proposes that a java based database will be the key link that will solve this connectivity problem. The article is really overhyping an unproven but interesting technology.

a) The described solution results is a “thin client”. To be technical, an application cannot operate as a thin client if the client does all the work on its own. The author makes an assumption that if it runs in a browser it’s a thin client. Thin client means access to a service is independent of where it’s used. Example: I can use GMail from my computer at work and computer at home and have the same experience, same email, etc. Inherently, a thin client does not allow for disconnected service access. This is in fact a mix of thin and thick client. The client acts as a thin client when it can and when it can’t it acts in a standalone fashion. Mixed thin / thick client is doable and valuable…

b) DB is overkill for the problem. Even if it’s lightweight. The data that would potentially need to be persisted would be rather minimal and the schemas would be per application specific. You don’t need to throw the generality of relational databases at this problem.

c) this solution is no better for solving the problem than existing solutions. Saving the data, formatted as xml, to the filesystem could do the trick. If saving to the filesystem is not possible, write a cookie. This is simpler and lighter-weight and does not require additional middleware.

d) Author does not recognize the bigger issue of re-synchronizing the data once the client is reconnected. This is not a data storage problem but a distributed system partitioning problem. I would expect middleware aimed at enabling disconnected services access to address this issue.

I think mixed thick-thin client is interesting and potentially valuable, however, I don’t think JavaDB specifically will do much for a web application developer. The better solution would be to have a “workoffline” state by which the web application will download it’s functionality locally to the computer. Then the client could operate independently of its connectivity to the service. State changes would be persisted via cookies. Then when the user gets connectivity again, the service would read the cookies to synchronize those changes.

[Software] The infinitely wise ESRB

I found this article on digg today: ESRB rerates Oblivion (Gamespot) ESRB, in its infinite wisdom has decided to rerate the game oblivion partly because of a particular modification to the game. Some crackers have created a modification to the game which allows characters to be shown nude in the game. This was done by hacking into the graphics libraries for the game. ESRB making a stink about the modification is ridiculous. This was not intended functionality of the game and in order to make this possible, a game user would have to install a 3rd party modification to the game. The game company cannot control what modifications that are made to the game. ESRB should not be holding the game development company responsible for the actions of 3rd party modifications and crackers.

[Random] St. Helens is active

News story It appears Mt. St. Helen’s is active. Really interesting formation that is bulging out of the volcano. Makes me wonder if St. Helen’s will erupt again in our lifetimes. (It’s certainly possible)

[Software] Microsoft Dead in the water?

John C. Dvorak has published an article called Eight Signs Microsoft is dead in the water. John C. Dvorak is very well respected software columnist, but I think he is here at fault at jumping on a Microsoft bashing bandwagon. At the risk of being labelled a Microsoft apologist, here is my take:

1) Truth be told on the features. Truth not be told on the priorities. #1 priority at Microsoft last several years, and correctly so, was improving security.

2) Yes sustain the monopoly. There is really nothing Microsoft can do except sustain it’s position in Office. However, he draws the conclusion that Groove is going to be a flop since it’s like Notes and Notes is a pain to use. I have no idea where he pulled this comparison from. The most significant connection I see between the two is Ray Ozzie. Groove purpose is creating shared workspaces and at its core the technology is peer-to-peer. In contrast, Notes is reliant on servers and is comparable to a souped up Outlook, a part of office.

3) MSN is #3 site in the world in traffic. Source. There is no reason for Microsoft to cut the MSN portal. The investment in the MSN portal has paid off. Perhaps John C. Dvorak can only recall the MSN that competed with AOL to sell dialup access. Well, yes, that part of Microsoft’s business does deserve to be cut. Selling ads is very profitable in software as the internet is becoming the biggest content medium in the world. Ever Hear of Google? Yahoo? Their core business models are selling ads.

4) He’s got a point MSFT doesn’t have their act together here… Definitely not pointless, though. Search is a big money maker. Even when only selling ads.

5) W-O-W. This doesn’t make sense. In fact, it doesn’t even belong on this list. Dvorak admits this is a big plus for Microsoft and somehow spins it into a… negative? Basically, Microsoft will steal alot of marketshare from Sony and potentially will have the dominant gaming platform with the Xbox360. How is this a negative again?

6) I assume that by “pad computing” he means tablet computing which has been a big initiative for Microsoft, recently. It’s true that Microsoft made a bad investment here in terms of purely financial metrics. I wouldn’t completely write this off as a technology, though. The initiative is valid in terms of implementation and the idea is compelling but it’s currently too expensive. Currently, buying a tablet costs several hundred more than buying an equivalent laptop. You also need to use a custom version of Windows XP. Tablet computing will be included in Vista and If the cost drops to something reasonable, “pad computing” may take off.

7) .NET itself is free and it’s all about selling Windows server software like SQL server and Microsoft Windows 2003. Without .NET the Microsoft server products would not sell well. However, these servers have strong marketshare and websites of Fortune 1000 companies run IIS. Go on job board and look for a programming job for C#, SQL Server, ASP.NET. The jobs are there.

8) Google is now ~1/2 the market cap of Microsoft. Last quarter Google had ~1/8 the profit of Microsoft. They are the strongest player in the one of the largest growth parts of the software business. Additionally, Google is stealing talent from Microsoft. Dismissing smaller but strong competitors is how many big companies falter. Dvorak is old enough to know the whole IBM / Microsoft story.

[Random] I just updated my christmas wish list

Some guy bought a fighter jet on ebay for 25K… I want one too! Ebay Page Flying a MIG would WAY better than taking the train. WAY.

[Philosophy] Brilliant, insane, or both?

Excuse the pop culture origins of this quote…

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” – James Bond (007)

If you loosely interpret the meaning of the word insanity, I think James Bond is actually right. To have any sort of success which could be termed as genius or brilliance, you really have to do some sort of perspective that normal (read, falling within n standard deviations of the “average” person) people do not see. Thus, the average person, not seeing things from that perspective will see this person as kinda off track in his or her insight. However, at least initially, it is impossible to determine whether this person has merely spun off or is really onto something. Only success can determine if this person’s perspective is real insight (thus, genius) or simply delusional, naivity, stupidity, or full-blooded insanity.

This applies not to fictional and elaborate plans to escape danger (James Bond) but to real life as well. Albert Einstein had insights which formed the theory of relativity. If he was unsuccessful and the theory of relativity was incorrect, then he would just have been some crank with some far out theories. Bill Gates had an insight that everyone will have a computer someday. If he was unsuccessful, he’d just be an overly ambitious nerd who was naive about the uses of computers. Steve Jobs had the insight that computers should be easy to use for everyone, not just technical people. If he was unsuccessful, this insight would just be some idealistic hippy idea.