Archive for February, 2008

Maroon, the Ultra High Level Programming Language

Posted in tech on February 27, 2008 by themaroon

I’ve been joking with friends for years about a programming language I’m going to invent. Inspired by numerous recent events, I decided to post it on elance last night and have it designed. Here‘s the link to the project for anyone who is a member, but for those who aren’t, here’s the project description:

Essentially what I need programmed is an Ultra High Level Programming Language, which I will call Maroon. That’s right, I’m naming my programming language after me, just like Bob Pascal did.

Anyway, the idea is to allow non-programmers to create dynamic, rich applications, web or desktop based, in as little time as possible and without troubling themselves with learning how to program. I tried picking up a programming book, but there was all this crap about if/then statements and something called a variable in the first chapter. That’s lame. Ideally someone should be able to write an entire web site in just a few lines of code.

With Maroon, you say what you want your program to do, and that’s what it does. No objects or methods necessary. For instance, someone who wanted to make an online auction site might write the line

“Clone eBay.”

And they’d have a perfectly working one. Or, if they wanted to customize it a bit, they might say

“Clone eBay, but use Google Checkout instead of PayPal.”

I’d like to do this for a fixed price. I’ve been saving my pay checks for this for three months (thank you Target) and only have a certain amount I can go up to. I’d like it to be written in either Python, PHP, Fortran, or Javascript.

I joked on Hacker News that some Indian firm would claim to be able to build it for $1,200. I woke up this morning to two bids for $1,000.

So I guess the problem now is what do I do? I mean, with this program I could clearly take over the entire universe, by just putting into it “Write a program that makes all other programs not work” or “Clone one of those machines from the U.S. mint that makes twenties.” And it only costs $1,000.

On the other hand I was just joking about the job at Target. I’ve been self-employed (which is a euphemism for unemployed) for over 6 years. So I’m willing to sell 2% of the project (and, therefore, 2% of the world after I take it over) for $1,000. Really that’s only giving the entire universe a $48,000 pre-money valuation, which I think is quite generous.

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Learning To Smoke

Posted in Stupid Shit I Found On The Web on February 23, 2008 by themaroon

Pretty awesome article here about a guy learning to smoke at the age of 46. I find it refreshing for a few reasons.

For one, it’s kind of neat to see someone go through the same thing you and everyone else did, but 25-30 years later in life. No 16 year old could ever be so eloquent about their experience and motivations, and even if they could, they’d be far different. So much has been written about why people start smoking (peer pressure, rebellion, etc.) but I’ve never seen anyone discuss the many non-biological reasons why they keep smoking.

Also you never hear anything about the positive effects. Clearly there must be something good there. Roughly one third of adult males smoke worldwide even knowing the health problems cigarettes cause. If that many people are willing to engage in a behavior that they know is likely to kill them eventually, there must be something redeeming about it. People are surprisingly irrational, so it doesn’t have to be a net positive, but they’re not so far from irrational that there can’t be any.

But the anti-tobacco nuts have made any honest discourse about smoking taboo, much like drugs. Impressive from a marketing standpoint, I suppose, but harmful to society. People don’t respond to fear tactics, especially teenagers, but an honest assessment of both sides of the coin is the only way to make an informed choice.

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Blu-ray

Posted in Opinions You Would Agree With If You Weren\'t An Idiot on February 20, 2008 by themaroon

So it’s official; Blu-ray has won the format war over HD DVD. No surprise.

About a year and a half ago, I gave a friend a stock tip, telling him to short Sony, then pick it up later. My logic was that the PS3 would be a flop, but even so, it would sell far more units than all HD DVD players combined, giving them the critical edge in the format war and earning Sony their first big win in media formats. They’ve had a long history of flops in that field (Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, etc.) and were finally looking like they were going to win one. And having a winning media format used to be worth a fortune.

I figured the market would react first to the PS3 debacle, and then later their shares would jump when they took a clear lead with Blu-ray. My friend didn’t take my advice, and I had too much money tied up in other things to do so myself.

I turned out to be right about the first half. In fact, I was more correct than I thought. Not only did the PS3 suck far more than I expected (I never guessed that I’d see units on the shelf in Best Buy right after New Year’s) but Sony also got hammered by a massive laptop battery recall. The stock dropped about 25%.

But I think I got the second part wrong. They won the format war, but I’m pretty sure that the days of media formats are limited, and maybe over. Their stock price has gone up about 10% since credible rumors of Toshiba dropping the HD DVD format surfaced, which makes me think that a lot of people feel the same.

Now that I think about it, it seems Blu-ray won for a combination of two reasons. One was the PS3, and the other was consumer apathy. People really don’t care about a high def media format, so the one that made its way into only a tiny percentage of American homes beat the one that got into virtually zero. That’s not really a win for Sony, it’s a loss for media formats in general.

It makes sense when you think about it. More than half of American homes don’t even have a single HDTV yet, and that number isn’t skyrocketing. And most HDTVs in homes now don’t have the HDMI ports necessary for full-on 1080p viewing. Right now only home theater nuts will find Blu-ray to be significantly better than what they’re used to, while everyone will find it to be significantly more expensive.

And by the time that changes, in a few years, it’s questionable how much media people will buy. Video On Demand and iTunes style services are making inroads, and I have to think that will continue indefinitely. True, a high definition movie from iTunes isn’t as good as a Blu-ray film in full 1080p, but most people won’t care. An overly-compressed 720p movie will be good enough for 95% of the population.

People buy movies now because they want to watch them multiple times, on demand. I personally own one DVD, because there’s only one movie that I sometimes suddenly feel like re-watching without having to drive to Blockbuster or wait a few days to get from Netflix. The number of DVD sales (largely but not entirely driven by the rental industry) tells me that a lot of people own more than one, but how often do they watch each of those movies?

When you can rent one for $5 without leaving your living room, and a Blu-ray disc costs $25, it doesn’t take a mathematician to realize that it’s far less economical to buy than to rent. I can’t imagine very many people watch a movie more than five times in their life, except for maybe the few that are perennially replayed on TV (Shawshank Redemption, A Christmas Story, etc.).

The exception would seem to be children’s movies. Parents use them as digital pacifiers, and kids can watch the same movie every day for years. I don’t really understand why, but it’s most certainly true. Kids also don’t know or care about the difference between standard definition and 720p, because marketing departments haven’t figured out how to explain lines of resolution and frames per second to a four year old yet.

So I don’t really see any high definition format taking off the way DVDs did. I agree with Mark Cuban that last-mile bandwidth won’t be sufficient in the near future to replace the current television distribution system. People won’t be streaming football games in high def for decades. But Americans spend a lot less time watching movies than they do television, and given that you only need to give a high def iTunes rental 5 minutes to buffer before you can start watching, the end bandwidth is already there.

I can’t even guess what mass movie downloading would do to the internet’s overall structure, but I’m sure it will adapt. One way or another, total bandwidth will keep up, since it’s a service people are paying for. To put it in Ted Stevens speak, they’ll add more tubes to the series. The money will be there to do so.

So congratulations to Sony on a pyrrhic victory.

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Another Poker Hack

Posted in Dollar Dollar Bill Y'all on February 13, 2008 by themaroon

Some people got offended by my last poker hack post and called it fraudulent. That’s ridiculous, but I do remember another one that happened in the early days of online poker that actually was. I never did this mind you, as I was pretty sure it was a federal crime of some sort. Granted, it defrauded an online poker site, which the government cared for about as much as they do drug cartels, but even ignoring the moral issues I was never one to risk jail time when I could make a living honestly. For those who couldn’t win at poker, though, there was always the following.

One of the methods of deposit on most poker sites, before the UIGEA, was the Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), which was basically an electronic check. You gave them your routing and account number and they would take money from your account just as if you had written a physical check. I don’t know a whole lot about how our nation’s financial system works, but I’m pretty sure it went through the ACH just like any regular check, and therefore took a few days. I know they all said 3-5 business days, but they usually seemed to clear in 2.

The sites limited the amount you could deposit via EFT, typically to something like $500 when you first signed up. But as you played more on the site and became a VIP, you could ask for higher limits, and it wasn’t really that tough to get them raised to something like $10,000 or even more. For some reason that I’ll never understand, when you initiated the EFT deposit, the sites put the money in your account right away, even though they took days to clear. The only rule was that you couldn’t cash out until they did. So the scam there was really pretty obvious.

The player started a checking account at their local bank and put a few grand in it. They deposited $500 on every major poker site via EFT, played as normal for a week or so, and then withdrew whatever they had back to the checking account. If they were a marginal player and stuck to low limits, as was usually the case, they’d still have most of their initial investment. They’d ask the sites for limit increases, which might be to a grand or two, and repeat until each site had increased them to whatever the max allowable was.

At that point they’d close their account at the bank, usually on a Monday because a lot of banks have rules that any EFTs or checks that come in for a few days after automatically reopen the account and cause an overdraft, which would then leave the scammer owing the bank and was obviously highly undesirable. They’d then wait until a Thursday or Friday night and make an EFT deposit for the max on each site (the poker rooms had no way to check to see if the account was still open) which gave them until Monday before the EFTs would all resolve, at which point the poker sites would know that they bounced and shut down the player’s account. The scammer just had to make sure the money was in their pocket by then.

The hardest part was getting the money out. The typical way to do it was to ditch it to a friend at a table. Ideally, you’d be at a table with 8 or 9 other people, one of whom you knew but had never played with on the site before. In fact, the person helping the scammer didn’t even have to know about the scam itself. Back in those days, getting money on and off of poker sites was a huge pain, and it was extremely common to help people out. Eventually the sites added inter-account transfer functionality to facilitate that, but in the early days the only way to move the money was by chip dumping. So if a friend asked you to collect some chips from him at a table while trying not to be too obvious about it, it wasn’t as odd of a request as it may sound.

So the scammer would sit on the phone or instant messenger with their friend and coordinate the loss of money. And the person to whom the chips were dumped would cash them out to Neteller or PayPal (online gambling was once a major source of profit for them, back before the eBay acquisition) and transfer to the scammer’s account there, most likely not even knowing they’d aided in fraud. The scammer would have the money in his hands by Friday, and the poker site wouldn’t even know what hit them until Monday. At that point they’d have no way to prove that the scammer dumped money to an accomplice, and even if they did decide they had enough to act on, it wouldn’t matter to the scammer. The accomplice could get their account closed and whatever funds they had taken, but that didn’t matter to the scammer whose money was already on its way to him from Neteller. And most times the poker sites just wrote it off as part of the price of doing business.

You could run pretty much the same scam with credit cards by simply issuing a chargeback. EFTs were more popular though because the limits were usually much higher, and most issuing banks blocked card transactions to online gambling sites long before people started playing poker online. (In the early days, when it was mainly casinos, people would buy in with credit cards, play until they either won a bunch or lost it all, and then charge it back if they went broke or cash out normally if they won, essentially giving them a freeroll against the house. That was why PayPal, and later Neteller, became the preferred deposit method of gambling sites. Even though their fees were outrageous, they were worth it since there were no chargebacks.)

The poker sites were left helpless. Any complaints to American law enforcement, which considered online gambling illegal, surely would have fallen on deaf ears and they knew it. I imagine those running the scheme did it multiple times. I heard of one fellow who changed names repeatedly to do just that, though that may have been urban legend. I never did hear of anyone having any legal trouble over it, even though it almost certainly violated many laws at all levels of government.

Eventually the poker sites got wise and stopped putting funds in players’ accounts before the EFT cleared. I only heard of that scam shortly before it ended, but it apparently went on for a few years. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone made seven figures doing it. It was clearly unethical and almost certainly illegal, but also brilliant and highly profitable.

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2008 Oscars

Posted in TV, Movies, Music, and Why They All Suck on February 10, 2008 by themaroon

Every year I make it a point to watch the movies that do well in the Oscar nominations. This year I got an early jump on it, watching a number of them in the last month or so. I have to say that overall it was a good year for movies. Here are my thoughts, ordered by number of nominations, along with my rankings.

1. No Country For Old Men (9/10, 8 nods): Best movie I’ve seen in a long time, and a return to form for the Coen Brothers, who seem to have done mostly comedies since Fargo. I might even call this their second best picture, behind The Big Lebowski. The acting is great, especially Javier Bardem’s performance as Anton Chigurh. Nominated for 8 Oscars, I’ll take a guess and say it will win 6, including Best Picture, Cinematography, and Supporting Actor. It might have some competition for Adapted Screenplay from the next movie on the list. It’s in 2 sound categories, and remains to be seen whether the extremely minimalist soundtrack will go over well. It definitely did with critics so the movie could take home quite a few.

2. There Will Be Blood (8/10, 8 nods): The only one I saw in the theater. Probably would win a nice chunk in any other year, but is up against No Country For Old Men in 6 categories. The Academy likes to award people for their careers as much as their nominated movie, and I think the Coen Brothers win on both fronts. Anderson got ripped off on Magnolia though (which ran into American Beauty) so maybe he’ll get 3, but I’d guess 1 or 2. If I had to set an over/under, it would be 2.

3. Atonement (7/10 7 nods): Mostly good movie with what I thought was a terrible, cheesy ending. Going to have a rough time in the categories where it’s against the first two on the list, but Original Score and Costume Design might be easy. I can’t guess with any certainty because I haven’t seen the competition.

4. Juno (6/10, 4 nods): Unlike most, I found the writing to be pretty subpar. It just sounded too much like an adult trying to write through a teenager’s voice. The acting was a little hokey, the dialogue tried too hard to be witty and often failed, and the soundtrack made me long for deafness’s sweet embrace. It wasn’t a terrible movie, and it might take the original screenplay category (I haven’t seen any of it’ competition there) but it seems a longshot to win more than one.

5. Bourne Ultimatum (7.5/10, 3 nods): About as good as action movies really get. Lots of fast paced punches and explosions, acting that isn’t laughably bad, coherent plot exposed at just the right times. It’s basically a relative 10 in its genre, but that doesn’t count for much with the voters. Still it has a good shot in the categories it’s up for (Film Editing, Sound Editing and Mixing) so I’ll be surprised if it goes home empty handed.

6.Transformers (3/10, 3 nods): For my thoughts on that movie, here’s a snippet from a conversation I had with my friend Keith, who couldn’t believe I hated it:

Me: It was like watching someone ass-rape my childhood.

Keith: They brought your childhood to life.

Me: Yeah, and then they ass-raped it.

Still it’s probably going to be tough to beat for Visual Effects.

American Gangster (0/10, 2 nods): In fairness I watched this movie for about 20 seconds until I realized Denzel was in it, then I stopped and deleted it. Every movie he does is hacky, cliché, overacted, and makes me cry about the two hours of my life wasted on it. So it’s a knee-jerk 0/10, but one I’m sticking by.

I still haven’t seen Ratatouille (and won’t) but it’s up for 5 and it’s by Pixar so it must be a shoe-in for at least Best Animated. And I haven’t seen Michael Clayton but probably should since it’s up for 7 in big categories. But barring any surprises I think the Coens will finally have the year they deserve, and a few other movies will duke it out for a distant second.

 

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Microsoft/Yahoo

Posted in Me Thinking So You Don't Have To on February 5, 2008 by themaroon

Ever since Microsoft announced their intention to purchase Yahoo, Silicon Valley has had their collective panties in a bunch. First the question was "is this a good idea for Microsoft and/or Yahoo shareholders". I think the answer is yes and yes. Yahoo’s primary power now is as a brand and a domain name. They’ve got the number one email service, which Microsoft can seamlessly combine with theirs. Nobody who uses Yahoo Mail gives a damn what the software looks like (and even if they did, Hotmail is superior in almost every regard) they just saw a link on Yahoo.com that said "free email" and clicked it. So as long as their ilovethepackers1982@yahoo.com address doesn’t change, and it won’t, they’re perfectly happy. MSFT gets the customers and lays off the employees.

That’s how it’s going to be with search and dozens of other things. I’m sure some, like Flickr or Yahoo Games, will replace MSFTs sad competitors. Either way, there’s tons of synergy there. The only losers are Yahoo employees, but most of them were going to get laid off anyway as the company swirled down the shitter. At least now they’re going to get to cash out some stock/options and, if they’re lucky, maybe get to jump to a ship that has a much smaller hole in its hull.

The shareholders win because MSFT is paying more than any hedge fund would (they can due to the synergy) and the way Yahoo was going, it was due for either a takeover or a bankruptcy. So despite all the grumbling coming from their top execs, I’ll be surprised if they don’t sell to MSFT quickly. Were I them, I’d dispense with the usual playing hard to get routine and be done with it next week.

Question number two was "is this bad for startups?" I think it’s great for the most part. The reason startups can compete with and destroy corporations is their size. Making one far larger makes it far slower as well. True, Yahoo has been fairly acquisitive, which is a bonus for startups, and not just for founders who cash out, but for anyone raising money from investors, who like to have more exits available. But I’m not sure there will be fewer overall acquisitions now. The newer, bigger, slower Microsoft/Yahoo might look to buy more companies to compensate for their overwhelming lack of innovation.

I’m running a fantasy sports startup and Yahoo is the biggest competitor in our market. The acquisition hurts me in that MSN was the largest portal (maybe the only large portal) that doesn’t have their own site (they seem to have some deal with Fox Sports). So we lose our largest potential acquirer. At the same time, our largest competitor is going to go through a long state of upheaval, during which I don’t see fantasy sports being much of a priority. Hell, they haven’t changed much code in the last ten years as it is, and still have Java Applets all over the place . So I think that’s a huge net win for us. If we do well enough we don’t need extra potential acquirers, so I’d rather just see my competition hampered.

Then there’s the question of whether or not the acquisition is fair, as posed by Google. Seems kind of absurd really, given that even combined, they’re still losing in the search market by about a 2-1 margin, and that the gap is probably going to keep increasing. You can bring up past antitrust cases against Microsoft all you want, but this is not the same. True, MS will combine the top two webmail clients, but there’s absolutely nothing preventing anyone from switching to Gmail. It’s almost trivial to do so. Hotmail doesn’t come with any sort of default install on Windows, as did Internet explorer. It’s the same for virtually every other brand involved. Being the default search engine in IE hasn’t gotten MSN past the 10% mark yet, so any regulatory concerns are clearly unfounded.

As far as I can tell, Google seems to find it unfair that they’ll actually have a competitor. Waaaaaaaaaaaah. I must admit I was baffled when I heard that the combined entity would comprise 30% of the search market. Who the hell is searching on Yahoo or MSN these days? I’m sure there are still plenty of seniors who still don’t know what a URL is, and think you have to go to Yahoo.com and then type in Google to get there, but that can’t be a third of the population.

And finally, there are all of the complaints that Microsoft is going to destroy the few awesome properties Yahoo does have, such as Flickr and Delicious. Bullshit. All of those arguments are predicated on the idea that Microsoft isn’t very good at consumer-facing apps. That’s downright retarded. See the XBox360, which, in only its second generation, has taken the lead from entrenched competition. See the new suite of Windows Live programs (this blog post is being built in Live Writer, which, if you’re a blogger, I highly recommend checking out.) See the new Hotmail, which is vastly preferable to any of its competition. It’s faster, better looking, and more functional (it has folders) than Gmail.

Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft isn’t perfect. But I feel like they’re smart enough not to kill a good thing. I’d expect that instead of destroying Flickr, they’ll instead allow you to integrate it with Windows and drag and drop pictures to and from it as if it were a hard drive. I’d pay double what I’m already charged to use Flickr for that. They might change the name to Windows Live Flickr or something, but they’ll only make it better. They almost certainly won’t make it worse, and they’d be downright idiotic to cancel it.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but I just don’t see an independent Yahoo in the future. At least, not the Yahoo we see today. They made too many mistakes, and it’s too late to right the ship. The least their management could do at this point is allow their shareholders some dignity and take the offer that’s on the table.

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My Thoughts on Death, From a Saturday Night Conversation

Posted in Dialogue on February 4, 2008 by themaroon

Me:  "I want to have one of those deaths that people talk about for years. After I die, I want people to say ‘I don’t know how he managed to kill those three lions with his bare hands before the shuttle exploded’…"

Ethan: "…but boy were those two hookers tired."

Priceless.

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