The soundbyte generation

I have noticed in the past few years that I am getting more and more flooded by people sending me web-links. Sometimes its just because they find something interesting, often though it seems as if they think I should take it seriously as intellectual discourse.

So its time for my soapbox again:

Forwarding a web link is to intelligent discourse what "Mama, look I found a bug under that rock!" is to biology.

If you are going to cite references and be taken seriously by anyone with any sort of intellectual training, you need to do at least 4 things that are generally never done when people send links around:

1. Validate the veracity of your source. The most heinous offenders of these are people who send me either press releases or marketing speeches. We used to have a saying at Sun while I was there: the only difference between sales and marketing is that sales *knows* its lying. A source that has something to gain from convincing you what it is saying is true is never, ever a reliable one.
2. Read the damn article yourself first. I have a friend who just loves to link quote, and more then half the time if you read the article he's quoted fully, it defeats his own argument.
3. Differentiate statements of fact from statements of opinion. Lots of people believed the world was flat. That didn't make it any more true then if only one person did. Common wisdom is seldom wise and almost always suspect.
4. Differentiate serious arguments from propaganda. Propaganda is inherently a manipulative form of communication. It is *built* to persuade and not to enlighten. There are standard social and linguistic techniques employed in propaganda, none of which standard up to a serious test of logical correctness.
   
   In a moment of deliberate irony,l I'm going to give you a URL link to the most complete list of the standard fallacies of propaganda I've come across.

Link-wars are, I suppose, the inevitable result of a sound-byte culture. Its argument by sound-byte. And it has just as much depth of thought.

Winners and Losers in Oracle's Sun Picks

Now that the dust has settled in the Snorcle merger, we can see some of what Oracle has kept and not kept in the Sun portfolio. This is my own set of calls on what were good and bad choices, time will tell if I am right or wrong...

Good Call: Keeping Glassfish 3

There seems to have been little impact on the Glassfish project. It is still open and going strong, Although there have been project management issues in the past (Glassfish2 was buggy and never fixed) in general this is a central enterprise technology in major use. There was some concern that they might suffer from being in competition with Oracle's own database-integrated app server but so far that hasn't seemed to have happened.

Bad Call: Keeping Java FX

Larry, what are you thinking??

The final and ultimate shot in Sun's pointless and already lost battle with Action Script. This is a whole lot like Japan deciding to invest half its GNP in a war effort *after* the bomb fell on Hiroshima. A huge expensive boondoggle that no one but Sun cares about. Even if Sun *could* win this war (which they can't), the entire future of the segment is now under *serious* threat from Apple and Google with HTML5, which basically makes both AS3 AND JavaFX unnecessary.

Good Call: Keeping Sun Labs

Sun Labs is where most of Sun's strength has emanated from. A highly efficient group, they get more done with less man-power then most of Sun.

Bad Call: Screwing with Sun Labs Portfolio

Look at it this way, Larry. Suppose some hairy engineer today had an idea for a brand new, never seen before, language on top of a brand new, never seen before operating environment that he wanted to write for a tiny-device market that didn't exist yet.

What would you say in portfolio review?

That, my friend, was Oak, which later became Java, which you paid HOW much to own???

Think about it.

Bad Call: Screwing with the Sun Culture

I have my ear to the Sun grapevine. You are leaking top talent right now like a rowboat made out of pumice. Why? Because if Sun people wanted to work in an Oracle environment they would've joined Oracle to begin with, not Sun. In case you haven't read yesterdays WSJ, the tech sector is in major hiring mode again. They have lots of options and they are taking them. I suspect you will find them very hard to replace.

Surprise Good Call: Keeping Netbeans

Honestly, I'm on the fence on this one. Two years ago I would've said Eclipse had it beaten dead rights and you should just port whats of value from Netebans to Eclispe plugins and kill it. But Eclipse seems to be running out of steam, weighed down by its own success and a panoply if increasingly incompatible plugins. Meanwhile, Neteabs 6.8 has managed to leapfrog Eclipse to be the better dev environment. It has better support for the most modern language trends and is easier to keep functioning.

Kudos to the Netbeans guys, in any event, for a surprising last-lap come-back.

Good Last Minute Decision Reversal: Keeping Kenai

In a clear last minute reversal of policy, Oracle reversed its position on Sun's competing open source environments, saying they would keep the java.net name but migrate to the Kenai backend.

Good call. OReily's software that Java.net runs on has always been a weak player in the field and Java.net's greatest weakness. Kenai is a modern hosting site well-integrated with Netbeans. mering the Java.net brand and exisiting project base with Kenai's technology is a best-of-both-worlds solution.

Worst Call of All: Buying Sun

I blame this more on the Sun board then on Larry Ellison, honestly. Sun is just not a good culture fit for Oracle and Oracle hasn't learned the IBM lesson that, when you buy a company you are also buying the culture so don't mess with it any more then absolutely necessary.

IBM was a far better culture fit. In the end, the Sun board had a chance with IBM to save all that was good about Sun and threw it away or the sake of 50 cents more a share.

Prediction:

When the dust settles in a few years, oracle will find all they bought was a few by then aging technologies and an aging brand. What was truly valuable about Sun, the holders of future-vision, will have all drifted off to other opportunities.

Just got my IPad

Quickie review

Pros:

great form factor, about the same size as my Clio was. (The Clio was fantastic, well ahead of its time hardware, crippled by crappy microsoft abandoned software.)

Handles books very very well, including PDFs. A nice surprise is that there is a free Amazon reader for it so I can get all my Kindle books on it, too. IBooks + Amazon Kindle + the free Good reader app for PDFs makes a pretty darn complete reading solution.

Video playback is superb... but ti only natively supports MP4 so you'll have to do some laborious converting of other formats to play them from memory. When done however it does a beautifuol job.

Cons:

Doesn't multi-task. I didn't realize how much id miss this, but it means that, although Pandora is available for the machine, I can't listen to Pandora and read a book at the same time :(

The only exception is their own Ipod app which *will* run in background... figures, huh?

Screen smudging. I tend to have oily hands. I'm going to be wiping this thing down pretty often. That it didn't come with a wiping cloth is mildly annoying.

App limits. Where there are apps, its great, but where there arent, life sucks. I cant play Hulu for instance on this device because Apple hates Flash and wants everyone to use HTML 5 instead. While I appreciate the sentiment, unless/until the world DOES go all HTML5 this will be a real limit on the Ipad's usefulness.

Edit: Discovered one more plus/minus over an ebook reader. Plus, it looks great in the dark. Minus, its pretty much unreadable in direct sunlight.

More Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Nothing is more meaningless or misleading then a statistic without context.

For instance, take this one:

Virtual Products & Goods Sales Reach $5 Billion in China vs $1 Billion in US in 2009

This article goes on to blather about micro-transactions and virtual object sales as a primary monetization model. But the link between these two ideas is never really established or demonstrated.Consider THIS statistic in light of the one above...

Over One Million Gold Farmers In China

So, how much of that 5 billion dollars above is in fact being driven not by F2P/virtual object transactions at all, but by the sale of gold coming out of traditional MMORPGs? And not actually being sold to Chinese but, in fact, to the west?

Based on the numbers above I'd hazard to guess a lot.

Emperors new clothes and suits made of suede

On numerous occasions I've heard it claimed that Free to Play (F2P) games are generating Average Returns Per User (ARPU) per month in the double digits.

I've always doubted these claims. They make no sense. Its well known that less then 5% of the users of these games pay *anything* at all. In order to return a monthly ARPU of even $10, this means that the average spend of those who DO spend money must be at least $200 a month.

How many people do YOU know that spend $200 a month, month after month, on micro-transactions? The very idea boggles the mind.

Where then did these inflated values come from? I found the answer in this article.

"http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/successful-mmogs-can-see-1-2-in-monthly-arpu/"

The answer to the mystery is in a footnote... almost an afterthought....

"* Note that this is based on monthly users. Many MMOGs calcuate their average revenue per user (ARPU) based on Peak Concurrent Users. On this basis, ARPU can be more than an order of magnitude higher than the $1.40 guideline."

This is nonsense. An accounting trick. The Peak Concurrent Usage (PCU) of a paid for game is only 5% to 10% of the user account population. If WOW (or most other pay to play MMORPGs) calculated their monthly ARPU this way, it would be between $150 and $300!

The PCU of free games is, logically, an even lower % of their account population as the incentive to come online is lower then if you are paying monthly for the privledge, and accounts of people who quit the game are never removed.

The F2P Emperors' new clothes, it turns out, are far less then their tailors' would have you believe. And as for suede suits, that goes to an old crude aphorism about gullible people I will chose not to repeat.

Saying goodbye to Sun

Today, Sun Microsystem officially ceased to be.

Sun was a great engineering company that was responsible for some great innovations. It will be missed by myself, and I expect many others.

Through Oracle's official announcements as well as what I am hearing from various friends in Sun, whatever gets folded into Oracle will not be the Sun we knew and loved. Frankly, I find some of Larry's choices to be a bit bizarre, but he bought the right to make bizarre decisions with his cold hard cash.

I do think there is a lot of gold being thrown out on the street in terms of both people and projects. It is my fondest hope that both get picked up by others with the vision to make them the successes they deserve to be. And in terms of what is being kept, well, I predict some indigestion in 18 to 24 months, but I could be wrong there, too.

Kenai to the rescue

I don't know if this has anything to do with the oracle Sun acquisition or not, but Sun has a new community development site up in beta and its HOT.

I never cared much for java.sun.com. I felt the Oriely software it ran on was ugly and ill fitting to my sorts of projects. But Kenai is awesome. Its a modern interface, has every feature I could imagine I'd want AND has full Netbeans integration. Best of all, its really a site for the community.

Unlike google code, who want to force you into releasing your project under licenses they like, Kenai supports every OSI license that exists. PLUS if you want to use your own license, you can. Now thats what I call community service.

Speaking of Netbeans integration, Ive gone back to NB with NB 6.8 and must say, I am VERY impressed so far. They may have leap-frogged eclipse again. The Scala plug-in needs some work still but is definitely better then the one for eclipse.

Which brings me around to the Scala work I've been doing. But thats for another post...

Conclusion: If you need free open source project hosting I'd *strongly* suggest you look at http://kenai.com