When To Spend More

Buying things seems to get more complicated every year. This increased complexity can include opportunity costs, the choices and sometimes, even the price. Then at some point in your life, you get a job and now you have more disposable income to spend. It's a lot easier to make a decision when you have a small budget. Good things at low prices generally don't come in huge varieties – take headphones for example. There is the Koss KSC75 at $15 - and then a huge gaping chasm in quality until you can afford at least a pair of Grado SR60s, which come in at around $80. When you have more to spend, you have a lot more choice. At the $100 - $150 price range, you have an abundance of excellent choices. In fact, you can now choose based on other criteria, like comfort, open or closed, size and portability. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true – there are also few choices at the high end of the market. If you are in the market for a new car that costs more than $2 million dollars, you have little choice besides a Bugatti Veyron Super Sports.

Needless to say, this leaves us with a conundrum most of the time. When should you splurge for the better product? There are probably a couple of factors to consider, some more obvious than others.

Is the more expensive product better? This could be an objective scale or a subjective scale. Sometimes, the comparison is simple: 3-ply toilet paper is strictly better than 1-ply toilet paper (maybe, in the case where you aren't using for its intended purpose, you could make an argument otherwise). Other times, like choosing between the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S III, you can have read countless comparisons and reviews and not come to a good conclusion.

Can you tell the difference? Don't just read what you can find on the Internet and take it as gospel. Sure, a 24k gold plated HDMI cable from Monster Cable is probably strictly better than a $2 cable from Monoprice; but you won't be able to tell the difference. After all, the signals are digital and the cable is going to be hidden behind your television. Nobody (except, perhaps you) would ever care how much you spent on your damn cable.

Are you buying it because of the brand? A lot of geeks and nerds look down on this pattern of buying. Why? This behaviour means that you might be buying a product (and paying more) based simply on marketing – not its actual merit. A good example of this are Beats headphones; they aren't actually bad, but they sure are expensive. Most Beats headphones have excellent Sennheiser alternatives for less than half the price - so if you own Beats headphones, it's pretty clear your intention sways more towards flaunting your purchasing power rather proving than your audiophile cred.

Now, I'm giving pretty specific examples with clear cut differences. Really, the product you can comparing can come with numerous differences that have their tradeoffs – and this can include things like after sales service, included accessories, aesthetics and even seemingly tiny items like a special hinge on a laptop or an additional button on a mouse.

So when should you spend more? It's really all up to you. Buy what's best for you. Who cares what angry people on the Internet think?

Being Evil or Just Following Incentives?

Anyone who has studied economics has heard of this word many times: ‘incentives’. It is what shapes our behaviours. It can explain pretty much why any of us do what do we do. The difference is merely that some of us have lines we do not cross. (You could say, we have an incentive to not cross that line chasing another more selfish incentive.)

In the past couple of weeks, we have watched the true nature of many companies come to light or fruition. Twitter announced a change to their API. This was seen by the first of many unwanted changes to come – and they’re probably right. The first casualty of the new API changes was the Tweetbot alpha. They couldn’t get enough tokens under the new token limit and Twitter refused to give them more. While Tapbots are reassuring us that the full Mac version will not be affected, one can’t help but be skeptical of the whole debacle.

If you look at the way the announcement was worded, and how Twitter has been behaving over the past couple of months (not just the recent announcement), you’d know that these changes were probably a matter of time. There’s somewhat of a huge uproar on the Internet over how Twitter has become another massive overlord, wielding its power over the Internet. All that has really happened is that Twitter is now focused on making money. People forget really quickly what a free service is really selling. In this case, Twitter really, is selling access to you.

We’ve seen this happen everywhere. We love free things – but economists will tell you that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. This dissonance will always occur whenever the value of the service to the business does not correspond to the value of the service to the customer. The business will always respond to its incentives: it needs to make money. The lines they aren’t willing to cross are the ones which will lose them most of their customers. They are more than happy to cross lines which will make them lose a small number of them. It’s been made clear that Twitter owns the dominant mobile clients.

Are developers being shafted? Perhaps they are. Many of them have been building clients for a while now. Twitter’s iOS client was originally a third party client. But times have changed – and if it hasn’t become clear by now, any time you build off someone else’s platform for free, you can certainly expect to run into issues. There will always be the systemic risk that that platform will be yanked from under your feet.

Maybe your client is growing so large, that it is a risk to the platform owner’s business. You may not have thought about this, but if the most popular Twitter client wasn’t controlled by Twitter, that would make Twitter be at risk of the client going rogue. Can you imagine the problems it would cause if the Twitter client used a different link shortener? A different picture service? Twitter also has to sell ads – imagine if this rogue client refused to comply and doesn’t display ads correctly. Heck, this rogue client might even work with app.net and start moving Twitter users there! The horror!

That’s the other thing – always think about what value you are offering the platform owner. If all you are offering is spending their money using their servers to further your own goal, you can expect that one day, that free lunch will be over. Sometimes, the incentives might align. The iOS App Store, for example, really has no obligation to developers. Their obligation is to their customers, the people who buy apps. However, their incentives align with developers. Why? The App Store takes a cut. You sell more apps, both you and Apple make more money.

Is that going to last forever? Probably not. Things change – and one day, the incentives you took for granted to be everlasting and unchanging are going to mutate, and when it does, it might stab you in the face.

Edit: Here's a fun analogy that I think is worth a read: Why Are People So Upset With Twitter? Let’s Grab a Bite

Looking Back On Computer Game DRM

It’s been a while since I blogged about DRM. The last time was me ranting about Steam more than 7 years ago. Funnily enough, as it turned out, Steam has become the least restrictive of the current popular DRM measures. I’ve chosen to rant about it this time because recently I’ve ended my boycott against Steam.

When Steam was first announced in 2002, I decided I would have no part of it. While I do have an account with Steam, I didn’t buy any Steam or Steam-DRMed game until now. At the time, it was the most restrictive, most ridiculous piece of DRM. This was back when most DRM was disc-based - and more importantly, back in Malaysia, we were still predominantly dialup or slow ADSL.

To make things even worse, Steam at this time did have an rather unreliable offline mode (on my computer, anyway), together with encrypted data on the discs. There was no question – this was the new enemy, and so I stopped buying Valve games.

As time passed, Steam started allowing third party games on the service, got even more creative with the DRM, and now even has a Mac version. Meanwhile, the rest of the game publishing world has decided to whip their own customers with even more horrendous anti-copying measures, like persistent online authentication (in some cases, you need to be always online to play a single player game) and limited activation schemes. We have even had cases of games being tampered with on purpose, so that the game is unplayable off a fresh install off a disc.

The one piece of DRM I can most certainly agree with is the one where the game chooses to do hilarious things to the player when they use an illegal copy – invincible enemies, impossible enemy spawns, permanently drunken driving. Although, this can sometimes result in the game being given a bad review by our dear pirates because they didn’t know any better.

Now Steam is our go to place for games. Why? Sales on good games, (funnily enough) less restrictive DRM than other places, and hell, even weekends when we can try and play a game for free!

So here we are, nearly 10 years later, and I’ve finally bought my first game on Steam. The honour happens to go to Bastion – which was on sale for USD 6 for a copy I could play on both Windows and OS X. So, Valve – you win. (Also, I look forward to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and DOTA 2 being released.)

Magic: the Gathering – Ups and Downs

I have a strange relationship with Magic: the Gathering. I love the game to bits, but I don’t like playing quite as much as I like brewing decks. I could spend days or even weeks perfecting a build for my favourite deck – but the same can’t be said for my passion for playing Magic.

I quit collecting in 2007, not playing after Future Sight had made its debut. I started again in 2009 - about two and a half years later. This was when Zendikar had entered the scene. I came back in only to acquire the numerous full art lands. (I’m happy to say I have a very good number of these, and no you can’t have them.) As it turned out, it was a good set to be back in – power crept up a bit for Zendikar block, especially for lands, which if you play Magic, you’ll know are the most ridiculous amounts of money you will ever plop down for a card that needs other cards to work.

Not long after that, I came back to Australia for work. At that point, Scars of Mirrodin had just come out. At this point, you could say I had quit. I wasn’t collecting or playing actively for any reason. It was partly because I couldn’t afford it, and partly because I had lost interest. However, I decided somewhere in April 2011 that I should get back into the same – and did so with New Phyrexia. I went in and won the second draft event I had ever participated in.

At that point, I had settled down enough to afford to play and collect cards again – so I did. Eventually, chewxy invited me to go to Grand Prix Brisbane 2011. I thought this was a fantastic idea, and went off to brew what was blue-white Humans deck with a control frame. (An interesting fact is that pretty much identical decklists showed up a month or two later winning a couple of events, until Dark Ascension showed up.) I ended up not playing, although I went to watch chewxy play. After he had finished playing all his 8 rounds, we went off to get some sukiyaki for dinner.

As it happens, I continued to play a little here and there, and decided that I should play Limited exclusively. I wasn’t too bad at building decks on the fly for a given environment and it would certainly help limit my (notably excessive) spending on singles.

An opportunity to play in a Limited Grand Prix arose at the end of March 2012 – Grand Prix Melbourne 2012. I went to chewxy to said event - and proceeded to lose pretty much every match except my first one, despite having an excellent Zombie deck. I just always happened to have bad hands and bad draws for 3 matches in a row. This wasn’t the reason I chose to quit again, however.

After losing that many matches, I was determined to put in more practice so that I could come back for a better Grand Prix run next time. However, I had to wait until after my examinations before I could justify spending the time playing Magic. In that time, I decided that I wasn’t making a sound decision. There was no way I could play Magic on a decently regular schedule. The local game store only runs Sealed for prereleases, and drafts pretty much close to 10pm on Friday nights.

To be honest, I’m not quitting because it’s inconvenient to play. I’m quitting because it’s beginning to not make any more sense. Of course, I’m sure I’ll be back in about a year or two again. I’m sure I’m never leaving Magic permanently until perhaps I have family. Even then, if Magic is still around, I’m sure there will still be many fun games to be had.

New Theme, New Host

I've decided to switch to a new theme again. The last switch was around 3.5 years ago, in October 2008. That was the first switch to a simpler design. The one I used up until September 2008 was a more complicated theme, customized to my liking, and even had an AJAX search box. What's the difference between this theme and the old one? The top bar has been simplified and streamlined - I've kept only the newer categories, and removed all the smaller, less important ones. It no longer has a hover dropdown. The theme is also responsive - which means it'll work on smaller screens as well as larger ones. As a consequence of this change, I've shrunk the Google Adsense ads again. Why would I do this? So the theme will work perfectly on an iPhone screen. I have no idea what it looks like on an Android screen at the moment, but it should work on a 320 by 480 screen, so I don't think it'll break anywhere else.  (If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll notice every time I switch themes my ads seem to grow smaller).

I've switched to a new host: WebFaction. Why? I was outgrowing my old host in terms of what I needed. I was with the previous host for a total of nearly 8 years. (It is, in fact, paid for until the end of this year.) I needed space for my other websites as well, so WebFaction, which I have grown familiar with because of Pressyo and its projects, seemed like the perfect fit. I have a few projects of my own, and this was really outgrowing what Cpanel hosts were capable of. What projects are these? You might or might not have seen ManaHelix or MagicCardRank. I started those projects some time last year, while I haven't updated them in a while, I will. They are just simple hobbies for now, but I hope that they'll grow into more interesting projects as time passes.

Update: Tested on Android, both on Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich default browsers - the search field fails to display (not sure why), but otherwise everything works - YAY! Also - higher resolution images for higher PPI screens browsing in webkit (also known as retina displays...).