A Voice in the Dark

I see this question a lot about songs by some artist or other who has a large catalog of songs available on the Zune marketplace. It frequently comes down to a question of legality.

Imagine that there is a band named The Band. One of the members of The Band - Bob Guy - writes a song. This song may be credited to The Band, or to Bob Guy. If it’s credited to The Band, the record label usually has the right to decide how they distribute it. However, if it’s credited to Bob Guy, the record label needs his permission to distribute it - because only The Band has given them that right. Even though Bob Guy was in the band and took part in that decision, listing him as the author gives him additional rights over that song.

Now let’s imagine Bob Guy goes out and starts a solo career. When he releases an album as Bob Guy, an invisible distinction is created between Bob Guy the band that released a solo album, and Bob Guy the individual person. To the listener reading the credits, there is no difference - indeed, they are the same person. But from a legal perspective, Bob Guy the band and Bob Guy the artist are different legal entities. Any number of subtleties in the contract language can create a legal requirement to get permission from Bob Guy the artist to distribute songs he wrote for Bob Guy the band.

To make matters worse, Bob Guy is probably not his real name. His real name might be Eric Schmidt, and one or more songs may be credited to Eric Schmidt. Even thought Eric Schmidt is Bob Guy the artist and Bob Guy the artist is Bob Guy the band, if the song was written by Eric Schmidt, they need Eric Schmidt’s permission to distribute it.

Confused yet? It gets worse. What if Eric Schmidt is dead?

It is likely that Eric Schmidt has passed on the rights to Bob Guy’s music, both the band and the artist. But Eric may have simply forgotten that once upon a time, he released music written by Eric Schmidt, and in the absence of a legal name change all unestablished rights to that music disappear until it eventually falls into the public domain. Nobody has any legal right to make decisions about it. For 75 years after his death, these songs are in limbo, and cannot be legally distributed except as already contractually established.

So when digital download became available, and those rights had never been negotiated, a significant part of the world’s music library was simply not legally distributable at all until it hit the public domain. Even if Eric isn’t dead, the music industry is finding that after they shit all over Eric’s career as Bob Guy, drove him hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt with “advances on royalties”, and ultimately bought all rights to his music at bargain-basement prices… well, he’s not well-disposed to giving them a fair deal on the digital distribution rights. He wants his piece of what they took from him. Unlike the day he signed away the fruits of his creativity to wipe out a half million dollars in debt, the record label doesn’t have any leverage now. They want something from him, they can’t get it anywhere else, and he’s going to drive a hard bargain before they get anything - because he holds all the cards.

So in general, the reason a song isn’t available for download is usually that there are complicated legal matters around rights, holes in many legacy contracts that can’t be fixed, and bitter artists the industry has abused.

Filed under: Business, Intellectual Property, Media, Music
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I’m heading back to Redmond and a contract position at Microsoft, although I can’t say anything specific about the position just yet. I’ve got several outstanding interviews with teams throughout Microsoft; one of them has already come through with an offer, so the only question is whether any other teams will make offers.

The tough part is that I’d love to have any of these positions, so it’s not so much which offer to take as which offers to decline… and I’m not going to like declining any of them. If I were to pick just one team out of the bunch as the prime choice, it would be the one that’s already made an offer, but I don’t have enough information about some of the other positions to make an informed choice. I need until at least Friday afternoon to finish up some interview processes and have enough information, and there’s an outside chance that some vital data will become clear on Monday morning.

In other news, I have now spent a total of 172 hours in Microsoft interviews, and judging by my current schedule, Monday afternoon will see it break 180. Whichever offer I end up accepting, it will be my seventh consecutive Microsoft contract.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft
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Received in an email from an opt-in list:

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If I’ve changed my email address, doesn’t that mean I didn’t get the email?

Filed under: Business
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Infospace has decided to withdraw their offer of employment, explaining that they really didn’t want to hire someone who was trying to move up into project management; they need someone who would be content to spend the next five to ten years making no appreciable forward progress in their career.

That actually explains a lot.

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I start my new job at Infospace on August 4th. I have no clue what my title will be; I’m going to be working in the test department, but also doing some development.

The interview process was grueling. My first contact was my future manager, followed by an aggressive and very bright developer who grilled me on C# concepts and was clearly pleased that he got to move into the more advanced territory.

We had one extensive argument over abstract classes which turned out to be a misunderstanding. I said an abstract class lacks implementation. He said an abstract class might have implementation. I responded that it must lack some implementation, and he insisted that an abstract class could be completely implemented. We argued intensely about this for some time before the equivocation fallacy came up: when I say “abstract class”, I mean a class which has one or more abstract methods. He means a class which is actually declared as abstract, an ultimately arbitrary distinction. Once we figured out the misunderstanding, the argument rapidly turned into vigorous head-nodding and retrospective agreement with one another’s points.

And that was awesome.

Looking back over the two decades of my career, I calculated that I’ve spent approximately 600 hours in interviews. Half of those hours were at Microsoft within the past two years. The end result of this is that I’m perfectly comfortable in interviews - they’re such a familiar experience by this time (occupying roughly half a day out of every week during the past two years), I don’t have any of the nervousness or anxiety I used to experience earlier in my career. I can walk into an interview, sit down, and just talk. I know pretty much what they’re going to ask, what they want to hear, and whether I can provide it. I can even call out my limitations beforehand without worrying about it - “I’m not great at the theoretical parts of OOP,” I said at one point. “Explain what OOP is,” my interviewer responded. “Abstraction, polymorphism, encapsulation, and inheritance,” I replied. He asked about abstraction; I described abstraction. He asked about inheritance; I described inheritance. He asked about multiple inheritance in C#; I said there was multiple inheritance of interfaces, but not classes. He slyly asked whether you inherit an interface, or implement an interface; I replied that this was just syntactic sugar, and under the hood you’re still inheriting. And that’s when he sat up and started asking the hard questions.

Ultimately, we came down to a coding test where I had to rotate a 4×4 matrix with the optimum number of comparisons. I got that question at Microsoft once, and I couldn’t answer it, but armed with the recollection of what didn’t work before - I managed to solve it. (I think the resulting code might actually be useful in a quaternion transform, but I’m not sure; I’ll have to test it.) Since I’ve had this question twice in interviews, I’m not going to give away the answer here, because it’s a tough question that’s both fun to solve and a great representation of abstract thinking.

After this, I was confronted by a member of the test team who looked way too much like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He was even wearing that ugly pea-green T-shirt. I had to restrain myself from asking him to say “Zoiks!” just once. His questions revolved around not only creation of test cases, but - in a radical departure from other test interviews I’ve had - how to manage test cases. What if something isn’t in the specification? What if the specification is simply wrong? What if there’s a contradictory requirement? What if management refuses to fix a bug that I’m sure is important? How do your test suites change when switching from black-box to white-box testing? There was the inevitable “how would you test this” question - a calculator, which was somewhat more interesting than Microsoft’s usual “soda can” or “Slinky” examples - where I focused primarily on things that almost certainly wouldn’t be in the specification.

He seemed surprised by this, so I explained at one point that there are many obvious test cases I’d skipped, like “does each number key produce the right number” and “does 5 - 3 equal 2″. Most people can see that a calculator should operate properly as a calculator, but I wanted to concentrate on the test cases that most people wouldn’t consider: impact resistance, battery life, tactile feedback of the keys, stability on slanted surfaces, vibration tolerance, environmental factors. So I did a quick rundown of the generic things any calculator should do, and he appeared satisfied with that.

The lead developer came up next, and focused more on the “soft” aspects of the position. How would I deal with other people, where did I want to go with my career, that sort of thing. He seemed surprised that I’m pointing myself in the direction of project management, and asked why I thought testing was the right route to pursue that. I pointed out that writing a test plan is a project, and managing a test team is a project, and coordinating a test effort is a project, and no matter what specific discipline you happen to choose it is fundamentally composed of encapsulated projects. The abilities and skills used to manage a project in its entirety simply don’t differ significantly from the abilities and skills used to manage the individual subprojects of which it is composed.

Finally, I spoke with my future manager again, who informed me that everyone was impressed but he couldn’t say anything official just yet. I was escorted to the elevators, went down to my car, and called the recruiter handling the position so I could tell him things went well. In the time it took me to reach the car (less than five minutes), they had already called him to make an offer and establish a start date.

I guess they like me. The feeling’s mutual; it seems like a really great company, and I’m sure it’ll be a blast working there.

Filed under: Business, Programming, Software
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So Microsoft has this whole XNA initiative, and one of the things they’re unveiling for Holiday ‘08 is the Community Games portal where XNA Creators’ Club members ($99 annually, $49 for three months) can put their XNA games on XBox LIVE for anyone and everyone who has an XBox 360 to download.

Trouble is, you can’t put your game up there and charge nothing for it. You’re required to charge 200 points for a 50 MB game, and 400 for a 150 MB game. You may also opt to charge 400 points for a 50 MB game, or 800 points for a game of either size. The revenue split is 70% and paid quarterly; at the current rate of 1.25 cents per point, this means you can earn $1.75, $3.50, or $7.00 per copy sold, depending on your price point. Microsoft can also position and promote your game, for an additional 10% to 30% of revenue - reducing your cut to a minimum of $1.00 to $4.00 - under conditions that aren’t entirely clear.

Now, first off, this is a generous revenue split. Good luck getting anything even close to this from a normal publisher or distributor. One of the better avenues I’ve researched - Reflexive Games - gives you the same 40% Microsoft is offering at the bottom end of their scale, but never goes above that.

But what really chaps my arse is the sheer number of people who can’t stop whinging about the inability to offer their games on XBox LIVE for free.

I am so incredibly jazzed about XNA, I can’t stop gushing about it. I’ve constructed a pretty decent 2D Breakout-style game that’s actually fun to play. I don’t have to worry about the details of getting sprites on the screen and sorting them and rendering transparency; XNA handles all that for me. It took me just over a week to build a working game. Now here comes Microsoft to say that for under $100, I can publish that game on XBox LIVE before the end of the year and actually get paid for it. That rules. This has changed everything - I’ve had this dream of building an indie game studio for over a decade, and now here’s exactly the channel I need to make that dream a reality.

But the community is divided over the relatively minor point that you can’t give your game away for free over that same channel.

And that’s rather a shame.

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Microsoft, Programming, Software
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Scott Adams asks what constitutes a “fair” tax rate for the rich. It’s a fair question, at least.

The question that always comes to mind is what a person is going to do with their tax money if they don’t spend it on taxes. Imagine that everyone pays a flat 20% tax, just for simplicity. On the one hand, you have Joe Rich, who makes ten million a year and pays two million in taxes. On the other, you have Bill Poor, who makes twenty thousand a year and pays four thousand in taxes.

Contemplate the impact of dropping the tax rate to 15%. Now Bill Poor pays $3,000 in taxes, and gets to put $1,000 in his pocket. Joe Rich pays $1.5 million, and puts $500,000 in his pocket.

What will these two people do with the added income?

Bill Poor will probably use his $1,000 to buy a television set or a motorcycle. Nobody cares.

Joe Rich will probably invest his $500,000 in a business venture of some sort. This will create new jobs and probably result in new products and services; even if it only provides existing products and services, the additional competition will be good for consumers.

The alternative to leaving that $500,000 with Joe Rich is to give it to the government, who is not exactly sporting the best track record for using money wisely. It could be argued, however, that their track record is better than Bill Poor’s - and, indeed, that by pooling Bill Poor’s money with other people’s money, it could do more good.

The “highest and best use” answer would be to take money from the poor and give it to the rich, but somehow I don’t think the American public would go for that.

Filed under: Business, Economics
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I’ve been away a while.

Those of you who know me - if anyone who knows me actually reads this blog; for that matter, if anyone at all actually reads this blog - know that I am generally a pretty stalwart individual. I keep a positive attitude and an optimistic outlook pretty much all the time.

This is not always an accurate view of my mental state.

I have been so drastically and deeply damaged and distressed by the end of my association with RDA, that (alliteration aside) I am not sure I will ever be the same person again. It’s been made clear to me that working for anyone, anyone at all, is simply not a secure arrangement. In the span of two days, I went from being frustrated but optimistic… to being unemployed. I have not recovered. I may never recover.

I have seriously contemplated suicide.

The level of despair with which I have struggled after the events of April 15th cannot be described. I am simply unable to fathom the reasons behind that day. I don’t blame anyone; there’s no conspiracy, no coalition of people who were “out to get me”, no malfeasance or stupidity behind it. It was just not the right place or the right time, I suppose. I wish it had been. I love RDA. I loved working there. I loved all the people I met there.

Now they don’t even respond to my emails. Would they be willing to provide a reference in my job search? Evidently not. I’ve been abandoned. Shunned. The only community with which I felt any real connection over those eight months has decided I’m no longer worth their time.

I’ve lived in Washington state for ten years. I have no real friends. America doesn’t provide much of a framework for adults to make new friends. You’re supposed to get them through your job. As a business owner, I was never a friend, but a boss. As a Microsoft contractor, I couldn’t be a friend, because I wasn’t really one of them. And as a former employee, the friendships I thought were forming simply evaporated once I left the fold.

I’m not one of them anymore. The friendship was not a real friendship; it was conditional. It was false.

There aren’t enough Jews in Washington state. I can’t find a good synagogue. My son needs to learn about his Jewish identity and what it means and how to be a Jew in the first place. He needs to meet other Jews. He needs to see that we are really out there, and it’s not just some weird thing his dad made up. He needs at least two or three Jewish friends. Eventually, he will need to have some Jewish female friends, so he’s only confronted with the choice of intermarriage - rather than being compelled to intermarry by circumstances.

I can’t support my family. I can’t educate my son. I can’t even find a friend.

I look back on my time in the Seattle area. I cast my eyes back ten years, and I find the white paper I wrote just before moving out here from Virginia. “I Am Not A Kook”, it’s titled. May 12th, 1998. Days before I left everything and came 3500 miles across the country to meet a woman I’d only ever known online - a woman with whom I have had two beautiful children, even if they don’t know what being a Jew is all about, and with whom I am still deeply and passionately in love. Even if we have an open marriage.

That “paper” (only ever posted online) ends quoting Marilyn Manson: “When I’m God, everyone dies.” Several months after posting it, someone mailed me a Chick pamphlet and admonished me in their handwritten note that “no man is God, ever”. I guess I hit a nerve.

I’m still the same person who wrote that white paper, fundamentally. I still like Marilyn Manson, although his latest album - “Eat Me, Drink Me” - was a little too self-important and pussified for my taste. “Golden Age of Grotesque” was okay; the “Doppelhertz” DVD with it was just plain fucked up, but I sort of expect that from him. I still read Nietzsche, and Kafka. Not as much… but here and there.

I still don’t know who I am or what I want or where I belong.

I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

And that’s okay, in a sort of cosmic sense. Maybe I’m not really supposed to know. Maybe I just have to shut up and keep going and see what happens. I don’t know.

But there is something powerful and profound in realising that over the past ten years, you have really not changed all that much. There is some sort of cosmic validation there.

These wounds won’t heal, this is my sin.

Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Philosophy
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Culturally, in America, you are what you do.

In a very real sense, that means when you’re unemployed, you’re nobody.

Even though I know, intellectually, this was just a circumstantial mismatch… there’s a part of me still trying to figure out what I did wrong.

Filed under: Business, Philosophy
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I woke up this morning at 2 AM to work on the stuff I’m doing for the EU protocol documentation effort. Around 7:30 I managed to get a big obstacle handled, so I could make real forward progress for the first time since the middle of last week.

And at 8 AM, I found out my employer - RDA Corporation - is terminating my employment.

It’s really one of those things that mystifies me. I came on board to do a specific job, and I was summarily pushed out of the project by a Microsoft FTE who didn’t like my methods. The projects since then had been a bad fit in oh, so many ways… fundamentally, I’m a shirt-and-tie go-to-the-office kind of person. RDA’s Redmond office is largely a virtual team environment, where your work day starts when you wake up and ends when you go to bed and in between you don’t really see anyone or collaborate in any real sense.

I don’t work well that way. I told them I don’t work well that way, from day one. And in my latest position, the state of the infrastructure was very, very immature… large swaths of support materials didn’t really exist, and “features” of the software I was using simply didn’t work. It looked like it would work, so I made estimates accordingly… and then I ended up past deadline because when it came down to the wire, the foundation was mud.

What surprises me is that this is precisely what I said at the beginning of the contract: that I was concerned about scope creep if the infrastructure wasn’t what we expected, and the language of the SOW was not specific enough for my taste.

They’re a great company. We didn’t fit well together, but honestly, I’d go back to them in a second given the right opportunity. It’s just that the right opportunity never quite materialised, and I guess they ran out of patience before I did.

I’m kind of lost now. Yesterday, on the way to work, my car just blew up. It’s unsalvageable. I spent four and a half hours on the side of the road with a dead cell phone. It really sucked. And things just keep getting worse.

Momentum being what it is, and since I’m a problem solver at heart, I’m going to finish up the stuff I was working on and send it to my PM anyway. I’ve spent four days trying to get over this hurdle, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop everything just because I don’t get paid for it. I’m not really in this field for the money, anyway.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Philosophy
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