While it’s stupid that the biggest story to come out of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive was the gossip over the interview of Mark Zuckerberg by Sarah Lacy, the one “hook” that has kept the story going is the suggestion that it was the use of twitter, in particular snide comments on twitter, which turned the audience against Lacy, the interviewer from Business Week.

There have even been comments (from those who weren’t even there) suggesting witch hunts and misogyny. Other bloggers used hyperbolic terms like “train-wreck” and “career-ending” which are serious exaggerations.

Short summary. In a “keynote” interview, Lacy, who has just finished a book about Facebook, was on stage to interview Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg was, as usual, a difficult interview subject, but for a variety of reasons the character of the interview changed as the audience turned against Lacy, cheering criticism of her. Most agreed they had not seen somebody lose an audience like this in some time.  read more »

I have sympathy for the TV writers, because I believe the 3 most important elements of a good TV show are story, story and story. You need more than that, but without them you are toast.

But my reaction is not likely to help them. One of the things they are striking for is to make more money off DVD sales and online delivery of their video. But with The Daily Show off the air, we found ourselves reaching for… other old shows on DVD.

The nasty truth is there may already be enough good TV and movies made to satisfy a lot of the public’s TV watching needs, and it’s all on DVD, and will all be online. Not that the industry can’t produce good new shows that are worth watching — but how much do we truly need new shows? We seem to have a preference for novelty, it’s true. And tastes change, making older shows less palatable. And much older shows have poorer production values. (Though in fact, many older shows were shot on film, and thus can now be delivered in HDTV to provide a superior experience to when they were aired.)

But our taste for novelty is just a taste. We can be quite happy for the duration of a writers’ strike satisfying ourselves from the very media they are not being paid enough for. In a better quality format, commercial-free.

This strike grid from the LA Times shows that a lot of shows have plenty of scripts in the can as well. Outside of shows like The Daily Show and Tonight Show, the public isn’t even going to notice many shows leaving the air for some time to come. The writers are hoping they can threaten the “pilot” season and thus scare the networks into worrying they will not have new shows for a Fall season. (This need of course is related to the public’s demand for novelty.)

Networks can’t easily go and put a series from the 80s or 90s on the air as replacement, however. The taste for novelty is quite strong, and too many people will have seen it. This is what DVD/online does better than broadcast. While the odds that you would like to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer or any other specific but have not seen it (in original airing or syndication) are not that good, given the wide selection of DVD out there, the odds that there is something to meet your needs during the strike are high. This is particularly true for the various pay channel series for those who don’t get those channels.

And, especially if you use Netflix or buying and selling used, at a very attractive price.

A friend asked for advice on selling real estate. I’m no expert, but I thought I would write up some of my thoughts in a blog post for everybody:

• The national average commission is 5%, though agents always ask for 6%. Do you want to do worse than average?
• Of course, home prices have soared far beyond inflation, but the realtor cut remains the same. This is the power of the realtor monopoly, which many have tried to break. Someday somebody will. I think Google could do it.
• A good realtor will usually get you 6% more than you will get on your own, which is how they justify their price. But that doesn’t mean a realtor couldn’t get you that same bump for far less if the market were more competitive.
• Except in hot seller’s markets, open houses are not to sell your house. They are so the agent (or one of their associates) can meet new buyers, and try to sell them any house, not just yours. In hot markets, houses really do sell via the open house. (Also see below.)

• A great story. A broker calls his agents in for a meeting. He asks them, “You’re listing a house and you’ve gotten one of the buyers you represent interested in it. Who are you working for?”

  One agent says, “The seller is the one you have a contract with, work for him.

  Another agent says, “The buyer is the one who decides to make the offer. Work for her.”

  A third agent says, “Actually, the law in this state requires that you try as hard as you can to represent the interests of both.

  The broker listens and then growls at them, “You’re all wrong! You’re working for me!”

• In other words, the agent is working at making a sale happen. I’ve never met a seller’s agent who would not quickly betray their seller to make a sale happen. By “betray their seller” I mean tell the prospective buyer information the seller would normally never reveal, such that they will take less. Some would argue (validly) in some cases that this is in the seller’s interest too.
• More often than you think, houses end up selling to friends and neighbours. A friend just listed a house and ended up with competing bids from the neighbour 2 doors down and another a few more doors down. People often love the chance to get a bigger house in the same location — no need to reclocate kids, learn new area etc. You need a neighbourhood that people love of course.
• Because of that, consider doing one week of basic “for sale by owner” marketing to let neighbours and friends know you are selling. You will get swarmed by realtors wanting your listing, which is OK if you want them to compete over you. Otherwise tell them you’ve already picked the broker you will list with if the FSBO doesn’t work
• You may still want an agent to handle your FSBO. There are agencies that do all the non-marketing part of real estate transactions for much lower fees, or you can talk a traditional agent into do it for far less as well.
• As an alternate, ask for a clause in your contract that says if the house sells to a neighbour or to somebody in your circle of friends, the commission is much less. In general the commission should be much less if your agent also represents the buyer, which would typically be the case here. Threaten to do FSBO (and give the agent nothing) if they won’t accept this clause.
• Zillow is really cool and useful.

Ever since the first science fiction about cyberspace (First seen in Clarke’s 1956 “The City and the Stars” and more fully in 1976’s “Doctor Who: The Deadly Assassin”) people have wanted to build online 3-D virtual worlds. Snow Crash gelled it even further for people. 3D worlds have done well in games, including Mmorpgs and recently Second Life has attracted a lot of attention, first for its interesting world and its even more interesting economy, but lately for some of the ways it has not succeeded, such as a site for corporate sponsored stores.

Let me present one take on why 3D is not all it’s cracked up to be. Our real world is 3D of course, but we don’t view it that way. We take it in via our 2D eyes, and our 1.5D ears and then build a model of its 3D elements good enough to work in it. In a way I will call this 2.5D because it’s more than 2D but less than 3. But because we start in two dimensions, and use 2D screens, 3D interfaces on a flat screen are actually worse than ones designed for 2D. Anybody who tired the original VRML experiments that attempted to build site navigation in 3D, where you had to turn around your virtual body in order to use one thing or another, realized that.

Now it turns out the fact that 3D is harder is a good thing when it comes to games. Games are supposed to be a challenge. It’s good that you can’t see everything and can get confused. It’s good that you can sneak up behind your enemy, unseen, and shoot him. Because it makes the game harder to win, 3D works in games.

But for non-games, including second life, 3D can just plain make it harder. We have a much easier time with interfaces that are logical, not physical, and present all the information we need to use the system in one screen we can always see. The idea that important things can be “behind us” makes little sense in a computer environment. And that’s true for social settings. When you sit in a room of people and talk, it’s a bug that some people are behind you and some are in front of you. You want to see everybody, and have everybody see your face, the way the speaker on a podium would. The real 3D world can’t do that for a group of people, but virtual worlds can.

I am not saying 3D can’t have its place. You want and need it for modeling things form the real world, as in CAD/CAM. 3D can be a place to show off certain things, and of course a place to play games.

In making second life, a better choice might have been a 2D interface that has portals to occasional 3D environments for when those environments make sense. That would let those who want to build 3D objects in the environment get the ability to do so. But this would not have been nearly as sexy or as Snow-Crashy, so they didn’t do it. Indeed, it would look too much like an incremental improvement over the web, and that might not have gotten the same excitement, even if it’s the right thing to do. The web is also 2.5D, a series of 2D web pages with an arbitrary network of connections between them that exists in slightly more than 2 dimensions. And it has its 3D enclaves, though they are rare and mostly hard to use.

Another idea for a VR world might be a 3D world with 360 degree vision. You could walk around it but you could always see everything, laid out as a panorama. You would not have to turn, just point where you wish to go. It might be confusing at first but I think that could be worth experimenting with.

In 1978, after finally saving up enough money, I got myself a Commodore PET computer. I became immersed in it, and soon was programming all sorts of things, and learning assembler to make things go really fast. I soon discovered the Toronto Pet User’s Group, which grew over time to be perhaps the most prominent Commodore group in the world.

A big reason for that was the group’s star attraction, a middle aged man with a great deep speaking voice and a talent for writing and explaining computers to newcomers. That man was Jim Butterfield. His talks at meetings were the highlight for many members, and he did both beginner’s talks and fairly high level ones. Jim had been working on reverse engineering the OS (really BIOS) of the PET, and one of my early cute hacks was a very simple loop that copied the computer’s “zero page” onto the screen at every vertical refresh (ie. 60 times/second.) The PET had characters for all 256 bytes, so this was like a live window into the computer’s guts, even beyond das blinkenlights found on mainframes. You could play with the computer and actually watch everything change before you. For his reverse engineering goals, Jim loved the little program and promoted it and we became friends.

Later, Jim would be hired to write the manuals for some of my software projects, including my set of programming tools known as POWER. I’m sure his name on the manual helped sell the product as much as mine did. He was the Commodore world’s rockstar and father figure at the same time. We were only in occasional touch after I left Toronto and then Canada, but the incredible longevity of Pet and C64 hacking has kept his name in people’s minds. He had a sense of humour, charm and love that is rarely found in a technical guru.

Cancer finally got him on June 29th. There’s a bit more at the TPUG page.

You can see this rather embarrassing advertisement that was published to sell software written by myself, Jim and fellow Mississauga software author Steve Punter with a picture of the 3 of us dressed as football players.

I’ve just returned from the 25th reunion of my graduating class in Mathematics at the University of Waterloo. I had always imagined that a 25th reunion would be the “big one” so I went. In addition, while I found myself to have little in common with my high school classmates, even having spent 13 years growing up with many of them, like many techie people I found my true community at university, so I wanted to see them again. To top it off, it was the 40th anniversary of the faculty and the 50th anniversary of the university itself.

But what if they had a reunion and nobody came? Or rather, out of a class of several hundred, under 20 came, many of whom I only barely remembered and none of whom I was close to?  read more »

I wrote earlier about the controversial topic of discriminatory pricing, where vendors try to charge different customers different prices, usually based on what they can afford or will tolerate. One particularly vexing type of such pricing is the mail-in rebate. Mail in rebates do two things. In their pure form, they give a lower price to people willing to spend some time on the bureaucracy. As such, they would work at charging richer customers more because richer customers tend to value time more than money compared to poorer customers.

However, they are rarely that simple. Some products offer ridiculously low rebates it’s not worth anybody’s time to process — they are not much better than a trick. With higher rebates, often the full price is inflated to make the discount appear larger than it is. This can also be a trick. A person who has decided she will not do rebates should normally never buy such a product, however, in many cases people do buy them, and never get around to processing the rebate.

While the vendors never release figures, clearly many people never get their rebate. Companies that manage rebates can in fact make fairly realiable promises about how many of the rebates will actually be redeemed. While I suspect the largest reason for non-redemption is “not getting around to it,” in many cases rebate programs work to make it hard to redeem. They will make the redemption process as complex as possible, and not redeem on any little error. Some companies have even been found to have fraudulently failed to redeem correctly prepared rebate forms, waiting for customers to complain and paying only if they do. Of course, few customers complain, as it’s even more work, and of those who do, few retain the documentation necessary for a complaint. In many cases, customers do not even keep note of what rebate requests they sent out. Rebate companies tend to deliberately take as long as possible — usually several months — to process rebates. This is partly to keep the float on the money, but also I suspect to make people forget about what they are waiting for.

As such, I avoid most rebates, but I do do some of them. In particular, if I can do rebates in bulk, it can be worthwhile. In this case (usually around the holidays) I will gather together many rebates and fill them out all at once. I took a sheet of laser printer address labels and printed out stickers with all the common items desired on rebate forms, including name/address stickers which I already have, and stickers with a special E-mail address and free voicemail only phone number (ipkall.com) to speed up the process.

This year, several rebates now “offered” online processing. This turns out to save time for the company, not for you. You fill in the information (saving them data entry work) and it prints out your rebate form, which you must still mail in along with the original UPC and some form of original receipt. (Fry’s has automated their end of the rebate process, printing rebate receipts and rebate forms on thermal printers at the cash register.)

One of the companies, onrebate.com seemed like an even nastier trick. On my first visit the site was incredibly slow, taking 30 seconds per page in a multi-step process. However, a later visit was OK. However, they of course do nothing to make things easier, like re-use of data on a second rebate (including some of the famous “double rebate” products.) One thing they offer which is very positive is payment of your rebate via paypal, which has two giant benefits — no need for a trip to the bank, and easy tracking of when you are repaid. In addition, it eliminates the common trick of printing rebate cheques with “not valid after…” legends set for the very near future, another way they block redemption.

Onrebate also offers quick payment, if you let them keep about 10% of your rebate. Of course this is a bad deal to just get money 2 months sooner, but we know people fall for it. As an experiment, I filed two rebates with them, one with the instant payment and one without. I got the notice of processing on the instant payment one first, saying I would be paid within a couple of weeks. On the other hand I got the money on the other one first! E-mail notification is positive for tracking, of course. Some companies go the other way. I received a $10 rebate check recently with no indication, other than the name of the general rebate processing company, of what it was for. This helps confuse people about what rebates they have received and not received.

Even with the streamlined bulk process, however, it took too much time this year. One needs to check that one has followed all the rules, which often vary. Some demand signatures, some demand emails, some demand phone numbers. Some demand copies of receipts, some demand originals. Some demand web processing. Almost all demand original UPCs which can be hard work to cut out of products. Some demand copies. A quick and easy idea for “copies” is to use a digital camera to take pictures of the various items. This also is a quick record you can go back and check should you have the inclination. It doesn’t say the copies have to be very good. Most households don’t have photocopiers any more, but almost all have digital cameras and printers, which is even easier than a scanner.

(I also have a small sheetfed scanner I use for my paperless home efforts, but it has problems with thermal paper receipts.)

We’ll never see this become easy because of course the rebate management companies want the redemption rate to stay low. I presume some of them even market to the vendors the low rates, otherwise we would not see the “free after rebate” concept that has become more common.

I filed claims for $290 in rebates this December. So far one $60 (paypal) and one $10 have come in, and the expedited paypal rebates have not. I don’t expect to see much before late February, however.

Outside of bulk processing or very good rebate deals, the non-redemption rate seems to make it better to always check if there is a non-rebated product at a good price. Figure out your own “discount rate” for how often you personally complete rebates and how often you actually receive money. I doubt many get 100%. Then factor in a value on your time — what do you get paid per hour, figuring 2000 to 2500 hours for salaried people? Expect to spend 10 to 30 minutes on a rebate form, including post office trips, bank trips etc. (This is much lower if you regularly go to these places, or have at-home mail pickup as I do.)

Of course, you may not even agree with the company’s original goal — to find a way to charge more to people who value time over money, and thus less to those who value money over time. It is interesting, however, to speculate on what other systems might be devised to reach this goal that are not so random and bureaucratic as the rebate system. For example, use of the web only became practical once you could presume the “money > time” crowd had web access — a system that allows discounts only for the rich is not going to be very effective. I am interested in alternative ideas.

One might be to offer the rebates to those who agree to take a web journey that exposes them to advertising. This both assures they value money over time but actually sells that attention. A web process, upon which you are paid by paypal at the end, could be highly reliable without the “lottery” factor. Vendors could even start including tokens in products with one-time-use numbers on them which people could type in rather than having to mail physical UPC codes. (However, the mailing of the UPC code, aside from adding work and cost to the process also is important for disallowing returns of products after rebates are filed. Stores would need to check that the token number was present, and not used, before doing a return.) Stores could also print a similar magic number on sales receipts.

The work associated in the logistics of rebates can’t be eliminated by the web, though. The goal, after all, is to make the process time consuming, so you can only shift work from one place to another. But it can be made less random, which would actually encourage more people to buy rebated products if they truly believe they will offer up their time and attention.

I’m not a gamer. I wrote video games 25 years ago but stopped when game creation became more about sizzle (graphics) than steak (strategy.) But the story of the release of the Playstation 3 is a fascinating one. Sony couldn’t make enough, so to get them, people camped out in front of stores, or in some cases camped out just to get a certificate saying they could buy one when they arrived. But word got out that people would pay a lot for them on eBay. The units cost about $600, depending on what model you got, but people were bidding thousands of dollars even in advance, for those who had received certificates from stores.

It was amusing to read the coverage of the launch at Sony’s own Sonystyle store in San Francisco. There the press got bored as they asked people in line why they were lining up to get a PS3. The answer most commonly seemed to be not a love of gaming, but to flip the box for a profit.

And flip they did. There were several tens of thousands of eBay auctions for PS3s, and prices were astounding. About 20,000 auctions closed. Another 25,000 are still running at this time. Some auctions concluded for ridiculous numbers like $110,000 for 4 of them, or a more “reasonable” $20,000 for 5. Single auctions reached as high as $25,000, though in many of these cases, it’s bad news for the seller because the high bidders are people with zero eBay reputation who obviously won’t complete the transaction. In other cases serious sellers will try to claim their bid was a typo. There are some auctions with serious multiple bidders that got to 3 and 4 thousand dollars, but by mid-day today they were all running about $2,000, and they started dropping very quickly. As I watched in a few minutes they fell from $1,500 to going below a thousand. Still plenty of profit for those willing to brave the lines.

It’s interesting to consider what the best strategy for a seller is. It’s hard to predict what form a frenzy like this will take, and when the best price will come. The problem is eBay has a minimum 1 day for the auction, so you must guess the peak 1 day in advance. Since many buyers were keen to see the auction listing showing that the person had the unit in hand, ready to ship, the possible strategy of listing the item before going to get it bore some risks. Some showed scans of their pre-purchase.

The most successful sellers were probably those who picked a clever “buy it now” price which was taken during the early frenzy by people who did not realize how much the price would drop. All the highest auctions (including those with fake buyers) were buy-it-now results. Of course, it’s mostly luck in guessing what the right price was. I presume the buy-it-now/best-offer feature (new on eBay) might have done well for some sellers.

However, those who got a bogus buyer are punished heavily. They can re-list, but must wait a day to sell by auction, and will have lost a bunch of money in that day. If they can find the buyer they might be able to sue. If they are smart, they would re-list with a near-market buy-it-now to catch the market while it’s hot.

Real losers are those who placed a reserve on their auctions, or a high starting bid price. In many cases their auctions will close with no succesful bidder, and they’ll sell for less later. Using a reserve or high starting bid makes no sense when you have such a high-demand item. Those paranoid about losing money should have at most started bidding at their purchase price. I can’t think of any reason for a reserve price auction in this case — or in most other cases, for that matter. Other than with experimental rare products, they are just annoying.

Particularly sad was one auction where the seller claimed to be a struggling single mom who had kids that lucked out and got spots in line, along with pictures of the kids holding the boxes. She set a too-high starting price, and will have to re-list.

Another bad strategy was to do a long multi-day listing.

It’s possible the rarity of these items will grow, as people discover they just can’t get one for their kids for Christmas, but I doubt it.

The other big question this raises is this: Could Sony have released the machine differently? Sony obviously left millions on the table here, about 30 to 40 million I would guess. That’s tolerable for Sony, and they might have decided to give it up for the publicity that surrounds a buying craze. But I have to wonder, would they not have been better served to conduct their own auctions, perhaps a giant dutch auction, for the units, with some allocated at list price by lottery or for those willing to wait in line so that it doesn’t seem so elitist. (As if any poor person is going to buy a PS3 and keep it if they can make a fast thousand in any event.)

Some retailers took advantage of demand by requiring customers to buy several games with the box, presumably Sony approved that. With no control from Sony all the retailers would be trying to capture all this money themselves, which they could easily have done — selling on eBay directly if need be.

I predict in the future we will see a hot Christmas item sold through something like a dutch auction, since being the first to do that would generate a lot of publicity. Dutch auctions are otherwise not nearly so exciting. When Google went public through one, the enemies of dutch auctions worked to make sure people thought it was boring, causing Google to leave quite a bit of money on the table, but far less than they would have left had they used traditional underwriters.

On a side note — if you shop on eBay, I recommend the mozilla/firefox/iceweasel plugin “Shortship” which fixes one of eBay’s most annoying bugs. It lets you see the total of price plus shipping, and sort by it, at least within one ebay display page.

When I’m having a problem with a company, I try sometimes to remind them of a principle of customer service I worked out when I was running ClariNet. Namely that when a company screws up, it should more than fix the problem, even to the point of losing money (for a while) on that customer. The reason, in brief, is that this does more than make the customer happy with the transaction. It signals in the strongest possible way that the screw-up is a rare event, which makes the customer come back for more.

I have outlined it in this page on Brad’s principle of customer service.

So over the last 2 weeks I attended 4 nicely catered parties, starting with a dinner for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference and ending with one for the SuperNova conference.

By the last party I made up a badge that said “1999 2.0” — that was after the shrimp came out. Though to be fair, it was still cash bar, so we aren’t quite there yet. Though they also gave everybody a $50 gift card at an online content store (where I couldn’t find anything I wanted to spend the $50 on…)

VC funding of speculative deals is certainly up, though of course the IPO market has yet to repeat the boom. People are watching Vonage, which spammed me with E-mail, a paper letter and a voice mail to tell me I could participate in their stock offering (except the fine print says I can’t as I am not a U.S. citizen.)

Web 2.0 certainly seems replete with companies getting funding with little sign of how to build a sustainable business.

There’s lots of buzz now about IE7 and the “search box” at the top of the window. Microsoft says if you download IE7 that box will use the search engine you used in IE6, which is normally MSN search. For anti-trust reasons they are not rushing to just force it to be MSN or live from the start.

Recent comments to me have made me think about just how valuable that box is, and whether in fact it’s as valuable as all of Windows Vista Home, for example. Rumours have circulated that Mozilla foundation got something close to 70 million dollars by making Google the default search in the Firefox search box. For about a 10% share of the browser market.

Microsoft may have views on what default to set, but the real parties that will set the default for a lot of users are the OEMs (like Dell and HP) that ship with Windows Vista, and the big ISPs (Cable, DSL) who love to push a customized browser on their users. Both these groups have done basic customizations like setting the home page and throwing in some bookmarks. But nothing has every been so valuable as the search box.

It was suggested to me that the OEMs might open the default on the search box to bidding. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the rest would bid on who could offer the vendor a better deal — either as a percentage of revenues or a flat fee. Indeed, the type of customer (rich, poor, corporate, personal) might dictate the deal.

At some point, if it hasn’t already happened, the value of the search box could exceed the OEM’s cost for Windows Vista Home (street buzz suggests this is around $40 for high volume OEMs.) In other words, at some point, Microsoft would be effectively offering Windows Vista Home to the OEM for free, or even paying the OEM to take Windows if Microsoft search is the default search box. (Or even locked in. While MS dare not lock it in for anti-trust reasons, an OEM could do this.)

All of this depends on the dynamic of the negotiation between Microsoft and the PC vendors. Since I doubt MS wants to be in the position of paying vendors to take Windows — effectively putting them in the search business where they are #3 instead of the OS business — they will use whatever tools they have to fight this.

It doesn’t matter a lot that many users would switch from the default, or download a new browser (even IE7 directly from MS) if they don’t like the choice. The value of the default is powerful enough, unless it truly sucks.

This line of thinking goes further. Our PCs are becoming a conduit for much of our commercial activity. Google makes about $2B/quarter from ads, without forcing much on you at all, which has been part of their genius. In the past, people like NetZero failed to even pay for dial-up ISP service from ads. But there’s still much more to exploit. As Moore’s law drives down the price of the computer, and the effectiveness of Google and other companies at monetizing the web experience moves up, at some point the lines cross and it becomes worthwhile to subsidize, and then give away the entire PC, at least to certan prospects. Decent Linux PCs with no monitor are $160 at Fry’s. Are we that far away from this happening?

Attending a convention in the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) I found one thing very surprising. The show organizer had to install wireless APs all around the building on poles, with long wires leading to power and ethernet. How can a new convention center not already be set up for wireless? I will admit, in some ways it is correct to anticipate that the radios that would do the work will be quickly obsolete, and thus should not be so permanently installed, but it seems crazy to me that a new CC would not have been built with spaces in the ceilings or upper walls ready for some sort of wireless network.

The meeting room halls also don’t have tons of power jacks in the floors. Today, at modern conventions, everybody brings laptops and they want to plug them in. Better conventions in older halls run extension cords and power strips, and there are a few of those here, but why should a new convention center not be ready to go?

As some will know, I got heavily into the Hugo awards 13 years ago during my efforts at becoming an eBook publisher in the SF field. The Hugo award is voted on by the fans who attend the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, a moderately small voting pool (under 1000 of the typical 4000 to 7000 attendees will vote.)

The most important award and 2nd most voted on is the one for best Novel. The least important, but most voted on award is the one for best movie.

But still, for a long time, though both SF and Fantasy qualified for the award, the best Novel went exclusively to Science Fiction (with one dab into alternate history by Phillip K. Dick) and usually to hard, ideas-based SF. This went on until 2000 when the superb hard-SF novel “A Deepness in the Sky” won. The drama award was also heavily into SF, though it had some deviations, such as the coverage of Apollo XI and a few films in the 80s.

But in 2001, for the first time, a Fantasy novel won the best novel Hugo. Not just any fantasy novel, but a children’s novel, Harry Potter 4. Of course, the Harry Potter series is the most remarkable success not just in fantasy, but in publishing, so this is not too shocking. What’s surprising is that in 2002, 2004 and 2005 a fantasy novel would win best novel. At the same time, fantasies won all the best movie awards and all of the new best TV episode award until 2005. (Read on…)  read more »

Recently, Joel on Software wrote an essay on good programmers and how they are qualitatively different from average ones. This is not a new realization, and he knows it and references sources like "The Mythical Man Month." It was accepted wisdom decades ago that a small team of really brilliant programmers would make a better product than a giant team of lesser ones.

That wisdom, however, failed to predict the rise of Microsoft. That wisdom says a software monopoly is impossible because there are reverse economies of scale in software development. So how did Microsoft do it. The answer to that is perhaps the true genius of Bill Gates.

The trick, in part, was finding ways to make software tremendously broad in scope and features. Microsoft Word has bazillions of features, as most people know. Windows in its kernel isn't much more complex than other systems but the real Windows also includes a vast collection of DLLs (libraries) that seem external but are really part of the OS. To clone the OS you must make these DLLs -- and many other things.

A program like MS Word, with so many features, takes raw money to clone. You need that core team of great programmers -- and Microsoft has many great programmers, make no mistake -- but you also need a giant team of lesser ones to keep all the features going, to QA and document them, to translate them and make them work in so many environments.

This does have an economy of scale in the development. Combine that with the immense economies of scale that exist in the distribution of all soft things that can be copied for free, and this permitted a monopoly.

Of course, no single user makes use of all the features of MS Word, so it took even more skill to get them to demand such a complex program, when they might be better served by a leaner, more elegant system. Like I said, this is only part of it.

Recently there was a big fuss (including denouncements from many I know) over a U.S. effort to do away with the leap second. People claimed this was like trying to legislate PI to be 3.I am amazed at the leap the the defense of the leap second. I would be glad to see it go. All our computers keep track of time internally as a number of seconds since some epoch, typically Jan 1 1970 or 1980. They go through various contortions to turn that absolute time into the local time. This includes knowing all the leap-day calculations and the leap day calculations. It’s complicated by knowing that sometimes the day is Feb 29, and by knowing that a very, very few minutes have 61 seconds in them (or if you prefer, that a very few hours have 3601 seconds and rare days have 86401 seconds.)

That’s a mess. A minute should always have 60 seconds. Special casing all time code to deal with this was the wrong approach, and as noted, is subject to errors because the code is very rarely tested in that state.

I’m astounded to see people saying this is the same as declaring pi to be 3. It’s having 86400 seconds in most days and rare leap seconds that is the integerization of a real number. The truly scientific approach would be to declare the day to be 86400.002 seconds, and lengthen that number over the centuries, would it not?

Astronomers, like computers, can and should keep track of time as an absolute number of seconds since some epoch. They actually care very little about what the local time is other than to know when it’s dark, something leap seconds have insignificant bearing on. Indeed, astronomers might be happiest using siderial time (where a day is 23 hours 56 minutes and +4.1 seconds, the true rotational period of the Earth.)

Our system of time is not one scientists would pick in the first place. It is clearly designed for the convenience of the ordinary people, and the legacy of the traditional means of telling time. It’s silly to use this legacy system and at the same demand the general public and its timekeeping systems jump through error-prone hoops to make it reflect noon correctly to the second. Nobody even uses local time anyway, they all use a time zone. The time zone is off by a huge margin from local time, why does it matter in the slightest if it’s off by a few more seconds?

In many centuries, the drift will be noticeable. If we still care about local time, we can fix it then.

I blogged earlier about my being in the Silicon Valley 100, a group generated by a marketing company to send out free stuff to hopefully influential folks. In that posting, I link to Dan Gillmor’s reaction to the program, where he writes about how “spooky” it is to him. I didn’t agree that it was that spooky, but there is a definite irony to the fact that I recently got a set of books via the SV100, and in that set was Dan’s own book “We the Media.”

Dan’s eyes rolled up when I told him that at dinner this evening. Of course, it was his publisher Tim O’Reilly who put the book out to the group, and again I don’t find much spooky about it. Publishers have sent out free copies of books to folks, hoping for reviews and buzz, since the dawn of books.

I was with Dan at the first event in our program celebrating the EFF’s 15th birthday, a BayFF panel on blogging and blogger’s rights which attracted an overflow crowd with an engaged audience. I’ll remember to announce some of the other events in our program in advance. We sang Happy Birthday based on the older lyrics which are out of copyright.

Sunday, I was invited, along with a crowd of other local friends and bloggers, to a preview screening of the new art film “Yes” by Sally Potter. I’ll review Yes, but what was interesting was the idea of Sony Pictures doing free screenings of movies for the “blogger” demographic. As I noted earlier, I’m also in this group called the “Silicon Valley 100” where they send us free stuff in the hopes we’ll generate buzz and useful feedback. (The last few products they sent have not been exciting enough to inspire me to write about them, though.)

It makes some sense. Advance screenings to create buzz have been around for a while, and now that you can have an audience of writers whose influence goes beyond their circle of friends, they are a good target to place. Though I also went in part because it was a social event, seeing a movie with a group of folks including friends. It was arranged by Mark Pincus, who loved the movie when he saw it at Telluride and suggested the screening to Sony. Equally important was going out to a bar after the movie.

As for “Yes”, I did find it quite good. It was, however the most “arthouse” style movie I have seen in years, so I doubt it will get great commercial success. Yes is done in verse, a la Shakespeare, but with modern phrasing and perhaps a touch too much rhyme. Though the Bard never had a Scottish dishwasher apply metre as he repeated the word “motherfucker.” But it’s also a good story, with good performances and good music. It has Bergmanesque stylings, and includes a lot of “inner thoughts” voice overs, which normally turns me right off, but at least in a few places, the voice-overs work. Notably when a dying woman gets to tell her story through her thoughts even though she can’t speak them.

Of course, they have picked a terrible title for a movie if they want people to be able to find writing about it on the web. (Drupal doesn’t have explicit tagging yet, and Mark went so far as to push people to use the pre-chosen tag “yes movie” if they wrote about the film.) However, the title makes artistic sense for the film so I can’t fault it for that.

When I was a teenager, my father lived in a downtown appartment tower with a cinema in the basement. Due to his press credentials he had an unlimited free movie pass. Star Wars played there for over a year, and when we would visit him, if we were ever sitting around wondering what to do, somebody would suggest, "Why don't we go downstairs and see Star Wars?" Today everybody does this but then the VCR was just dawning, so this was something really cool.

So of course that movie held a special place in my heart, and it was indeed groundbreaking, particularly in effects, grand story and perhaps most of all, good editing. "The circle is now complete" as Lord Vader would say.

So I'll repeat what everybody else has said, Revenge of the Sith is far better than episodes 1 and 2 of the modern trilogy, better perhaps than the Ewok-burdened Return of the Jedi. It's an astounding triumph of visuals as well, with a much more moving and interesting story. Yes, the acting is sub par, the dialogue well sub par and the romantic scenes are non-credible, but the good parts more than make up for this.

At the same time I am left with a disappointment, because it could have been so much more. Lucas is cursed because the bar was so high. He built an empire on that first movie but only delivered some of what he could. I'll get into spoilers in the after-the-break part of this posting, and here I'll speak more generally.

The entire new trilogy is the story of the fall of Darth Vader. This movie contains its climax, as he changes from troubled Jedi to evil lord. Powerful as it is, it's still not credible. Lucas had 8 hours of film all leading up to that one moment, so there's no reason it had to be that way.

Tied in with the moral fall of Vader is the more literal fall of the Jedi. As we know, they are betrayed, but that story too could have been much richer.

In addition, the biggest thing missing from trilogy 2 is the humour. Yoda, the imp who stole Empire barely cracks a smile in all the other movies. Almost nobody does. And the movies suffer for it.

On to spoiler-based discussion  read more »

Update: A more active thread on how this relates to Goodmail and other attempts at sender-pays traffic

There is much talk these days of “who invented the internet?” Most of the talk is done wearing a network engineer’s hat, defining the internet in terms of routing IP datatgrams, and TCP. Some relates to the end to end principle. These are valid and vital contributions, and recognition for those who built them is important.

But that’s not what the public thinks of when it hears “the internet.” They think of the collection of cool applications they use to interact with other people and distant computers. Web sites and mailing lists and newsgroups and filesharing and VoIP and downloading and chat and much more. Why did these spring into being in this way rather than on other networks?

I believe a large and necessary ingredient for “the internet” wasn’t a technological invention at all, but a billing system. The internet is based on what I call the “internet cost contract.” That contract says that each person pays for their own pipe to the center, and we don’t account for the individual traffic.

“I pay for my half, you pay for yours.”

While the end-to-end design allowed innovation and experimentation, the billing design really made it possible. In the early days of the internet, people dreamed up all sorts of bizarre applications, some serious, some entirely frivolous. They put them out there and people played with them and the most interesting thrived.

Many other networks had users paying not by the pipe, but based on traffic. In that world, had you decided to host a mailing list, or famously put a webcam up in front of your company fishtank, the next day the company beancounter would have called you into the office to ask why the company got a big bandwidth bill in order to show off the fishtank. The webcam — or FTP site or mailing list — would have been shut down immediately, and for perfectly valid reasons.

Pay-based-on-usage demands that applications be financially justifiable to live. Pay-per-pipe allowed mailing lists, ftp sites, usenet, archie, gopher and the web to explode.  read more »

Creationists regularly complain that schools teach evolution improperly and should also offer creation science as an alternative. They went so far as to push one school board to put stickers on biology textbooks remindng students that evolution is a theory and should be critically viewed.

Well, surprisingly, I have some agreement with them. Evolution, like Quantum Mechanics, gravity and others is indeed a theory. And in proper science all theories are subject to intense scrutiny and testing. They are required to make predictions which can turn out false, and those predictions are tested with repeatable experimentation and observation.

So now I wonder, why if we give them their way — sort of — and mandate the teaching of “creation science” in the shools. Except I mean a rigourous, scientific treatment, by non-religious teachers, where a lesson about science and bad science is taught. Other examples of bad science should also be covered.

Students should be challenged to consider the predictions, past and present, of the creation “scientists” and whether they have come true. They should learn what happens when people conclude the results in advance and try to bend the facts to fit them. It happens in all areas of science, and a good education trains you to identify when it is happening, and when you are doing it yourself. They should of course also learn the predictions of evolution and many other theories and how they have been tested and verified. They should learn about theories that had supporters but then failed their tests and thus fell from favour.

Why creation science and not every other bogus fake science? Well, studies show it is probably the one most widely believed by the public, though psychic powers, alien abductions and others also rank highly. So as the #1 it deserves a place in our curriculum, because the critical examination of bad science deserves a place.

Indeed, for a student not actually going into science, it could well be that learning to understand bad science would be the most important thing they take out of the program. They will almost assuredly never need to calculate the velocity of a spherical monkey hanging from a massless rope over a frictionless pulley. But they will encounter bad science and have to deal with it.

(I think the same is true in math for non-professionals. One of the most important things they should learn is how statistics are misused.)

So give them what they want, and then see them beg to take it back.