The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

I just finished Michael Chabon's new book, "The Final Solution," a little tidbit of a detective story set in WWII Sussex. It's an entertaining enough read, but ultimately pretty unsatisfying. I think there were two reasons I didn't really like it.

One, it relies too heavily on the protagonists' reputation, which is simply stated in the text. There's not enough direct evidence or actual anecdote related to that, and instead there are too many omniscient-voice statements like, "...his sense -- a faculty at one time renowned throughout Europe -- of a promising anamoly." Reading all of these sentences made me want to read a different book about the Old Man when he was actually famous instead of this book about his retirement -- after all, wouldn't have wanted to watch a series about Columbo doddering about in the old age home.

Secondly, and probably more fatally for most current audiences, is the resolution of the central mystery regarding a series of numbers that a parrot repeats ad infinitum. [mild spoiler] The end of the book reveals that... we don't know what they are. The last utterance of the book by the young boy, combined with the book's title, gives a pretty clear hint as to their true significance. But for any mainstream audience, especially a non-Jewish one whose acquaintance with details of the Holocaust is weak, I think that hint, and thus some of the power of the book, will be lost. Yes, it's bad to talk down to your audience, but if you want to rely on a particular practice from the death camps for your resolution, you should introduce that bit of history to the narrative somewhere.

SketchUp acqusition makes more sense now

A few months ago, Google bought SketchUp (http://www.sketchup.com/), a cool but very quirky 3D modeling program. It wasn't obvious why this made any business sense, although it was great becase they started giving away SketchUp for free.

Now it makes more sense -- with the latest Google SketchUp and the latest Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/earth4.html), you can directly export from SketchUp into Google Earth. So, what they're hoping is that by providing a free end-ser content creation tool, they'll get lots of people to model various buildings in the world and contribute the results to Google Earth (the new Google Earth also supports Collada input, meaning you can use any of the mainline 3D modeling packages like Maya, Max, ro XSi as well).

If they're successful at creating a critical mass of data -- which seems likely, if you haven't played with Google Earth, it's really fun -- then they'll control the most complete dataset of 3D models of the planet. Yet another brick in the "organizing the world's information (and serving AdWords against it)" architecture!

District B13

My friends Bill and Dave went to see District B13 in Sausalito last night. It was the right demographic fit -- it's definitely a guy's movie. Action, action, action. Really fun movie with great stunts and action sequences. The French director (Pierre Morel) embraces modern editing style and makes it do for action movies what 28 Days Later did for horror films.

It was a double-plus bonus for Dave (a European film fan), he got a French flick and an action movie in one outing!

We went to Rustica in Sausalito for dinner afterwards, pretty good as well -- very friendly place.

Lincoln

I just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin's excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet, "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Perhaps later I will write about the insights from the book, but for now, I will do as the author did, and reprint these words in their entirety:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that, government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

- A. Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Cars

I was fortunate enough to get invited to a screening of the new Pixar film, Cars, yesterday. Since it's not out yet I won't talk about the film -- but I will say two things:

• One-Man Band, the short that plays in front of it, is beautiful just as Bill Polson promised!


• The trailer for Ratatouille is awesome! It was my favorite thing of the day.


• The outtakes at the end are the best ever. I know we got kind of tired of the idea when I was at Pixar, but now that I'm just a satisfied audience member :-) I can just sit back and think they're awesome!

E3

Another E3 survived! Because I had a fair number of meetings this year, I actually went to the show three days in a row, something I haven't done for a long time.

Check out my writeup.

Koreatown

While I was down at the E3 conference last week, my friend Onny met up with us and took us to hang in K-town, the large korean section of LA.

For dinner, we went to this awesome yakitori-style place. It's dark and (in the inner room) smoky, there is no sign in english on the outside, and there is no menu in English on the inside (we had to rely on lots of negotiation with the waitress). They have a whole variety of small foods, grilled meat on skewers, donburi-like food, noodles and stews, and lots of other little greasy treats (not a health food restaurant). We ordered blindly (including asking for one of what they had at the next table, which turned out to be chicken gizzards over a vegetable bed) and had a fine meal washed down with an "O.B." (korean beer, it stands for "Oriental Brewery" which is kind of funny in its own right).

I can't tell you the name, but it's in the mini-mall at the corner of 6th and Berendo and the outside (like the inside) is decorated with vintage asian movie posters.

Afterwards, we hung at the H.M.S. Bounty, a bizarre neighborhoody bar a few blocks away on Wilshire. It's in the ground floor of a residence hotel, and a fair number of the patrons look like they live there in more sense than one. Very friendly -- Onny was regular enough to know the bartender -- except for using the restroom. You go next door into the other property to use the restroom, and you've stepped into a set for Max Payne. The old russian desk clerk glared up and me and said, "the bathrooms are downstairs". Downstairs means a echo-y trip through harsh flourescent lighting, marble hallways, and numerous umarked wooden doors. Cool place, we called Dickson and Ken to come join us!

True Sake

So, after getting shit from my friends at E3 because I live within six blocks of the place and haven't been there yet, I finally got to True Sake (www.truesake.com) tonight. True Sake is a premium Sake (Japanese rice wine) store in Hayes Valley in San Francisco, and supposedley has the best selection of sake in North America.

I can't vouch for that, but they certainly have a lot of great-sounding sakes. I got a bottle of the Otokoyama (man-mountain) because the manager suggested it was similar to Namahage, a sake I've had at restaurants and liked; and a bottle of another recommended dry sake, Hakkaisan (Mt. Eight Seas, I think? I'm a little iffy on the middle kanji). We'll try one of them at Gilles' tomorrow and we'll see what the reviews are!

Firefly -- so fantastic, so depressing

I just finished watching the DVDs of Joss Whedon's "Firefly," easily the best science fiction I've seen since I saw the original Star Trek as a child. This show is just awesome, with a great ensemble cast, razor-sharp writing, and lots of humor placed intrinsically within the character interactions.

So, of course, I now have post-cancellation depression. Our culture must be truly doomed when something this high-quality can't even make a second season. And it's not like it was from some unknown new artist, either -- Mr. Whedon has made Fox plenty of money in the past. Is it stupid network executives? Is it a lack of patience?

Three season's worth of Firefly episodes would have created the next great science fiction franchise after Star Trek and Star Wars -- all the ingredients were there, we just needed enough episodes to make syndication viable. Instead, we have only one gem of a season and one pretty good movie (Serenity). Well, I'm certainly thankful for that!

Awesome Rube Goldberg creations

From bumpers for a Japanese TV show called pitagora suiichi

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6176491654107670145

Couloir Article on Vallée Blanche

Couloir magazine is a magazine for serious backcountry skiers/snowboarding/showshoers/etc. So when I saw their Winter 2006 issue had an article on skiing i Chamonix, I was psyched. We went to Chamonix in 2002, and I figured that Couloir's reporters would have some awesome hardcore of places we missed.

Instead, it turns out, the article had the benefit of making us feel like total studs!

My friends and I skied with Vincent Lameyre (their guide). He auditioned us on two lesser ski areas to evaulate our skills and stamina - routine for guides. ... Of the 15 of us who hoped to ski the Vallée Blanche, Vincent was taking eight.

Sweet! When we went, we were six people and all six of us skied the Vallée Blanche multiple days.

Groups with cross-border ambitions do the first part of the Vallée Blanche ... and then angle to the south to skin up the Col de Toule, as small pass right on the French-Italian border. ... We had neither the legs nor lungs for this detour.

Heh. On the last day we were in Chamonix, Oren, Justine and I took this route (see Snowboarding to Italy on the website).

Wow, I guess the next time we go we'll have to write an article of our own!

Dream or Nightmare? You decide

So last night, I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I went back to work at Pixar. The movie we were working on a was a new Star Wars movie. The Empire is trying to build a big weapon, which was a giant cigar shape that sits underneath a Star Destroyer (I guess they hadn't come up with the Death Star thing yet). At the end of the movie, the star, Bruce Willis, hotwires the device so that when the Empire fires it, it blows up.

The Pay-to-send Email World [was: RE: nytimes: goodmail]

I've thought through schemes like this any number of times (it's not a new idea, contrary to what Dyson implies in her article), and many of the things I value about the internet become unworkable if most internet email shifts to a pay-to-send basis. Unfortunately, you actually have to think about it to realize that.

Running a mailling list like friends@ourshareddomain.com [note to blog readers -- this discussion thread was moved over from a thread on a mailing list I'm on] is one of the things that will go away in a pay-to-send internet -- current membership totals about 30, so sending a message to ourshareddomain.com means somebody has to fork over $0.30. Well, who's gonna be the person to fork out that $0.30? We have no way to make you pay at the moment you hit send. This discussion thread is just about to cross over the $1 point. Would you pay $1 to be part of every email thread on the hiking alias?

Advocates of pay-to-send schemes claim, "Oh, no, you can still send free email, it's simply that free email won't have the little icon next to it." Yet, Goodmail and other pay-to-send scheme advocates claim they're going to resolve the spam problem. Well, they only are solving the spam problem to the extent that covered recipients ignore all email without the little icon. So, they're lying about their side effects: for them to achieve the benefit they promise (fixing the spam problem), free email must be ignored. So much for friends@ourshareddomain.

Don't think that will happen? One of the geniuses of this idea as Goodmail is advocating it is that they're going to share their revenue with AOL. Once that happens, your ISP will have a vested financial interest in making it harder and harder for you to read free email (after all, they'll be "solving the SPAM problem" for you). Their motivation will be to start quarantining (i.e., not sending to your mail client by default) free email.

The scotchnight problem recurs over and over when you look at a pay-to-send internet: evite; topical mailing lists e.g. sourceforge.net; alumni networks at your college; the mailing list for a condo homeowner's association; the expixar mailing list; the neighborhood association mailing list; etc., etc. What happens in that form of the internet is that all players in the internet will be highly disincented to relay email in any form whatsoever.

A second problem has to do with open standards. Goodmail -- and all of its' proprietary competitors -- have strong motivation to make their network closed, requiring their own software in order for you to share in their revenues, because it represents real money. That is, they are motivated to make it so that non-free email cannot be relayed except by their own software. If Dyson is right and their are multiple competitors, the nightmare will unfold: to be a viable ISP, you need to have five or six different proprietary email relays installed, and somehow sort out which mail should be processed by which relay, and have revenue-sharing agreements in place with those five or six companies. That speaks to what the pay-to-send proposal in this form is really about: providing a new revenue stream for large ISPs.

The pay-to-send schemes allows ISPs to collect money for sending spam, rather than no one being paid for it. The large ISPs are willing to see this experiment run because if it's successful, they and the new companies will share in taxing the senders of Spam.

Dyson asserts without proof that "I also think it [Goodmail] and its competitors will eventually transform into services that more directly serve the interests of mail recipients." Of course, she has to state that without proof because there is no evidence any such thing will ever happen. She's asserting the equivalent of, "Give some more money to the beleaguered phone company, and they'll probably decide to share some with you." Both by logical deduction and historical precedent, she's wrong: they will keep that money and be thankful they're being paid for the spam they deliver.

Lastly, Dyson makes the counter-economic assumption that because the ISPs are making money, they'll be more vigilant in guarding against Spam. Unfortunately, the pay-to-send scheme that we have long experience with -- the Post Office -- demonstrates nicely why this is false. In every country, the post office is highly motivated to promote the sending of junk mail, because it is their primary source of revenue. The fact that it costs $0.20 or so to send me a piece of junk mail has clearly not stopped a deluge of companies from deciding to assault my mailbox. The post office makes sure there's no effective way to screen it, because effective screening of junk mail would put them out of business (you can register for "no junk mail" at the post office: all that does is stop mail that isn't specifically addressed to you. So by the Post Office's definition, the AOL disks I periodically receive are not, repeat not, junk mail).

Some people might still prefer the pay-to-send internet, because one thing you can't deny is that the Nigerian and Chinese spammers will largely be gone. Like postal mail, your overall volume of email will be lower than the current internet. Like postal mail, most of email will still be junk, but like postal mail, the delivery service will have been paid to bring you the junk. And like postal mail, you won't trivially send emails to 30 friends, you'll have to find some cheaper, easier way to get a hold of them, like email used to be.

Leo


On Mar 18, 2006, at 9:35 AM, david fix wrote:

I don't know about the merits of her position but this argument strikes me as sophistry.

"What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That's wrong."



From: Bill Polson
Reply-To: ...
To: ...
Subject: nytimes: goodmail
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:33:43 -0800

This seems reasonable to me, but on a recent hike I advocated something like this and got an earful from a fellow hiker. No names, but he hikes too fast and knows way too much about cooking and obscure technologies.

-Bill

----

March 17, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor

You've Got Goodmail
By ESTHER DYSON


A COMPANY called Goodmail Systems thinks it has come up with a potential (and partial) solution to the problem of spam and fraud on the Internet. According to Goodmail, market forces are the answer, rather than the kinds of ineffective regulations that have so far failed to solve the problems.

What Goodmail is proposing is a sort of FedEx for e-mail. For a penny or less per message, the sender gets guaranteed delivery for mail and the promise that it will stand out in the user's mailbox. The recipient pays nothing. (Goodmail, of which I am not an investor, has tested its system with the participation of a few companies, including this newspaper.)

Internet service providers like America Online, which receive and process mail in bulk, can share in Goodmail's revenue if they want, as long as they promise to pass the mail to their customers without filtering it for spam. The payment encourages AOL to adopt the service and to display a "certified e-mail" icon to users on each "stamped" message, indicating that the message is wanted and safe.

Goodmail's customers have to prove that recipients want their mail, and Goodmail checks the sender's mailing behavior and manages the quality of the mail through a system that makes it easy for recipients to complain about unwanted messages. Too many complaints and the senders lose their accounts.

This all sounds perfectly sensible to me, but Goodmail has been met with a barrage of criticism and calls for a de facto boycott from several nonprofit and public interest groups. These organizations seem to think that all Internet mail must always be free, just because it was free before. Yet they pay for computers and Internet access and office supplies, just like everyone else.

Goodmail, in my eyes, does not raise moral issues. It simply wants to make the Internet a better place — and yes, make a little money along the way.

Of course, the critics say, this is the first step. Pretty soon all mail will cost money, and then the free, open world of the Internet will be closed to poor people, nonprofits and other good guys, while multinational conglomerates fill their ever-growing pockets.

I agree that pretty soon sending most e-mail will cost money, but I think that's only right. It costs money to guarantee quality and safety. Moreover, I think the market will work, and that it will not shut out deserving senders, if we only let it work freely.

In fact, I hope Goodmail succeeds, and that it has lots of competition. I also think it and its competitors will eventually transform into services that more directly serve the interests of mail recipients. Instead of the fees going to Goodmail and AOL, they will also be shared with the individual recipients.

There's no question that we need to try some new approaches to e-mail. The current situation — where the Internet is ridden with spam, most mail is unwanted and some is objectively dangerous — illustrates a market failure. When the Internet began, it was a small community, one that needed neither markets nor regulations. The people on the Web mostly behaved well, and things worked.

But the Internet has become mainstream, which means we have abuse and crime and freeloaders. We need a way to deal with the abuse. Spam filters are imperfect, partly because the senders of "bad" mail are getting better and better at defeating them. And those who take advantage of the Internet aren't paying for the costs of their abuse.

Instead, the recipients' Internet service providers are paying the cost of spam filtering, and recipients are paying when legitimate messages get caught in those spam filters.

Senders should bear the costs of sending mail, and it should be the senders' duty to figure out whether each piece of mail is wanted. Ultimately, I believe, Goodmail or its successors will develop a mechanism to rebate some of the fees to the senders whose mail is wanted. That's why I don't worry about individuals and nonprofits being squeezed out.

In the short run, AOL and others will serve as the recipients' proxies. If they don't do a good job of ensuring that customers get the mail they want, even from nonpaying senders, they will lose their customers. And in the long run, recipients will be able to use services like Goodmail to set their own prices for receiving mail.

In my case, I'd have a list. I'd charge nothing for people I know, 50 cents for anyone new (though if I add the sender to my list after reading the mail, I'll cancel the 50 cents) and $3 for random advertisers. Ex-boyfriends pay $10.

What shocks me most about the opposition to Goodmail is that people who claim to believe in the free and open Internet, with its welcome attitude to innovation, want to shut down an idea. That's wrong.

If people like those little stamps that mark their mail as safe and wanted or as commercial transactions, then let the customers have them. And let other companies compete with Goodmail to offer better and less expensive service.

Goodmail isn't good because it's new, but neither is it bad because it's new. If it's a good model, it will succeed and improve over time. If it's a bad model, it will fail. Why not let the customers decide?

Esther Dyson, an investor in technology start-ups, is the editor of Release 1.0.

QotD: [GameDev] Design Docs

"At the onset of development, completed design docs are not always very useful to us, as we're not yet sure what will be fun."

-- from the Post-Mortem of Harmonix's "Guitar Hero", the best game of 2005 IMHO, published in Game Developer magazine

Snow on Mt. Tam

Last month we went hiking up Mt. Tam into the snow. Dan Lyke has some photos here, it was amazing.