Terminally Incoherent

The old hacker motto used to be “information wants to be free”. This was the driving philosophy of the 80’s and the 90’s when the Internet was going through it’s awkward onset of puberty, and turbulent teenage years. We currently live at a peculiar junction in history where information is truly free. And it’s all thanks to advances in communication technology, ubiquitous broadband access and ever growing transfer speeds. Information is no longer scarce - it is a commodity much like water, or electricity. It’s obviously not worthless, but it’s relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things and it’s plentiful. For a modest monthly fee you have unlimited access to all the water and electricity you want.

In the very same way for a flat monthly fee you get unlimited access to the Internet which contains most of the information you will ever need. Every song, every movie, every book or piece of software ever made is out there for the taking. All you need is a torrent client and a little patience. Sure it’s not entirely legal but the odds of getting caught are incredibly small - not much bigger than the odds of winning the lottery. And there is just nothing that can be done about it right now. Neither the lawsuits and aggressive take downs of p2p networks nor the copy protection and ever more restrictive DRM have put any dent in the overall p2p traffic. Anything that is in digital format can be copied - no exceptions. Anything that can be copied will end up on the internet. Anything that is not in digital format, but can be digitized, will also end up on the internet. For free. And unless we completely change the fundamental rules of electronic communication this trend will only escalate.

Naturally the cost to produce these digital goods (movies, songs and software) is nonzero. It is actually quite expensive make them - both in terms of investment capital, and labor. But thanks to internet, their effective market price approaches zero. You either sell yourself cheep, and loose money or sell high, and put up really tough competition from p2p. This competitor is different though - he cannot be thwarted, legislated away, sued into oblivion or absorbed via hostile takeover. You are competing with the basic human nature. There is nothing - and I repeat, NOTHING that can be done against this. Unless of course you can figure out a way to turn back the clocks, and cripple the internet to where it reverts to it’s slow and non-threatening form you remember from the 80’s. For better of for worse, you are stuck with broadband internet as the most efficient distribution system, and the fiercest competitor you will ever encounter.

How do you compete with free? Obviously you can’t cut the price, unless of course you are willing to pay your customers to use your product. The only thing you can really do is to add value to your product. Believe it or not, but people are always willing to pay for a superior quality. Think about this next time you are shopping for a new cell phone. You provider probably offers a fully functional free phone with the service, but a lot of people opt for the sleek looking $200-$300 alternative which has extra features, bells and whistles. You have to do the same - you have to add bells and whistles to your product - and once you do, people will eagerly hand over their money to you, even if a free version is available.

The only problem here is that you can’t add value to information by combining it with more information. Adding bonus tracks, or blooper reel to your album or dvd doesn’t do anything because these things will end up on the internet as well. You need to add something that cannot be easily digitized and sent over a wire.

Kevin Kelly in his excellent article Better than Free identifies 8 value adding features you can use to make your digital product more desirable to customers. I highly recommend reading his piece in it’s entirety but if you are to lazy here are the 8 things he proposes:

1. Immediacy - ie. the ability to ship the product to the customer before 0-day crack comes out
2. Personalization - tailoring your product to customers specific needs
3. Interpretation - lifetime support, warranty, 24 hour helpline, etc..
4. Authenticity - genuine article is bound to have highest bit rate, sharpest picture and no embedded trojans
5. Accessibility - pay once, download from anywhere and in any format
6. Embodiment - no mp3 can beat a live concert, and no ebook is as nice as a beautifully bound hard cover edition
7. Patronage - fans usually buy original cd because they want to support their favorite musician - not because they can’t find the mp3’s of the songs it contains
8. Findability - iTunes are more user friendly than bittorrent - even with the DRM - you can capitalize on that sort of thing

So there you have it. Kevin goes into much more detail there, but I don’t want to steal his thunder. Read the article and see if you agree. All you need to do to make money on the seemingly free data, is to implement one or two things from this list above. And most digital content producers are already halfway there. They are just to set in their old ways to develop their strengths and capitalize on them. They still think it terms of distribution and scarcity. But this is a dead end.

Internet is the most efficient distribution channel you can imagine. You can’t get your data faster to your customer than over a high bandwidth fios connection. And if you try to use a slower channel or introduce artificial scarcity, into the equation to drive the price up the consumers will simply pick the free (illegal) alternative. If you concentrate on adding value in one of the 8 ways listed above however you can easily rise prices without scaring away or alienating the customer.

The funny thing however is that information is not the only thing that is becoming a free ubiquitous commodity. Even the physical products that were once scarce are heading that was as the technology improves and the prices fall due to normal market mechanics. Just go and read Kevin’s Technology Wants to be Free essay. I don’t think I can explain this concept any better than he does. But he is right - and his vision of future is certainly bright for us as consumers.

Installation wizards have their place. For example, when you are installing and configuring an operating system a wizard is your best friend. The design of the wizard is paramount as it is often the very first thing your user sees. First impressions are crucial, and if your install procedure sucks, then it puts your whole application in a bad light. That said, sometimes wizards - no matter how pretty, and helpful are just unnecessary overhead.

For example, let’s compare the way a Windows user and an Ubuntu user perform a typical installation. The windows user will start by downloading the package form the internet or popping in the CD into the drive. From there he will have to typically go through following steps:

1. Look at some generic “This installer will guide you through the process…” screen
2. Agree to an EULA
3. Pick program components to be installed
4. Confirm he wants to install the application in C:\Program Files\The Application
5. Decide if he wants shortcuts to be added to Start Menu and Quick Launch
6. Review the summary of chosen settings
7. Stare at the progress bar
8. Confirm that he wants to run the application and/or read the README file
9. Start using the application

Note that I omitted the common steps of entering the product key and online activation to keep things fair. Let’s assume the windows user was installing a multi-platform open source application - something like Firefox or something similarly popular and ubiquitous. To install the same application a typical Ubuntu user would just open Synaptic and find it on the package list (equivalent of finding and downloading the package from the web) and then:

1. Click on the Install button
2. Stare at the progress bar/scrolling text
3. Run and start using the application

What is the difference here? I mean other than one system uses a repository and other downloadable packages - that bit is actually inessential here. The major difference is that in Ubuntu the application is silently installed in the background without asking the user any stupid questions. And believe it or not, this is much more user friendly way of handling installation than a pretty looking wizard.

The average user wants the default components to be installed in the default directory with the default set of options and shortcuts. Think back on recent windows applications which you have installed - how often do you change the default installer options to something else? I typically just leave the default settings unless the app ships with annoying add-ons like toolbars or other adware and let’s you opt out of them by un-checking a box or two in the installer. Other than that, I typically just click next.

Tons of applications these days provide a silent install option that can be invoked by passing a special command line parameter to the installer binary (typically something like /S, /Q or –silent). This performs the whole installation in the background choosing all the default settings in a way simillar to that used by apt and Synaptic on Ubuntu. But the default installer makes us jump through multiple hoops instead. Why is that? Why can’t the silent install be the default option and the detailed wizard be invoked by some command line switch?

Usually people who would want to take advantage of the customization options in the installer are power users who could easily figure out how to trigger this hidden mode. The rest of us would simply hit a button, wait few seconds and then simply enjoy the application.

It seems that folks in Linux and Apple camps always knew this. Ubuntu for example only uses wizards for configuring complex pieces of software - like the OS itself. In the windows world however, the installation wizard is the king for apps big and small. It is sometimes quite ridiculous - for example, it is not uncommon to see a 2-3 MB application composed of a single executable requiring 6 or 7 step installation process. I know because I created such installers myself. Most of us are so used to them we hardly even notice them, but if you sit a complete novice in front of the computer and tell him/her to install some software every extra step they have to take is another occasion for doubt and panic.

And no - I’m not making this up. I’ve been actually asked by coworkers to stand there and watch them install this or that application. They would click the installer, hit the first question and look back at me. I would nod and they would proceed to the next one. Most of them would then apologize for taking my time and explain they were simply afraid they would mess something up if they answered one of the questions wrong. They just didn’t realize all they had to do was to click next repeatedly.

Adobe already figured this out. When you go to install their PDF Reader app these days all you need to do is to clikc on the Install button on their page. Then an ActiveX or XUL window pops up and displays a progress bar. There are no questions asked, no configuration options to be chosen. The reader is just installed and then the progress bar disappears letting the user know his application is ready for use. It’s clear to me that these guys got it. They did the usability research and they noticed that most people just click next all the time. And if overwhelming majority picks the default settings, then why even ask? Just install the app with most common configuration and provide mechanism for power users to circumvent it.

Comment notifications are not working. Or rather they are working but with like a 48 hour delay. So if there was a comment posted today, you may get it Wednesday or something like that. And there is nothing I can do about it. Or rather nothing short term - long term solution is to switch hosts naturally. Dreamhost doesn’t seem to be able to figure out how to run a fucking SMTP server.

They had the same exact problem like a month or two ago, and apparently they haven’t really fixed it cause it is back only worse this time. I swear, I can’t win with these guys. Do not host with them - seriously!

In the meantime I recommend using a service like Co.mments.com to keep track of the discussion threads on your favorite dreamhost hosted blogs. I routinely use it for blogs that do not offer email notifications at all. You don’t get notifications instantly the way it is with email, but it’s better than nothing.

I noticed a disturbing trend recently among many users. This includes my coworkers, students and family. See if you noticed it too. I can for example tell someone to go to some website - let’s say I want to point someone to this very blog. I would simply tell them to go to terminally-incoherent.com. This is the process these users go through to get to my site:

1. Open IE which by default opens up the MSN website with all the flashing flash animations
2. They click in the address bar and type in http://www.google.com (yes, they actually type in http and www parts)
3. Then they click in the Google search box despite the fact that Google uses Javascript to make it the active box on the page
4. They type in http://www.terminally-incoherent.com in the search box
5. They click the search button with their mouse
6. Finally they inspect the search results and click on the link to my page

I swear - this happens so often that I no longer get surprised to see it. I can understand the excessive clicks and the silly insistence on typing http and www in front of every address. What I really do not get is why people insist on using Google as the intermediate step when trying to navigate to some address?

In fact we had a guy call up our help desk recently because he could not access one of the company’s new websites. I think he spent half an hour on the phone doing various troubleshooting steps before someone realized that he was actually using the process outlined above. Naturally the website, being an internal service used only by the employees is not and does not need to be indexed by Google. When he was instructed to type in the URL he was very confused and it took him 3 or 4 follow up questions to actually locate this “mysterious address bar”.

The things users do these days baffle me sometimes. I really do not understand their logic. It’s almost as if there was this huge gap between us and the lusers. And instead of closing up, this gap seems to be widening as new generations grow up with technology learning to use it without ever even trying to understand it.

It’s funny, back in the day used to wonder how the future will look. It seemed really bright and positive back then. We figured that kids will be growing up with technology, and using computers on every day basis. We figured that they will play and tinker just the way we did, and every generation will be more computer literate. We were wrong.

The level of computer literacy did not increase. The kids learn to use computers very early, but they do not learn how to understand them. The myspace generation has no fucking clue about technology - all they know is how to awkwardly browse the web and IM eachother all day. Nothing else.

It almost seems like some of us are predisposed for this stuff. We are naturally drawn towards technology and we love figuring out how things work, and how to do things better and faster using the available tools. Others are destined to remain clueless forever despite the fact they have every single opportunity to learn and experiment. Having easy access to technology does not always imply any level of familiarity with it.

I finally got to see Cloverfield few days ago, but I never got around to writing up a review. I have to preface this review by saying that I went to see this movie clean. I did not really pay attention to the viral marketing stuff that was going online. All I saw was the official trailer which was awesome. Based on the trailer I had huge expectations but few people who saw the film on the premiere day told me it totally didn’t live up to the hype, or even the trailer. Few days later I talked to someone who liked it but admitted it was not really as awesome as it was made to be. So I went in expecting to be entertained but not blown away.

This is essentially what happened. Cloverfield is a new take on one of the oldest themes in movie history - the giant monster attack. In most of the productions of this type, starting with Godzilla and ending with… um… The American remake of Godzilla we follow a group of characters who are always privy to the information about the monster, and are in position of stopping it or luring it away. Sometimes these are misunderstood scientists, other times they are heads of state, military leaders and etc. No one before told this type of story entirely from the perspective of the little people on the streets of attacked town who are desperately trying to avoid getting stomped on.

Cloverfield fills this niche, and uses the big creature from the depths of the sea (or wherever it came from) as a backdrop for the human drama taking place on the ground. In fact, the point of view we see is even more restricted. The movie is filmed with a Blair Witch shaky cam to look like an amateur recording of the monster attack found in the ruins of Central Park at some undetermined point in the future. The characters are a group of young people caught in the thick of things, trying to escape the city and avoid being killed by the monster, or by accidental friendly fire of the military forces sent to fight it. We never get an explanation for the monsters arrival or it’s origin story. It’s just a nameless force of nature that is just there.

It’s actually a great concept! To bad the execution was a bit sub-par. First, the monster was only interesting when they didn’t show him. The sound effects, explosion and tension building devices were all executed perfectly. Unfortunately the cgi done on the monster itself was less than spectacular. I think the golden rule “less is more” would apply here. There are several scenes in the movie in which we get a very good look on the beast and it is neither scary, nor distinctive. There are memorable creatures in the movie history but the Cloverfield thing is not one of them. It essentially doesn’t look like anything - to me it was a cross between a frog, king kong and a praying mantis. Or something like that. I think that by making it so alien looking the CGI team unintentionally made it awkward and forgettable.

But as I said before, the monster is not the main focus here. It’s the human story that counts. But, it is a story that we have seen before. We have the obligatory pair of lovers who had some falling out just prior to the monster attack. The crisis will bring them back together and help them to discover their true feelings for each other. We have the comic relief sidekick who always says inappropriate things at the wrong time. He also happens to be the camera man, and his name is Hud. Is that a play on the acronym H.U.D. or am I just looking to much into it?

There is also a token minority friend whose personal drama takes second fiddle to the central love story, but who is destined to survive this crisis due to the Hollywood logic. Everyone else is a walking casualty that can be exploited to heighten the drama. Predictably enough, the boy and the girl get separated and trapped in different parts of the city. The boy and his friends decide to go and rescue the girl which takes them directly into immediate vicinity of the monster and the funny sounding crab/insect looking parasites that jump off of him. And that’s about it. There is not much else to it. And that’s the disappointing part. The story is astonishingly simple, and the relationships between characters are a bit shallow and one dimensional. We don’t really get to know them well enough to care about them. There are a cohesive group of friends, and there is no rift or internal conflict between them.

With this premise, they could have easily made the film half an hour longer and work in some powerful character driven subplots, and expand on the relationships between the protagonists much more. It could have delved into psychological and social aspects of the catastrophe. It could have shown the natural leaders of the group buckling down under these circumstances, and the weak and timid assuming leadership roles responding well to the pressure. They could have shown intense drama of having to choose between helping a friend in need and the instinct to run away save oneself when faced with these sort of circumstances.

But there is none of that in there. All our protagonists hold up pretty well. They all support each other, and stay together till the very end. And Hud keeps filming even when he is being attacked by the small monsters, or when climbing a very steeply inclined roof of a ruined building.

Don’t get me wrong though. There are some intense moments in the movie, few twists and and an ending that may either shock you or piss you off. The acting is good, and all the cast members deliver convincing performances. Other than the monster effects, the CGI and sound effects are spectacular. With the exception of the parasite/small monster sound. This must be the stupidest sound effect I have ever heard in my life. It belongs in a Saturday morning cartoon, not in a monster movie.

The shakycam work was pretty decent - bad enough to look realistic, but not enough to make you sick. The action moves fast, and there is never a dull moment. There is no time to be bored, and the film genuinely keeps you on the edge of your seat most of the time. It is a solid dose of entertainment, but it could have been so much more.