Ezra used his mastery of the healthcare-related arts to wrangle Emily & me a pair of tickets to Michael Moore’s new movie, Sicko. Ezra’s going to be seeing it later in the week, I believe, but his his shadow already loomed over the theater: I’m pretty sure I heard someone in the row behind us say his name (although I may have just misheard him asking, “Does this seat recline?”).

The movie was pretty good, but having read enough blogospheric health care wonkery to make me officious-while-not-all-that-well-informed, I also couldn’t resist picking out aspects of the film’s argument that seemed unsatisfying. Among them: it was hard to know what to make of the anecdotes about care being denied; the trip to Cuba seemed likely to be so staged as to be meaningless; there were no real distinctions made between the different idyllic-seeming foreign healthcare systems; discussions of price were limited to foreign stuff being really cheap and our stuff being really expensive; and despite flirtations with the idea, the movie never really talked about preventive care’s effect on cost. Overall, it was a little hard to feel confident about drawing any conclusion other than “America should probably be embarrassed”. Maybe Ezra’s Health of Nations article left me expecting too much from a movie that bothered to travel to Canada, the UK and France. Instead of highlighting the variations between these countries’ systems, we just got a lot of repetition about how nice free health care is.

But the movie was still effective, and very entertaining — Michael Moore’s a funny guy, and he knows how to pluck a heartstring. I think most people will leave the theater angry about our healthcare system and envious of the French, and that’s probably about as much as one can reasonably expect. I’ll be curious to hear what Ian (who was also in attendance) and Ezra think.

Tim Lee takes issue with an article by Nicholas Carr in which Carr explores the limits of the open source development methodology. Carr says the OSS isn’t very good at innovating. Tim disagrees:

There are lots of examples of ground-breaking free software. Apache wasn’t the first web server, but it preceded most of the proprietary servers now on the market, and it’s been the market leader almost from its introduction. Perl, Python, PHP, BitTorrent, and SendMail are a few examples off the top of my head of free software programs that aren’t clones of proprietary protocols. And on the flip side, a lot of Microsoft software is derivative. For example, Excel, Word, Windows, IIS, and SQL Server were all late-comers to markets that had been pioneered by other companies.


The reality is that really groundbreaking software ideas — word processors, spreadsheets, the web — are extremely rare, and they’re usually the work of a single smart individual. Whether that individual chooses to commercialize his idea or license it as free software is up to the whim of that individual. The vast majority of software development, on the other hand, involves making incremental improvements to existing software products and concepts. As far as I can see, that’s equally true whether you’re talking about free software or proprietary software.

I think Tim’s right: it’s silly to complain about the lack of paradigm-shifting projects on SourceForge. Ideas like the nonlinear video editor, the word processor or the spreadsheet simply don’t come along all that often, and many of them originated before the internet had made open source software possible and widely-known. And, in fact, I think you’d be surprised how many experimental interfaces you could find in the open source world if you cared to look. It’s just that most of them are pretty lousy. Boring as it may be, I believe that there is a relatively narrow range of visual metaphors that are appropriate for manipulating data on a 2D display with a pointing device and a bunch of buttons.

With that said, I do think Tim’s overstating his case just a bit. There aren’t enough originality-related datapoints within the world of classical applications — instead, let’s look at games. The evidence here is less than encouraging. There are plenty of open-source games, but few have gained traction in a serious way. And they’re frequently derivative: the most successful open-source games tend to be clones of existing commercial games like Tetris or Civilization, or applications that build on or otherwise support playing commercial games more cheaply or easily.

But I don’t think this lack of originality is due to any inherent flaw in open-source contributors or the organizational model they employ. I think it’s simply a question of capital — open source projects typically haven’t got any. The vast majority of applications benefit from network effects that arise when their userbase becomes large enough: suddenly it’s easier to find someone to play against online, or the documentation is better, or you can exchange files in the same format that your friend uses. It’s relatively easy for open-source projects to achieve the necessary level of market interest when dealing with highly technical users and applications, as Tim’s examples demonstrate — there are accepted techniques (e.g. the RFC process, making frequent commits to the project) and media outlets (e.g. listservs, usenet) that can confer legitimacy and generate interest without an investment.

That isn’t true for products aimed at consumers, however — these frequently require investment in concerted promotion efforts in order to reach the network tipping point (or else must meet an unfulfilled need in a way that generates earned media like Wikipedia has). Witness the Ogg Vorbis audio format, which is widely agreed to be technically superior to MP3, offers advantages that are applicable to the average consumer, and has been almost completely ignored.

This brings up another issue: collaboration with the private sector is often much more difficult for open source projects. If Ogg had been able to attract support among portable audio player manufacturers its history might be very different. Similarly, it’s easy to imagine that if the Blender project could talk to Nvidia about what advances their next generation graphics cards will offer, it might be able to better-compete with professional products like Maya and 3DS Max (I should note that I’m not particularly familiar with 3D modeling software, so perhaps I’m wrong about this).

But that’s frequently not possible, and consequently the open-source projects that succeed are the ones that can form a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with products that have institutional backing. It’s a lot easier to get folks to use your word processor if it can speak to Microsoft Word; it’s a lot easier to get people to play your FPS if it’s an add-on to a game that already has a large installed base; it’s a lot easier to launch an IM client if it talks to an existing network.

That’s the issue, I think. Carr makes out open source software’s derivative nature to be a question of organization, but that’s flatly wrong. The conventions may be different, but many projects have well-developed protocols surrounding the use of development IRC channels or mailing lists. Anyone who thinks the Mozilla or Apache (or Drupal!) projects could have achieved what they have without a high degree of coordination among volunteers is crazy. These organizations have roadmaps, design documents and established internal policies. It’s just PR money and private-sector legitimacy that they lack. Fortunately the public’s increasing technical literacy means that the need for the former is declining; the undeniable commercial relevance of open source means that projects are increasingly being accorded the latter.

cross-posted at EchoDitto Labs

John From Cincinnati: still terrible, but now somewhat easier to spell. It’s remarkable how little interaction the characters engage in. The show is mostly composed of aimless soliloquies. Admittedly, there will sometimes be some yelling about how one person is a disappointing son/mother/father/husband/wife, and the other is a disappointing opposite-of-that. But these fights quickly devolve into the characters speaking past one another, and then it’s back to spouting disconnected profundities as if I was paying $10 a month to watch ponderous student films with strangely high production values.

Still, tonight was an improvement over week one, primarily because last week I missed the intro and so was pleasantly surprised to hear my favorite post-Clash Joe Strummer song being used for the opening music. Good job, HBO. Way to play songs I like when I’m not riding my bike back from U Street. Keep making those kinds of creative tweaks and you just might have another hit on your hands.

Despite this forward progress, John From Cincinnati remains a bad TV show. But I’m quickly developing a sense of apathetic tolerance toward it, like scar tissue forming around a foreign object (in my Sunday TV schedule). The human body, and in particular its desire not to get up from the couch, is an amazing thing.

Flight of the Conchords: highly promising! Back in college I loved Tenacious D, but have been increasingly embarrassed about it ever since their album came out — it turned out that what I thought was a pretty funny joke wasn’t actually the joke being told by the people doing the telling. These days I’m older, more sedate and, let’s face it, quite a bit wussier. I’m glad to see that parodic folk-pop has finally caught up with my slowed-down outlook. Flight of the Conchords : Tenacious D :: VH1 : MTV. Except that makes it sound like I don’t like the show and/or that I enjoy like VH1. I assure you that neither is the case.

Although it boasted the state of the art in product placement, collagen injection and tiresome Stan Lee cameos, I’m still going to have to give the new Fantastic Four movie a thumbs down. Emily says that it’s silly to carp about the movie failing in ways that any reasonable person would expect it to fail. So while I was taken aback to find the writing well below even the “doomed TNT original sitcom” level of quality and closer to “decent fanfic”, maybe it’s not fair to complain about the ways this expected-to-be-bad movie resembled… a bad movie. I paid for a bad movie, and that’s what I got.

But disrespect for the Marvel canon? That just won’t stand. The guy playing Dr. Doom seems like he would be better cast as a brooding new doctor on Grey’s Anatomy than as the fearsome and merciless ruler of Latveria. And where the hell was Galactus? Yeah, that was a voracious-looking space cloud. But it boggles my mind that a creative process that settled on “my bad” and (immediately before the deployment of a cyclone-based attack) “let’s all go for a spin!” as mots justes somehow decided to forego an awesome CG version of the comic book Galactus, presumably over worries that it might come off as cheesy.

UPDATE: A proof that a giant dude with enormous metal sideburns can be made to look totally rad, I offer up this screencap from the Marvel Ultimate Alliance videogame, which I found on this webpage. Given that this is just from a videogame cutscene and that the FF movie seemed to have a pretty big SFX budget, I’m confident that the creators could have come up with something cool.

Ever since reading about the body-modification folks who’ve implanted magnets in their fingers I’ve been kind of fixated on the idea. Being able to sense magnetic fields seems like it’d be awfully cool. But even if the unavailability of anesthesia for the operation wasn’t enough to scare me off, the apparently-guaranteed infection that follows would be.

As my meager knowledge of electronics has grown, the idea of building a tool has begun to seem more feasible, and promises to merely result in finger burns instead of outright amputations. I’ve been screwing around with a 555 timer and pricing Hall Effect sensors in preparation for building a gadget that’ll whistle to me when it feels a field.

But look! Someone already built the exact same thing and put it on Instructables. It’s a good thing, too, since I a) didn’t realize that Hall sensors put out varying voltage instead of resistance and b) wouldn’t know how to change a 555′s timing on that basis. In fact, due to my unwillingness to untangle resistors and figure out their color codes, my 555 circuit keeps threatening to melt down. I’d still like to put this together, but I may substitute a vibrating motor that I scrounged from a walkie-talkie instead of making it sound-based — turning it into a tactile feedback mechanism seems like it’d do more to satisfy my fingermagnet lust.

At any rate, it’s cool to see that the idea’s workable, even if it’s slightly disappointing to be beaten to the internet writeup of what I thought was an original(ish) idea.

The curious can find a little pedantry from a decidedly underqualified electronics expert after the jump.

More »

Yesterday Kevin Drum quoted a ridiculous excerpt from the Weekly Standard in which Irwin Stelzer frets about CEOs’ solidly middle-class-ish income when compared to the titans of Wall Street.

Hilarious as that sentiment is, it may actually be part of a trend. We’ve had the May issue of Forbes kicking around the office (don’t ask me why), and they have a feature on compensation that begins like this:

TOP GUNS

Think chief executives get fat paychecks? People who manage piles of money do much better.

If you fret about the outsize paychecks of America’s chief executives, take a look at the kingpins who run private equity and hedge funds. Reaping the rewards of percentage fees, the 20 top Wall Street fund managers earned an average $658 million in 2006 versus $145 million for the 20 highest-paid chief executives. It’s almost enough to think the chiefs ought to ask for a raise.

James Simons, who owns an estimates 40% of Renaissance Technologies, sits atop our list with earnings of $1.5 billion. That’s $850 million more than the top-earning chief executive, Apple’s Steve Jobs.

It concludes like so:

Ever since the days of Cornelius Vanderbilt Wall Street has been a good place to build net worth. There are 16 billionaires on our list of top Wall Street earners but just 4 among the 20 best-paid chief executives.

Those poor fucking guys! And with the rising cost of fuel, do you have any idea how expensive it’s becoming to fly the kids to soccer practice on your private jet? That flat tax can’t get here soon enough.

Okay, so hedge fund managers are obviously overcompensated. But who cares? The victims of their outsize paychecks are primarily other elites, who simply get a worse return on their investment than they otherwise might. They can take their business elsewhere if they’re bothered by this arrangement. But when a company’s resources are unjustifiably directed toward the top, many of the people who are negatively affected are typically powerless to do anything about it. That’s the problem. CEO whining about how Billy’s mom lets him stay up late (on his own private island) is unlikely to convince anyone.

All of which reminds me: I still need to see 28 Weeks Later.

Comment RSS permalinks now actually work. Hurrah! Now you won’t have to go hunting for how to find disc0unt clonazepam or hot young teens.

I’ll turn this into a completed website yet, goddammit. Next up: a comment preview template, tentatively scheduled for completion in 2011.

Everyone gets a ton of Nigerian 419 scams in their inbox, but I’ve got a new favorite. Apparently I’ve got a nefarious uncle who’s trying to claim my new fortune for himself by maintaining that I recently died in a car accident. The dastard! Fortunately, my friends at the IMF are uneasy with his story — and, of course, deeply concerned that the sum in question gets to the person who truly deserves it. So they’re trying to get in touch with me:

We want to hear from you before we can make the transfer to confirm if you are dead or not.

More »

It’s been a somewhat traumatic day at the office, but the main reason I didn’t post anything this afternoon is that I decided to wrap up my Asterisk tutorial over at EchoDitto Labs. If you like the idea of screwing around with VoIP technology but have been intimidated by Asterisk’s learning curve, it might help you find a way to gain a foothold. Head on over and check it out.

Two things I enjoyed reading over the weekend:

• Ryan’s thoughtful post on summer crime and economic development
• The City Paper’s Letters From an Arsonist story, pointed out to me by Nicco — it’s a really excellent article