All men dream: but nor equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

-- T.E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Home Pemium?

In other news, I bought a new Pre smartphone this morning.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how these two news items are connected.

The new product is called Hunch, and Fake describes it as a “decision engine,” probably to avoid the mistake that Cuil made of pitting themselves directly against the Google monolith. (That kind of comparison sets up expectations that any startup would be hard pressed to meet.) A better term for it, though, might be “guided search” — the way it works is that you put in question you want an answer to, and then Hunch asks you some other questions to identify exactly what you’re looking for, and then it brings back a recommendation based on your answers. The more frequently you use the site, it promises, the better it will get to know you, and the more accurate its results will be.

It’s a clever idea, and the few test queries I ran through it were returned with decent answers. But my first impression of the service was actually incredibly negative — and it wasn’t until hours later that I realized why.

Here’s what you see when you visit Hunch for the first time:

My annotations are in red; I put them there to illustrate how Hunch’s interface led me astray.

See, when you first visit Hunch, the first thing you notice is the ginormous front-and-center box asking you a simple question — in this case, “Where is your home located?” The whole schtick of the site is that it “learns” your preferences, so naturally you figure the way to start using it is to answer the question. So you do…

… which results in another simple question (like “do you prefer to work with numbers?” or “What type of French fries do you prefer?”) being asked. Answer that, and you get another. Answer that, and you get another. And on and on.

After you’ve answered five or six questions, you start to wonder where the hell the actual application is. You’re not there to answer questions, you’re there to get answers to questions. And yet Hunch just keeps asking and asking without giving anything back to justify why you’re spending all this time answering trivia questions about yourself — there’s no progress bar, no “you’ve answered 5 out of 15 questions!” notice; it’s just Questions Without End, like a blind date from hell. I eventually got frustrated and clicked away.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized what I had been missing — the trivia questions about yourself are entirely optional. You can get right into the meat of the application — the guided search process — by typing a question into the search box in the top right corner of the page. This search box is how you get into the “funnel” which has the answers you seek at the other end. But it’s waaaay too easy to miss, because:

1. It’s in a place — the top right corner of the page — where sites typically put a site search feature, which is an element you usually only turn to when you have failed to figure out how to get where you’re going via the site’s navigation scheme; and
2. It’s physically much smaller and less prominently featured than the trivia question is, making it easy to skip over if you’re just scanning the page

This is a shame, because it makes it far too easy for new visitors to get led off down the garden path of answering questions about themselves. That might help Hunch “tune” itself to their preferences better, but that only matters if they become long-term users; and they will only become long-term users if the site’s first impression is strong enough to bring them back a second time. Getting them into the guided search funnel makes that strong first impression; the trivia questions do not. So having them front and center is a huge mistake; it hides the very thing that makes Hunch immediately useful.

This could be remedied simply by moving the search box down from the top right into a more prominent position, like so:

(Pardon the not-quite-perfectly-matched-up colors on some of the lines; this is a quick edit hacked together in Paint.NET in five minutes. But you get the idea.)

You wouldn’t have to have the search box in this position on all pages; once the user chooses one of the two funnels (the guided-search funnel, or the tell-us-about-yourself funnel), it could move back up to the top right. And for returning users (people who’ve already created an account, or who have the site’s cookie set), it could go up there on the home page too. But for new users, to make that critical first impression, you want to make it as easy as humanly possible for users to discover what it is you’re offering; and the personal questions don’t do that, the guided search does. So anything that gets them into the guided search funnel is a Good Thing, in my opinion.

And with that, I will stop offering unsolicited advice to the designer of one of the most famously usable Web applications ever designed, before the gods decide to punish me for my arrogance and I spend the rest of eternity condemned to pushing a boulder uphill, or reading TechCrunch, or some other horrible fate.

UPDATE (June 16): Caterina graciously takes the time to respond, and to share some of the thinking that went into Hunch’s UI, in the comments.

Oh, yeah, that’s why.

UPDATE (June 10): So did a lot of other people, apparently.

I’ve told you before about my undying love for indie game Mount & Blade. So it’s exciting to see that at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles this week, the game’s developers pulled back the curtain on a new expansion pack, Mount & Blade: Warband, which adds a ton of new features — including online multiplayer.

You heard me. With Warband, you won’t be limited to skirmishing against the computer — you’ll be able to take part in massive 64-player online battles. And there’s a bunch of other cool stuff as well:

Key features revealed for the first time at E3:

• Overhauled graphics; HDR, FSAA, Depth of Field, Soft particles, Tone Mapping and many other effects are all now implemented.
• Majority of Models are being redone.
• Multiplayer battles can now handle up to 64 players with Mods including ‘Team Death Match’and ‘Search & Destroy’.
• Ability to become the ruler of a faction and convince lords to become your vassals in the Single Player Campaign.
• Ability to upgrade your companions to vassalage by granting them land.
• Improved Mechanics for Soldier Morale: Soldiers will break and run away if their morale gets too low.

A summary of additional features previously revealed at GDC are Multiplayer for up to 32 players, improved strategic AI, improved graphics and optimization including customizable quick battles, extended diplomatic options and new weapons, armor and animations, a new faction with unique troops and equipment.

Other aspects introduced in Mount&Blade: Warband are improvements to the combat system with more physically accurate horse archery, a variation in horse sizes, and more options when embarking on sieges.

This is rapidly shaping up to be a must-buy.

If you haven’t played Mount & Blade yet, what the hell are you waiting for? There’s a free trial for download that lets you play the full game until your character reaches level 7, and the full game only costs $29.95 to download, no trip to the store required. So being cheap and/or lazy is no excuse here, people. Get to it! You can thank me later.

Since tomorrow will see the opening of the much-ballyhooed remake of Star Trek, we’re probably going to be hearing a lot of bellyaching this weekend about how They Don’t Make Anything Original Anymore, Hollywood Is Out of Ideas, etc. etc. etc. So I thought I’d take a moment to offer a contrary opinion.

The short version: remakes aren’t bad. They’re good, and the world would be a more interesting place if we had more of them, not less.

The key to understanding why is this — don’t think about the movies. Think about the theater. Not the movie theater, but the art of live performance on stage.

Plays have been being “remade” for pretty much all of human history. Shakespeare’s works have been mounted on stages around the world for hundreds of years; the works of Euripides, for thousands. In most of these cases the texts are unchanged from the original productions, or at least they are as close to those originals as time and translation will allow.

So where is the howl of protest about how the stage is out of ideas?

It doesn’t exist, for a simple reason — new productions of old texts actually add something to our understanding of those texts. A new director and new actors can take old words — even words that millions know by heart — and put an entirely new spin on them. And by doing so, they can force us to re-examine what we think about the play, and indeed about the world at large.

To see what I mean, one can turn to the early career of Orson Welles. He’s best remembered today for his monumental films like Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, but before he went to Hollywood he earned his early fame on the New York stage of the 1930s, mounting visionary productions of Shakespeare classics that took the well-known plays and turned them into commentaries on contemporary social issues: a 1936 Macbeth showing the absurdity of segregation by offering an all-black cast before a backdrop of Haitian voodoo; Julius Caesar reimagined in 1937 as a warning about the rise of fascism, the noble Romans clad in Mussolini-style military uniforms.

One could have asked Welles why he didn’t instead busy himself writing new original scripts rather than re-imagining Shakespeare; but that would have been missing the point. Welles’ productions took on additional power because they were remakes. The politics of the Roman Republic were matters of life and death to the men who took part in them; today, though, they’re matters of academic interest. By picking them up and placing them in a modern context, though, Welles accomplished two things: first, he made them real to contemporary audiences by plundering the symbology of 1930s international politics, which by 1937 were clearly building to something ominous; and second, he showed how Shakespeare’s points about power and ambition are just as true in the modern world as they were in Elizabethan England.

That’s the power of a good remake: by taking something we know and showing it to us from a different angle, it can prompt us to see things in it we had never seen before.

Costuming is just one way a theatrical remake can create that effect; another is casting. Consider the character of Hamlet; over the last century and a half it has been played on stages around the world by a who’s who of the world’s greatest actors: Edwin Booth. John Barrymore. Laurence Olivier. John Gielgud. Kenneth Branagh. Each brought his own interpretation, his own understanding, to the character; each told the familiar story in a way that opened the audience’s eyes anew.

And yet people still complain that it’s sacrilege to have anyone other than William Shatner play James T. Kirk? Give me a break.

Will the new Star Trek be any good? Will Chris Pine’s performance as Captain Kirk be as memorable as the ones Shatner could occasionally offer? I have no idea.

Not all remakes of Shakespeare are brilliant, after all. Sure, Olivier played Hamlet:

.. but so did Mel Gibson:

… and God knows how many bad Hamlets have graced the stages of high schools and community theaters across the fruited plain. So just because it’s a remake doesn’t mean it’s automatically good.

But — but — it doesn’t mean it’s automatically bad either. All it means is that it’s part of a tradition as old as art itself; one that has, all told, enriched our collective cultural life immeasurably. The interpretations of the geeks and Gibsons are, after all, quickly forgotten; those of the brilliant Oliviers add new layers to the work, layers that can survive long after the actor himself has passed.

Can the same magic happen in film? I don’t see why not. Even when the source material is dreck, a gifted director, writers and cast can turn it into something special; just compare the original Battlestar Galactica to the recently concluded re-imagined version to see what I mean. The former is kitsch; the latter is art.

If it can happen on the small screen, it can happen on the big screen, too. The studios just need to stop looking at remakes as a way to squeeze some quick cash out of a played-out property and start looking at them as ways to create new blockbusters by bringing fresh perspectives to classic stories. All it takes is to bring some imagination to the table.

Here’s the video:

… and the transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So what is the responsible way? That’s my question. What is the Republican plan to deal with carbon emissions, which every major scientific organization has said is contributing to climate change?

BOEHNER: George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide. And so I think it’s clear…

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you don’t believe that greenhouse gases are a problem in creating climate change?

BOEHNER: … we’ve had climate change over the last 100 years — listen, it’s clear we’ve had change in our climate. The question is how much does man have to do with it, and what is the proper way to deal with this?

Where to begin?

1. Boehner indicates that the problem people have with carbon dioxide emissions is that they fear CO2 is a “carcinogen”. Boehner appears not to understand what “carcinogen” means — a carcinogen is something that causes cancer, which nobody claims CO2 does. The reason people are worried about CO2 emissions is because they’re afraid those emissions will raise the global temperature level by trapping heat inside the atmosphere — which is why CO2 is called a “greenhouse gas”. Cancer has nothing to do with it.
2. Next, he argues that CO2 isn’t bad because we’ve lived with it for as long as humans have been breathing: “every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide”. It’s true that CO2 isn’t inherently bad, but nobody’s suggesting that; what they’re suggesting is that excessive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere — amounts far higher than those we’ve lived with in the past, thanks to massive industrial emissions — are bad, which is a different question altogether. Think of it like this — is water bad? If you’re drinking a glass of it, no; but if I pour gallons of it straight down your throat, you’ll die. Water in and of itself is not bad, but too much water is very bad indeed.
3. Finally, he suggests that cow flatulence is a source of carbon dioxide, which it isn’t; cows fart methane, not CO2. Methane is also a greenhouse gas, so it’s almost understandable why you would mention cow flatulence in this discussion, but Boehner directly and specifically attributes increased CO2 levels (not general greenhouse-gas levels) to said flatulence, which is not correct.

All these weird assertions would be easier to take if they were being spouted by some random person on the street, but John Boehner is the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, which means his opinions have a direct bearing on climate policy in this country.

And yet, he appears to not even understand the most basic facts on the subject — stuff that we routinely expect junior high school kids to grasp.

Nine months ago, I told you that netbooks were the future of the PC industry.

Today the New York Times tells you the same thing:

Get ready for the next stage in the personal computer revolution: ultrathin and dirt cheap…

So far, netbooks have appealed to a relatively small audience. Some of the devices feel more like toys or overgrown phones than full-featured computers. Still, they are the big success story in the PC industry, with sales predicted to double this year, even as overall PC sales fall 12 percent, according to the research firm Gartner. By the end of 2009, netbooks could account for close to 10 percent of the PC market, an astonishing rise in a short span.

Just Well Mixed: the place to come to read about the things everyone else will be reading about next year.

It’s never a good thing when one of your consumer electronics doodads dies smack in the middle of a format transition.

I’ve been rediscovering this timeless bit of wisdom now, because my DVD player recently died. This was a bigger disappointment than you might think. See, when I built my current home theater system nearly a decade ago, the early-adopter gene passed on to me by my Dad drove me to buy the best DVD player then available — the Denon DVD-2800. The DVD-2800 was a hulking beast of a machine that offered a feature that had previously been available only in players costing many thousands of dollars — progressive scan playback, a feature that (on an HDTV) provides the maximum possible picture quality you can get from a DVD.

To get this superior performance, I paid an (ahem) superior price: $700! That still seems like a lot of money to me now, so you can imagine how much it felt like back when I was still making just-out-of-college money. But compared to other progressive-scan players at the time, $700 was a bargain; the DVD-2800’s picture quality surpassed players costing $2,000 and up. So I sucked it up and told myself that I was buying a fine piece of gear that would keep me happy for many years to come.

And so I was. But now the DVD-2800 is dead, and I’m stuck with the question: what comes next?

If I wanted to just buy a straight replacement for it, I could do so for practically nothing. The feature set that seemed like a steal at $700 back in 2000 is now available for $50 plus tax. They practically give the damn things away in cereal boxes.

But, there’s a reason why decent DVD players are so cheap — the high-definition DVD wars are finally over, and we know now what The Future looks like. Blu-Ray Disc offers picture quality that blows plain old DVD (even when progressive-scanned) out of the water, and now that its primary competitor, HD-DVD, is dead, it’s clear that the home video market is settling into two segments: Blu-Ray for obsessives like me, and DVD for everyone else.

Thing is, though, going Blu isn’t cheap. Decent Blu-Ray players start at $300 and spiral upwards from there, just like DVD players did back in the day. And that’s not the only cost associated with Blu; your old DVDs will look the same on a Blu-Ray player as they do on a good progressive-scan DVD player, so to get anything out of your new Blu-Ray player you have to buy your movies over again in Blu. And for maximum quality you need a “1080p” HDTV, which I don’t have (again the early adopter gene bites me in the ass; the TV I bought at around the same time as the Denon DVD player tops out at 1080i).

Naturally, in a few years decent Blu-Ray players will be cheap and plentiful, just like progressive-scan DVD players are today; which is why I had figured I would wait a few years before going Blu, letting someone else pay the early-adopter premium this time. But now I need to buy something or else resign myself to never watching a DVD for however many years that takes.

So this is my question: is $300 a low enough price point, do you think, to make it worth trying to “future-proof” by going Blu? Or does it make more sense to just spend $50 on another DVD player and wait for Blu to get cheaper? The cheap-ass side of me screams that it makes no sense to shell out extra for Blu until I also have the cash to buy new discs and a new TV that can really make use of it — not to mention that, unlike the days of dot-com giddyness when I bought the DVD-2800, the Current Unpleasantness argues against extravagance of any kind. The early-adopter in me, however, screams back that if you’re eventually going to end up going Blu anyway, you may as well put the $50 towards that now rather than wasting it on a DVD player you’re just going to throw away in 6 or 12 or 18 months.

Have any of you gone Blu yet? What do you think?

UPDATE (March 24): In the comments, my friend Oscar asks a good question: why not split the difference and get an “upconverting” DVD player, like the outstanding units made by OPPO Digital?

(For reference, an upconverting DVD player is a player that uses some clever software to take your regular DVDs and display them in near-HD quality. This process is also referred to by some manufacturers as upscaling. It doesn’t look as good as Blu-Ray, but you don’t have to re-buy the movies, so it’s much more economical; and upconverting players are priced in the sweet spot between plain-old-DVD and Blu-Ray, usually running an affordable $100-$150.)

It’s a good suggestion, but it doesn’t work for me because of another way I got bit in the ass by the early-adopter gene. Permit me to explain.

See, when HDTV was first standardized, the electronics industry decided to use what are called “component video” cables to connect HDTVs to HD video sources. This made sense because component offered the highest-quality connection available. So for several years, every HDTV that was sold was sold with component plugs on the back.

Then in the early 2000s, the movie and TV production industry had one of its periodic shit fits about Evil Hackers, and the source of their nightmares was all those TVs with component plugs on them.

Component cables, you see, are “dumb” cables — they just pass the signal along from point A to point B without monkeying with it. To the copyright cartel, this was a terrifying prospect, because it meant you could do things like (gasp!) record the signal onto a videotape. And if people could easily record and share HDTV broadcasts, they feared, they would stop buying movies and TV shows on disc in favor of getting them from the Evil Hackers for free.

The solution, they decided, was to come up with a new cable — called HDMI — that encrypted the signal so that it couldn’t be recorded. And then to use their monopoly over high-profile content to force the electronics industry to ditch component in favor of their new, “protected” connection.

It mostly worked. HDMI is now the standard connector for home theater devices. But people who bought HDTVs before the big shift to HDMI — like, say, me — found that our TVs had instantly become near-obsolete, because you can’t plug things into them anymore without having the things you plug in suddenly lose huge chunks of functionality.

Take upconverting DVD players. They all require you to connect the player via HDMI in order for the upconverting feature to be activated. Most still come with component plugs as well, but if you connect to your TV using those, all the fancy upconverting software gets switched off — and you’ve essentially got a $50 DVD player, only you paid $150 for it.

In most cases this would be a simple matter of just buying an adapter and putting it in between your TV and your player. But because the push for HDMI was driven by a perceived need for copy protection, adapters don’t work; if they did, the Evil Hackers would use them to get around the encryption. So for the fancy upconverting features to activate, your entire connection from the player to the TV must use HDMI cables.

Which means if you don’t have any connectors for HDMI cables on your TV, then you’re kind of boned. Your only option is to buy a whole new TV.

So that’s why I haven’t been considering upconverting players. The HDMI problem isn’t unique to them — Blu-Ray players don’t give maximum 1080p resolution unless you connect them via HDMI, for example — but you can still get 1080i out of them via component, which isn’t too bad as a stopgap. But buying an upconverting DVD player as an interim measure makes little sense if you can’t make use of the one thing that makes it more appealing than a cheap-o plain Jane DVD player. And I can’t.

All of which explains in part why I hate copy protection schemes with a burning fury — because they end up screwing legitimate users like me, without particularly inconveniencing the Evil Hackers they are supposed to hurt. I will have to go spend thousands of dollars on a new HDTV at some point just to get the Magic Connectors that eventually will be required to hook up anything, for no reason other than reassure some rich studio executives that their business model isn’t borked. That’s fucked up no matter how you look at it.

Chloë Sevigny as Nicki Grant in Big Love

I don’t know if you have been watching HBO’s Sunday-night drama series Big Love, but if you haven’t been, you really should be.

Now in its third season, the show has recently generated some controversy with its portrayals of its main characters, a polygamist family from a splinter group of Utah Mormons, but that’s not why I’m recommending you check it out. I’m recommending you check it out for actress Chloë Sevigny’s portrayal of one of the family’s three wives, “sister-wife” Nicki Grant. Sevigny’s performances on this show have been one of the finest examples I’ve ever seen of how an actor can shape the audience’s perceptions of a character through their performance.

If you were just reading the script for a given episode of Big Love, you’d probably think that Nicki Grant was a bitch on wheels, a woman without a single redeeming characteristic whose narcissism and inflexibility threaten to destroy her entire family. And you’d be right; as written, Nicki is those things. She’s not a very empathetic character.

But Sevigny brings such nuance and humanity to her performance that it changes before your eyes from a two-dimensional stereotype into something much more human. It’s not a case of the “lovable rogue” (think Robin Hood or Han Solo) or any of the other wheezy stereotypes of drama; Sevigny’s Nicki is far from lovable. But Sevigny brings to her performance an approach that teases out nuance from a character that otherwise would have none. Nicki was raised on an isolated compound of fundamentalist Mormons, and Sevigny plays her as half-woman, half-girl, tough as nails but with an incomplete, simplistic understanding of how the world works; just when you think her character is irredeemable, Sevigny finds a note of humanity in a gesture, a look, that stops you in your tracks and reminds you that there’s a person — a deeply wounded person — underneath all of Nicki’s armor.

Anyway, it’s a great performance, one that’s deserving of awards, and you if you’re interested in the craft of acting you could do a lot worse than to tune in and watch how a master does it.

Big Love airs Sunday nights on HBO at 9PM Eastern. The Season 3 finale airs next Sunday, March 22. If you want to start from the beginning, seasons 1 and 2 are available on DVD.

I’m in awe.

In 1993, Bill Hicks — one of the truly great American comic geniuses — made his twelfth appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman and delivered a monologue that the Letterman staff considered so controversial that, after taping was complete, they cut Hicks’ entire appearance out of the show.

This was a Big Deal. Letterman had never censored a comic before, and had earned a reputation by doing years of boundary-pushing comedy himself as someone who was friendly to edgy acts. So to completely excise Hicks’ set from the show after the comic had finished taping and left the studio, rather than, say, flagging the problems with it and working with Hicks to work them out, struck a lot of people (including Hicks) as being a pretty severe kind of sell-out.

Here’s a cable access TV interview Hicks gave shortly afterwards, in which he discussed the incident:

Hicks’ set from that show was never aired, that night or ever again. And when Hicks died of cancer just months later at the too-young age of 32, the Letterman set became a part of his legend — a Lost Performance that would never see the light of day.

Until now. Fifteen years after turning the lights out on Hicks, The Late Show has announced that they will be airing the infamous set this Friday:

As is the case with many trailblazers, Hicks’ material was also controversial. In 1993, the Southern satirist became the first comedy act to be censored at CBS’ Ed Sullivan Theatre. Hours after delivering a routine for The Late Show with David Letterman, the show’s executive producer called to tell him it wouldn’t air. Tragically, Hicks died of cancer less than five months after the incident. He was 32.

On Friday, Bill Hicks’ mother will appear on The Late Show to discuss her son’s legacy. Letterman will also air the censored performance, which includes riffs on pop culture and social issues. (For an early peek, read a transcript of the routine.)

So if you want to see a bit of comedy history fifteen years too late, tune in to CBS this Friday night at 11:30 Eastern/Pacific.

UPDATE (Jan. 29): I just realized that I have now lived a longer life than Bill Hicks did. So if you think there’s any kind of justice in the universe, forget it.