June 30, 2007 4:30
My iPhone Review: The iPhone Isn't Actually a Horcrux
I tried and I tried to transfer a part of my soul into it. Just couldn't figure out where to stick the USB cable. May have to wait for Pogue's Missing Manual for that.
June 29, 2007 5:23
Spoiler Alert: The iPhone is a Horcrux
I'm off to get an iPhone. If I don't come back, look for the Dark Mark over the midtown Apple store.
June 29, 2007 12:46
The Trailering: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
It's here:
My angry, blackened nerd heart does so hate to be warmed. Didn't I just say something about those damn celestas? Still, it's a good cast, and somebody appears to have checked the "acting" box in Natalie Portman's preferences.
June 29, 2007 11:36
Now in Papervision: Harry Potter and the Sinister Spoilers
This blog is not turning into a Harry Potter blog. I have a rich fulfilling life outside of Harry Potter. I do and say and think lots and lots of exciting things that have almost no connection to Harry Potter whatsoever.
That said, here's a link to my piece in Time this week, which is all about Harry Potter.
Because J.K. Rowling doesn't really need extra publicity at this point, she gives very few interviews. For Deathly Hallows, Rowling and Scholastic together decided that she would give an interview to exactly one print publication in the U.S. market. That print publication...is not Time magazine.
But Scholastic did let us talk to a lot of executives and editors who handle the Potter franchise, enabling us to take a pretty interesting inside look at the gears and catchments of the mighty Potter machine, tracing the book from manuscript to finished book. It's a weird world in there. Here's a sample:
Another early reader was a studious 28-year-old named Cheryl Klein, whose job title is continuity editor. Rowling's books have become so complex—and their fans so obsessively nitpicky—that it takes a full-time Potterologist to make sure Rowling's fictional universe stays factually consistent. "I keep track of all of the various proper nouns that appear in the series," says Klein. "For instance, with Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, I make sure it's always B-o-t-t-apostrophe-s. Every Flavor is not hyphenated, and Flavor does not have a u." It's a tough beat: Klein acknowledges, for example, that in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Moaning Myrtle sits in a U-bend toilet, whereas in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, she occupies an S-bend toilet (this crept in, it should be noted, before Klein's tenure, which began after Goblet). Klein has either the worst job in the world or the best, depending on how you look at it.Like everyone else at Scholastic, Klein maintains the Harry Potter omertà. "Most people know better than to ask," she says. "That includes my friends and my family and everyone else." After Rowling revised the manuscript, per Levine's and Klein's suggestions, Klein flew to England to pick up the new draft. On her way home she was stopped for a random security check at Heathrow. "The woman opens up my bag, and she starts pawing through it. And she says, 'Wow! You have a lot of paper here.' And I thought, Oh, God, she's going to look at it, and she's going to see the names Harry and Ron and Hermione. But I just smiled, and I said, 'Yes, a lot of paper!' And she said, 'Uh-huh,' and she zipped it up. That was the end of the scariest two minutes of my life."
Regular readers of this blog can skip the last three paragraphs (or 'grafs' as we seasoned journalists call them) of the piece. You've already seen them.
June 28, 2007 4:23
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: The Movie: The Screening: I Went
Just back from a screening of Order of the Phoenix. I think I'm probably not supposed to say too too much about this. There's a lot out there already anyway. But I will say this: it's quite good.
As much as I like the books, I haven't really ever been totally sold on Potter as a movie franchise. Maybe it's because of the revolving directorial door, maybe it's the length of the books (way too complex to fit comfortably in a two-hour movie), maybe it's the inevitable uneven-ness you're going to get when dealing with lots and lots of young actors, maybe it's just the difficulty of reproducing Rowling's delicate balance of charm and grit, and avoiding treacle. Maybe I'm just a books-snob. I couldn't even sit all the way through Chamber of Secrets.
But -- to me -- Phoenix is by far the most successful of the movies, right from the opening scene, with Dudders and the Dementors. This was always among Rowling's best openings, and this Yates fella -- the director, whoever he is -- gets what it's all about, which is wiping the last of that Chris Columbus vaseline off the lens and projecting Harry's fantasy existence into a naturalistic suburban world. It has almost a documentary feel to it, and the harsh realism of the visuals -- you can practically count Mr. Dursley's gin blossoms -- makes the magic that much more magical. And someone had the wit to keep Radcliffe from shaving for a couple of days, a detail that really sells Harry as a teenager now, not a child.
The plotting is a bit compressed, the pacing totally hell-bent, but what can you do, there's a lot to get in. Whoever did the script -- I think they brought in a new writer -- showed some skill (and some guts) in nipping and tucking Rowling's plot points where necessary. And I'm really not going to say anything much about the showdown at the Ministry of Magic, except that, you remember that slightly unintentionally funny duel between Gandalf and Saruman in Lord of the Rings, where somebody ends up spinning on his head? This is nothing like that. When Dumbly and Voldy get down to it -- well, that's what a wizard-fight should really look like.
June 27, 2007 3:20
The Top 10^H^H^H^H^H6 Geek T-Shirts
This post began life as a top-10 list of the finest in nerdwear. Nerds are, of course, a t-shirt-loving people, and the richness and diversity of their t-shirt culture is a beacon for all of mankind. After weeks of sifting through possibilities -- yes, I actually devoted a lot of time to this -- and a whole lot of jokes about rogues, I present you with my findings. Which are 6 in number.
1. Han Shot First. Well, he did.
2. I Roll 20s. Do people think you roll anything else? Disabuse them. (This version's also good.)
3. The RPG shirt. It's the missing pull-down menu for all situations. If you require something way way obscurer, go for Twisp and Catsby. I think there's probably a German word for the pleasure of wearing a t-shirt nobody will ever get, ever.
4. Wordless Indiana Jones t-shirt. Graphically appealing, instantly recognizable, and message-wise, it's timelier than ever. I have two words for this t-shirt: LUV YOU.
5. I'M THE GUY WHO SUCKS/PLUS I GOT DEPRESSION. It kind of explains itself. Based on the apparel of that great geek avatar, Achewood's Roast Beef. He's a cat, he's furry, he doesn't have to wear a t-shirt, but he wears this one. For all of us.
6. 1up. I feel calmer just looking at this shirt. I feel somehow -- I don't know -- lifier.
(As noted above, this list started life as a top-10 list, but I felt like I was having trouble coming up with genuine top-quality geek t-shirts. So if anybody can top these, please have at it, and let's fill out the final 4. Because the more shirts I have, the less often I have to do laundry.)
June 27, 2007 1:49
The iPhone: How It Will Play Out
This is not an actual post, but merely a shadow post, linking to a post by somebody else which is much funnier than anything I could have written.
June 27, 2007 10:42
Flight of the Conchords: Sniff This One, It's Dead
I am not among the earthly elect who subscribe to HBO (nor for that matter am I among that somewhat larger elite class who own a TV) but these days video content is leaking messily all over the Internet, which is how I caught the first episode of Flight of the Conchords this weekend. The premise: a nerdy folk-singing duo from New Zealand trying to make it in downtown Manhattan.
It is, intermittently, pretty brilliant. The first episode was notable for the Conchords' performance of "The Humans Are Dead," a musical eulogy for the human race delivered by two robots, featuring an excellent impression of Stephen Hawking-style synthesized speech.
Concert footage of the duo performing "Humans" is embedded below. Worth a view. In the future there are no more elephants. There is also no more unethical treatment of elephants...
Once again without emotion!
June 26, 2007 1:00
Shooting Begins on Indiana Jones 4
They've released a little video to announced the start of shooting on Indiana Jones 4. Not a lot of meat to it: no stars visible (that I recognized, anyway), just some drag racing with old-tymey classic cars, and Spielberg and Lucas standing around in the sun looking like the grizzled warhorses they are. The takeaway: making movies sure beats blogging in some office in New York.
June 25, 2007 9:08
The Great Harry Potter Re-Read
I've said elsewhere that I don't really believe in the myth of the spoiler -- the idea that knowing how something ends takes all the fun out of it. But I do hate it when I'm reading something and I can't remember how it began. And now that the Deathly Hallows -- whatever they are -- are hard upon us, I find myself thinking: how long has it been since I actually read Sorcerer's Stone? What in fact was the sorcerer's stone? I mean I'm sure it was a stone or rock of some kind, exceedingly magical in nature, but what exactly...?
I'm kidding. Sort of. But I do feel like this is the last new Harry Potter book I'm ever going to read, and I really should come into it prepared to appreciate the richness of all the references and to "get it" when all of Rowling's carefully laid plot points pay off. So I'm frog-marching myself back through as many of the books as I can to make sure I'm Potterologically sound by July 21. Feels like I'm cramming for my O.W.L.'s.
Anybody else doing the same thing? I don't think I'll ever not be stoked when Harry waves that wand in Ollivander's, and all the sparks come out...
June 21, 2007 3:32
The Hacking of Harry Potter
As it happens I'm hard at work on a large-ish story about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so it hasn't escaped my attention that some hacker somewhere is claiming that he grabbed a copy of the book off a Scholastic computer and posted information about the ending.
Coupla things to say about this. One, it's surprising in a way that this hasn't happened sooner. Movie studios and record labels take great pains to keep digital copies of their products from getting out on the Net. And yet they always do. And compared to those larger, richer, more digitally savvy industries, book publishers are relative amateurs at this kind of digital security. If Eminem and Jay-Z and Metallica can't record albums without them getting leaked all over the Intertron, how are publishers supposed to cope? Especially since text files are relatively small, even when at maximum fidelity, as it were -- no such thing as a lossy format when you're dealing with words.
But two, contrary to what I just wrote, there is almost no chance this is real. This is a hacker bragging on a bulletin board. That's what hackers do. The Reuters story linked above is inadvertently humorous on this score. Besides referring to Scholastic spokesperson Kyle Good as a man -- she is in fact a woman -- it quotes David Perry from Trend Micro (a very smart and sensible person; also of the male gender) as saying "there is a good chance that Gabriel's claim could be a hoax." Shyeah. Hacker culture is a culture of lying about what you did. Without credible scans of actual pages, there's no way I'm getting on board with this. Or devoting any more space to this.
Except -- three -- to point out the obvious, which is that the whole premise of ruining a book by revealing the ending is hopelessly flawed anyway. Quoth the hacker Gabriel: "We make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring." That idea is based on a reductive, impoverished idea of what makes reading pleasurable. Books are not data. Just because you know how they end doesn't mean you've had the deeply awesome experience of reading them. You can't spoil a book like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by revealing its ending. That would not render the book useless and boring, that's not how reading works. It's just not that easy to ruin something that awesome.
June 20, 2007 10:55
Space Mission to Mars! Volunteers Wanted!
Disclaimer: Volunteers will not actually participate in a space mission to Mars. Instead they will be confined for 17 months in "a series of interlocked modules in an research institute in Moscow." The point being to study the psychological stresses that would result from an actual mission to Mars.
The European Space Agency is looking for 12 (European) volunteers in all, of whom 6 would participate in the 17-month study, to begin late next year or early 2009. The article says the facility is 19,250 cubic feet in size, which sounds pretty small -- cozy, anyway -- for 6 people. Salary: 120 euros a day, or -- envelope calculations here -- around $40,000 a year. Not much. Though it does include "room" and board. And my lease is up in September...
They're being pretty hardcore about it. You have to eat space-type food, go through simulated emergencies, and endure a 40-minute radio delay when communicating with loved ones. Dang. I know they're testing for psychological resilience, but you have to think anybody who would put themselves through this wouldn't be super-ultra-sane to begin with.
There's much more detailed information on the actual application, downloadable here, which astutely excludes people who are already in prison from applying (nice try, convicts!) And I love how they decorated the application with artist's impressions of a dude walking on Mars. We can't stress this enough, people: if you volunteer for this you will not actually be going to Mars.
Or will you...
June 19, 2007 1:24
Three Movies I Want to See, Starring Jack Black, Strong Sad and Seth Rogen
1. Man-Witch. Jack Black plays a teacher who discovers he has magical abilities. He then has to join a coven and go to magic school with a bunch of girly-witches. There is nothing about this concept that I don't like. Nothing. IMDB has this as 2009.
2. The Homestar Runner Movie. Don't misunderstand, there is nothing about the state of the world today that in any way suggests to me that I will ever see a Homestar Runner movie. But I want to. According to the article linked above they're not even doing TV -- apparently they're content to rule the Web as the grandmasters of flash cartooning. I interviewed these guys three-four years ago and was expecting them to break out any minute -- I had book editors calling me, begging me to help them land the Homestar Runner book deal -- or even the Homsar book deal - but no dice. They still refuse to sell out, yo.
3. Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse. Ca s'explique:
June 18, 2007 11:09
Who Will Watch the Night Watch?
Earlier this year, for a story I never ended up writing, I sank some time into watching Night Watch and then, later, its sequel Day Watch, two films that were colossal blockbusters in their native Russia. I mean, huge, industry-changing, all-time box-office record-setters. I'd been aware of their come-hither effects-heavy trailers for a while, partly because I'm a Russophile, and partly because, well, they're effects-heavy, so it was good to finally getting around to reckoning with them. I think Day Watch is currently in limited release here.
The setup is part Matrix, part Highlander: witches, vampires, etc. are real and move among us secretly, posing as ordinary humans, locked in a millennia-old stalemate, light against dark, good against evil. Each side keeps an eye on the other, guarding against treaty violations and potential imbalances -- I suppose, it's very Cold War-like, if you wanted to read the story geopolitically. When a couple of entities arise on both sides who are powerful enough to tip the power balance, the cold war goes hot. OK, end of plot summary.
The movies have huge amounts of charm, much of it attributable to vivacious direction, and to the lovable shlubby everyman lead, played by one Konstantin Khabensky, a mid-level functionary on the Light side who struggles with the legacy of a past sin. In fact all the performances are great - maybe it's the legacy of Stanislavsky, but the Russians just don't seem to have bad actors the way we do. And it's always interesting to watch an American genre get refracted through a very Other culture -- the movies' preoccupation with fate and predestination is Very Russian indeed.
But they're kind of a tough watch nonetheless. The pacing feels all wrong to our impatient, gloriously jaded American eyes. They're very slow, and the story beats come at all the wrong times -- the sensation is akin to watching some anime movies, which are painfully beautiful and mind-annihilatingly boring at the same time -- the storytelling conventions are just different. And of course the CGI looks cheapo compared with the peta-budget digital creations we've been spoiled by. I'd be surprised to see them break out of the art-house circuit.
Surprised, but pleased. It's almost worth sitting through the two movies for the ending of Day Watch, which is a real burn-the-house down, premise-annihilating twist that feels totally right. Kinda like the ending of Escape from L.A., but so much moreso. Anybody else get that far?
June 15, 2007 3:56
Now in Papervision: The Future Is Plastics, I Mean Touchscreens
For my late Friday afternoon non-post, I bring you a link to the thing I wrote in Time's print edition on touchscreens and why they are the future. Yes, it's mostly an excuse to run a big picture of the iPhone, but it also brings in Microsoft's new Surface Computing initiative, which may -- I actually believe this -- in the long run be as big a deal if not bigger.
Seriously. Microsoft's Milan product is just a big touchscreen that supports lots and lots of fingers at once, and can recognize -- if they're tagged properly -- objects that are placed on it. It's deeply unsexy, and probably looks incredibly kludgey on the inside (it's built around Vista and an array of infrared cameras), but it's so ridiculously useful that it -- or something like it -- is bound to become fairly ubiquitous. I mean, how long can the mouse really last as a pointing device, when we've got fingers? In 10 years it's gonna be like Minority Report up in this joint. I hear Microsoft has a "busty psychics" initiative in the works, too.
June 14, 2007 2:17
Invasion of the Body Snatchers Snatchers
(You see what I did with that subject line -- it's like the movie itself has been snatched and remade as an emotionless alien version of itself. So meta. These are the dividends that you, the reader, reap from my three years in grad school.)
For me the 1970's-era Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the primal SF horror movie experience. That slow, cold, creepy burn, the minimal effects, the twist ending, the casting that's so close to being kitsch (Donald Sutherland and Leonard Frickin' Nemoy!) but veers right into perfection. Plus full frontal nudity. Plus a dog with a dude's head.
That's still the only version -- of the three extant and one forthcoming -- that I've actually seen. But I'm certainly curious about the new one, where the title is truncated to "The Invasion." The opening, shot in documentary style, and featuring a munged, contaminated space shuttle, gets the sense of wrongness just right. And yay for Jeremy Northam and Jeffrey Wright, both eternally watchable. And there's a hint of some shocking Kidman-on-Kidman action right there at the end. Boo for the mommy/child plot, though -- no one touches my child either, but I don't have to make a damn movie about it, do I? And that guy who tells Kidman not to show any emotion leaves open the question as to whether Nicole Kidman has ever in her life shown any emotion in anything she's ever been in. So you know, maybe she's good with that.
Buzz on the film has been bad - apparently the Wachowski brothers and longtime partner James McTeigue were brought in for rewrites and reshoots. But you know what? I'm game for this. People say the 1956 version was about communism, and the '78 version was about conformity. Maybe every generation gets the Bodysnatchers it deserves. Probably ours is about something lame like the Interweb or some such, but hell, I'm curious enough to find out.
June 13, 2007 11:24
Marvel Zombies: This One's a Biter!
Earlier this week I got a copy of the hardcover collection Marvel Zombies, and I have to admit, I'm deeply impressed. With all the corporate ass-covering that goes on in the media world, what other company would be willing to take its flagship intellectual properties, several of which are the basis of forthcoming mega-budget movies -- I'm looking at you, Wolverine, Iron Man, the Hulk, Spider-man, the Silver Surfer, and (probably) Captain America and the Avengers -- and turn them into flesh-eating zombies?
I mean, we're talking about Spider-man eating Aunt May and Mary Jane. That right there is the mark of a comic with the courage of its convictions. (That's Mary Jane, above, in zombie form.)
Marvel Zombies is spun off - I think -- from an episode in Ultimate Fantastic Four in which every hero on an alternate earth is infected with a zombifying illness. The key is that the 'heroes' actually retain their sentience, at least as long as they're well-fed. They appreciate the horrific nature of their actions, they just can't calm their insatiable hunger for human flesh. The action centers -- briefly -- on the uninfected Magneto's attempts to survive on that world. Briefly. After that the whole book is just a Sadean orgy of cruelty. Captain America loses the top of his skull on page 5 (it doesn't slow him down). Iron Man loses his legs. Wasp spends much of the book as a decapitated head (it's bitten off by her husband Giant-man).
Etc. The zombies are pleasantly cavalier about the whole business. Every time somebody breaks into the standard flowery comic-book-hero palaver, the zombies all roll their eyes and look bored. They just want to eat flesh. How hard is that to understand?
June 12, 2007 2:47
id Software's New Game Engine
I wasn't at Jobs's keynote yesterday, but I was interested to hear that John Carmack was there, showing off his new technology. Carmack is the guy who pretty much invented the first-person shooter -- Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Doom again -- the technical side of it anyway, and he's still at the top of his game. So to speak. And it's been a while since we've heard from him -- not since Doom III came out, really.
Check the video: he turns up at about the 11:30 mark and says a lot of things in his special graphics geek dialect. (If you wait till the end of the segment you can hear Carmack bust out his signature verbal tic, a kind of "mn!" noise he makes, apparently involuntarily.) Nice to see them doing big outdoor environments, instead of the claustrophobic spaces of Doom III. I was down at id a few years ago for the Doom III release, and I heard an artist say he was busy drawing trees, so I figured something different must be in the pipeline.
I doubt this signals much of a change in the bleak landscape of Apple gaming. But at the same time I can see why Carmack shows up for these events when Jobs calls, and brings his massive geek cred with him. id is the Apple of gaming: they're getting thwocked in market share by Unreal -- just the way Mac gets thwocked by Windows -- because, like Apple, they're not as interested in licensing their tech and being partner-friendly, because they like to keep an obsessive level of control over what they do.
At the same time, what they do is...pretty cool.
Update: An embedded guerilla-video version from Gametrailers.com:
June 11, 2007 11:27
My First Blackberry: Tasting the Forbidden Fruit
Last weekend the display onmy phone up and died. It's not a proper snow crash, since my brain-stem hasn't been hacked with an ancient Sumerican code, but just about. I did not mourn, since I'm not all that fond of my phone, but it's definitely an annoyance. It's still a phone, it still makes and receives calls, but I can't see who's calling me, and I can't see to use my contacts.
As it happened, the folks at RIM had just sent me a Blackberry Curve, so I unboxed it and have been using it as a replacement. Suddenly I'm one of those people. I've always resisted being one of those people. (For a while there I was feeling just like Will Smith in I Am Legend.) Now I e-mail people when my subway goes above ground. I text while pushing my daughter on a swing. I thought maybe I could make it OK if it were a father-daughter thing. Baby, look! Look at daddy's new fancy-phone! But no. She doesn't care. She's three.
Like they always say in the zombie movies, it's painless, you don't feel a thing. The little hermaphroditic mini-trackball-slash-button is pretty intuitive. My thumbs are slowly learning the delicate typing dance. The distinction between texting and e-mail has already begun to blur, since they present pretty much the same way onscreen. Is it possible, nay inevitable, that the difference between texting and e-mailing will soon be lost to us altogether?
I have some quibbles. Bandwidth is quite low -- it takes frickin' forever to send a picture, though when they do go through they're quite nice -- click here for a sample. I'm not charmed by the aggressive way this device brands e-mails by appending a sig. And gawd, there are some simple interface tweaks that could improve matters. The fact that you have to use ALT to type a period or an @ in the e-mail field, which, not surprisingly, one does all the time, is pretty amazing.
Jobs would have this thing smoothed out in no time. (Oh, wait, that's right...)
June 8, 2007 4:01
Bill Gates, the Early Years: Damn, This Thing Works!
I'm going to post a lengthy excerpt here from the conversation I had with Bill Gates earlier this week, because, well, I have so much of it, and it kind of works as this wonderfully absorbing dramatic monologue about where Microsoft came from. This is him essentially telling the story of how he and Paul Allen figured out that writing software for personal computers was maybe a good business to be in. Which is pretty impressive since at the time, in the mid-1970's, almost nobody had a personal computer.
He also talks about his math career at Harvard, his anti-social-ness, the origin of Steve Ballmer, his C+ in organic chemistry, why he was never a hardware guy, and other interesting digressions. (Note that even though he digresses a lot, it always makes sense -- Gates always closes the parenthesis.) It's amazing how excited about this stuff he still is; also interesting is how much credit he gives to Paul Allen. This is raw transcript, so Gates won't always speak in complete sentences, but you get the idea. If you're curious, the actual audio is here.
ME: So did you guys know, really know, that you had something special going on?
GATES: Sort of yes. It's a very unusual thing, because I had…my obsession with the computers, and my relationship with Paul was at Lakeside, starting in eighth grade. And so we had done programs, we'd done the school scheduling, we'd sold a payroll program. We'd done a lot, enough that we took part of my high school time off doing a job for TRW. I helped Paul get a job at Honeywell, so he could be back there so we could brainstorm, because his deal was the microprocessor—we'd agreed the microprocessor was going to change the world, it was weird that people didn't see that. He wanted to be back there to kind of convince me that, hey, we should do something about it. So anyway he was living just a few miles away, and that was my sophomore year that he came out and we were talking about those things.
It was interesting there. I thought of myself as a math person. And one of my classes freshman year was the one where everybody is the best math person they've ever met. And their personal positioning is, I am the best math person. We all had 800s on our SAT, 5s on our AP. And so we go into this thing. I'm having dinner, the three of us who came in best in that class, one is a lawyer in New York, super successful at Hughes Hubbard; one is a professor of mathematics and chaos theory at Cornell, Jim Sethna; and then I. So the three of us sort of survived out of the 80 people who had this personal positioning, we survived somewhat intact, and that actually made us very good friends.
But, anyway, I remember talking to one of these math guys, and he said, geez, this computer stuff, you know, you're really good at that. I said, yes, but the courses here are so easy, and so I never signed up. And the only computer science course that I ever signed up for was the one that had the most prerequisites in the whole catalogue, and I signed up for the second half of the year, which is this thing on stochastic scheduling. So my freshman year, I show up and it's all graduate students, and two days into the course I tell the professor, hey, you know, this thing is wrong, because I was a little -- my social skills weren't that great. So I told this guy, this queuing theory thing he did was wrong.
Anyway, so I was going to these super hard math classes, and staying away from computer science classes, partly because I'd done so much computer science, and I was doing computer science projects using the computer there. Paul and I did the microprocessor emulation on the big computer that was there, and that's actually where we did the first version of Basic that he flew back with this paper tape to take to those guys [i.e., the guys who made the Altair, the MITS guys. But that comes later – ed.]
When I was in high school, we had bought a 8008 chip, which is the 1971 chip. But the 1974 chip, which is the 8080, which is the one where Paul hands it to me and says, look, this is the one -- Bill, you've got to admit this one is good enough, because it was better than the PDP-8, which was a minicomputer that I had done a Basic interpreter for that we'd had on loan out at the high school. And Paul was right. The 8008 was way below the PDP-8, meaning the minicomputers there, and the 8080 was better than the PDP-8. So then the idea that you could do this incredible computer around it, he was certainly right. So we wrote that emulator.
But, anyway, the math guys were always saying, hey, you're going to end up in computer science. And I said, yes, I think maybe so, but it's not the courses -- the courses weren't that interesting. And the great thing was, if you were a major in what was called applied mathematics, if you wanted to get into any class, like an economics class that was overcrowded, or a history class, you could say you were applying mathematics to that subject, and so you got the privileges of that major, but they never kept track that you were pretending to be applying mathematics to economics one day, and then the next day applying it to history. So I had this wild card major that I could use, and it was key. That was how I met Steve, was I got into this graduate economics course that we didn't have any of the prerequisites for, which was a fantastic microeconomics course taught by Mike Spence, who is -- what is he now, head of Stanford Business School, or something like that?
ME: You know, the stories that people tell, and even some of the way you played it in the Harvard speech, is that, you know, you weren't that serious of a student.
GATES: Yes and no. The whole thing where it was so many people, where you come from a small high school, and then there's so many people, and they're all so talented, it's a little bit of a shock. I had a group that amongst ourselves we were quite social, but we were the anti-social group. And so we'd hang around and talk about how our courses didn't really matter, and stuff like that. And I had this thing where after about three weeks in my freshman year, I would go to the courses that I wasn't signed up for, and not go to the ones I was signed up for. Then during reading period, I would study. I was very hard core, I was at Hilles Library…first thing in the morning, and I stayed until the end of the night, and I studied like mad.
And so, I only got one bad grade the whole time I was there, which was in organic chemistry. I almost put it in the speech. I got so intimidated by the premeds, and so I'd go to watch the videotapes, and half the videotapes they had the video but not the audio, and the other half they had the audio but not the video, which in organic chemistry is terrible, because the guy will say, we take this chemical, and you hear the chalk going, and this chemical…so the audio is no help. I got a C+ in that course.
ME: Why were you even taking that?
GATES: Well, I love science, and my favorite course in high school had been in organic chemistry. You were supposed to take Chem10, which is inorganic, and then take organic. But I knew [inorganic], because I had an incredible chemistry teacher in high school. In fact, I was remembering, there is this book by Sacks called Uncle Titanium, which is about the fascination of some chemicals are shiny, and some aren't, some precipitate, some don't. [I only realized later that meant Oliver Sacks's Uncle Tungsten. Yes, this proves it: I'm smarter than Bill Gates.] Anyway, that whole thing of the elements, and how they work. So I loved inorganic, but then I didn't like organic. There are certain ironies to that, because now in my foundation work, I am spending all sorts of time reading medicine, and biology, and stuff like that, but that's my C+ there. So I was a weird student.
This friend and I had this thing where when we would go down and sit at the table, we'd always discuss the courses we took the year before, and everybody else was like, why are you discussing those? We're paying attention to these. And we'd like be going over the homework we didn't turn in, or something like that.
The great thing about Harvard was, you could always bet it all on the final, virtually every course, and so I would just do this thing during reading period. And this friend of mine decided to do it the same way, actually Monte Davidoff, who helped us write the Basic, he's actually the third guy who wrote a small part of the Basic. The first Basic is Paul and I, and then the floating point is this guy Monte. So Monte tried to imitate my thing where you don't do much during the normal year, and then you study hard at the end. But he just freaked out. It really is hard on you. And so he got not very good grades. I decided I wasn't going to tempt other people into this sort of perpetual procrastination, and actually when I got going at Microsoft, it took me a while to get out of that mode that the coolest thing was to wait until the last minute to get something done. That was my showoff kind of thing.
And so I was really a good student. I mean, like in that EC 2010 course that Steve and I took together, you know, I actually got the top grade on the final, at the end we had studied so much, so much, because it was -- I still wanted to be a good student.
ME: Let me get back to that question I asked before. Everybody tells the story about that article in Popular Mechanics with the Altair on the cover. You'd grasped that this was an innovation of enormous importance. How much did you know about what was going to come?
GATES: Well, the key thing was, in 1971, in Electronics Magazine the 8008 comes out, and it's like on page 94 of Electronics Magazine. So Paul Allen is reading Electronics Magazine. He was always much more of a hardware guy than I was. I could never -- it was always these wire-wrapped boards you would do, and I hated that kind of stuff. But he showed that to me, and he said, look, with this doubling, with this doubling every year thing, this thing is going to be amazing. And I thought, God, he's right. Our friends at Digital Equipment must be stunned, the microprocessor is going to change the rules.
And of course nothing happens in 1972, 1973, and then even Intel a little bit didn't realize what they had. There were people coming to them like Bubcom, Datapoint and saying, hey, your chip can do more than just control elevators. Datapoint did some really cool stuff with it. Bubcom is a Japanese calculator company. And then when they come out with the 8080, even then they don't know what it is.
So Paul had really gotten us talking about the idea of a machine that an individual can buy. There was a guy named Ted Nelson, who was writing some crazy stuff about computers and how neat and cool they were, and Bob Albrecht had done using minicomputers sort of a time-sharing thing called People's Computer Company. So there were tiny hints -- there were a couple of guys in France did a thing called MCM -- of people trying to get computers down to play with. Now, our idea of playing with a computer was to sneak in at night, like at the University of Washington, and get the thing at the Department of Physics that nobody was using, and use it all night, because they were big and expensive, that was our only way. And our whole high school years, this thing of finding free computer time, which a university like UW, the number of computers up there that are sort of half-used is very large, the medical area, physics, and so those were our highlights of our high school years were sort of bumming computer time.
ME: Isn't there some story where you scammed a little too much time and you got kicked off?
GATES: Yes, we did this thing where we proved you could steal the password file on this PDP-10, and then Paul and I were banned from using the computer for a year. Then six months into it I find out that Paul has found a computer up at electrical engineering, and has been using it without even telling me. He'd been using it the whole summer, and the whole three months. It was a great computer. So then I was like, Paul, why didn't you tell me? And Paul actually was better than I was at finding things up on the campus. There was one we got into physics at night, the EE one was the ninth grade one. There was one down in the medical center.
So this idea that computers would be a neat thing to have, and that you could do some interesting things…literally, we'd written Monopoly game programs, and recipe card programs, all sorts of goofy stuff. So when we saw that magazine it was the thing that Paul and I had been talking about happening was happening, and it was happening possibly without us.
So in a way we were sad, it was a cold, Boston winter…it's December that it's there on that magazine stand and we buy it. And we're sitting there going, oh no! It's happening without us! So that's when we call them, from the dorm, and say, hey, we can give you a Basic interpreter. We can license you a Basic interpreter to really make people able to use this thing. And they said, that sounds interesting. So then we went to work, and four weeks later we had the first version, which we used this brilliant simulation technique.
Then I called them up and said, hey, how do you get characters, if you connect a teletype up, what's the I/O port, and the character-ready bit mask to get characters in and out of this thing? And the guy on the other end, his name was Bill Yates, he was the real designer of the thing, although Ed Roberts is the name everybody knows, said, that's interesting. You must really have some software, because nobody has ever asked us before how you get characters in and out of the thing. Let me look it up and call you back.
So he calls me back and then two weeks later Paul flies out with the paper tape, which I stayed up all night checking to see that the book that describes this processor, that we read it right. If we just had one little thing about how you include instructions wrong he was going to fly out there, this paper tape would load up and nothing would happen. Nothing. We had to have everything right. So it was such a miracle.
They had never had a machine with 4k of memory before. So [Allen] writes the bootstrap loader on the plane coming out, loads it in, and the thing runs, and it runs fast, because our simulator was fairly inefficient. So Paul calls me up and says, damn, this thing works!
June 8, 2007 11:35
Will Smith Is Legend. Legend Has Nice Abs
Trailer's up for I Am Legend. It's a last-man-on-earth story, based on a science fiction novel I've never read (anybody?) I believe Will Smith plays the sole survivor of some kind of nuclear catastrophe -- the Brooklyn Bridge bites it in the trailer, anyway, the victim of an air-to-surface missile attack. Smith does lots of chin-ups (personally I would let myself go) and races around in a sports car. Then some vampires turn up, I think, though they didn't make it into the trailer.
Good trailer. Chances of actual movie not sucking...I'm gonna say 60%? The director is Francis Lawrence, who I'm happy to see is out of movie jail after his first movie, Constantine, under-performed. Speaking as the only person who liked Constantine, this strikes me as good news.
It puts me in mind of a book that's out next month, Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which I want to read, about what, hypothetically, would happen to the planet if humanity disappeared. Apparently, as far as Manhattan goes, it works like this: the subways flood; skyscraper foundations erode; skyscrapers fall down. Oh, and all the roaches die. It would almost be worth it.
June 7, 2007 11:19
Bill Gates Is Not Running for Prom King
I don't generally like to work when I'm on vacation. I like to vacation when I'm on vacation. But I got an e-mail last week saying that Bill Gates was thinking about doing some press around his Harvard Commencement address today, and whenever there's a chance to talk to Gates, I take it. Hence my getting on a plane to Seattle on Sunday.
As an interview subject, Gates never disappoints. It's pretty electrifying to hear him talk about the early days, when he and Paul Allen were kicking around Cambridge reading chip ads in Electronics magazine and figuring out how all this stuff was going to go down. He's also a surprisingly funny, warm presence.
But as terrifyingly effective as he was as a CEO, it may all end up being a footnote to his work as head of his foundation. He's got $60 billion to work with (that's factoring in Warren Buffett's gift, which will take a while to fully kick in). He's not running a business, so he doesn't have to worry about taking on risk. And no one is going to hire David Boies to defend a malaria parasite.
Anyway, the piece is here. I'll tease you with this rousing nugget of cultural history:
Gates wasn't just the nascent titan of a new industry. He was the harbinger of that quintessential fin de millennium American type, the power nerd. He didn't have social skills, but then again, he wasn't running for prom king. The forces that were reshaping the world weren't political or cultural anymore; they were technological, and if you knew where the bits and bytes were buried, you had the power. Long before the dotcom boom, long before it was hip to be square, Gates crossed over to the dork side.
Update: "they" put quite a bit of the audio of the interview here. Listen to Bill Gates and myself geek out about the wild west days of personal computing, explain away his C+ in organic chemistry, and compete for who has the squeakiest voice.
About Nerd World
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman blogs about anything and everything that could be plausibly labeled geeky--science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books, tech stuff, and so on. If it could get you beaten up in junior high, it's fair game. About the Author
Matt Selman
Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer. About the Author
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