Made out of people

Excel Treemapper

Now on Raindrop: The Excel Treemapper. Check it out.

When Usability Goes Wrong

Usability people are good folk. It's important to be out there for the user, asking how a message will be interpreted, what will be read, and what's the clearest way to phrase it.

But sometimes, the usability person's notes don't cut it.

In this case, for example, I'm pretty sure that there was an original error message: "The server could not handle your request. Please try again." And the usability expert wrote some comments to guide them:

• What do you mean by "server"?
• What sort of "request" did the user make? They thought they were playing a media stream!
• How did it fail?
• In what way should they try again? Do they need to tweak a setting?

The developer--who really doesn't care about error messages--promptly answered those questions. With this display:

which manages to answer every question, but not handle any of them.

But I'm glad that if I ever need to find out what a server is, I can just check my smartphone's error message.

An embarassment of riches

Apparently, GMail has decided that they are stable enough to spread 50 invites at a shot. Astoundingly, eBay still has 'em for $0.89 (or $2.25 for 50).

Are we seeing some limit on the ways that networks spread? I'd pretty much figure that anyone who wants one has one -- I can't imagine that they're expecting to see all 50 go.

JUNG & Netscan on Many-to-Many

Ross Mayfield has been chatting with Marc Smith about Netscan

His blog entry (and the associated Flickr series) shows some cool pictures of the reply-to network in Usenet: that is, the network of who replies to messages by someone else.

Of course, the images are generated with JUNG, the open-source network calculation and visualization package.

This is particularly interesting in the context of AOL dropping newsgroup support which has been much-discussed ( here and here and here and here )

I'll put in my own two-cents worth below the fold...

There are a number of good reasons why AOL might want to drop newsgroup support. Some people have pointed out that Usenet is less of a critical resource than it once was, and more people are moving to blogs and other fora.

It's definitely the case that Usenet-sans-binaries has remained roughly flat for a while. Here's the number of daily posts, as recorded by Netscan, over the last four years, MINUS ALL POSTS IN ALT.BINARIES (x axis is the number of days since January 1, 2000. Sorry for the awkwardness, but I don't feel like fighting Excel right now.)

So here's how I read the AOL story:

AOL has historically viewed itself as an editor (presenting a happier bit of the internet), I can imagine that maintaining newsgroups have perpetually been a thorn in their sides: a quick skim through the titles sees a distressing amount of sex and pirated and cracked. Especially if their interface is one of the traditional “here’s 30K newsgroups, which do you want?” types.

Combine that with their lawsuit from Harlan Ellison and the fact that newsgroups have to sit on their own server (which means that AOL is “storing” and “holding” the data, which might make them liable), and I can see their desire for getting rid of them.

So I’d read it this way:

• AOL figures that Google Groups is taking up the slack for them (for people who are not seeking binaries)
• AOL figures that Easynews (and similar) will take up the slack for them (for people who are seeking binaries, especially dubiously-legal ones)
• AOL figures that either way, any liability that follows Usenet around becomes not their problem
• AOL gets to not ship and support a newsreader

And, from the AOL perspective, Usenet is flat (as seen above).

There’s growth on microsoft,public, more mixed on the rest of Usenet. Here’s daily post counts for all of Usenet, minus all posts to alt.binaries. It’s pretty much flat, possibly downward trending.

Doesn't mean that Usenet isn't interesting -- just that they are less likely to lose customers over not having it.

Update: Similar thoughts at Tim Jarret's

Maybe I'll pack him a nice shiny late-2004 vintage Treemap.

Telephone opportunity?

Some interesting things have happened with the IM market. In particular, each of the serivces has a huge degree of lock-in. If I'm an AIM user, it's a serious pain for me to chat with an MSN user or a Yahoo user. So you see two different response patterns:

• I try to convince my friends to use my tool of choice.
• I change to a tool that my friends use.
• I use more than one tool and thus try to cover all my various friends.

Obviously, option (1) is the one that a service wants me most to do. If I can't do that, I should at least do option (3): then there's a fair chance I can make them convert ("Dude! YIM has superhero figures!" "Yeah? AIM is native to my mac!") Whatever happens, of course, I shouldn't do (2).

Interestingly, the cell phone companies are trying for the same thing. Recently, we've seen ads from T-Mobile, Verizon, and ATT/Cingular all advertising something like

• Free conversations with other people within the network
• Substantial discounts to "share" an account (that is, split the minute budget) with another person the network.

But, wait. If I split a line with a friend, and then call pretty much only people within the network, I pay nothing except the price of the shared line.

They hope this leads to strategy 1, of course: that I can convince them to leap over. They disincentivize strategy 2 by putting huge costs on dropping. And strategy 3 used to be too expensive.

So here's the plan. I'll get together with two friends. I'll buy a T-Mobile phone, and then get two shared lines, and give one to each of them. They'll do the same with Verizon and Cingular. It'll cost me 1 month (minimal minutes) plus 2 "add a lines" per month. I have three numbers, sure -- but that's no different than having an MSN, an AIM, and a YIM ID.

And splitting minimal minutes isn't too bad when you don't use any for most calls.

Now all I need is someone to physically build a Trillian unit that takes three SIM chips and acknowledges three phone numbers...

Photos out of windows

Blogging from Cordoba, old seat of the Roman & later Visigothic Spanish empires, old Moorish capital, home to Maimonides. From an internet machine in the back of "Bar Hollywood" which is running IE 5.0, and thus cannot run Gmail. Since all popups are blocked, I can´t use a lot of websites...

So I´ve been thinking for a bit about the fact that I like to take pictures of scenery out of bus windows. The pictures inevitably turn out to be crap, of course:

- Busses are moving fast, so some scenery is blurry
- Busses are bouncy, so some stuff is shaky
- The windows are dirty, so some stuff has smears in front of it.

Now, the fact that it´s scenery gives us a few nice advantages.

The first of these is a problem of shutter speed; I don´t know how to solve it. But it doesn´t bother me much, if it´s close enough to parallax, it isn´t scenery. Scenery is stuff that stays still when you don´t. The second is interestingly solved by my camera already.
The third should be solvable if the human can contribute a little more information. Specifically, I´m happy to do several things to help improve the shot.

I could move the camera a little, and thus move the dirt marks. I could zoom the shot a little, and thus change the relative location of the (close up) dirt from the (far off) scenery. Last, I could take a bunch of shots and reconstruct an image.

Not many shots, of course: the scenery is doing a lot of moving. But at least a few shots. What if my camera was willing to go into "moving" mode, and I took eight shots on the spot while wobbling my camera around a little? (My camera has this already, just for a different purpose). We could then use reconstruction techniques to build a map of where the dirt was. Call the rest "signal".

Now, of the dirt, some images have it, some don´t. I´m not completely sure how to separate... do we assume that dirt is dark? It occurs to me that there´s a better way: we already know that dirt doesn´t look like the rest of the stuff around it.

So look for places where the area isn´t "smooth", at least compared to the other images around it. Sure, sometimes the "not smooth" will be a castle or something in the background -- but that will be the same for all the images with the castle.

Now, this is a pretty simple idea, and an extension of a technique that´s been around since the 70s. Anyone know of an implementation? I have some images to test it on... or I will when I return. Assuming my iPod doesn´t get stolen or lost or eaten by a grue or suffer a hard disk crash.

For the true fanatics: have a copy of the hand gestures to Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. because ... well, it came across a mailing list.

Movin', an iPod

Cleaning the remains of my apartment while listening to my new iPod ("really, it's a data storage solution for my trip.") The original plan was to progressively delete music from the iPod as I took pictures, and thus leave me plenty of space for both entertainment and photos.

I plan to travel for six weeks without a laptop, and thus without iTunes, the iPod driver program.

And I'm now realizing that there's no easy way in the interface to delete a song on the iPod. Which means that this irritating truncated Phillip Glass bit is going to stay there. As are the songs that I don't particularly like. And I'm going to have to make all decisions about the stuff that I want to listen to before I get on the outgoing plane ...

Yes, I don't really expect to take 40 GB of pictures on the road. But I also don't want to limit myself to not taking pictures because I'm out of space. The idea that the iPod is a write-only device when unlinked to a computer is a little worrisome.

Any suggestions?

Update: No, I really am not taking my laptop. I don't need the extra pounds for six weeks of travel. Nor the extra breakability. Plus what sort of vacation is it if I have a laptop?

Blogs, Personality, and Community: A Technical Response

I seem to have generated a little bit of discussion off of my comments on personality.

Netwoman responds to my post on personality, and brings up the idea of the "community" around a post, or around a blog.

One of the major problems with blogs (in general) and aggregators (in particular) is that they tend to be fairly static about which conversations I'm involved in. In particular, I choose a list of blogs, and my aggregator presents it to me. If I join a conversation on a post -- by responding to the post, say -- the conversation still drifts away into the past. I need to manually go out, remember that I've been part of a post, and check it for comments every once in a while.

Some people have gone ahead and attached a little RSS feed for each post, so I can (manually) subscribe to the conversation attached to the post. This is certainly a good start; it lets me track the comments on a single note, and turns the comment into a social, online place. (Sorry, LiveJournal readers: I can't imagine that under their dominant metaphor--that of "friends"--you'd particularly want to make "friends" with one of my posts, and the comments under it. But I could be wrong.)

Still, I can't help but feel that this isn't all. What if I was auto-subscribed to every page that I left a comment on? The metaphor is that I've got a stake in the conversation, now--so it adds me to the conversation. It's entirely possible, of course, that the conversation will go nowhere--but that's ok, the RSS feed will just fade off into the distance.

I'm not the first person to mention this-- see here for example.

Can we go a step further? What if my browser tried to subscribe me to an RSS feed for every page I looked at, if it's offered? Most of the pages are pretty static (so I wouldn't care) or are revisited frequently (so it would be mimicking my current behavior anyway)--but for conversations where I had clicked through the feed to the article, I'd get a little background on the page.

Now we'll need a few constriants: there are certainly some pages I would want to not remind me constantly that I'd touched them--but I wonder whether adding this sort of reminder would be a valuable tool? Sounds like I should push it onto my list of extensions-to-do-someday. (Can someone else? Please?)

Design and Accomodation

I like to think of myself as a little bit (just a little bit, mind you, but still) of a user interface designer, who gives some thought to the way that interfaces work. And that means that I feel like I can complain in interesting ways about stuff that's kind of broken.

I was humbled at ASA 2004 when I realized I was seeing the world from the wrong perspective.

(Continued, with visual aid ...)

So I'm in the elevator, and the people I'm with notice these odd buttons. One set goes up, the other down.

This, I can tell you, is no good at all. I have to remember which side of the elevator I'm on in order to know how to read the display. I can't just glance over at the panel and tell whether my stop is coming up soon, or which buttons are pressed. A top side button on the left means "low numbered floors," while a top side button on the right means "high numbered floors."

Very confusing. Obviously done by a designer who had never met a user.

So we asked the bellhop, who matter-of-factly said, "Well, we have many guests who come here in wheelchairs. This way, they can reach all the buttons."

Oh.

Clear iconography

As a bicyclist, some days I need this sort of humbling reminder ... in clear, simple iconography.

Blogs and Personality

I'll have to think about this issue for a little while. Last Wednesday evening, I met Howard Rheingold for the first time. He's an old friend of my future boss and with Barry and so he had some members of the Netlab and I over to dinner. Howard and I spend some time deep-thinking about blogs, wikis, group and individual editing -- it's all out there in a post that I will try to write shortly.

That evening, I sent out the post that said that Microsoft had officially hired me, and shortly thereafter I got an email from Howard:

Didn't realize yesterday that your blog has been on my aggregator for a
while!

How odd ... Howard Rheingold has been reading my blog for a while. I met him, we talked, and he had no idea who I was. His explanation was that

RSS does tend to remove the personality from blogs and strip it down to
the content of the entries.

which isn't false, but something is missing. The great marvel of blogs over (for example) Usenet is that while Usenet is topic-oriented, blogs are author-oriented. I read a blog because I believe the author (or authors) has something distinctive to say to me. Some of them I choose due to point of view, such as political blogs; others I choose by topic area (Many2Many); others by friendship.

In all of them, though, I thought that I was looking for Authorial Voice. If I want random discussion of a topic, after all, there's Slashdot and Metafilter and--yes--Usenet. But if I want to follow the quirks of a particular person, I hit their blog.

But in that case, something is going horribly wrong if authorial voice is lost in the RSS feed. Am I just one part of a greater link filter, or a slightly more-profound idea-filter? Is, in other words, Howard producing his very own Slashdot (or New York Times) in which lots of anonymous articles bubble up, to be read and contemplated and, once in a while, the writer pokes through? This suggests that the "distinctive" hypothesis is wrong.

Instead, perhaps, consider the "seal of quality" hypothesis. My name on my blog isn't so much my voice, but instead my promise that all my entries are up to my own standards. They trivially are, of course: I wrote them. (Not universally true: Lawrence Lessig brings on a slew of guest bloggers.) So rather than trusting a single paper ("The New York Times") to do the editing, Howard (or my hypothetical reader) is trusting me to do my editing, and is giving up the shared editorial voice that something like the Times gives you.

The analogy runs slightly false, here: for one, the Times doesn't quite offer my blog, in all it's bloggy goodness. This is it. Your only source for "Made Out Of People." For another, and this is the worrisome question, the question that could keep me up at night, were I to let it--why does Howard trust me to edit a blog, but doesn't know me well enough to know if I write it?

Or am I just reading too much into the story of a guy with a few hundred RSS feeds?

What I'm wrestling with here is the question of what it means to author a (non-journal, not-necessarily-personal) blog.

Design is hard ... but not that hard.

Just when I think I truly hate electronic ballots, I discover something like this

Palm Beach County has introduced an absentee ballot that requires voters to indicate their choices by connecting broken arrows, sparking criticism that it is even more confusing than the infamous "butterfly ballot" used in the 2000 election.

Theresa LePore, the elections supervisor who approved the 2000 butterfly ballot, opted for a ballot design for the Aug. 31 primary that asks voters to draw lines joining two ends of an arrow.

This is mind boggling.

Incidently, the absenteee instructions (and, yes, the url really does end with .pdf.pdf) has this image to clarify.

Apparently, this "tested" as the best choice. Via Crooked Timber. What's wrong with a circle to fill in, like the SATs?

(Incidently, I've used "arrow fill in" ballots that ran about a quarter inch, and thus were essentially boxes. This looks to be more like an inch or so, and as such seems to be good guesswork.)

You may learn more about the innovative designer who has brought this to us at her biography.

Terrible registration experience

So I decide to register my brand new Adobe product.

The label says "You can register your products online at www.adobe.com/support."

I can handle that, and I go to that page. Nowhere to register. (Can you find it?)

I end up dropping into the search engine, and searching for "product registration", which gets me here. That's a good start, although I have no idea how I'd have found it on my own.

(Note: The last of these three issues is already mentioned at This Is Broken)

[more below the fold]

Enter the basic information

So I enter the relevant information (serial number deleted). Unfortunately, there's no choices to enter my product version:

Fine. I hit submit anyway, and get an error message. Fortunately, the error screen now has a couple of choices to hit.

So I select a choice (why this ordering? "7, 6, 5.5, 7.1"?) and now I can move onward.

Almost registered

Sounds like I'm getting somewhere. Just one more form to fill out: my Adobe ID. Here's the form:

I think I used to have one, but I don't remember. That's a pain. Good thing there's a "forgot your password?" button. I'll press it.

Ok, forget it. I give up. They lose.

Update:
Ok, so I didn't completely give up. I put the URL of this entry at the Adobe customer service form which auto-sent me this response:

Thank you for your interest in Adobe product registration.
Register your Adobe product online to receive expert technical support, new product announcements, special offers, and early notice of product upgrades. Products downloaded from the Adobe Store are automatically registered at time of purchase.

For information on finding your serial number, read the Adobe knowledgebase document "Locating your Adobe serial number."
http://www.adobe.com/support/salesdocs/10686.htm

ERDPS: 1090887253.13744.4 (DO NOT DELETE THIS LINE)

I'm not impressed yet.

Update, 7/29/04
bq.. Hello Danyel,

Thank you for contacting Adobe Customer Service.

For your records, your customer ID number is 113606378. The customer ID
number is the easiest way for us to access your account in our database.
In the future, please reference this number when you contact Adobe.

If you would like to register your product online, please visit the
Adobe® Web site at the following URL:

https://www.adobe.com/store/customerregistration/your_account.jhtml

*Note: Either login with your Adobe ID you created, or register for an
Adobe ID.

For further information on registering your Adobe products, please visit
the following customer support page:

http://www.adobe.com/support/salesdocs/217e.htm

Also, visit the following URL on the Adobe Web site for the latest
customer service and technical information:

http://www.adobe.com/support/main.html

The information provided is documented in case #: 1990421.

For more information on Adobe® products or services please visit us at:
http://www.adobe.com or contact Adobe customer services at 1 (800)
833-6687. Customer Service Representatives are available 6:00am-8:00pm
PST, 7 days a week.

Best Regards,

Sarah Y.
Adobe Customer Service

Well, THAT clears it all up.

Small things make a difference, I suppose

Ze Frank writes:

I recently changed the front page of the scribbler - instead of going directly to the app, a screen allows you to branch to the gallery, about, robot, and live vid stuff. the reason i mention it is that such a small change in presentation (not content) has led to a 3 fold increase in traffic to the scribbler. small things make a difference i suppose. i'm going to where my underpants inside out today.
bq. - Saturday, July 3, 2004 09:58 a.m.

[More below the fold]

For a while, I've been thinking about how things we consider small can make a surprising difference. As a techie, for example, I am very aware how trivial it is to make small changes to, say, a user interface: to redraw a line slightly thicker, to put text inside a box rather than outside it. It's easy enough that I often don't think about it--I just put something down and worry about it later.

Turns out that users care. Turns out that other techies care, even if they fervently deny it. This is no surprise to the graphic design community, of course: there's a reason why there can be an entire conference around typefaces -- and, of course, I write this on the eve of the biannual attempt to encourage HCI people and designers talk to each other, DIS.

But I digress. Part of the intent of my research with Martin on multiscale analysis of visualizations (read the paper referenced at bottom) was to try to describe what sort of difference these small things made.

We found some results that were startling to us--even though we both work frequently in this space. His Market Map looked far better with a small tweak to alter the thickness of edges. (This is documented a little bit in the paper).

And here's a redesign that Inxight did of its own hyperbolic tree. The lighter version is a lot easier to read, and figure out what's going on.

The code difference is probably all of ten lines.

After that, my own work got a substantial redesign too.

Naming Conventions

In which the author tearfully confesses a series of abysmal research project naming conventions, and realizes he has managed nearly all of them in his dissertation work:

Updated to correct date typo

1. Encyclopedia Brown That is, a project is named after clever-if-obscure reference. Thus, for example, my dissertation's infrastructure is named "Soylent" (because it's made out of people). Those who get it may or may not enjoy the extra layer of reference to the server name for this blog (DrZaius).

1. BicapitalizedNaming Remember when everything was about MungedTogether names? I need not actually name names, but I will admit that my dissertation's first-ever application is called "TellMeAbout."

1. SUI2C (Silly Unpronouncable Initials To Confuse). GNU may not be Unix, and YACC may be yet another compiler compiler, but "Bison" is an obscure reference (see above). "EE4P" is Enhanced Email for People; after a team of undergrads had played with the system enough, it stuck.

1. MASIT (Meaningless Acronyms Spell Irrelevant Terms). I once was involved in a project named EUPHORIA (End User Production of grapHical interfaces fOr Really Interactive distributed Applications). I'm now on an open source project, JUNG, the "Java Unified Network/Graph infrastructure". The title--containing a vague reference to a pychologist--is awfully hard to find in a Google search.

I think that's my own list of sins--how's your naming convention doing?

Update Auros reminds me of one important additional type:

1. Strawberry2Blueberry As far as I can tell, most software spends most of its time converting one thing to another: a graph to a list, unicode to ascii, Java to Fortran, whatever. While I'm fairly sure that I haven't committed that particular sin much, it's certainly still with us in all sorts of code.

ClearType and Rotating Monitors

Ok, so I love ClearType: it really does make my monitor look prettier. Enough prettier, I'm afraid, that I really don't like having it off. Which means that my nicely rotating monitor, perfect for displaying a full sheet of text, never gets rotated. Because when I rotate it, I need to turn off ClearType. (CT depends on attributes of the ways that pixels are physically aligned on the screen.)

Any solutions? Is there a perpendicular ClearType driver out there somewhere?

Games and Sound II

In my last entry, I talked about a variety of game sounds, and discussed some of the technologies for adaptive music systems linked to sound. In this entry, I’d like to spend a few minutes on some of the ideas that I see growing from that.

In my last discussion, I emphasized “subtle”. Here’s part of why. My friend had talked about cartoon-type sound tracks: when you walk up the stairs, for example, the game would play “stair climbing” music, perhaps with each successive note getting higher: “plunk plonk plenk plink!” When you walked down, it would play it getting lower. Users want power over their games, and many try to explore every inch of the game world, and—wow! That’s a mini-game. What happens when I walk half-way up, then turn around? And jump off? And then walk up again? The user, now actively playing the game of “learn about the sound system,” has forgotten about the underlying game of “shoot the enemy,” and is now wandering around the sound system.

Presumably, that's not realy a game goal, or a direction the designer is trying to go. And it's a distraction, rather than an enhancement, to the game.

So let’s grant that this is a cartoon world. Give me the goal of generating Carl Stalling¹ music: a good solid trombone “thwaap!” when you throw a pie; a “sneaky” theme when you get on tip-toes, and so on. Carl Stalling, however, had an advantage that no game player ever will: he knew what was happening next. And as such, a lot of his music anticipates the next step: the trombone subtly sneaks out of the theme so that it can be ready with the surprising “thwaap!”; the touch of cymbal anticipates the sound of sneaking around the corner, and so readies you for the rimshot when you are discovered.

But when a character is wandering around the world, you can’t be sure that he will be compliant. How do you ensure that the pie will be thrown on beat? How can you know whether the AI will catch him (and so the sneaking / rimshot combination is correct), or whether he’ll make it past (and so a different music set might be more rewarding)? In other words, a movie composer can see into the future, and a game designer can’t.

There are certainly clever solutions--I talked yesterday about a skating game that melded into a (beat-less) riff at the beginning of a jump, and so could hit a downstroke when the board touched ground. I also got a comment on the last article, discussing a game with different zones, and a bunch of bridges between them. As the player moved between zones, the different bridges would smoothly play. Which meant that the music would shift seamlessly as the player wandered about the world.

But can we do better?

A number of years ago, I saw a dynamic adaptive music system out of Microsoft Research. I don’t recall the name offhand, but it was a research project that allowed a user to start with a basic musical theme. It would then produce simple variations on that theme based on notions like “louder” or “faster” or even “more exciting” and “funkier.” As you played the music, you could order it to get solemn, and the system would smoothly transition to playing solemnly.

So in my mind, an adaptive sound system could use that sort of idea to generate a system that pays attention to the user’s state. Like Splinter Cell, it might play different music for “seen” or “visible”—but it might do better than that. Let’s look at a few dimensions that really are available to the system. Let’s pick a simple first-person shooter with a stealth component (say, “Counterstrike” or something like that).

• How vigorously is the character moving? He is now running / jumping / walking / crouching / hiding against a wall

• What’s his military stance? He is unarmed / ready with a tool / armed with a small sneaky knife / has a shotgun in one hand

• How’s he doing? powerful / ok / wounded / hopped up on steroids / about to die

• Does anyone see him? a guard just noticed / alarms have been sounded / no, he's in the clear

You can even add an aspect of judging the gameplay:

• He’s got a knife? He is sneaking up behind a guard / he is insanely running into a machine gun nest.

• He’s got a shotgun? good way to kill a zombie / useless against a horde of soldiers

• Is he running into battle / away from battle / covering great distance with no enemies near.

And so on. I think you can probably handle this combination of stuff with both ambient music and event sounds. And there might be more than one theme to be explored with its variations. But I think that setting up a couple of axes to the system could then allow dynamic, unpredictable music to be generated. The composer lays down the theme and works out how its variations will be played—but the game is responsible for putting the pieces together to decide when to play “sneaky” or “sneaky with spotted” and even “sneaky, and sneaking up behind the bad guy.”

My suggestion, then, is that with a system that knows something about how to score different sorts of music--on a subtler level than "louder" or "softer"--you might be able to do this with fewer than the nasty-seeming combinatoric matrix of sounds. Start with a few themes, adaptively twist them for different moods...

Just a thought.

--
I should point out that none of this is new: again, I'm a non-expert. A google search for "adaptive music" finds hundreds of hits; Gamasutra has an interesting article from 2001 about adaptive music, which touches on some of these points..

Indeed, I just noticed Adaptive Audio that engages some of these issues, including two very interesting case studies.

Games and Sound

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a friend who is deeply involved in the music design business for video games. After an undergrad degree in movie music composition, he got involved in the core design team for a major game sound platform.

This is a two-part blog entry. In this, I’ll talk a little about the unfortunate state of the game music industry—as summarized to a non-expert, over a beer or two, after a long day of doing other things. Again, I'm NOT AN EXPERT: I don't even play a lot of games. Rather, a conversation has stirred thoughts, and I want to talk about them.

In the next, I’ll blue-sky for a few little bit about possible designs for more adaptive, dynamic music in game systems. Neither, I’m afraid, will be explicitly about anything being made out of people: however, this entry is about the social process involved in game design; the next entry is about the use of creative design for sound systems, based loosely on some of my various work.

My friend was discussing his work as a designer and as a consultant. He’s the program manager for the system, but spends a lot of time going to trade shows and game companies, evangelizing the facilities that his system provides, discussing the technical aspects of it, and exploring different ways that it can be used. His API essentially makes it easier to connect game events to sounds, and thus allows the composer’s job to be less programming-intensive.

This helps with some of the basic issues: it provides a vocabulary for wiring game events to sounds, so that it’s easier to code “the enemy fired a bullet, forward and to the right”. (*Update*: In case I wasn't clear before, this is pretty classic. In lots of games, audio is a crucial gameplay aspect in figuring out what's going on, is is a useful second cue. I'm more thinking about whether audio can be more sophisticated than the fairly realist take of "I step, and it goes 'thock.'")

Unfortunately, game audio is too often an afterthought. He complained about game designers who bring in music “because it’s missing something; someone has to make it fun,” who hire composers after the game is nearly finished, or who just ship out the sound design to a couple of interns.

Thus, in a world where the game developer has the resources to locate 3-D sound anywhere around the player, who can simulate curtains and echoing walls and footsteps, who can generate music on the fly, the designers often settle for a loop of music in the background and a line of recorded sounds in the foreground. This makes for a fairly dull experience, when sound might conceivably lighten the game up and add a great deal of subtle excitement.

Subtle, of course, is the critical word. It’s easy to see a good graphics system, and it’s fairly quick to observe good game AI. But what does good sound sound like? “Well, it’s CD quality” doesn’t cut it: is it exciting? Is it fun? Does it build on the game experience? Unfortunately, humans are far more sensitive to—or at least have better vocabulary for describing—video than audio, and so the music is often under-evaluated. Press kits include videos and pictures, but never game sounds without pictures. While game soundtracks are becoming popular, that’s more of a celebrity music track than it is music as part of the game. (My friend pointed out that many game reviews never bother to mention the sound at all, or limit themselves to words like “realistic” and “amusing”.)

The unused potential is nearly infinite. Think of a character walking behind a curtain ringing a bell. As the player moves around, a good ray-trace should be able to determine whether the bell sounds local or distant, muffled or loud. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of work—and rather computationally expensive. Yes, some of that information is already available to the game engine: after all, it’s doing some ray-tracing already to figure out where the curtain is, and whether the player can see it. But the graphics-oriented ray tracing system is oriented towards things that are visible, and “behind a curtain, and behind the player” isn’t quite there. (I have seen an old SIGGRAPH paper on ray tracing sound, but no matter how you see it, the system gets expensive: is that payoff to do so much work worth it when you can approximate? “In this room, play the sound quietly; in that room, play it loud”.)

Of course, the bleak picture I paint above isn’t the only thing that’s happening today.

First, music oriented games think hard about music. Amplitude dynamically mixes tracks, and adds other audio cues both to direct the game-play and to provide feedback on success, Dance Dance Revolution uses music to guide the player’s steps (to some extent—I’ll have to blog about that some other time), and uses crowd applause to reward skillful play. Space Channel 5 synchronizes the game around music.

Second, one can do moderately-more sophisticated variants of the linear play. For example, the recorded samples in a game might have slight variants: a footstep might sound randomly slightly different; a gun cartridge casing might eject with either a “plink” or a “thunk.” The music might vary level by level, or even region by region. And ambient music can be played out in different ways. For example, many games have an “outdoor ambient” track: it’s the birds chirping, the crickets humming, and the wind blowing. While the game may use up to a minute or so of this track, they often simply repeat the track over and over. Users begin to notice this, and start to get bored: “ah, the crickets have chirped. Next, we’ll hear some wind.”

In contrast, Microsoft’s “Halo” works slightly differently. The same minute has been recorded, but now it’s sliced into five-to-ten second segments. Those segments are played back in a largely random order, which creates a constant sense of novelty.

Last, one can synchronize the music with the action to create a more integrated experience. It’s this, actually, that I’m most interested in, and will be discussing more in my next entry. But to start off, there’s a couple of variants that are worth noting: one is the ways of cueing different sorts of music to the action. For example, “Splinter Cell” plays different music when enemies have spotted you and are actively hunting, as opposed to when you are unspotted. (It also plays louder footsteps for running than walking, and so gives some feedback to how audible you might be to an opponent).

My friend also discussed a snowboarding game, with DJ-mixed music in the background. When the player did a trick, the system always made sure that there was a solid downbeat at the moment the snowboard hit the snow again—which added a bit of emphasis to the jumps. (Turns out the system also played higher-pitched, quieter music during the jump, which helped ensure there was greater contrast upon landing.)

I think that’s a decent non-expert, birds-eye taxonomy of game sound. In my next entry, I’ll discuss some of my thoughts in those last categories: game music linked to game play.

When "Don't Be Evil" is hard

People have certainly pointed it out before. But once again, Google finds that its adwords program's idealistic constraints match poorly against reality.

One site recieves a letter:

At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain "language that advocates against an individual, group, or organization". As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site. I have reviewed your site and it contains language such as 'secretive, paranoid and vengeance-filled' which we will not allow to run on our site at this time.

(Perrspectives: Articles: Google's Gag Order)

It's an interesting issue. I have to admit I don't have a definite answer on this: I can see that Google doesn't want to sell adwords to hate groups, but it's hard to figure out where the right line is. A few years ago, a friend put together a website expressing a strong opinion about the Nike corporation, and bought adwords on "Nike Sweatshop." Would that have been against Google rules? It's hard to figure out -- but it's pretty clear from a search for adwords google censorship that this is not the only time this issue has been encountered.

Take THAT, Ubicomp!

William Tozier is unimpressed by the ubiquitous computing visions he's heard. Apparently, someone told him that his fridge will someday order his milk.

But, if I may say so, it’s the most irredeemably boring vision of the future I’ve heard for several decades. My fridge will order my milk? Thousands of man-hours of research and thought by diligent creative grad students and technicians and a few professors leads to the disintermediation of the ... shopping list industry? What happens to all the innumerable real advances in multi-agent systems, smart materials, affective computing, and ubiquitous computing? We forget them, like the people in the Star Trek universe all forgot how to use an automatic pilot or a computer targeting system? (ref)

He wants a more exciting future vision:

My milk will sense it’s not feeling well, and will chat with the fridge and maybe ask it have a look-see with its extra senses and bring its extra smarts to bear, or ask some friends. Together they concoct a plan to remedy the situation. Maybe they do some chemistry. Maybe they develop some antibodies. Maybe they try to talk the bacteria out of their harshness, convert to a nice communal yoghurt and seek a permanent existence as a collective, nurtured and supported by the sheltering fridge. The least they can do is see it off to a noble end, with a little dignity, and make arrangements to take care of its progeny. (ref)

Four dimensions of english words

Via Language Log, a nifty visualization of 4-letter english words here (Written with Processing, which is incredibly pretty looking).

Each letter is a different dimension. X,Y,Z are each the second, third, and fourth letters of the word.

It's interesting, although it's got a few difficulties. I agree with Language Log that it really should do some sort of dimensionality reduction, and perhaps a shuffling of the elements: there's a lot of noise in the system from coincidences. (Specifically, the visualization implies that there is meaning to adjacency, that A is "closer" to B than it is to E. Is that true, linguistically?

Don't we have ways of measuring these things? Perhaps transforming it into another space--a pronunciation space, for instance--would be informative. Sort it by phonemes.

Random note

SEATTLE. Visiting Microsoft as a "guest researcher".

This evening, I saw my host's wife wandering about with a keyboard. "I need to reset my tablet pc," she said. "And to do that, I need to hit control-alt-delete. So I'm getting the remote control keyboard."

Wow. Keeping the keyboard for control-alt-delete.

Online Communities: more pointers

Some stuff I've run into in the last few days that seems like I should keep track of (isn't this what de.ico.us is for? yes.)

Full Circle Associates Online Blog
Full Circle Online Community Toolkit

And, also,
Teleconference on Making Visualizations of Complex Information Accessible for People with Disabilities

... an issue of some interest to me, partially since I understand that large software makers with government contracts end up making decisions about how accessible their software is relative to the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that brings up visualization design issues. More later, after I hear back from my favorite ADA compliance expert...

What is your airplane downloading?

As our flight began to depart Heathrow on its way back to the states, the seatback TVs all went blank. Then this message appeared. I suppose they were just getting the program and controls for the next flight, but it was a fairly odd experience to see an entire plane full of seatback displays all "downloading."

People taking pictures of themselves

I'm not really used to seeing this sort of advert in the US--I saw at least two or three billboards of people taking pictures of themselves. Note that this isn't just taking pictures with your cellphone--of your groceries, of your friends, of tourist sights--but of yourself.

Not sure what this means. Except that everyone who cleverly thinks they're the first person to point a digital camera at themselves is wrong. Do advertisements like this excite people (man, I need to get one of those cameras!), or does it stifle reinvention?

Small Children

Some messages pretty much speak for themselves.

Seen at the crepe shop, Irvine Spectrum.

Doing my part with Google

I just got an email from various interested parties mentioning a petition asking to remove JEWWATCH from Google¹. In particular, they want the Google rankinkgs to be modified so that it is no longer the number one site when you search on Jew (or even on Jew).

(This note, incidently, is not meant to criticise the guy who sent me the original message. It's clear that he was curious about why Jewwatch was down, and not pushing for me to sign anything.)

Google's response² was, I think, eminently reasonable: they have no interest in tweaking their algorithms to fix specific cases (except for those that expose weakenesses in the algorithms themselves). Indeed, I worry about the idea of Google single-handedly coming in and modifying the results. (One might think about how various groups might wish to affect results around notions like "abortion", or "intifada", or "gay"...)

Of course, I've also seen a fair number of Intenet petitions, very few of which seemed to do much of anything. (Which makes me wonder about the role and purpose of PetitionOnline, in which one can write a meaningless internet poll to push ANY cause).⁴

I'm reminded of an earlier internet poll that wanted to change How the Internet Worked. Usenet newsgroups (remember them?) could be added with a sufficient vote of interested parties. If enough chihuahua owners thought that we needed rec.pets.dogs.chihuahua, the group could be created. On the other hand, if more dog owners preferred to keep the groups together, the group might be stopped.

There's a lot of reasons why that might happen. For example, it's a pain to read too many groups--and so rec.pets.dogs would lose people who might have valuable things to say to the dog community.

A number of years ago (1996!), the Usenet newsgroup rec.music was feeling irritated at the population who really, really wanted to talk about white power music. And so they started a request for a new newsgroup. Word got out, with huge numbers of miunderstandings and confusions and well-intentioned Nazi stoppers⁵. A website describing the fiasco is still up, eight years later.

More recently, there was the stop the Taliban! petition (which I saw circulated even after the US had invaded Afghanistan). I'll leave others to your casual exploration at BreakTheChain, a site dedicated to ending online chain mail letters.

It's interesting to see that the limitless potential of the internet, its power to stir--as long as you don't actually have to move--is so often mistaken for real power and real movements.

I do the same thing myself...

---

¹ Oddly, the site has a few interesting (and conspicuous!) errors on it. For example, they write, "In order for google to remove this They would need a petition of over 50,000 requests". That is, I suppose, vacuously true: Google has made it clear that no number of requests will do it, that they aren't interested in a petition, and that they have already gotten "over 50,000" comments. So if you insist on knowing how many "more" petitions you need, the answer is "lots."

² Google points out³ that this is partially a linguistic shift. The word "Jew", used alone, is often somewhat derogatorily used; Jewish people say--well, "Jewish". A quick Google search shows a similar phenomenon for Gay vs Homosexual , for example.

³ I think that I have TextAd banner blindness. I had trouble finding that message. I tend to ignore the light blue background--which is a shame, because the ads are actually pretty good.

⁴ I suppose they are a way of proving that you can get a population of people who are aware of an issue. They are an answer to "no one is watching," or "no one cares"--but they are not an answer to "we have a better reason."

⁵ You, too, can stop the Nazis! Just SIGN THIS PETITION!

That nifty isometric infographics look

Matt Jones reminds me of the nifty Royksopp video Remind Me, in which an ordinary day is transformed into 80's style infographics. Beautiful stuff...

The same directors have apparently started a slick advertising campaign for a Canadian power company.

I wonder if one could generate such things interactively--my own displays look so dull in comparison!

He and others tie it to The Child by Alex Gopher and the rather disturbing Plaid:Itsu .

I'll throw in a reference to Jon Haddock's Isometric Screenshots . A disturbing and fascinating look at photographs and movie scenes you know well, except in SIMS-like isometric views.

I actually saw these on exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum's "Cyborg Manifesto" show. I stopped to listen to an elderly docent explaining the exhibit. A lively debate had started between the two of the visitors about whether these were photographs or paintings. ("But look! They're all from above, at the same strange angle!") ("Yes, it took quite an archivist to get all these shots!") The docent was pretty sure they were paintings, and thought that the point was that things look different from above.

No one was making headway.

I tried to explain that these were a parody of computer games, which allow the user to direct a character through scenarios--including violent ones. I got a lot of blank stares. This was not an audience that was ok with the concept of computer games, much less with parodies of them.

How do you get from Pong to this?

Multiple dimensions

Might you be a libertarian? Rate yourself on social and personal liberty

Maybe you sit better on a multiple-axis personality set: Myers-Briggs from Extroversion-Introversion; Sensing-Intuition; Thinking-Feeling; and Judging-Percieving.

Maybe the axes you need are dwarf-elf; ninja-pirate

It seems that we get these several-dimension systems every once in a while. I find them as cool as anyone else: I want to see where I fall onto various scales¹. I think that mostly what's fascinating about them is the fact that there is more than one dimension, and that gives them a certain degree of universality. We're all pretty annoyed at the charicatures of "left to right" or "good to evil," but with two dimensions---ah, with two dimensions, we can express some choices.

And we can draw it nicely on paper. Which leaves us with cool maps that are nicely clear and highly visible.

In other words, the 2×2 analysis appeals to our sense of fairness, our sense of balance. And it's hard enough that we can stick with the two, thankyouverymuch.

Of course, there's no guarantee that two dimension are nearly enough: for example, one research project that I was involved in casually found that movie preferences wanted something like five dimensions to cover the vast majority of the variation in the sample.

Perhaps five dimensions would be a more useful scale. Could we, perhaps, modify this usful system? We might now analyze a given person on the five-dimensional space of rockity, paperness, lizardicity, spockacity, and scissizznit.

--

¹ One friend of mine was taking an undergrad abnormal psychology class. A side effect of such classes is that all students end up reading, then ranking themselves and their friends, by the entirety of the DSM IV . She wandered about shouting that various people were "scale six!"--a reference to a five-point scale of adjustedness. I guess exceeding the bounds isn't quite the same sort of phenomenon, but it gives the same sense of placing people on a scale.

ET Needs Home

Edwart Tufte's popular Ask ET forum is being temporarily shut down while he crunches on his book.

I'm contemplating the merits of setting up a photo.net (OpenACS) server somewhere--it's the same thing he has--and see whether I can't convince a subset of the crowd to migrate over. It's a tricky adoption problem, and that's after I get it set up.

And assuming ET is interested in helping redirect traffic.

Unfortunately, the only volunteer I've found is offering a Windows server, and OpenACS seems to be less than stable on Windows.

Knowing what I do about online communities and adoption, I'm half-tempted to not bother. But I've found the fora serve a useful function for me, and it would be a shame to see it die off.

Broken Stuff

I rather like This Is Broken , Mark Hurst (of "Good Experience":[http://www.goodexperience.com/]) weblog of stuff that doesn't work.

I'm particularly pleased, of course, at my own contribution here
 

Target currently advertises the DVD of BASIC for $14.44, PRICE CUT from $19.99. But flip up the new price tag and see what was below it... the old price, of $14.44.

But you might also enjoy some of these others...

On useless buttons

Joshua points out this article: For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button:

The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined.

It seems that most of New York City's intersections are computer-controlled. They have automatic timers, and the value of allowing pedestrians to control them is vastly lower than than the value of keeping traffic smoothly. So the pedestrian lights flash on schedule, and everyone is happy.

Apparently, it's expensive to remove the buttons. So they don't.

That's not the part that bothers me. This is:

There are 750 locations where the buttons actually do work, Mr. Primeggia said. Some of them have been installed more recently, while others are holdovers from two decades ago. The working buttons are only at intersections where the walk signal will never come unless the button is pushed or a car trips the sensor, Mr. Primeggia said. He cited two examples, one at Hicks and Summitt Streets in Brooklyn and the other on Flatbush Avenue just south of the Belt Parkway exit ramp. But other working push buttons are hard to find. A random survey of more than 30 intersections in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan found one, at Marathon Parkway and 51st Avenue in Little Neck, Queens, that worked.

There are 3250 walk buttons. 2500 of them don't do anything. 750 of them do. There is no visible difference between the sets. There is no clear way to know which one they are. And if it works, it has a 90 second delay.

Interestingly, this problem reminds me of the challenges that public health educators have with safe sex messages. "Most of the people you have sex with don't have a disease. Of the ones who do, you won't always catch it. And of the ones who catch it, you won't know for a couple weeks or months."

Irregular, delayed feedback is an interesting problem. I've heard it suggested that the elevator "door close" is often just as much a fake--or also has a long enough delay to be nearly meaningless

Any other favorite examples?

On the Third Place, and Denny's

I don't end up watching TV much these days, between my dissertation work and my--well, not owning a TV. So I was startled to catch up with some of the rebranding which our various commercial sponsors are now interested in.

Quite a while ago, Starbucks started to try to brand itself as a "third place"--the evocative place for hanging out that we stay in after our work day has ended, but before we're ready to go home. Sort of a social place, to match the work and domestic aspects of our lives. This is the model of the British Pub, of course: and its what we strive for when we watch Cheers (set in a bar), or Friends (set in a large communal living room and a coffee shop). To some extent, it's even the third place featured in Seinfeld, when the group gathers at the local cafe to plan, talk, and run into strangers.

It makes sense for Starbucks to do so. They can seel a $2.50 cup of coffee, sure, but they slowly discovered that they had to sell a Starbucks lifestyle to go with it. Otherwise, you might pay $2.25 for the same cup from someone else. The Starbucks lifestyle, of course, means that you can sit down on a large comfy couch, read the Times, and meet interesting new people.

(When I first moved to Irvine, I was chatting with a friend. We met up for coffee at the local Starbucks, and he explained that this had once been his coffeeshop. But he met a girl there, and the relationship had eventually gone sour. And so he had to move to drinking at the other local coffeeshop. You know: as part of the relationship alimony settlement, she got the coffeeshop)

Update 2-28: It has been ever thus. The Economist compares today's coffeehouse to the coffeehouse of 1650.

Back to TV commercials. Denny's now seems to be advertising that they are " a good place to sit and eat." Their commercial isn't about convenience, or about being open at 3 in the morning, but about the sociability. I don't know if I buy it--is Denny's likely to hit Starbucks for a Grand Slam, by letting you buy a midafternoon burger and fries with the same enthusaism that you can get your cofeee?

Students seem to have a good knack for places that are good to sit and eat. Especially if it lets them gossip and work on homework at the same time. When I got to UCI, it had a nearby pricey coffee-shop, a pricey teashop, and a Denny's. The Denny's was almost always empty, at any hour; they closed down a few months after I got to town.

Of course, KFC is trying to convince you that they are "kitchen fresh." So we'll see where all that goes.

On Shiny Features and Dull Features

Someone mentioned during one of the HCIC talks that car makers often sell cars based not on gas milage, speed, efficeincy--but on the convenience of the cupholder. We heard from Nokia a long discussion of features on the cell phone company side: converting address books! transfering memory sticks! All this was pitched in terms of the out-of-the-box-user experience.

Something about that didn't ring a bell for me, though. I may just not be enough of a cell phone user, but I really don't care too much about the pain of transferring data from cell to cell. Sure, it's annoying--once every two years, for an hour and a boring half.

But the feature that I need, and that I will happily switch phones for, is a phone with a better battery life, better signal quality, and, on the outside, perhaps one that I can bring to Europe inexpensively. Really. The camera is cute, and the GPRS-to-bluetooth is fun for sending email from the airport, but that's not what I'm looking for. Indeed, I look with a bit of suspicion at the phone with the high quality ring synthesiser and the color screen: how much juice are they draining in order to flash me an animated logo at boot up?

But, I think, we've seen a change in the field. I don't see "talk time" advertised on the phone boxes and web sites in the way that it was three or four years ago. Is this because the batteries have gotten so good that we don't care-or is it because the makers have found it doesn't pay to advertise on that?

And why don't they? Is it customer demand, or is that they don't advertise on it because no one else advertises on it, and vice versa?

Perhaps we need several dimensions: There's Shininess, which are features that are slick to demo and easy to advertise. There's Smoothness, which are features that are easy for users to see, but hard to advertise ("hey, check out those cupholders!"). And then there is Strength, which are those more basic features--like actual talk time and --that are both hard to advertise and hard to see.

But these don't actually explain why we don't see advertisements with some guy chatting for six hours at a time: "The new Nokia XXXX lets you chat forever!" After all, we get the "Can you hear me now? Good!" ads, which are marketing on the range and quality of the network. But just barely: as far as I can tell, no one is counter-advertising ("no, our coverage is even better!").

--

I brought some of this up to Don Norman, who was at the conference. He pointed out a much simpler explanation: you don't advertise on your weakness. No one runs ads saying "Our coverage is terrible." You instead say "our color screen is REALLY vivid." And you don't advertise on it until you are ahead of the others. So if suddenly Nokia comes out with the six month battery life phone, they'll let you know. But until then, the users pretty much have their attention turned away from the weakness, and they buy another charger or two.

On the role of industrial research

PeterMe asks what Big Industrial Research is for: after all, he points out, lots of innovation comes from little companies and pairs of clever people putting stuff together--while MSR brought us Clippy.

peterme.com: Research and Development in Interaction Design

Now I have the good fortune to be a friend of arc Smith, to have been involved in parts of Remail, and to have an advisor who used to work at a prominent industrial research firm or two.

I've certainly heard a number of cynical takes on the role of research labs:

• They are recruiting and sales tools that raise the prominence of the organization.
• They are a form of corporate public service.
• They form a tie between the corporation (where work gets done) and the academic community (where research gets done).

There are more optimistic flavors: that having a research lab encourages innovation in a company that is large enough to start slowing down. Or that having a research lab means that you have interesting internal presentations on the state of the art that can help drive other development.

But let's assume it's all about the product.

Peter skips over several important transitions: how does the research get motivated? how does the research get transitioned into a product?

The latter question may be what actually kills research more often than other times: Bell Labs, famous for getting smart people together to do clever things, never solved that problem; neither did Xerox PARC (inventors of the mouse, the GUI, ethernet, and more cool stuff than you can imagine).

Times are changing a little. Research is now usually forced to orient their products at the company. For example, I know that some Microsoft researchers have explained that their own time is paid for by the company out of research funds, but any developers and hardware they get need to be provided by product groups that are willing to invest.

At IBM, to the best of my knowledge, research teams get some seed money from the company, but then need to contact product groups for matching funds: $1 from a product group will be matched by another dollar from the company.

This leaves groups in a variety of positions. One team at IBM had held onto the Little Red Dot long after it stopped being research because they needed the income stream from the laptop group.

The Remail team at IBM pushed hard against the Notes group to get money and interest in Remail. They succeeded, and built a working prototype, which they passed on to dev. I believe it's scheduled to be a product in a year or two.

Other groups keep a mix of 2-year horizon and 5-year horizon researchers around, trying to balance tomorrow's software with farther-future stuff.

This seems like where research really can shine: sure, it has a lot of failures. But it can also think in ways that small-business innovators can't. Peter listed a bunch of clever tools put together by small teams and innovators--but they don't have the access to large organizations to build big things.

And I think there's room for both. We need CmdrTaco to write up Slashcode (small), and we need someone to provide a few dozen terabytes for Marc to archive and cross-reference Usenet (medium) and we need someone with chip fab plants and machine rooms to build little red dots and advanced graphic cards.