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Did we mention that winter is coming? Y Combinator is funding less startups in its winter 2013 cycle—less than 50 so far, down from 84 this summer. To reach the smaller number, the accelerator focused on predictors of failure. Turned out, they took a friendlier view of applicants they met after lunch. [Y Combinator]

Ashton Kutcher's movie portrayal of Steve Jobs is set to debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013. But will the tech-savvy actor's film be overshadowed by another Jobs flick—written by Aaron Sorkin and based on the Walter Issaacson biography that's also in the works? [The Verge]

A judge gave preliminary approval to Facebook's plan to pay $10 to as many as 2 million users to settle a class action suit charging the social media giant with using members names without permission to advertise products in its "sponsored Stories" feature. Hurry, while supplies last. [Bloomberg]

Apple and Android operating systems have made massive inroads into the Windows-operating Intel machines. That and more, from Mary Meeker's report on internet trends. [VentureBeat]

Oracle is paying out $800 million in dividends this month, with an eye to avoiding potential tax increases as Congress seeks a deal on the fiscal cliff. Which is nice if you're a shareholder, or someone with a private island to sell by year-end. [NYT]

Mr. Sorkin

We haven't really been following All Things D's D10 conference, but when we heard Aaron Sorkin was slated to hit the stage, we decided to cue up the livestream. It's a slow news day, after all.

We're glad we did, though. In a discussion with Walt Mossberg, Mr. Sorkin revealed a few interesting details about the current film he's working on--an adaptation of Walter Isaacson's biography of the late Steve Jobs--including what kind of actor he envisions playing the title role.

1. He has barely started on the film.

“I’m at the earliest possible stage with Steve Jobs," said Mr. Sorkin. "What I’ll do is go through a long period that, to the casual observer, might very well look like watching ESPN.”

2. The movie won't be "cradle to grave" like the book was.

"I'll focus on a point of friction that interests me," said Mr. Sorkin.

3. He's nervous to tackle a portrait of such a momentous culture figure.

"It was a little bit like writing about The Beatles," confided Mr. Sorkin. "There are so many people out there that know so much about [Steve Jobs] and revere him. I just saw a minefield of disappointment, frankly....Hopefully when I'm done with my research I'll be in the same ballpark of knowledge of Steve Jobs that so many people are."

4. He contends that The Social Network was an 'adaptation,' and the Jobs movie will be, too.

"All I can say at this early stage in the game is that any time you're at the movies and you see the words, 'The following is a true story,' you should think of it as a painting and not a photograph. You're going to get an authorial point of view. There could probably be many movies of Steve Jobs--and there are. Ashton Kutcher is making one now.

5. Mr. Sorkin doesn't know yet who will play Steve Jobs in his film.

"I don't know, but they're going to have to be a really good actor," he said. "There are a lot of things that actors can fake, and intelligence is something that you can't fake."

Mr. Kutcher and his jOBS team have some serious competition headed their way with the recent news that Aaron Sorkin has also signed on to do a Jobs film. They upped the ante by getting permission to film in the original Apple garage, but considering that their Twitter account still only has a follower count in the mid-600s (and is so terribly run that we originally thought it was a parody account), we'd venture to say that Mr. Kutcher's project has a long way to go before it gains credibility.

Posting a Craigslist ad for "people with longish hair, sideburns etc." and those "who have 1965 to 1973's cars" is probably not the quickest route to Legitimateville. Hey, at least they're offering to pay extras in free food along with that minimum wage?

Mr. Sorkin (flickr.com/politicalpulse)

We almost missed it amid all the excitement, but yesterday Aaron Sorkin let slip a few more details regarding Sony's upcoming biopic of Steve Jobs, based on that doorstop of a Walter Isaacson biography. For one thing, they've hired Woz as an advisor on matters both technical and Jobs-related.

It also sounds like Mr. Sorkin will once again be making free with the poetic license:

"I know so little about what I am going to write. I know what I am not going to write. It can't be a straight ahead biography because it's very difficult to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biography, " Sorkin told Reuters in an interview for his upcoming HBO drama "The Newsroom."

This is just going to be Citizen Kane, but with computers, isn't it? Too bad Mr. Sorkin isn't enough of a nerd to make Mr. Jobs's blue box into the twenty-first century Rosebud.

Mr. Sorkin (flickr.com/politicalpulse)

One Steve Jobs biopic isn't cool. You know what's cool? TWO Steve Jobs biopics. At least according to Hollywood.

Though it's been widely-rumored since late last year, a press release issued by Sony Pictures yesterday confirmed what is either your worst nightmare or dream come true, depending on how pearl-clutchy you are about the tech industry: Aaron Sorkin will be adapting Walter Isaacson's bestselling biography of Steve Jobs for Sony Pictures. We're positive it will be every bit as packed with heavy-handed dramatic irony and "so bad it's good" euphoria as The Social Network is.

Unfortunately, Mr. Sorkin's movie may have a competitor in the already-announced JOBS Movie, starring Ashton Kutcher. But that's an indie biopic with an official Twitter so terribly rendered that we originally thought it was fake. Additionally, the working title for that film--Steve Jobs: Get Inspired--may be one of the most terrible movie titles we have ever heard.

If casting for Mr. Sorkin's film can find an actor who bears a resemblance to Mr. Jobs as strong as Mr. Kutcher's, we're sure they'll have nothing to worry about.

Why? A quick look at Sorkin's most famous characters shows a writer in love with intellectual rogues (such as the guy who sold the film rights to A Few Good Men when he was 27). For example:

• Every protagonist on The West Wing—whether they're Harvard grads or former Hollywood flacks who found themselves in a White House job—are always winning an argument from the underdog positioning. Their methods are unorthodox, and when they lose, it's because the world doesn't rise to their brilliance.
• The titular Charlie Wilson of Charlie Wilson's War, who—strippers in bathtubs aside—transcends political red tape to bring American guns to Afghanistan's freedom fighters. His methods are unorthodox, and when America fails to follow up after the Russians are exiled, it's because the government doesn't understand the situation at hand. He's punished for doing the right thing.
• In A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise is an unorthodox military attorney who pushes court-marshal protocol to the brink. When certain characters don't receive a just outcome, the system has doomed them, and they're punished for following orders.
• Most recently, in Moneyball, Oakland A's manager Billy Beane uses sabermetrics to put together an squad of baseball players who appear doomed to fail but succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams.  His methods are unorthodox. Whenever Beane is defeated, it's Major League Baseball's fault (too much money elsewhere). He's punished for not playing the way everyone else plays.
• In his play about the invention of television, The Farnsworth Invention, a brilliant (unorthodox) innovator is undercut by people who exploit the moral high ground. The system defeats his claim to the invention of television, because he's a good guy.
• In the teleplay for his forthcoming television drama centered around a Keith Olbermann-like character—More as This Story Develops—a newsman too brilliant for many people to work, a man who fights The Good Fight, is publicly reviled for his volatile temperament by underlings while quietly praised for his hidden qualities of compassion (we've read it in two drafts, it's pretty great).

There's one exception to this rule:

• In The Social Network, a brilliant rogue who invents the ultimate friend-connecting machine finds himself more often than not an ostensibly misunderstood genius, yet, is a loathsome creature whose failure to meaningfully interact with a world outside of the internet makes him a creep.

Sorkin generally portrays Zuckerberg's invention as the film's ultimate antagonist: this is why this guy is awful, it's why the people around him are alienated and fighting, and the biggest fight Zuckerberg will ever have won't be so much with his own nature as with his invention. It was pretty great, except: It prominently displayed a recurring theme of Sorkin's, which is an anti-technology (and especially: anti-internet bias). Previously:

Sorkin’s hatred of bloggers stems from an incident during his West Wing days, when he took to a Television Without Pity message board to defend himself against criticism, and was given a harsh shellacking on the board and in the press for doing so. He channeled this into a particularly wonderful episode of The West Wing. Since then, he’s taken every chance he can to sideswipe these pesky bloggers who blog things (it’s often argued that he wrote an entire film about his distaste for the democratizing nature of the internet, let alone the press he did for it), forgetting the fact that he still often takes to those same blogs to communicate with the hoi polloi whenever it’s called for.

That post went up after an interview with the New York Times' David Carr, in which Sorkin snidely undermines a technology-savvy Times reporter. You know who else hated bloggers?

Steve "What Have You Done That's So Great?" Jobs. Who is—in so many ways—a perfect Aaron Sorkin character:

• College dropout (a rebel).
• Inspired by acid (a miscreant; Sorkin, by the way, was once arrested for possession of psychedelic mushrooms and used to write The West Wing surrounded by potted plants, high on crack).
• Early computers were tossed aside as impractical alternatives to PCs (a heretic to conformity).
• Kicked out of his own company at one point (an outcast).
• Criticisms came from a uniform "system" unwilling to change (an underdog).
• Has a Christ-like rise to prominence in the third act (a genius).

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs was also:

• A resentful, absentee father.
• Psychotically competitive.
• Anti-organized labor, and not much of a proponent of the hoi polloi.
• Gossipy.
• Censorship-happy (he wanted to give the world "freedom from porn" and obsessively hunted down press leaks).
• An enabler of humanity-cracking work conditions.
• A bully.

All of these qualities have been portrayed as villainous at one point or another in Sorkin's work (even the daddy-issues, which both the president and one of his advisers have in The West Wing). And yet: genius is almost always the driving quality of a misunderstood protagonist in all but one of Sorkin's screenplays, The Social Network, where the invention is a manifestation of the great Sorkin villain: the tyranny of the masses. Jobs built something that enabled the masses, but not without being the complex—and some would argue, not-so-saintly—man we're continuing to learn he was.

In Sorkin's version of this story, which character do you think we'll meet, or at the very least, how many shades of him will we get to know?

End of the day, the book's always better than the movie. But more people see the film.

Steve Jobs might be the perfect Aaron Sorkin character. But, given his track record, he might not be given the most honest, fufilling treatment so much as the most entertaining one, or at least the one Sorkin relates to the most.

I'm obviously a Sorkin fan. If he does get the gig, here's hoping I'm proven wrong.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek