Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 31 August 1996, 10:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Weekend Diary
Bank Holiday. Time for all sensible types to loll around in the hot sun, sipping cold beer... which is why I'm in The Flying Vicar's (see last week) front room, busily explaining how frames work in Microsoft Publisher. MS Publisher is one of the most usable programs we've seen at PC Magazine -- we've given it various prizes for its usability, and compared to some of the infinitely painful rubbish to which we subject our guinea pigs (*) it is a model of compassion and gentleness.
It is instructive, therefore, to see TFV approach the software. He knows how to format text in a word processor, and proceeds to try and do the same -- tabs and spaces, basically -- in Publisher. When he tries to drop a graphic onto the page (after I'd shown him that you could cut and paste between applications), it hit all this strange white space and the text went everywhere. Quite dramatic.
It took me about five minutes to explain the basics. For all its ease of use, Publisher just didn't expect its users to try and do things in quite such a strange way, and didn't react properly. It's all very well expecting a tabula rasa (**), but people have bad habits (well, he's a vicar so you can't really call them bad habits. Just habits) and software should really cope. It's possible to analyse what's going on and suggest alternatives -- the next step for wizards, I suppose, will be to apply more and more AI and realise when the results are unlikely to be what the punter wants.
It's not easy, this usability thing.
(* We have Usability Labs where real people are incarcerated, after being dragged in off the streets, and made to perform certain demeaning tasks. Our trained psychological warfare division watches them from behind one-way mirrors, occasionally applying small electric shocks or subliminal signals of terror, making notes about how difficult each task seemed to be. Works a treat, and means our reviews aren't dependent on what computer journalists -- never entirely typical human beings -- think of things. If you think you'd like to take part in this sort of thing and can spare some time in Central London, drop some mail to Alison Sweeney. I lied about the electric shocks, by the way).
(** Tabula Rasa -- blank slate. Also the name of a piece by Estonian composer Arvo Part, whose new CD, Litany, is out now and very fine indeed if you like contemplative choral music in the Orthodox tradition)
Tuesday
Feels like Monday. Ugh. Follow, miserably, the online discussion that's resulted from The Observer's remarkable piece on how Demon Internet is shovelling Disgusting Filth into the nation's homes. Read the piece: it is hard to know where to begin when the wrong end of the stick has been so rudely grasped. Feel particularly sorry for the Demon guy whose photograph has been printed alongside allegations of remarkable ferocity, and feel something akin to anger towards The Observer. I used to read it religiously; stopped a few years ago, but had hopes that the Guardian's purchase of the paper, together with Will Hutton's editorship, would revitalise the old lady. Nope.
In effect, the Metropolitan Police has decided that a number of newsgroups are to be banned -- including, terrifyingly, stuff like alt.homosexuality. You don't have to be a bleeding-heart liberal to feel very uneasy about this. Demon has said that it doesn't think the Met can do this, and won't quietly comply. The Observer has decided that this makes Demon a hard-core pornography company. Suspect that the real issues behind events are various power groups jockeying for position as Chief Internet Inquisitor -- a role that the Home Office is undoubtedly going to award at some point -- and the Observer's sales figures.
Wednesday
Disaster! Spill Diet Coke on my US Robotics Pilot, and in shaking the thing vigorously to remove the surplus stickiness manage to dislodge the little plastic stylus. This launches itself into the air, looking for all the world like a tiny cruise missile, and soars majestically over Production into the wide blue yonder. Don't have time to go looking for it while my Pilot gently weeps: rapidly stick the PDA into its replication holster and press the button. Fortunately -- or perhaps because it's been designed well -- the device happily uploads my entire life into the PC despite being sopping wet with tooth-rotting liquid. At least my data's safe.
Clean the thing up, and improvise a stylus with a propelling pencil from which the lead's been removed. All is fine, except that the tracking of the pen tip is around a centimetre away from the point at which it actually makes contact. Very disconcerting; all my appointments are two hours early and when I try to find the phone number for the bank I end up calling Anchovies 'R' Us.
Eventually end up taking the Pilot apart, cleaning the sticky residue from around the display with lighter fluid -- a far superior liquid for this purpose than meths -- and some of Max the Photographer's Kleenex (don't ask). To my great delight, the Pilot is as good as new after this emergency surgery; my data returns from the PC and it's as if the accident never happened.
Find the stylus eventually, embedded in a passing sheepdog.
Thursday
Went out to The Good Mixer, Camden's notoriously trendy muso pub, to meet Peter I, an old colleague, drinking buddy and mixing desk designer. We like this place, I because it is close to home, stays open late and has good beer, and he because... well, where you get pop stars you get trendy bimbos. I need say no more. Being a good anorak, I soon manage to distract him from such contemplation and onto more meaty stuff about networks, chip design, digital signal processing and how to make a beer-proof Personal Digital Assistant.
He has some interesting things to say on all these points, but the most interesting one was the rumour that Novell may be dropping NetWare 3.12. As he put it, Novell is concentrating on the Green River/NetWare 4 versus NT 4 end of the market, and sees NetWare 3.12 as a rather tedious legacy system that just steals sales of the newer and far more sexy products (yes, he really did call an operating system sexy in a pub full of Brit Popettes. I despair). As a result, 3.12's days are numbered.
But, quoth Peter, the world is full of people who trust and love 3.12, and don't want to use anything else. They don't want the latest and greatest, they want solid, reliable, well-understood networking. Stop supporting these people and stop selling more of the same, and they're not going to automatically move up to your more advanced systems. It's not clear that Novell isn't about to shoot the last fatted calf on the menu and make an omelette of its golden eggs (that's enough mixed agricultural metaphors -- Ed). Shame: it's not clear that anyone else will take that niche market, and that's another scalp lost to the Demons of Redmond. We don't need that.
But we needed more beer. Conversation went downhill, and the last I saw of Peter was a blurred shape heading out towards the West End. Oh dear. If you ever see a man in a silly trilby hanging around in Los Locos, that's him. Just don't mention NetWare.
Friday
Out meeting Texas Instruments, or at least the bit of TI that makes chips. It's got a brand-new process for producing ASICs, that's Application Independent Integrated Circuits, electronic devices that companies can configure how they like, to do what they like. ASICs are the building blocks of electronics these days; you find them in everything. This new process can make transistors which are 0.18 uM -- that's micrometers -- across. You can get up to 125 million individual transistors this way on a standard sliver of silicon. Golly.
That's not the half of it. Because these things are so small they take almost no power and go terrifically fast. Mobile phones that take 90 per cent less power than today; wristwatch computers that recognise your voice and run from tiny batteries; PDAs that can probably run your life to the point at which your mother's redundant (and are beer-proof); the list of potential products is endless. Most of the early excitement is for high-speed datacomms, 'cos one of these chips can switch up to 40 gigabits per second. That's 660,000 phone calls. On one chip. Another bit of the cheap gigabit global network infrastructure falls into place.
Very impressive. Even more impressive is the fact that the marketing man in the meeting knows what he's talking about, and mere impressiveness is nowhere near enough to describe my feelings when it turns out he knows all the history of Sinclair Research (for whom I once worked). Those stories can wait for another day -- the JoyBurger, the shrapnel display, TR4... ah, happy days.
I return to the office, secure in the knowledge that TI is a Good Thing and, as always, determined not to do a scrap of computing over the weekend. One day, I'll get a life...
Friday 23 August 1996, 6:24 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Weekend Diary
Monday morning. What a relief. Have spent most of the weekend recovering from Friday's Gary Numan V96 warmup gig, held down in a shed in Chelsea. It was a big shed, but very loud nonetheless... devotees of the pasty-faced one can catch my write-up on the Numan mailing list. Not that this is something I'd admit to 30 million people on the World Wide Web... What? Oh...
Milling around in the bar before the show, I was accosted by a tall, bald chap in an obscure T-shirt. "You Derek?" he asked. I'm not, and said so. "Really?," he said. "Not the one that does the Numan Web site?" Nope. "Oh..." he said, and wandered off.
I'm not sure what's more frightening, the idea that Numan fans have such a shaky sense of their own identity or that I look like someone who's dropped one HTML tag too many. Is it that obvious?
Worry all the way through the weekend, but Monday takes my mind off things. Highlight - of sorts - was a long conversation with a pal who's thoroughly sold on Linux, the freeware Unix operating system. Over the past four years, this experiment in Internet co-operative development has become the coolest alternative OS, especially among those who even regard Solaris with suspicion (don't even think about asking them about Windows). It's good, it's reliable, and hundreds of very dangerous people spend lots of time writing software and drivers for it.
The only trouble is its cultishness. Get collared by a Linuxian and say goodbye to the afternoon. You'll probably have to gnaw your own leg off to escape: these people have the devotion of the Popular People's Front of Judea and will talk about nothing else no matter how many cows come home. Lighten up, guys.
If you do find yourself in the above situation and don't fancy dental amputation, I have evolved a foolproof plan to extricate yourself. Merely mention some invented - but hideously obscure - Unix utility you once spotted on a Serbian FTP site, and the Linuxian will dash for the nearest browser in less time than it takes to fork a process. Don't say we never do anything for you.
Tuesday
I have a beige box to review. Whoopie. However, this one is genuinely interesting - Instant Internet from Performance Technology. The idea is simple: plug the box into a phone or ISDN line, thence into your Ethernet LAN, and finally the mains. Load the special Winsock on your workstations, and viola. Internet access via your local PPP ISP for all. Because the box does IP to IPX translation and the special Winsock translates the IPX to ordinary Winsock API, there's no IP on the LAN side at all. Hence no firewalls needed, and none of that tricksy IP address allocation. It works, too, and is undoubtedly a very fine thing indeed.
That's the good side. I phoned up Performance Technology (well, Bay Networks now since PT was absorbed into the evergrowing pulsating brain-in-a-vat that's Bay these days) to ask for the price. "Can't tell you," said the lady. "Why not?" "You're a journalist. There's only one person here who can talk to journalists, and he's on another call." In vain I said that all I wanted was the list price. In vain I offered to call back with a false beard and silly voice, pretending to be a punter. In vain I offered to resign for five minutes so she could pass over the top secret information (that would've given our Human Resources department something to think about).
Eventually, the highly trained Journalist Handler called back. "£2,195," he said. "Thank you," I said. What foolishness. Still, not as bad as IBM back in the bad old days when I reviewed a PS/2 MCA portable. Then I phoned for the price: can't tell you, you're not a dealer. Phone the dealers: can't tell you, you're not buying one, you'll have to talk to IBM. It took me two hours to find out that absolutely nobody was prepared to tell me how much the thing cost. On the principle that such coyness was unlikely to hide the bargain of a lifetime, I laid into the product and called it underperforming, overpriced and barking in all departments. I'm not sure they ever sold any.
Wednesday
Parrrrrtay! Microsoft has decided to have a First Birthday Party for Windows 95, and hired a film studio in Shepherd's Bush for the occasion (the same place also has the odd rave and hosts the annual Sex Maniac's Ball, where people... but anyway, I digress). Loads of journalists were invited and quite a few turned up - there was jelly and party games, and a giant stuffed dog named Petra. The very best bit of such occasions is not Pin The Tail On The Donkey, but Pin The Blame On The Microsoft Marketing Manager. There were quite a few there, and those who partook of the jelly (laced with vodka) or the various cocktails were easy meat for those journalists who took care to pace themselves just that little bit more. If anyone from Text 100 (Microsoft's press relations company) is reading this: we have the negatives, the signed confessions and Petra...
11pm: leave party.
Thursday
4am: leave Troy's, the infamous drinking establishment in Soho where the very, very silly go after parties finish. Nothing should be said about the journalist who decided to use the party crayons (given out in the goody bag at the end of the do) on the pen-based Sharp organiser he was supposed to be reviewing, nor the one who decided that since the bubble mixture (also in the goody bag) didn't work (which it didn't -- all you got were wet trousers) he should dump it in someone else's Guinness and see whether the victim noticed. Victim did, but only because the mixture was still in its container: when decanted out of that into the first journalist's drink, first journalist failed to notice.
8am: ouchie ouchie. Something else to blame Microsoft for. Type quietly for remainder of the day.
Friday
Day off. Take train down to Plymouth for bucolic Bank Holiday in company of The Flying Vicar (Goodwins Snr, aging country parson, trainee private pilot and estimable maverick) and Mrs G Snr (wife of above and secret videogame freak). Type up diary on the train while staring out of window at rain and fields full of mad cows (well, you'd be pretty upset if you had to stand out in the Devonian weather). Superdooper lithium battery technology on my superdooper TI Travelmate goes phhhhht at just the wrong moment, and as my hard disk spins up to speed to save the thousand word document, all goes dark. Spend first hour back in the Vicarage typing entire thing again. I love days off.
Decide not to touch another keyboard until I'm back in the smoke. Well, apart from trying to sort out TFV's modem and doing a little configuration for his printer... and he's got a couple of questions about Microsoft Publisher now that he's doing the parish magazine on it. And I did think I could show them Quake...
Oh dear.
Saturday 10 August 1996, 10:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins Weekend Diary
Oh dear. One of the more pleasant aspects of this job is the steady stream of Stupid Things that turn up in the post from public relations companies and their clients. Nobody's quite sure why they do this, and nobody can ever remember which bits from which companies are supposed to make us think of which products. On my desk as I write this are a cheap pair of sunglasses from HP (or was it Sun?), a plexi-glass-encapsulated Thing from Sony, a multi-coloured hat with rotating propellor on from ITC (who I don't think I've ever heard of), and more clutter. Today, Microsoft sends us all compasses which don't point north. Something to do with Internet Explorer
Friday 2 August 1996, 6:34 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Weekend Diary
Any week that starts with me having to rip the top off my PC is not going to go smoothly, but, nevertheless, have great fun with a new video card, Motion Picture from Advanced Technologies Manufacturing Ltd. This is a UK company who's previously done stuff for Acorn computers in the educational sector - don't get me started on Acorn - but is now branching out to Windows, PCs and other, more common markets. To my great delight, the card is simple to install, takes no time to configure and works just like that. Software's fine, and the price is particularly good - £49. It's always a pleasure to find a good product that just does what it claims, even if the process of installing it means I drop a screw in the middle of my PC and have to spend half an hour shaking the darn thing about like a cocktail before the reticent fragment of metal drops to the carpet. Can't really blame that on the card, but nevertheless impress co-workers with wide knowledge of foreign swearwords.
I've brought in my ancient Sony camcorder to provide a video source for testing, and discover an old home movie of Amsterdam. Spend a pleasant half-hour setting up a screenshot for the article, whizzing backward and forward through some very dodgy stuff indeed. Am informed by Production (the unsung heroes of PC Magazine, who actually take everything and produce, as if by magic, a real publication) that Circulation do not feel that sales will increase if we are moved to the top shelves at WH Smith's. Reluctantly choose tasteful images of statue and modern art museum for screenshot.
Tuesday:
Wireless LAN project steaming ahead. Find myself stuck in pages of Very Hard Mathematics, trying to work out whether to believe what various companies tell me about their products - what is the difference between Frequency Hopping and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum transmission? Company experts curiously reticent about details, but the Web comes up with the goods. Soon discover huge amounts of industry politics concerning adoption of IEEE 802.11 wireless interworking standard, which makes the maths look like Janet And John. Now, I'm very fond of the technical stuff and find the politics of this business more boring than SQL databases, but - alas - the former are just as important when it comes to deciding what product is likely to be worth recommending. Console myself with a quick spin around a few Web pages discussing new satellite data broadcasting systems - it seems that by the end of the century there'll be hundreds of the little darlings up there giving us tons of bandwidth wherever we might go. Providing, of course, they can sort the politics out.
Wednesday:
A busy day, very little of which is spent in the office. Microsoft has invited myself and Andrew Watts (PC Direct) to a lunch meeting to talk about NT version 4.0. We turn up to a room full of Microsofties, other journalists, PR women in red jackets (why they always want to look like Virgin stewardesses is a constant mystery) and some efficient flunkies who dole out the canapes and drinks with ferocious regularity. Talk soon descends to gossip about absent journalists, Microsoft's less pleasant marketing habits and what on earth the competition's up to - there's one techie Microsofty I keep plied with questions about architecture, network security and other esoterica. It turns out that this is the day that NT 4.0 Workstation and Server are both going to production - the thing's finished! So why, one wonders, will it not be available for another month (at least), and why is there no CD or list of server features in the distressingly thin press pack that's handed out? Decide to eat canapes and reserve judgement until final code in actual hands of actual journalists.
Back to the office -- more wireless LAN mashing -- thence out again to Viva! Radio. Every week at around 6:40 on the Wednesday, Viva! drive-time show I turn up and talk about 'the latest developments in science and technology' to an audience of... well, not very many. Viva! is an AM-only station transmitting to London only and, according to its licence, women only. This strategy has left them with so few listeners the audience research people can't actually count them half the time. Nevertheless, as a confirmed media junkie I'll happily cross town and sit in front of a microphone to natter about all manner of things -- who cares if nobody listens? (it's on 963kHz, by the way. Hint hint.) When I started this gig, I thought they'd want to talk about computers -- not a bit of it. They want soundbites about weird and wonderful gadgets, advances, ideas or whatever. This week, our combined research has come up with a power station that runs on orange peel, Internet telephony, a wristwatch that sounds like a Dalek, and a new cure for impotence. Not entirely sure my bosses at Ziff know I'm on-air talking about flaccidity and prostaglandin gels. Makes a change from modems.
Finish off the day back at Ziff, where Hitachi's storage division has taken over a local wine bar and enticed the entire company down for drinks. This sounds like a good idea... except that the Hitachi sales managers down there are the most intense example of the species I've encountered in a long time. And they're all wearing identical ties with little yellow disk drives on them -- I find myself staring at one while a well-meaning chap smoking a virulent cigar tells me how important DVD (Digital Video Disk, the new 9/18Gb CD-ROM replacement technology) will be. I agree. He tells me again. I agree again. He's on the point of telling me for the third time, when I point out I've written about this already. Move on to DVD-RAM, the rewriteable version. Aha! Interesting stuff! Don't know about this... and, it turns out, neither does he. Documentation is promised, and I take advantage of him nipping off to get me a mineral water (don't ask) from the bar to merge into the background and join in a discussion with journalists from Computer Life about the private lives of various editors we know.
Thursday:
While hunting for something else on the Web, happen across the oddest bit of software I've seen in a long time. Executor, from Ardi, is a Macintosh emulator that runs under DOS. These people have completely rewritten the Mac ROMs and put the software on top of an 68040 emulator program -- fire it up, and there's a rather peculiarly munged - hacker-speak for distorted - Macintosh running on your PC. Entirely bizarre, and quite perversely fun. Alas, the thing's very slow at reading floppy disks and the demo version - available from the Web site above - is limited to ten minutes before it self-destructs. This is just too short to load anything in to test it, which is frustrating; but it does come with various little utilities and demo programs. If you fancy baffling a pal, download this.
Friday:
Big meeting at PC Magazine -- the Forward Features Planning get-together. Entire editorial staff pile into the boardroom and stare at a whiteboard with 48 spaces on it. These are the features for 1997 -- four an issue for twelve issues. Our task - fill those spaces. A long list of ideas has been circulated, so over coffee and fizzing discussion we try to predict what's going to be hot all the way through to December of next year. As the industry seems to be running on product lifetimes of around three months, this is an interesting challenge.
Two and a half hours later, we've done it. Well, the first crack anyway -- there'll be lots of changes as time goes on -- but it looks impressive and almost feasible. Now, much as I'd love to tell you exactly what we've got cooking, I'm sure you'll understand that our many friends elsewhere in the computer magazine publishing business would be even keener to find out and we like to leave a few surprises in store. However, it looks like 1997 is going to be a cracking year. We'll be doing some things we've never done before, and revisiting some of our old favourites in new ways.
It's fun, this business. Apart from the two and a half hour meetings, sulphurous stogies, product launches with no products and the occasional hangover, that is. And I still haven't quite worked out when I'm supposed to do all this writing that keeps piling up.
Rupert Goodwins is Technical Editor of PC Magazine
