Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 28 September 1996, 10:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Weekend Diary
MSN comes in to say hello. We struggle manfully to get our guests a telephone line, and then nod wisely as the Great New Plan is unveiled. The MSN client software is being ditched in favour of totally Webbed content. With CompuServe saying that the same fate awaits the less-than-loved WinCIM, this leaves AOL all out on its lonesome once again. MSN's business model is that the company sells you Internet access fairly cheaply and also offers some editorial and other content to keep you looking at its site. That's the same business model as the rather troubled CompuServe uses, and identical to the now-defunct Europe Online and the less-than-sparkling UK Online. Can't really see the point, to be honest: if you want to sell cheap-ish connectivity, why not just do that? Demon manages. And, if you want to do content, concentrate on that instead. We do. There's no real reason to bundle the two together, any more than it would make sense for (PCDN publisher) Ziff-Davis to buy newsagents or Smiths to start magazine publishing.
AOL and CIX have a much more interesting plan. They've both spotted what the content people like best, stuff that just can't be provided in printed form, is the stuff provided by other people. Both have fostered the community spirit, and as a result make a good fist of getting people to pay to write the content that other people pay to read. It's an astonishing trick; while CIS and MSN do run forums where people discuss stuff among themselves, AOL and CIX share the ability to let the punters create their own areas. That makes all the difference. Now, if MSN took the time to write some good back-end conversation and forum management software so that it could legitimately claim to be the next generation of online conferencing, one would get much more excited.
Instead, gaze with pallid face at the Star Trek and American Car Buyer areas on MSN that the company hold out as the great hope for the future, and sigh.
Tuesday
Do I want to go to Live 96? A good question. No. I hear back from those who have been that it's jam-packed with the sweaty, heaving throng. A few gadgets stand out (Sony's tiny camcorder, Psion-Dacom's exceptionally silly modems
AOL and CIX have a much more interesting plan. They've both spotted what the content people like best, stuff that just can't be provided in printed form, is the stuff provided by other people. Both have fostered the community spirit, and as a result make a good fist of getting people to pay to write the content that other people pay to read. It's an astonishing trick; while CIS and MSN do run forums where people discuss stuff among themselves, AOL and CIX share the ability to let the punters create their own areas. That makes all the difference. Now, if MSN took the time to write some good back-end conversation and forum management software so that it could legitimately claim to be the next generation of online conferencing, one would get much more excited.
Instead, gaze with pallid face at the Star Trek and American Car Buyer areas on MSN that the company hold out as the great hope for the future, and sigh.
Tuesday
Do I want to go to Live 96? A good question. No. I hear back from those who have been that it's jam-packed with the sweaty, heaving throng. A few gadgets stand out (Sony's tiny camcorder, Psion-Dacom's exceptionally silly modems
Saturday 21 September 1996, 10:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
To the Cumberland Hotel, where a floor has been set aside for a xDSL conference. xDSL covers an entire hoard of acronyms
Saturday 14 September 1996, 10:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Weekend Diary
Much giggling in the office at the news that NT 4.0 Workstation and NT 4.0 Server are exactly the same bit of software and you can switch from one to the other by changing a couple of registry entries. Tut tut, Microsoft. Not that there's anything wrong in marketing stuff in that way, but when you've heard so much about how Server is hugely optimised and special and nobody should consider running anything at all difficult on Workstation it's hard to suppress a grin. People have been selling hardware and software ever since time began with that sort of feature
Saturday 7 September 1996, 10:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Weekend Diary
One of the delights of being a computer journalist is that people assume you know the answer to everything silicon. At one extreme, this leads to the I'm Off Duty syndrome: for example, the barman at the Bunch of Grapes overheard a conversation I was having one evening, and subsequently brought along a sheaf of listings to demonstrate a problem he was having with his LaserJet and Word for Windows. I knew nothing of this until I bought two pints of Young's Special later on that week and had my change returned with a pile of A4... Rule One of journalism is never upset the people providing the drinks, so I washed down my bile with a swig of beer and sorted him out gracefully -- beware, if you try the same trick on a computer hack at a party when you don't have a major brewery behind you.
Tuesday
Packard Bell has launched a new series of home computers. They are -- to be honest -- not the sort of thing to really zap the tastebuds or pump the adrenaline, but they're OK. It can be hard sometimes to give new products the appraisal they deserve: I lose count of how many machines pass though PC Magazine's doors every month, but it can approach the hundred when we're doing one of our big round-ups and there's a good clutch of First Looks cooking. Highlight of the launch was the point at which Packard Bell announced a distribution deal via Dixons, and someone from BHS in the audience was minded to ask a question that made certain comments regarding the noted high street electrical goods retailer of the first part that cannot, I'm sure, be legally repeated here.
Bob Kane, our shiny new American editor-in-chief, turned up from a schmoozathon in Brum sometime later. He's settling in well, we feel, and is slowly coming to terms with the interesting and in many ways unorthodox bunch of people within PC Magazine. I was startled, however, when he greeted me with "Hello, Binky, how's it going?"
Wednesday
Netscape hears that I'm writing the review of Internet Explorer versus Netscape Navigator (actually, since the products have been in public beta for so long this is the third time I'm writing this particular review. But the things are finished and we can at last say what they're like without hedging our bets). The inevitable phone call comes in from the PR company:
"Hello, how's it going?"
"Err, fine, fine."
"Are we winning?"
"You'll have to wait and see, we don't normally discuss what we're writing until it's published"
"OK. I'll get our marketing manager to call you..."
"Really, don't bother. I've been in the briefings, I've used your product since it was called Mosaic, I've read the blurb, I've shaken hands with Marc Andreessen"
"... just in case you have any questions"
"I don't"
"Well, if you do."
"No. Thanks, but no."
. Finish the phone call and carry on writing. Phone rings. It's the marketing manager.
Thursday
Goodbye Hobbit! Hobbit Coward, our Productivity Editor, is leaving after five years on the job to go and work for another publisher doing even more technical magazines about even more obscure subjects. The place won't be the same without his unique persona. His name suggests a short hairy person with a beer belly and thick glasses: most people who've heard of him are thus utterly surprised when a very tall, very slender black guy dressed to kill hoves into view. Hobbs was one of the original team, and five years in any job in this business is quite exceptional.
Productivity -- the green pages at the back of the magazine -- is a very difficult manor, but one that we know is much loved by the readers. To pull together so much technical information every month from a team of freelancers, check it for accuracy (often difficult, because the people who write for it are usually some of the best experts in their fields and who else do you ask?) and make sure it's relevant is time-consuming and painstaking. I write the OnLine column every month, and that's hard enough to find good, meaty contents for -- running the whole section is one of the many jobs on the magazine that'd turn any normal person into so much marrowbone with meaty lumps of jelly.
Friday
I had hoped to reveal details of a brand-new computer I was invited to see this afternoon, but I can't. In fact, I can't say who I saw, what they showed me or anything about their plans: I am under NDA. Non-disclosure agreements are one of the most stupifyingly ridiculous aspects of computer journalism: they are pseudo-legal documents that bind our tongues until the people showing us the goods decide we can relay what we've seen to the world at large.
The principles aren't too silly. Publications such as PC Magazine have quite long lead times; it takes a few weeks from us getting some information to you getting it in your hands. When a product is to be launched between those two points, it makes sense for us to be given a preview provided we promise not to breath a word until whatever it is, is unveiled. Fair enough, that way we have time to do our research and write the story and you don't have to wait for months afterwards. The manufacturer gets talked about, but no competitor's had a chance to sneak in and mess things up.
I have no problems with this. I do have problems with being given a page of inpenetrable legal jargon with no time to digest it, let alone have it checked out, and being asked to sign it there and then. If the company doesn't trust us, what business has it showing us secrets anyway? Any journalist worth their salt knows that information can be leaked in a zillion different ways, NDA or no NDA. If they do trust us -- and at PC Magazine, like most magazines, what we do is very public and we try very hard to be trustworthy -- then asking us to slap our moniker on so many weasel words is insulting. And not telling us about the NDA until we turn up to see the product so temptingly dangled in front of our noses -- I hope you're reading this, Company X -- is not going to make us think fondly of anyone.
It was a very interesting computer. You'd love to hear about it. I'd love to write about it. We can't.
Tuesday
Packard Bell has launched a new series of home computers. They are -- to be honest -- not the sort of thing to really zap the tastebuds or pump the adrenaline, but they're OK. It can be hard sometimes to give new products the appraisal they deserve: I lose count of how many machines pass though PC Magazine's doors every month, but it can approach the hundred when we're doing one of our big round-ups and there's a good clutch of First Looks cooking. Highlight of the launch was the point at which Packard Bell announced a distribution deal via Dixons, and someone from BHS in the audience was minded to ask a question that made certain comments regarding the noted high street electrical goods retailer of the first part that cannot, I'm sure, be legally repeated here.
Bob Kane, our shiny new American editor-in-chief, turned up from a schmoozathon in Brum sometime later. He's settling in well, we feel, and is slowly coming to terms with the interesting and in many ways unorthodox bunch of people within PC Magazine. I was startled, however, when he greeted me with "Hello, Binky, how's it going?"
Wednesday
Netscape hears that I'm writing the review of Internet Explorer versus Netscape Navigator (actually, since the products have been in public beta for so long this is the third time I'm writing this particular review. But the things are finished and we can at last say what they're like without hedging our bets). The inevitable phone call comes in from the PR company:
"Hello, how's it going?"
"Err, fine, fine."
"Are we winning?"
"You'll have to wait and see, we don't normally discuss what we're writing until it's published"
"OK. I'll get our marketing manager to call you..."
"Really, don't bother. I've been in the briefings, I've used your product since it was called Mosaic, I've read the blurb, I've shaken hands with Marc Andreessen"
"... just in case you have any questions"
"I don't"
"Well, if you do."
"No. Thanks, but no."
. Finish the phone call and carry on writing. Phone rings. It's the marketing manager.
Thursday
Goodbye Hobbit! Hobbit Coward, our Productivity Editor, is leaving after five years on the job to go and work for another publisher doing even more technical magazines about even more obscure subjects. The place won't be the same without his unique persona. His name suggests a short hairy person with a beer belly and thick glasses: most people who've heard of him are thus utterly surprised when a very tall, very slender black guy dressed to kill hoves into view. Hobbs was one of the original team, and five years in any job in this business is quite exceptional.
Productivity -- the green pages at the back of the magazine -- is a very difficult manor, but one that we know is much loved by the readers. To pull together so much technical information every month from a team of freelancers, check it for accuracy (often difficult, because the people who write for it are usually some of the best experts in their fields and who else do you ask?) and make sure it's relevant is time-consuming and painstaking. I write the OnLine column every month, and that's hard enough to find good, meaty contents for -- running the whole section is one of the many jobs on the magazine that'd turn any normal person into so much marrowbone with meaty lumps of jelly.
Friday
I had hoped to reveal details of a brand-new computer I was invited to see this afternoon, but I can't. In fact, I can't say who I saw, what they showed me or anything about their plans: I am under NDA. Non-disclosure agreements are one of the most stupifyingly ridiculous aspects of computer journalism: they are pseudo-legal documents that bind our tongues until the people showing us the goods decide we can relay what we've seen to the world at large.
The principles aren't too silly. Publications such as PC Magazine have quite long lead times; it takes a few weeks from us getting some information to you getting it in your hands. When a product is to be launched between those two points, it makes sense for us to be given a preview provided we promise not to breath a word until whatever it is, is unveiled. Fair enough, that way we have time to do our research and write the story and you don't have to wait for months afterwards. The manufacturer gets talked about, but no competitor's had a chance to sneak in and mess things up.
I have no problems with this. I do have problems with being given a page of inpenetrable legal jargon with no time to digest it, let alone have it checked out, and being asked to sign it there and then. If the company doesn't trust us, what business has it showing us secrets anyway? Any journalist worth their salt knows that information can be leaked in a zillion different ways, NDA or no NDA. If they do trust us -- and at PC Magazine, like most magazines, what we do is very public and we try very hard to be trustworthy -- then asking us to slap our moniker on so many weasel words is insulting. And not telling us about the NDA until we turn up to see the product so temptingly dangled in front of our noses -- I hope you're reading this, Company X -- is not going to make us think fondly of anyone.
It was a very interesting computer. You'd love to hear about it. I'd love to write about it. We can't.
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...
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...
