Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 31 May 1997, 9:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Bank Holiday. Ate bacon sandwiches, wrote science fiction, nursed head after weekend of birthday celebration. It's nice to churn out words that don't have megabytes or baud rates attached
Saturday 24 May 1997, 9:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
"NEW PRICING PLAN FOR YOU!" screams my AOL mailbox, with an official looking ID claiming that even cheaper access is here. Click on the link, and you're taken to a Web page designed to look just like an AOL page. I know the difference; you'd know the difference; most AOL users wouldn't. The page invites credit card details and other stuff. I decline, and shortly afterwards AOL causes the page to go away.
This sort of thing is going to get worse, with better and better fakes populating the untrammelled frontier towns of the Internet. Lots of naïve users are going to be conned. You can either think of this as evolution in action, or an indication that as the Web gets more widespread the need for security isn't going to be limited to making sure data is safe in transit. Some mechanism for checking the validity of a Web site is going to be needed
Saturday 10 May 1997, 9:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Bank Holiday. Still time for a gossip with a pal, though, who informs me that the Motorola-based Iridium global satellite system has hit a few problems. It needs a constellation of 60-odd satellites in low earth orbit, all crammed with electronics. Since the Cold War went away, though, the military hasn't been buying nearly as many space-certified components as they used to and the price has gone, er, rocketing.
So Iridium has gone looking for alternatives. The toughest it's found - more than up to the job - turns out to be car parts. We're about to be surrounded by talking, orbiting Ford Cortinas...
Tuesday
"Why are these darned Word 7 documents twice the size of Word 6?" asks an exasperated editor, not unreasonably. Hey, we're PC Magazine! Why don't we phone Microsoft and ask?
Err... Unicode, says Microsoft. Now, Unicode is the successor to ASCII, and it's true that a Unicode character is 16 bits wide rather than ASCII's 7 or 8 - the scheme covers all foreign character sets. However for normal English characters the top 8 bits of Unicode are zero and can be omitted. "Ah. We know that," says MS. "That's why we strip them out." So why *are* W7 documents so big? Because having carefully stripped them out, the software apparently appends them to the end of the document and saves them anyway, doubling the size.
Why, Microsoft?
Silence.
Wednesday
Like many, I'm keeping half an eye on the Kasparov/Deep Blue chess tournament (currently running at two games each). Get a phone call from Simon Bates (yes, that Simon Bates) who's now on Liberty 963 AM - the radio station occasionally gets me to opine on topics technical. Are computers taking over the world? No. Doesn't Deep Blue beating Kasparov prove that it's smarter? No. Why not, asks Batesy. I ask him whether he plays chess, and whether his computer can beat him. The interview is terminated shortly thereafter.
Thursday
Ziff-Davis UK is 6! Entire company traipses over to Tower Bridge, where we party on down in the corridors that run between the towers. Much internal gossip and mildly depraved behaviour - the highlight of the evening comes when I describe a grandiose idea to Tony Westbrook, online director, with an expansive sweep of the arms. Am carrying a glass of red wine which impinges on the buttocks of our managing director: glass bounces off him without leakage and applies itself liberally to my nice white Martin Bell linen jacket. Doh!
End up with small band of nogoodniks at Troy's, the nearly-legendary Hanway Street drinking hole. Attempt to impress bored woman with in-depth knowledge of Microsoft's ongoing comedy of errors and also variegated jacket. Fail.
Friday
Hangover the size of a hippopotamus. Work at home. Quietly. If anything's happened in the outside world, I don't care.
