Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 30 August 1997, 9:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Tuesday
Back at work. No granite, sheep or kites. Boo. Learn from a correspondent that the Internet online videoconferencing orgies (see last week's diary) have taken a hold at our centres of learning. So much so, says my informant, that at a certain northern university (which for the sake of argument we'll call Lancaster) the software is now called CU-SeeMe-SeeEverything.
In the spirit of scientific, dispassionate exploration I decide to plumb the depths and find the truth - just for you, distant reader. In two hours of sweaty, degrading networking I find two bald people with glasses (one called Sven, one not), five empty chairs, two dark rooms (where orgies may well have been going on) and a gaggle of schoolchildren looking for the NASA Select TV feed.
Return to Teletubbies page, and pour large gin. It's not easy being a journalist.
Wednesday
"Your copy of Netscape Communicator is out of date!" says my copy of Netscape Communicator. "Do you want to automatically upgrade?"
This never works, I think, as I fatalistically click on the Yes button. There then follows an 8Mb download, followed by a window saying "Click on Continue when the upgrade is finished". I misread this as "when the download is finished", click on Continue and thus abort the process.
Try again. This time I leave everything well alone, until a Java error pops up complaining about some incomprehensible missing class. Not impressed... but that's nothing compared to how unimpressed I am to find the software not upgraded, my disk full of useless download and my bookmark file gone.
Only one thing answers: gin.
Thursday
The venerable nabob of bitstreams, Grand Vizier of the V.standards, Master of Matters Modemical and occasional morris dancer, Bill Pechey of Hayes, arrives for a long natter about the state of the 56K modem art. Very interesting - will the ITU manage to approve the standard in time for next year? How fast do these things go anyway? How can we test them? This last matter turns out to be far more complex and challenging than we expect, and we are reduced to alternately giggling hysterically and swearing loudly at each other. It's good to have technical relationships with industry figures based on sober, mutual respect.
One thing that Bill mentions gives us special cause to think. "We briefly thought about whether we should make the modems report a full 56kbps connection every time, regardless of what speed it actually runs at," he said. "Because everyone's connecting to ISPs and nobody knows what speed the data is arriving over the Internet, nobody would ever be able to tell when it was the modem that ran slower.". Fortunately, Hayes is too responsible a company to play such tricks. As for the others... well, when we've sorted out the testing (mu-law codecs, line impairment sets, gibber gibber gibber), we'll let you know.
Friday
Take a lunchtime jaunt to our new offices. We're moving at the end of September, just down the road to offices opposite the Tower of London, as I've mentioned before.
There are some great views from the new place. St Katherine's Yacht Haven - a beautiful lake filled with boats - is outside the Online Editorial area. The Tower Of London fills the windows by the PC Magazine Ad Sales department. David Craver, our careworn yet surprisingly youthful MD, has both Tower Bridge and the Tower itself displayed around his corner office.
We - PC Magazine Editorial - get the Tower Thistle Hotel, a fabulously ugly concrete monstrosity with mirrored glass windows set like acne in the rough walls. The Usability Labs are even more fortunate - here, the hotel windows are so close to the office that they can almost be touched.
Sulk momentarily, then brighten up. I think we should do a set of webcams from the new site, relayed onto ZDNet UK. The BridgeCam, showing the state of London's most famous landmark. The TowerCam, relaying the comings and goings of the Royals to an eager world. And, best of all, an infra-red HotelRoomBedCam. That should get me admission to the secret world of videoh-oh-oh-conferencing and get the stats on the site up nicely.
Brilliant!
Saturday 23 August 1997, 9:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Down in Plymouth, dropping Number One Son off with his grandparents for the last blast of the summer holidays. Also attend to my father (the West Country Vicar)'s modem, which has received a direct lightning strike up the interface and is no longer working. I wonder what the theological significance of this is as regards the Internet but the Reverend is more concerned with getting his e-mail back. A pragmatic cleric, Goodwins Senior.
Tuesday
Sony hints that it's about to announce a partnership with Philips and Hitachi about breaking away from the DVD-RAM standards group. NEC has previously said much the same thing, so that'll be three competing standards for read/write high-capacity optical disks. Idiots. I ask my informant to name me one case where fragmenting a new market in this way helped anyone, and he changes the subject.
Ask US Robotics. Ask Hayes. Ask anyone involved with the X2/K56Flex farrago whether sales have met expectations, or whether everyone's waiting for the ITU standard next year. Since the whole thing started, I haven't heard one technical argument why one of these is better than the other - it's purely a marketing thing. And the marketeers have done the market no good at all... and these will be the people responsible for ADSL's eventual appearance.
I don't have a good feeling about this.
Wednesday
Fill in for Dave Green, friend and proprietor of a scurrilous online newsletter (which isn't getting another free plug this week), on GLR, London's local BBC radio station. This involves about ten minutes blathering on the Breakfast Show about techno-wheezes, videogames, latest inventions, all that sort of thing. Jolly good fun, and concentrate on MPEG 1 level 3 (yawn...) which by compressing CD quality music down by 90 per cent has resulted in huge archives of ripped-off music on the Internet (aha! Much more interesting!).
Also mention, inter alia, that Microsoft is having problems. Windows 98 won't have an upgrade path from Windows 3.1, I opined, which is a bit of a shame given that 70 per cent of corporates haven't bothered with 95. Later back at the office, I get a pained call from Microsoft's PR company. "Rupert," says the worried voice, "that wasn't exactly accurate. We will have that upgrade path..."
"You mean you buy Windows 95 first?" I ask, trying to make a joke.
"No," says the long-suffering PR, "although the revenue would be nice. It's just that the upgrade path won't be available at launch. Very shortly afterwards, it will"
Very shortly, it transpires, is "around two months". Those are Microsoft months, of course. So, I am happy to say that I was wrong, and Microsoft is expecting such a rush of corporate upgrade requests for Windows 98 that it will be making the path available some time after launch. My advice remains: don't wait underwater.
Thursday
MCI and BT are determined to merge. I know nobody who thinks this is anything other than an enormous disaster from start to finish. Would prefer BT to worry about innovation, investment in new technology, cutting-edge services and forward-looking infrastructure (which it has done in the past) than trying to bolt itself to a troubled, mediocre American telco in uncertain condition. One rarely gets fit by strapping oneself to a corpse.
Friday
Tapping rapidly away about videoconferencing over the Internet. Having problems - only video capture card I have is PCI, and all my slots are full. Shall I ditch my network card, hard disk interface or video adaptor? Hm.Tricky.
Meanwhile, talk to a pal about this technology. "Nobody's using it..." I say, but trail off as a distant, haunted look crosses his careworn face. "Well, that's not strictly true" he says, and proceeds to tell me about late-night online orgies, impromptu strip shows and general malarky all carried by CU-SeeMe, VDOphone and Iphone. Recall that he bought a camera not two weeks ago, and hurriedly change the subject. Think once more about lightning strikes and telephone interfaces.
Questions. Are online videoconference orgies another example of push technology, and should they be restricted to people with fat pipes?
Saturday 9 August 1997, 9:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Back from a terrifically pleasant holiday in a forest by a lake in Sweden. Before you ask, no, Sweden's not that expensive (apart from gin at twenty quid a bottle. Poo.); yes, the Swedes are charmingly bonkers; no, I nearly didn't come back. A log cabin in the wilderness with an ISDN line paid for by EU teleworking project funds sounds more than appealing.
I wonder if there's commercial potential in month-long working breaks? Am thinking of wiring up a set of farmhouses and renting them out: you can take time away from the office, enjoy the delights of bucolic living and still get some work done. Not a holiday, but wouldn't you rather go for a swim in a springwater lake before breakfast and type to the sound of birdsong for a while? Might be time to set up the ZDNet Travel Agency.
Tuesday
Hmm. Perhaps xDSL and 6 megabit Net access over telephone lines isn't going to rule the world after all. NTT, the Japanese telephone company, is deploying its Pi Fibre To The Home (FTTH) system -- it's got a lot of old copper to replace, and the company says that now is as good a time as any to rebuild with glass. The interesting thing is the cost, which is planned to be the same as or cheaper than copper by the year 2000. Subscribers get 40 analogue and 120 digital video channels, with more bandwidth if wanted. The question, says NTT, is whether anyone would want to use that bandwidth: why is it that telcos either say it's not worth doing fast domestic networking because nobody would use it, or that it's not worth doing because it'd get used too much and flood the backbones?
Wednesday
Ever stumbled across something and wondered whether everyone knew about it all the time but just never told you? A while ago, some pals and I had the idea of setting up a database of music CD track listings and sharing it on the Internet. Being the slackers we are, that's all that happened - meanwhile, someone was actually doing it. The CD Database, now has nearly 90,000 CDs on file and a selection of rather snazzy players that know about it. It's rather wonderful to slot a brand-
new (or very old) CD into the player and see a complete track listing pop up in seconds: so far I haven't been able to beat it, even with the obscure Wire/Eno/Dukes of Stratosphear stuff that none of my friends have heard of (or want to).
Bet it doesn't know about my Sex Pistols "Never Trust A Hippy" Amsterdam bootleg, though. Hope it does - there's no track listing on it, and the quality is so appalling I'm not sure what half the stuff on it is anyway.
Thursday
Oh no! Run for the hills. Any hills. Readers with history may just recall videotext: block graphics, flash attributes, 1200/75 modems, Mode 7. well, the fur-clad, woad-painted tribes are back. Heaven is a Web site dedicated to rebuilding those halcyon days. It has a Java Prestel terminal emulator. It has an online videotext service. It has a lot to answer for.
As for me. somewhere, I've got my ancient history as one part of MicroMouse (*800651#) and the, er, Buck Fusby fanclub (which got me thrown off Prestel under suspicion of having a sense of humour). I suspect it's on Microdrive, in a box with my Spectrum and VTX5000 modem.
Oh dear.
Friday
A sad little tale reaches me about a fellow journalist - identity and gender withheld -- who 'got talking' one day online to a pleasant American of the opposite sex. One thing followed another, and before long they were swapping IP packets in front of witnesses and getting married in cyberspace. Their digital coupledom went swimmingly, and seemed set fair to break through into RL (Real Life, for non-saddos) when said journo was offered a chance to go on a press trip to the US. Hotel rooms were booked and much glee was planned. when the RL spouse of the American binary bigamist suddenly found out what was going on. Not happy? I should coco. Needless to say, the online matrimonials have been declared thoroughly off limits, and the UK hack was last seen attempting to drain Soho of all liquids.
(PS: The Heaven story was stolen from Need To Know, a scurrilous online magazine run by desperados who should not be approached under any circumstances.
