Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 22 November 1997, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
It's quiet in the office. Manek Dubash - thespian manqué and flamboyant deputy editor -- and Ed Henning - ex-Emerson Lake and Palmer roadie and European labs director - have gone to Comdex. The rest of us flick through the newswires and monitor the Web. Hey, who wants to party down in Vegas when we can watch the rain fall on Tower Bridge?
Actually, that's a very good question. Time was when computer shows were unavoidable. If you wanted to see what new products were being launched, get the gossip and make sure your face was known, there was no alternative to attending one or other of the Comdexes. Now you can hunt down your prey via e-mail, see everything you need to on the Web and generally do the whole schmeer from your desktop. Once upon a time, people thought that videoconferencing would replace business travel: I suspect they'd just got the wrong technology.
But I do miss Las Vegas, even if I no longer have the energy to behave quite as badly as once I did. Gone are the days of finding that no bars were open at 5:30am: that might have had something to do with me and Ms X seeming to have stumbled into the Nevadan desert. We hitchhiked back while singing Convoy in one of those huge American 18-wheeler trucks, then burst into a publisher's hotel room and demanded that the naked, terrified man buy us breakfast. Some things the Web just can't do...
Tuesday
More details emerge, painfully, about Rockwell's lawsuit against Bay Networks, one of its own customers. Bay, you may remember, had the temerity to build a modem that does both Rockwell's K56flex and 3Com's x2 56kbps technology: Rockwell decided to show its commitment to customer choice and its advanced client relationship techniques by sending the lawyers in.
Turns out that the modem in question doesn't do both modes simultaneously. You have to load different firmware into the flash memory to set the mode. What a good idea! Now, it shouldn't be beyond the wit of a half-decent DSP hacker to write alternative code for many existing modems - yes, it would violate licencing conditions, so I couldn't possibly suggest it. Nor that such code could be easily distributed over the Internet. Nor that such guerrilla action would perhaps make those bloody modem companies see sense and finally let the ITU set the standard.
So don't even think it, you naughty hackers you.
Wednesday
1998 will be the Year of Speech Recognition, eh? I asked Maggie 'Usability' Williams, who's been testing the latest products in the labs, what she thought of this suggestion.
"Well, Rubbered, shave gutter log way to glow beefheart flail quirk kneely arse well as a peeboard. Eye wooden wreck on end them."
Thanks, Mags.
Thursday
According to the Press Gazette, VNU, our esteemed colleagues in the magazine publishing industry, is worried about staff turnover. While it's a lively industry anyway and it's rare for a month to go by without at least one journo hopping from Ziff to EMAP to Dennis to VNU to Future, it is undoubtedly true that the revolving door at VNU's Soho headquarters goes around a little faster than most.
To combat this, the management at Broadwick Street is introducing psychometric testing. Wacky! Nothing is more likely to send hacks hurtling into the arms of a competitor than the idea that someone wants to see inside their heads. Whenever a company does this sort of thing - and I've seen it happen more than once - the question that never gets answered is why nobody ever thinks to just ask the employees what they think. Every company has problems: most of them are twice as visible to the workers as the bosses.
Friday
Manek's back from Comdex! And he's got a red stylus for his Palm Pilot! I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.
But I don't hate NetMeeting. A friend persuaded me to download it at home, and two minutes later his happy face was smiling at me from his front room. I had some new software on my machine to show him; he wanted to point out some Web stuff to me. NetMeeting worked admirably well at connecting our computers - and us - together across the Net. Nice one, Microsoft.
Saturday 8 November 1997, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Like many an ageing anorak, I affect a world-worn mien when confronted by technology. Can I get excited by the latest Windows utility to organise my hard disk? Another 56k modem? The latest revision of Office? Hardly. Sometimes, though, the old fervour comes back. ADSL has sparked the latest example: on paper, it looks a damn good proposition. 6Mb across ordinary phone lines 24 hours a day at a cost of £200 a modem and £40 a month? Want it? I do!
Of course, it's not that simple. First of all, there are two competing 'standards', DMT and CAP, which don't work together but provoke much vituperation from the opposing camps. Then, the telephone companies here and in the US have been doing quite a lot to stop it ever happening except on their terms; in the US, the various telcos have been accused of knobbling lines, dragging their feet and generally not supplying the goods, and over here BT is telling nobody about anything - at least while it tries to milk ISDN for as much as it can.
Now Rockwell is muddying the waters. Today, it announced CDSL - yet another incompatible version, slower but with some good points. Few technical details have yet been forthcoming, mind, and it seems to be a pre-emptive strike at a new ITU standard that's being discussed. Will it let others use the technology freely? Probably not: and so others will develop competing standards. This is a rerun of 56k modems, where politicking and bluster has led to the whole market being poisoned: I bet if Rockwell, Lucent and USR/3Com had agreed an interoperable standard, they'd all have sold a ton more modems by now.
Who gets hurt? We do, and so do the companies involved. We could have our own personal megabit pipes by now, if foresight and openness had won over crabbed competitiveness and paranoia. The former led to the Internet and much joy for all; the latter... well, ask IBM and Apple about the latter.
Gah!
Tuesday
It's still happening! After Princess Diana and the (strangely evanescent) Wall St Crash, the sad case of young Louise Woodward is the latest media hoo-hah to send the Web into spasm. It's great that the judge will publish his verdict on the Web; not so good that he announced the site well before time and thus caused the now-familiar total lockup of all routes west.
Apparently, he was persuaded to do this by his Net-crazy son. Perhaps the Judgelet could bone up on mirror sites next time before pushing his gavel-wielding father into cyberspace.
Wednesday
I tried. Really, I tried. But when you're a big company trying to sell your products on the grounds of their reliability, scalability and utility, and your flagship service running on those products hasn't worked right since day one, you're going to have to accept that oiks like me will be unable to resist the temptation to write about you.
Yes, it's MSN. No, it's not working. In the middle of the campaign to get 10 million new software version CDs out, the ability to let new users sign up is broken. As it has been for two days. As it was a fortnight ago. Unkinder souls than I would call this online service's record a dog, but I suspect that any canine with such a medical history would've made that final trip to the vet a while ago.
Thursday
The day starts in an exciting way as a small incident with PC Direct's production department, a piece of toast and a fire alarm results in evacuation of the entire building. What a way to meet the new neighbours...
Meanwhile back on AOL, what started as an annus horribilis seems to be turning out for the best. Remember the pain and anguish over the switch to fixed-price? The engaged lines, the lawsuits and the bad publicity have drifted into folk memory to be replaced by today's announcement of $19 million profit in the quarter up to the end of Sept 30, a takeover of old enemy CompuServe and the latest wheeze - a competition to find the replacement for the 'You've got mail' voice. That's in the US, of course: over here, Joanna Lumley will continue to be sufficient for all purposes until the heat death of the universe. Got that, AOL? Good.
(By the way, AOLsters should pop along to keyword ZDUK on Thursday evenings at 7:30, where they can indulge in real-time chat with a selection of our finest journalists. Who knows what you'll find out...)
Friday
All day meeting at PC Magazine, where the sandwiches lie thick upon the table, the sun shines wanly in through the blinds of the boardroom and we discuss matters of Great Importance. Can't say exactly what was discussed, but... well, look out for some very significant changes in the near future. We've been doing things the same way for nearly six years now, and it could well be time for something new.
Some small revelations: PC Magazine was originally modelled on 'Cosmopolitan' and 'Car and Driver' (really! "Only without the orgasms and emphasis on leather interiors", we were told), and during a discussion about acronyms we educated Bob Kane, American Ed-in-Chief, as to what VPL really means. Perhaps we'll get it into a feature table yet...
(oh, of course you know. No? Visible Panty Line, the scourge of the sleekly fashionable. Don't say ZDNet UK isn't educational.)
Saturday 1 November 1997, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Crash! Bang! Wallop! As I struggle to wakefulness with the sound of the Today programme, it becomes clear that all is far from well on what used to be called the stock market (it's now far more complex than that: I don't recall seeing pictures from the Depression of ruined bankers holding up signs saying they'd lost everything on the forward derivative spot market.). In curious synergy, the Internet gets the same malaise as the day progresses -- it seems that absolutely everyone is trying to get real-time feeds of the prices via the Net, and nothing can cope with demand. Even more curiously, high tech companies that announce particularly good results today get hit peculiarly hard: it's as if all sanity has left the planet.
Tuesday
Stocks rally - is this the dead cat bounce? (that's a bankers' term for the way prices rise for a little after a really vicious crash). Internet better. Those high tech companies recover particularly well: some people have obviously made a lot of money over the past couple of days. I'd wondered whether that would happen, and had thought that buying chunks of the palpably good companies when the price was way down would have been a good idea.
I'd like to say that my journalistic ethics forbade me to buy shares in companies about which I write: in truth, there's nowhere near enough liquidity in Goodwins plc to put my integrity in the slightest peril.
Wednesday
While my morality may be untested, my vanity is rarely in question. I happen to be in DejaNews (the service which indexes Usenet) looking for stuff about new radio technology, and succumb to the old urge to type my name in and see what happens. Will there be hoards of people discussing my latest reviews? Some nascent fan club planning a surprise party? A film director desperately trying to find me to discuss a really hot script idea?
There are precisely two hits. One concerns bugs in the old Spectrum 128K computer, and mentions yours truly as perpetrator of same (in cyberspace, one's sins last forever. There is no redemption). The other mentions a Rupert N Goodwin, a 75 year old petroleum geologist from Louisiana.
Retire to a PR party in a Mexican restaurant. Miller Shandwick is responsible: one must draw a veil over the events of the evening, except for two words. Tequila Frenzy. Discover things about editor-in-chief Bob Kane that are utterly astounding and certainly good for a couple of extra per cent at pay review time. Discover also that I've forgotten the lot five minutes later.
Thursday
More on cookies, those little snippets of data that Web sites leave on your computer to remind them of you when next you visit. The Putnam Pit, a newspaper from Tennessee, is jostling to make the local municipality hand over the cookie files from public workers' PCs. These are public documents, the newspaper claims, and as such covered under the US Freedom of Information act.
Interesting. All in favour of FoI -- too much secrecy is never a good thing. Then I go to the newspaper's Web site to read about the campaign for myself. It turns out the proprietor is seeking to make sure that workers aren't spending taxpayers' dollars visiting sites about sodomy, promoting homosexual lifestyles, desecrating the Flag, adultery, the anti-Christ and heroin (The newspaper is also against white slavery, white supremacy and communism).
Any residual feeling I had from Tuesday that sanity may have returned to cyberspace is swiftly dispelled. However, in an attempt to raise enough dosh to insider-deal my way to riches, I am prepared to sell my cookie files to the highest bidder. Sealed e-mails only, please.
Friday
As anyone who's ever been involved in publishing will tell you, there is nothing in the world quite like the launch of a new title. Today, we unveil Gamespot UK to an astonished world -- our latest Web site, dedicated to the needs and delights of the gaming community.
Online, this takes the form of Lara Croft -- abundantly appointed cyberbabe -- pulling a big switch to (as we so delicately put it) Turn Us On at midday. With a flourish, half a gigabyte of reviews, hints, news and other good stuff are linked into the World Wide Web. All yours, distant reader, and we hope you enjoy it.
What actually happened behind the scenes is somewhat different. The unveiling ceremony involved a large number of Ziffies holding plastic cups of champagne and cheering as the real Lara Croft (Asher, the bearded, ponytailed, abundantly bicycle shorts-wearing Gamespotter) typed in the commands to our server to make the switch. Three minutes later, he typed the correct commands and all was live. Two of the other real stars of the show could be easily spotted by them having bags under their eyes as big as Lara's virtual assets: Saul Hazledine and Chris Lewis.
The amount of programming, hackery and mind-bending binary buggering about that's gone on for months, at all hours of the day and night, cannot be overestimated -- it's so easy when one's idly clicking through a swish Web site to overlook the gallons of sweat and coffee that make it all happen. So spare a thought between vanquishing aliens and conquering worlds for the heroes of HTML, the knights of the networks who burn entire candelabras of candles at every end possible.
