Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 31 January 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
A member of the PC Magazine editorial team -- who shall remain nameless -- cut himself shaving today. Sliced off a mole, in fact. Oooh! In some pain, faint from loss of blood and with mere seconds of consciousness left, he dashed into his kitchen to search for the Band-Aid. While he was thus engaged, he slowly realised that the situation was complicated by a number of factors: the kitchen windows were large and clear, they faced onto the street and (apart from a thin, greasy film of blood) he was stark ballcock naked.
Summoning the last reserves of mental agility, he immediately ducked out of sight and edged back towards the safety of 'the inner core or sanctum', as Protect and Survive calls the centre of the house. Alas, since he is a member of staff who not only shaves but believes in a certain standard of sartorial presentation, the steam iron was (a) on, (b) standing upright and (c) now pressed into his right buttock. Our unfortunate colleague will from henceforth be known as 'Tefal Man', and will doubtless be appearing on a Channel 4 chatshow soon.
Tuesday
Well, the DSL consortium (Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, telephone companies and Uncle Tom Cobbley) has woken up and told the world what a good idea it all is to have a permanent 1.5 megabit a second wired into everyone's homes. It'll all be USB and Windows, strangely enough. The company I mentioned last week was Texas Instruments, by the way, but everything had to wait for the Universal ADSL Alliance to show its colours. Or, rather, colors - all the companies involved are American as far as I can see. Also missing, oddly, is Hayes.
Find myself explaining ADSL to a colleague. "So... everyone will have a fast enough link to the Internet to make and send real time, TV quality video?" he said. "Yes." I said. "So everyone will be transmitting home porno movies, downloading ten at once, and videoconferencing their willies?" he said. "Er... probably", I said. "Hm" he said. "Of course, some of us will need more bandwidth than others." Only he could move a conversation from high-speed networking to penile size in two sentences...
Wednesday
One of the simple pleasures of the online world is wandering into an IRC, AOL or CompuServe chatroom and winding up Americans. I have nothing against Americans or America, but there are times when one just itches to get in there and press a couple of buttons... The trick is finding people who can respond in kind.
Surprisingly, some of my more right-wing online sparring partners react very badly when I tell a couple of Clinton jokes (You've heard them already, honest. Oh, OK: "When 500 Washington women were asked whether they'd have sex with Bill Clinton, 490 answered "Not again"".). While none of them seemed to like the man much, they thought that he was the President, dammit, and worth defending on principle. Anything else was demeaning to America. Now, you try feeling the same way about, oh, Blair.
Odd, that.
Thursday
Noises of misery down the phone. A friend of mine has the same morning problems as I do - faced with anything resembling 8am, a temporary yet neurologically profound coma sets in. She's tried to fix it by calling BT and asking for an alarm call every morning, positioned strategically between the alarm going off and her boss achieving low earth orbit. "Any idea how much that costs?", she asked me, "Because I just thought to ask them after all these weeks."
Um. 50p? That seemed about right, so I opened the bidding there. Nope. Sixty. No. Seventy? A quid? A quid fifty? By now, I was beginning to get the idea. The ten second alarm call was sold to the woman under the duvet for no less than two hundred and seventy of your earth pence. Ouch, I said.
Of course, they don't tell you this. Now, if it takes the operator thirty seconds to call the number, wait for it to be answered and say "Alarm call", that's 5 quid 40 a minute. Or three hundred and twenty four pounds an hour - just to wake people up. And I thought consulting in the City was a good payer...
Friday
It's Domain Name Terror again! The US Government (hey, who put them in charge of the Internet? Did I miss something?) is proposing to hand over control of things like .com, .net and what have you to a committee of fifteen bods. These will decide when to add new ones like .vend, .person, .store and so on - after all, .com is heavily oversubscribed. But it's not clear how they'll decide this - a mixture of commercial pressures and residual public service, I suppose.
Why not do things the Internet way? Invent a voting protocol, set up a server, and add the top five new domain name suffixes - as voted for by the great connected - every month. That way it'll all be nicely democratic and if some crass commercial interest wants to get an unfair advantage they'll just have to bribe an awful lot of us.
(Here's the story on news.com. But I have no idea what Denis Norden has to do with it...)
More News | ZDNet
Summoning the last reserves of mental agility, he immediately ducked out of sight and edged back towards the safety of 'the inner core or sanctum', as Protect and Survive calls the centre of the house. Alas, since he is a member of staff who not only shaves but believes in a certain standard of sartorial presentation, the steam iron was (a) on, (b) standing upright and (c) now pressed into his right buttock. Our unfortunate colleague will from henceforth be known as 'Tefal Man', and will doubtless be appearing on a Channel 4 chatshow soon.
Tuesday
Well, the DSL consortium (Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, telephone companies and Uncle Tom Cobbley) has woken up and told the world what a good idea it all is to have a permanent 1.5 megabit a second wired into everyone's homes. It'll all be USB and Windows, strangely enough. The company I mentioned last week was Texas Instruments, by the way, but everything had to wait for the Universal ADSL Alliance to show its colours. Or, rather, colors - all the companies involved are American as far as I can see. Also missing, oddly, is Hayes.
Find myself explaining ADSL to a colleague. "So... everyone will have a fast enough link to the Internet to make and send real time, TV quality video?" he said. "Yes." I said. "So everyone will be transmitting home porno movies, downloading ten at once, and videoconferencing their willies?" he said. "Er... probably", I said. "Hm" he said. "Of course, some of us will need more bandwidth than others." Only he could move a conversation from high-speed networking to penile size in two sentences...
Wednesday
One of the simple pleasures of the online world is wandering into an IRC, AOL or CompuServe chatroom and winding up Americans. I have nothing against Americans or America, but there are times when one just itches to get in there and press a couple of buttons... The trick is finding people who can respond in kind.
Surprisingly, some of my more right-wing online sparring partners react very badly when I tell a couple of Clinton jokes (You've heard them already, honest. Oh, OK: "When 500 Washington women were asked whether they'd have sex with Bill Clinton, 490 answered "Not again"".). While none of them seemed to like the man much, they thought that he was the President, dammit, and worth defending on principle. Anything else was demeaning to America. Now, you try feeling the same way about, oh, Blair.
Odd, that.
Thursday
Noises of misery down the phone. A friend of mine has the same morning problems as I do - faced with anything resembling 8am, a temporary yet neurologically profound coma sets in. She's tried to fix it by calling BT and asking for an alarm call every morning, positioned strategically between the alarm going off and her boss achieving low earth orbit. "Any idea how much that costs?", she asked me, "Because I just thought to ask them after all these weeks."
Um. 50p? That seemed about right, so I opened the bidding there. Nope. Sixty. No. Seventy? A quid? A quid fifty? By now, I was beginning to get the idea. The ten second alarm call was sold to the woman under the duvet for no less than two hundred and seventy of your earth pence. Ouch, I said.
Of course, they don't tell you this. Now, if it takes the operator thirty seconds to call the number, wait for it to be answered and say "Alarm call", that's 5 quid 40 a minute. Or three hundred and twenty four pounds an hour - just to wake people up. And I thought consulting in the City was a good payer...
Friday
It's Domain Name Terror again! The US Government (hey, who put them in charge of the Internet? Did I miss something?) is proposing to hand over control of things like .com, .net and what have you to a committee of fifteen bods. These will decide when to add new ones like .vend, .person, .store and so on - after all, .com is heavily oversubscribed. But it's not clear how they'll decide this - a mixture of commercial pressures and residual public service, I suppose.
Why not do things the Internet way? Invent a voting protocol, set up a server, and add the top five new domain name suffixes - as voted for by the great connected - every month. That way it'll all be nicely democratic and if some crass commercial interest wants to get an unfair advantage they'll just have to bribe an awful lot of us.
(Here's the story on news.com. But I have no idea what Denis Norden has to do with it...)
More News | ZDNet
Saturday 24 January 1998, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
I don't understand markets. Ascend, makers of ISP equipment and the company best positioned to carry on making loads of dosh during the next two stages of Internet growth, is doing well despite all the palaver in the Far East (an important market segment). The company's got increased turnover and a healthy -- if slightly diminished - net income this quarter, and while it has some problems it does a good job and clearly has some fine people producing great technologies. Yet the stock market hates it, showing it little of the indulgence it extends to some far dodgier Web-based companies. On good results today, the stock fell. If it was marketing apples over the Internet and had just announced a million dollar loss for the eighteenth month in a row, the stock would be stratospheric.
People with braces really shouldn't be let near a computer.
Tuesday
This has nothing to do with computers, except that it came from an e-mail correspondent of mine. In fact, it's rather naughty. Home Secretaries and their offspring should look away now.
It transpires that in New Zealand, there is a large and bountiful business in growing the local variety of cannabis. The climate is conducive and the woodlands plentiful, so the local longhairs trek out into the forest, sow their seeds and return some months later to harvest the illicit wares. The plods discovered by helicopter nearly an acre of the finest weed burgeoning upwards in the middle of a national park, and decided to stake the place out the better to apprehend those who do such naughtiness.
NZ is a close community, though, and somehow the farmers got wind of this. They didn't bother to come back, so the police stayed there for weeks watching the cannabis bud, flower and finally seed. Eventually, it became clear that nothing was doing and so the decision was made to burn it all.
"Oh no", said the forestry commission. "This is a national park. You can't set an acre of anything alight here." Hm. A solution! Cut down the plants, transport them to the nearest beach (some 10 miles away) and ignite the lot there. So the machetes came out and the plants were heaped up, put into a big net and carried by the self-same helicopter to their final burning place.
Trouble is, when you take a large number of plants full of seeds and fly them in a net over a forest by helicopter, the seeds tend to fall out. What was a single acre plantation has now grown to a stretch of ground some ten by two miles... "Can we use weed killer?" the police asked. "Oh no", said the forestry commission. "This is a national park".
The sheep are reported to be 'very happy, thanks'.
Wednesday
An interesting meeting with [CENSORED] at [CENSORED], discussing ADSL issues under non-disclosure. So I can't talk about that. But perhaps they'll let me off if I reveal one of the more entertaining aspects of the whole issue. As y'all know by now, ADSL is basically a very, very fast modem - it sends up to 8 megabits per second down an ordinary telephone line. It's great. It's cool. It's going to make a whole new world. (It is, it is.)
However, it works by basically having 256 ordinary modems in one chip, each with its own radio frequency transmitter and receiver. All these separate signals are zapped down the line, received and recombined. One of the things that can slow ADSL down, therefore, is interference - noise, other radio stations on the same frequency, that sort of thing. One of the worst offenders, [CENSORED] says, is other components within a PC. These can mess up the highest frequency signals and drop ADSL's top speed down from 8 to 6 megabits.
"Oh," says I. "You mean fast buses, overclocked CPUs, unshielded disk drive connectors?" "No," says they. "It's the fan in the power supply. Nine times out of ten, it's making enough radio noise to drown out Brian Blessed".
So, when you phone up technical support and complain that your ADSL modem's not going fast enough, don't be surprised if they tell you that the wind's blowing in the wrong direction. Sometimes, I wonder about all this high technology...
Thursday
Intel has its Christmas Party today, a bare month after everyone else. A good idea, of course; just enough time after the New Year to get detoxed, and well clear of the impossibly jammed schedule of the pre-holiday PR blitz. But why, when there were only four parties this month, were they ALL on the 22nd? Ah well.
This is a very pleasant if horizontally laid-back affair, in the leopardskin basement of Planet Hollywood. We mingle with the Intellites, swapping tales of the good old days of Multibus and 386s, then watch a couple of stand-up comedians. Best line? "My grandfather wasn't very well, so my grandmother covered his back with lard. He went downhill rapidly after that..."
As we left, we chanced our arms at a lucky dip. I got a Pentium II chocolate bar (delicious, especially without the heatsink). However, I'm still disturbed by the image it conjures up of Andy Grove as Willy Wonka, surrounded by Bunny Suited Oompa-Loompas in a Hollywood version of a chip fab plant. Not sure that the analogy won't bear some extension, to be honest...
Friday
Microsoft to buy BT. Microsoft, Intel and Compaq to announce ADSL services and standards in conjunction with four out of the five American regional telephone companies on Monday. Microsoft and Siemens putting NT into telecoms switchgear. Microsoft's telecommunications control software business unit is nearing its first birthday. The world telecommunications market is worth some £500 billion. Let's play spot the strategy, shall we?
I think I'll move to New Zealand and communicate by Morse.
More News | ZDNet
People with braces really shouldn't be let near a computer.
Tuesday
This has nothing to do with computers, except that it came from an e-mail correspondent of mine. In fact, it's rather naughty. Home Secretaries and their offspring should look away now.
It transpires that in New Zealand, there is a large and bountiful business in growing the local variety of cannabis. The climate is conducive and the woodlands plentiful, so the local longhairs trek out into the forest, sow their seeds and return some months later to harvest the illicit wares. The plods discovered by helicopter nearly an acre of the finest weed burgeoning upwards in the middle of a national park, and decided to stake the place out the better to apprehend those who do such naughtiness.
NZ is a close community, though, and somehow the farmers got wind of this. They didn't bother to come back, so the police stayed there for weeks watching the cannabis bud, flower and finally seed. Eventually, it became clear that nothing was doing and so the decision was made to burn it all.
"Oh no", said the forestry commission. "This is a national park. You can't set an acre of anything alight here." Hm. A solution! Cut down the plants, transport them to the nearest beach (some 10 miles away) and ignite the lot there. So the machetes came out and the plants were heaped up, put into a big net and carried by the self-same helicopter to their final burning place.
Trouble is, when you take a large number of plants full of seeds and fly them in a net over a forest by helicopter, the seeds tend to fall out. What was a single acre plantation has now grown to a stretch of ground some ten by two miles... "Can we use weed killer?" the police asked. "Oh no", said the forestry commission. "This is a national park".
The sheep are reported to be 'very happy, thanks'.
Wednesday
An interesting meeting with [CENSORED] at [CENSORED], discussing ADSL issues under non-disclosure. So I can't talk about that. But perhaps they'll let me off if I reveal one of the more entertaining aspects of the whole issue. As y'all know by now, ADSL is basically a very, very fast modem - it sends up to 8 megabits per second down an ordinary telephone line. It's great. It's cool. It's going to make a whole new world. (It is, it is.)
However, it works by basically having 256 ordinary modems in one chip, each with its own radio frequency transmitter and receiver. All these separate signals are zapped down the line, received and recombined. One of the things that can slow ADSL down, therefore, is interference - noise, other radio stations on the same frequency, that sort of thing. One of the worst offenders, [CENSORED] says, is other components within a PC. These can mess up the highest frequency signals and drop ADSL's top speed down from 8 to 6 megabits.
"Oh," says I. "You mean fast buses, overclocked CPUs, unshielded disk drive connectors?" "No," says they. "It's the fan in the power supply. Nine times out of ten, it's making enough radio noise to drown out Brian Blessed".
So, when you phone up technical support and complain that your ADSL modem's not going fast enough, don't be surprised if they tell you that the wind's blowing in the wrong direction. Sometimes, I wonder about all this high technology...
Thursday
Intel has its Christmas Party today, a bare month after everyone else. A good idea, of course; just enough time after the New Year to get detoxed, and well clear of the impossibly jammed schedule of the pre-holiday PR blitz. But why, when there were only four parties this month, were they ALL on the 22nd? Ah well.
This is a very pleasant if horizontally laid-back affair, in the leopardskin basement of Planet Hollywood. We mingle with the Intellites, swapping tales of the good old days of Multibus and 386s, then watch a couple of stand-up comedians. Best line? "My grandfather wasn't very well, so my grandmother covered his back with lard. He went downhill rapidly after that..."
As we left, we chanced our arms at a lucky dip. I got a Pentium II chocolate bar (delicious, especially without the heatsink). However, I'm still disturbed by the image it conjures up of Andy Grove as Willy Wonka, surrounded by Bunny Suited Oompa-Loompas in a Hollywood version of a chip fab plant. Not sure that the analogy won't bear some extension, to be honest...
Friday
Microsoft to buy BT. Microsoft, Intel and Compaq to announce ADSL services and standards in conjunction with four out of the five American regional telephone companies on Monday. Microsoft and Siemens putting NT into telecoms switchgear. Microsoft's telecommunications control software business unit is nearing its first birthday. The world telecommunications market is worth some £500 billion. Let's play spot the strategy, shall we?
I think I'll move to New Zealand and communicate by Morse.
More News | ZDNet
Friday 16 January 1998, 5:40 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Monday
Down in the West Country, oh yes, staying at my parents' vicarage next to the Tamar. Even in the Seven Stars, one of Plymouth's better pubs, my quiet chat with the Reverend Goodwins is peppered with overheard snippets from the bar where people are talking about Web sites and AOL accounts. Is there no escape anywhere on the planet?
Apparently not. According to the Guardian today, two senior citizens made a drive of over a hundred miles to get to a radio station. They turfed up at Reception, and said "Hello, dear. We've come in response to your invitation"
Receptionist: "Errr, what? What invitation?"
Wrinklies: "You know, the one on the radio. You said in an advert we should come and visit your Web site. Well, here we are!"
I believe they were given a cup of tea and sent packing. Rumours that they were then promptly hired by VNU to head up the New Media division are entirely scurrilous, and I shall not sully your screens by repeating them.
Tuesday
Preparations are progressing for the TV quiz show I'm doing with my mother on Thursday. This is called Today's the Day, and is largely based around events that happened on the date of broadcast. Our date is March 5, so I plug away gamely on the Internet, pulling down screeds of stuff from various 'today in history' sites. Useful, that: it turns out that this was the day Stalin died, Churchill made his 'Iron Curtain' speech and Rex Harrison was born. Also Eddie Grant and Bernie Washington.
Mother and I sip gin over piles of printouts, murmuring to ourselves that it was just as bad as being back in school. I point out that gin was not normally encouraged in the classrooms (although our headmaster could normally be counted upon to have enough in his bloodstream to fuel at least three squadrons of F1-11s). Whoever said schooldays were the happiest of our lives
Down in the West Country, oh yes, staying at my parents' vicarage next to the Tamar. Even in the Seven Stars, one of Plymouth's better pubs, my quiet chat with the Reverend Goodwins is peppered with overheard snippets from the bar where people are talking about Web sites and AOL accounts. Is there no escape anywhere on the planet?
Apparently not. According to the Guardian today, two senior citizens made a drive of over a hundred miles to get to a radio station. They turfed up at Reception, and said "Hello, dear. We've come in response to your invitation"
Receptionist: "Errr, what? What invitation?"
Wrinklies: "You know, the one on the radio. You said in an advert we should come and visit your Web site. Well, here we are!"
I believe they were given a cup of tea and sent packing. Rumours that they were then promptly hired by VNU to head up the New Media division are entirely scurrilous, and I shall not sully your screens by repeating them.
Tuesday
Preparations are progressing for the TV quiz show I'm doing with my mother on Thursday. This is called Today's the Day, and is largely based around events that happened on the date of broadcast. Our date is March 5, so I plug away gamely on the Internet, pulling down screeds of stuff from various 'today in history' sites. Useful, that: it turns out that this was the day Stalin died, Churchill made his 'Iron Curtain' speech and Rex Harrison was born. Also Eddie Grant and Bernie Washington.
Mother and I sip gin over piles of printouts, murmuring to ourselves that it was just as bad as being back in school. I point out that gin was not normally encouraged in the classrooms (although our headmaster could normally be counted upon to have enough in his bloodstream to fuel at least three squadrons of F1-11s). Whoever said schooldays were the happiest of our lives
Saturday 10 January 1998, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
And a happy new year to you, distant reader. I hope Santa brought you everything you desire: I pre-empted the bearded one and bought myself a rather snazzy Korg Prophecy synthesiser. It's smooth and silver-shiny, has masses of flashing lights and - most importantly - makes noises like Gary Numan in a liquidiser.
This arrival has led, inevitably, to the moving around of the computer chez Goodwins (otherwise known as the Ramshack) and space being painfully prepared for the inevitable arrival of a four-track tape recorder and a mixer. I've also been spotted reading sinfully sad magazines (Sound on Sound, for heaven's sake) and contemplating sequencing software.
The biggest surprise is just how plump and sleek the music hardware and software market is these days: when I was a lad, home electronics was big and electronic music but a fad for longhairs. Now the case is changed: you can barely find an anorak these days who knows his BC108 from his 555 (let alone his ECH803), but try moving in certain parts of town without stepping on some pasty-faced youth mumbling about sampling rates and effect foldback. The magazines reflect this: with hundreds of pages of colour bumf describing multi-thousand pound toys, someone somewhere is making serious money. And lots of people are having serious fun. And I'm one of them. Hurrah!
Watch out Spice Girls...
Tuesday
Gradually, the magazine office is coming back to life. The arthritically slow workrate is enhanced immensely with the discovery that due to what may most safely be called a miscalculation we have a week less to write everything than we thought. Sweat beads on brows, bloodshot eyes glow with adrenalin and Bob Kane, Editor-in-Chief and recently returned from Christmas in California, proves that jetlag is no barrier to effective use of Anglo-Saxon idiom.
Meanwhile, back in the US, Compaq announces that it'll use both AMD and Cyrix alternatives to Intel's Pentium. Good? Well, obviously: breaking a monopoly increases choice and lowers cost. But there's also a downside; the Pentium and its ilk are among the most complex -- and most costly to design and get into manufacturing - machines on the planet. Yet AMD and Cyrix are helping reduce the part to just another commodity, and it's increasingly difficult to justify large investment in something prone to commodity-style price flattening. Everyone knows Moore's Law -- complexity doubles every eighteen months - but its sibling, Moore's Second Law, is less widely known. That states that the cost of the production plant doubles alongside it. Finance, not physics, may stymie processor development.
Wednesday
Hurrah! For the best part of six months, we've been wondering what's cooking in managing director David Craver's office. Now we know: our very first weekly newspaper is coming out. Called IT Week (which happily transmogrifies into I Tweek at the merest shift of a space), it promises to be quite something. No anaemic pamphlet this; with a projected staff in the region of 45 bods and a serious pack of newshounds after the juiciest news on the planet, it should make interesting reading.
A rapid bout of online chatter ensues, especially among journalists. Some sort of prize deserves to be awarded to one particular chap - ex-editor of a magazine, software distributor and something of a lugubrious character - whose first response was 'How do I get on the circulation list?'. Laudable, especially since the launch is some six months away and the magazine currently consists of a few hundred square feet of carpet and a spare mains cable. I suggest he forward £5,000 in used tenners to my desk, and await further instructions.
Thursday
Had to happen: the Tamagotchi is yesterday's news. Now it's virtual lovers. The new toy is a little keychain gadget with a synthesised human: give it chocolates, flowers, karaoke dates, love letters and so on, and eventually you can progress from kisses to marriage.
Wonder, balefully, about coding up my recent love life for duplication as an online experience. However, the byzantine twists therein would probably require a minimal machine specification of at least four 300MHz Pentium IIs, and still wouldn't make any sense. If only it were just a question of flowers and karaoke - there'll be some awfully surprised teenagers out there when the batteries run out and the hormones kick in.
Friday
Today's task is to review a Windows CE 2.0 PDA from Casio. I find it very difficult to call them by their official name - Handheld PCs - since they have almost no compatibility with anything you or I would recognise as a PC. Processor? Memory architecture? Expansion? Ah well. What's in a name?
To my considerable delight, the Cassiopeia comes with a reasonably pokey speaker. When it's talking to its host PC, the various stages of synchronisation or its loss are announced by little tootles, fanfares and even, at one point, a sound not unakin to Gary Numan in a liquidiser. Alas, the host PC isn't so amusingly enhanced: I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that the synchronisation process caused Word to go bits-up. Taking with it, of course, the review of the product... nothing to do but start again. However, even though the review has to be finished now I'm going to carry on playing with the Casio until I find out exactly what's going on.
And yes, it's better than WinCE 1.0. Yes, there's more software. But put any Windows CE machine next to a Pilot and the choice remains utterly clear... with the possible exception of HP's colour CE handheld. More on that another day.
More News | ZDNet
This arrival has led, inevitably, to the moving around of the computer chez Goodwins (otherwise known as the Ramshack) and space being painfully prepared for the inevitable arrival of a four-track tape recorder and a mixer. I've also been spotted reading sinfully sad magazines (Sound on Sound, for heaven's sake) and contemplating sequencing software.
The biggest surprise is just how plump and sleek the music hardware and software market is these days: when I was a lad, home electronics was big and electronic music but a fad for longhairs. Now the case is changed: you can barely find an anorak these days who knows his BC108 from his 555 (let alone his ECH803), but try moving in certain parts of town without stepping on some pasty-faced youth mumbling about sampling rates and effect foldback. The magazines reflect this: with hundreds of pages of colour bumf describing multi-thousand pound toys, someone somewhere is making serious money. And lots of people are having serious fun. And I'm one of them. Hurrah!
Watch out Spice Girls...
Tuesday
Gradually, the magazine office is coming back to life. The arthritically slow workrate is enhanced immensely with the discovery that due to what may most safely be called a miscalculation we have a week less to write everything than we thought. Sweat beads on brows, bloodshot eyes glow with adrenalin and Bob Kane, Editor-in-Chief and recently returned from Christmas in California, proves that jetlag is no barrier to effective use of Anglo-Saxon idiom.
Meanwhile, back in the US, Compaq announces that it'll use both AMD and Cyrix alternatives to Intel's Pentium. Good? Well, obviously: breaking a monopoly increases choice and lowers cost. But there's also a downside; the Pentium and its ilk are among the most complex -- and most costly to design and get into manufacturing - machines on the planet. Yet AMD and Cyrix are helping reduce the part to just another commodity, and it's increasingly difficult to justify large investment in something prone to commodity-style price flattening. Everyone knows Moore's Law -- complexity doubles every eighteen months - but its sibling, Moore's Second Law, is less widely known. That states that the cost of the production plant doubles alongside it. Finance, not physics, may stymie processor development.
Wednesday
Hurrah! For the best part of six months, we've been wondering what's cooking in managing director David Craver's office. Now we know: our very first weekly newspaper is coming out. Called IT Week (which happily transmogrifies into I Tweek at the merest shift of a space), it promises to be quite something. No anaemic pamphlet this; with a projected staff in the region of 45 bods and a serious pack of newshounds after the juiciest news on the planet, it should make interesting reading.
A rapid bout of online chatter ensues, especially among journalists. Some sort of prize deserves to be awarded to one particular chap - ex-editor of a magazine, software distributor and something of a lugubrious character - whose first response was 'How do I get on the circulation list?'. Laudable, especially since the launch is some six months away and the magazine currently consists of a few hundred square feet of carpet and a spare mains cable. I suggest he forward £5,000 in used tenners to my desk, and await further instructions.
Thursday
Had to happen: the Tamagotchi is yesterday's news. Now it's virtual lovers. The new toy is a little keychain gadget with a synthesised human: give it chocolates, flowers, karaoke dates, love letters and so on, and eventually you can progress from kisses to marriage.
Wonder, balefully, about coding up my recent love life for duplication as an online experience. However, the byzantine twists therein would probably require a minimal machine specification of at least four 300MHz Pentium IIs, and still wouldn't make any sense. If only it were just a question of flowers and karaoke - there'll be some awfully surprised teenagers out there when the batteries run out and the hormones kick in.
Friday
Today's task is to review a Windows CE 2.0 PDA from Casio. I find it very difficult to call them by their official name - Handheld PCs - since they have almost no compatibility with anything you or I would recognise as a PC. Processor? Memory architecture? Expansion? Ah well. What's in a name?
To my considerable delight, the Cassiopeia comes with a reasonably pokey speaker. When it's talking to its host PC, the various stages of synchronisation or its loss are announced by little tootles, fanfares and even, at one point, a sound not unakin to Gary Numan in a liquidiser. Alas, the host PC isn't so amusingly enhanced: I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that the synchronisation process caused Word to go bits-up. Taking with it, of course, the review of the product... nothing to do but start again. However, even though the review has to be finished now I'm going to carry on playing with the Casio until I find out exactly what's going on.
And yes, it's better than WinCE 1.0. Yes, there's more software. But put any Windows CE machine next to a Pilot and the choice remains utterly clear... with the possible exception of HP's colour CE handheld. More on that another day.
More News | ZDNet
