Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 14 March 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
First day in the new job - moving computers, tidying up desks, getting to meet the new team. All very congenial, relaxed and totally unlike what will undoubtedly become a mammoth adrenaline-fest as The Date rolls towards us.
During the tidy-up, I find an old Connectix black-and-white QuickCam sitting at the bottom of a draw. Excellent - loads of my friends are getting going with videoconferencing these days, and I quite fancy being able to scowl at the world when I'm working here at midnight. Of course, the drivers are long gone, but that's what the Web's for, right? Right.
Wrong. Connectix' site has updates, but they only work if you've already got the software loaded. If you've uninstalled it, had a disk crash or are moving things to a new machine, you must use your original disks, then upgrade it. If you don't have those, Connectix will send you a new CD for ten dollars - and if you don't pay, you can't play.
And I always thought they were such a nice company - still, looking around the Web for other things about them, it transpires that they've also been very reluctant to let third party developers know how their compression scheme works and thus forced loads of people to move to other products.
With the number of cheap PC-based videocameras about to explode like a dynamite-eating dog in a microwave - and with nobody else trying to take ten bucks a pop for drivers - it's going to be interesting to watch Connectix' fortunes. Or at least I would, if I could get this camera to work...
Tuesday
The siren call of Kensington Olympia wafts up the hill to my Highgate fastness, so I schlep off to see the Windows 98 Show. Confusingly, it's all about Windows 95, NT and CE. First impression - my, how it's shrunk! If you took away the Adobe and Microsoft stands, you could fit the rest in a large marquee. Apart from the usual press room gossip about who's moving to what magazine, what the opposition is up to, and exactly which senior figures are involved in what illicit love affairs - boring stuff I won't bother you with, the most interesting thing on show was ZY.COM and its server-based Web creation package. Go to the site, sign up and start creating content using nothing but a browser. It's got lots of fab graphics stuff too - online rendering of 3D and rotating text, that sort of thing - which you'd expect seeing as the company comes from the same table as Xara.
It's still in beta (better believe it - it's already lost some pages on me), and I've got serious reservations about its flexibility and how it'll work under load, but it's a fascinating experiment that does get you on the Web faster than just about anything else I know. And if you want to know more - the basic service is free! Just pop over there and have a fiddle.
Wednesday
Spend the day wandering the Web, researching 'enterprise connectivity' - which, unfortunately, has little to do with the protocols behind Scotty's transporter beam. I've kept a mild watch on this during my days on PC Magazine, but it's much more to the fore with IT Week. This leads to me getting embroiled in a 'The mainframe's dead!' 'No, it's better than ever!' discussion with Nick Edmunds, our steely-eyed Enterprise Editor and one-time manager of very large Cray installations for very discreet people. I can see I'm going to have to learn a whole new set of acronyms... but not, perhaps, for long.
A conversation with my favourite network analyst reveals that Token Ring is dying out so fast that even the untouchable corporate heartland which was its natural home is ripping cables out of the walls and going over to Ethernet. And IP.
(PS - National No Smoking Day! Ooo-eer. Pension fund scandal! My, my... Giant Asteroid To Hit Earth! That's more like it. Right, twenty Capstan Untipped Full Strength and tell my financial advisor to go mug a pensioner...)
Thursday
Microsoft sends me a big yellow hard hat, bless it, to publicise the launch of Microsoft Site Server. I am so moved by this that I wear it all day.
A thought occurs. Since I've got a brand-new computer with almost no software on it yet, I wonder how many times the word Microsoft occurs. I ask File Find to locate all files with Microsoft in them - 2,510. That's on a clean computer. A look in just the Windows subdirectory reveals 19,102 mentions in 1,540 files... so a quick calculation indicates that some 300k of my hard disk is taken up purely with the word Microsoft.
Is this strictly necessary?
Friday
Wahey! Webcast! Ericsson is announcing - ooh, don't know what, exactly, but they're Webcasting the event. So I can sit at my desk and drink my coffee and still be virtually present. Alas, the appointed hour arrives and all that's cast across the Web is a 'sorry, it's broken. Server problems.' message.
Which is ironic: I investigate the rest of the site and find the company is talking about its range of telephone exchanges - sorry, switches - which now have oodles of Internet connectivity. This is the same week that Deutsche Telekom has announced huge investments in voice over IP: the monstrous amoeba of the Internet is absorbing the telephone companies faster than anyone ever really believed possible. Wonderful!
Final irony: I spend a very happy hour pulling stuff about this from the Ericsson site and printing it out: at the end of the day, a arge folder arrives by courier by way of apology for the Webcast not working. It contains duplicates of every page I printed off...
More News | ZDNet
During the tidy-up, I find an old Connectix black-and-white QuickCam sitting at the bottom of a draw. Excellent - loads of my friends are getting going with videoconferencing these days, and I quite fancy being able to scowl at the world when I'm working here at midnight. Of course, the drivers are long gone, but that's what the Web's for, right? Right.
Wrong. Connectix' site has updates, but they only work if you've already got the software loaded. If you've uninstalled it, had a disk crash or are moving things to a new machine, you must use your original disks, then upgrade it. If you don't have those, Connectix will send you a new CD for ten dollars - and if you don't pay, you can't play.
And I always thought they were such a nice company - still, looking around the Web for other things about them, it transpires that they've also been very reluctant to let third party developers know how their compression scheme works and thus forced loads of people to move to other products.
With the number of cheap PC-based videocameras about to explode like a dynamite-eating dog in a microwave - and with nobody else trying to take ten bucks a pop for drivers - it's going to be interesting to watch Connectix' fortunes. Or at least I would, if I could get this camera to work...
Tuesday
The siren call of Kensington Olympia wafts up the hill to my Highgate fastness, so I schlep off to see the Windows 98 Show. Confusingly, it's all about Windows 95, NT and CE. First impression - my, how it's shrunk! If you took away the Adobe and Microsoft stands, you could fit the rest in a large marquee. Apart from the usual press room gossip about who's moving to what magazine, what the opposition is up to, and exactly which senior figures are involved in what illicit love affairs - boring stuff I won't bother you with, the most interesting thing on show was ZY.COM and its server-based Web creation package. Go to the site, sign up and start creating content using nothing but a browser. It's got lots of fab graphics stuff too - online rendering of 3D and rotating text, that sort of thing - which you'd expect seeing as the company comes from the same table as Xara.
It's still in beta (better believe it - it's already lost some pages on me), and I've got serious reservations about its flexibility and how it'll work under load, but it's a fascinating experiment that does get you on the Web faster than just about anything else I know. And if you want to know more - the basic service is free! Just pop over there and have a fiddle.
Wednesday
Spend the day wandering the Web, researching 'enterprise connectivity' - which, unfortunately, has little to do with the protocols behind Scotty's transporter beam. I've kept a mild watch on this during my days on PC Magazine, but it's much more to the fore with IT Week. This leads to me getting embroiled in a 'The mainframe's dead!' 'No, it's better than ever!' discussion with Nick Edmunds, our steely-eyed Enterprise Editor and one-time manager of very large Cray installations for very discreet people. I can see I'm going to have to learn a whole new set of acronyms... but not, perhaps, for long.
A conversation with my favourite network analyst reveals that Token Ring is dying out so fast that even the untouchable corporate heartland which was its natural home is ripping cables out of the walls and going over to Ethernet. And IP.
(PS - National No Smoking Day! Ooo-eer. Pension fund scandal! My, my... Giant Asteroid To Hit Earth! That's more like it. Right, twenty Capstan Untipped Full Strength and tell my financial advisor to go mug a pensioner...)
Thursday
Microsoft sends me a big yellow hard hat, bless it, to publicise the launch of Microsoft Site Server. I am so moved by this that I wear it all day.
A thought occurs. Since I've got a brand-new computer with almost no software on it yet, I wonder how many times the word Microsoft occurs. I ask File Find to locate all files with Microsoft in them - 2,510. That's on a clean computer. A look in just the Windows subdirectory reveals 19,102 mentions in 1,540 files... so a quick calculation indicates that some 300k of my hard disk is taken up purely with the word Microsoft.
Is this strictly necessary?
Friday
Wahey! Webcast! Ericsson is announcing - ooh, don't know what, exactly, but they're Webcasting the event. So I can sit at my desk and drink my coffee and still be virtually present. Alas, the appointed hour arrives and all that's cast across the Web is a 'sorry, it's broken. Server problems.' message.
Which is ironic: I investigate the rest of the site and find the company is talking about its range of telephone exchanges - sorry, switches - which now have oodles of Internet connectivity. This is the same week that Deutsche Telekom has announced huge investments in voice over IP: the monstrous amoeba of the Internet is absorbing the telephone companies faster than anyone ever really believed possible. Wonderful!
Final irony: I spend a very happy hour pulling stuff about this from the Ericsson site and printing it out: at the end of the day, a arge folder arrives by courier by way of apology for the Webcast not working. It contains duplicates of every page I printed off...
More News | ZDNet
Saturday 7 March 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Wow! V.90 modems already! Wow wow! They're only $100 in the States! Too good to be true? Er, yes. These are the sadly misnamed software modems that use your Pentium to do the sums that decodes the noises that come down the line - this saves a twenty quid chip, but you still need the interface card to plug things into the phone line. There's nothing wrong in theory with this, except that while your Pentium is working hard it's not available for other jobs - in effect, your 233 MHz Pentium is running like a 133MHz machine.
Do the sums: you've saved twenty quid and wasted the couple of hundred quid you spent on buying a faster machine. Or you could buy a slightly more expensive modem and have done
Do the sums: you've saved twenty quid and wasted the couple of hundred quid you spent on buying a faster machine. Or you could buy a slightly more expensive modem and have done
Saturday 28 February 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Now it can be told: I'm leaving PC Magazine. Packing my bags, shoving my modem into a red polka-dot tablecloth and tying it to a stick... and going all of 20 metres over the other side of the building to IT Week. Where I'll cease being Technical Editor (Online) and become Technical Editor (With No Brackets Afterwards Whatsoever).
I've been on Mag for more than six years, and it's been fun. I won't miss the modem reviews, but I will miss the people. And there's nothing like a weekly deadline or three to make the heart beat a little faster... add this to that the fact that our first issue will be out on May 18 and every week thereafter, and icicles of panic soon set in.
Which wear off immediately afterwards. This is going to be great fun: news writing has a thrill to it like no other, and the upside to short deadlines is that you don't stay doing the same thing for too long.
Watch this space for further developments...
Tuesday
Deirdre C, my Irish friend and all-round top woman, returns from Florida. And New Orleans, where she has apparently been partying her bits off during the Mardi Gras celebration. By way of a memento, she's brought me a huge trunk of masks, feather boas, voodoo equipage and miscellaneous glittery things - and I've taken it into the office.
I must report that when confronted with an inoperable copy of Internet Explorer 4.0, it doesn't do the software any good if one dresses up in peacock feathers, sequins, blue glitter wig, a large hooded mask, a larger purple feather boa and waves a voodoo doll in front of the hapless PC. But it does make one feel a great deal better - and causes no little concern among one's workmates.
Wednesday
Those awfully nice Pace people turn up, clutching press packs containing stories about new modems. To be expected - but there's other stuff in there too. Expect the unexpected, as they say, with a range of new products coming out over the next few months that I certainly couldn't have predicted. They have a lot to say for themselves about the UK modem market, and complain with some feeling that other companies are shipping 'upgradable 56K modems' bundled with their PC but with no way to upgrade them. Indeed, the companies concerned - Pace reports - sometimes badge the modems with their own name and then fail to recognise them in technical support. Some conversations are reported where the technical support at such a company first tell the caller that the V.90 upgrade will make their modem go faster, and that the caller 'should call the manufacturer' of the modem for details. "Who's the manufacturer?" asked the caller. "Er, well, it's on a bit of paper in the box", said technical support, shortly before refusing to say anything else. All this at 50p a minute premium phone rates, too.
Of course, it could be that the Pace people were exaggerating for effect, but I don't think they are. They wouldn't tell me the name of the company involved... so if you've had a similar experience with a cut-price bundling deal, do e-mail me. I'd quite like to have that conversation myself...
Thursday
My pal the Java developer calls. "You know that Sun versus Microsoft court case?" he whispers, "well, rumour has it that it's been settled out of court and the finishing touches on the joint statement are just being sorted out in time for the Java One conference." He goes on to opine that it's a bit like Clinton versus Saddam, where it's quite clear that one side will win but with so much collateral damage that everyone would be better off just not bothering. The trick, he said, was to give Microsoft the ability to come out of it with face saved. With many new programming and debugging tools coming onto the market and the Java embedded systems business looking particularly healthy, it seems as if the language is going to survive the various problems it has and will genuinely prosper. And about time.
Friday
Mobile phones: gizmo or godsend? Two intrepid explorers from the office - Manek 'Vampire' Dubash and Ed 'Yeti' Henning are even now tending towards the latter point of view... they were invited, you see, to a big industry bash halfway up a mountain in Switzerland. Ed and Manek decided to spend some free time skiing, so caught a train further up and stopped off at a small town, there to hire some skis. Alas, the shop was shut... so they made the best of it and thought they'd walk back down again.
In retrospect, the fact that they set off without proper clothing, a map or any idea of the weather could be seen to be a little unfortunate. They probably realised this themselves as a huge snowstorm closed in, they wandered off the path up to their waists in snow and found themselves in a very tricky position indeed. Disoriented, lost and beginning to get dangerously cold, Ed finally gave up and called the hotel. Or, rather, Manek called PC Magazine to get the dialling code for Switzerland, because his phone still thought it was in England. Then he called the hotel, who got out a snowplough, which came and saved them.
So - for all you who think that the life of a technology journalist is beer, skittles and exciting foreign trips: think again. We risk our very lives to bring you the stories that matter!
More News | ZDNet
I've been on Mag for more than six years, and it's been fun. I won't miss the modem reviews, but I will miss the people. And there's nothing like a weekly deadline or three to make the heart beat a little faster... add this to that the fact that our first issue will be out on May 18 and every week thereafter, and icicles of panic soon set in.
Which wear off immediately afterwards. This is going to be great fun: news writing has a thrill to it like no other, and the upside to short deadlines is that you don't stay doing the same thing for too long.
Watch this space for further developments...
Tuesday
Deirdre C, my Irish friend and all-round top woman, returns from Florida. And New Orleans, where she has apparently been partying her bits off during the Mardi Gras celebration. By way of a memento, she's brought me a huge trunk of masks, feather boas, voodoo equipage and miscellaneous glittery things - and I've taken it into the office.
I must report that when confronted with an inoperable copy of Internet Explorer 4.0, it doesn't do the software any good if one dresses up in peacock feathers, sequins, blue glitter wig, a large hooded mask, a larger purple feather boa and waves a voodoo doll in front of the hapless PC. But it does make one feel a great deal better - and causes no little concern among one's workmates.
Wednesday
Those awfully nice Pace people turn up, clutching press packs containing stories about new modems. To be expected - but there's other stuff in there too. Expect the unexpected, as they say, with a range of new products coming out over the next few months that I certainly couldn't have predicted. They have a lot to say for themselves about the UK modem market, and complain with some feeling that other companies are shipping 'upgradable 56K modems' bundled with their PC but with no way to upgrade them. Indeed, the companies concerned - Pace reports - sometimes badge the modems with their own name and then fail to recognise them in technical support. Some conversations are reported where the technical support at such a company first tell the caller that the V.90 upgrade will make their modem go faster, and that the caller 'should call the manufacturer' of the modem for details. "Who's the manufacturer?" asked the caller. "Er, well, it's on a bit of paper in the box", said technical support, shortly before refusing to say anything else. All this at 50p a minute premium phone rates, too.
Of course, it could be that the Pace people were exaggerating for effect, but I don't think they are. They wouldn't tell me the name of the company involved... so if you've had a similar experience with a cut-price bundling deal, do e-mail me. I'd quite like to have that conversation myself...
Thursday
My pal the Java developer calls. "You know that Sun versus Microsoft court case?" he whispers, "well, rumour has it that it's been settled out of court and the finishing touches on the joint statement are just being sorted out in time for the Java One conference." He goes on to opine that it's a bit like Clinton versus Saddam, where it's quite clear that one side will win but with so much collateral damage that everyone would be better off just not bothering. The trick, he said, was to give Microsoft the ability to come out of it with face saved. With many new programming and debugging tools coming onto the market and the Java embedded systems business looking particularly healthy, it seems as if the language is going to survive the various problems it has and will genuinely prosper. And about time.
Friday
Mobile phones: gizmo or godsend? Two intrepid explorers from the office - Manek 'Vampire' Dubash and Ed 'Yeti' Henning are even now tending towards the latter point of view... they were invited, you see, to a big industry bash halfway up a mountain in Switzerland. Ed and Manek decided to spend some free time skiing, so caught a train further up and stopped off at a small town, there to hire some skis. Alas, the shop was shut... so they made the best of it and thought they'd walk back down again.
In retrospect, the fact that they set off without proper clothing, a map or any idea of the weather could be seen to be a little unfortunate. They probably realised this themselves as a huge snowstorm closed in, they wandered off the path up to their waists in snow and found themselves in a very tricky position indeed. Disoriented, lost and beginning to get dangerously cold, Ed finally gave up and called the hotel. Or, rather, Manek called PC Magazine to get the dialling code for Switzerland, because his phone still thought it was in England. Then he called the hotel, who got out a snowplough, which came and saved them.
So - for all you who think that the life of a technology journalist is beer, skittles and exciting foreign trips: think again. We risk our very lives to bring you the stories that matter!
More News | ZDNet
