Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 25 April 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Tellytubbies on the Web! Terrific! No so terrific is the way in which the Beeb carefully put the TubbyFrighteners on anyone who dared to put images of the psychedelia-for-toddlers show on the Web previously. I was peripherally involved in one such site, where the owner was busy creating a whole new alternative background for the Tellytubbies. He'd got as far as them being mutant survivors of a nuclear apocalyse, being bred for food by underground controllers: my solitary contribution was suggesting that the toddler's face in the sun was in fact David Bowman from 2001, after his transmutation into the StarChild.
All good clean fun. But it was not to be: Aunty caught wind of such errant creativity and caused the removal of unauthorised images, double-quick. I know all the issues about copyright on the Web, but when you can buy ripped-off Tellytubby T-shirts in any street market it seems a real shame to stomp on something so harmless.
Tuesday
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Bulgarian state institute of computing - previously dedicated to virus, er, detection - has 'solved the millennium bug'. That's awfully clever, given that said bug is in fact a huge range of algorithmic, implementation and conceptual errors in an even larger range of formats. Nevertheless, those canny Bulgars have cracked it. One solution for a million problems.
How? "Send us $500 and we'll tell you", they say. Wonder if it cures piles, dropsy and ague too?
If anyone out there fancies finding out, send the dosh to me. I'll make sure you get the full story. Ho yus. And while I'm at it, that fancy Tower Bridge thingy outside my window here is being flogged off, and I know a bloke on the council that can do you a really good deal...
Wednesday
From AT&T's press conference explaining just why its entire frame relay network (you know, the one that runs America's cashpoints, credit checks and card authorisations) went down for 24 hours.
Frank Ianna, executive VP: "I have yet to pinpoint exactly what that particular problem was. Probably some type of hardware or software or combination of that type of problem."
Thanks, Frank. I was afraid the coal-fired boiler had sprung a leak...
Thursday
Spaceman time! I go off to see Herr Thomas Loewenthal, MD of Iridium Communications Germany GmbH. Iridium is one of those astonishing satellite-based telephone systems with loads of orbiting hardware (sixty-odd satellites, in this case) and a rather indistinct marketing strategy. As a long-term fan of all things orbital, I'm delighted to learn that the company has managed to produce a satellite per week for more than a year and has been getting them up (so to speek) with astonishing regularity. The first mass-production use of space.
If all goes well, the final batch of birds goes up on Sunday, and the service goes live in September. Who'll use it? "The universal citizen," apparently - in other words, the sort of chap who lives in London but works on a huge project in Siberia. There's a range of phones - they look like rather old handheld phones with big warts on the back - that automatically choose your local GSM provider or Iridium, depending on what's more appropriate. And there's a pager, which might work indoors.
Will the system work? Yes. Will it make any money? Doubt it. Do I want one? Of course. Would I pay 'between $3 and $7 a minute'? Nope. If I was on a huge Siberian construction site? Yep.
It all depends on how many factories get built in the deserts of the world. Iriduim is bold, ingenious and brave - as Sir Humphrey would put it. I wish them luck.
Friday
If you're using a PDA, be careful. If it goes wrong, don't assume you'll be able to get it fixed and - more worryingly - don't assume you'll be able to read any of your old data. Word reaches us of an HP 200 owner whose machine died, gracelessly. But he'd been a sensible chap and had backed up all his data.
He phoned up HP and asked 'What format is this data in, so I can get it out of the Intuit and Quicken files?' HP said: "We don't know. We don't have any record of that." Our friend asked more firmly, and HP went and grilled the engineers responsible. No good - they'd forgotten or pulped the printouts or something, and the company was completely unable to help.
In the end, chummy had to go into the files with text editor and cut-and-paste stuff out. He was not impressed, and neither are we: after all, the HP 200 was still available not so long ago. The moral of this story is - if you can't even trust HP to keep that sort of information, better get used to taking backups in longhand. You could even keep them in a handy, portable format - say a three-ring binder? A sort of file of facts...
All good clean fun. But it was not to be: Aunty caught wind of such errant creativity and caused the removal of unauthorised images, double-quick. I know all the issues about copyright on the Web, but when you can buy ripped-off Tellytubby T-shirts in any street market it seems a real shame to stomp on something so harmless.
Tuesday
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Bulgarian state institute of computing - previously dedicated to virus, er, detection - has 'solved the millennium bug'. That's awfully clever, given that said bug is in fact a huge range of algorithmic, implementation and conceptual errors in an even larger range of formats. Nevertheless, those canny Bulgars have cracked it. One solution for a million problems.
How? "Send us $500 and we'll tell you", they say. Wonder if it cures piles, dropsy and ague too?
If anyone out there fancies finding out, send the dosh to me. I'll make sure you get the full story. Ho yus. And while I'm at it, that fancy Tower Bridge thingy outside my window here is being flogged off, and I know a bloke on the council that can do you a really good deal...
Wednesday
From AT&T's press conference explaining just why its entire frame relay network (you know, the one that runs America's cashpoints, credit checks and card authorisations) went down for 24 hours.
Frank Ianna, executive VP: "I have yet to pinpoint exactly what that particular problem was. Probably some type of hardware or software or combination of that type of problem."
Thanks, Frank. I was afraid the coal-fired boiler had sprung a leak...
Thursday
Spaceman time! I go off to see Herr Thomas Loewenthal, MD of Iridium Communications Germany GmbH. Iridium is one of those astonishing satellite-based telephone systems with loads of orbiting hardware (sixty-odd satellites, in this case) and a rather indistinct marketing strategy. As a long-term fan of all things orbital, I'm delighted to learn that the company has managed to produce a satellite per week for more than a year and has been getting them up (so to speek) with astonishing regularity. The first mass-production use of space.
If all goes well, the final batch of birds goes up on Sunday, and the service goes live in September. Who'll use it? "The universal citizen," apparently - in other words, the sort of chap who lives in London but works on a huge project in Siberia. There's a range of phones - they look like rather old handheld phones with big warts on the back - that automatically choose your local GSM provider or Iridium, depending on what's more appropriate. And there's a pager, which might work indoors.
Will the system work? Yes. Will it make any money? Doubt it. Do I want one? Of course. Would I pay 'between $3 and $7 a minute'? Nope. If I was on a huge Siberian construction site? Yep.
It all depends on how many factories get built in the deserts of the world. Iriduim is bold, ingenious and brave - as Sir Humphrey would put it. I wish them luck.
Friday
If you're using a PDA, be careful. If it goes wrong, don't assume you'll be able to get it fixed and - more worryingly - don't assume you'll be able to read any of your old data. Word reaches us of an HP 200 owner whose machine died, gracelessly. But he'd been a sensible chap and had backed up all his data.
He phoned up HP and asked 'What format is this data in, so I can get it out of the Intuit and Quicken files?' HP said: "We don't know. We don't have any record of that." Our friend asked more firmly, and HP went and grilled the engineers responsible. No good - they'd forgotten or pulped the printouts or something, and the company was completely unable to help.
In the end, chummy had to go into the files with text editor and cut-and-paste stuff out. He was not impressed, and neither are we: after all, the HP 200 was still available not so long ago. The moral of this story is - if you can't even trust HP to keep that sort of information, better get used to taking backups in longhand. You could even keep them in a handy, portable format - say a three-ring binder? A sort of file of facts...
Saturday 18 April 1998, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Day off. Turned up for an afternoon of fatherhood with Number One Son: it's reached the point where we talk of Visual Basic and array handling, PDAs and CD-ROM drives as much as we talk about The Simpsons and killer ghouls. Was I that much of an anorak when I was twelve? (yes, of course).
I think he wants his own email account and modem. I've been a Guardian-reading bleeding-heart pinko liberal media tart for a while now, and have always been of the opinion that the less control The Powers That Be exert over the Internet, the better. Let a thousand flowers bloom - and if some of them offend thee, well, you don't have to pluck 'em. Yet the thought of Goodwins Junior wandering blithely around some of the places out there on the Web is quite sobering: do I actually believe my own, anti-censorship attitude when it comes to the crunch?
On the whole: yes, I do. The lad's sensible enough not to go rushing out to try and build a nuclear bomb or seduce the entire Dagenham Girl Pipers band, and when I remember some of the things I got up to at his age... anyway. Didn't do me any harm (at least, not now I've got the anti-drool sheeting fitted to the keyboard. Those electric shocks were wicked).
Tuesday - The Cable Guys
I've succumbed. Three years ago, I didn't have a television. Today, I'm getting cable. Since I'm a denizen of North London, it falls to Cable London to provide the service. They sent me a special Easter offer, with cut-price telephone and a free second TV outlet in the bedroom, and I gave in (why? The Goodies and South Park, mostly. And I have a secret fondness for aeroplanes, which seem to make up 90% of Discovery's output). I'm also hoping to be in a position to beta test cable modems, which may be coming sooner than we think.
Anyway. The installation team (two lads of sturdy Basildon stock: how come these people never want a cup of coffee or tea any more, but always want to use your loo?) zap in, drill holes, thread cables, make phone calls and bang. I'm connected. Lovely. QVC. How achingly beautiful that capo di monte walrus is. And the telephone? And the second TV outlet? The Cable Lads look puzzled. "Snot on our list..."
They leave. I phone. "The telephone will be installed by 1pm", says the woman. I sit at home, tapping away industriously, and call again at 1:30pm. "Oh... hold on". Ten minutes of music. "Er, we have you down for installation, but we haven't assigned anyone to you. No idea how that happened. Sorry. Can you wait in until six?" No, I couldn't (what do these people imagine we do all day?).
As for the second outlet... nobody seems to know anything. I content myself with looking up the specifications of the set-top box on the Web, the intricacies of hybrid fibre coax distribution systems and the format of their authentication schemes for pay-per-view. Interesting. And these people are going to give us all megabit cable modems and run network access? Ho, ho, ho.
Wednesday - Palm's Technological Breakthrough
The Palm III is in, and is getting reviewed. You know the score: just like a Palm Pilot but rounder, more memory and an infra-red port. One of our reviewers phones up the marketing bod in charge of the Palm, and asks: 'So, what can you do with the infra-red?' 'That's a great thing', said the bod. 'You can upgrade your memory with it.' Our reviewer thinks for a second - surely Marketing Bod means update? - and asks, 'What, you mean upgrade the 2Mb static RAM?'. 'Yeah. To four megabytes.'
'Via infrared?' 'Yep, through infrared'.
Barely able to contain himself, our heroic reviewer calls the American side of the operation and says 'Your bloke in the UK has just told me that I can upgrade from two to four megabytes via the infrared port.' Silence. Then, 'Oh no, you can't do that. At least, I don't think you can. I'll check.'
I hope someone's told Intel.
Thursday
3Com's excitingly named Mike Valiant comes in to talk to me about ADSL and other delights. It turns out that people are already using the technology in the UK on campuses and the like, and it's all fab. A memory struggles out: doesn't BT sell a service where you can hire a twisted pair from your site to an exchange and then from the exchange to a second site? That means we could have an ADSL link from Ziff Towers to somewhere nearby - like the gaff of Chris Lewis, ZDNet UK Main Man, who lives just down the road.
A few moments on the BT Web site and exactly that service is uncovered - KeyLine Standard. At least, it may be the right service: the details are sketchy and somewhat contradictory. And there's no telephone number to call. Eventually find one that looks promising: 'Business Data Sales' I phone up. 'KeyLine wot?' says Ron from Romford. 'Nah, we don't do nuffink like that.'. 'It's on your web site...' 'Really? Wot is it?' I explain. 'Oh, like a sort of private telephone line?' I get transferred to someone who also hasn't heard of the service, and then tells me that because I want to link a business to a residence, it's not allowed anyway. I can't buy a business service for residential use. 'It's for home working!' I say. She's heard of this, and grudgingly allows that I might be permitted to buy the service - if she knew what it was. She gives me another number which is busy.
Later, we get through. The voice informs us that there are only two people in the company who know about this service, and they're both out. These are the people who are going to give us all megabit DSL modems and run network access? Ho, ho, ho.
Friday
You'll no doubt have noticed the story about Number 10's website spewing out Microsoft ODBC error messages instead of coming up with the goods. At the time of writing, it's 'been fixed' more than once: nobody, alas, has told the error messages which are still in residence. I overheard some of the phone conversations between Chris Lewis and the various people connected with the web site: did you know that the site was launched three times yesterday, at 10am, 2pm and 'sometime later in the evening'? It all depended who you talked to. Still, the developers have clearly done their research: "It's the firewall causing the problems." "How, exactly?" "Oh, we can't tell you that. Security forbids it."
Sir Humphrey would be delighted.
One hopes that the problems (which look to me a lot more like Microsoft's back-end processor overloading than a firewall issue) will help the Government reassess its entirely unhealthy obsession with all things MS.
Given that our glorious leader has expressed a complete dislike of actually using technology, though, it's clear that the Seattle lobby will carry on tickling his ear for a while yet.
I think he wants his own email account and modem. I've been a Guardian-reading bleeding-heart pinko liberal media tart for a while now, and have always been of the opinion that the less control The Powers That Be exert over the Internet, the better. Let a thousand flowers bloom - and if some of them offend thee, well, you don't have to pluck 'em. Yet the thought of Goodwins Junior wandering blithely around some of the places out there on the Web is quite sobering: do I actually believe my own, anti-censorship attitude when it comes to the crunch?
On the whole: yes, I do. The lad's sensible enough not to go rushing out to try and build a nuclear bomb or seduce the entire Dagenham Girl Pipers band, and when I remember some of the things I got up to at his age... anyway. Didn't do me any harm (at least, not now I've got the anti-drool sheeting fitted to the keyboard. Those electric shocks were wicked).
Tuesday - The Cable Guys
I've succumbed. Three years ago, I didn't have a television. Today, I'm getting cable. Since I'm a denizen of North London, it falls to Cable London to provide the service. They sent me a special Easter offer, with cut-price telephone and a free second TV outlet in the bedroom, and I gave in (why? The Goodies and South Park, mostly. And I have a secret fondness for aeroplanes, which seem to make up 90% of Discovery's output). I'm also hoping to be in a position to beta test cable modems, which may be coming sooner than we think.
Anyway. The installation team (two lads of sturdy Basildon stock: how come these people never want a cup of coffee or tea any more, but always want to use your loo?) zap in, drill holes, thread cables, make phone calls and bang. I'm connected. Lovely. QVC. How achingly beautiful that capo di monte walrus is. And the telephone? And the second TV outlet? The Cable Lads look puzzled. "Snot on our list..."
They leave. I phone. "The telephone will be installed by 1pm", says the woman. I sit at home, tapping away industriously, and call again at 1:30pm. "Oh... hold on". Ten minutes of music. "Er, we have you down for installation, but we haven't assigned anyone to you. No idea how that happened. Sorry. Can you wait in until six?" No, I couldn't (what do these people imagine we do all day?).
As for the second outlet... nobody seems to know anything. I content myself with looking up the specifications of the set-top box on the Web, the intricacies of hybrid fibre coax distribution systems and the format of their authentication schemes for pay-per-view. Interesting. And these people are going to give us all megabit cable modems and run network access? Ho, ho, ho.
Wednesday - Palm's Technological Breakthrough
The Palm III is in, and is getting reviewed. You know the score: just like a Palm Pilot but rounder, more memory and an infra-red port. One of our reviewers phones up the marketing bod in charge of the Palm, and asks: 'So, what can you do with the infra-red?' 'That's a great thing', said the bod. 'You can upgrade your memory with it.' Our reviewer thinks for a second - surely Marketing Bod means update? - and asks, 'What, you mean upgrade the 2Mb static RAM?'. 'Yeah. To four megabytes.'
'Via infrared?' 'Yep, through infrared'.
Barely able to contain himself, our heroic reviewer calls the American side of the operation and says 'Your bloke in the UK has just told me that I can upgrade from two to four megabytes via the infrared port.' Silence. Then, 'Oh no, you can't do that. At least, I don't think you can. I'll check.'
I hope someone's told Intel.
Thursday
3Com's excitingly named Mike Valiant comes in to talk to me about ADSL and other delights. It turns out that people are already using the technology in the UK on campuses and the like, and it's all fab. A memory struggles out: doesn't BT sell a service where you can hire a twisted pair from your site to an exchange and then from the exchange to a second site? That means we could have an ADSL link from Ziff Towers to somewhere nearby - like the gaff of Chris Lewis, ZDNet UK Main Man, who lives just down the road.
A few moments on the BT Web site and exactly that service is uncovered - KeyLine Standard. At least, it may be the right service: the details are sketchy and somewhat contradictory. And there's no telephone number to call. Eventually find one that looks promising: 'Business Data Sales' I phone up. 'KeyLine wot?' says Ron from Romford. 'Nah, we don't do nuffink like that.'. 'It's on your web site...' 'Really? Wot is it?' I explain. 'Oh, like a sort of private telephone line?' I get transferred to someone who also hasn't heard of the service, and then tells me that because I want to link a business to a residence, it's not allowed anyway. I can't buy a business service for residential use. 'It's for home working!' I say. She's heard of this, and grudgingly allows that I might be permitted to buy the service - if she knew what it was. She gives me another number which is busy.
Later, we get through. The voice informs us that there are only two people in the company who know about this service, and they're both out. These are the people who are going to give us all megabit DSL modems and run network access? Ho, ho, ho.
Friday
You'll no doubt have noticed the story about Number 10's website spewing out Microsoft ODBC error messages instead of coming up with the goods. At the time of writing, it's 'been fixed' more than once: nobody, alas, has told the error messages which are still in residence. I overheard some of the phone conversations between Chris Lewis and the various people connected with the web site: did you know that the site was launched three times yesterday, at 10am, 2pm and 'sometime later in the evening'? It all depended who you talked to. Still, the developers have clearly done their research: "It's the firewall causing the problems." "How, exactly?" "Oh, we can't tell you that. Security forbids it."
Sir Humphrey would be delighted.
One hopes that the problems (which look to me a lot more like Microsoft's back-end processor overloading than a firewall issue) will help the Government reassess its entirely unhealthy obsession with all things MS.
Given that our glorious leader has expressed a complete dislike of actually using technology, though, it's clear that the Seattle lobby will carry on tickling his ear for a while yet.
Saturday 11 April 1998, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
"The next generation of Windows CE will be real-time", announces Microsoft. Yer wot? I thought that telephone companies, car manufacturers and everyone short of NASA had signed up to use WinCE already - and it's not real time yet? For those who unaccountably haven't designed embedded systems, real-time means just that - something happens, and you act on it immediately. Wheels locked? Get the ABS going. Now.
With Windows CE as it is, if something else is busy - the satellite global positioning system is downloading a bitmap of Croydon, for example - you'll just have to wait. Not ideal when there's a whisker between you, the lamp-post and a huge articulated lorry.
I've got a very bad feeling about this...
Tuesday
Wandering around the Internet, I stumble across a reference to Kingston Communication and ADSL. It seems that Hull will be the first part of the UK to get fast domestic net access: not quite enough to make me move there, but still exciting enough.
But what does one do when one wants to find out about a telephone company? One goes off to find the Web page, of course. Only I couldn't. Now, I've been hanging around in this Web thing for a few years now and take a certain pride in being able to sniff things out, hunt them down and chase them into a darkened back alley before giving them a darn good seeing-to. In this case... nothing.
So, I give in and phone the press department. It only takes three voicemails before I hit a real person, and we chat amiably away about ADSL and telephones and such. "It's odd," I say at length, "but I just can't seem to find your Web site. You could almost suspect you didn't have one."
There's a short silence.
"Actually, we don't. It's really embarrasing," said the PR. "There was some restructuring recently and the people who were going to do the Web site..." He trailed off.
There is a certain irony in this: the company at the forefront of UK ADSL provision - a company which also owns an ISP - has no Web site. Especially since the Web's got to the point where one's slightly surprised if one's local corner shop doesn't have a home page somewhere.
It's grim up North.
Wednesday
This is more like it! Vapour-phase cooling of a 600MHz Alpha chip means you can run it at 767MHz, and ice-cold company Kryotech is snuggling up to Digital to produce just such a machine. Nothing terribly high-tech - it's basically yer standard refrigeration components - but it's nice that a few tubes, pumps and radiators can get the sort of speed increase out of a processor that normally takes a billion-dollar upgrade to a chip production line. Soon, Kryotech predict, it'll have these things deep-chilled to well under -100 degrees celsius and you'll be able to keep a side of meat in your workstation for a month.
How different from the Pentium-II based portables that PC Magazine is reviewing at the moment. Far be it from me to foreshadow the results of the tests, but one reviewer was heard complaining loudly in the lifts that he'd been using one such laptop on the train into work. Or rather, he'd tried - but the thing got so hot it singed his legs. "My thighs were burning, so I had to pull it off!" he said loudly, as the lift stopped at one of the other floors in the building and a couple of suits got in. The rest of the journey was marked by nervous silence, punctuated by the occasional giggle. What do they think of us...
Thursday
Showing an excellence of taste rare in the industry, Seiko has unveiled a wristwatch computer called the Ruputer (www.ruputer.com). A bizarre, Joe-90esque gadget, it has a 102x64 pixel LCD, infrared and serial connection to a PC, can upload and download to your PC and comes with 'three applications from Microsoft'. Oh, and it has 2Mb of storage. It may even tell the time.
More than that, I cannot say. The only source of information in the world is on the Web site, and it's all in Japanese. Even the American arm of Seiko seems taken aback, with a note on its site saying 'this is all we know, but it looks cool'.
I want one, and not only because of its remarkably fine name. No, according to the product pictures on the site the thing has a graphical user interface that looks just like Gem - possibly the silliest thing to put on a watch, aside from toggle switches and octal LEDs. A cult object.
Friday
Hurrah! Day off. Spring cleaning, visiting friends, intensive duvet testing - ahoy there! And no, I'm not going to reveal what happened when I took a close friend to an East End male stripper show for her birthday and left her there with a digital camera - you'll have to find the Web site for yourselves. Nor what happened subsequently in the Soho Spanish gambling den...
With Windows CE as it is, if something else is busy - the satellite global positioning system is downloading a bitmap of Croydon, for example - you'll just have to wait. Not ideal when there's a whisker between you, the lamp-post and a huge articulated lorry.
I've got a very bad feeling about this...
Tuesday
Wandering around the Internet, I stumble across a reference to Kingston Communication and ADSL. It seems that Hull will be the first part of the UK to get fast domestic net access: not quite enough to make me move there, but still exciting enough.
But what does one do when one wants to find out about a telephone company? One goes off to find the Web page, of course. Only I couldn't. Now, I've been hanging around in this Web thing for a few years now and take a certain pride in being able to sniff things out, hunt them down and chase them into a darkened back alley before giving them a darn good seeing-to. In this case... nothing.
So, I give in and phone the press department. It only takes three voicemails before I hit a real person, and we chat amiably away about ADSL and telephones and such. "It's odd," I say at length, "but I just can't seem to find your Web site. You could almost suspect you didn't have one."
There's a short silence.
"Actually, we don't. It's really embarrasing," said the PR. "There was some restructuring recently and the people who were going to do the Web site..." He trailed off.
There is a certain irony in this: the company at the forefront of UK ADSL provision - a company which also owns an ISP - has no Web site. Especially since the Web's got to the point where one's slightly surprised if one's local corner shop doesn't have a home page somewhere.
It's grim up North.
Wednesday
This is more like it! Vapour-phase cooling of a 600MHz Alpha chip means you can run it at 767MHz, and ice-cold company Kryotech is snuggling up to Digital to produce just such a machine. Nothing terribly high-tech - it's basically yer standard refrigeration components - but it's nice that a few tubes, pumps and radiators can get the sort of speed increase out of a processor that normally takes a billion-dollar upgrade to a chip production line. Soon, Kryotech predict, it'll have these things deep-chilled to well under -100 degrees celsius and you'll be able to keep a side of meat in your workstation for a month.
How different from the Pentium-II based portables that PC Magazine is reviewing at the moment. Far be it from me to foreshadow the results of the tests, but one reviewer was heard complaining loudly in the lifts that he'd been using one such laptop on the train into work. Or rather, he'd tried - but the thing got so hot it singed his legs. "My thighs were burning, so I had to pull it off!" he said loudly, as the lift stopped at one of the other floors in the building and a couple of suits got in. The rest of the journey was marked by nervous silence, punctuated by the occasional giggle. What do they think of us...
Thursday
Showing an excellence of taste rare in the industry, Seiko has unveiled a wristwatch computer called the Ruputer (www.ruputer.com). A bizarre, Joe-90esque gadget, it has a 102x64 pixel LCD, infrared and serial connection to a PC, can upload and download to your PC and comes with 'three applications from Microsoft'. Oh, and it has 2Mb of storage. It may even tell the time.
More than that, I cannot say. The only source of information in the world is on the Web site, and it's all in Japanese. Even the American arm of Seiko seems taken aback, with a note on its site saying 'this is all we know, but it looks cool'.
I want one, and not only because of its remarkably fine name. No, according to the product pictures on the site the thing has a graphical user interface that looks just like Gem - possibly the silliest thing to put on a watch, aside from toggle switches and octal LEDs. A cult object.
Friday
Hurrah! Day off. Spring cleaning, visiting friends, intensive duvet testing - ahoy there! And no, I'm not going to reveal what happened when I took a close friend to an East End male stripper show for her birthday and left her there with a digital camera - you'll have to find the Web site for yourselves. Nor what happened subsequently in the Soho Spanish gambling den...
Saturday 4 April 1998, 8:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Sorry for the lack of a diary last week - flu, don'tcha know. Which means I couldn't relay the happy story of one night in Dublin, where I ended up at 4am having one last little drinkypoos for the road (the plane left at 6, and I really didn't want to go to sleep for fear of missing it). Across me in Sinners (that's the wine bar) sat a very happy man, who looked vaguely familiar. The familiar bit turned out to be that he used to be in a group called The Honey Thieves (who? Well, they once headlined Reading. Third on the bill was Nirvana). These days, he works in a repro house doing packaging and books and things like that.
Things like that this week, he said, were Microsoft-shaped. To be precise, stripping off the Java logo from manuals, boxes, publicity material and the like - for all of MS' products for Europe. Which is what - ten or so languages? A hundred-odd products? By no means all will have the Java logo, of course, but even the thought of Internet Explorer cheered him up considerably. "Microsoft has got thirty days to completely strip down and restock all its channels", he said, "and it's in no position to ask for favourable terms from its suppliers."
Excellent Chilean Merlot in Sinners, by the way. Thanks, Bill. Oh, and I got the plane.
Tuesday
After nervously checking the FTP servers every hour or so, the Mozilla source code is finally there! A short while later, a copy is firmly embedded in Online where the happy hackers pounce on it with compilers flying. It takes about half an hour to rebuild under Linux, and there we have it. Our very own Web browser kit of parts, for us to fiddle with as much as we like.
As anyone involved in writing commercially-sized chunks of code knows, making software this easy to move from system to system is excruciatingly difficult. Netscape is to be thoroughly congratulated, not only for the courage to make the code available but for actually managing to have it in a good enough condition to make the exercise plausible.
Has anyone out there ever seen genuine Microsoft source code? Email me if so and let me know if it's as bad as I suspect...
Wednesday
Everyone from IT Week hares off to the Grosvenor House Hotel for our first Editorial Summit. We sit around a large table, drink mineral water and thrash out who's doing what. Who's going to keep an eye on servers? AS/400 connectivity? 2Gb database technology? It's fascinating - the title's going to have a much larger scope than PC Magazine ever did, so I find myself finding out about all sorts of things that I never even suspected existed (and no, I don't mean copies of Network News).
Sadly, nobody wants middleware. Poor, bedraggled, grey middleware. It really hasn't got much to make the heart beat faster. Do you know what it is? Do you care? Does anyone? I guess we'll sort out who watches that market later... perhaps if everyone just tiptoes quietly away, it'll vanish.
Thursday
Not content with inventing the Internet (as the Times reported a couple of weeks ago: this is the same newspaper that's advised its readers to keep their CD-ROMs away from magnetic fields), Bill Gates is clearly working hard at restructuring the fundamentals of integer mathematics. The latest report is that NT 5 'will reduce total cost of ownership by 107%'. Now, 7% return on investment isn't that great, but it's a start... will Microsoft start bundling ten pound notes in the shrinkwrap?
It wasn't so long ago that a MS ActiveX guru told a meeting of developers that the next cut of the technology would reduce DLL size by 300%. When the multitude expressed some disbelief at this, he said: "Well, around that much, anyhow".
Friday
"No, it's British Telecom! No, wait, it's the Belgians... Germans? The Vatican?" The longest running rumour in the history of the Internet is finally squelched with the unconfirmed-but-yes-it's-true story of Demon Internet being bought by Scottish Telecom. Oh, I'll take the low byte and ye'll take the high byte... (enough of that, Goodwins).
At least it's fairly clear what's going on there. Unlike with Cix, which has been the recipient of a 'management buy-in', where the owners have got someone else to pay them money to let them carry on owning the business. Or something - my fiscal acumen isn't up to comprehending what actually happened
Things like that this week, he said, were Microsoft-shaped. To be precise, stripping off the Java logo from manuals, boxes, publicity material and the like - for all of MS' products for Europe. Which is what - ten or so languages? A hundred-odd products? By no means all will have the Java logo, of course, but even the thought of Internet Explorer cheered him up considerably. "Microsoft has got thirty days to completely strip down and restock all its channels", he said, "and it's in no position to ask for favourable terms from its suppliers."
Excellent Chilean Merlot in Sinners, by the way. Thanks, Bill. Oh, and I got the plane.
Tuesday
After nervously checking the FTP servers every hour or so, the Mozilla source code is finally there! A short while later, a copy is firmly embedded in Online where the happy hackers pounce on it with compilers flying. It takes about half an hour to rebuild under Linux, and there we have it. Our very own Web browser kit of parts, for us to fiddle with as much as we like.
As anyone involved in writing commercially-sized chunks of code knows, making software this easy to move from system to system is excruciatingly difficult. Netscape is to be thoroughly congratulated, not only for the courage to make the code available but for actually managing to have it in a good enough condition to make the exercise plausible.
Has anyone out there ever seen genuine Microsoft source code? Email me if so and let me know if it's as bad as I suspect...
Wednesday
Everyone from IT Week hares off to the Grosvenor House Hotel for our first Editorial Summit. We sit around a large table, drink mineral water and thrash out who's doing what. Who's going to keep an eye on servers? AS/400 connectivity? 2Gb database technology? It's fascinating - the title's going to have a much larger scope than PC Magazine ever did, so I find myself finding out about all sorts of things that I never even suspected existed (and no, I don't mean copies of Network News).
Sadly, nobody wants middleware. Poor, bedraggled, grey middleware. It really hasn't got much to make the heart beat faster. Do you know what it is? Do you care? Does anyone? I guess we'll sort out who watches that market later... perhaps if everyone just tiptoes quietly away, it'll vanish.
Thursday
Not content with inventing the Internet (as the Times reported a couple of weeks ago: this is the same newspaper that's advised its readers to keep their CD-ROMs away from magnetic fields), Bill Gates is clearly working hard at restructuring the fundamentals of integer mathematics. The latest report is that NT 5 'will reduce total cost of ownership by 107%'. Now, 7% return on investment isn't that great, but it's a start... will Microsoft start bundling ten pound notes in the shrinkwrap?
It wasn't so long ago that a MS ActiveX guru told a meeting of developers that the next cut of the technology would reduce DLL size by 300%. When the multitude expressed some disbelief at this, he said: "Well, around that much, anyhow".
Friday
"No, it's British Telecom! No, wait, it's the Belgians... Germans? The Vatican?" The longest running rumour in the history of the Internet is finally squelched with the unconfirmed-but-yes-it's-true story of Demon Internet being bought by Scottish Telecom. Oh, I'll take the low byte and ye'll take the high byte... (enough of that, Goodwins).
At least it's fairly clear what's going on there. Unlike with Cix, which has been the recipient of a 'management buy-in', where the owners have got someone else to pay them money to let them carry on owning the business. Or something - my fiscal acumen isn't up to comprehending what actually happened
