Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 25 July 1998, 8:10 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Ya doity mouse! Ya doity mouse! A little bird tells me - in a remarkably good Sean Connery - that the next big thing in text-to-speech generation is the Celebrity Voice. I've seen this idea before but it's never quite worked: the idea is that instead of the neutral, slightly robotic tone that most computers adopt when reading out loud you can choose James Cagney or Jean-Luc Picard, Jeremy Irons or Joanna Lumley. You can even give it your own voice, by reading prepared texts to it and letting it analyse your vocals.
This is a lovely idea, although it could lead to trouble. Think of the lawsuits involving the porn sites who get the great and the good moaning along to the script of Hot Vixens In Porridge III. Think of the problems when you get a phone call from someone who's really a computer - but you recognise them anyway. The worlds envisaged by Philip K Dick and Derrida, where simulacra so pollute the concept of `real' that it ceases to mean much, grow closer every day.
I mention my fears to my computer, but it's otherwise engaged. "Look at me, Ma! Top of the world!" it says, shortly before it explodes in a gout of fire.
Tuesday
I find out what EPOC means. EPOC, you may recall, is the operating system that Psion invented and is now marketed by Symbian as the best thing since sliced time for the cellphone industry.
EPOC. Go on, guess. Enhanced Psion Operating Code? No. Electronic Portable Organiser for Communication? Nope.
It is, and I quote a Psion insider, Electric Piece Of Cheese. "The original programmer had a fetish for milk products", says the insider, "and decided to immortalise that in the name of the system. I don't think Ericsson and Nokia ever thought to ask, before they bought in..."
Glad to see that whimsical isn't entirely excluded from this fast-moving, no-nonsense world of ours.
Wednesday
Vint Cerf, generally acclaimed as the Father of the Internet (but does it remember his birthday?), has been discussing the technology's next giant leap. He wants to equip future space probes with Web servers, and make them accessible via the WWW. NASA agrees, and there's now discussion about domain names -- should there be .earth and .mars domains, for example? What would Bill Gates make of the inevitable .sun? Presumably declare Microsoft a new planet.
More seriously, Cerf suggests that it would make good sense to have a postbox on the probes. "I'd love to receive email from Mars", he says, and I agree completely. The latest Mars machine, the Surveyor, has an experiment on board to check whether amateur radio types could receive signals from a small transmitter onboard without the need for the whole Deep Space Network giant dish schmeer. They could - and it would be perfectly possible to install independent systems onboard and communicate with them from small, homebuilt Earth stations.
So expect this to happen, and get ready to boldy go...
Thursday
My computer at home has given up the ghost. Rather, the second hard disk - a gigabyte IBM, from the days when a gigabyte was really quite something - has closed its last file and corrupted its last directory. A sort of Cluster's Last Stand (joke for disk nerds). I poke around with some diagnostics, but they all glumly concur - the disk light is on, but no-one's at home.
Of course, I have no backup. That disk didn't contain anything of commercial importance - but it has the email logs of my last five love affairs, three uncompleted novels and goodness knows how many research notes, nifty utilities and downloads from http://www.hotvixensinporridge.com. In short, the dusty attic of my online life is there - and online has been one of the major parts of my life for about fifteen years.
I could go and get the thing fixed. It might even be trivial - the symptoms indicate some electrical failure rather than mechanical, which is a good sign - but somehow I don't think I shall. One gets a sense of the way things are, just at the moment: one leaves the marital home and moves into a tiny flat, from which whatever possessions one took are nicked. And then the insubstantial baggage vanishes, too - it's a bit rich to see the death of a disk drive as a mystical portent, but really it's good to be rid of a gig of nonsense (a gig! How many bytes did Shakespeare generate in his life?). The novels were cack, anyhow, and as for the love letters...
Eesh. Thanks, oh fallible silicon.
Friday
Even though my old computer can still be used - just - to get online, I decide that something better is required. I retire the ancient Apricot Pentium 60 (won at gambling, no less, and thus precious to me beyond gold), and proceed to install The Laptop, a rather dusty Taiwanese jobby that nonetheless manages to be four times faster, have twice as much memory and three times the disk space (pre-Fall). It also has USB ports, into which I plug a Kodak videocamera: ten minutes later, I've attached the old monitor (next for replacement), my old clattery IBM keyboard (never, ever to be replaced) and a V.90 modem I'm testing.
The whole business takes half an hour, after which I'm back in the game. Terrific! Most impressive? Getting the videoconferencing going - and establishing a two-way link with someone in Australia, who I pick from the list purely because I can - takes quarter of an hour. That's with Netmeeting, one of Microsoft's best client products; as we chat and peer at each other, we swap notes and files in the background.
My worst experience is getting Notes going. There must be two sorts of Lotus Notes, a kind of Jeckyll and Hyde transformation that takes place. The first - Jeckyll - is the one that Notes developers know. For them, it is a wondrous product that can replicate, sort, produce applications and support thousands of users. It can do no evil. The Mr Hyde face is the one that I see, as do many users: client software that's fussy, doesn't understand Windows, works in mysterious and unproductive ways, and has all the characteristics of an atavistic ape with a bad case of crotch rot.
The list of sins committed by Notes on The Laptop is large. It doesn't understand my modem, because it's not on its list. Everyone else uses Windows' built-in modem support, and doesn't care. It doesn't understand drag and drop. It produces NOTES.RIP files and incomprehensible error messages like a turd produces flies.
Please, someone, write a decent Notes client. You'll make an old man (fifteen years online? It can't be true) very happy...
Saturday 18 July 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Do you remember your first time? No, not that - and if anyone still thinks www.ourfirsttime.com is legit, I have genuine pictures of Bill Clinton studying Exodus 20:14 for sale - but your first time on the Net? Mine was messy, confusing yet ultimately incredibly rewarding (oh, do shut up at the back there), but it took a good few hours fighting unfriendly software and strange new ideas - a subnet mask, you say?
Now, it's just a matter of loading some software, plugging in a modem and getting the credit card ready. And BT is proposing to make it even easier, by letting you log onto the Net and getting the time charged straight to your phone bill. No authorisation required. Convenient? Certainly? Bad? Yes, say the existing ISPs, who can't compete with that sort of system. And yes, say those who worry about security. With no credit card check, anyone can create an account any time they like and do what they like with little fear of reprisal - and you can do a great deal of damage in a couple of hours on the Web, if you're skilled in the art. BT claims it has security measures (which it can't talk about) to stop this sort of thing, but in my experience security measures you can't talk about are generally flawed or absent.
There's another option. Nobody is obliged to accept an IP packet: if BT's service does cause problems, there's nothing to stop the other Internet companies from filtering out those packets and just not forwarding them to their destination. The ghettoisation of the Net would be a terrible thing to see, but unless BT takes care it may well happen.
Tuesday
I have lived through strange times. I have seen, done and even gargled with things that make peculiar seem like a pretty normal word. Yet my sense of the surreal went off the deep end today when I learned that Philippe Kahn, founder of Borland (now Inprise) and current owner of Starfish Software, is to join board of Motorola when the latter buys the former. Kahn is one of the most colourful characters ever to grace the industry: party animal (don't mention the togas), sax player and creator of ebullience by the lorryload. Motorola is an electronics company of the old school. Imagine Brian Blessed joining the Law Lords, and I don't think you'll be far wrong.
It'll do Moto the world of good. The company is suffering from - oh, let's be honest - an inability to make good products. I've got a phone it made: the user interface is something I'd have rejected in a ZX81 program. (The electronics is fine: that's not good enough, these days). Whatever it is Motorola makes, someone else makes it better. Kahn understands users. He thinks like a software marketeer: he's lived through the Web explosion where the experience of the user defines the success of the product.
And they'll have some great parties.
(IT Week will be interviewing Philippe Kahn next week. I wonder if he'll sign my copy of his CD...)
Wednesday
Another publication has a big splash on its front cover: Win98 "not Y2K compliant". Coo. On the surface, it looks like a good story - they even have the product manager from Microsoft making abject noises.
Dig a little deeper, though, and it all falls apart. There's no bug there: the new feature of Windows 98 that is supposed to cause this panic is in fact a pretty pointless - but still roughly correct - step in the right direction. No new problems are caused, and one day some may be solved. It's hardly a story at all... except that the product manager from Microsoft missed his chance to stamp on it. It was almost as if he didn't quite know what was going on: and that's unthinkable, surely? Microsoft in the US can't be keeping the UK in the dark about anything, can it? Absurd! The very thought!
Thursday
Unutterably tantalising set of technologies converge on my desktop! Today, I have information about Jini - a Java-based system that lets completely different devices talk to each other and establish links, UMTS, which is going to make mobile comms work at enormous speed, and Universal Access, which lets you log onto the net anywhere in the world and slip into your favourite work environment. In about three years time, we'll be able to access exactly what we want, how we want, where we want - at low cost and minimal fuss. It'll be as unremarkable as wearing a wristwatch - and that's if just the things we've defined already work as planned.
The rate of change in the next decade is going to make the 90s seem like a leisurely stroll through a Cornish village. Unless economic collapse is just around the corner, in which case the next decade will be a leisurely stroll through a Cornish village, at least for me.
Friday
Bored? Try finding any mention of the word "Digital" on the AltaVista main page. Or try asking 3Com: "You said that you'd be launching your USB modem in the UK when Windows 98 came along. Here's Windows 98. Where's your modem?." Or try installing Notes on a laptop... no, nobody can be that bored with life. I've been doing it for three days now. It's poo. I'm going home.
Saturday 4 July 1998, 8:42 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Still at the wettest Glastonbury on record. It's awful - foot-deep mud, nowhere to sit down, cold, damp and windy. Or so the newspapers would have you believe: fact is, all of the above is true and yet everyone's having a brilliant time. Well, except for three groups of people - first, the bloke found dead in his tent; second, those who've been ripped off by the tent thieves (who've taken to using a hot wire coat hanger to burn their way into nylon tents, because it's quiet), and third, those poor souls in the Dance Tent. The organisers despatched a tanker on the back of a tractor to suck out the liquid mud which was preventing dancing (or motion of any kind): alas, said tanker had just been used to empty the infamous Glastonbury Bogs, and some bright spark switched it to `blow' instead of `suck'.
There's a lot of technology around, too. A roving reporter with a head-mounted camera is feeding the Greenpeace website, linking images back to base via microwave and a solar-powered backpack. I start chatting to some other environmental activists, who ask me `got any ideas for finding a whaler in the South Pacific'? Turns out this is very non-trivial: the whalers now observe military conditions of radio silence, so you can't direction-find them. Of course, it's getting quite cheap to launch your own satellite these days...
Tuesday
The trusty pigeon-grey Skoda extracts us from the mud of the Glastonbury car park (teehee - all around, the Volvos and Fords are being towed out by tractor. Schadenfreude!) Arrive back at work terribly late and rather distant, to find Psion Software has turned into Symbian and is now the shining hope for all those who mistrust Windows CE's ability to fulfil its promise.
It's certainly started in a noteworthy fashion. If you try and find the website but type in www.sybian.com instead, you get a completely different sort of technology addressing a completely different class of problem. We can't really go into details, but merely note that Symbian ("to create a major engine of growth for Wireless Information Devices") is up against Sybian ("the ultimate in sexual gratification for women").
Wednesday
Tesco is to become an ISP. Whatever next? Ten bits for the price of a byte? Entire graveyards of information for five pee? A bit of digging, and it turns out that lots of people are thinking of becoming ISPs - football teams, finance companies, even David Bowie.
What's behind this? Vanity ISP provision was never so easy: companies like BT and ICL will happily do you a deal whereby they'll run a complete packaged ISP in your name. Oddly, nobody seems too keen to talk about this: there are dark hints of projects being kidnapped and divisional infighting, and a steady scent of internecine politics. Still, lots of companies are seeing ISPhood as being just as much fun as owning their own radio station, and with as many possibilities for force-feeding the punter predigested opportunities to purchase. Of course, the price for access will be discounted - who'd be an ordinary ISP? Cliff Stanford's sale of Demon looks more and more like a masterstroke, at least as far as timing's concerned.
Thursday
"Watch this", said my giggling pal as he showed me a page on the Microsoft web site. He then added "::$DATA" to the end of the URL, and resubmitted it. A script appeared, with - no! Yes! - embedded server names and passwords for databases within the Microsoft organisation.
"Is that a bug in NT?" I asked. "The same NT that runs Terraserver, the demonstration database of geographical images that MS put up to show how scalable the operating system is..."
"... but merely served to show that most of its users got turned away because it was too busy? Yes, the same NT" said the pal.
"So that's two major public fluffs in a week?"
"Four, if you count Windows98's problems in installing cleanly over the top of Win95 and the $5 million settlement MS had to make to the owners of the Internet Explorer trademark."
Good old Microsoft. Who needs to say anything more?
Friday
You've heard of MP3, of course. That's MPEG 1 level 3 audio compression - not MPEG 3, which doesn't exist - and it is the avenging angel that'll kick seven kinds of plague out of the music industry. It compresses proper hi-fi stereo audio down to a size where you can consider downloading tracks or complete albums from the Internet: of course, loads of naughty people have already set up archives of thousands of records for the delight of loads of other naughty people, to the shrill cries of dismay from the CD producers.
That's not what's going to puncture their balloon though. What's going to thoroughly fricassee those who wax fat on selling us 40p of polycarbonate in a £13.99 shrink-wrapped package is the advent of people like Goodnoise (www.goodnoise.com) and The Cambridge Design Partnership (http://www.cdpl.demon.co.uk/ufi/pics.html). Goodnoise has set itself up as what will undoubtedly be known as a next-gen record label - bands sign up, and MP3 images of their music are available for sample and sale via the website. Distribution? Manufacturing? Retail? Bu-bye. Meanwhile, CDP has built a matchbox-sized player that takes a standard memory card with an MP3 image on it, and plays it. It's like a Minidisc, but much smaller and a thousand times as flexible. And of all this, the key to this format taking over the world is the fact that we'll be able to listen to stuff before we buy it.
How many albums have you bought on the basis of a review, or on one track heard on the wireless, only to find that you've got around a quid's worth of good music and a tenner of naffness you'll never listen to again? No more. Over the years I've bought a couple of hundred CDs - of which I listen to maybe 10% more than twice a year. Investing in MP3 gear (if you've got a PC, the player is free software) can only save me loads of dosh. And I'll get to hear more good music. And I'll have an excuse to buy a hi-fi player the size of a matchbox. And if I make music, I'll be able to publish my noises worldwide from my own website without putting a sou into the pockets of EMI.
The CD is dead. It just hasn't stopped spinning yet.
