Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
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
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
Saturday 21 February 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
See a sneak preview of an absolutely fab cellphone. I can't reveal the name of the manufacturer - because they don't know I know - but it's the bee's knees. It has infra-red connectivity, so you dump it next to your laptop and voila, it's all connected. It has an absolutely splendid user interface, and it's small with a stupendous battery life. And it's dual band.
The best bit, though, is the radio linked cordless headset. The size of a small pen, this tucks behind your ear and communicates with the phone from up to six metres away. So, you can have your phone in your briefcase or pocket and make and receive calls in complete freedom. Stunning, and I want one very badly indeed.
Tuesday
Cambridge Display Technologies has something wonderful to show - a 2" green and black television screen. This is perhaps not exciting for what it does - the first electronic TV display that managed the same feat used a Braun tube and flickered into life sometime in the mid 1920s - but for what it is. The active constituent is plastic.
CDT's light emitting polymers - LEPs - are pretty similar to ordinary plastic. You mix them up in a big bowl. You spread them on something and let them dry. Then you attach electrodes, and they light up. It's just like LEDs or LCDs, only you don't a billion dollar plant to make it: I've seen an LEP made by one bloke in a white coat in a perfectly ordinary chemical lab.
This is undoubtedly going to be one of the hottest technologies of the next twenty years. It has one big drawback - minute contaminations lead to a rapid degeneration of the light output. Water and oxygen don't help. They think it's going to take a while to sort that one out, but when they do - and it's a when, not an if - we'll have cornflake packets with videoscreens. It's going to be that cheap, that ubiquitous, that much fun.
Wednesday
Day off: finally get the police around to check the flat (no dabs, no hope), and my parents turn up with a spare TV, video and stereo that were gracing The Vicarage. They also bring with them an insurance man, who whips out his clipboard and - before I can say Pearl - has the place covered. Hah! Do your worst, blaggers!
Parents terrific in all respects. My father, the flying vicar, is getting very close to his PPL - he regales me with tales of perfect landings and cross-country stints.
Thursday
Shoulder locks solid. Ouch. Now, I've never been blessed with the most athletic, slickly moving of bodies but I've never had much in the way of aches and pains. This comes as an unpleasant surprise. I mail a friend who's an absolute martyr to her RSI and ask 'Could it be...?'
She mails back and says 'Probably. And if you don't get it sorted out now, then I'm never talking to you again'. Don't much fancy never getting drunk with the woman again, so I email human resources and ask for help.
Alyson Nesbitt, long suffering taker of care for all of us, turns up with a risk assessment form. It remains unfilled as she gasps in dismay at my working habits - monitor close to face, piles of stuff everywhere, me sitting on edge of seat. With a sigh, she sorts out a better chair for me and makes some mild recommendations - but will the threat of painful disability cause me to change the habits of a lifetime?
Watch this space.
Friday
It's 42 inches big. It glows in lots of different colours. It's Fujitsu's new 3" thick plasma display and it's utterly, utterly gorgeous.
We've got one in the office, and all work crawls to a halt as various technical editors fight for the right to put up their favourite stuff. We have psychedelic screen savers, DVD movies, FIFA '97 and that infamous Windows desktop, all shining forth across the room in the most luscious colours imaginable.
Good news: it's three thousand pounds cheaper than the old version. Bad news: it's still seven thousand quid. Once they get down to the thousand pound mark, you won't be able to see for the dust raised by the stampede - but I wouldn't be sure that they'll get there before the LEP stuff is in the same ballpark.
Technology marches on. It's a great time to be alive!
More News | ZDNet
The best bit, though, is the radio linked cordless headset. The size of a small pen, this tucks behind your ear and communicates with the phone from up to six metres away. So, you can have your phone in your briefcase or pocket and make and receive calls in complete freedom. Stunning, and I want one very badly indeed.
Tuesday
Cambridge Display Technologies has something wonderful to show - a 2" green and black television screen. This is perhaps not exciting for what it does - the first electronic TV display that managed the same feat used a Braun tube and flickered into life sometime in the mid 1920s - but for what it is. The active constituent is plastic.
CDT's light emitting polymers - LEPs - are pretty similar to ordinary plastic. You mix them up in a big bowl. You spread them on something and let them dry. Then you attach electrodes, and they light up. It's just like LEDs or LCDs, only you don't a billion dollar plant to make it: I've seen an LEP made by one bloke in a white coat in a perfectly ordinary chemical lab.
This is undoubtedly going to be one of the hottest technologies of the next twenty years. It has one big drawback - minute contaminations lead to a rapid degeneration of the light output. Water and oxygen don't help. They think it's going to take a while to sort that one out, but when they do - and it's a when, not an if - we'll have cornflake packets with videoscreens. It's going to be that cheap, that ubiquitous, that much fun.
Wednesday
Day off: finally get the police around to check the flat (no dabs, no hope), and my parents turn up with a spare TV, video and stereo that were gracing The Vicarage. They also bring with them an insurance man, who whips out his clipboard and - before I can say Pearl - has the place covered. Hah! Do your worst, blaggers!
Parents terrific in all respects. My father, the flying vicar, is getting very close to his PPL - he regales me with tales of perfect landings and cross-country stints.
Thursday
Shoulder locks solid. Ouch. Now, I've never been blessed with the most athletic, slickly moving of bodies but I've never had much in the way of aches and pains. This comes as an unpleasant surprise. I mail a friend who's an absolute martyr to her RSI and ask 'Could it be...?'
She mails back and says 'Probably. And if you don't get it sorted out now, then I'm never talking to you again'. Don't much fancy never getting drunk with the woman again, so I email human resources and ask for help.
Alyson Nesbitt, long suffering taker of care for all of us, turns up with a risk assessment form. It remains unfilled as she gasps in dismay at my working habits - monitor close to face, piles of stuff everywhere, me sitting on edge of seat. With a sigh, she sorts out a better chair for me and makes some mild recommendations - but will the threat of painful disability cause me to change the habits of a lifetime?
Watch this space.
Friday
It's 42 inches big. It glows in lots of different colours. It's Fujitsu's new 3" thick plasma display and it's utterly, utterly gorgeous.
We've got one in the office, and all work crawls to a halt as various technical editors fight for the right to put up their favourite stuff. We have psychedelic screen savers, DVD movies, FIFA '97 and that infamous Windows desktop, all shining forth across the room in the most luscious colours imaginable.
Good news: it's three thousand pounds cheaper than the old version. Bad news: it's still seven thousand quid. Once they get down to the thousand pound mark, you won't be able to see for the dust raised by the stampede - but I wouldn't be sure that they'll get there before the LEP stuff is in the same ballpark.
Technology marches on. It's a great time to be alive!
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