Rupert Goodwins' Diary
How are your liberal credentials today? Here's a quick test for you (Daily Mail readers need not play): A virus has been released that seeks out and destroys gypsy music. Is this the first sign of ethnic discrimination among the viral community, or a service to the world?
BitDefender, the Romanian company who added the signature of the virus to their scanner only to receive complaints from users who liked what it did, is unsure. For anyone who is enjoyed secretly replacing the Most Relaxing Classical Music In the World... Ever! CD in their aunt's stereo with an Extreme Noise Terror/Aphex Twin mash-up (then supergluing the drawer closed. And don't think I wasn't tempted), the idea of seeking out and destroying all the bad music in the world is so tempting it's all too easy to overlook the rather poor credentials of those who've tried before. Have a quick Google for Entartete Musik if you'd like a hint - although if you actually are a Romany you may already have guessed.
So that's a bad thing.
Much as we might like the concept of a world free of folk, improv jazz, Coldplay, The Crazy Frog or Kurt Schwitters (I suspect those latter two are the same thing), there are no shortage of people who feel much the same about the things we love. A tolerant, inclusive attitude is required. Indeed, we must defend those who are attacked, even if we loathe their taste in easy listening - although even Voltaire might have been hard pushed to maintain his Enlightenment ethos in the face of his neighbours' 2 AM samba party.
I have a dream - a dream where digital signal processing has progressed to the point where active earplugs monitor all sounds before letting them through, blocking those which fall beneath our exacting aesthetic standards. Then let a thousand cheesy ringtones bloom! They will no longer be able to harm us.
Tuesday 14/06/2005What is it with wristbands?. I will admit to wearing a rather tatty macrame affair a la Keith Richards, in my ponytail days, but now they seem to be official issue for Government ministers and fey young things alike. There's something slightly sinister about them and their regimentation of compassion, as if going about with an unadorned wrist is a sign that you don't care enough or in the right way.
Nokia, ever sensitive to trends among the image makers, is keen to get one on the wrist too. The company has the bright idea that not only could an active wristband contain a phone - not in itself a daft idea - but that with RFID technology it could interact with the surroundings. Walk into a shop, and your wristband will tell the retail machinery what you like buying and how much you want to spend. It can also use motion sensors to detect hand gestures and use these to control home electronics, although exactly where the combination of wrist-powered computing and high resolution multimedia will lead us is an exercise best left to Viz magazine.
But if BT changes things - as it says it will, with the next generation of Fusion perhaps not being UMA at all - then it's going to have an even harder time convincing the mobile industry to play. Sign up and lose revenue! BT's last effort at this sort of thing, tbe Onephone("BT Onephone is a world first. It's the only cordless phone you can use from your home telephone line and the cellular network.") failed miserably, and with that you could even choose your mobile and fixed line supplier.
Daft, I call it.
Thursday 16/06/2005Those dear hearts at Microsoft are busy trying to get a buzz going for Longhorn. Marketing types know the value of a teaser campaign, dribbling out hints that put just a little light onto the monstrous beauty to come. People get interested, then fascinated, trying to work out what's going to happen next and hooked on a diet of carefully-rationed facts that keep them guessing in a sea of ambiguous promise.
The trouble with Longhorn, at least on the desktop, is that there's so little to trail. You go to a briefing only to find the Microsoftie pushing the incredible significance of having thumbnails in search results. Well, er, right. Or look! You can make this window transparent, and look through it onto the windows beneath! What, like I could with my £400 Amiga twenty years ago? And today, we learn that the operating system will come with templates so you can easily fine tune it to various tasks -- not a bad idea, if you forget that you've been able to script that sort of thing in Linux for ever -- and that there'll be Monad, a new command line interface. In release two. In 2009.
I'm baffled. There's nothing wrong with taking a cool look at peripheral details, bundling up a whole load of minor improvements and announcing them as a significant release: if you got your basic architecture right the first time, you're pretty much restricted to this sort of thing for a while anyway. Likewise, there's nothing wrong with taking your time to extensively test a new feature before releasing it. I know that Monad is a thoroughly good idea. There have been betas out for a while, and it's the sort of thing you want to get right. But how on earth can it need to cook for another four years? What are they going to do with it?
Two plausible reasons suggest themselves. One is that Microsoft has decided that operating systems are pretty much done now, and isn't bothering to commit the sort of resources that could make Longhorn happen in a reasonable time. After all, if nobody's going to bother to upgrade for another hardware cycle, why waste the money? The other is that beneath the hood, some major changes are going on and a lot more is being rewritten than the surface features would suggest. If I had to guess, I'd say that if this is happening it's tied in with the whole trusted computing malarky. Longhorn may look much the same as XP or Server 2Kx, but inside are thousands of elves devoted to protecting Microsoft IP and locking down anything that might possibly offend those who have appointed themselves the guardians of all data.
Whatever is actually going on, Microsoft's teaser campaign with the media is having something like its desired effect but for perhaps a slightly different reason to that intended. I can't wait to see Longhorn proper, not because I'm in awe of what it will look like but because I can't honestly believe that it'll be as big a non-event as the clues suggest.
It can't be.
Can it?
Friday 17/06/2005A couple of weeks ago I was in a small yet luxuriously decorated room beneath a London hotel, taking part in a "Meet ZDNet UK" evening laid on for various PRs by tech marcom firm Fullrun (If you think Tech Marcom is the name of a film noir detective, I would like to emigrate to your world. Send forms). One of the things we talked about was the art of effective press releases - or, indeed, adequate ones. Many don't even get as far as our inboxes, as they fall foul of the spam filters.
As you already know, Professor, spam filters work by spotting various clues within a message and assessing how likely they are to add up to it being spam rather than legitimate correspondence. The trouble with press releases is that they're awfully like spam already - impersonal, over-written promotional documents advertising something slightly sordid. Stuff like embedded HTML, coloured text, CAPITALS, attachments, weird abbreviations and so on only enhances the resemblance - and so PRs who concoct that sort of release will frequently find that it goes nowhere.
What is less frequently known is that a reverse process takes place in the mind of a journalist when scanning a press release. If enough plus points are amassed, something wonderful happens and the thing gets through to the next stage. This is something that Helen Carroll of Octopus Communications clearly understands when she managed to couple today's Silly Sod story - City lawyer is a complete berk to his secretary, is discovered - to one of her clients.
Briefly: a solicitor at Baker & McKenzie was at lunch with his secretary, who spilled tomato sauce on his trousers. He had them dry-cleaned, and then emailed her asking for the four pounds that cost. She's late paying, because she's sorting out the small matter of her mother dying, and he leaves a Post-It note on her desk to remind her.
That story had all the things that makes a chap on a deadline go ping. World's biggest law firm embarrassed? Five points. Underdog gets own back? Five points. Solicitor specialist in computer law and electronic commerce undone by email? Five points. And the killer? Trousers are involved. Ten points. Ping ping ping.
Alas for Ms Carroll, her client - Autonomy owned Aungate- undoes the good work. Aungate? Sounds like a scandal involving Japanese sects. Can't even pronounce it. Minus five points. What it does - email tracking. Ooops, sorry, it's a "total communications management solution". Dullsville. Minus five points. Connection with real story - minimal. The damage was done outside the company, after the email had escaped, and nobody's trying to hide anything. Minus five points. Any mention of trousers on Aungate website? None whatsoever. Minus ten points. Ah, well.
But you can't hang a woman for trying, and a darn fine try it was too.