Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The Crashed Pips Awards for 2008

Filed under: Administration — Tags: , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 17:35

2008 Awards BadgeYes, folks, it’s almost 2009, and therefore, it’s time to present this year’s Crashed Pips Awards. (Yes, I know that emblem’s a cheapo generated badge fetched off a website, but having been rather busy with a broken laptop and the fact it’s Christmas, it’s all I could find with eight and a half hours to go.)

So, without further ado, let’s begin with the Best Linux Distribution award, whose nominees are Ubuntu, Mandravia, Xandros, and OpenSUSE. However, the winner this year is Fedora, for its sheer slickness out of the box and speed.

The Worst Kept Secret award is pretty simple this year: nominees are the iPhone 3G, the MacBook Air, the iPod Nano, and the Windows 7 Beta. However, the irrefutable winner in this category is the new MacBook family, which, to be honest, we all saw coming from a mile off and even had time to prepare a tea party for.

Next up is the Jason Jones award for the Most Superfluous Use of the Number 7. This year it goes to Windows 7, for being so-called because, according to Microsoft, it’s the seventh release of Windows. O RLY? Let’s see… in chronological order, we have

  1. Windows 1
  2. Windows 2
  3. Windows 3
  4. Windows 3.1
  5. Windows for Workgroups 3.1
  6. Windows NT 3.1
  7. Windows NT 3.5
  8. Windows NT 3.51
  9. Windows 95
  10. Windows 95b
  11. Windows NT4
  12. Windows 98
  13. Windows 98SE
  14. Windows 2000
  15. Windows ME
  16. The Xbox distribution of Windows (which doesn’t carry a name)
  17. Windows XP
  18. Windows Server 2003
  19. Windows Vista
  20. Windows Server 2008

So, in short, Windows ‘Seven’ would be the twenty-first release of Windows. Yeah. Very significant, there.

The Nixon Award For Talking Out of One’s Own Anus has several nominees.

  • Apple, for saying that Macs are ’secure out of the box’. Yeah, if some fairy visits the machines while they’re in transit and turns the firewall on. Sorry, folks. That’s the truth.
  • Psystar, for saying Apple didn’t copyright Mac OS X. Epic fail on that front.
  • The BBC News head of department, for blathering on NewsWatch that after ten years of a perfectly good brand, scrapping the BBC News 24 name was a good idea because it was just the time you wanted it to be called ‘the BBC News Channel’. Yeah, because I always thought the news on News 24 came from ITN.
  • The LHC Defense organisation, who said that there was a chance that the Large Hadron Collider might destroy the world. It cannot, has not, and will not destroy the world.
  • Andrew Burnham, for saying that cinema-style age ratings for websites are ‘an option’. Over my dead body.

However, the undisputable winner this year is Woolworths, whose website, at the time of writing, says - and I’m not joking:

Our site is currently undergoing essential maintenance. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Please check back later.

What’s that? Bidding starts now. Do I hear one farthing?

The Month of Apple Bugs award for standing up gallantly to a crowd of screaming fanboys goes to PZ Myers, for weathering a storm of hate mail after pointing out that Holy Communion is… well… a cracker and some dilute wine. After taping a consecrated wafer to pages from the Qur’an and a copy of The God Delusion, he threw it in the rubbish and allowed it to be taken off to a landfill site somewhere. This, of course, meant ridiculous death threats and wretched screaming from the Catholic League, who presumably now believe that Prof. Myers will end up in a pit somewhere with Satan gnawing on his right leg. For standing up to the crackpot fundies, we salute you, PZ.

Now, the Oh God, it’s You Again award goes to Trevor McDonald, for returning to ITN’s News at Ten so briefly it didn’t really matter. And, with that, we come to our most prestigious award, the Crashed Pips Award for Services to Humanity and Small Furry Creatures from Alpha Centauri.

I was going to give it to Tim Berners-Lee, who, let’s be honest, deserves nothing less than World Presidency and God status for developing the World Wide Web and giving it away for free. However, late-breaking news forces me to change that decision (hard luck, Tim - maybe next year) and award it to the 30gB Microsoft Zune, which is, as we speak, committing mass suicide across the globe! It’s a service to us, protecting humanity (and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, Vogons, biros, and super-intelligent shades of the colour blue) from certain death, re-animation, intoxication, indoctrination and enslavement by their evil brand of personal media players.



Sunday, December 28, 2008

Imagine…

Filed under: The News — Tags: , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 18:35

Yes, that’s a digitally re-animated John Lennon promoting the OLPC Give One, Get One programme in the USA. Truly brilliant: the OLPC needs some strong publicity if G1G1 is going to take off.



Saturday, December 27, 2008

Andrew Burnham: Clueless

Filed under: Communications, Internet, Politics, The Law and Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 15:50

 

The Hon. Andrew Burnham, courtesy of 2-5 Media GbR

The Hon. Andrew Burnham, courtesy of 2-5 Media GbR

Andrew Burnham, the Minister for Culture (sorry, Culture Secretary - what exactly is his job?) has said in an interview with the Telegraph that cinema-style age ratings for Web sites are ‘an option’.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

Compelete and utter nonsense. It’s totally unworkable.

Firstly, let’s remember the original goals of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The whole point was to create a medium where anyone could freely express himself, and be out of the reach of governments and censorship. This idea undermines the whole principle of ‘net neutrality’ on which the Web was founded.

Moreover, let’s not forget that filters are used all the time: and there are always ways to circumvent them. Just ask any twelve-year-old how they access Bebo during their ICT lessons: proxies are available and for every website blocked, another mirror or identical proxy will spring up somewhere else.

What Mr. Burnham appears not to understand is that the Internet is very much decentralised. Any computer can host a Web site with the right software installed, and when that’s connected to the Web, it can be accessed from any machine in the world. Mr. Burnham’s understanding of the Internet appears to be like a spider: with all information in the centre and clients all outside. It does not work like that.

It worries me that the Government is getting more heavy-handed with regards to the Internet, and, for once, even it’s now becoming worthwhile to host one’s Web site outside the UK. Guido Fawkes’s blog is moving to a host outside Great Britain, because, in his words, ‘Google UK likes to please governments.’ Even the Daily Mail (and most of its commentators!) agree that the whole idea is barmy.

Tom Watson MP, a Labour MP and cabinet minister who does understand technology, is inviting the public’s opinion on his Web site, which he will forward on to Burnham. It might be worth heading over there and giving your opinions on this cretinous proposal.



Friday, December 26, 2008

You have received a new message

Filed under: Uncategorized — Jonathan Rothwell @ 22:16

You have received a new message, originally uploaded by Jonathan Rothwell.

[edit at 2217GMT: well, it is until you have to tap out the bloody description on the number pad. Now I know why moblogging is having touble catching on.]



Why, In Comparison to 2007, 2008 Sucked

Filed under: Apple, Internet, Macintosh, Microsoft, The News, Web 2.0, Windows — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 19:14

 

2008 was designated the International Year of Planet Earth, as well as being International Year of languages, the potato, sanitation, the frog, and the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

2008 was designated the International Year of Planet Earth, as well as being International Year of languages, the potato, sanitation, the frog, and the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

So, it’s Boxing Day. And, in my opinion, good riddance to 2008. In some ways. In some ways, 2008 was brilliant.

In political circles, for example, we proved that a mixed-race gentleman from Hawaii could fend off a grumpy old man and a hockey mom who believes dinosaurs were around 6,000 years ago, and that the secret ballot is one of the things that’s “really cool” about America. We also managed to get the LHC started up (even if it did fail afterwards), and we showed that the eucharist is what everyone thought it was already: a cracker and some dilute wine. On the technology side of things, all was not doom and gloom either: the superior format won for once in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war, the MacBook got its first substantial update since 2001, WordPress got a brilliant new admin panel, Linux’s hardware support came along in leaps and bounds, and big media is finally getting the hang of using these modern TVs with typewriters attached to deliver media.

However, this was also the year the recession started to bite: with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, MFI, and, most recently, Woolworths, it’s been shown that the economy desperately needs some TLC. For the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with George Bush on the financial bail-out plan - although it was unpleasant, it was necessary to stop things going from bad to worse. (As I thought that, Satan shivered and put on an extra layer of clothing, probably nabbed from the Woolworths closing down sale.)

In this blog’s métier of technology, not all has been very rosy either. Abit is to cease trading, and Microsoft is hurrying past the mess that is Vista and opening the pumps full-on to concentrate on Windows 7 - which is what they should have done with Vista. Ubuntu has released two rather disappointing releases, and Apple has also disappointed in some respects, even announcing it’s going to pull out of Macworld.

The games console front was not particularly healthy: with release after release of recycled Mario and driving material by Nintendo, who seem to have been attending the Peter Kay school of re-releasing and copying, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Wii’s programmers are starting to find their idea wells running dry. The PlayStation 3 has dominated, and Microsoft has failed to incorporate a Blu-Ray drive in the Xbox 360.

Now, I’m not famed for my gaming ability. I don’t even own a games console currently. The height of my gaming prowess extends to getting to Level 7 on Vortex, the iPod’s implementation of Breakout. However, I do know that Microsoft needs to do something about the Xbox 360 in 2009 to adjust it better to the world.

Firstly, it has to sort out the disk scratching problem, and it also has to rally behind Blu-Ray. There’s no point standing on a sinking ship: although the HD-DVD peripheral has been discontinued, they need to move to Blu-Ray. However, there’s something far more major than that.

In previous years, the Xbox 360 has had major releases every year. Call of Duty 2 and Gears of War in 2005/6, Halo 3 in 2007. This year’s flagship game, I think, was meant to be Gears of War 2 - but just compare that to previous years. Halo 3 was being released after years of hype, and Call of Duty 2 bathed in the post-launch honeymoon after the X360 was released in 2005.

So, a charismatic and historic game, about life-like soldiers from the most bloody war in Earth’s history, and a rip-roaring sci-fi adventure about a ’space marine with really cool green armor’ (their words, not mine) have been followed by a game about a fat man, whose face looks like Steve Ballmer’s office chair, where you have to look over his shoulder to see the damn targeting reticule. Ridiculous. They need to find a decent flagship game for next year.

Apple’s announcements have also been noticeably low-key this year. Steve Jobs seems to have been assigning a lot of the work at the Stevenotes to Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, and Jonathan Jony Ive, who appears to have changed his name by deed poll into something that makes absolutely zero sense when read and mispronounced.

Apple’s product turnout this year has also been noticeably smaller: last year, we had the iPhone, new iMacs, Leopard, new iPods, iWork ‘08 and iLife ‘08. This year, we had updates to the iPhone, the MacBook Air, the Time Capsule, updates to the Apple TV, new MacBooks and 15″ MacBook Pros, and the usual crop of new iPods. It seems that Apple misfired a bit this year, but with rumours circling of a new Mac Mini and new iMacs, and possibly a netbook, at Macworld 2009 (notably without Steve Jobs, presumably much to the disappointment of his stalkers) we can only hope it gets back on track next year.

All in all, therefore, a pretty sombre year for the technology industry - the only real source of excitement has been the sheer number of ridiculous web 2.0 startups. Was it the recession? Possibly. Here’s to a more exciting 2008.



Just use the damn apostrophe. PROPERLY.

Filed under: pedantry — Tags: , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 17:29

Yes, it’s time for me to stand up and confess. I am guilty of Grammar Nazism. If you so much as dare misuse an apostrophe in front of me, or don’t properly capitalise your sentences or truncate words when it is in no way necessary, I will probably smash you over the head with a copy of The Shorter Pepys before sacrificing you to the god of San Seriffe.

OK, I am exaggerating a little here - but not much. I really do find the misuse of apostrophes one of the worst blights on the English language - in all dialects. I’m not even the sort who detests American English: in fact, I think American English is in many ways more logical and elegant than British English. (For example, er more accurately represents the sound at the end of meter/metre than re.) I just get really annoyed when I see the entry in my iPod’s menu for ‘to-do’s’.

So here, for the consumption and inward digestion of confused Internet users everywhere, is a complete guide to when to use - and when NOT to use - the apostrophe.

  1. The apostrophe is never used to indicate a plural. For example: one tree, two trees. An apple, some apples. Microsoft Windows. A picture window. Three hundred Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae. This doesn’t change when using a plural of acronyms: it’s still CDs, not CD’s. However, it does change when pluralising a single character - for example, 50p’s, P’s and Q’s.
  2. The apostrophe is used to indicate ownership of an object by a single entity by being appended, with an S, after the owner. For example: Fred’s ball. Steve’s pen. Jenny’s computer. This does NOT change when the owner ends in an S: it’s still James’s phone, Jesus’s parables, et cetera.
  3. When the owner of an object is ‘it’, the apostrophe is NOT used. For example: its buttons. ‘It’s’ means ‘it is,’ and therefore saying ‘it’s nibs’ is saying ‘it is nibs,’ as opposed to ‘the nibs belonging to it’.
  4. The apostrophe is also used to indicate ownership of an object by a group by being appended with an S after the owner. For example: The men’s shirts. The women’s shoes. This DOES change when the owner ends in an S: for example, the girls’ dresses. The ladies’ hats.
  5. When talking about a time period, such as the nineteen twenties, the de facto style used to be to put an apostrophe in between the number and the S. This is no longer the case: The accepted style is now 1920s, 1400s, etc.

That’s probably confused you. A lot. But it still infuriates me when people misuse the apostrophe and its friend, the letter S. Sorry for that brief English lesson: normal service will resume shortly.

[edited 1430GMT, 27 December: Thanks to Simon Howard for pedanting me on a few aspects here.]



Wednesday, December 24, 2008

L’ordinateur, il marche.

Filed under: Macintosh, My Computers, hardware — Tags: , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 22:40

Well, it’s nearly Christmas, and I have, if you’ve been following my Twitter feed, been having a spot of bother with my machines lately. After a drop that the Eee would normally survive, it mysteriously stopped working (I think it is either a problem with the screen’s power, or a BIOS issue. Either way, it’ll be difficult to fix.)

Never fear, I thought, as I reached over to boot up the iMac. To my horror, Tiger wouldn’t boot, hanging at the blue screen with a sporadic throbber, leaving me without a UNIX machine - and meaning that to fix it, I would have to resort to the horror of using a Windows Vista machine to find a fix.

My first job was to isolate the issue, which, as booting into verbose mode (Command and V at the startup chime - for a list of more of these handy shortcuts, see here) told me, was that coreservicesd kept crashing at boot with a segmentation fault. Googling told me that rebuilding the launch services register might help, so I ran the following command from single-user mode:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

However, this also exited with a segmentation fault. This created a problem - I couldn’t rebuild the LaunchServices register without lsregister, meaning that my OS X installation was effectively bricked.

The simple way out, as it were, would be to reinstall OS X. The major problem with that is that I didn’t have access to an OS X install DVD at the time, leaving my only option to find a hard drive with OS X installed on it, and to swap it in.

I eventually managed to find an old 6gB drive from a Power Mac G3 with a copy of Tiger on it. It worked. Although the screw was a little tough, and the hard drive takes a bit longer to spin up, the machine now works like a dream.

With all this in mind, I nearly forgot that it’s Christmas Eve. There’s very little I can say at 22:45, with only 75 minutes to go until the event, without sounding ineptly slow and out of date. All I can summon up the typing energy to do at this late hour is to wish all my readers, and the blogosphere, a very happy and peaceful yule. Have a good one.



Wednesday, December 17, 2008

More on Apple’s Macworld pullout

Filed under: Apple, Macintosh — Tags: , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 20:36

I think it’s fair to say that yesterday’s Apple announcement was initially a bit of a shock. Apple’s stock price went down in after-hours trading, and the whole announcement has again sparked concerns about the Dear Leader’s health.

However, I think that pulling out of Macworld may turn out to be a smart move for Apple in the future. Mac developers have long been complaining about the cost of hosting a stall at Macworld: a small booth, without Internet access and with only one power point costs in excess of $15,000. Want internet access? Somehow, that’s an extra $2,000. Want an extra power outlet? You have to pay a union electrician. That’s before we start to count travel, development and staffing costs. In fact, many believe that the end of the Apple keynote will spell the end of Macworld SF for good, leading some to speculate that Apple may begin hosting its own, more reasonably-priced, conference.

There’s another reason why Macworld’s keynotes may be a liability. Every January, Apple is expected to announce several major new products. It’s almost like a forced release cycle, and Apple doesn’t work well when pressed for time. It’s what nearly drove the company to bankruptcy in the 1990s. I think I first noticed this with the arrival of the Apple TV: it was initially a bit of a dud, and even Steve Jobs described it as a ‘hobby’. If it had been given another six months or so in the oven, it might have been more of a success. In the end, it was a bit of a flop.

However, another important factor is Steve Jobs’s health. While we all hope he’s OK, he’s evidently had a bit of a bad year (viz. his skinniness at WWDC) and Apple needs to prove its resilience, so that if something does happen to Jobs, Apple will survive.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Phil Schiller is a very competent businessman. His public persona is nowhere near as charismatic as Steve Jobs’s, but he’s very capable of steering Apple into the future, with or without his predecessor.



Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Breaking news: Apple not to make an appearance at Macworlds after 2010

Filed under: Apple — Tags: , , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 23:25

Shock horror: Apple will only be wheeling out Phil Schiller at the 2009 Macworld SF conference, and it won’t even be appearing at future Macworld conferences! There’s a turn-up for the books. More soon.



Saturday, December 13, 2008

Do we all need ’slogans’ now?

Filed under: Communications, Internet, Web 2.0 — Tags: , , , — Jonathan Rothwell @ 15:44

Is it just me, or does this whole Web 2.0 thing seem to be turning into a bit of a marketing-fest? It seems to me that everyone’s primary goal on the New Web (which is really how the Old Web was meant to be) is to have as big a presence and following as possible.

I have this blog, a Twitter account, a Delicious account, another, more ‘traditional’ web site at jonathan-rothwell.co.uk and I post to a couple of internet forums. However, social media ’superstars’ like iJustine and Chris Pirillo seem to be more omniescent than Starbucks. (In Pirillo’s case, you can even spy on him, 24/7, using the live stream. Making life easier for stalkers? Never let it be said.)

I don’t have any objection to this: in fact, I relish it. The fact that people can become celebrities over the Internet is one of the best aspects of it: it truly is the common man’s own expression medium. However… that said…

We also have people telling us how to become successful on the net. Apparently, we need to ‘market ourselves’ and build up a ‘personal brand’. Really? Does this mean every Internet user needs a marketing suite, similar to those supplied by the likes of AMV BBDO, Wolf Ollins and Martin Lambie-Nairn to corporations for hundreds of thousands of pounds?

Does this mean we should all have a corporate colour scheme? A jingle? A logo? Slogans?

How about these, then?

  • Jonathan Rothwell: destroying badly built PCs since 1992.
  • Crashed Pips: The world’s easiest demotivator.
  • Crashed Pips: Oh. My. God.
  • Jonathan Rothwell: Ever been to Thorpe Park? Remember Nemesis? He’s worse than Nemesis.
  • 97% of readers rated Crashed Pips more coherent than Norma Major’s latest book.
  • Crashed Pips: it might be crap, but at least it’s free. (i.e. you don’t get paid if it damages you emotionally.)

In theory, if we are to believe the SM marketing types, now I’ve put these slogans up here, people will come flooding to this website in such numbers that I’ll have to take up prostitution as a full-time job in order to pay for the bandwidth.

I somehow doubt it. Heavily.



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