Stan Winston R.I.P.

It was with great sadness that I learned of the untimely death of Stan Winston, who’s work in fantasy films enthraulled a generation. So I was insipred to write something about his work on Geek, here.

DVD Rot killed the Dinosaur

Last weekend I was working on a group test of DVD writers, for my sins. As part of this I decided to test how fast each of the six drives could read commercial DVD releases of single and dual layer types. So I went to my DVD collection and found two ‘pristine’ examples and set about testing them. To my utter horror I discovered that the dual layer test disc, the Disney CGI animated movie ‘Dinosaur’ wouldn’t read at all. A closer inspection reveals what looks like condensation, the dreaded DVD rot!
I’ve now set up an exclusion zone around that case, with a matt moistened with disinfectant – if this spreads it could be expensive!
But seriously, what slightly annoys me is that I bought this from Play.com in 2002, it was the ‘special edition’ so it wasn’t cheap, and it’s been played maybe twice. Play has a 30 day returns policy, so I’ll not get a replacement or my money back. But this disc was a faulty batch, where the aluminium layer as separated from the plastic above it allowing for oxidisation to occur. It was made wrong! But as it’s take five years for this process to reach this point, I’ve got no means of redress! And that’s pants.
I’m tempted to check all my discs now, but it might be better to just not know.

UK iPhone launch in November!

Mr Jobs came to this green and pleasant place to tell us today that he’d be anointing us with his highly desirable iPhone profit generator on November 9th. The UK price will be £269 (inc VAT) for the 8GB model, but you’ll need to take out an O2 contract for 18 months, at a minimum of £35 a month. So that’s a total outlay of £999 for the joy of having a phone that doesn’t even have 3G.

Myself I’ll be sticking with my ancient Nokia and a pay-as-you-go spend of £30 a year, approximately.

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HD War not going well for either side

A while back I commented that neither side was winning the HD format war, because as yet they’ve not sold anything like the number of players or discs that would worry anyone with a DVD duplication business. I also recall a few people, on another blog remonstrated with me for this view. But now Sony’s let the cat out of the HD bag, so to speak.
This image, from coverage of CEDIA 2007  on AnandTech entirely gives the game away.

Yes Blu-ray fans, your format is marginally ahead. But what’s really scary about these numbers is that the trend of the graph, left to right, is down. Since their launch both formats have declined, with Blu-ray suffering the bigger drop of the two. Surely after initial blips the trend of this graph should be up, not down?
What concerns me most about this slide is that to demonstrate their superiority Sony didn’t mind showing they’re both drowning from a sales perspective. Is that the new criteria of business success, not growth, but who goes out of business last?

Customer Service – some get it, others don’t

I’ve had one of those experiences this morning that entirely lifts your day, which is curious because it started with a very expensive piece of my kit going wrong.
Back in November I bought a 42 inch Toshiba Regza TFT TV, which is amazing. Yes Sky looks like the best of Enid Blyton sent through a wood chipper, but that’s Sky’s fault not the Tosh. But shortly after Christmas is developed a minor fault where a thin black line appeared down the centre of the screen. At first we tried to ignore it, but eventually I decided to get it sorted out, as the TV came from John Lewis is a five year warranty.
This is doing Customer Services Right:

Rang with the problem, told that the TV engineering company would ring me tomorrow.
Engineers rang as promised and said they’d be here on Thursday.
8.30am Thursday they rang to give me a two hour windows (9-11) that the engineer would call
9.20am Engineer arrived, assessed problem
9.30am Engineer called John Lewis arranged replacement screen for Friday and collection of broken screen, with same early call and two hour window promised.
9.35am He left, leaving me with complete confidence that I’m going to get my screen fixed, and that I’m not going to be without a TV in the meanwhile. Result!

And now to bring balance to the universe, how to do Customer Services wrong!

Saw a wardrobe in Homebase that I wanted, tried to buy it, couldn’t…it was the last one.
Homebase sales staff said I could buy it online and get it delivered, so went home.
Went online and found item, £25 more…but thought what the hell and ordered it.
After the order was taken the web page told me that I would be rung and a delivery date arranged.
A month later no phone call received, so I sent an email asking the situation.
Automated response, no reply
Two weeks later I sent an email to customer services at Homebase asking why they didn’t reply to emails.
I got another automated response it read…
Thank you for your enquiry. Your email has been given a reference …
We aim to answer all emails within 2 days.
That was 27 days ago. No reply.
Rang Homebase two weeks ago and asked where the item was.
Promised on the phone that the item would be with me on the 1st of September, at the very latest.
On the 1st of September received a letter explaining the item was out of stock and that it would take longer, no delivery date provided.

If anyone from Homebase is reading this, YOU ARE CRAP! (and no, I’m not expecting a reply)

But they’re not alone.

I noticed that the pieces I wrote on the BBC Series Jekyll, so I thought it might be of interest to my readers to review the DVD boxset.
So I contacted the BBC on that basis.
The BBC press office replied,’If you are a journalist, we are considering your inquiry and will respond as soon as we can.’
Well I am a journalist, and they haven’t after 3 weeks.
I think what galls me more here is that I’m indirectly paying for them to be rubbish!

And last but not least, Pipex

I’ve posted a number of times about my fun with their ADSL service, which after years of being excellent went pair shaped about two months ago.
I’m not going to repeat the entire sordid tale here again, but I’ve now had at least two Pipex representatives promise to ring me back but never did. My ADSL still doesn’t function like it once did, and they’ve ignored at least two emails I’ve sent.
When I get cable in, and then tell them I’m terminating my contract I’m sure they’ll have plenty to say, but when I’ve got a problem they’re less interested it seems. Customer service is something that they’re heard about, but not really understood it seems.

Hitachi 1TB…big boys toys

It’s not often that I’m in awe of computer kit these days, but today Hitachi very kindly sent me once of the their new 7K1000 drives. This baby has 1TB!!!
It’s easy to dismiss stuff like this and just say it’s a bit bigger than the 750GB Western Digital I reviews a while back. True it’s entirely arbitary amount of data, like any other size, but an entire terabyte on a single drive, numbs the mind a little.
Let me put that in a little perspective. The first hard drive I owned was the 30Mb MegaStore for the Atari ST. This drive is a thousand gigabytes or a million megabytes, which is a mere 33,000 times bigger! I’m not sure how many MegaStore’s Atari sold in the UK, but I think I could hold more capacity in one hand in these drives than they pushed in all the MegaStores. Assuming the rate of growth is proportional, which it isn’t, in 2027 we’ll have 20,000 or 40,000TB drives. Or, more HD movies than it’s possible to watch in lifetime. Bring it on!

AMD 690G build crazyness

I’ve spent the day trying to complete a PC build for a friend, which I’ll document more completely at a later point. But this morning the PC had XP on it and was pretty ready to go (or going as in the picture). So why have I just finished mucking about with it???? In a word ‘sound’. For a reason that still defies logic I noticed that no sound device had been installed, and then more strangely that the sound device was missing! I assumed, wrongly, that it was an XP driver muck-up, and reinstalled XP using repare mode. That didn’t fix it. So in desperation I threw Vista on it, mainly to find out if it was something wrong with the hardware. It was, because I got no sound in Vista either!
In the end I wondered if the BIOS settings weren’t being shown correctly, and considered pulling the battery out to reset everything. Before doing that I reset to factory defaults and kerrr-pow!…We have sound. Now all I’ve got to do is scrap off Vista and start again with the OS my friend actually wants…
Perhaps I should write an article on how to waste about five hours on something stupid.

WiFi Theft – utter garbage

Can you steal a wireless broadband connection service? Apparently according to Birmingham police you can. The story covered by the Birmingham Post tells us that ‘Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act.’. Doh! This has to be the dumbest story I’ve heard for a long while, and based on other things going on currently in the news it makes you wonder where this officers priorities might be. Was the owner of the link aware? Did he care? Did it cost him anything extra this month? How was he deprived by this act? At what point was he being dishonest? When asked by the police officers what he was doing, he told them!
If the owner of the access point had wanted it closed, surely he should of closed it?
I’m not legally trained, but surely stealing is the act where you intend to permanently deprive the owner of a possession? But he never intended to  take anything, unless it’s possible to filch electrons or direct them illegally.
Based on the logic of this, if you walk past a house where someone is listening to a CD in the garden, then your stealing their music? Or if light from a property is falling on your newspaper, allowing you to read it while you wait for the bus, that’s stealing too?
But again I come back to my key point. With gun and knife crime a major concern, along with terrorism, the effort in the pursuit of someone what is effectively a victimless crime seems inappropriate at best.

Are Journalists threatened by Bloggers?

Last week I went an event called PlayBite, which was to bring Journo’s and various hardware makers together for mutual benefit. There I was able to talk to Seagate, Toshiba, Belkin, ZyXEL and others about current and upcoming products and potentially plan some reviews in advance.
Good stuff. But what was also interesting was the questionnaire they asked me to complete as I left, which seemed to be concerned about the impact of Blogging on us erstwhile hacks!
I know that some people are very worried about this, and I can understand why, but myself I’m not. You see I don’t see bloggers are actually a threat to conventional journalism, but another potential outlet for people with genuine writing skills. By day I’m a ink journalist, meaning by work is printed and distributed, in much the same way that it’s been for hundreds of years. Yes it’s all composited on computer, and sent to a computerised press, but it’s an ink and paper deal like it’s been since Caxton.
Luckily I work for a weekly mag, so there isn’t a huge time difference between the actual events we discuss and them going into print. It’s not got the instant appeal of a blog or online mag, but sometimes it’s good to let a little time go by without spouting, to get a better handle on the underlying story.
So will this type of product go away entirely and be replaced by Bloggs? I don’t think so, not in the short to medium term. If you go back in time you’ll find that people predicted the demise of print when Radio and TV was invented, and again when the Internet took hold. But it’s still going, and many of the daily still sell more than a million copies!
Now I’m writing a Blog, and it’s given me a whole new perspective. This is an immediate medium that allows me to talk about things that don’t generally fit into either the readership or interest of the print publications I produce for. It also doesn’t currently pay me anything, but it’s a ‘work in progress’ so I’ll accept that for the moment. At some point I’ll expect it to pay it’s way for the time I spend on it, or I’ll reduce the amount I do.
Looking at what other Bloggers are doing, I don’t see anything different from what most journalists do, which is the see an idea or a story and then find their own angle. The Blogs that do well are either written skilfully or have imagination, despite what some think there is no ‘free lunch’ for the Blogger. Those that manage to get large numbers of people reading them have had to work hard to achieve that. Their are millions of bloggs that are read by few people, and some that will never get thousands of people a day tuning in.
The medium might have changed, but the rules remain the same. If you can produce material that people like or interests them then you’ve got a future, if you don’t you haven’t.
I think those in the printed press that feel the Bloggers are going to consume their occupations, by offering something similar for free are missing the point, I’d suggest.
In the same way that a picture taken with a mobile phone isn’t going to make you Photographer of the year. Those with genuine skills will shine through, irrespective of how they’re labelled.
The interest I’m seeing is that marketing people like the ‘new and exciting’ aspect of commercial Blogs, which they see as easier to influence than the battle hardened hacks they’re used to dealing with. Once the Web 2.0 world has matured a little, I think they’ll find it isn’t any different, and many of those hacks are the same people they will deal with in a new context.
In the meanwhile, I’ll just keep writing…for any medium that has an outlet.

Server Build

This week I’ve been working on building a server, for my friend Mr. Cheng. As with all these things it will also be a feature in Micro Mart. The machine is actually finished now, but I’ve had a few ups and downs along the way. The system uses an embedded Linux solution called NASLite V2, written by a great guy called Tony Tonchev. But when I first built the rig it used a Sapphire motherboard which didn’t pass the drive details on correctly, and the two 500GB SATA drives in there didn’t register! I switched to an ASUS board and it’s all cooking now!

SCO train hits the buffers

The Linux world woke up to some excellent news today, the sort that makes people actually believe in the American legal system. If you’ve not a techie or being living under a rock then it might seem incredible but SCO (formally the Santa Cruz Operation) has been holding a revolver to the head of the entire Linux world for the past four years, ever since it sued IBM claiming that millions of lines of code in Linux where owned by it.
The claim was utter bunk, but we’re seen SCO attempt to railroad this claim without virtually any evidence that it was true. But despite running a very tight legal ship it’s not IBM that’s really put the mockers on this whole sordid exercise. As part of it’s case SCO claimed it owned UNIX, after a previous deal with Novell. Except Novell said it owned UNIX and not SCO. It’s this other side to the case that’s finally delivered the coup de grass on SCO, as Utah Federal District Court Judge Dale A. Kimball has ruled that Novell owns UNIX, not SCO. That’s a big problem for SCO, because not only does their case against IBM collapse, because they’re suing for using something they don’t own, but they’ve also taken money from the likes of Microsoft and Sun Microsystems for license which is legally now Novell’s. Giving that money up is a difficulty, because the amount they got is greater than the net worth of SCO.
I’m sure when SCO CEO, Darl McBride and friends thought this scheme up it looked great. We hold Linux to ransom, get IBM to pay use off, take our ill-gotten gains and head to the sun! But when the stock market opens on Monday, and the reality of where SCO is really heading dawns of those holding stock, it could really be the end. Personally, I hope so.

If you want to read more I’d head over to the excellent Groklaw , who’ve been providing a blow-by-blow coverage of this case.

UPDATE
SCOX (NASDAQ code for SCO shares) closed at $1.50 on Friday, opened at $0.45 on Monday and on Wednesday is trading at $0.37…
I hear the sound of water going down the plug-hole.

The Future is a scary place…we’re told

Apparently that’s the overwhelming conclusion of the House of Lords report on the Internet, which they likened to the ‘Wild West’. Putting aside the argument that the notional concept of the Wild West is pure fiction anyway, from the portions that have been reported this document seems to have discovered that the Internet isn’t immune from exactly the same sorts of threats that people encounter every day in ‘reality’. Gosh that’s a revelation! How long exactly did it take them to work that one out?
What worries me the most though isn’t the banal rehash of what’s been true for at least five years, but the assertion that ISPs should somehow be made responsible for what others do with their service. People have been scamming people with letters and phone calls for years, since these mechanisms became widespread in fact. But I’ve never seen the government turn around to Royal Mail or BT and ask them to stump up when some old lady buys shares in a company that doesn’t exist, or hands over her details to a criminal!
This isn’t a new idea though is it, as the whole YouTube and Torrent rows demonstrate. You can’t hold Google responsible for stuff found by their indexing or put by others on YouTube. In the same way that Ford aren’t responsible for letting people drive their cars while drunk. It isn’t Ford’s responsibility to sit outside the pub and stop you driving, and it isn’t the ISPs responsibility to work out which packets of data that are travelling on their network might ultimately upset someone.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see ISPs being more pro-active on killing virus packages and mail zombie data in transit, because I think that’s entirely practical, and it’s something they could actually do. But making them liable is frankly the stupidest thing I’ve heard recently.  As many of them resell services from other providers, like BT, they could share responsibility around, eventually bringing a huge class action against the relatives of Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray and Edison  for their contribution to the creation of this highly dangerous facility.
Clearly based on this thinking Elton John is ready for a peerage, which I respectfully suggest is given to him just minutes before the unelected second house is disbanded and replaced by an elected one with people who have more of a grip on modern technology. But then the other elected house doesn’t seem to have any of those, so maybe that’s asking too much.

2007 Hurricane Season – WTF?

Many countries have seen major weather disruption this year, with flooding and other extreme events. But, curiously, these events have also highlighted the unpredictability of weather and how little those that predict it seem to understand it. For a number of years I’ve been interested in the formation of Hurricanes, using various weather and satellite services to track them. I find it fascinating to watch them develop from a small pressure wave, into a low, tropical storm and then occasionally a full-blown Hurricane. Obviously sometimes the consequences can be very serious, so it’s important that work goes on to better understand them, but this years predictions have been wildly out. Before the season started (officially on June 1st) the hurricane forecast team at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins anticipated that 17 named storms to form in the Atlantic between June 1st and November 30th. And to back them up Noah (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) also punted for a ‘very active’ season.
The first tropical storm actually beat the start of the season by almost a month, so they must have thought they’d got 2007 down pat. In fact it’s been an almost implausibly quiet season. But they’ve continued to make these predictions, with the CSU stating on the 3rd of August that it still expects 15 named storms, 8 Hurricanes and four of those to be major.
However, so far we’ve seen only three named storms, and no Hurricanes whatsoever. To hit the CSU numbers requires an average of a named storm each week and a Hurricane every two for the rest of the season. The least active season on record is four named storms, of which two where Hurricanes, neither major. Is 2007 going to rival that?
What concerns me is that if 2007 is a total bust for Hurricanes, people might not take the 2008 predictions very seriously, which might have dire consequences. And. obviously the weather still isn’t something we understand nearly enough.

XP SATA install without floppy

I know this has been possible for a while, but I’d always worked around it, either by finding a floppy drive or installing to an ATA drive and then cloning it to the SATA when happy with the installation.
But today I decided to grasp the thorn and do it the slick way with a tool called nLite. It worked a dream! I’m so impressed with my own ability to follow simple instructions, I might well turn this into a Micro Mart feature, or alternatively put it here.
The bottom line is that you don’t need a floppy to install XP on SATA! Is this the bitter end for the floppy?

Ety8 – old square ears is back!

I’ve just reviewed these weird things for Micro Mart (be published in a few weeks). They’re Bluetooth headphones.
You can wait then to read what I think of them, but one aspect of them I’m going to share with you. In the promotional pictures they have of this product, you see a man wearing them, with the block part of the device flush against his ear! How?? I’m a big person but my ear canals aren’t nearly wide or deep enough to have the plastic tube on these entirely inside. If they did reach this point, I’d be brain dead! Who thinks of this stuff? Yes, correct, to the person who just shouted out ‘The Cybermen’!