Status-Q

CNET is starting a series of articles on Microsoft’s plans for world domination via Windows XP.

Having moved quite frequently between several different machines over the last few months, I thought I might offer some advice on how to do things on different operating systems:

Windows

• You can probably do it in several ways
• None of them will be particularly intuitive
• Some of the ways will cost you lots of money
• If it doesn’t work, getting support will cost you even more money
• At least there are an awful lot of other people who can sympathise.

Linux

• You can do anything
• It won’t cost you anything
• It will be exceedingly reliable
• It will probably be horribly complicated
• If you can’t do something, just modify the source, update your compiler, find and install a few extra packages, and recompile the kernel
• Well done! Go to a party and see if you can find anyone who appreciates how clever you’ve been.

Mac OS X

• Things on the Mac fall broadly into one of two categories:
• Things that have been done right
• Things that haven’t been done yet
• You can therefore do it easily or not at all
• If you can’t do it, just relax and go to Starbucks instead
• It probably wasn’t that important after all, man.

Bob Metcalfe’s law states that the overall usefulness of a network is
proportional to the square of the number of people connected to it
(because each of the N users can make N-1 connections). I was thinking
of this while listening to a radio programme this morning about the
global dominance of English as a language.

A similar multiplying effect must occur with databases on the net. The
more data a particular database contains, the more people will use and
add to it. The marvellous Internet Movie
Database was an early example.

Now, I wonder if this one
will ever really get going….

OK, I guess I’m just a bit slow, but I’ve suddenly discovered an area of computing that I’d never come across and which had never occurred to me before… Did you know that, as well as a Flight Simulator, Microsoft also sell a Train Simulator? And that Hornby not only sell model railways, but virtual ones as well? Wow, there’s a whole page full of similar software here!

Any serious anorak-wearers will be wondering, no doubt, which planet I’ve been on for the last few years, but somehow I had managed to miss these. They seem a bit sad and yet rather fun at the same time. Good Christmas presents, I guess, for the right person, and think of all that attic space you could save….

I was sad when the U.S wireless network Ricochet was shut down a few months ago. It offered quite a good service to the insufficient number of people who subscribed. Still, if you’re in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings, wondering where it all went wrong and why you bothered, then you can’t get a much better finale to raise your spirits than this story.

Follow-up to the Fidelity Investments story: If you’re wondering what this XML thing is and why a company should want to spend many millions of dollars using it, you might want to read The Importance of XML. Feedback welcomed.

The next version of the Radio Userland package which I use to publish this weblog will apparently be “priced competitively with Groove“. It’s very competitive at present, being free! It sounds as if that won’t be true in future, which is a pity – I would have it was worth having it widely distributed as an introduction to Userland’s more powerful Frontier application.

But the comparison with Groove is an interesting one which had occurred to me before. On the surface they are very different applications, but they are both built on underlying platforms which are much more flexible and more powerful than the casual user might realise, and which have a certain amount in common. Groove promises quite a bit more, at present, but Radio delivers more reliably, in my experience. It will be interesting to see the next version, which will also – goody! – be available on Mac OS X.

Fidelity Investments has apparently made a huge move of its corporate infrastructure to XML. Story at ComputerWorld.

Small but encouraging discoveries today. I imported a large and very complex Powerpoint poster into OpenOffice, and, while it didn’t render perfectly, it was pretty darn close. I then discovered that OpenOffice was in some respects rather better than Powerpoint, because it has a concept of ‘styles’, much as in a word-processor. When you’ve formatted one text box as yellow text on a blue background with a red border, you can create a style from that and apply it to any other boxes. Modify the style, and all of the boxes change. Obvious stuff, really, but nice none the less, and not available in Powerpoint.

I explored a bit more and found another cute feature. When you create styles you normally make them dependent on other styles. A ‘block quote’ style, for example, is typically based on a normal paragraph but with larger left and right margins. In OpenOffice, you can view the list of styles as a hierarchical tree, so you can see exactly which ones are dependent on which other ones. Lovely.

The final discovery was that I could export my slide as SVG – a completely non-proprietary and open standard for scalable graphics – which I could then view using, for example, a browser with the Adobe SVG viewer plugin.

This is all exciting stuff.

Mac OS X 10.1 is out this weekend in the U.S. and by all accounts it fixes most of the remaining issues with the existing version. Current users can just walk into an Apple reseller for an upgrade CD. Steve Jobs, in his announcement at Seybold, carelessly neglected to mention how people in the UK can get hold of it, so I called our local supplier first thing this morning. There was a delay getting through, and the person I spoke to apologised for it, “We have about 5 lines all ringing at the moment!”

“Ah”, I said, “they probably want to know the same thing as me. I’m interested in OS X version…”

“Monday!”, she interrupted, with a laugh.

Here’s some Net folklore….
On BBC Radio 4 this morning they were discussing Alan Turing, and said that the Apple Computer logo was actually a tribute to him. He committed suicide by taking a couple of bites out of an apple which was laced with cyanide. I read elsewhere that this is apparently repeated by Sadie Plant in her book ‘Zeroes and Ones’, with the additional assertion that the rainbow background is the symbol for homosexuality, accusations of which drove him to it.

Now this is a good story, but there’s a different account in the FAQ on the rather good www.apple-history.com site:

Steve Jobs had worked during the summer at an apple farm, and admired the Beatles’ record label, Apple. He also believed Apples to be the most perfect fruit. He and Steve Wozniak were trying to figure out a name for their new company, and they decided that if they couldn’t think of one by the end of the day that was better than Apple, they’d choose Apple. They couldn’t think of anything better, so on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer, Inc. was born.

But they needed a logo. The first design included Sir Isaac Newton, a tree and a banner that said “Apple Computer.” Jobs decided they needed a less busy logo, one that would signify a brand. The second logo attempt was very similar to the current logo, but without the bite taken out of it. Jobs thought this logo looked too much like an orange. The third attempt was the logo that Apple still uses.

Take your pick. Somehow, to me, the latter sounds more plausible, if only because it’s not quite so neat. If it happened today, of course, Jobs and Wozniak would have discovered that apple.com was already in use by a record company and would then have had to think of something much less elegantly simple.

Disposable cellphones are almost with us. If that sounds ridiculous, think what people would have said a few decades ago if you’d suggested a disposable camera.
More info on how they are made can be found here. Apparently, they’ll be available within a month or so. Some models keep costs down by using speech recognition instead of a keypad and display. They only need to understand a few digits, of course, but this may be the first significant mass-market use of embedded speech recognition technology?