Status-Q

A nice story from the Register – well, rather a depressing one really – about Camelot, the UK’s lottery operator, having to withdraw a recent scratchcard competition:

According to the Manchester Evening News, to qualify for a prize, punters had to “scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card”. Sadly, as the card had a decidedly wintery theme, this initially-shown figure was often below zero.
…
Among these was Levenshulme’s Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted “she had left school without a maths GCSE”. She explained: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop.”
…
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.”

They had to withdraw the competition because rather large numbers of people had the same complaint…

Many thanks to Michael for the link.

It had to happen eventually, but perhaps it really is beginning now… in Japan at least. PC sales are falling, according to this AP article.

I have always looked forward to living in a post-PC world.

The personal computer as we normally picture it has been such a successful model over the last quarter of a century that it has stifled quite a lot of innovation because many ideas, which might otherwise have exciting new tangible forms, are easier just to do on a PC. But as PCs become less of a focus, we should see new types of interaction becoming more common.

Mark Weiser’s famous article, “The Computer for the 21st Century“, talks about when core technologies become really powerful: when you don’t notice them any more.

The most frequently-cited example of this – highlighted by Don Norman – is the electric motor. There was a time when you could buy a ‘household electric motor’ and a range of accessories which would allow you to use it as a blender one minute, and a vacuum cleaner the next. But you know electric motors have become really significant as a technology when you start thinking of a washing machine as a washing machine, and a drill as a drill, rather than as incarnations of an electric motor.

Perhaps that’s what we’re starting to see in Japan.

Millions download music directly to their mobiles, and many more use their handsets for online shopping and to play games. Digital cameras connect directly to printers and high-definition TVs for viewing photos, bypassing PCs altogether. Movies now download straight to TVs.

More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.

Now, to be fair, it’s not clear that people are actually doing without traditional PCs, they just aren’t upgrading their old ones very fast.

But this is a start. One thing that characterises appliances like washing machines, at least for most of us, is that you replace them when you have to. You don’t buy a new one so you can boast to your friends that this years’ model has a higher-wattage motor.

This is not the end of personal computing. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

What fun!

A reminder, in case it happens to be relevant to you, that summer daylight-savings time ends in the UK this coming weekend… and in the US the following weekend.

So next week the time difference between us will be one hour less than usual.

More info here.

My friend Alan Jones sent a message telling me that the ITU meeting on the redefinition of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which was held in Geneva last month, agreed on a process to phase out leap seconds by 2013.

If you don’t know what leap seconds are, don’t worry. They happen every 18 months or so and you’re unlikely to notice them unless you’re listening to the BBC time ‘pips’ at midnight, when you’ll hear an extra one.

One of the results, if it goes ahead, will be that time-sensitive software will be much easier to write.
Another is that, unless they agree on occasional fixes (leap hours have been proposed in the past), the time shown by sundials and sextants will start to drift, very very slowly, from ‘official’ time…

Here’s a handy site for UK wine drinkers: Quaffers’ Offers. It lets you search in a variety of ways for particular wines and tells you which of the UK supermarkets have them on special offer at the moment. Planning a party, for example, and want a few bottles of Oyster Bay?

I don’t generally buy any one wine in large enough quantities to adjust my shopping location in this way, and this site doesn’t of course cover places like our really excellent local wine merchant. But for large purchases it’s very handy.

Thanks to Peter Haworth for the link…

Now there’s a surprise. BT has joined forces with FON. I first heard about FON and met the founder at the e-Tel conference couple of years ago. Basically, it’s a system to allow people to share some of their wifi bandwidth with passers-by who also subscribe to the FON system. I liked the idea – I’d written a proposal for something very similar when I was at AT&T – but I didn’t think FON’s model would work because it would violate the usage contracts of most ISPs, who don’t like you sharing your broadband with others.

Of course, if the ISP is in on the action, then that’s a different story! Congrats to Martin Varsavsky for this, and to BT for not behaving like an old-fashioned telco. It will be very interesting to see how popular this proves to be…

More info at BTFON.com…

This is a short but wonderful clip of Richard Dawkins demonstrating what he does believe in!

What did the lightbulb say when it was switched off?

See the comments for the answer…

And how he was rescued…

(From the BBC)

Visitors from abroad often ask me whether I’m concerned by the level of video surveillance in Britain. It’s widely reported that we are the most-watched country in the world, with more public CCTV cameras than anywhere else.

Well, I’m not too worried, though I know that if I had more time to worry about such things, I probably should be. My lack of concern is partly because, as someone who has been burgled on several occasions, I tend to approve of any measures that might help catch wrongdoers. Remember that old adage about “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”? Secondly, as I’ve written before, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, and my faith in our authorities’ (a) general good intentions and (b) general incompetence makes it hard for me to get wound up about suggestions of anything too sinister.

I am very aware, though, that the fact I can afford not to worry about this is a privilege denied to much of the world. There are only a handful of countries where I would feel as unthreatened by it as I do here, and history is littered with stories of overnight revolutions… I may yet live to regret my folly. But life’s no fun if you feel you ought to worry about everything!

As I pointed out to friends recently, we all have numerous devices in our homes which anybody in the entire world could use to wake us up repeatedly in the middle of the night, deprive us of sleep, and, if they so desired, shout abusive messages at us, and do so completely anonymously! We tolerate such an outrageous situation because, for most of us, the benefits of the telephone outweigh the likely disadvantages. For me, CCTV cameras in public places still fall on the same side of the line.

There are about 5m CCTV cameras in public places in England and Wales – approximately one for every ten people – and the average Briton can expect to be caught on camera around 300 times per day. (I imagine a very small number of those instances will actually be recorded, however). The other figure I learned from this week’s Economist, though, which surprised me rather more, is that there are around 30m cameras in the USA, which makes the ratio per head of population about the same. Since many of my concerned visitors are from the States, I thought this was an interesting statistic.