According to the book-jacket endorsements Stephen King (author), Dave Barry, (author), Bill Schulz (producer, Fox News), Chez Pazienza (producer, CNN) and The Smoking Gun website really liked this book. I think it is a one-eyed, mean-spirited view of the media written by a ‘tapeworm’.

Drew Curtis is the founder of the fark.com website. He claims that each day Fark receives 2000 news submissions from its readership, which he filters placing the ones he finds most interesting online.

Curtis does not like journalists or the media at all. For example (there are so many) I paraphrase this quote from his book

”Media will ask survivors the most deplorable questions, such as ”How do you feel right now?” ”Has this changed your life?”…… At any rate it’s not the interviewee’s fault coming up with stupid answers. Reporters shouldn’t be asking these types of questions in the first place. Just leave the poor bastards alone.”

Yes, I am sure the Bush administration would have been very grateful if the media had not gone to New Orleans to ask Hurricane Katrina survivors how ‘life’ was for them.

‘Bastards' pops up again in another context, when Curtis discusses a story about terrorists utilising heat seeking missiles. ”It said that the success rate with shoulder-fired heat seekers is extremely low because the terrorists are ignorant bastards who don’t read instructions and fire the things when the plane is to close.”

Curtis might like to consider just what is his definition of this swear word that he throws about so casually.

Jackass gets trotted out as well; ”there’s always some jackass who doesn’t come down with it.” He is referring to people who don’t get the flu over winter, where he makes the quite ludicrous claim that everyone gets the flu over winter; except for the ‘jackass'.

And let’s not go past his casual racism.

”You don’t see Canada or Mexico trying to invade the United States every decade or so, although some would argue Mexico has been doing it one person at a time for years now.”

As he wrote the above, it’s reasonable to assume that he agrees with the statement.

With this book Curtis has taken stories that have been on Fark and then rubbishes them and the media for even publishing the story in the beginning. In effect Curtis feeds off the media like a parasite (tapeworm).

In one instant he highlights quotes from an article in ‘Nature' magazine then adds this comment: ”Well no shit. No word if he actually ever said that. The article might as well have said ”If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.” Yes, indeed she would."

‘Nature' is a science magazine targeted at a highly-educated audience with a good grasp of scientific principles. Curtis mocks quotes that he does not understand.

Curtis also works up a head of enraged hot air over magazines/newspapers coming up with Top 10/20/50 lists of this and that.

In regards to a Top 50 Sidekicks of All Time article he writes

"Number two was Robin of Batman and Robin fame, followed by George Constanza, Chewbacca, and Ethel Mertz. Who is Ethel Mertz? Exactly my point."

I guess it never occurred to him to try Google!

I’ve only got as far as page 66 on this book. I’ll keep you posted on how the rest of it pans out.

PLEASE NOTE: There has been a further blog on this book. Here.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher July 30, 2007 2:26 PM | Comments (9)

I was intrigued by the wraparound cover and title of Lee Gutkind’s book ”almost human”, subtitled "Making Robots Think".

In seven silhouettes it shows the development of humankind; the first a monkey on all fours, then standing on two legs, then cro-magnum man, then a human. This is followed by two more silhouette humans, the first with a small robot, then with a sophisticated robot. The final silhouette is just of a robot (ie they have supplanted humans).

Clever graphic, great book title and now the reality check. The book’s contents implicitly state that robots remain as thick as two planks, requiring constant input from human handlers to achieve even the most basic of operations.

If you believe C-3PO from Star Wars, the robots depicted in Steven Speilberg’s AI or the Will Smith movie iRobot are, development wise, coming in your lifetime or that of your children’s, think again.
And as for the Terminator movie trilogy, the notion that we are just short of a nuclear Armageddon started by manmade robots that will then seek to eradicate the survivors is just laughable. [This though does not detract from the fact that the Terminator trilogy is the greatest movie trilogy ever. And, surely, Terminator II is in your Top 20 movie list!]

In truth, on the domestic front robots come in the form of dust-buster vacuum cleaners. That’s it. Sony had developed and marketed the Aibos robot, a four-legged robo-dog toy, but the company killed it off in March 2006.

The biggest, if not insurmountable, problem to robotic development is the programming of the software.
To bring robots up to the ‘reality’ of Hollywood movies is going to require self-progamming, self-replicating software that can debug itself.
Yes, I am sure that debugging point has got a lot of software programmers rolling around the floor laughing.
However, should it happen, the person who can crack that particular equation will become as famous as Albert Einstein.

There are two realistic avenues that are viable for robot development; space travel and war.
The robots sent to Mars are as sophisticated as they currently get and they are just drive-around machines that can perform rudimentary scientific experiments. However, in these machines lies the long-off possibility of space travel to other galaxies, with robots instead of humans making the trip. Although, be assured, this won’t happen in quite some time. I can’t see the quantum advances we have seen in say cellphones, coming to the world of robotics.

The other is war. About two-thirds into the book the author finally acknowledges this. ”Much of the work in robotics performed by Carnegie Melon and most of the universities in the United States is supported by the military, especially in the Department of Defence. The technologies developed at Carnegie Melon for NASA could easily be adapted for fighting and surveillance apparatus.” he blandly states

Body bags are the second-worst PR for any war (losing it being the first), so if army commanders could fight on a battlefield with an ‘it’s our robots killing their robots and we have better robots’ scenario, war could well become more acceptable. Perhaps even fashionable!

Posted by Rodney Fletcher July 23, 2007 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

We knew we were making big strides with our website but we didn’t know quite how much until this week…last month this website made it into the top 10 newspaper or magazine sites in the country for total traffic by unique browers.

Our own stats show reseller.co.nz now regularly attracts over 2000 hits a day (although they’re not necessarily unique browers). Last month was particularly strong with a day that saw over 13,000 hits and another with over 19,000.

As you’d expect given their audiences, tech sites did well in the top 10 ranking produced by Nielsen Netratings, and our stablemates pcworld.co.nz and computerworld.co.nz were third and fourth respectively.

It wasn’t surprising that the Herald and Stuff sites continued their domination of the list, but we think making the grade counts for a lot.

So keep visiting!

Posted by Amanda Sachtleben July 17, 2007 4:40 PM | Comments (0)

I got to the end of the book ”Bill & Dave", a retelling of the business lives of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. (See blogs June 22, July 2, July 9) Here are the last six paragraphs of the book.

”The day before the garage dedication, [December, 2005] a group of thirty people gathered in a Palo Alto restaurant to watch a video. All had been executives at Hewlett-Packard during the Bill and Dave era. It was a Proustian moment: the faces were familiar—Dave Kirby, John Young, Dean Morton, Karen Lewis, Al Bagley, Bill Terry and more—but in the intervening thirty years these once young and ambitious men and women had all grown up. Fong, [Art] the oldest, was eighty-five. Most were in their seventies. Even the youngest, Steve Wozniak, [who was never an executive at HP despite the claim in the second sentence] was now in his mid-fifties.

"As they ate lunch, the group reminisced about the past, told anecdotes from their HP days, compared their current health, shook their heads at any mention of Carly Fiorina, and nodded cautious approval of ”the new guy”. Whatever mistakes had been made in the past were now forgiven. After all, they were family. And, like a family, they mourned all of those who were no longer with them, especially Lew Platt, whose recent and sudden death still shocked them all

”They had been brought together by Hewlett-Packard to be the first to view a new corporate video, produced by an award-winning documentarian , telling the story of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. HP had ordered the creation of the video as a way to teach HPers many of whom had never even known the company during the good times — the legacy they were inheriting. Most of the assembled knew it was coming; many had even been interviewed for it. But assembling footage, filming reenactments, and interviewing HP veterans had taken months — and by then, having become accustomed now to disappointment from Hewlett-Packard, many of the veterans assumed the project had been abandoned.

”But now here it was, entitled simply ”Origins”. As the video played, the audience looked on in astonishment. It was all there: the garage, the Redwood Building, company picnics, Packard’s challenge to the stunned gathering of corporate executives, Hewlett cutting off the tool bin padlock — everything that they cherished; everything that they had assumed had been long forgotten by Hewlett-Packard Co and the rest of the world.

”As they watched, they marveled at the footage of an impossibly young Bill and Dave. They laughed one more time at the Bill and Dave stories. And they scrutinized closely the faces of the interviewees who were not among them — Paul Ely, Tom Perkins, Barney Oliver’s successor Joel Binbaum — for the marks of time and toil. The longer the film ran the louder the audience became. Fearful at first of one more insult, one more misrepresentation of the past, they now relaxed , confident that they were at last seeing the realization of what they had long been waiting for. They began to talk back to the screen, add their own side comments, and joke to each other over events a half century gone.

”For those few minutes, it was as if time had rolled back. They were young again. Working once more with Bill and Dave. And proud to be part of the greatest company in the world.”

Posted by Rodney Fletcher July 13, 2007 9:42 AM | Comments (0)

Don’t we just love the irony... here I am in Denver to cover Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (Yes, WPC for short), and wouldn’t you know it my first post from here is about the iPhone.

I had the pleasure of having a good play with Apple’s much-hyped, much-anticipated and much-maligned iPhone, at a local Apple store on Monday - thus becoming probably the first NZ tech journo to have manhandled one these puppies.

Therefore it would be rude not to share my impressions... first off - I like it, I really do (Stop your ”fanboy” braying, Birkeland). It is sleek, it feels great to hold and OMG the multi-touch screen is brilliant.

It lets you do super cool things like literary flick through album covers and photos - it actually makes you feel like you’re flipping through an actual photo album (remember them - those paper-based books we used to keep photographic prints in?). Not only that, but you can also zoom in photos and webpages by either double tapping on the spot you want to see close-up or by dragging your finger in opposite diagonal directions across the screen - a motion similar to when you flick a moth off your TV.

Most of the familiar iPod controls are still the same, except instead of the scroll wheel, you just make upward or downward flicks on the screen depending on which direction you are searching.
Long-time iPhone users will struggle with this at first as they’ll naturally try and scroll across the screen in curricular motions of the thumb, as you do with the iPod scroll wheel.

Another great feature on the iPhone is an external volume control, which the iPod lacked to its detriment, but like the iPod it has a 3.5 mm stereo headphone minijack. This means you toss the included headphones out for a better pair.

As far as using the iPhone as a phone, the large screen size and large number keys on the phone interface make dialling a diddle. Searching the contact book is also a breeze with the touch capability and large display.

However, text messaging is a bit clunky. Seasoned texters will find it hard to adapt to the QWERTY keyboard for messaging after being so accustomed to the more natural alphabetic keypads of most mobile phones. Also the predictive text seems tricky - I couldn’t quite figure out how to select the suggested words while writing a message. The screen area devoted to enter message text is also relatively small.

The touch keyboard will also take some getting used for emailing as it does not make enough use of available screen real estate and the keys are quite small - unlike the number keys.

Meanwhile streaming YouTube videos and surfing the web was seamless in the Apple store, so was emailing a photo taken with the onboard, passable, 2MP camera (see image below). But this experience will be less positive in New Zealand due to our non-ubiquitous wifi access and slower mobile internet speeds.

So, would I buy one if could use it in Kiwiland?

Probably not.

In its current form, the iPhone is neither a great media player nor a great phone/mobile emailing device.

Despite the great looks, which not everyone likes with at least one fellow Kiwi attendant at the Microsoft conference calling it ”effeminate”, and the superb controls for controlling music, video and photo playback, the iPhone just does not have enough storage to make a great iPod replacement. If you’re paying US$499 or $599, you want much more storage than 4 and 8Gb respectively.

And as a phone it is OK for making calls, but the email and text messaging interfaces need some work.

Having said that, if money was no object, I’d definitely get one - not only for the bling factor and bragging rights, but for the reasons raised in my previous post.

Posted by Louis Van Wyk July 11, 2007 2:44 PM | Comments (0)

I’m reading Michael Malone’s book ”Bill & Dave”, subtitled How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company (see blogs June 22, July 2).

Steve Wozniak was a young technician hired at Hewlett-Packard’s Advance Products Division in the early 70s to work on the HP 35 and HP 65 calculators.
Wozniak: "It was just something magic. Designing the products, laying them out, doing the software work — and we were all part of the same thing, working together. And we knew while we were working together that we would take care of each other — and boy that sure influenced my thinking."

As did his involvement with the Homebrew Computers Club that met once a month in Silicon Valley. This legendary club was a hotbed of innovation in the mid-70s and Wozniak developed a reputation as the go-to guy for really tough design problems. He was also working on his own rudimentary computer.
Steve Jobs, a childhood friend, saw the work and sensed a business opportunity. The book’s author does not appear to be a fan of the Apple co-founder, describing him as "manipulative, brilliant, obnoxious and a born entrepreneur."

By the end of 1975 Wozniak had finished the Apple I prototype.
In January 1976 he approached Hewlett Packard along with a co-worker Myron Tuttle and another technician, to present the product.
"Boy did I make a pitch. I wanted them to do it. I had the Apple I, and I had a description of what the Apple II could do. I spoke of color. I described an $800 machine that ran BASIC (an early computer language), came out of the box fully built and talked to your home TV. And Hewlett-Packard found some reasons it couldn’t be a Hewlett-Packard product."

Tuttle remembers the meeting this way.
”It was one of those informal meetings. It wasn’t a big deal. We just sort of asked for five minutes and showed Woz’s board. We were told, ‘HP doesn’t want to be in that kind of market’."

[Steve Jobs has quite a different take on events in this renowned quote.
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet’."]

In April Wozniak filed a formal memo to Hewlett-Packard’s legal department requesting the release of his technology (as he was required to do under his employment contract). It was granted and Wozniak left the company, sold his HP 65 calculator, (Jobs sold his VW), and that seed money, along with the Apple I prototype, was the beginning of Apple Computers.

There is one more blog on the book here

Posted by Rodney Fletcher July 9, 2007 9:49 AM | Comments (2)

The coders will be burning the midnight oil at Take-Two Interactive to get Manhunt 2 past the UK censors and shake-off that pesky AO rating in the US. What they need is a better back story.

Here’s a suggestion. Earth has been invaded by aliens who inhabit human beings as pods. Danny isn’t killing people when he escapes from the asylum; he’s killing aliens who just happen to look like people. (Danny can’t be infected… it’s a long story)

Manhunt II has had some bad press, what with the bans, so lets really soft soap things here.

Death frees the victims from the alien parasite and (so cool) the people Danny kills come back to life - no matter how badly mutilated they were in the killing. Danny slaughters aliens to save people! With a quick tack-on at the final stage after Danny has wiped out every human-pod alien, the grateful masses will gather in a colosseum to praise him.
New title; Manhunt II: Resurrections. This could get it past the censor and, silver lining here, open up Mel Gibson’s fan base.

Though, regardless of a new back story or toned-down violence, what concerns me is the jump gaming is making from fast cars, guns and physical combat - these are after all standard boy-type past-times. Manhunt and Manhunt II are quite different - it’s violence for the sake of it. And that is not normal boy-type, or human-type, behaviour at all. We wouldn’t have got past the caveman stage of evolution if it had been.

Yes, you can trawl the internet for sites showing violent sex and graphic murder ad nausea. And for any number of people currently in preventive detention in prison that once would have been ‘normal behaviour’.

Yes people can point to the violence in movies and television. But in those mediums, within the mainstream context, there are limits. Free-to-air television does not screen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and violent or pornographic movies don’t figure in Oscar nominations.

Yes, the furor over Manhunt II has been a windfall of publicity. This though is the gaming world as part of the mainstream media, reaching a point where the actions of characters are just not acceptable. I don’t have to play Manhunt II to know I would be sickened by it. Just as I don’t have to put my hand in candle to know it will burn me.

As for the link to real-time violence, throw in a heavy use of P and, yeah, I think you can join the dots. Smacked out on P, four hours straight on Manhunt II then walking down to the dairy to buy some cigarettes and finding you have not quite got enough money. I’d say there is a raised potential for violence in that kind of scenario, with Manhunt II part of the mix.
Here’s the rub; P dealers go to jail, game makers get to drive Porches.

And if you think Wii is where it is at for physical role playing, think how realistic it will be five years from now.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher July 6, 2007 2:02 PM | Comments (1)

Games and gamers have been getting a bad rep lately, namely with the uproar around Resistance; Fall of Man being set in an English church and of course the attention around Take Two’s Manhunt 2 for Playstation and Wii.

Violence in games has existed since the dawn of programmed gaming, and has followed the traditional Hollywood path movies were bound to. Tetris and Pong can be likened to the early silent movies, and gaming has evolved accordingly since then. The only difference is that games have evolved over a much shorter and more intense period of time.

Manhunt 2 can in my mind be likened to the early work of our beloved director, Peter Jackson, with the movies Braindead and Bad Taste. Both were over the top violent movies that became instant cult classics. The more recent films Hostel and Hostel 2 are also on the board of over the top violent films, yet people pay good money to go and see them. So far, I have not seen anyone come out of the movie theatres with emotional scars or a desire to kill anyone.

In the 13 year history of the Entertainment Software Rating Board only 23 games have received an ‘Adults Only’ rating and most of those games are of a sexual nature.

A violent videogame should be paralleled with a violent movie, and console manufacturers (Sony and Nintendo) should be seen as the movie theatres. It should come down to the individuals if they want to go and see an R18 movie or not, as with videogames.

Stronger regulation in the sales of videogames is what is needed, not public uproar about the violence in them. Banning Manhunt 2 will probably result in Take Two toning down the violence a little bit, and upon release the game will become an instant classic due to all the press.

The argument that the user is performing the act rather than watching it, and therefore is worse, is preposterous. Watching a car crash on television and crashing a car in the virtual world are two sides of the same coin. Watching a movie and wanting the good guy to kill the bad guy is the same thing, only with games you can control the good guy.

Posted by July 3, 2007 8:32 AM | Comments (1)

I’m reading Michael Malone’s book ”Bill & Dave", subtitled How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company (see blog ”Technology changes, people stay the same" June 22).

In 1959 the company launched what is thought to be the first ever employee stock purchase plan. It enabled staff to put a portion of their wages to the purchase of HP stock at a discounted price.
However, the founders had made one mistake. To their surprise employees at all levels, including senior management, were all too often selling the stock at market price and pocketing the difference. The stock purchase programme rules were quickly altered to include a vesting period and HP employees became among the largest shareholders in the company.

Another innovative development was flex-time - allowing employees to individually adjust their work schedules (start and finish times) to suit themselves. The company assumed staff loyalty without demanding it, trusting them to get the work-life balance right.
[Down here, when the concept arrived it was called ‘glide-time’. I found it extremely useful (and who hasn’t) in my first job as a junior draughtsman in the Lands and Survey Department.]

The company started 1960 with 3000 employees and 10 years later had revenues of $325 million and 16,000 employees. Its founders, in 1970, were now 57, Hewlett, and 58, Packard and recognised as brilliantly successful entrepreneurs and enlightened businessmen.
The 1970s were somewhat more turbulent for the company as recession hit Silicon Valley with the first of the boom-bust cycles that still plagues IT to this day. For most companies this meant lay-offs. Dave Packard had accepted the position of US Secretary of Defense in Washington in 1969, where he would remain for three years, and Bill Hewlett was running the company.
His solution to avoid layoffs was to introduce the Nine-Day Fortnight, asking every HP employee, from himself to the janitors, to take every second Friday off work. It cut overheads, preserved the company’s intellectual capital, maintained morale, positioned the company for the turnaround and was an ongoing recruitment tool as Bill Hewlett demonstrated his loyalty to HP’s staff.

As well, this memo from Hewlett on July 16, 1970 is worth repeating in full. It says volumes about the company, its founder and ‘the HP way’.

SUBJECT: Evaluations & Terminations

An increasing number of cases are coming to my attention in which employees are being terminated with little or no warning that their performance has been unsatisfactory. In some cases, evaluations have been glowing up to the time that an individual is released.
There is just no excuse for this. It is not humane. It is not HP-like. It is not justified. I would like you to be guided by the four points.

(1) The individual affected has had advance warning through written evaluations and has been advised constructively on how he/she should improve.

(2) Wherever practical, assure the employer is given the opportunity for other placement where he/she might make a greater contribution. Employee placement is a function of supervisors and Personnel and not a function of the employee to be turned loose to find his own job someplace in HP.

(3) If termination is the only alternative, Personnel must be fully advised and believe the case is satisfactorily documented, and the decision has the approval of the general manager concerned.

(4) Before any adverse action is taken, it should be well thought out. We must recognize that each of our people represents an individual with problems, families etc.

Posted by Rodney Fletcher July 2, 2007 9:38 AM | Comments (0)