Randall can handle the jandal

The always excellent xkcd has some good general advice today:

It's called Statistically Improbable Phrases in the parlance of our times.

Modern Maladies

Science & Technology may have ended the terrible blights of smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis. Then again, our grandparents didn't have mobile phone dermatitis, 3D TV strabismus or wet wipe anal rash.

High fibre diet

Big ups to Sam Morgan, Stephen Tindall, Rod Drury and others for forming Pacific Fibre, which is planning to open up NZ's connectivity with a 5.12 Terabit/sec pipe to Oz and the US. There's a not so subtle dig at the Southern Cross cable, which is partly owned and operated by Telecom:

Sam Morgan commented: “We desperately need a cable that is not purely based on profit maximisation, but on delivering unconstrained international bandwidth to everybody, and so we’ve decided to see whether we can do it ourselves.”

Say goodbye to Hollywood

"Strange,' mused the Director, as they turned away, 'strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.'

- Brave New World, written in 1932 by Aldous Huxley. pg 26.

Joseph Goebbels was a master at reading and writing the public mood in Nazi Germany. While the Soviet politburo was pushing out dire propaganda films such as Tractor Farmers, Goebbels was commissioning Triumph of the Will. Say what you will about the Nazis as an ethos, but their spinner knew how to stroke the public psyche.

The list of German films commissioned between 1933 and 1945 describes an arc of the Nazi psyche. The early films flaunt the fulfilled destiny of Hitler personally as the successor to Frederick the Great, as well as the Volk's common destiny as the master race. In 1926, they even experimented with 3D films.

Sherlock Holmes was also a popular subject. In 1936, there was Hound of the Baskervilles. 1937 featured The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes and Shadow of the Gray Lady. In between such fictions, atrocities were also being promoted. 1937 was the year of The Jews Unmasked and Victims of the Past (euthanasia agitprop).

Fast forward through nationalistic zeal, romcoms and genocidal anti-Jewish rationalisations of WWII and have a squizz at the output after D-Day. The Nazis are losing the war. Desperation has set in. Frosty the Snowman and Wedding in the Coral Sea sum up the fantastical, distract the masses at all costs productions. Frankly, no-one wanted to cope with reality.

So I'm not rushing off to see Avatar, the $300 million allegedly anti-establishment environmental movie financed by a conglomeration of corporations. Or Robert Downey Jnr's Bam Kapow drug-free Sherlock Holmes. Hollywood has long since given up on any idea of source loyalty or lack of irony. The nadir for me was Wall-E merchandise.

And if anyone sees me with a Kindle, an iPhone or an X-box, please thump me.

Six of 7, 3 on one mother

While Telecom used confusion as a marketing tool, it looks like Microsoft has adopted confusion as corporate strategy. Windows has learned next to nothing from the Ferrit of operating systems, Vista.

Not that you could tell from this gushing advertorial for Windows 7 in today's Herald. No, consumer testing has shown that the many many faults in Vista have been tidied up. There's a new task bar, "jump lists", "Aero Peek" and "BranchCache." While Seinfeld may no longer be fronting the ads, it sounds like he's working in the branding department.

Ben Green, Microsoft New Zealand's Windows client business group manager, said as well as improving the user experience for Windows users, 7's features should offer local businesses ways to improve productivity, cut costs, and reduce the time workers spend performing some PC tasks.

Indeed. With Windows 7 shipping in six flavours, I'm sure there's a bleeding nostril licence scheme to suit any level of business. But pity the poor bloody consumers. Nowhere in the article is mentioned the entry level 7, Windows 7 Starter.

7 Starter won't be sold separately, but as OEM systems for new computers. From Computerworld:

The Windows 7 version of Starter will retain the restrictions of the Vista edition with the name, including a limit of three applications, or windows, active or open at the same time; no local network connectivity, although the operating system can connect to the Internet; and a limit on screen resolution.

A maximum of three applications, no networking, limited screen resolution. Web browsing, music player, email client, Minesweeper. Choose 3. Friends round and keen for a networked game? Tough.

As foobar at Geekzone points out, this is an example of anti-feature:

Somewhere in the core of their OS there must be some lines, similar to this:

bool allow_new_app() {
if (edition == "STARTER" && num_apps == 3) {
return FAILURE;
}
else {
return SUCCESS;
}
}

Specific code, just introduced to cripple the capabilities.

This is code not through necessity, but through malice. Microsoft seem to be saying to the masses, upgrade or fuck off to Linux. Pardon me while I bathe in the warm glow of Schadenfreude.

Hasta la vista, Vista

A week into my month long self-imposed trial of Ubuntu, it's settled. Vista can go bite the big one. No more gazillion windows updates checking whether my software is their software and chewing my data cap. No more credit card scams from unnecessary software. No more hyperactive processor grinding away every other second. No more DRM!

A system that takes 12 seconds to boot down, not 12 minutes. A system that can perform all the bells and whistles of the Vista UI without requiring 10 Gigs of RAM. A system that is blunt and beautiful without needing to resort to euphemistically obscure program functions. I mean, how long did it take you to find Add/Remove Programs in Vista?

Now I'm no full tit geek. I've dabbled a bit in BASIC and DOS, but mostly in the paddling pool of listing and changing directories. Navigation is OK but for the life of me I've never got the hang of driving or programming computers. It was this fear of fuck-ups that put me off trying out Ubuntu for a long time. Not to mention that some of my favourite programs only run on Windows. But after Miramar Mike's description of moving to Ubuntu, I had to give it a go.

On the first day, I downloaded the install program and burned it to CD (800Mb CD, not Vista's 2 DVD bloat). I booted from the disk but the 800 by 600 screen resolution was rubbish. The wireless network didn't work, nor the webcam. The cable connection for the internet was a doddle to set up, so that was something. An update notification advised that video driver updates were available. As installation of these required a reboot and the Live CD wouldn't remember the changes, I was stuck. The Live CD showed the UI worked, but it didn't work well.

On the second day, I installed a Vista/Ubuntu dual boot system. Even after backing up data and scrubbing a few programs from the hard drive, I was left with a measly 10 Gig of free space. Dual boot wasn't a long term option, but I had to see if the updates cured some of the Acer's ills. Reboot and voila! 1280x800 resolution!

On the third day I installed Ubuntu, overwriting Vista. The next great discovery was that there was only minimal playing around in the Alpha and Omega of the Terminal. On a really basic level, there was the Add/Remove engine that not only showed what was installed on the box, but what you could install. No more roaming the web for programs, it was all in one place. For more sophisticated or experimental software, the Synaptic Package Manager does all the hard yakka.

By the fourth day, everything was running well apart from the wireless and the webcam. I had my MP3s playing, my avis movieing, and had even got Photoshop working in a Windows shell program called Wine. The webcam was no biggie, but the wireless problem was. This is where Ubuntu Forums come into their own. After tweaking the search criteria, a little bit of trial and error, a brief foray into Terminal with copied and pasted sudo commands, and a reboot, the wireless worked.

A week of putting the new OS through its hoops, and finding myself with 20 extra Gigs of hard drive I never used to have, I am left with two questions. Firstly, why are you still using Windows? Secondly, why aren't schools, universities and all government departments using non-Windows operating systems?

Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi

Bugger me with a porridge knife, the next pop-culture tech release is upon us. Forget the iPhone and check out the mobile phone vid projector. Resolution under ideal lighting conditions of up to 60 inches. No-one will be safe from a Powerpoint presentation ever again. And buggered on how the Electoral Finance Act could scrutinise its use. Hat tip /.