"Gonna Miss You Loads" My Ass
Oh lord. Oh god. Shall I... no. Further comment would be otiose and we all kno otiose comment's like gunna make Kong like totally crap on the rug, right?
Technorati Tags: culture, infantilization, web
December 15, 2006
December 11, 2006
Drug Company Behaves Reasonably Well, Considering, But They Can Afford To
Won't remind anyone of the story of the widow's mite because I wouldn't want to detract from Bristol-Myers Squibb's donation to the World Aids Fund, which you can increase by lighting a candle. Beautifully-designed page, too; sometimes (but only sometimes) Flash is worth using. (Thanks to my good friend the drummer Timothy Bye -- move your ass, Gadd -- for pointing it out to me.)
December 07, 2006
Oh THOSE Training Purposes...
From the Daily Telegraph email disclaimers:
Emails sent and received may be read by people other than the intended recipient and may be monitored to ensure efficient operation of our email systems.
Ah, "efficient operation". I see. So... if I send someone an email and it doesn't arrive -- i.e., the email system isn't operating efficiently -- nobody will know. Very good.
Incoming and outgoing telephone calls to our offices may be monitored or recorded for training and quality control purposes and for confirming orders and information.
Training whom? To do what? Controlling quality of what, come to that? My accent? Grammar? Excuse me? I mean to say, is this how stupid you think we are?
Technorati Tags: computing, journalism
December 05, 2006
This Is Your Captain SpeaKABOOM
Thinking of flying RyanAir? A recent report from the AAIU into an incident in which a collision (with the ground, at Knock) was "narrowly avoided" has shown up so much corner-cutting, toothless regulation, bad cockpit management and just about everything else you mightn't want to happen on an aircraft you were flying on, that you might want to think of flying on another airline or maybe just not going at all.
Some of the comments on PPRUNE, the Professional Pilots' Rumour Network, that are really disturbing. Anyone who's ever flown RyanAir knows that its management are cost-cutting pricks who have nothing but contempt for their passengers, headed by the prick-in-chief, Michael O'Leary - who allegedly has threatened to move his entire operation to Eastern Europe if the toothless old whore of a clapped-out "regulatory" body, the IAA, don't co-operate.
There's too much stuff in the PPRUNE forum to quote here. But when you see the pilots sitting at the sharp end of your next RyanAir flight, you might like to know how their day began:
Well yes, believe or not we do have pre flight briefings but just try to do them in 45 min. for a 4 sector day including:
* gathering all the info. (aircraft reg, pax numbers, stand, etc.)
* printing your own plogs
* printing your own met & notams
* ordering your fuel
* brief cabin crew
* collect jepp. fotocopies of all the destinations, alternates and of course checking that each single plate is up to date.
* Fill our container with water for the day (I am embarrassed to even tell that one)
* long walk to the aircraft
* and nowadays we do fuel supervision as well.
Throw on top of that printers that don't work, zero wind plogs, missing jepp. plates and a total chaotic crew control with only one person to control 45 flights during the first morning wave and you will see the recipe for a disaster happening very quick.
Of course you always have the option to show up well before and break the IAA approved 10 hour minimum rest that we get.
Reassuring, yes? Nice to know the regulators of the Nanny State are looking after us so well. For, of course, our comfort and safety...
Technorati Tags: air crash investigation, aviation, RyanAir, travel
They Just Don't Learn, Do They?
Another perpetual-motion scam (with the usual it's-not-quite-perpetual-motion scam provisos in its corporatist huffing) has demanded that all websites remove all references to it.
Oh men of Nikkogen, don't you realise that that sort of blowhard nonsense is only going to make more of us plaster references to Nikkogen, together with possibly (though probably not quite) unrelated phrases such as "pull the other one" and "bollocks, if you ask me", all over blogs which wouldn't have mentioned Nikkogen (although we might well have mentioned other annoyances, entirely unrelated to Nikkogen, such as people who think we're idiots, and grandstanding assholes who think that by sending out stroppy letters they'll get us to do exactly what they want.
Doesn't work any more, Guys At Nikkogen. The estimable Tim Worstall explains why. But if you want to read the stuff for yourself -- the horror! the horror! -- have a look at what seems a little slippery, in the way that snake oil is slippery: a slipperiness which is explained at the excellent Ministry of Truth.
December 03, 2006
Vista™®™™®™®™™™® - It's™ sublime®
The image of Windows™®©™ Vista©™®:
What are they looking for, this cosy adventurous couple perched in a Rousseauiste landscape of uncompromisingly pure sublimity? A computer that works, perhaps? But this has nothing to do with computing, and everything to do with not-computing.
And whatever it is they are looking for, they haven't yet found it.
But let's remember that Rouseau found it necessary for the™ sublime to make him afraid.
Technorati Tags: computing
January 05, 2006
Ooh Look Ma, Big Brother's Got A New Computer.
Brian Hughes comments on my recent post about privacy:
Do you really think "the Government" has got nothing better to do than keep an eye on boring old farts like us? And how many people d'yer think they'll need to employ for the task?
Privacy? British Lower Middle Class invention circa 1908. Bah!
Fairly near the truth; The Invention of Privacy would be a good book for someone to write. Plenty of cultures don't even have the concept, even in Europe; Turkey, for example.
But it's not "the Government" who will be keeping an eye on us. It's the Government's computers. And that's a very different thing. Even now it can be quite chilling; have a look at this and see if you like it...
January 04, 2006
I'm Sorry But You'll Be Glad
Guy Kawasaki was the first great Mac evangelist and has taken (better late than never) to blogging in what should now be essential reading for anyone in any sort of business. (That's everyone outside old-style command economies, the Civil Service and the armed forces.) In this entry, he reminds us of Jeff Raskin's great maxim:
Seek forgiveness, not permission
Raskin was one of the visionaries behind the Mac interface, and died in February last year. He didn't need forgiveness...
Technorati Tags: business, computing, culture, design, puppy
December 29, 2005
You Can't Even Run, Never Mind Hide
Web 2.0 is all very well but what about Web 1984? We were discussing how long it would be before the whole of Britain reached the number-plate recognition camera tipping point: the moment at which all everybody's movements would be tracked every minute of every day. We all had different timescales, but agreed that it would certainly be by 2015. The wearied cry of the aged springs to the lips: "Thank God I won't be alive to see it." But (probably) I shall be and so will you.
The opposing cry of the terminally smug also leaps to mind: "The innocent have nothing to fear". It's the cry of the idiot through the ages -- idiot, that is, in the ancient Greek sense of one who absents himself from public life. And at its core lies a category mistake: that there is a direct link between "innocence" and "freedom". Not, I would argue, the case. There is a link between certain sorts of guilt and the removal, temporary or permanent, of freedom. But is "innocence" the necessary precondition for freedom? No. The necessary precondition is, as Thomas Jefferson observed, eternal vigilance.
Jefferson's remark may, in our present context, seem cynical. But government -- all government -- is less concerned with preserving our liberties than with extending its powers. Power is what drives individuals to put themselves forward as our rulers. As the late Auberon Waugh wrote, the desire to hold political office should in itself be enough to disqualify a man from holding it. This is not cynicism but experience.
Over the last decade or two, and under various propositions of allegedly unarguable benefit -- reducing road accidents, reducing crime, safeguarding "homeland security", deterring paedophiles, increasing our health, saving money, protecting intellectual property, maximising investor return -- we have allowed our freedoms to be eroded to the point, I suspect, of no return. Facial recognition technology coupled with search engines, data mining, data aggregation, communications interception, numberplate recognition technology, biometric ID cards, mobile phone triangulation, ATM and credit card tracking, just for starters, have led us to the point where cradle-to-grave, 24/7 monitoring of individual private citizens is an achievable reality. The only individuals who can remain outside the system are those who... remain outside the system. The very individuals who, according to the PR, these measures are designed to monitor.
It is the condition of the infant to be subject to continuous surveillance. Web 1984 is the web from a different angle: not the web we travel, bringing with it infinite riches in a little room, but the web as the fly sees it: a monitored reticulation which can trap when it chooses, the fat black spider of Government poised in a corner, calibrating the vibrations and poised to spring.
Privacy is now more endangered than ever before. We need to reconsider what we mean by it. Is privacy a fundamental right, or is it a privilege which may be rescinded incrementally by governments? At the moment we are losing it by default, nor is it from our failure to make ourselves heard, because we are not even shouting.
September 04, 2005
Hey, I Know What, Let's Do Some More Managing
Nobody could deny . . .
[PAUSE]
. . . See? I told you nobody could deny . . . that "management" "science" is one of the great curses of the last half-century, neither qualifying as science nor assisting in management but merely existing to generate bullshit. Great companies (like Apple) become great because they do great things. Lousy companies (like Microsoft) become lousy because they are more interested in "management" than in what they do.
(Yes, Microsoft is richer than Apple. Nicholas van Hoogstraten is rich.)
Note that I say "management", not management. They're different. Management is a necessary part of a system. "Management" is a process run out of control. The ex-Rolls-Royce turnaround wizard Tony Roulstone put his finger on it the other day: "The big problem is when the process takes over the system".
Remind you of anything?
Remind you of almost everything?
Now Will Shipley (Omni Group founder, code wiz and top banana at Delicious Monster) has embedded a crucial piece of business advice in the middle of an eloquent but standard-issue polemic against the Palm Treo, which has mightily displeased him. If everyone involved in "management" were to read it, our culture might just possibly take a turn for the better.
But they won't, of course; just as the creationists are far too busy praying to read some science.
