The winner on the right

The Palm Treo is much like the iPod. The problem is the iPod is sexier, better marketed and of its time. As a result the Palm Treo is up against the wall.

Being a journalist you sometimes meet people who change the way you look at things. For me, one of these people was Donna Dubinsky.

She is an amazing person. On September 27, 2007, Donna Dubinsky was conferred the Harvard Business School’s highest honor, the Alumni Achievement Award. (Incidentally, at the same time it was awarded to Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala who I had met under different circumstances.)

Donna Dubinsky was one of the three people who effectively invented the Palm Pilot personal organizer — which I would argue was the godfather of the iPhone — in 1997.

(Donna also taught me the phrase, ‘reality check’ when referring to a flight of fancy by a PR. It is a term which I find immensely useful.)

Palm Computing was founded by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan. The first Palm were pretty primitive yet sold like gangbusters. It took some time before you could upgrade them to one meg of RAM. By the time of the Palm III series there were external memory slots and firmware-upgradeable flash memory.

The original founders eased out of the company and the company moved over to making personal organizers which were also mobile phones. As opposed to the Apple iPhone which is mobile phone which is also a personal organizer.

Now the Palm Treo 700w combines a Palm handheld with mobile phone, e-mail, SMS, and instant messaging and, fatally in my opinion, uses Windows Mobile. It has slimmed down considerable from the early models and pretty much has everything built in.

But it is up against the Apple iPhone and the Blackberry and simply does not sell enough.

The company is up against the wall but last week had a much-needed vote of confidence from its largest shareholder in the form of a $100m investment.

The injection of cash, from private equity firm Elevation Partners, calmed some of the concerns that had blown up on Wall Street in recent weeks following news of a dramatic fall-off in sales of Palm’s existing line of PDAs and smartphones.

The bet is that Palm’s promised launch of a new generation of devices before the middle of next year will bring the company in out of the cold. I doubt it. I honestly doubt it.

The Palm was the pioneer. You can tell pioneers. They are the ones with arrows in their front.

Lola with grandchild

This is a little complex but bear with me. I have a very beautiful daughter in the United States and her name is ‘Roo’ Ruth Rhiannon Williams. (Would I lie to you?)

She is married and has just become a mother. She is on  Facebook and the picture is of the grandmother, who was once my wife, and the baby whose name is Remmy.

Roo suggested I join Facebook because she had found my son Ben — by another wife — on there. (Incidentally, they are expecting a baby in February. And I thought the birthrate was dropping.)

So, although I thought of it generally as an idiot adventure for young people, I joined Facebook.

And had the pleasure of seeing lots of pictures of my new grandchild with her grandmother who, in the Philippines, is designated Lola. Do not ask me what grandfather is for I will not tell you.

In future this may go one step further and I am not sure I want to know.

A New York PhD student is toying with an invention that could transmit every in-utero kick to the internet.

The pregnancy belt sends a signal to a computer every time the foetus moves, with a message such as ‘I kicked mummy at 11.38am’.

It also could send updated messages if the foetus were particularly active.

Corey Menscher developed the belt, which is still at prototype stage, out of curiosity with his wife’s pregnancy.

No, no, no, no, I don’t think so. This is not for me. Seeing the baby afterwards is fine. Getting the kicks on Facebook is not.

Who knows what it could lead to?

Difficult to keep a straight face. But the Herald Sun brings a story where fans are advised to wear neck braces if they are listening to head banging music.

Dr Andrew McIntosh, biomedical and injury expert at the University of NSW, has found that headbanging in time to heavy metal music could cause head and neck injuries.

Indeed, I am sure he is correct. But most very loud music will damage your hearing. A test in Sweden some years ago found that 80% of youths were unsuitable for training as sonar operators in the navy because they had been made deaf from very loud music. At one time it was going to be made illegal but the moment seems to have passed. Me, I simply never listen to any music except classical, and the quietly. That may make me something of an old fart but I still have excellent hearing.

My apologies. Everything conspired to keep me off line. Specifically an infection called pseudomonas which gets in your ears, creates great pain and does not respond to antibiotics. That has now been cleared although it leaves me a little deaf.

I shall still be filing on China Economic Review but I am also adding Blorge to my efforts. As my wife says, it keeps me occupied.

My son is a classical pianist and he sent me a list for Christmas which he thought Father Christmas might put in his stocking.

Bartok Mikroskomos played by Kocsis
Frederick Rzewski Variations on The People United Will Never Be
Defeated! (El pueblo unido jamás será vencido) published by Zen-on
Bach St Matthew Passion Vocal score published Bärenreiter BA5038a

Sadly, none of those were available so I sent him Mantovani’s Goden Hits. I am sure he will be pleased.

David Pollard

Frequently I have difficult getting people to believe the more bizarre news stories I encounter in a day.

Consider with awe the story of David Pollard and Amy Taylor. They met in an online chat room in 2003 and married finding a joint love for the game Second Life. They each had avatars — make-believe characters — to represent them. He was Dave Barmy and she was Laura Skye.

They married in July 3005 and moved to Newquay and, as well as a real wedding, had their avatars wed on Second life. (Do your best to hang on to reality here. It is not easy.)

Amy Tayor became Amy Pollard but also remained Laura Skye. As Laura she also played in another imaginary digital world which was World of Warcraft.

The real Mr and Mrs Pollard

All of this computer role playing took up a lot of time. One day she took a short nap and woke to find that on her husband’s computer  his avatar, Dave Barmy, was having it away with another avatar on a sofa.

She said, ‘I was so hurt. I just couldn’t believe what he’d done. It’s cheating as far as I am concerned but he didn’t see the problem and couldn’t see why I was upset.’

Both of the players in real life are somewhat on the rotund side. Not ones to stare after in the street. But in Second Life — they are pretty snazzy.

What happens then stretches belief even further. Amy hired a Second Life private detective to spy on her husband’s avatar. The detective — his avatar was Markie MacDonald — caught Dave Barmy doing virtual sex with the same avatar and reported back.

As Amy Taylor or Amy Pollard she sued for a real divorce — and it was granted in a real courtoom.

After the divorce David Pollard, who is also Dave Barmy, said his former wife was more interested in her life online than she was in him. He said, ‘She just played World of Warcraft. If I wanted to spend time with her I had to ask.’

Is this story a beat-up? Did some idle journo invent it. Well it is in The Times although that newspaper also published Hitlers fake memoirs when management had already been warned by Lord Dacre they were fake.

This story feels like a beat-up. Something the late Kevin Sinclair could have created. There is too much detail, in one sense, and not enough in another.

What address? Which court? None of the basic journalist questions are answered.

If it is a beat-up it is delicious.

If it is not a beat-up it is still delicious, but frightening.

The latest word is that this is a true story and all of the details have been supplier. Totally frightening. The Guardian is probably the best secondary source.
Source: The Times

This system is on my Dell PC. The model, sadly, is not

Google’s email software seems, for what most people do, to be superior to other software. (That does not mean Google gets it right in every area. But at email it is fantastic.)

In a sense in depends upon your speed of Internet connection but if you have a fast enough computer you can use Google for email and searches and word processing and most everything you need on a computer.

Now Google has gone one step further and released video and audio  to Gmail chat.  And, for me, it could be useful. I spend a  lot of time talking to people overseas. Seeing them would make it more like conferencing and, perhaps, more meaningful. Perhaps.

Google chat installer

I have tried it wih other, separate solutions, and if I was a young parent (which I am not) it would be useful to see the kids and, just now and again, some of relatives. And watch my son play piano before a concert and whatever.

Like most things Google does this is in beta and works very well but needs a few twitches to get it to work. You download and instal the sofftware, Follow the instructions of Google:

‘you’ll notice your “Options” link in your chat wind now has changed to “Video & more”.  Open this menu and click “Start video chat” to see and hear your conversation partner in high-quality video.  You can pop out the video and change its size and position, or switch to full screen.  If you don’t have a webcam, you can simply chat by voice.’

I have a webcam and it works.

There are a lot of other Google thingies —some of which I use, most of which I ignore. Sorting out my e-mail is its primary purpose and it does this pushing stuff into folders, color tagging them, stopping spam. Its voice and video is an useful addition. And, if you have the bandwidth, then using the Google programs for most everything else makes sense.

It would be useful if you could download Google Apps and run them like any other program. So I tend to use other programs simply because a lot of the time I am traveling and do not have an Internet connection. But you cannot have everything.

Any complaints? Just one. In the Australian phrase Google is up itself. There is no place to write to complain.

Google simply does not want to hear from you. What Google wants is that you should use its software and then please shut up. Sometime that is seriously annoying.

Daylight saving

In Australia, daylight saving is a source of contention with some states changing at slightly different times thus adding to the general confusion. Not everyone believes that it is essential.

Farm animals, despite stories to the contrary, still march to the seasons. Daylight saving means naught to them. It is purely for the covenience of human beings.

Japan doesn’t observe daylight saving. And hasn’t since a brief stint from 1948 to 1952. That was forced on them by the United States. When they went, so did daylight saving.

Cows do not understand daylight saving.

China also doesn’t observe time changes nor yet time zones. The entire country is set to Beijing, meaning 9 a.m. is still dark for some citizens and practically the middle of the afternoon for others.

Some countries play it differently.

In order to assert its independence and separation from surrounding countries, Nepal put itself on the quarter-hour, meaning that if it’s noon in Washington, it’s 9:45 p.m. in Nepal. Damn good and damn right too.

In Russia, Stalin imposed daylight saving one spring but forgot to officially end it twowards the end of the year so Russia did not go back to standard time for more than 60 years. Stalin was like that.

Nepal is a quarter of an hour in front or behind

Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, said, ‘The only people who adopted daylight savings and never wavered from schedule are the British.’ Which is possibly why there is no longer a British Empire.

The diverse United States hasn’t managed to get on a national page for time changes:

Arizona doesn’t observe it at all. Hawaii doesn’t, either.

In Indiana, time zones change by county, and it passed legislation in 2005 that every county would participate in daylight saving. Not neccessarily at the same time.

Michael Downing said, ‘The entire idea of daylight savings is at best theoretical, or possibly philosophical. The idea that we can save time or lose time by moving its measuring device is preposterous.’

Back in 1999, terrorists on the daylight-saving West Bank built several time bombs, delivered to co-conspirators in Israel and scheduled to explode at a set time.

Problem was, Israel had just switched back to standard time, so the only people injured were the terrorists themselves when the bomb detonated an hour earlier than they expected and killed them all.

Daylight saving is not for everyone. And China does not have a bar of it. Hoorah.
Source: Washington Post

The moonwalk dust saved NASA

Difficult to write this without getting into a rage. NASA lost all its tapes of data on the moonlanding. They lost them. Mislaid the bloody things. The incompetent bastards.

Aussies to the rescue. SpectrumData has saved a wealth of unique data from NASA’s Apollo moon missions from oblivion, after 173 data tapes were recovered from an archive in Perth following nearly 40 years in storage.

The tapes contain data on lunar dust collected by the Apollo 11, 12 and 14 missions from 1969 to 1971, information which could have been lost forever were it not for the discovery and the donation by the Australian Computer Museum.

Perth physicist Dr Brian O’Brien invented the ‘dust detectors’ that were used on the Apollo missions, all of the data from which was transmitted back to earth and stored on these tapes, and tapes at NASA.

O’Brien published several papers on lunar dust, however, his findings failed to arouse much interest so his work was eventually put on the backburner and the tapes sent to storage. In 2006 NASA announced that it had lost its copies. Which is simply beyond belief.

However, fortunately Dr O’Brien’s were still safe and sound after being in storage for over 40 years.
In a sign of the digital dark ages to come, the problem was getting the data —which is now quite valuable due to NASA aspirations to return to the moon — as while the tapes are intact, the means to read them is no longer readily available.

Pete and Dud wiped by BBC incompetents

Fortunately, SpectrumData managed to track down a 1971 IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum. While the drive needs some work, the company is confident that it will be up and running and reading data by January 2009.

Stories of this sort can be repeated time and time again.

Few radio stations realized sound tape deteriorated. Some television companies - the BBC being the most awful example — wiped video tape for reuse.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore? Most of it wiped.

The Beatles in Australia? Most of the tapes deteriorated beyond redemption.

What is needed is a book called Avoiding the Digital Dark Ages. I can think of three publishers who would snap it up.
Source: Image and Data Manager Online

SanDisk with a faked label

Plainly solid-state drives would be the way to go for notebooks. They are inherently quicker, more stable, take up less room and power. Alround a good thing. But are they totally reliable? Personal testing shows that they may not be as reliable as has been stated.

Now SanDisk has shown an advanced flash file management system it says will dramatically improve the performance and reliability of solid-state drives. (It can be argued that if it will ‘dramatically improve the reliability’ then they were not that reliable in the first place. And they weren’t.)

SanDisk said the new ExtremeFFS system, which will ship in SanDisk products starting next year, ‘has the potential to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems.’

This would be a very good thing. Solid-state drives have always been quick at reading. Not so quick at writing.

SanDisk has proposed benchmarks for comparing the performance and endurance of the two technologies. Given that the speed of spinning disks is measured in revolutions per minute, the company proposes a virtual RPM or vRPM standard for comparing solid-state and hard-disk drives used in PCs.

The proposed long-term data endurance, or ‘LDE,’ metric measures the total amount of data writes allowed in the life span of a solid-state drive. SanDisk has proposed both benchmarks in a paper sent to the JEDEC, a developer of standards for the solid-state drive industry.

Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk’s solid-state drive business unit, predicted the performance of solid-state drives will improve by a factor of four in 2009 over current-generation solid-state drives and be six times faster than the newest 2.5-inch hard drives.

At a guess by 2012 it will be an unusual notebook that is not running with a solid-state drive.

Steven Sinofsky is the person behind Windows 7

Windows 7 , which everyone has now agreed is better than Vista (how could it be worse?) is going to be the next Big Thing in operating systems. And netbooks, cut down laptops, are the next Big Thing (it has already started) in notebooks.

Now Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has given a demonstration of Windows 7 running on a debranded Lenovo IdeaPad S10 — a typical netbook system build on the common foundation of an Atom N270 processor and 1 GB of RAM, although Sinofsky later revealed his had been bumped up to 1.5GB.

Sinofsky claimed the demo netbook still had about half its memory after booting Windows 7 and that it ran pretty well.

He said, ‘We’re pretty excited about the work that we’ve done on performance, and I’m pretty excited about this class of machine and the work that we can do to deliver Windows 7 on those machines.’

This has been confirmed independently and you can look forward to next year being able to buy a netbook — think small, stripped down laptop — for, say, $300 or so running with Windows 7. And not making a fuss about it. Hoorah!