You’d also be wrong. The latest attempt (as reported by El Reg) comes from cybersecurity firm Symantec, “collaborating” with Snoop Dogg to launch a competition to find the best rap about Internet security and cybercrime.

Using the thoroughly “down wiv da kidz” title of HackIsWack.com, it offers a prize consisting of “2 tickets to Snoop concert, meet his mgmt/agent, Toshiba laptop” (their formatting, not mine) and says that entries will be judged based on originality, creativity and message.

Unsurprisingly, El Reg is unimpressed. Neither is anyone else.

I can’t help but think that this is an attempt by Symantec to try to stay relevant in the consumer security market, where the growth of free solutions such as AVG Anti-Virus and Microsoft Security Essentials (along with more robust security built into Windows itself) means the only reason you’d buy Norton AntiVirus is if you’re misinformed, or an idiot. This could well be part of the strategy that’s led to the recent proliferation of the awful Norton Security Scan… but that’s another story.

I will admit, I found this entertaining, despite the fact that I am a .NET programmer and that my present attitude towards anything Oracle is “fuck them.” (Besides, it’s definitely one of the better executed Lady Gaga parodies, and at least it has some thought put into the lyrics. Ca- ca- ca- catalogue, anyone?)

If it makes you feel any better, I had to look up capriciousness.

Jesus Christ, is education really that bad in Texas?

Footage captured on a police dashboard camera shows one officer striking the driver’s seat window with a baton up to 15 times and another officer jumping on the bonnet of the car and kicking the windscreen in an apparent attempt to crack it.

Police pulled over Robert Whatley, 70, for not wearing a seat belt as he drove through country lanes in South Wales. The 8-mile chase started after officers tried to give Mr Whatley a fixed penalty notice but he drove off.

The video is embedded below:

What I find intriguing is Mark’s take on the subject:

The Police officers involved have been suspended pending an investigation but frankly I am not sure what needs investigating. They terrified a confused pensioner with as far as I can tell no justification, acting like utter thugs. The man has a heart condition. We could easily have been looking at something much more serious here. Next time maybe we will. That’s why we need to try and make sure there is not a next time.

I’m not saying for a moment that police brutality is in any way acceptable, but it seems quite obvious, to me, that there definitely was a cause for chasing this gentleman and arresting him.

Not only was he not wearing a seatbelt, he also drove off when the police tried to give him a fixed penalty notice. If this is down to him being “confused”, then to be honest, I doubt he should be on the road at all: if he’d been thinking straight, surely he’d have understood that trying to give the police the slip was a bad idea.

Whilst there’s no doubt that the police were heavy-handed, and the two officers involved have, quite rightly, been suspended for smashing the car’s window and dragging the accused out, I find it very hard to feel any sympathy for Mr. Whatley.

The fact he was a “terrified pensioner” had nothing to do with it. The bottom line is that he has been charged with several driving offences and drove off from the police. The law applies to everyone, terrified pensioner or not: it is plainly obvious (to me at least) that this is hardly likely to be as black and white as either the Telegraph or Mark make it out to be.

I like this analogy, but given a number of recent events, I’m doubtful of its truthfulness.

See, since the start of this year, we’ve had the introduction of the iPad (or Jobsian Fondle-Slab to readers of El Reg) which, in my opinion, fits more closely with the concept of a bicycle than a PC ever will. This also applies to the majority of single- or only multi-purpose devices out there: smartphones, e-readers, music players, etc. All of these have something in common: an idiot could use one.

At present, my analogy’s probably making very little sense, so here’s a simple thought problem.

A bicycle is a very simple machine: you sit on it, turn the pedals, and you move. Steer with the handlebars, brake with the… brakes. A man who’s never ridden a bicycle in his life could easily walk up to one, and in a very short space of time be scooting around like there’s no tomorrow.

Image courtesy of Phil Sangwell on Flickr, modified under licence

As a contrast, let’s compare this with, say, an inter-city train. With an inter-city train, the principles are virtually identical: you get on, tell it how much power you want from the power cars, and apply the brakes when coming to a stop.

However, of course, I, having never driven a train of any form, could almost certainly not saunter up to the cab of the 4:15 from Waterloo and drive it to its destination. The first reason for this is, of course, is that I’ve never been inside the cab of an inter-city train before, and would not know what buttons or levers to use when and where. In short, I’m incapable of driving an inter-city train.

There is, however, a more pressing reason: would you get on a train if I were the driver? With no prior training, I could, in all fairness, probably work out and memorise how to do a few simple tasks (accelerate, sound the horn, etc.) The fact I c0uld do this, however, does not qualify me as a train driver.

This bears a parallel with computing for the reasons I’ve outlined above: firstly, the majority of the time, computers, in their present form, are simply too complex for an inexperienced user to “get” without extensive training. And, let’s be brutally honest, people aren’t willing to undergo extensive training when they’ve been told their computer will “just work”: they will, instead, memorise how to perform a few tasks (or demand a crib sheet.) And, of course, this then falls apart when something goes horribly wrong, or even a planned upgrade takes place and something moves: the user simply has no way of knowing how to handle it.

My second point is that inexperienced users are made gullible and dangerous by their inexperience: this is made obvious by the fact people still install “free” smiley programs, still fall for scareware attacks, and still fall for over-the-phone malware scams. This is what happens when a person uses a computer without understanding it.

But again, we then come to the problem of training: if a computer is like a “bicycle for the mind”, why should the user have to spend a significant amount of their lifetime learning to use the thing? After expenditure of what’s now regularly in excess of a thousand pounds on a new computer, they expect it to “just work”, which it never does. This isn’t an OS- or manufacturer-specific problem: even if a car is very convenient, it’s still easy to reject learning to drive on the rhetoric of, “why bother when I can just take the bus?”

This is where the iPad, and the myriad of inferior and superior devices that will invariably follow, will find their niche. In some cases, it already has: consider centenarian Virginia Campbell, who purchased her first computer – an iPad – earlier this year and received half a million YouTube views in the process.

Of course, I’m not saying PCs are going to become redundant: they’re still exceptionally useful and powerful multi-purpose machines that can do practically anything you tell them to (within reason.) I’m definitely not planning on chucking out my PC in favour of an iPad: in fact, I’m planning on ordering a new laptop within the next few months. However, el Jobso said it himself best at D8 this year:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.

In two words, he’s right.

PCs are great, but most people simply don’t need them: now that there’s a new class of alternative devices that can do the same things, but hassle-free, people will inevitably begin moving to them. And yes, it’ll be uncomfortable for those of us who have invested a significant portion of our lives in learning how to tame PCs. It will be even more uncomfortable for software freedom advocates: even discounting the RMS-style FSF “freetards,” the walled-garden approach of Apple, Amazon, Motorola et al makes many uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable as it is, though, we’ll get used to it. Eventually.

Or Richard Stallman will suicide bomb Apple’s HQ in Cupertino.

Image - Rasbak (Wikimedia Commons), modified under licence

Naturally, the Daily Mail’s swallowed this story whole (as has the Telegraph) – but then again, neither of these publications have been known to allow the facts to get in the way of a good EU-bashing. Iain Dale’s post seems to have been written when he was drunk and in the middle of a daydream about Dick Littlejohn: it opens with “you couldn’t make it up” and gripes about the “E bloody U.”

Essentially, the Mail says that new regulations, which would require the carton to display “322g of rolls” as opposed to “six rolls”, therefore means that eggs will now be sold in evil metric fives and tens, and shoppers will be confused into oblivion.

…except it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, there’s no reason that you’d be forbidden from buying eggs by the dozen: the idea that a change in the headline figure would result in the actual quantity changing is a complete non sequitur.

So what if the packaging doesn’t say “six eggs” any more? Eggs aren’t exactly packaged in a way that makes them difficult to count. Two times three equals six, therefore I’m getting six eggs that total x grams.

If anything, the new system, if there is one, makes more sense. When using eggs as ingredients in cooking, something like “100g of egg yolk” makes a lot more sense than “the yolk from 3 medium-sized eggs” which is an absurdly arbitrary measurement. And if you’re buying them to eat as eggs? Well, you can count them!

That said, I’m beginning to sense a pattern here. The Mail often gripes about falling standards in education, but then has the temerity to complain that the public should be asked to do simple tasks – namely, sorting rubbish, or counting eggs/rolls. That said, let’s also consider the countless other EU non-stories the Mail’s pumped out – straight bananas and all – and consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this story might have been spun from nowhere to flog their sodding paper.

The idea that a beardy fairy

Conjured up something from nothing

(after, himself, coming from nothing)

And then decreed that wives should serve their husbands

And that gays, rape victims and dissenters should be killed

And murdered the Sodomites and the Egyptians

And condoned rape, and murder, and pillaging

And then had a son (with nothing for a father)

Who he then killed, by proxy, at the age of thirtyish

Before coming back to life as a sort of astral ghost-zombie thing

And then chose to leave nothing for evidence

And still has the sheer temerity to claim moral authority and superiority…

…makes perfect sense.

Now, you decide which makes better sense.

I’m not saying the No. 1 is bad (no-one calls it Goldline, btw.) I’m saying the buses themselves are some of the most distastefully-designed and poorly-thought-out public transport vehicles since the CrossCountry Voyager.

Even more bizarrely, the “Goldline” brand means that Stagecoach markets this as a luxury route. I’m sorry, there’s no way you can make a bus “luxury” any more than you can make a zerba crossing entertaining.

Images - Arriva436 (Wikimedia Commons)

In (mildly) related news, this site’s been running WordPress 3.0 RC3 since Saturdayish.

The new phone has a number of features – apart from a new, slimmer, more squarish (and, in my opinion, more handsome) design which should be familiar to any regular Gizmodo reader, a new camera with a flash, and an absurdly-christened “retina display” with a 960×640 resolution, the new “killer feature” is something called FaceTime.

Ostensibly, this is a video calling feature: unlike 3G video calls it seems to only work over Wi-Fi for now, and, technically, the implementation doesn’t look half bad. It should also help to silence critics who’ve “pah”d at the fact that previous iPhones have lagged behind other phones, which have been able to do this for year (my Skypephone, before it died, could handle video calls – after a fashion, since there was no forward-facing camera).

I’d be willing to argue, however, that no-one will use it anyway. True, it’ll see a minor explosion in use for a little while, but then it’ll fall back to its core usage: people who communicate through sign language, and grandmothers who want to see their little cherubs’ faces when they speak to them.

My rationale is as follows. Firstly, video calling is far more inconvenient than conventional phone calls.

With my current non-smartphone, to place a call I dial the number (or select a contact) and press the phone to my ear, and talk when the other end answers. On the iPhone, this is a largely similar affair – hit “phone”, select contact or dial number, put phone to ear, wait for other end to answer.

With video calling, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, you have to activate FaceTime while the phone’s still ringing. Then, before the other person answers, you have to hold the phone up, in front of your face, so that you can see the screen reasonably well and the camera can see you. It’s generally here that you realise you look like a drunken elephant, and quietly deactivate the video call part.

Credit to Apple, this does seem to be a little better than the status quo: now, it seems, if the video (carried by WiFi) goes, the audio will stay put. However, it doesn’t tackle the critical issue that I need to hold the phone a foot or so away from my face for it to work properly: until Apple invents some kind of anti-gravity technology to make it hover alongside me as I walk down the street, I can’t see this problem going away. (Besides, I can’t imagine doing that in public: it’d make you look like a complete and utter fool.)

Second, there’s another very good reason why video chatting hasn’t caught on already: most people like the privacy. I can’t imagine, for instance, anyone wanting to answer phone in Facetime if they’ve just come out of the shower, or if it’s four in the morning and they’re desperately trying to hide the other person in the bed when the husband calls. And this is before we even begin to account for facial expressions or other potentially embarrassing gaffes.

So, I suppose it’s good Apple’s finally implemented it (and I’ll know if they’ve implemented it well when I’ve seen it.) However, I don’t imagine it’ll see much use at all.

Image courtesy of Apple

Of course, the chance that anyone in the media would have listened to it is virtually nil, given that it just wants to draw in more readers/viewers: however, even now, in the aftermath of the Whitehaven shootings, the papers, in particular, have demonstrated that they’re willing to veer once again on the side of acrimoniously bad taste in order to flog their outmoded rags.

They’re known as the vulture press for a good reason. While I’m not pretending for any moment that the Whitehaven massacre was a minor event, as Brooker mentioned in the above video, blanket coverage only serves to turn this murdering twat into a nihilistic antihero – and, as far as the media’s concerned, it’s a great way to sell more papers.

There’s a longer discussion of these at Enemies of Reason (incidentally, one of my favourite blogs about the dead-tree press) but my attention was drawn to this one: specifically, how absolutely fucking horrid it was.

The headline in question

It’s physically sickening to think that an editor greenlit that: someone, presumably a well-educated human being, thought it was perfectly acceptable, less than twenty-four hours after a lone gunman senselessly murdered twelve innocent people, to be printing photographs of his fucking family.

Oh well, it’s not all doom and gloom – hey, look! On the side! That’s Kelly fucking Brook, in a bikini! Hah, the presence of her tits almost makes the voyeuristic murder-porn on the left acceptable. (or not, in case your sarcasm detector’s got dandelions stuck in it).

Need we need any more evidence that the dead-tree press should be left to rot? No.

Will people continue to read it? As long as there are gullible people who actually find this sort of thing acceptable, yes. Sad, but true.

A common stumbling block comes before anyone’s even managed to start Ubuntu for the first time: working out what to do with the strange ISO file that comes down the line when you click the “Download Ubuntu” link. Thankfully, Windows 7 features an ISO burner by default, so that problem is somewhat mitigated – however, there’s still potential for foul-up.

In the past, people have copied the ISO file to the CD using Windows Explorer, and tried to extract it and find another image file contained within. Consider, also, people without Windows 7: for this, people have to download third-party software to create their Ubuntu CD. This is likely to scare off new users.

One way around this is to use Wubi – however, this only creates an installation inside an existing Windows install, which is far from ideal in many cases. In interface terms, however, it’s definitely on the right track.

This, for example, is the configuration dialogue.

There’s practically nowhere to go wrong here: if someone can download the installation file, they can almost certainly fill out this simple form.

My question is this: should there be a way for prospective users to do a more traditional installation of Ubuntu (namely, burning to a CD or USB drive and installing in its own separate partition) without having to deal with third-party downloads?

Ideally, there should be something similar, but geared towards creating installation media. Of course, there’s UNetBootin and the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator, but both of these are underexposed options, are intended to create USB startup disks, and have too many knobs, buttons and switches where things could go wrong.

Surely there must be an easier way? Something like…

At present, this is just a thought. Yes, I’m aware something like this has almost certainly been done before. And yes, I should think of a more accurate and slightly more creative name than “Ubuntu Automatic Installer”. (At present, the names “AutoBuntu” and “Ubuntu Automatic Toaster” spring to mind.)

However, with some thought, it makes perfect sense. Right now, a newbie running a crapware-infested unpatched copy of Windows XP pre-SP2 would definitely find downloading, burning and installing Ubuntu a challenge.

Give them a downloadable .exe to double-click, get them to ask a few questions, and then let them walk away and burn the CD While U Wait.

It’s a project I would probably (time permitting) be willing to offer my (incredibly limited) Windows development expertise for: the question is, does anyone think there will be a utility for such a tool (given that Windows 7 finally implements ISO burning by default)?

It’s a strange feeling to see one in person for the first time. It’s smaller than I was anticipating, and, whilst a little heavier than an equally-sized book, and definitely heavier than, say, a Kindle, it’s still very portable.

The screen is also very good indeed, the touch pad is responsive, and it’s incredibly nippy. On the other hand, typing takes a lot of time to get the hang of, and typing without a physical keyboard (rectified, I know, with the keyboard dock) is, while no slower, nowhere near as pleasant. (I also found myself frequently overshooting the left SHIFT key and hitting the bezel.)

I’m still not entirely sold. I definitely wouldn’t want an iPad as my primary computer, given that it won’t even be able to multitask until this autumn. However, I can definitely see its utility now.

It’s the machine you want if you’re on a crowded train and want to do a quick check of whether you should bother digging your umbrella out at your destination. It’s the machine for a quick e-mail check in the canteen, or on the bus.

True, laptops and smartphones can already do both of these things perfectly adequately; the iPad, however, surpasses adequate and turns it into a true pleasure.

The question now is thus: for myself and this blog’s no doubt technically-minded (albeit pitifully tiny) readership, does pleasure come before customisability, price and capability?

Right now, not quite. However, if you have the cash, it’s an excellent supplement.

Image: Matt Buchanan on Flickr

Image shamelessly stolen from Facebook

Yes, I had a cold. Yes, I underestimated how much money I’d need and ended up having to blag £1.60 from a complete stranger (who, if they ever read this, might remember me and know who they are, in which case, I thank them dearly). Yes, I spent nearly an hour crammed into a noisy, unpleasant CrossCountry Voyager. Yes, I got lost on the campus of Southampton University. And yes, I spent an hour and a bit waiting for an interchange on the way back.

On the other hand, the evening of Saturday 8 May was spent in the lovely surroundings of Turner Sims in Southampton, quietly sipping some drink to soothe my irritated throat, and listening to the fabulous music of the Neil Cowley Trio. That just about made up for it.

(Well, I lie. It more than made up for it.)

For the uninitiated, the Neil Cowley Trio is [somewhat unsurprisingly] fronted by pianist and pencil-headed Gordon Freeman lookalike Neil Cowley, along with bassist Richard Sadler and drummer Evan Jenkins.

Too many attempts have been made to describe their music, all of which have been rather terrible: there really aren’t words to describe how it sounds. The best attempt I can make is that it’s like sitting at the junction between instrumental jazz and a high-speed railway line. Whilst a jazz trio blasts out music behind you.

Considering that was a rather lame explanation, I’ll just embed one of their videos and let the music speak for itself.

Recorded, their music sounds excellent. Live, it’s simply magical: nothing prepares you for the sheer wall of sound Neil creates with his frantic key-plonking. It is astonishing to watch as well as listen to – his fingers dance across the piano like a musically-trained octopus having a seizure. To the audience, it seems a miracle Richard and Evan can keep up with him, let alone supplement it with a driving bass and explosive drumming.

The quiet moments were just as effective: many of the tracks open sedately, but build to a maniacally tempestuous climax. This appears to be Neil’s forte, and the encore, She Eats Flies (from Displaced) was a superb example of this: it’s pretty good on the album, but live it’s positively orgasmic.

Tortured metaphors aside, however, the bottom line is that it’s bloody good fun to listen to. I’ve always been a sucker for instrumental music, and got hooked on them after they appeared on Jools Holland’s programme a few years back. Their tunes are insanely catchy.

And let’s not forget the supporting acts: The Swiss, a brilliant jazz-rock trio with John Simm’s incarnation of the Master on the lead guitar, and VITA, the neo-soul purveyors of foyer music. (I was unfortunate enough to miss most of VITA, thanks to getting lost on the University of Southampton campus – however, I’m told they were very good.)

Thanks to Neil for spelling my name correctly, and to the gentleman who kindly gave me the £1.60 required to purchase this CD

Afterwards, having procured the extra £1.60 I needed to buy the Trio’s new CD, Radio Silence, I got it signed in the foyer. Neil came across as being very friendly – he shook my hand, and even spelled my name correctly, first time. (Very few people do that: it’s remarkable how many people assume my name is Johnathon, etc.)

However, it was only upon leaving the concert hall that it struck me as to what I should have asked him to sign it with: how he thought you were supposed to spell an indifferent groan. (This will not make sense to you if you weren’t there.)

Anyway, I loved it, and just wanted to get that off my chest. In summary, therefore:

1. Never buy bottled water from a railway station vending machine, even in desperation. Wait until you’re on the train or at an ungated interchange station. Or you may have to rely upon the kindness of complete strangers.
2. Never underestimate the kindness of complete strangers.
3. Neil and co., if you’re reading (which you will be doing either through your own vain act of Googling yourselves or through my shameless act of self-promotion in posting this link to your Facebook wall) then thanks for a great concert. Oh, and sorry for coughing horrendously all the way through it.

In an even more astonishing move, you are still allowed to teach someone programming in Visual Basic 6, a language which has been deprecated in favour of Visual Basic.NET for almost as long as time. Of course, the reason for this may be that many schools can’t afford new computers capable of running Visual Studio in a sandboxed environment, but still—seriously? Why can teachers not simply learn something new like Python or Delphi?

This is not setting a good precedent, especially considering the usefulness of C and the increasing desirability of C#.

What do you mean “sickeningly middle class” you arrogant twit.

Middle class people are the ones who pay the bloody taxes that keeps the layabouts in luxury while they sit on their fat arses doing nothing but being jealous and insulting of anyone with money, who actually work for a living and deserve their little luxuries, unlike the so-called “poor”.

You must a another bloody loony-left student, arrogant and ignorant, god help the UK is all I can say.

(Incidentally, I believe this to be a repeat troll: a similar comment was posted a month or so back, which I deleted because I took it to be a one-off instance of fuckwittery.)

Not only do I find this comment personally offensive, due to the fact that both my parents are in full-time employment and the only reason I’m not is thanks to education and a general job shortage getting in the way; it also demonstrates precisely the hidden subtext of that brief throwaway remark.

Middle-class people—not all middle-class people, mark you, but a large proportion of them—have a tendency to be incredibly smug and arrogant. This might be because this particular subset believes everything the Daily Mail says, and considers all us common people to be benefit-riding dossers. (I’m not denying that such people exist—in fact, I wish death upon them—but the Mail vastly overinflates/conveniently omits figures to sell more papers.)

Perhaps it was a nasty remark to make: of course it was made in jest. Of course, if you were offended, please take this to be my reserved apology – and grow a thicker skin, for Christ’s sake.

Alarmist headlines, dubious levels of truth, poor citations. So what tabloid is this from?

Answer: it’s not from a tabloid at all. All the headlines above are taken from Slashdot stories from the past few days.

True, Slashdot has never exactly been a bastion of journalistic integrity: in reality, it’s nothing more than a hivemind-operated news aggregator. However, in recent years, it’s been slipping slowly towards a Daily Mail level of sensationalism.

The “Facebook linked to rise in STDs” story was republished straight from The Sun, and the one about Facebook data sharing was clipped from an excerpt of a single TechCrunch article based around a short segment of a statement from Facebook regarding some changes to its privacy policy. Perhaps I’m being unfair to /. here: if anything, its users are to blame for this downward trend.

However, Slashdot is based entirely around user submissions, but the peer review process seems to have broken down lately. Microsoft-bashing headlines (often with poorly-sourced foundations) are becoming ever more frequent, and when Slashdot republishes a Daily Mail story practically verbatim (one which has already been debunked, no less) you know you’re in deep trouble.

I recently removed Slashdot from my RSS subscriptions list, simply because the encroaching stupidity was getting too much for me to be bothered with every day. I’ll still pop on from time to time, and I’ll continue to receive the daily digest e-mail. However, from now on, El Reg and Ars will be my primary tech news sources: I’m not willing to have double standards when it comes to gutter-press journalism.

Of course, when I say “material” I speak in the loosest of terms: there’s “femail” celebrity paparazzi dross, usually a story about the evils of the BBC/gays/muslims/Richard Dawkins, peppered with regular pus-rich ejecta from Littlejohn, Hitchens, Moir et al. In fact, I’m pretty certain the only reason anyone does visit the Mail website is to observe the flora and fauna of the comments section.

However, I’m veering off on a tangent here: the stupidity of the Mail‘s hacks/commenters is covered in far more depth (and quality) by Enemies and Speak You’re Branes. Instead, let’s focus on astonishingly lazy journalism.

It seems rather superfluous, as today is no slow news day: the Obamacare reforms have passed in the US, for better or for worse, some former ministers have been filmed displaying outright corruption, Soham murderer Ian Huntley has had a brush with death himself, and Google has stopped censoring its Chinese operation. It is, therefore, a mystery to me as to why the Mail’s front page currently has the news that a woman is pregnant, an idiot nearly won a Darwin Award, and a woman went out of her house whilst wearing some shoes.

Then, however, you run across this:

It seemed like a simple request.

Swansea Council sent an email to its in-house translations service to have a road sign – ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only’ – translated into Welsh.

The only problem was that the Welsh translator wasn’t in at the time. An automated email response was sent to council officials who believed it was exactly what they needed.

But in fact it stated: ‘I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.’

Unaware of the real meaning of the message, authorities had it printed on the road sign under the English.

Hmm… haven’t I seen this somewhere before? Oh, yes. Almost one and a half years ago.

There are two possible reasons for this.

1. The Mail‘s journalists were so lazy they didn’t check the source of said story, and therefore failed to see that it was dated some sixteen months ago.
2. The Mail has such contempt for its readers that they believed they could get away with regurgitating this recycled crap to fill up the pages, in the hope no-one would notice that it’s old news.

Given the Mail’s pedigree, I can’t help but wondering if it’s both.

In theory, it ticks all the boxes:

• Has something distinctly British (the London Underground) to appeal to a British audience.
• Features people the audience can relate to.
• Features a small, cute child in a school uniform to appeal to mothers.
• Everyone is implausibly attractive.
• It features some zany humour to get people talking about it.

However, it’s not a good ad for two reasons:

• You have to be either blind or stupid to get lost on the Tube. And you certainly don’t ask strangers for directions.
• The product itself is relegated to seven seconds at the end of the ad, which doesn’t even show it being used properly. The first twenty-four seconds is junk, with a dramatic segment bearing almost no relation to the “what has information overload done to us?” tagline. It might make idiots laugh, but the fact Bing itself doesn’t appear until the end means you’re likely to miss it entirely.

(Disclaimer: I’m not an advertiser, I’m just applying common sense.)

1. Use Comic Sans and shocking pink in the PowerPoint presentation.
2. Demean your audience by calling them “children” or “kids”.
3. Fumble with the technology aspect of things and then try and make do by just playing the video that should have played in PowerPoint in RealPlayer.
4. Attempt to relate to your audience by pointing out that you are, in fact, a pushy parent.
5. Pick on people in the audience to try and demonstrate your point.
   • Especially at random, with something like a teddy bear or a smiley-face sticker hidden under the seat.
6. Don’t bother to adapt your presentation for your audience.
7. Get your audience to fill out worksheets.
   • On dead trees.
8. Overrun.

Damn you, nonderivative licenses.

The FSF is a bizarre organisation. True, its intentions are noble – to develop and promote free and open-source alternatives to proprietary software – but it seems to have completely the wrong idea about the way to go about it.

They’re simply way, way too childish about it. Consider the Windows 7 Sins campaign, which screams, on its front page, that PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE ATTACKS EDUCATION!!! (In big, bold, Time Cube-esque letters, just in case you didn’t notice it.)

A click on the link will reveal the following tract:

Many US states even boast about how they are cooperating with Microsoft, either ignoring or not understanding the corrupting influence that accepting freebies from this huge corporation has on their government. Because Microsoft’s software is proprietary, it isincompatible with education — users are simply passive consumers in their interactions with Windows, they are legally forbidden from adapting the software to solve a particular problem, or from satisfying an intellectual curiosity by examining its source code.

Now, the bit about restrictive licensing, I can agree with. I even sort of agree with the giving-freebies-away thing (I say, writing this from an installation of Windows Server 2003 obtained from Dreamspark – please don’t hurt me!)

However, it then continues:

Free software, on the other hand, gives children a route to empowerment, by encouraging them to explore and learn. Nowhere was the promise of an educational platform using free software more significant than the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. Launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, OLPC was designed to lead children around the world to an advanced education using the combination of information technology and freedom. The project aimed to produce low-cost devices (starting with one called the XO) so that millions of children could have access to them, and free software, so they would have the critical freedoms to explore and share their software.

Then under pressure from Microsoft, Negroponte backed the project away from its commitment to freedom and announced that the machine would also be a platform for running the nonfree Windows XP operating system.

Microsoft is not the only threat to education — Adobe and Apple are both firmly placed in education, even on Windows. Adobe’s proprietary Flash and Shockwave players and Apple’s QuickTime and iTunes are widely used by educational software.

However the highlighted part qualifies as news is a mystery to me. “X86-powered machine runs X86-compatible operating system.” In other news, “two-legged woman in Ramsgate wears two-legged trousers”, and “sighted man in Putney watches television”.

One of the great things about free software is choice. With enough expertise, you can choose practically every single detail of the system. However, there’s also a choice not to use free software if you want to. This also goes the other way for developers. You have the choice of releasing your software under any free software license you so choose, but you’re welcome to keep the source to yourself if you want to.

Following this, there is a link to an article by Lord Stallmanbeard himself entitled Why Schools should Exclusively Use Free Software. The premise is flawed from the start, but let’s take a look at some of his arguments first:

Schools have a social mission: to teach students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will tend to use free software after they graduate.

Hmm… last time I checked, teaching students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society didn’t consist of being sat through endless hours of furiously scribing “I MUST RECYCLE,” or “I MUST ALWAYS BUY FAIRTRADE,” or “I WILL NEVER GET INTO A PRIVATE CAR AS LONG AS I LIVE FOR THE GOOD OF THE ENVIRONMENT.”

This is the thing: he’s proposing fighting the alleged “indoctrination” of schoolchildren into using BorgWord and related software, by getting them to indoctrinate children into using OpenOffice instead. It’s hypocritical tit-for-tat childishness.

He continues:

Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!”

No, proprietary software says, quite simply, “we’re not giving you the source code to look at because we make money by selling precompiled binaries, and don’t want other people making money out of compiling our source code.” Again, it’s not an excuse I entirely agree with, but the concept that the Borg, Darth Jobs of Cupertino and Monkey Boy all want to turn your children into vegetables is simply not true – and, I don’t know about you, but it has a whiff of conspiracy theory about it.

(Incidentally, he then reaches this astonishing conclusion:

Schools, starting from nursery school, should tell their pupils, “If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other students. And you must show the source code to the class, in case someone wants to learn.”

For some reason, I can’t imagine a four-year-old being particularly interested in seeing the source code of some irritating Flash game based around a talking caterpillar.)

And now, for the more practical reason his premise is flawed. For the most part, a lot of free software simply does not work unless you’re a serial computer-tinkerer.

I’ve already mentioned I’m writing this on Windows. This is for two reasons: 1. at present, I’m in the middle of coding a Visual Basic.NET application in Visual Studio (something which, incidentally, has no equivalent on GNU/Linux, making programming for the system an utter nightmare.) 2. Ubuntu, at the moment, is as sluggish as hell.

Gnash is the finest example of nasty FLOSS software besides Hurd. Touted as a free replacement for Flash, it still can’t even handle most YouTube videos without muting the sound after nearly five years of development – if anything, it’s worse than Adobe’s own (appalling) Linux implementation of Flash.

(It might also be useful here to note that Stallman doesn’t like Silverlight, even though it’s better than Flash from a free software viewpoint, because it has a FLOSS implementation (Moonlight) that works most of the time, and because it’s sort-of open source anyway. No prizes for guessing why.)

It doesn’t stop there. Windows may not have a proper permissions system, and it may need defragmenting every once in a while, but at least Explorer doesn’t take ten seconds to display the contents of a single folder *cough* Nautilus. Hardware support, while improving, is still as shaky as ever, and how anyone can honestly put up with the crap-laden disgrace that is OpenOffice.org is beyond me.

The Windows 7 Sins campaign launched with the symbolic throwing of copies of Windows 7 into a giant trashcan in a Boston park, by a man dressed in a giant gnu costume shouting “GNU wins again!” (which it hasn’t, because people are still using Windows, Mac OS X and plenty of other things that are NOT GNU.) I can’t help but think that if they’d spent the money on hiring programmers instead of an infantile publicity stunt that had no impact whatsoever, we’d be an awful lot closer to something like a better Flash implementation.

Hence, we return to our original point. The FSF is concentrating too much on trying to discredit the alternatives, whilst failing to actually provide anything to replace it that’s any good. True, a lot of free software is brilliant – GIMP, WebKit, GNOME and most of Ubuntu and Fedora are great examples – however, only everything about it gets better than the rest will people start using it.

Cheap point-scoring doesn’t work for the FSF. It works for Apple with those astonishingly smug Get a Mac ads, because they have something that works to replace Windows. A simple visit to the FSF website, on the other hand, will befuddle you with a variety of links to distributions like gNewSense, the probability of which working seemingly depends upon your hardware, the alignment of the stars, and the ratio of milk to cornflakes in your breakfast this morning.

This is mostly due to a cult-like belief that anything so much as tainted with proprietary software (such as all the good Linux distributions) is therefore evil. Hence, you’re pointed back to a distribution that fails to recognise your wireless and graphics card, makes you think (by association) that all free software is shit and makes you switch back to BorgOS.

Guilt by association is another immature frame of mind. Consider this, from Stallman’s own web page on his computer use:

I stopped using the OLPC because the OLPC project made their machine act as a platform for running Windows. Now I use a Lemote machine which has a free startup program and all free software. Since the processor is a variant of MIPS, Windows does not support it.

Again, guilt by association. Because the OLPC can run Windows (and the OLPC project collaborated with getting it to run Windows, for people who wanted to do so) it is, therefore, evil. It’s like a small child saying “I won’t play with little Johnny because his brother Jimmy stole my ice-cream.” It’s like saying that because of 9/11, all people who look slightly dusky are terrorists. Or that because of Gok Wan, all gay people should be thrown off the nearest cliff edge.

With this incessant campaigning (the majority of which is useless, simply because no-one outside the technical community gives a fuck) the FSF is missing the point entirely. With this in mind, here’s my list of wishes to make the FSF actually work:

1. Get some bloody coding done. Yes, Flash is evil. I knew that. But does Gnash provide a viable alternative until HTML5 finally stamps on Flash’s remains? No.
2. Recognise that proprietary software, in itself, is not evil. It’s only evil when the proprietary aspects are used to control and monopolise the market.  Therefore, a binary-blob driver for a wireless card, while not necessarily good, is not a reincarnation of Beelzebub.
3. Stop using the guilt-by-association argument. I happen to think Microsoft Office for Windows and iWork are the two best office suites out there right now, I like Visual Studio, and I also enjoy playing a few games from Steam from time to time. This does not make me a Microsoft whore, so quit preaching that I should only ever use free software.
4. For god’s sake, be more professional. If you want to peddle free software (providing it’s all fixed, good and reasonably bug-free and snappy) then do so without scaring potential users into thinking they’re supporting a fascist regime by using Microsoft, and don’t do anything as ridiculous as that bloody trashcan again.
5. Don’t be so arrogant and elitist. The Mac ads are love-it-or-hate-it – many people hate their smugness. Arrogant, holier-than-thou attitudes towards potential users simply alienate them, especially when the software you’re peddling isn’t as good as the one they already had.

Note: I’ve been meaning to write this for some months, and finally hammered it all out in a one-hour spurt during which the word count has steadily shot up to 1768. Cripes…

In response to a trending hashtag on Twitter yesterday, Mr. Wright made this comment:

[you've never voted Tory] because you can put lipstick on a scum-sucking pig, but it’s still a scum-sucking pig. And cos [sic] they would ruin Britain.

It’s an obvious mirror of a comment Barack Obama made about Sarah Palin last year, and with it, it brings in the nasty, American breed of political campaigning, where personal smears, lies and deceitful horseshit is generally the order of the day. This is one of the reasons I’m proud to be British – we could descend into this dung-slinging contest every election run-up, but this fecal peddling is mostly left to the Daily Mail and co.: mainstream politicians are way too polite to do so, and when they do cross the line, there is invariably uproar.

So, naturally, this was a nasty comment that got some attention. So what would Mr. Wright do? Apologise? Publish a retraction? Justify it? Why bother, when you can just cop out and blame it on a hacker?

“I put up on twitter a message linked to Barack Obama’s comment in the Presidential race last year about conservative policy, which is you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig. It looks like somebody, a third party has gone into my account and made it more offensive.
“I think it was a legitimate comment and I mean twitter is edgy and you know it provokes debate, it looks on this occasion as if it has caused a serious problem and we need to go back and look at that.”

Hmm… I don’t know why, but I (and several others) certainly think I’ve seen this defence before, somewhere. Moreover, Guido has helpfully pointed out that the fact tweets cannot be edited blows an awfully wide hole in his excuse.

This is exactly the reason people lose faith in politicians. In this case, while a simple apology could have been in order, he instead chose to blame it on someone else. Trouble was, this pitiful attempt at arse-covering was so obvious and half-baked it was bound to backfire.

Is there a moral in this story? Yes. Two.

1. You may disagree with someone, but you’re still British. No matter how heated the discussion gets, you don’t resort to name-calling. This is not a teabagger meeting.
2. For god’s sake, stop blaming any slightly embarrassing incident on a hacker. It’s not working for Rod Liddle, there’s no reason it would work for you. The electorate is not stupid, and certainly does not like being patronised like this.

There are several factors I must take into account: what’s on the front cover? Does it pique my interest? Do I have room in my bag, amongst the textbooks, stationery and other trappings of a college student, to carry a freesheet? Is it a slow news day? Is the train departing in ten seconds and counting?

Most of the time, the answer is sort-of, yes, no and no-but-with-no-time-for-complacency-quick-grab-it-now-and-dash-up-the-stairs-to-Platform-1. For all its faults, Metro is a decent paper: it usually regurgitates some semblance of facts without trying to slip in political propaganda, and provides a reasonably broad range of stuff to read through or skip over as you please. And it’s free, so you can’t really complain.

That said, there is one major flaw: the news is always at least one day late. Most of the time, this isn’t too bad, although we’ve had incidents in the past (such as the Balloon Boy situation) where the article was written before the story’s climax (or deus ex machina, in this case.) The commuters of Britain knew Falcon Heene was safe and well (and probably used by his parents as an attention-whoring pawn) as Metro screamed about the fear for the little boy’s life.

Today, though, this lateness played an altogether more beak role. While eating breakfast this morning, I was idly listening to the radio, registering in passing the sad news of the death of charity microlight pilot, Martin Bromage, whose body was later recovered off the French coast.

It is, of course, a tragic case that Mr. Bromage’s attempt (and life) were cut so short, so early in the voyage – and it is perhaps doubly cruel that he was raising money for Help for Heroes in the process. However, after flinging myself out of the front door, hopping on the bus, waiting for half an hour for the first train and rushing through Ash Vale Station’s subway, I couldn’t help but note some grim, ironic humour in this item which greeted me as I opened my hastily-grabbed copy of Metro to page 20:

Oh dear.

Seemingly discontent with claiming Doomsday in would happen at the end of 1982 (which it didn’t), that Scotland is a “dark land overrun by homosexuals” (which it isn’t), that Hinduism is “demonic” (which it isn’t), that there would be a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest in 2006 (which there wasn’t) and that there would be mass killings, probably nuclear, in the USA 2007 (which there weren’t), Robertson has now made this address on his television programme, in which he announces the cause of the recent earthquake in Haiti:

You know, Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. Ahhh…you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said we will serve you if you get us free from the French. True Story. And so the Devil said “Okay, it’s a deal.” and…uh…they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle, on one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. Um, they need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy, I’m optimistic, something good may come.

Watch it here if you like (nofollow has been vigorously applied)—it’s about the six-minute mark, and every bit as putrid as it sounds.

I strongly suggest donating to the British Red Cross’s emergency appeal: every penny counts, and Haiti needs our help and attention right now more than this nincompoop deserves in a lifetime.

The next stop will be Sharkjump Central. Please mind the gap.

(cross-posted from here)

Serenity is, perhaps, one of the most bizarrely-birthed movies of recent years. Based on the TV show Firefly, created by Joss Whedon (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse fame) it joins the elite club, also occupied by Star Trek: The Motion Picture, of movies spawned from cancelled TV series.

Firefly, ostensibly, is a “space western”. The clash of genres sounds bizarre here, but trust me: it works superbly. Nathan Fillion (an actor no-one in the UK has ever heard of, unfortunately, seeing as he’s arguably a better actor than Milo Ventipuckermouth off Heroes and his face looks less like a rat’s arse) stars as Captain Malcolm Reynolds of the spaceship Serenity, an ageing, cramped rustbucket that’s like the twenty-sixth century equivalent of a Victoria line Tube carriage.

(Warning: spoilers follow.)

Part of the reason Firefly was so superb, apart from its unique setting, rich visual design and excellent storytelling, was the fact that all the characters felt unique, and therefore real. Reynolds, for example, has a predominantly rather dark, brooding and withdrawn character that is deeply scarred by the fact he was on the losing side of an inter-planetary civil war.

However, in the first episode of the series, he plays a dark, cruel practical joke on the ship’s new doctor, and then has a laugh about it with the other members of the crew. He’s dark and brooding, alright, but he’s also got a sense of humour: these little things instantly add an extra dimension to each character, and make them feel real.

Serenity, on the other hand, appears to dispense with the complex and rich characterisations of Firefly for an altogether simpler and more bare story, both in terms of characters and plot. Everyone seems to have become a one-dimensional parody of their former selves: “angry guy” Reynolds softens up around “slut” Inara, while “nasal tit” ship’s doctor Simon and his “mad psychic” sister River do a lot of shouting and running. Meanwhile, priest Shepherd Book, one of the most consistently intriguing and fascinating characters in Firefly, is relegated to around two scenes, and Kaylee, the proudly girly and delightfully likable engineer, turns her previous crush on Simon into servile fawning. And the previously witty-and-madly-in-love coupling of first mate Zoe and pilot Wash? That turns into a recursive loop of shouting matches followed by cries of “oh my god, baby, TALK TO ME.”

All these characters are played excellently by the respective actors, considering the apparent offal they were given to work with. The direction is also reasonable, although much, much darker than Firefly’s and toning down the Western aspect significantly in favour of a more “sci-fi” environment. (When it comes to Firefly, think “Blade Runner, but brighter and more Western.)

The thing is, not one part of the movie feels “better” than the TV series. A common criticism of film adaptations is that they feel like an extended TV episode; this is worse, where the movie feels like a failed attempt to revive the TV series. In this way, it shares yet more characteristics with Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Along with characters who are impossible to care about, there’s also a plot that draws on the worst tendencies of the TV stories and exacerbates them greatly. There’s zombie-like “Reavers”, a cretinous government operative played by that security advisor out of 2012, an almost Scooby-Doo like plan from Reynolds and a terrible, terrible example of deus ex machina which leads to an immensely unsatisfying ending.

Overall, if you’re at all a fan of Firefly, you’ll feel short-changed by Serenity, and if you see Serenity having not seen Firefly, you’ll be put off it unnecessarily. This is not good.

Perhaps I’m being unfair: overall, it’s not a bad movie. It all looks exceptionally pretty, considering its low budget, and it still has a few signature Firefly touches: space is still silent, and River has her entertaining “childish” moments. However, it certainly doesn’t live up to its predecessor, and is most definitely overrated: claims that it’s “the finest sci-fi movie ever made” are incredibly overblown (that merit still goes to 2010, the original The Day The Earth Stood Still, Star Trek II/III, Alien(s) or Blade Runner.)

With the previously-established cast of clichéd peripheral characters and out-of-character main cast, you’d probably be doubtful they could squeeze another one in. And you’d be wrong.

Just to complete the set, “Mr. Universe,” a mysterious and reclusive techno-wizard who lives on an isolated planet with his sex doll wife, who finds a “subliminal message” encrypted in a TV transmission and then checks the timestamp on a few computer files. As with Star Trek, it’s set too far in the future to earn a place in the Implausible Computers Guide: however, as far as technology goes, these elements dance between the clichéd, the inane, the passable and the ridiculous.

Overall, I’m finding it very hard to like Serenity. My expectations were high, and were simply not met—however, it’s still a reasonable enough film. Hence, it’s gaining a score of 6.5 out of 10.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Based upon an image by Annie Mole

I’d like to apologise to anyone who had trouble accessing the site earlier: this was, as far as I can tell, due to a problem at the host’s end, and not down to yesterday’s minor traffic spike or due to the presence of this cretin in the comments section causing the server to fail because of the stupidity in the air.

On the other hand, I’m incredibly impressed with NearlyFreeSpeech.net, who dealt with my support request in no more than twenty minutes. For almost a year now, they’ve hosted this site practically for free in comparison to the amount of money I spent with 1&1, and this customer service is the icing on the cake.

The gay marriage debate in a nutshell

If you think Nick Griffin’s bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Liberal Conspiracy tells us of the new Independent candidate for the Salford and Eccles by-election, Richard Carvath. (This is the same seat Hazel Blears is due to contest.)

Instead of being subtly homophobic, á la Griffin, Carvath goes on the full “pervert” offensive at the news that Matthew Sephton, a local Tory campaigner (who also happens to be gay) has been selected as the Conservatives’ candidate.

Well… read it for yourself.

The Conservative Party has just selected homosexual Matthew Sephton as their candidate for Salford and Eccles.

As a rival [and pro-heterosexual!] candidate I welcome Matthew to the contest for Salford and Eccles.

Matthew’s own blog is heavy with pro homosexual pervert content…

OK, I get it now.

This is a British Mike Huckabee with a £500 deposit to burn… wonderful. We could really do with lunatic American-style candidates in office… not.

#uknowitsarecession when the local water utility is using our tax dollars on “maintenance”. Working people buy bottled water #tcot #gop

I’m really not sure what to make of this. Is this gentleman infuriated that his tax dollars are being used to… y’know… improve services?

Yeah.

Yes, I am as tired as I look - if not more so

So I’m blogging from the Apple Store on Regent Street after attending the Maths in Action day at the Institute of Education, as part of a smaller-than-anticipated party from my college.

After arriving in London on the same train as a man who looked like a clean-shaven Gordon Freeman and getting the Tube to Russell Square, we had a lecture on the science of how diseases spread through social networks.

Unfortunately for the Daily Mail, this doesn’t mean any Facebook users should be quarantined. However, the story of how networks can be modelled is fascinating: there is a ‘sweet spot’ in the area of randomisation of small-world networks to provide a “realistic” model of a network. There was also discussion of Erdős–Bacon numbers.

After this, we had some discussion of why buildings fall and collapse during earthquakes, followed by a lecture with the title At Home With Maths, which seemed to cover why cardioids are formed by light reflecting in cups, among other things.

After lunch, we had a lecture from the computer science department at Queen Mary, University of London on mathematically-inspired illusions. Mercifully, it wasn’t Britain’s Got Talent-style, but instead featured computer science such as algorithms to help sort through cards, or tricks of the mind that are also used in MP3 compression. (It sounds weird… I might explain later, if I have the time.)

And finally, just as we were all beginning to drop off, we were re-awakened by the fabulous Colin Wright, a juggler-turned-mathematician-turned-software developer-turned-maritime traffic controller. He led us through the mathematics of juggling, how to describe a juggling trick in writing, and generally spent an afternoon demonstrating why he was a lot better than all of us put together (even though he was in the private sector).

Overall, it was a very interesting series of lectures about the application of maths in the real world. Often, we take for granted how much maths actually goes into everything. (Me typing on this MacBook Pro, for example, involves millions upon millions of mathematical calculations simply to bring the words up on to the screen then portray them, across teh intertubes, to the server.)

Anyway, this brief period of mathematical nerdgasm is now complete. Normal service resumes shortly.

The most common issue is that Ubuntu One won’t authorise your computer properly, and will therefore continue trying to add your computer to the list of authorised machines in an infinite loop. Mercifully, the problem is easy enough to fix, by removing the client software completely and then reinstalling it.

Quit the Ubuntu One client, then remove the authentication token from Passwords and Encryption Keys. (It’s also a good idea to move the Ubuntu One folder in your home folder out of the way.) The run the following commands:

$ sudo rm -rf ~/.share/local/ubuntuone
$ rm -rf ~/.cache/ubuntuone
$ rm -rf ~/.config/ubuntuone
$ sudo apt-get purge ubuntuone-client* python-ubuntuone-storage*
$ sudo apt-get install ubuntuone-client* python-ubuntuone-storage*

Everything should be working now: once you restart the Ubuntu One client, it should authorise the computer successfully.

This is bullshiet which american television giving to all you, same as with swine flu.

Flu is just normal strong cold which you need to recuperate with antybiotic.
Already I have flu and nothing wrong with me while I taking medicines

What was going through this person’s head is… confusing.

What's the difference between Nick Griffin and Hitler? A bullet in the cranium. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Mrmurrey)

Well, despite the best attempts of Unite Against Fascism, Commander Arsewipe Supreme Nicholas “Adolf” Griffin of the British Fascist C**thive has appeared on Question Time.

Nick Griffin‘s appearance was, to put it simply, a complete and utter car crash. I was initially rather disappointed he wasn’t being faced by Diane Abbot, Shami Chakrabarti, Richard Dawkins and Iain Dale… but the panel (even Jack Straw and Baroness Warsi) gave him an utter kicking. Even David Dimbleby caught him with his trousers down.

Bonnie Greer, in particular, was incredibly strong, and it was particularly wonderful to see her, as a black person, being so cool and collected and calmly destroying his arguments. However, Griffin certainly did a lot of the work for the panel, by being more gigglesome than a Loose Women presenter in what appeared to be an attempt to appear like a “normal” member of the panel.

Griffin certainly wasn’t destroyed by the incident, but he was certainly dented. Of course, he’s now spinning for his life by claiming the BBC put him against a “mob”, but that’s just his usual tactic.

Either way, Nick Griffin has demonstrated himself with his cringeworthy performance to be the demented fuckwit that he is… however, UAF were a boon to his defence with their attempts to breach Television Centre.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to have stolen much of the programme’s thunder: even the Daily Express‘s front page today called Griffin a “disgrace to humanity”. (The Daily Mail, of course, took the opportunity to blame it on the BBC.)

Image courtesy of Pete Souza, The Obama-Biden Transition Project

Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize was bound to ruffle some feathers, even he’d won it thirty years hence after turning the world into some kind of pacifist utopia. The fact he’s been awarded it now, merely ten months after entering office, is both surprising and incredibly confusing.

My personal view, as a stinking liberal and someone who would’ve voted for Mr. Obama had they had the chance, is that it’s an incredibly bad decision. The most immediate problem with it is that it is far, far too premature.

True, he’s improved the US’s image abroad (as in, the rest of the world hates America less than it did under Dubbya.) However, there’s still a long way to go.

All he’s done so far is promised to end the war in three years, had a warmer attitude towards North Korea, Iran and Russia, and done very little else.

True, he has the potential to live up to the expectations, and we can’t expect him to change things overnight: however, I can’t help but get the feeling that Mr. Obama has been somewhat… inert.

Domestically, he’s also done very little in the way of his election promises. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule still has not been repealed, and he performed a U-turn on same-sex marriages after entering office. We still haven’t had transparency on the Iraq torture documents, and the Afghanistan war will still only end in three years.

Overall, many (myself included) are beginning to think that his substance won’t be able to live up to the style. True, he’s worked wonders for international relations, but there’s still plenty of time for everything to go tits up.

Indeed, Mr. Obama himself has indicated he doesn’t feel he deserves to be in the company of the “transformative figures” who preceded him as recipients. (Thankfully he’s had the good will to give the money away to charity.)

The one thing that is certain is that this award will put real pressure on Obama to deliver, both internationally and domestically. But it also calls the relevance of the prize into question, when it’s been awarded to a man who’s only had ten months to do an awful lot, very little of which has actually been done. This does not sound like a Nobel Peace Prize laureate to me.

It’s fair to say that Microsoft has never exactly had a penchant for marketing: in 2003, it commissioned a band (conveniently called Press the Green Button) to sing two songs… about Windows XP Media Center Edition. (Neither of them are very good, so don’t bother.) Then came the Seinfeld ads, the middle finger in the face to Apple with the “I’m a PC” ads, the out-of-date and technically inept Laptop Hunter ads, etc. etc. You know the story by now.

So what’s MS’s latest attempt to improve their image? One can only imagine the brainstorming meeting with the marketing execs.

AD MAN #1: So, after the success of our “Laptop Hunters” campaign… what’s next?

AD MAN #2: We need something top down, something that is very much web 2.0 and a granular approach to viral marketing.

AD MAN #1: I know! Let’s ask Windows 7 beta testers to throw a house party!

AD MAN #2: Genius! Why didn’t I think of that?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ

I don’t think I need to say any more.

Look at it. Lookatit. Whatthebloodyhellweretheythinkingof!?

Why would you throw a party to launch a new release of Windows? It’s kind of like saying, “there’s a new strain of chlamydia spreading rapidly through our population: get the cocktail sticks out!!!”

Besides, what would you do at a “Windows 7 launch party”? From what I can glean, you’re supposed to invite people into your home and “entertain” them, instead of with food, music, dancing or a film, like at a normal party, with a series of Windows 7 demos. So basically, it’ll be like a really rubbish version of a Steve Jobs keynote, because

1. There won’t be any Windows fanboys who worship Steve Ballmer and become sexually excited as soon as you mention “ISO burning integrated into Explorer”
2. you’ll be obliged to do a monkey impression before throwing your chair at a wall screaming about what you’re going to do to Google.

Charlie Brooker described it best: the promotional video for these events, let alone the events themselves, induces shitasmia. (That word will enter a dictionary of neologisms now.) How the hell do Microsoft think they can beat the smug, but at least sane Get a Mac adverts with these?

That said… Richard Stallman’s campaign of overinflated FUD, nonsense and preachy FLOSS fundamentalism is no better.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

This time, they’re bribing offering a course called ExpertZone to employees of Best Buy in America (sort of like America’s PC World, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar campaign appeared in Gordonland before much longer.) Incidentally, on taking the “course”, said employees get a $10 copy of Windows 7. Hmm.

So a member at Overclock.net has kindly provided screenshots… however, due to Photobucket’s terribleness, they’ve exceeded their bandwidth limit. Not to worry… they’re mirrored here, and they’re probably floating around on 4chan as well. And they might have *cough* accidentally appeared on this site, too.

One of the modules of said course is entitled something along the lines of “Linux vs. Windows 7.”

I won’t list them all, because some of them are so full of horseshit that they’re toxic. Some of them aren’t too bad… however, these ones are. (Follow the show original post link to show these if they don’t appear, or follow the “read more” link if you’re viewing this from the site.)

If you can’t read this one, here’s a transcript:

Linux updates and upgrades are easy.

[ X ] FACT
[     ] MYTH
INCORRECT

• Linux can require a lot of time to maintain. For example, Ubuntu, a version [sic] of Linux may have hundreds of updates a month.
• It can be unclear to users whether or not software updates are optional or need to be applied immediately.

To be fair, they do have a point with the second article. However, the idea that Linux takes “a lot of time to maintain” is complete nonsense. Maybe on a distribution like Slackware, Gentoo, or (possibly) Debian… but Ubuntu and Fedora are incredibly easy to update. The procedure is, essentially

1. update manager window pops up behind all your other windows to tell you that updates are available.
2. you click “install updates”, enter your password, and the updates are downloaded and installed.
3. You probably don’t even have to reboot. Therefore, there is no step 3.

Also, “hundreds of updates in a month” indicate, to me, that the system is being actively developed, bugs are being fixed and holes are being secured all the time. Compare this to Windows (and, to some extent, Mac OS X) which only release updates in massive payloads on a weekly/monthly basis.

Linux is safer than Windows.

[ X ] FACT
[     ] MYTH
INCORRECT

• There’s no guarantee that when security vulnerabilities are discovered, an update will be created. Users are on their own.
• There is no ability to set parental restrictions.

This, I think, is very nearly my favourite. Since when was Microsoft in any position to preach about security and safety? This is, apparently, some definition of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of. (Presumably, it puts restrictive parents being able to censor the internet ahead of more obvious things… like malware and protection against pharming.)

I find the security argument particularly funny, especially since Windows 7 includes a major regression in security. In a bid to make UAC less “annoying”, it no longer switches to a secure desktop when asking for permission to do something… so, in effect, all the cracker has to do is hijack the mouse dæmon, and boom! he’s in.

Aside from this, how can they accuse any GNU/Linux distribution of not guaranteeing updates, when, in the previous slide, they complained that a distribution such as Ubuntu could have “hundreds of updates a month”? They are contradicting themselves heavily here. And as for parental restrictions… someone needs to show these guys dansguardian.

The next one, though, I think, is the best.

Linux is easy to learn and will meet consumer expectations about the things they can do with their PC.

[     ] FACT
[ X ] MYTH
CORRECT

• Linux is a self-help solution. There are no step-by-step tutorials provided and help documentation is limited.
• Because there are different “flavors” of Linux, you can’t learn one version and be sure you know them all.

True, they’re right about some documentation being particularly bad… but I’ll just emphasise this one quote again.

• There are no step-by-step tutorials provided
• There are no step-by-step tutorials provided
• There are no step-by-step tutorials provided
• There are no step-by-step tutorials provided

O RLY?

I’m not in the least surprised by this: MS have a history of trying to nip its opponents on the shop floor. But awareness needs to improve, and both staff and customers must be educated that they have a choice – and the facts must be facts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDyP9JrFNEM

Virgin Media calls this their “advanced web search”, and while at the moment it seems somewhat benign, I can’t help but worry this could be being used to gain revenue from 404 errors. Mercifully, it’s easy enough to opt out. At the moment.

From left to right: Dr. Yan Wong, Jem Stansfield, Liz Bonnin and Dallas Campbell

At first, things didn’t look good. The person who appeared to be the show’s frontman, a man called Dallas Campbell, who I’ve never heard of, introduced the show with a hyped-up monologue that was in no way reminiscent of MythBusters. (A quick examination of Campbell’s biography indicates he’s an actor and writer. Oh dear. No scientists?)

After the titles, we’re thrown into what looks like something between Battersea Power Station and an overgrown untidy shed. We then learn this is the studio, where we see a presenting style that seems like an uneasy mix of Top Gear and Blue Peter. Only Campbell, Jem Stansfield and Liz Bonnin (the latter two of whom, I’m told, are scientists) are present in the studio, as allegedly, the fourth presenter, Dr. Yan Wong (who apparently wrote a book with Richard Dawkins) has an intellect “too big to fit into the studio”. (In short, that means he’s the roving reporter, whose job it is to mingle with the Great Unwashed and show the public that science isn’t as shit as science class makes it out to be.)

After a brief introduction, we’re shown the first pre-recorded segment, a film that begins by talking about CCTV, and how incredibly easy it is to fool a CCTV operator by changing clothes and walking with somebody else inside a building. OK… not so much science so far.

We’re then shown the University of Southampton’s project for measuring someone’s “gate” (that is, their posture and stride that is unique enough to act as a fingerprint.) Put simply, it’s a long tunnel with coloured blocks on the walls, and an array of cameras all feeding into a computer. Hurrah. Now we’ve actually got some science involved.

Initially, this didn’t look hopeful either. Before Campbell makes his first proper walk down the lane to register his gate with the system, he plays the fool and does it as if it were a cat walk. I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny. And then, as a voiceover explained how the system worked, we saw some terminal output that looked like it was specifically designed to show how “hi-tech” this system was.

However, when the system recognises Campbell’s and Bonnin’s gate, it turns out this terminal output flying past is in fact the output of the program, as demonstrated when it outputs a table of the closest matches. This pleased me. It wasn’t visuals for visuals’ sake.

However, before we leave, Campbell can’t help acting like an utter pillock again by doing another walk down the lane, jumping up and down, impersonating a breakdancer, and generally making you feel like throwing rotten tomatoes at the television screen.

The next film featured Jem Stansfield building a vortex cannon to ‘blow a house down’. Starting with scale models, cheering when it works… hmm… reminds me of something… And, typically, it’s broken partway through to be continued later in the programme.

J. Craig Venter. Image courtesy of Public Library of Science

The next film we’re shown sees Bonnin (so far my favourite out of the presenters) heading out to interview J. Craig Venter. Yes. Seriously. And she even mentions the scientific controversy and the ethics behind it.

The interview takes place aboard Sorcerer II and she discusses artificial lifeforms with Venter in an informative and interesting interview. Venter even mentions the word scalable – THIS IS PRIME TIME BBC1!

And then, it all comes tumbling down as they link out of the film with Campbell saying, in his annoying and patronising voice, “that was such an interesting film.” Ugh. He’s a pain.

We’re then shown a segment with the roving reporter, Dr. Yan Wong, who shows the public how to fry an egg in a paper container. Am I the only one who’s noticed his resemblance to Jimmy Carr, but with glasses? It’s his habit of raising one eyebrow when talking. It’s suspicious.

Yan presents an informative, if somewhat frivolous film, saturated, of course, with completely uninformative vox pops from the public. “Ugh… that doesn’t look edible,” one woman says. As if I care.

I should make it clear here: I don’t have a problem with humour in science programmes, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of the science. The vox pops seemed unnecessarily frivolous. And then, a word from Campbell, who complains that he recently bought an expensive frying pan and now realises he shouldn’t have bothered. Brilliant. Not.

And finally, we see the end of the big film, with Jem allegedly blowing down a house of bricks (in reality, slightly demolishing a small wall of bricks that aren’t even cemented together) using his vortex cannon. The whole thing plays out like a poor remake of MythBusters. True, Jem doesn’t have the same “piss you off” factor as Campbell, who desperately needs to cut back on the infantile humour, but the point where he alone cheered as the wall slightly collapsed was rather disappointing. Common sense would dictate that you would turn it into a “spectacle” – i.e. have the whole presenting team there. And also, at some point, I swear he said they were trying to get the right mix of explosive to air, before explaining what “the right mix” was. Seriously. We know. We’re not stupid.

Overall, Bang Goes The Theory wasn’t too bad, but it needs several things fixing:

• Liz Bonnin needs to be at the helm. She’s the perfect presenter. Also, the Top Gear presenting style needs to be improved – the format doesn’t work for every programme (just remember how they butchered Gardener’s World with such a style.)
• Dallas Campbell needs to cut back on the poor humour. I’m sure he’s a relatively competent presenter, but infantile jokes just irritate the audience. He arses around like a student.
• For god’s sake, the big experiments have to stop being such rip-offs of MythBusters.

Anyway, for all the wonderfulness of Twitter, I do have one tiny little problem, one kvetch! if you like, with this magnificent system. And that’s the problem of spam.

Yesterday, I received no less than three new spam followers, all porn spammers, and all showing rather naughty parts of themselves in their avatars. And for each one of these, I had to go through the same tedious process to report spam:

1. Visit spammer’s profile page, risk malware injection.
2. Click “block” button.
3. Confirm block.
4. Return to homepage.
5. If you haven’t already, follow @spam.
6. Direct message @spam with the name of the spammer.
7. Cross fingers that it’s dealt with.

All of this trouble could be saved if only Twitter would provide one single option: a button that reported spam. It can’t be that hard to implement, and it would take away the hassle that deters people from reporting spam.

I know no-one from Twitter is likely to read this, but on the off-chance that one day, Biz Stone, age seventy-six, stumbles across this blog post… please, for god’s sake, give us a quicker way to report spam.

can you dowenload a lunix dowen load on a vista or pc

the anserw is no becuse i just tried

How on earth this woman was elected, even by Alaska, is confounding.

Courtesy of wigu.com

Daniel Hannan is an idiot.