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From issue 43... early 1998... my first ever Epilog column. Apple got SO excited by it that Guy Kawasaki emailed me and asked if he could reprint it out to his Apple Evangelist list... And it doesnt seem to have aged at all in the last 10 years. Wierd. " Epilog43 With my consultant’s hat on, I often get asked to recommend hardware for evaluation by businesses and corporates. And its true to say that no-one got fired for buying Compaq, IBM or HP. Sometimes some Gateways or Dells escape into the offices of users and do sterling service. But there is one name that is often strangely missing. So I went on a hunt to see what they were up to, to see whether they could offer a solution for real-world desktop operation in a connected, wired office space. I have this beast sat in front of me right now. It’s fast, very fast. It is easy to use. It runs Office 98. In fact, I’m typing this into Word 98. It runs FrontPage. And there’s Microsoft Outlook for connection to my Exchange Server email backbone, and I can see my inbox just fine. It has Internet Explorer 4 on it, and Netscape 4 as well. And a big suite of Adobe tools like PageMaker, PhotoShop and so forth. In fact, in terms of software, it has everything you need. It has an Ethernet network connection, peer networking, a nice 17” monitor, full Internet connectivity. Stereo sound too, and a microphone. And a CDRom drive, and a big hard disc. And a very sensible floppy disc arrangement too. The keyboard isn’t bad, and the mouse is perfectly nice. It is, indeed, the very essence of a modern multimedia computer for home or office. It runs all the sensible software that I want and need to work with, and works with all the other machines around it in the office. The price/performance is competitive too. So it should be on my Recommendable List. And yet you are not buying it. It has plug and play that works, far better than the PC to its left. Hardware expansion is no problem – it has room for plenty of storage, and the internal PCI bus takes name-brand industry standard cards. You can plug in several monitors at once, and get a desktop that spans all of them. It doesn’t suffer from stupid limitations like 16 IRQs, and being unable to use a modem on a port near a mouse. And yet you are not buying it. This machine has more name-brand current-version software dripping out of its hard disc than you can shake a stick at. Its from a company that has arguably done more over the last fifteen years to further desktop computing than all of the mainstream PC vendors put together. And yet you are not buying it. And I look at it, and to be honest, I’m scratching my head. This is a product with a staggeringly bright future, whose operating system today, although a bit creaky in places, is very competent at performing the business and home tasks that you care to throw at it. It runs all that software and integrates with your Novell or NT network, so what’s the problem? And the next major release of its operating system, due months before Windows NT 5.0, will bring back into the fold some fabulous, tried and tested work that was initiated nearly ten years ago. Best of all, this new OS will run on the native hardware, and there is a complete Intel build of the OS too. But if you want to stick with Microsoft OS’s, there’s a runtime for NT and Win95 too so you can run the apps there. And yet you are not buying it. If I worked for this company, I would be tearing my hair out. You, dear reader, are quite happy to buy hardware that is appallingly backward, where “prehistoric” doesn’t even begin to do justice to some of its more 1960’s let alone 1970’s thinking – when was the last time you thought rationally about that parallel printer plug, for example? How can we justify column inches and learned discussion about the pros and cons of Intel’s Slot One for the Pentium II processor, when the surrounding machine architecture is so full of utter rubbish, and bitter, twisted nonsensical design? The parallel plug, a keyboard bus that requires a separate mouse port, shared IRQs for the serial ports, the AT bus, base port addresses – the list is endless! Hardware configuration and BIOS’s that look byzantine in their complexity – just what is a “post-refresh burst rate delay” anyway and do I want one, two or four of them? “Plug & Pray” speaks for itself, and is often a bigger headache in the corporate support world than the problem it was attempting to solve. We’ve still have ISA. EISA failed, PCI64 has gone nowhere. Limited, if none, hot plugging or fault tolerance in mainstream machines. Where is the industry push for good technology like Firewire or even USB? And look at the operating systems – one wrong configuration, and you’re stuffed. “Have you tried reinstalling the OS?” is a statement that brings tears to the eyes of an IT manager. PC 98 spec is a decent enough step, but why is this specification PC98 anyway – why wasn’t it PC90, or even PC87 when the 386 shipped? In the PC marketplace, whether it be SOHO or corporate desktop, this is just yet more “me too” so-called engineering wrapped up in “all tinsel and no Christmas tree” bullshit. A lowest common denominator “it’ll do” illness, and a cost cutting frenzy par excellence, pervades most everything that most vendors do. No wonder PCs are so expensive to maintain, when the ingredients are this bad. Ask yourself why TCO is such an issue now – when was the last time you thought about TCO on your phone system? Or a fridge? And you wilfully part with your money for this stuff. Maybe there was a reason in the past not to buy into the computer that I’m referring to, but I am hard pushed to find one today. My mother wanted a computer to “browse that Internet thing”. She now has one of this brand I’m referring to, and mum@woodleyside.co.uk (please be gentle!) is now a live email address. She browses the web with gay abandon, and is reassured by the happy smiley “system ok” face she sees when she turns the machine on. Now I will accept that this company has done some stupid things in the past. But that was then. They are now making money. I accept that there were good reasons for corporates not to buy into this platform in the past. But that was then. Maybe, just maybe, its time for a fresh look? I have a brain. I have an Apple Macintosh. What’s your excuse?" Tags: apple, epilog
Current Location: lab
Current Mood:  amused
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(Was four years ago on Monday...) Epilog Issue 126 In the words of the Monty Python sketch, “I wish to register a complaint”. Like many of the, shall we say, more mature readers of PCPro, I was born in the 1960s. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to descend into a ramble about how life begins at 40, or even how the wonderful editorial crew of PCPro hadn’t been conceived when I first laid hands on a micro-computer in my distant youth. No, I am here to complain that science isn’t delivering on the promise. Back in my teenage years, I was an avid watcher of BBC’s Horizon programme, and other science programmes too. However, Horizon always seemed to be the best, the most focussed. It wasn’t particularly consistent, and some episodes were distinctly ho-hum. Others, however were thought provoking in the extreme. As an 18 year old unsure gay man, about to go up to University, their programme about the then-new “gay plague” sweeping San Francisco in 1981/2 was the sort of program that made one sit back and have a really hard think about life. However, I remember a program they did on the subject of CT scanning – computer tomography, whereby the body is “imaged” using a big ring scanner that looked like a huge mint with a hole. It appeared to “slice” the body into microscopically thin layers, and thus allowed you to peer inside and see what was going on. That wasn’t all – they demonstrated some fantastic three dimensional modelling which enabled individual components of the body to be visualised as solid objects. Suddenly, the body wasn’t a collection of microscope slides stacked on top of each other, but a real thing – something you could almost reach out and touch. It was probably using some super-large Silicon Graphics monster workstation costing hundreds of thousands, but this was almost the stuff of science fiction. Modelling what was going on was going to take on a whole new capability, and we were moving into a new era for medical diagnosis. Unfortunately, I was also a big fan of science fiction too. Sitting in the flea-pit cinema in my home town, trying to work out what Kubrick’s “2001” meant when viewed through a scratchy, jumping worn-out film print was the definition of hard work. But there, just a few years hence, was a large spinning orbiting space station, and the music of The Blue Danube was forever changed in the minds of the viewers. Worse still, Mr Roddenberry had redefined the vision of the hospital of the future – the Star Trek medical center was equipped with beds that you laid on, and an overhead computer panel that went “ping” and “bloop” quite frequently. You know, it looked just like that CT scanner. I never really trusted the whirly illuminated thimble device that he waved around – it’s noise just didn’t seem serious enough for the work it was obviously doing. So why the reminiscences about childhood television programmes? Well, over Christmas my mother finally lost her battle against cancer – she’d had two primary breast cancers and we thought it had spread to her liver as secondaries. What we didn’t know until almost the end was that it was actually a new and highly aggressive primary cancer of the lower intestine, and wasn’t related to the previous episodes at all. The quality of care she received, both at The Royal Marsden in London and at the local hospital where I took her via ambulance on Boxing Day, cannot be faulted. You know that they are doing their best when you are prescribed a new research drug from GlaxoSmithKline which is so new it has a few hundred patients taking it worldwide, and it doesn’t even have a name yet – just a long number. Yet, I spent almost one day a week for some 5 months taking Mum down to the Marsden for tests, including a whole batch of CT scans. When she finally fell very ill, she had yet more CT scans. In my innocence, my mind harked back to the Horizon programmes. When the doctors said they could see secondary tumors, I assumed they were there on the nice big 3D image, maybe coloured an appropriate tone of bright red as a warning. Indeed, I expected they could tell what she had eaten for breakfast too, down to the name of the free-range chicken who had laid the egg. It wasn’t to be. Talking to the surgeons, I expressed my surprise and disappointment, both at the lack of hard information that they could offer, and my naiveté for expecting clarity and certainty. At such a time, “maybes” and “it’s likely” and “we believe that” is not the sort of words you want to hear. They showed me the scans. When they had said “it is like looking through a fog, darkly”, they weren’t joking. My vision of beautifully rendered 3D images was taken away and put in the bin. In an attempt to see anything at all, they inject you with “contrast dye”, in the hope that it will improve the quality of the imaging. And even then, everything comes down to the expertise of the person looking at the images, to spot the things that they are looking for. And therein lies the underlying problem – a CT scanner lets you try to find the things you are looking for. It is hard for it to highlight things you are not. So this is my complaint. I want machines that go warble and ping. I want CT scanners that produce fully rendered 3D images in real time. Most of all I want a clever bed which can tell you that you have stubbed your toe, had a ham sandwich for lunch, and theres something not so happy in your lower colon. After all, I was promised it as a child and now its time for payback. Come back, Bones, all is forgiven. Even your acting. Tags: cancer, epilog
Current Location: Lab
Current Mood:  pensive
Current Music: The Who -- Geting In Tune
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I am a complete fan of Apple iTunes and the iPod. I carry it with me wherever I go, and especially love using it in the car. It makes long flights bearable, because I slip on the utterly fantastic Bose noise cancelling headphones, tune-out the noise and snooze along listening to Joan Armatrading, Maria Callas or someone of equivalent talent. I will long remember flying over the Brazilian Amazonian rain forest last year. The air was crystal clear, it was dawn, and you could see each tree. At 35,000 feet, armed with a medicinally sized Gin &Tonic, the only music that seemed appropriate was Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello played by the incomparable Pierre Fournier. And now with the arrival of the iTunes Music Store, my life is almost complete. I can browse, taste, try and purchase, all at the click of a mouse button. And it automatically lands down into my iPod for listening when I am next out and about. In the lab, the iMac is wired up to some Naim amplifiers and some KEF Reference speakers, so we don’t skimp on music quality there either. There is almost nothing to fault in the entire system, providing you can get along with the requirements of digital rights management and the concept and practise of doing regular backups. I say “almost”, because there is a nagging doubt that we have lost something very precious, and almost irreplaceable along the way. ( read more )Tags: epilog
Current Music: All I ask of you (The Phantom of the Opera)
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Epilog 122 In my travelling around, I have used just about every method of connecting to the Internet from a laptop. In the beginning, I had a serial cable which plugged into the GSM phone, and I made a data call over the phone system to a modem at the other end. Then along came GPRS data streaming, which was a significant improvement, although the pricing left something to be desired. Somewhere in there, Bluetooth started being useful, so the wire was dispensed with. And there was the whole debacle where I tried to convince myself that a Palm or Windows CE device was actually adequate. All this fell apart when I got my first Tablet PC, because this was something I could carry around like a pad of A4 paper and do real work. The killer app was OneNote so I could doodle, record meetings, and also run real applications too. I will never forget the time I finally gave up on the “Microsoft Word” and “Excel” abominations found on Windows CE – it resulted in a shiny new Compaq iPaq being thrown across the lab. For some unknown reason, it never worked well after that incident. ( read more )Tags: epilog
Current Music: All I ask of you (The Phantom of the Opera)
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Epilog 124 Politics and politicians are two things I do my very best to steer clear of. It doesn’t seem to matter who you vote for, a politician always gets in. My dear departed Grandfather had the right idea – he maintained that they were all on the make, doing their best to climb the greasy pole, and that one should be taken out and shot every month just to keep the others in line. Appealing though his views might be, some might think they were a trifle radical. Still, at a recent poetry evening by Felix Dennis, owner of all things PCPro (and many other titles too), he admitted to having given a slug of money to the Labour Party who were then in opposition. It was clear from his expression that this wasn’t a gesture he would be repeating in a hurry. (And if you get the chance to go to a Felix poetry evening, I cannot recommend it highly enough – www.felixdennis.com will tell you of the current itinerary) Lest anyone think I hold any party political position, let me say that I find them all equally abhorrent, placing them just below estate agents. Naturally, they are still above lawyers, but then who isn’t? My voting apathy will continue until the politicians have the guts to allow a “None of the above” tickbox on the ballet paper. ( read more )Tags: epilog
Current Music: All I ask of you (The Phantom of the Opera)
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Epilog 125 So farewell, old friend. You time has come to call it a day, to admit that the world has had enough of you, and that technology has caught up. I am referring, of course, to the demise of the VHS video recorder. It hasnt actually shuffled off this mortal coil just yet, but the writing is on the wall when a major high street electrical chain decides its time to clear the shelves. This is a product that has had an enormously long life, and is proof positive, if any were needed, that media devices aimed at the mass market home environment have to be static in design for years if they are to have any hope of succeeding. It wont be long before pre-recorded VHS tapes are cleared from the shelves of the supermarkets either. The rise of DVD is now almost complete, and prices of DVD players has hit rock bottom. Online vendors will sell you one for a few tens of pounds, at which point it really is game over for any sort of price war. ( read more )Tags: epilog
Current Music: The Music of the Night (The Phantom of the Opera)
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Epilog 126 In the words of the Monty Python sketch, “I wish to register a complaint”. Like many of the, shall we say, more mature readers of PCPro, I was born in the 1960s. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to descend into a ramble about how life begins at 40, or even how the wonderful editorial crew of PCPro hadn’t been conceived when I first laid hands on a micro-computer in my distant youth. No, I am here to complain that science isn’t delivering on the promise. Back in my teenage years, I was an avid watcher of BBC’s Horizon programme, and other science programmes too. However, Horizon always seemed to be the best, the most focussed. It wasn’t particularly consistent, and some episodes were distinctly ho-hum. Others, however were thought provoking in the extreme. As an 18 year old unsure gay man, about to go up to University, their programme about the then-new “gay plague” sweeping San Francisco in 1991/2 was the sort of program that made one sit back and have a really hard think about life. ( read more )Tags: epilog
Current Mood:  angry
Current Music: The Music of the Night (The Phantom of the Opera)
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Epilog 127 Tipping points are interesting things to watch out for. Those little things that tell you that something big has happened, even if it isn’t immediately obvious. A tipping point happens when something fundemental changes in a marketplace. It might not be visible, but you just know that things aren’t the same any more. Back in my very first Epilog column, I wrote a deliberately provocative piece saying that the PC was a mess, and that the operating system for it, in the shape of the Windows desktop, left much to be desired. I didn’t pull my punches either, saying: “In the PC market, this is just more "me too" so-called engineering wrapped up in "all tinsel and no Christmas tree." A lowest common denominator "it will do" illness and a cost-cutting frenzy par excellence pervades almost everything most vendors do. When the ingredients are like this, it's no wonder PCs are so costly to maintain. Ask yourself why total cost of ownership is such an issue now: when did you last think about TCO on your fridge? And you wilfully give money for this stuff.” Sounds strangely familiar, doesn’t it? Just to ram the point home, I closed with the cry of “I have a brain. I have an Apple Macintosh. What's your excuse?” ( read more )Tags: epilog
Current Music: The Music of the Night (The Phantom of the Opera)
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Epilog 128 I have lost my temper with Google, and its hard to see how I will calm down enough to return to using it daily. What have they done to upset me, you might well ask? Well, my dissatisfaction with Google has been growing for months. Probably even years, if I was honest about it. Back in the early days of the web, search engines were like a revelation from above. Suddenly, the space of knowledge that we could access went way beyond what our friends and family knew, or the pages of links that sprung up at the time. It seemed like a miracle – instant access to new stuff, with nothing in the way. And it was free, too. Like all good things that are free, of course, it had to come to an end. As the Internet exploded in size, the amount of index crawling and data storage exploded as well. Keeping an index up to date was a huge task. Worse still, building the software to do the queries in an efficient manner was really bleeding edge stuff – a lot of this work was effectively being done for the first time ever. We hadn’t had data sets this large to work with either. So there was no great surprise that the available competitive engines shone bright for a time and then waned, as new engines dreamed up better algorithms to use. ( read more )Tags: epilog
Current Music: The Music of the Night (The Phantom of the Opera)
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