Microsoft backs down

I can’t believe I wrote that, but it’s true. Redmond has decided not to appeal the EU instruction to produce a stripped-down version of Windows. Stand by for Windows sans MS Media Player. Yippee!

(Not that it matters personally to me. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly used Media Player.)

Pass the sickbag, Alice

In some ways, the Financial Times is an excellent newspaper. In other ways, it’s nauseating. Once a month, for example, it publishes a glossy supplement entitled How to Spend It aimed at folks who think they’re under-dressed if they don’t have a Breitling watch or a gold-plated Rolex. Last Saturday the paper’s restaurant critic, one Nicholas Lander, took the gold medal for pretentious tosh when he wrote about lunching at La Tour d’Argent in Paris. Here’s a sample:

“It is important therefore to find some balance in the choice of wine and to bear in mind that as this list has been slowly and scrupulously accumulated, the prices of the older vintages are remarkably gentle for a restaurant of this standing. We drank a 1990 Faller Schlossberg Riesling (95 Euros), and a 1991 Gevrey Chambertin Abeille from Ponsot (109 Euros) both less than the least expensive wine on the list at the three-star Michelin Arpege across town. The Japanese couple next to us chose well, spending 1,400 Euros on a bottle of 1991 Ta Tache. This wine can easily cost 850 Euros retail”.

The bill for six, you will be interested to learn, came to 1,030 Euros (£725) — “considerably less than I had paid for a far less satisfactory experience at L’Arpege”.

The Mac comes of age

Twenty-one years ago today, the Apple Mac was launched.

A collective of German Mac fans has digitised the only surviving video tape of the launch. The recording features all the often-told moments of the launch – from Steve Jobs’s bow tie (how diferent from the jeans and black turtlenext of today) to the moment he pulls the Mac from the bag, and the huge grin he casts at the assembled early Church of Mac at the now-demolished Flint Center in Cupertino. Until today the video has never been seen online. But now it’s available on several mirror Web sites (list here). It shows, among other things, the demonstration of the computer’s ability to convert text-to-speech — when Macintosh said “hello” to the assembled multitude.

In my book I wrote about my own first encounter with the Mac. I’ve just dug out what I wrote. Here it is:

“It happened at a workshop for academics known to be interested in personal computing which was organised by Apple UK at the University Arms hotel in Cambridge.

The venue was a stuffy conference suite ringed with tables covered in green baize. On each table stood an astonishing little machine with a nine-inch screen and a detached keyboard. Compared with the clunky, three-box design which then represented the industry’s idea of what a personal computer should look like, these elegant little machines seemed, well, just gorgeous. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one.

After an initial spiel by the Apple crowd, we were let loose on the machines. They had been set up, for some unfathomable reason, displaying a picture of a fish. It was, in fact, a MacPaint file. I remember staring at the image, marvelling at the way the scales and fins seemed as clear as if they had been etched on the screen. After a time I picked up courage, clicked on the ‘lassoo’ tool and selected a fin with it. The lassoo suddenly began to shimmer. I held down the mouse button and moved the rodent gently. The fin began to move across the screen!

Then I pulled down the Edit menu, and selected Cut. The fin disappeared. Finally I closed the file, confirmed the decision in the dialog box, and reloaded the fish from disk. As the image reappeared I experienced what James Joyce would call an epiphany: I remember thinking, this is the way it has to be. I felt what Douglas Adams later described as ‘that kind of roaring, tingling, floating sensation’ which characterised his first experience of MacPaint. In the blink of an eye — the time it took to retrieve the fish from disk — all the DECwriter teletypes and dumb terminals and character-based displays which had been essential parts of my computing experience were consigned to the scrapyard. I had suddenly seen the point — and the potential — of computer graphics.

All this was Bill Atkinson’s doing. In the circumstances, to call him a programmer is like calling Christian Dior a dressmaker. Atkinson is in fact a genius, or at the very least an artist whose medium just happens to be software.”

Note for non-Macintosh folks: Bill Atkinson was the programmer who wrote MacPaint. He later wrote HyperCard. Not many people change the world twice in one lifetime.

Ubuntu Linux

I’ve just installed a lovely big Linux server for the Naughton household. It’s running the Ubuntu distribution, which is the distro we’ve decided on for the Ndiyo project. Ubuntu is an elegant, sparse, easy-to-install distribution based on Debian but with African connections (‘Ubuntu’ is an African word meaning, roughly, “humanity towards others”) but is relatively unknown over here. So it’s nice to discover that other people like it too.

No place like home

Quentin’s back, with a nice essay on what makes England special for him. “As I flew in to Heathrow yesterday”, he writes, “we came in on my favourite flight path, which goes right over the centre of London and affords spectacular views of the Thames, the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge etc. It wasn’t that view that made my heart skip a beat and showed me how glad I was to be back, though. It was shortly before, when I looked out of the window and saw the patchwork of irregular, small, odd-shaped fields with tree-lined public footpaths between them. I don’t know where it was. Warwickshire, probably. But it sure as hell ain’t America.”

I know just what he means. The view from a descending aircraft can be very evocative. I remember one morning in 1989 flying into Knock airport in Mayo (where I was born) and looking down at the rocky, boggy landscape and suddenly hearing in my head these lines of Seamus Heaney’s:

I come from the scraggy farm and moss,
Old patchworks that the pitch and toss
Of history has left disheveled.

The helium-filled Inaugural

Scott Rosenberg on Dubya’s nauseating Inaugural Address:

“Empty language untethered from the perplexing world we occupy and from the messy events of the last four years, sentences floating off into an empyrean of millennial vagaries.

The world is a simple place to Bush. For him, ‘the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right’ is one that involves no hard calls. And since America represents freedom and freedom is eternally right, it must still be right even when it locks hundreds of people away for life without trial or it tortures prisoners in a war launched on a lie. We are the forces of freedom; we can admit no wrong because we can do no wrong.”

Sixty years on

Next Wednesday is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Tonight BBC2 screened a memorable film — Auschwitz: a musical memorial in which survivors told of they way they had played to save their lives, and great contemporary musicians played in the ruins of the camp.

In an earlier life, I worked on the New Statesman with Dick Crossman, the celebrated Labour politician, cabinet minister (in Harold Wilson’s government) and diarist and once, during a conversation about the Second World War, he told me an extraordinary story.

Photo from Spartacus Schoolnet

Crossman had served in the Psychological Warfare Department during the war and arrived at one of the death camps just after it had been liberated by the British army. After absorbing the initial shock, Crossman demanded that the commanding officer summon an army Film Unit to record what they were uncovering. The officer protested, arguing that they had much more important, humanitarian, work to do. Why did Crossman want a film crew just then. “Because”, Dick replied, “some day people will deny that this ever happened”.

Teardrops

A window decoration, shot against the evening light.

On this day…

… in 1972, in its Roe vs. Wade decision, the US Supreme Court legalised abortion in the US under certain conditions. Wonder if the judgment will survive Dubya’s second term.

… in 1905, Tsarist police and Cossack troops fired on 150,000 unarmed demonstrators who had assembled to petition the Tsar outside the Winter palace in St. Petersburg. Over a hundred demonstrators were killed and several hundred wounded.

Why Sony blew it

One of the really baffling things is why smart technology companies don’t seem to understand how self-defeating an obsession with intellectual property can be. So here’s something new.

‘Father of PlayStation’ says Sony blew it on media players is the headline on a fascinating story on SiliconValley.com. It continues: “Sony missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content, the head of Sony Corp.’s video-game unit acknowledged Thursday. Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., said he and other Sony employees have been frustrated for years with management’s reluctance to introduce products like Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod, mainly because the Tokyo company had music and movie units that were worried about content rights. Now, Sony’s divisions are finally beginning to work together and share a common agenda, Kutaragi said at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo.

‘It’s just starting,’ he told reporters. ‘We are growing up.’

High-ranking Sony officials have rarely publicly said their proprietary views were a mistake. Kutaragi, who has long been viewed as a candidate to lead Sony, was unusually direct in acknowledging Sony had made an error and blaming proprietary concerns from its entertainment division.”