Tom West RIP

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Gosh: here’s something from a vanished age. Tom West, the engineer who created Data General’s Eclipse 32-bit mini and was immortalised in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine has died at the age of 71. He was rightly credited with saving Data General (DG) after DEC announced its VAX supermini in 1976

The Register carried a nice obit. Sample:

He was a folk singer towards the end of the 1950s and worked at the Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, Mass, before returning to Amherst and gaining a bachelor’s degree in Physics. He continued working at the Smithsonian, going to other observatories and ensuring that the time was precisely synchronised.

West then joined the RCA corporation and learned about computers, being largely self-taught, and then joined Data General and worked his way up the engineering ladder.

DEC shipped its VAX 32-bit supermini in 1978. This was in the era well before Intel’s X86 desktops and servers swept the board, when real computer companies designed their own processors. The 16-bit minicomputer era had boomed and DEC was the number one company. DG was the competitive number two sometimes known as ‘the bastards’ after a planned newspaper ad that never ran, and was a Fortune 500 company worth $500m. But 16-bit minis were running out of address space (memory capacity) for the apps they wanted to run.

DG launched its own 32-bit supermini project known as Fountainhead. It wasn’t ready when DEC shipped the VAX 11/780 in February 1978 and suffered from project management problems, so it is said. West, far from convinced that Fountainhead would deliver the goods, started up a secret back-room or skunkworks project called Eagle to build the Eclipse MV/8000, a 32-bit extension of the 16-bit Nova Eclipse mini. He staffed it with an esoteric mixture of people, some of them recent college graduates, and motivated them not with cash, shares or external incentives but by the sheer difficulty of what they were trying to do. It was described as pinball game management. If you got to succeed with this project or pinball game the reward was that you got to work on the next, more difficult pinball game.

Gordon Haff (who worked with Tom) described Kidder’s book as “perhaps the best narrative of a technology-development project ever written” and I agree with him. Its real significance, though, was that it was the first book to awaken the non-tech world to the idea that the computing business was a really vibrant, intriguing phenomenon.

Narrative Drift and mainstream media

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Very perceptive blog post about the BBC Social Media ‘summit’ by Adam Tinworth. Sample:

My abiding impression of the BBC Social Media Summit was of a bunch of people who are still trying to incorporate social media into their pre-existing narrative. They are trying to rope new communication technology onto the conventions of the past. They are using petrol engines to pull carriages once pulled by horses, while others are busy pottering around in cars.

Those who believe that Twitter is mainly about “broadcast” for mainstream organisations are not just wrong, they are wilfully ignoring the experience, successes and failures of many others. And that was one of the most powerful messages that came out of the summit to me – that some people will work very hard to exclude the experiences of others that challenge their own preconceptions of their working environment. I’ve called this “special pleading” in the past. Every single market we serve at RBI has given me reasons why social media won’t work in their market. Most memorably, someone from Computer Weekly gave me a long speech on why people in the tech industry would never, ever use social media. Ever single piece of special pleading has been proved to be false.

Elements of the “mainstream” media have already started to change their narratives. Alan Rushbridger’s mention of “mutual media” was probably the most compelling sentence uttered in the entire day. But then compare the name of his publication – The Guardian – to the Telegraphs, Mails, Heralds, and Mercurys – broadcast names all, in their own ways. His implies a relationship with the people they serve beyond that of those-who-are-speaking and those-who-are-listening. The others do not.

Until the mainstream of the “mainstream” media learn that 10,000 quiet voices can be more powerful than a single loud one, then days like last Friday will have elements that are useful and even compelling – and I think the talk from Al Jazeera was one of those – but ultimately be dominated by too many voices raging against the irrelevance of their own story. They no longer have an angle, and they hate it.

And while we’re on the subject, why does every conference now have to be a “summit”?

#PRfail. Or how not to get attention

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Aw, isn’t that nice. This email just popped into my mailbox from a PR firm which shall be nameless.

Hi John,

I’m getting in touch because I thought you’d be interested in hearing about a new celebrity mobile video service launching today. It’s called Sparkle.

Sparkle brings you video messages from the stars, direct and unedited. It is the only subscription-based mobile video service that guarantees regular authentic, never-before-seen footage of genuine stars. Sparkle connects you via video message directly from your favourite celebrities’ mobile phone to your own, at least three times a week.

Sparkle is launching to coincide with the Gumball 3000 Rally 2011. Celebrity Gumballers including Hollywood’s Christian Slater, the cast of Dirty Sanchez, hip-hop star Eve and Sparkle Ambassador Tamer Hassan will film and share their Rally experience in real time only on Sparkle.

We’d like to give you the chance to test Sparkle for free.

Note the cheery familiar tone, and the assumption that a tech blogger might be interested in news about celebs — which suggests a complete failure to do any background research on the intended recipient of such trash!

And the funny thing is that until this moment I thought that Sparkle was some kind of domestic cleaning product. It isn’t — but it’s a lot of other things besides.

Apple makes late entry into whack-a-mole game

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley.

After weeks of dodging the issue of a recent widespread malware outbreak, Apple has changed course and is addressing affected customers’ concerns.

On Tuesday, Apple finally posted instructions on its support site on how to avoid or remove the malicious program, and said an Mac OS X update in the coming days will remove it or block it from installing in the first place.

The MacDefender malware, one of the few to actually target Mac operating systems, is a phishing program that fools users into thinking they are downloading anti-virus protection when it’s actually going after credit-card information. ZDNet estimates between 60,000 and 125,000 Mac users have been affected in the past month, and in an eyebrow-raising report quoted an Apple tech support insider who said they were expressly forbidden from helping callers remove the malicious program. That supported leaked internal documents that Gizmodo published last week which, among other things, told customer service reps: “AppleCare does not provide support for removal of the malware. You should not confirm or deny whether the customer’s Mac is infected or not.”

While support from Apple is a welcome development, the company’s initial reaction is disturbing from a customer-service standpoint. Just as disturbing to many Mac users is the realization that their OS’s, so long considered safe from most Internet viruses, are not immune after all.

This is beginning to look like a pattern. Remember the clueless way Apple handled the problem with the iPhone 4 antenna and then the controversy about the ‘bug’ which enabled iPhones to accumulate and store unencrypted location data on the devices? The problem Apple has is that its reputation for effortless design superiority now leads to corporate paralysis whenever events threaten to undermine the image.

And of course there is the problem that as the Mac becomes more and more successful, the juicier a target it presents for malware.

UPDATE: The Apple advisory note is already out of date.

Ed Bott says “File that memo under, ‘Too little, too late.'”

Within 12 hours of Apple’s announcement, the author of the original Mac Defender program had a new variant available that renders key portions of the current Mac Defender prevention plan obsolete.

A security researcher for Intego, the Mac-centric security company that identified the original Mac Defender, found the first example of this new code via a poisoned Google search very early this morning.

Several factors make this specimen different. For starters, it has a new name: MacGuard. That’s not surprising, given that the original program already had at least three names. But this one is divided into two separate parts.

The first part is a downloader. In the original version, this asked the user to enter his or her administrator password. The new version works on the assumption (generally correct) that most Macs are single-user machines –which means that the user has the requisite privileges and so the malware bypasses the admin-password dialogue. The software then installs an application named avRunner, which launches automatically and installs the second part, which is similar to the original Mac Defender. The installer then deletes itself from the user’s Mac, so no traces of the original installer are left behind.

So Apple is now embarked on the same game of whack-a-mole that Microsoft has had to play for years. The evidence so far suggests that Steve Jobs & Co aren’t experienced players. Maybe they need help from Redmond, where they know more about this than anybody else.

Lies, damn lies and laptop dimensions

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I spotted Dell’s claim on a piece of junk mail that came through our letterbox the other day but thought that life is too short to go checking ads. Fortunately, the eagle-eyed chaps at the Guardian checked out the small print.

Noted in passing: advert for the Dell XPS-15, containing the phrase

“Finally, the power you crave in the thinnest 15″ PC on the planet*.”

Wow, the thinnest? But wait, what’s the asterisk?

Small print time: “Based on Dell internal analysis as at February 2011. Based on a thickness comparison (front and rear measurements) of other 15″ laptop PCs manufactured by HP, Acer, Toshiba, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, MSI. No comparison made with Apple or other manufacturers not listed.”

From Engadget’s review of the XPS-15: “it’s actually a few hairs thicker than a 15-inch MacBook Pro, wider, and at 5.54 pounds, it weighs practically the same.”

So that would make the XPS-15 the world’s thinnest… apart from any thinner 15-inch laptops it wasn’t compared against. This seems an interesting way to proceed with future advertising: the most powerful in the world* (apart from others that are more powerful). And so on.

Well spotted, guys.

Expensive revelations

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If you’re a Leica user, this is a distressing picture. Why? Because the Tri-Elmar retails in the UK for an eye-watering £3198.

I came on it via a tweet by @jwcgraves pointing to Cory Doctorow’s post on BoingBoing, in which he observed:

Hefting and peering through a high-end camera lens, you get a sense of the craft, the precision engineering, and the thoughtful design that went into it. But look at it in cross-section, as with this photo a neatly bisected Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm lens and the hellish, gorgeous complexity is revealed in a visceral way: “These were actually made by Leica students as a graduation project and boxed as a ‘cutaway model’ of the lens.”

The costs of futility: a footballer’s guide to Twitter

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My Observer colleague Peter Preston had terrific piece about the lawyers-vs-Twitter controversy in yesterday’s paper in which he highlighted an aspect of all this that has not received the attention it deserves. This is the fact that the motive force behind the growth in privacy injunctions is not just the intrusiveness of the British tabloid media, but the enterprising greed of London’s leading law firms. As he puts it,

The other defining change of the last 12 years has gradually seen the essential big earner for England’s small but richly endowed libel bar sliding away. English libel law, offering heavy damages, huge fees and real advantages to a prospective litigant, has slowly become another victim of the digital revolution. Our courts have traditionally welcomed cases from all over the globe, however vestigial publication to a UK audience may have been. In that sense, the internet seemed to offer still plumper pickings. But American administrations, first at a state then a national level, became disgusted by the justice they saw meted out to their citizens by the Strand. They have decided that no English ruling that infringes the right to free speech can be enforced across the Atlantic. Our own politicians, spurred into action, are seeking to reform the gross imbalances of English libel.

And this decline in libel rewards is fundamentally connected to the rise in privacy speculation since 1998. Max Mosley could have chosen libel, but opted for privacy. Lawyers, naturally, have moved into this fresh, potentially lush area of litigation. Sweeping injunctions – nobody has quite counted them yet – have become the weapon of first resort. Sometimes (as with Trafigura’s attempt to gag the Guardian) the case has been too outrageous to endure. More typically, though, the queue of celebrities at the court door has succeeded in buying expensive secrecy for marital misdeeds – even if some, such as Andrew Marr, eventually repented of going to court.

(Emphasis added).

What’s going on, I suspect, is that law firms are encouraging clients to splash out on what they (the lawyers, that is) must know is futile expenditure. In the case of footballers earning anything up to £200k a week, the fees probably look like small beer, so there’s clearly room for business expansion here — for lawyers.

In the interests of helping innocent footballers I’ve built a simple DIY calculator which will enable the average footballer to work out how much it will cost him to fail to get a US court to force Twitter to reveal the identify of Twitterers. It assumes that a US law firm will also be needed to do the business on the American side. On the assumptions I started with, it looks like the minimum cost would be about two days’ wages.

Copyright, copywrongs and Professor Hargreaves

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Today’s Observer column.

Watching British politicians engage with technology companies is a bit like listening to maiden aunts wondering if they would look better in thongs. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to name just two such aunts, fantasised that Microsoft was cool, and spent years trying to associate themselves (and New Labour) with Bill Gates – even going to the lengths of making the Microsoft boss an honorary knight. Then we had the equally ludicrous spectacle of Cameron and co believing that Google is cool, which is why its CEO, Eric Schmidt – who for these purposes is the Google Guys’ representative on Earth – was an honoured guest at Cameron’s first party conference as leader. Given that, it’s only a matter of time before Ed Miliband discovers that Facebook is the new cool. And so it will go on.

Cameron’s worship of Google did, however, have one tangible result. Mortified by the Google Guys' assertion that the UK’s intellectual property regime would have made it impossible to launch their company in the UK, he decided to commission an inquiry into said regime under the chairmanship of Professor Ian Hargreaves.