FIFA, corruption and the Olympic five-ring circus

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It’s not often that I agree with Simon Jenkins, but the news that Dave Cameron is going to FIFA to plead Britain’s case to host the 2018 World Cup has annoyed him almost as much as it annoys me.

Britain should have no truck with a body like Fifa, any more than it should with the International Olympic Committee or those who run much of international sport. Five minutes spent with the cuttings, or trawling such websites as playthegame and transparencyinsport, should have stopped Cameron being photographed shaking hands with Blatter at Downing Street. His staff should have read Andrew Jennings’ Foul! on Blatter, and thrown in Christopher Shaw’s Five Ring Circus, about the IOC, for good measure.

Incident after incident, case after case, has shown these self-governing supranational apparatus riddled with accusations of backhanders, bribes and fixed votes – often quite legal in the countries where they carefully base themselves, such as Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Their officials jet the world, pushing the one narcotic to which all modern governments are addicted – sporting glory.

For decades the IOC turned a blind eye to the communist bloc’s use of drugs to boost performance, or China’s (and Tony Blair’s) exploitation of the Olympics for political ends. It now demands inexcusable outlays of taxpayers’ money to stage its two-week festival of minority sports. When the IOC demands an exclusive “Zil lane” for its official cars up London’s Mile End Road, the British government meekly obeys. It would not offer this to a head of state.

Likewise Fifa turns a blind eye to longstanding charges of vote rigging. Its laughable ethics committee deplored last month’s revelations as “unethical” and “rumours”, though it was forced to suspend six of the alleged “vote fixers” named in the paper. Fifa’s Blatter has contrived to keep his job for 36 years, by means that would do credit to a Muammar Gaddafi. He professes “surprise” at talk of bribes while banning journalists like Jennings who ask questions about them from his press conferences…

Right on. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to a delightful three weeks in Provence while the London Olympics are on.

The amateur dictator

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For years, I have wanted to use speech recognition software, but have always held back because the best product – Dragon Dictate – ran only under Windows, and I am a Mac user. But the company has released a version of the program for OS X, and I’ve just installed it. And this blog post is the first I’ve ever done simply by talking to the machine.

The accuracy of Dragon Dictate is scary. The strange thing is that we used to think that successful speech recognition was a problem for Artificial Intelligence. What none of us suspected was that it was a problem that could be solved using statistics and brute-force calculation. In fact, many years ago I knew someone in Cambridge – Frank Fallside – who was one of the pioneers of this approach to speech recognition. He died tragically young, so it’s nice to see how his work eventually came to fruition.

Android’s fragmentation problem

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One of my boys has recently adopted my Android phone after his 6-year-old Motorola handset finally gave up the ghost, and it’s been interesting to observe his reactions. On the one hand, he’s charmed by finally having a handheld device that connects properly to the Net and the Web. But his experiences with Android Apps mirror mine, namely that there not much quality control, great variability and many Apps won’t work with lots of handsets. In fact, he’s experiencing the problems that finally drove me to get an iPhone.

What he hasn’t experienced yet, though, is the maddening control-freakery of the mobile carriers in relation to updating the OS on the handset. First of all, they accept no responsibility for the OS; and secondly, even when they grudgingly offer some upgrade facility, it’s often flaky and sometimes requires serious geek skills to implement. A friend of my daughter’s has the same Android handset (a t-mobile Pulse) and when I asked her what version of the OS it was running she said “I think it’s 2 point something”. Surprised (because she is not in the least geeky), I asked her how she’d done the upgrade from the version 1.5 that’s running on my handset. She replied that her brother — who is an engineering student and a real geek — does the upgrades for her. But then she added: “the only problem is that it crashes a bit after he’s done the upgrade”.

Dan Gillmor has an interesting piece in Salon.com in which he explores some of these issues.

The first problem, as I noted in a recent post, is that Google has given the mobile carriers nearly total control over the phones they sell — including the software. In the process, they’re taking Android — an open-source operating system when it gets to the carrier — and turning it into an operating system that removes user choice, by adding software that locks down the devices in ways that are even worse, in some respects, than the famous Apple control-freakery. At least Apple doesn’t load crapware — mostly unwanted, unneeded and un-removable software — onto the iPhone and iPad, as the carriers are doing with their Android devices. This has forced users to jailbreak their Android phones, a perversion of the very idea of openness.

We’ve seen the consequences of mixing manufacturer control-freakery with open source OSs already in the Netbook market, with every vendor offering its own infuriating version of Linux Lite. I’m tired of having to clear the disk of every Netbook I try in order to install Ubuntu. But at least the Ubuntu people take responsibility for their distribution, and they’re very helpful in relation to different brands of Netbook. Google should do the same for Android.

The iPadification of Mac OS

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Hmmm… Apropos my column pondering the implications of iOS for Apple computers, here are some interesting thoughts on the same subject.

But it is the changes coming in Lion that are inspired by the iPad's user interface that will have broader ramifications for the future of all Macs, even desktops. These include the Launchpad screen and its folder-creation method, (OS-level support for) full-screen apps, auto-save and auto-resume. As with the iPad-inspired hardware changes, these will bring tradeoffs. Many of these make computing more accessible to newcomers, a path that Apple has doggedly pursued since the dawn of the Mac. To Apple's benefit, they also differentiate Mac OS further from Windows and tie together Apple's products better.

For veteran users, though, the changes may not represent an ideal execution. For example, auto-save can be a lifesaver, but for productivity applications it is ideally implemented with version control that is generally not in iPad apps today and which can be a confusing concept to new users. Similarly, the Launchpad interface may be effective for a world without mice or hierarchical folders, but Apple already offers the dock and the Applications folder for easily browsing programs. And with tried and true aids such as list view and sorting, one can take advantage of larger displays to view more apps at a glance without having to wander among screens, particularly when hunting for apps that are used less often.

But the hope is that Apple will blend them into the Mac OS rather than graft them on. Just as with the new MacBook Air, the key is to recognize what is relevant and what is not.

Apple hasn't yet offered extensive details on how these iPad calques will work in Lion; there doesn't seem to be any requirement for users to use these in Lion. But the hope is that Apple will blend them into the Mac OS rather than graft them on. Just as with the new MacBook Air, the key is to recognize what is relevant and what is not. For example, while Apple has dismissed physical keyboards on its iDevices, it continues to treat them as sacrosanct on the Mac, ensuring that its smallest notebook still has a keyboard with full-sized keys with spacing…

John Gruber has some interesting thoughts about this — as usual. For example:

iOS apps do run on Mac OS X, today, in the iPhone/iPad emulator that ships with the iOS developer kit. Ends up they’re just not that pleasant to use on a Mac. Gestures that are natural and fun with direct touch are awkward and clumsy using a mouse or touchpad. I never hear iPad developers — who run their own iOS apps on their Macs during development, for testing and debugging purposes — wish that they could ship them as-is to Mac users. Ever try a game like Pac-Man on the iPhone? A game that’s designed from the ground up around a hardware joystick or D-pad just isn’t very good on a device without a joystick. Everything about iOS apps is like that when you run them on a Mac. (And, conversely, popular iOS games like Angry Birds tend to feature controls that only really make sense with a touchscreen.)

iOS 4.2 for iPad: the gist

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Really useful walkthrough for those of us too busy to poke into the innards. Summary:

iOS 4.2 on iPad is a revelation. It’s the way iPad is meant to be. That’s not to say it’s perfect or has every feature on every geek’s wish list — it certainly doesn’t — but it has enough new functionality to make iPad much more valuable.

Like with iOS 4 on iPhone, multitasking and folders extend the existing UI in a way that gives power users what they need, but keeps casual users either grounded in familiar metaphor, and feature-phone types blissfully unaware it’s even there.

AirPrint addresses an important bit of functionality for home and business alike, and AirPlay has the potential to turn the TV video scene upside down.

Worth browsing in full. I learned a lot from it.

Something missing?

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Raymond Williams once quoted an observation that his father had made about someone in their village. “He’s the kind of man”, said Williams Snr, “who turns on a switch and isn’t surprised when the light comes on”.

Apologies for the absence of apostrophes in the captioning, but it came with the embed.

Thanks to Hap for the link.