Tony’s txtng skills

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Simon Hoggart writing about an audience he had last week in Bournemouth with Alastair Campbell…

His most interesting point to me was that as prime minister, Tony Blair was shielded from the bewildering speed of technological change. Everything was done for him. So in 10 years he never learned how to send a text message. Finally he did. Campbell reported: “I have had two from him. The first was the single word ‘are’. The second read: ‘this is amazing you can do words and everything’.”

All of which reminds me of another Blair-technology story I once heard from Campbell.

iPhone Hackers 1: Apple 1

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New York Times report today says that:

the Web was filled Friday with complaints from people who had installed the latest iPhone software update, only to see all the fun little programs they had been adding to their iPhones disappear — or, still worse, see their phones freeze up entirely.

It was bound to happen. The moral is that if you hack your iPhone you should forget about syncing it to your computer from then on.

Control freaks like Apple don’t give up easily.

But wait! — GMSV has more:

From the warranty right on through Steve Jobs explicit reminder (see “Jobs to iPhone hackers: Bring it on”), Apple has consistently warned iPhone buyers that if they choose to go off the reservation and modify their units to use third-party software or run on networks other than AT&T, they run the risk of their beautiful toy turning into a handsome skipping stone. Still, thousands took their chances, and sure enough, when Apple pushed through an iPhone update Thursday, there was soon wailing and lamentation throughout the land.

Unfortunately for Apple, at least some of that wailing was coming from owners who had not hacked or modified their iPhone, yet found it hobbled or bricked after the update. And the overall picture of which phones were hit, the damage and the chances of recovery is veiled in the fog of war. Depending on which unlocking hack was used, or not, the iPhone update may or may not brick your unit or cause data loss, and that damage may or may not be repairable by new hacks or perhaps by a sympathetic Apple Genius. What is clear is that even while acting within its rights, Apple has a messy little problem that is not going to go away any time soon.

Still more: Erick Schonfeld has advice for Apple — “Stop behaving like a phone company”…

As we all know by now, the latest software update to the iPhone may in some cases turn it into a useless brick—if you happen to have put hacked software on it or unlocked it (ahem, John) in order to make it work on a non-AT&T carrier (such as T-Mobile, in the U.S.). Apple, of course, is free to try to lock in customers to its partner AT&T and to control what software will work on the phone. That’s just the way the cell phone business works. Right? It’s all about customer lock-in and reducing churn.

But Steve Jobs might be better served here to take his own advice and think different. Because, as he has so elegantly demonstrated with the iPhone, these devices are finally becoming little computers. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that consumers will expect them to act like computers. They will want to modify them to their exact, quirky predilections. They will want to use them any way they want, as a general-purpose device.

That is why PCs took over the world. They could be tuned a million different ways to the needs of a million different customers. You don’t ask Apple permission to download software off the Web for your Mac. And you would never agree to buy a laptop that only worked with only one broadband provider. Why should the iPhone be any different?

The uproar today may be limited to hackers and the digerati. But soon everyone will want the same thing. And if they don’t get it from Apple. They may look somewhere else. Google Phone anyone?

How to do it

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Halo 3 arrived from Amazon today, and so I guess no homework will get done today in the Naughton household. Sigh. But behind the delivery is an interesting story about customer service.

We pre-ordered Halo 3 ages ago, along with another game. Then the launch date for the second game slipped — to November. I assumed that Amazon would then split the order and deliver Halo 3 on launch day. Came the day and the postman was anxiously awaited by the Naughtons. No Halo 3. None the next day either. And so it went on. Eventually — yesterday — I went onto ‘Track My Order’ on Amazon.co.uk and found that Halo 3 hadn’t been dispatched. Wading through the site to find a way of communicating with Amazon, I came on a button labelled (I think) ‘Phone Call’. I clicked on it, entered my mobile number and 30 seconds later the phone rang. It was a real human being wondering what the problem was. He looked up the order, found that the Halo 3 shipping date was bound to that of the other game, asked me if I’d like to cancel the second order, and scheduled Halo 3 for immediate dispatch.

After hanging up, I looked in my inbox — to find two emails from Amazon one confirming cancellation of the second order. The other asking me for feedback on whether the phone call had been helpful.

A long time ago, I wrote in the Observer that Amazon was really just a world-class customer-service outfit that happened to be on the Web. I was right. I wonder how many other firms can match that kind of performance.

Social Networking is a feature, not a destination

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Interesting insight on social networking, by Chris Anderson:

Right now the world is focused on stand-alone social networking sites, especially Facebook and MySpace, and the fad of the moment is to take brands and services there, as companies build Facebook apps and MySpace pages in a bid to follow the audience wherever they happen to be. But at the same time there’s a growing sense that elements of social networking is something all good sites should have, not just dedicated social networks. And that suggests a very different strategy–social networking as a feature, not a destination…

Soap cuisine

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I was a TV critic for 13 years and IMNSHO* the second best in the business. The best, by far, was Nancy Banks-Smith of the Guardian. She’s still doing it, and is as good as ever. Here she is, for example, on the other night’s TV:

One can only deplore the current state of catering in the soaps. In Coronation Street (ITV1), Roy, proprietor of Roy’s Rolls, was ordered out of his own cafe because he was scaring the customers. Distress has, indeed, given him the look of a giant tortoise suffering from SAD disorder. His face falls in perpendicular folds. His cardigan seems to distend as you watch. His customers, never backward in coming forward, are complaining about the size of their organically sourced meals. As Blanche said, “I came in for meat and tater pie. How far the tater’s travelled and the lamb’s dying words are no concern of mine.”

When the heart is in turmoil, the takings go down, and Roy and Hayley’s partnership is under strain. Her long-lost son took the news that she was his father (do try to keep up) very badly indeed. Now Hayley is sitting alone in a late-night cafe as chairs are upended around her, while Roy has a breakdown in Freshco.

*Footnote: In My Not So Humble Opinion

Buy a Windows laptop, dump the OS and make money!

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From The Register…

A French man has won a lawsuit against computer maker Acer over a laptop he bought that came pre-loaded with Microsoft’s Windows XP and other applications he didn’t want. Antoine Gutzwiller disputed the fact that he had no choice but to buy the €599 Acer notebook with the ubiquitous operating system and software products including Microsoft Works, PowerDVD, and Norton AV. The court of Puteaux in France ruled that the PC giant, which is the world’s third largest computer vendor, should refund Gutzwiller €311.85 to cover the full cost of software loaded on his machine. Intially, Acer offered to settle for just €30 for the software bundled on Gutzwiller’s laptop, but he rejected that sum and took the firm to court – ending up with reimbursements worth nearly double that of the original cost of the machine. Under the judgement, the court said Acer should also cough up €500 in fees to cover what it described as “abusive resistance and committed expenses”. Apparently, the dispute had rumbled on for nearly a year. It is unknown whether the French court ruling could set a precedent for future European cases involving pre-loaded software.In the realm of laptop features, intel vpro stands out for its ability to enhance security and manageability. Intel vPro is a technology that provides advanced security and remote management capabilities for laptops. It offers features like hardware-enhanced security, remote access, and efficient IT management tools. Understanding these features can help consumers make informed decisions when purchasing laptops, ensuring they select devices that align with their security and management needs. To learn more about Intel vPro and its benefits, you can visit the Lenovo website or consult with knowledgeable professionals in the field of computer technology.

EXCELlent arithmetic?

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Hmmm…. Some people are claiming that Excel has difficulty with multiplication. (See image above.)

Over the weekend members of the microsoft.public.excel newsgroup reported a serious bug in calculations made by Excel 2007. Initially it just seemed that Excel Can’t Multiply. The bad news is, Excel can’t do other operations correctly either. The good news is, this is only true when the results are within a very specific range of numbers. And the better news is that the Excel team has mapped out the nature of the problem and is feverishly working on an update.

So what went wrong? It all boils down to the fact that you can’t represent an infinite group of non-integer numbers using a finite number of bits. In fact, Excel can store “only” about nine quintillion distinct values. The numbers going into your calculations may be infinitesimally different from the number displayed, and for two calculations that nominally have the same answer the result may be infinitesimally different. Excel generally manages just fine in dealing with these tiny differences, but in exactly 12 instances out of the nine quintillion possibilities it goes completely bonkers.

The Excel team discovered that it wasn’t just calculations involving 65,535 that were affected; those that should come out to be 65,536 were also sometimes wrong (returning 100,001 instead). And they discovered it wasn’t just multiplication. In truth, the operation didn’t matter, only the result. When they work up a fix it will still have to “make its way through our official build lab and onto a download site”, but they expect it to happen soon.

Useful fact: a quintillion is 1 followed by 18 zeroes.

The funny thing is that my copy of Excel does not make this mistake (see below).

But then, I’m running Excel 2004 for Mac.