Author: Mosh

Quantum cock-up

Sony unveiled the new PS3 on Monday. The graphics and so on look superb. They always do for 12 months until the pC catches up, anyway.

What grated was one of their representatives saying that it was a “quantum leap” forward in technology, or some such hyperbole. Now what he meant was that it was a huge leap. What he’s actually said is they’ve made the single smallest step forward they could possibly have made while still calling it forward motion.

Stripping away the physics-specific definitions, I got the following from “define: quantum” on Google:

• The smallest discrete amount of any quantity
• The smallest physically realizable unit of something
• Latin – amount
• the smallest unit of a discrete property
• The smallest ‘unit’
• energy and other physical properties exist in tiny, discrete particles
• the smallest amount
• Quantum, which means “smallest part”, is used today in general for the smallest unity of matter, space, time and energy
• the Latin word for a singular amount
• the smallest discrete quantity of some physical property that a system can possess
• A quantum is the smallest increment into which many physical properties are subdivided
• Quantum is a fictional character, an elemental supervillain in the Marvel Comics universe

OK, ignore the last one.

How the definition of the smallest thing measurable turned into something that even Princeton University define as “a sudden large increase or advance” is beyond me.

One rule for them…

Here we go again. A police officer doing 159mph gets off scot free. What a ******* joke. Double the speed limit in slower areas, too.

But it’s OK. He’s done an advanced driving course, he’s experienced, it was early in the morning so the roads were quiet and he was just testing the vehicle out in case he needed to drive it like that in the line of duty.

Cobblers.

Bullshit. Crap. Arse. Gobshite.

I’ve got a friend who has an advanced driving certificate, a clean license and is a very experienced driver. He used to own an Audi TT and he never drove it like that. He never would. Partly because he knows he’d get caught, but mainly because he’s not a ******* arrogant **** who knows he can get away with **** like that because he’s a copper.

What a ******* disgrace. An ambulance driver transporting an organ has to go to court to explain his case, in a bid to keep his job – and he was barely topping 100mph on an empty A1. This ****** was exceeding 60mph in residential areas.

Can anyone kindly explain how the **** this is justifiable?

Last week the training centre from one of our remote sites sent a hard drive up to us from one of their servers. Our task – to put a simple freeware email server on for demo purposes. No worries.

They sent the wrong hard drive.

In fairness, there weren’t many clues as to which drive it was that they’d sent. Apart from the big yellow bit of tape with the server name on the front of the box they took it out of. Or the big yellow bits of tape with that server name and operating system on the drive itself.

So back it went, after we’d got it running just to check it wasn’t the right drive after all, only (vigorously) mislabelled.

Early Monday morning and the trainign department go mental. They can only get one of the applications in the remote training office to work. When they try to connect to the second from the first, all kinds of “cannot open file” errors appear and things fall over. This, obviously, is our fault.

We ring up the on-site trainer and check things with him.

“Did the drive arrive last week?”

“Yes, we got it back and I put it in the server.”

“Hmm. And you say you can’t get to the applications on the server? Can you get to the screen?”

“No – there’s no screen attached to it. It just runs.”

(which is fair enough – it’s a UNIX boxand it usually gets accessed remotely)

“OK, can you just reboot it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not switched on.”

Call closed.

Really. It can be. And not just making custard powder tins explode. Physics can be fun in the office, especially if you have a swivel chair which goes up and down.

Game one – see who can spin the longest, or the most number of times, on their chair. The secret here is the keep your legs close in to you. Try it – legs out… slow down. Legs in… speed up. Centripetal motion at work.

Game two – bouncies! Find out who’s chair is the more sturdy by just bouncing up and down on it until the pressure valve goes *BANG* and you land with a very sore thud on your lower spine. Then swap the chair for the one belonging to the guy who’s off for the day. Do not, however, do this if his name is Nigel, he’s an ex-marine with a short temper and he signs the bottom of his chair in marker pen so he knows when someone’s switched them. Ever seen a big, scary guy lose his temper then sit in the car in a huff till someone gives his chair back?

Game three – spinning/moving waste paper bin basketball. OK, this should be fairly self-explanatory. Have the chair in motion as you try to hit the target. Make it more fun by using stuff like chewing gum. The loser has to scrape it out of the carpet.

As you can see, it’s shaping up to be a busy week in the office.

Literally. I mentioned this in a comment recently and it’s worth hunting out. It’s called Guess-The-Google and it’s fun! My current high score is 325 – feel free to pop yours in the comments.

Check out the rest of the guy’s site, including the program it’s based on. Very smart stuff – simple yet effective.

Rooney puts in another strong challenge

It seems Mr Rooney has gone into someone and caused them damage again. At least this time he may get more than a flipping yellow card.

I thought I hated him before. Now I find out he drives a BMW X5 as well. So he’s an even bigger obnoxious **** than even I figured.

Not exactly Glazer…

I was heading back from Liverpool last weekend when I overtook a knackered old Cortina. It had an array of ManUre stickers in the back window. You know the type – plastic shirts with the name and number of the players, stuck on with a little rubber sucker.

Thing is, this cheapskate bastard had “updated” some of them. He’d obviously bought them years ago and the squad had changed. So with some incredibly unsubtle work involving masking tape and a black marker, the number 1 shirt now read “Howard” and the number 7 “Ronaldo”.

****’s sake. These things only cost pennies! Mind you, it’s a typical ManUre ****. Forget the old squad – they’re only interested in the people doing the business now. So he’s even got that wrong, putting a Tim Howard sticker up…

In a phrase, “Where were you when you were ****?”

Answer? “We were ****? When? We’ve always been great. Since football began. 10 years ago.”

(Apologies to Mr Parrot, who’s a canny lad – except for his choice of team)

No new Wembley

While the FA harp on about Wembley being ready on time, their builders disagree. Mind you, with a woman as spokesperson it raises doubt in my mind, too. Them lot can’t even put a bloody shelf up straight.

Am I the only one picky enough to spot these things, or has anyone else ever had a problem with something they’ve bought and wondered how the hell it got past the testing stage? I’m mainly on about mobile phones. Foreigners (and by this I mean you Yanks), please bear with me as I’m sure you have different makes/models to us. I’d be amazed if you don’t have the same issues, though.

I used to have a Nokia 3310 and a 3330 – one work, one personal. Before that, I had two “brick” Nokias, which were very much the same, worked in the same way and just happened to be slightly bigger. Now, these three phones all did the job they were meant to. Sent and received calls and texts. They keypads were good – clear, uncluttered, good spacing between keys and the keys themselves were responsive with superb feedback. That is, when you pushed a key, you got a “click” or “beep” for each press as well as the tactile feedback of knowing you’d hit it.

Each phone also had the numberic keypad, a hash, a star, two arrow buttons, a cancel and a menu button. Look at the links previous and see how clear the layouts are. Texting was a joy on those phones.

Enter the new phones. My current personal phone is a Nokia 3510i. First off, notice the extra two buttons. Also, the keys are rubbery and a bugger to press. The feedback’s lousy as well. The phone is so slow that often it doesn’t make a click or beep when you press them, so when you’re texting quickly it’s very easy to press the keys too many times.

In addition, it’s now harder to do some things that were a piece of cake on the old 3310/3330. A common example is receiving a text, replying to it, deleting the text you’ve input then deleting the one you received. Post-reply on the 3330, this used 2 buttons and a total of 7 keypresses. On the 3510i, it requires 10 presses of four buttons and you’ve got a very high chance of the thing quitting out of what you’re doing (if you hold the clear button down too long) and having to go back in and start again. Same job, almost half as complicated. The other bugbear is setting the alarm clock, almost twice as hard.

My new company phone is a Nokia 6230 which has managed to introduce another piece of interface-related crapness. The big central square button is actually five buttons in one. Four directions, plus if you “mash” it, it’s another input. They keys are too small and close together, and the maxiumum keypress feedback volume is vastly reduced, making quick texting a nightmare. This large button, though, is the biggest pain.

If you’re working quickly and don’t have fingers like pinheads, it’s far too easy to nudge up or down instead of – or worse, immediately before – mashing the big button as “accept”. I’d say more than 50% of the time, I end up selecting the wrong thing from a menu because of this.

Two other issues with it. I cannot change the font colour – it’s always black. When someone rings, my wallpaper picture doesn’t disappear. This means I can’t have a dark wallpaper picture as I end up with black on black text and can’t see who’s ringing. The other daft thing that’s slipped through is the “welcome note”. On the 3310/3330, when you designed the welcome note what you saw (including layout) was what you got. On the new one, you place your text, justify it so it’s centred and save it. Then when the phone comes on, it shrinks it to a font half the size, removes all the extra spaces and scrunches it in the top left corner.

Who on earth tests these phones? Nobody? Or someone who sucks up so they think they have more chance of testing another one? The whole point of testing things is to find what’s wrong with them, yet these things still make it to market. I really want to know why and how.

I also want to know if anyone has a decent, working 3330 available. I think I’ll pop in eBay. With any luck I can get a newish one for less than I can sell my 3510i for. And I can put my old NUFC logo on the backdrop.

Don’t get me wrong, the new features and stuff all have their uses – the cameras, voice recording, built-in radios and stuff. But what’s the point of having the toys when the basic functions of the phones are being made a nightmare to use?