Pointless activity
We hope this is the last word in activeness: ‘Inactive is both post-active and pre-active, and active is both post-inactive and pre-inactive,’ says Raymond Lee at Plastico.
‘Reactive is a subsequent iteration of active and is also therefore both post-inactive and pre-inactive. Inactive can be pre-reactive and post-reactive as well as pre-active and post-active. Strictly speaking, active cannot be pre-pre-active as there is no direct relation between one activity and an unconnected activity, otherwise active might also be post-post-active and all the recursions thereof. Instead, active could only reasonably be extended to pre-pre-reactive on the basis that there is, in fact, a subsequent reactivity associated with the initial activity. In another sense, the intervening inactivity is entirely self-related…’
There’s more of this, but we’re doing you a favour by denying you the chance to see it, believe us.
Power trip
Matthew Diggle ‘can well understand frustrated people wanting to throw computers out of windows’, as he feels the same way several times a day. But he takes issue with the IBM ‘underpowered boxes’ advert that features several discarded PCs.
‘It clearly shows that at least one of the discarded PCs has no power supply, and probably no motherboard either,’ he says. ‘Perhaps someone should tell IBM that plugging servers into an electricity supply is a good way to increase their power.’
Still, he does give IBM the benefit of the doubt.
‘Isn’t it nice to see someone trying to get computers out of windows, rather than all those Linux aficionados who always try to get Windows out of computers.’
Track, trace, trick
We can all agree that one of the greatest innovations of ecommerce has been the ability to track and trace parcels electronically. Except when they get lost, in which case one of the greatest innovations of modern management is to come up with a wrong answer and charge for it.
‘On 18 August I put in a claim to Royal Mail for a “signed for” package that had not been delivered, and which does not appear on the tracking system,’ says Dave Burnett.
‘Today, I got a letter from Royal Mail stating that it was delivered on 8 June, and had a signature that I could have a copy of for £2.20. I think this is an amazing service and deserves tremendous praise,’ he adds, generously, not least because he didn’t post the package until 28 July.
That’s what consultants call ‘added value’.
Speed doze
Still, at least we lead the world in slow broadband connections. John Thomas – stop tittering at the back – writes from Deakin Walton to show us the result the Orange broadband checker gave him.
‘Your current broadband speed is 1Mbit/s,’ it tells him. ‘You can upgrade to 512kbit/s. Upgrade cost: £20.’ As John says, what a bargain.
Meanwhile, the black art of installing broadband kit gets murkier still. When the equipment in Martin Clinton’s local exchange was upgraded, his 2Mbit/s connection went from 1.8Mbit/s to 512kbit/s overnight.
‘I called AOL support and was told that, since I had just switched over to the new kit, the connection might be warming up,’ he says. ‘What age is the equipment that AOL installed in my exchange?’
Whatever age the valves or whatever are, the equipment did indeed ‘warm up’, as a day later the connection was back to 1.8Mbit/s. Please, someone explain.
At least we can understand the problem reader Chris Green had: ‘Once, when we complained of poor quality, we were told our cables could not be replaced because they could not be located in the exchange. The drawings, from the 1930s, had been lost.’
DunRomanian
Did the Romanian Henri Coanda invent the jet engine? Not likely, says Dorian Creber at Krupp Camford Pressings; our own Frank Whittle still has that accolade. Well, sort of.
‘Henri did in fact develop a type of jet engine before Frank Whittle,’ he admits. ‘It was the thermojet, which used a piston engine to run a compressor to suck air into a combustion chamber, where fuel was added and then ignited. Not a very elegant solution but still a jet engine, of sorts.
‘The term jet engine covers a broad grouping of these types of engines. A bit like comparing Cornflakes with Rice Krispies: they are all cereals.’
Don’t tell us the Romanians invented those as well?
Bit off more than you can chew
Breaking news: ‘In December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the leading international organisation for worldwide standardisation in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission.’
How did this slip by without us noticing? Maybe there was TV on that night.
So, what are these units, you may ask. One kibibit, written 1kibit, is 210 bits, or 1,024 bits; as opposed to the kilobit, which is 1,000 bits. And so on for the mebibyte and gibibyte.
‘It hasn’t had much success as far as I can see,’ says Adrian Lumsden, who brings this great leap forward to our attention so that we can further muddy the waters over broadband speeds, as measured by InternetFrog.com.
‘If we take 2Mbit/s and convert it to Mibits we get 1.907Mibits,’ says Adrian, offering ISPs a fig leaf of respectability if they sneak in the new measurement unit.
He also suggests that InternetFrog could measure the shortfall in broadband speed in its own unit – wait for it… the ribit.
Speed merchants
Which brings us nicely to broadband speed. The question remains: what other service would, or legally could, be sold like this?
‘I have the unlimited 2Mbit/s connection with Tiscali,’ says Gareth Lynch. After a line test he was quoted 1Mbit/s, and actually gets 800kbit/s. ‘And Tiscali still charges me for 2Mbit/s of bandwidth,’ he says.
‘My “up to 8Mbit/s” PlusNet service runs at 45kbit/s,’ says Ian Macdonald.
A few weeks ago PlusNet sent him a text message, asking him to leave his faulty line on for testing, and requesting that he should reply to the message – using the web.
Meanwhile, several of you think of artful ways to explain why broadband is reliably rubbish.
‘Is Alan Cooper’s broadband supplier like the water utilities, losing bits through leaky pipes. If so, what is Ofcom doing about setting targets to reduce leakage rates?’ asks Robin Amphlett at Parker Hannifin.
Strewth mate
We are defending all sorts of people who don’t really deserve it this week: Alec Cawley at Quantel comes to the aid of Australians.
‘Australians only claim to have invented the two-stroke motor mower, not the lawn mower,’ he says. ‘As the internal combustion engine did not exist in 1830, it is a fair guess that Edwin Beard Budding didn’t use one on his lawn mower invention.’
We are more concerned with TV, as who was responsible is still open for debate.
‘Baird did produce a working system, although it was a technological dead-end,’ says Paul Adkins. ‘However, the true pioneer of the modern television system must surely be Britain’s Alan Blumlein, holder of 75 TV related patents and principal engineer of the world’s first public regular high definition TV service, broadcast from Alexandra Palace in 1936.’
Unless you know better.
Bored of the rings
Rather excitingly, we have discovered the source of the silent ringtone that Sue Nanninga was offered a few weeks ago.
‘Sue is now getting on a bit in age,’ says Pete Chapman, slightly abruptly, and lacking in chivalry, we feel. ‘If she was still in her early twenties, she may have had a chance of hearing the 17 kHz ringtone, audible only to the young, and going down a storm in classrooms across the country.’
If only they could restrict all novelty ringtones to the range around 17 kHz, all of us who are, ahem, thirtysomething and above could have a break.
Spam jam
‘I finally got myself an invitation to open a GoogleMail account,’ says Chris Groves-Kirkby. ‘I opened the account on 2 September, and I haven’t used it or given the address to anyone yet. So far there are 62 spam messages in my inbox. Can anyone beat this record?’
Active service
Finally, one thread is getting a lot of what we can only call reaction.
‘On the assumption that at some stage of inactivity a person stops being inactive – and thus becomes reactive, or just plain active – would it be appropriate to describe the initial state of inactivity as being pre-active?’ says Steve Joy at 3M, ‘And afterwards, as post-active. And is active actually pre-pre-active?’
We feel the need for a diagram, and a lie-down.
Full speed ahead
This week we are going to stop whining about broadband speeds and bring some bad news.
First, Chris Hills reports that his Telewest connection in Worcester has, since day one, given him the full 10Mbit/s.
Mark Waters has hit on a sneaky way to get faster broadband: ‘BT upgraded my 512kbit/s service to 2Mbit/s. However, I changed to a cheaper provider reverting to 512kbit/s. Two years later, I am still paying for 512kbit/s, but my bandwidth is measured at 1.92Mbit/s. I presume that once BT uprated the bandwidth on my line, the change was permanent.’
Just to even things up, some advice for ISPs from Matthew Smith at Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery, after a reader complained that you would not sell cereal like this.
‘Cereals always have warnings on the box: “Contents may have settled in transit”,’ he says. ‘Maybe it’s an excuse the ISPs could use.’
Evil machinations
We asked why companies use people instead of machines to give bad service. Neil Harvey answered.
‘The primary purpose of these answering systems is to generate revenue for telephone companies,’ he says, ‘An immediate automatic answer, no matter how useless to you, will incur cost.
‘If humans are employed to be unhelpful, it costs more than using machinery; machines can handle more calls faster and machines do not mind being shouted at.’
We think that is what’s called a win-win. Except for the rest of us, of course.
Tied up in knits
‘As I sit here in my office looking over the beautiful Clyde Estuary at the imposing vista of the Isle of Arran,’ says a lyrical Bill Carey at North Ayrshire Council, ‘I feel compelled to disabuse you of the source of what you…’ well, to cut to the chase, it’s an Aran sweater, which comes from Ireland.
In Arran they make little round pies out of lamb, and non-Aran sweaters, which are very warm but tend to get waterlogged because it rains for 364 days a year. On the other day you get eaten by midges.
Extensive research (OK, Wikipedia) still suggests inconclusiveness about the origins of said garments, so we instead stand by our idea that an Aran sweater with your logo knitted into it would be a stylish office uniform for thrifty companies.
Actions louder than words
We are still worried over the definition in modern business of the word ‘active’.
Indeed, from the number of suggestions we’re receiving on this we sense that focus groups and action teams are setting up conference calls and creating action items at this very moment to resolve this problem.
‘Active might be defined as those small bits of time when we are at work but are not reading Backbytes, telling each other funny stories, or eating,’ says David Bowen at Audata.
‘Surely the opposite of pro-anything is anti, so should reactive actually be anti-active? Has anti-active been shortened to in-active?’ asks John Powers, who likes to think outside the box.
‘Reactive is usually used to describe an action we take because we have been caught out. Inactive is where we do not take an action at all.’
More blue sky thinking is welcome.
Jet setters
This week’s example of a stolen invention comes from Nick Quarmby.
‘If you ever travel to Romania and want to provoke a lively debate,’ he says, overestimating by a smidgeon our command of Romanian, ‘just drop into the conversation the fact that the British, and specifically Frank Whittle, invented the jet engine. Every Romanian knows, and will defend long into the night over many beers, that it was actually invented by their very own Henri Coanda.’
Those of you jetting into Romania will recognise the name: the country has just named its largest airport after him in what we, as journalists, are obliged to call a snub to Our Frank.
May the G force not be with you
We have been covering in great detail the exact G force that a hard drive falling off your desk would experience to answer the question of whether this exceeds its design limit. Now Hefin Crook at retail distributor Palmer and Harvey McLane has a suggestion to remove all doubt.
‘Why not keep the hard drive on the carpet, thereby stopping all possible deceleration forces?’ he suggests.
Warm thoughts for a cold winter
A few weeks ago Alistair Maclean suggested saving on heating bills by employing small, fat people. If you’re about to seize on this idea, Graeme Leggett has a warning: this only works for small people if they are carrying a thick layer of fat.
‘It’s a question of heat loss, which is related to surface area. Small mammals, such as mice, lose heat fast because they have a large surface area compared with their weight.’
However, the legality of any recruitment policy based on our helpful advice could be questioned, so Graeme has a more practical suggestion.
‘I suggest a winter corporate dress policy: Arran jumpers with company logos knitted into the pattern. This would benefit the environment and increase employment for sustainable sheep-rearing.’
The other alternative is to employ staff in places where there is no need for a jumper. India, for example.
American dream
‘The French mathematician Johann Dirichlet, working in the early 19th century, defined a geometrical tessellation in which the boundaries between any set of points are exactly halfway between the points,’ says Peter Halls at the University of York, demonstrating that he’s unlikely to be a hit at a speed-dating evening.
But he has more important things to tell us: the Dirichlet Tessellation is another example of an American filch. ‘It is a fundamental part in calculating the areas covered by mobile phone cells. However, in the US this methodology is termed “Thiessen” after a German-born American who, in 1911, passed this methodology off as his own.’ The swine.
But in the interests of balance, Cliff Lawson points out that the process works both ways. ‘Ask any British schoolkid who invented television and chances are they will name Scotsman John Logie Baird,’ he says, before pointing out that he invented ‘a mechanical scanning technique for transmitting a picture from one place to another – quite unrelated to modern TV’.
Instead he names the true pioneers of TV as American Philo Taylor Farnsworth and Russian Vladimir Kosma Zworykin. And Timmy Mallett, of course.
Rude recordings
More customer service: this time from Kingston Communications.
‘It has a new service – a phone system that automatically hangs up on you without the need for human intervention,’ says John Loader at DotSix Brailling Services.
When subsidiary Eclipse Networking had an outage, John called technical support. He got two rings, and a recording that said: ‘we cannot take your call at the moment’. Then it hung up.
Why use people to demonstrate incompetent service when machines do it more consistently?
When ISPs fail to measure up
How fast is your fast broadband? Michael Hughes has 6Mbit/s broadband running at 0.88Mbit/s… until the service went down.
And when Alan Cooper moved to ‘up to 8Mbit/s’, his first week was notable for repeated cutouts. His ISP wouldn’t look at the complaint for 10 days, so he found the solution on the internet: cut the bell wire in his socket (we didn’t tell you to do this). Speeds of up to 7Mbit/s as a result.
One week later, his problems resurfaced, but finally the line settled down. At 0.16Mbit/s. So he took it upon himself to install a new socket, and managed to get back to a stable 4.6Mbit/s.
‘Where has my other 2.4Mbit/s gone?’ he wails, ‘Imagine buying a cereal packet saying “up to 750g” and finding it half empty.’
Inaction stations
In our last column, NHS stalwart David Bolt expounded his theory that, with the invention of ‘proactive’ as a buzzword, we can safely interpret ‘active’ to mean ‘inactive’. It made sense at the time, and has prompted quite a reaction .
‘Re: Proactive, active and reactive. Think about 0 and 1 (or 1 and 0). Then proactive is the 0 (or 1) state and reactive is the 1 (or 0) state and active is the state when the 0 flips to a 1 (or when the 1 flips to a 0). Inactive is when the whole thing is switched off,’ says Jeremy Hall at Hall Marketing, ‘or running Windows. Hopefully this clarifies things.’
Finally, John Batty at JMJ Bulk Packaging adds: ‘This explains the observation of public sector unions, well-known for instigating a “day of action” when their members will, in fact, be inactive.’
