Web sites are way beyond compare
Our story on fake names last week mentioned thecomparisons.com, the people who decided that their startup investment money was best spent on a story that would get not one but two mentions in Backbytes.
What they didn’t know is that you’re not easily taken in by mere jovial stories. You’re after more substance.
“I’d not heard of the-comparisons.com before, but I have heard of many others – comparethemarket. com, confused.com, moneysupermarket.com…” says a jaded Andy Davis from Cardinal Newman Catholic High School.
“My question is, is there a comparison site for all the price comparison sites?”
We’re not aware of it, though we checked on price comparison sites to make sure, and there’s probably only one that would carry the results.
Living in the past?
Good to hear you’re keeping up. Simon Turner at the aptly-named Two Places In Time is working his way through his back issues of Computing, and has reached Backbytes for 19 September 2002, where we asked who had the oldest back issue of Computing.
“Is the competition still going?” he asks. Frankly, no, but unless you start reading faster, you’re not going to find that out until the middle of 2013. We look forward to you getting in touch round about then.
Hungary? No, just feeling a bit ruff
You know we like to keep you in touch with the exciting developments at the forefront of international science, and so it comes to our attention that the BBC has discovered a Hungarian science programme dedicated to discovering the meaning of dog barks.
Researchers at Eotvos University in Budapest have analysed 6,000 barks to try to discover what the dog is saying – whether it has seen a ball, or is asking for a walk, for example.
Having done this, the software can recognise the emotional state of 43 per cent of dogs.
We look forward to an exciting time in the future when we can discover the interesting things that dogs have to say for themselves, such as “I want food” and “this dog’s bum smells interesting”.
Could house of pain be fake?
We’re still trying to get to the bottom of the IT Hell House story. If you recall, the M and the C were removed from Mitchell House. We ask: was it photoshopped?
“I was curious about the photo and took a look when I dropped my son off at Eastleigh station,” says Nick Kitson.
“In fact, I’m that sad I took a photograph because I noticed all the letters were there.”
He thinks it was a fake, and was merely a cry of pain by the IT staff trapped inside. Any more eyewitness accounts welcome.
Pods cast doubt
Many of you offer possible suggestions as to how the software parked under the seat of Heathrow’s driverless pods will work, but, interestingly, only one of you voices the fear that this interesting design might not work.
“I hope these new Heathrow customer transit pods don’t stop short of the destination,” says Andrew Carpenter at Cirencester College.
“Since virtually everyone is now banned from The Stack you will have a lot of beer going to waste. Why not offer it to Heathrow to fuel the pods?” asks Pete Clegg.
Gone, but not forgotten
We’re wondering how Windows decides whether software is used “frequently” or “rarely”. As David Kelly at Cardiff University’s School of Chemistry has discovered, “frequently’ does not mean the same thing as “recently”.
If someone who knows how this dialogue box decides how often we use software, could they tell us?
And if you too have a frequently-used application that you haven’t used for more than four years, let us know.
Izzy, wizzy, let’s get Linuxy
Graham Tucker wanted to know how he could delete files from his hard disk when there was no room to do the operation because his disk was full.
Usually when we ask these questions, we get a reply from a fan of the operating system which was designed to do obscure things that few people really want.
And hey presto: “Actually a solution to Graham Tucker’s problem would be to boot the machine up using a knoppix disc http://www.knoppix.net/ which would load a Linux operating system on his machine that runs in RAM and off the CD,” says Simon Marsden at Springfield School.
“This would allow him to see the hard drive and delete what he wants, and might introduce him to the magic of Linux in the process.”
A chip off the old Bloggs
In an act of almost Backbytian pointlessness, we hear that price comparison web site thecomparisons.com has completed a survey of the fake names that British people use when filling in online forms.
Top of this list was “Joe Bloggs”, which represented 48 per cent of the fakes – either that, or Joe has been looking really hard for new car insurance. If any of our readers know a real Joe Bloggs, please ask him – or his brother Fred, who came third in the survey. Second was James Bond, while there were strong showings from Bob Marley, Bob Builder, David Beckham and Marilyn Monroe, who tops the fake female poll (that’s Marilyn not Becks, by the way).
We find also, with dismay, that several Star Wars characters make the list. This must be really inconvenient for anyone out there called Jabba Hut who wants to be taken seriously when he phones a call centre.
John Smith is curiously absent from the list - presumably because when you give that fake name people assume you just have really boring parents.
Just a storm in a teasmade
Martin Williams, who in his days with Powys Council was often a contributor to these pages, has left the public sector, but this hasn’t discouraged him from commenting in depth on matters of little importance.
This week he takes exception to our decision to poke fun at the British contribution to the struggle to build the perfect automated domestic machine: the teasmade.
“We used several teasmades in our marriage,” he says. What did it for the teasmade, in his opinion, was the introduction of central heating, which made the milk go off overnight.
It’s sad to realise that, as a nation, we came so close to leading the world in robotics. Indeed, if Pifco or Russell Hobbs had made full use of their brew-automation expertise to make the step into home computing in the 1980s, the humble PC might have had a better beverage-serving functionality today.
Soft focus
Several of you venture to suggest explanations for the diagram carried in the newspapers recently of Heathrow’s new customer transit pods, which was labeled only “front”, “back” and “software”. How would this work? we asked.
“Simple,” says Phil Thane. “Japanese experts will do the basic research, Taiwanese engineers will do the design, they will be manufactured in China, the software will be written in Mumbai and the energy will come from EDF’s nuclear power stations in France.”
The British will provide the finishing touch: “The graphics will be drawn by a media studies graduate in Wapping,” he says. Good to know we can still contribute.
John Day has decided that the location of the mystery software – under the seat – is in fact a design feature.
“If you were returning to Heathrow after a long flight, which would you find more comfortable – software or hardware?” he asks. “Though firmware would be better for your posture.”
Mitc(hell) to pay
If you thought the picture of the IT hell house in last week’s Backbytes was a fake, think again.
“It’s not photoshopped,” says a contributor to our blog. “I work there. Some joker – not me – removed a few letters from ‘Mitchell House’ and prompted a management panic about low employee morale.”
Not enough of a panic, we note, to replace the missing letters. Could our readers in Eastleigh let us know if the letters have been replaced? And if it snows please send us a picture, so we can make jokes about it freezing over.
Where in the world can he go?
There is a bit of controversy about how we are handling The Stack bans. Although fewer of us are being let in these days, the regulars want fewer still.
“I feel I must nominate Keith Swinford to be banned from The Stack,” says Karl Eade at Lamberts.co.uk.
Before Christmas Keith nominated the staff of PC World because they didn’t have the computer he wanted. But Karl wants to go further: “Anybody who buys a PC from either PC World or worse still, from Argos shouldn’t be allowed in, let alone be able to buy a pint,” he says.
Meanwhile, Peter Cawkwell, excited by the potential of virtual worlds, suggested that everyone drinking at The Stack should be able to come as anything they wanted to be. This, to put it mildly, has not gone down well.
“Surely most people who work in IT already have too many alter-egos? I think it would be great to have an arena where people are forced to be themselves, however dull,” says Mat Barnard at GMAC Commercial Finance, who is typical of the responses.
“He has obviously never played an online game such as Second Life,” says Andrew Carpenter. “If he had, he’d know that half the population are anatomically unlikely women, and the other half are furries.”
Put like that, it doesn’t sound too bad after all.
Pod and chips
One of the most useful pieces of journalistic wisdom is that, whenever you see a headline with a question mark at the end of it, you should try answering “no” to the question.
So it is with the BBC web site’s story “Are driverless pods the future?” which explains how the little pods that will be used at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 will work. We are directed to the schematic diagram of a pod at the bottom of the news story by Lucy Rodgers.
“It shows an outline of the pods, and along with helpful labels saying ‘front’ and ‘rear’ there is one pointing at the floor of the pod saying ‘software’,” she says. “It does not say if the software is actually contained in anything, maybe it’s a software gas that powers the vehicle? Or would that be vapourware?”
As the front, back and the software are the only three things labelled, we’re open to suggestions about how exactly the future’s transport systems will work. Your suggestions please.
Pinheads
We like to think we keep up with the latest developments at the cutting edge of science, so you will be delighted to hear that scientists at Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, have been able to cram all 308,428 words of the Hebrew Bible onto a space smaller than the head of a pin.
The next step, according to the project leader, is to magnify this so that it is large enough to be read by the naked eye, sort of like a normal book.
Which leads us to ask an important question: why bother?
Breakfast at Twendy’s
From the wacky world of Japanese robot science, the latest prototype to hit the news is named Twendy One, and has been designed to help solve the eternal problem of how to make breakfast when you don’t want to do it yourself.
Twendy has soft fingers that can pick up bread without squashing it, and is designed to help an ageing population around the house. Unfortunately, he has come along a little too late for some of Backbytes’ ageing population, because his inventors don’t think
he will be available to buy until 2015.
As we’re developing a thread on rubbish ways we lead the world, perhaps Twendy could be merged with that great British contribution to the robotic breakfast, the teasmade, in an international joint venture.
Hell hole
Kevin Darley at the University of Leeds sent us this photograph of a building he saw while visiting friends in Eastleigh.
“I spotted this building on exiting the railway station. I am sure many in our industry will have claimed to have worked there at one time or another,” he says. Just click on it for the full effect.
Does anyone have similar examples of what it's like to work in IT - Photoshopped or otherwise?
We’re just too good at being bad
“I could not help choking on the ‘UK IT leads the world’ headline,” says Keith McLuckie, referring to an article in our final issue of 2007. “Does this mean that other countries have governments that waste even more than us on IT projects?”
It’s easy to consider this a negative thing, but if it’s something we do better, or bigger, or just more often than other countries, perhaps we should celebrate it. So in the spirit of New Year optimism, we’d like you to suggest some rubbish ways in which our IT business can truly be said to lead the world.
After all, we’re doing the development to find all the problems with ID cards and health service patient record schemes, and we’re excellent at disposing of government data. Backbytes is the ideal forum to celebrate our specialness.
Cash and grab
Stuart Hadley at AAH Pharmaceuticals points out that our speculation that an IT salary of £45K would be £45x1,024 is bucking the
industry trend.
“With the 40GB drive in my work computer actually showing 37.2GB available, then £45k would actually equate to £45,000/1.024= £43,945.” But where does the extra £1,055 go?
And a special mention...
As a sideline to our long-running thread celebrating the UK’s oldest second-generation programmers, we bring you the story of David Ward’s uncle Geoffrey.
“He was a member of the team that built the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park during the war,” says David. “Input to the computer was by punched tape which was made into a long loop and then read at an extremely fast speed.
“Geoff was recruited into the team because of his considerable expertise with teleprinters.”
Uncle Geoff had to keep his secret for 50 years, at maximum cost to his career because he was unable to tell anyone what he had been doing.
“Geoff holds one other ‘first’ in connection with computers,” David tells us. “He was the first person to smash one up.”
Now that’s a world first that is certainly worth celebrating. We anticipate the naming of the “Geoff Ward Electronics Recycling Centre” any day now.
Pure magnetism
Graham Tucker supplies this little conundrum, asking us how he can delete his files when the error message tells him there’s no room to delete them? We recommend a strong magnet, which should do the trick by a different route.
Flat rate
With New Year’s Eve safely out of the way, we pay our first visit of the year to The Stack, Backbytes’ very own pub, where last year’s debate about whether a true curmudgeon thinks the glass is half empty has inspired end-of-year soul searching among regulars.
“The only thing you need to know about a glass which is half full, half empty or only half there (to be completely accurate) is that when it is in that state it is time to order another,” opines Bruce Parker at Computer Software Group.
“One man may claim his pint is half full, and another may see his as half empty, but only the truly wise man realises that the beer is flat,” adds Richard McLean, who must have some pretty disappointing pubs close to his work at Highlands & Islands Enterprise.
One leg good, tin leg better
We have been debating how much of your body has to be replaced before you become more machine than man. John Roberts at Federal-Mogul Corporation passes on the information provided by his one-legged friend.
“My colleague John Cameron-Pilkington knows perfectly well that the correct name for a man in his condition is a ‘unidexter’, as coined by Peter Cook in the famous ‘one leg too few’ Tarzan audition sketch with Dudley Moore.
“I wouldn’t say that his tin leg has taken away his humanity, but it has provided him with many anecdotes. He will happily bore the regulars in The Stack, given a glass with any amount of free beer.”
John has knowledge of these stories, having been present for many of them, “while acting as his unpaid bagman, chauffeur and occasional nurse”, especially in airport security.
