Well, there was a guy at the other end of the village who ran a live-steam railway round his house.

No garden? There was a train simulator for the Sinclair Spectrum, and I think there are copies around that will run on the various emulators. "Southern Belle" was London-to-Brighton, while "Evening Star" was Bath to Bournemouth, on the S&DJR.

The problem with spray-painting is that you can really have a problem with the paint getting into all the connectors. And, by the sound of it, the people who did that PHKL were doing a pretty poor job. It shouldn't be sprayed heavily enough to drip and run. The paint should be wafted into place wuth a light, delicate, touch, akin to that of the breath of dusky maidens.

Failing that, I'd suggest getting a 2-inch brush and applying a coat of infra-red-reflective green. Then use a stencil to put on appropriate ID-codes, possibly in Cyrillic.

Unless you want to have problems, avoid using Arabic script.

Could be an interesting powder coating project. Know any powder coaters who are doing plastic?

Larry

"Can you build a pulse-jet powered cruise missile with a guidance computer full of radio valves and a case that glows blue? Enquiring minds want to know."

A sort of upgraded V-1, you mean?

Cool idea, but I don't think it has enough power to run my Marshal cab.

I see that weird technology still has some attractions.

There's a guy called Simon Barber who takes some of these ideas to rather silly extremes in his fiction. Little things like hypersonic planes which use evaporative cooling to stop the MDF wing skin from catching fire...

http://vcl.ctrl-c.liu.se/vcl/Authors/Simon-Barber/

Charlie, if I end up with a rental car when we're at WorldCon, we gotta do a sidetrip to Fry's Electronics -- it's like a WalMart for geek toys.

Cory: I've done Fry's before. That is a bad suggestion!

Charlie - I'm planning on renting while out there, so if people want to direct me, Frys is definitely on my agenda...

The http://www.technokitty.com stuff reminds me of Cyberdog ( http://www.cyberdog.net/ (warning, big ugly flash animation) ) fashion apparel.

Charlie

The Alphasmart Dana - is it *that* much more advanced than Clive Sinclair's Z88 or the Amstrad Word Processor, both of which I was using quite happily five years ago?

Mark ... I own three Z88's. The Z88 had several weak points. One was the lack of screen real-estate (in lines of text). But much more importantly, it was a complete pain in the arse to store text on in a non-volatile form; either you used EPROMs (whee! 32Kb on a card then you have to use a UV light to reclaim some data space!) or RAM cards that lost everything if they went without power for 30 seconds during a battery change.

The Dana looks like the Z88 done right. Better screen, WYSIWYG fonts (to some extent), proper keys (like the Amstrad), and two SD card slots. Think about it. You can load up a 128Mb card for storage (1Gb, next year), and a Bluetooth card to let you transfer files via wireless to a real computer. The 30 hour battery life looks right, too, as does the weight. It's the fact that it's the *reincarnation* of the Z88, without the irritating character flaws, that makes me think this could be the portable for me.

80% of the time I don't *need* a full laptop. I just need a PalmOS machine with a decent keyboard and a screen good enough to read a page of text at a time. My IIIc doesn't do the job (because of the screen). The Dana looks like it's the ticket.

The Nine-Year-Old protests: Alphasmarts are not wasted on elementary school children. They are extremely easy to use, and *much* better for typing drills and practice than the iMacs...

The Wombats of Mass Destruction protest also...

Looking at the pictures of the Dana, though, it appears that the screen is completely unprotected; so it'll get scratched to fsck. Totally agree about the need for a keyboard on PDA. I still use my Psion 5.

Charlie, it's been a couple of months since you last wrote anything about the Dana. Are you still using it? If not, was there anything in particular that made you stop?

Edited by author 01-15-2003 08:33 AM
No point in going to Morgan, they're out of stock. Meanwhile, it continues to be advertised on their web site (they claim that the - obviously dynamically generated - page must be in cache somewhere), and they apparently have no inventory check as part of the purchasing process.

So either their shop is broken (accidentally or by design) or they aren't running it correctly. I reckon this is a good enough reason not to shop with them, myself.

I don't think I've used my Psion 5 as anything but a bedside alarm clock for the last couple of years -- it makes a pretty good bedside alarm clock though....

-- The Yes/No Interlude

Mine arrived this morning -- I suspect Steve got in there just too late.

Martin: the Dana I had was a review machine, I had to give it back after a couple of weeks. The EU model (with pound and euro symbols) isn't due to ship until March, dammit -- otherwise I probably wouldn't be consorting with Psion.

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it - what is so cool about nixies?

Duncan, you're not a retrotechnology fan, are you?

Retrotechnology?

I can remember when that was new and wonderful, and Raymond Baxter was on Tomorrow's World.

Excuse me while I go and whimper piteously in the corner.

Edited by author 01-23-2003 05:52 AM
Ah - I think that David Bell has explained it perfectly.

I thoght I was a fan of retrotech. I loved my ancient asbestos-based Sunbeam Toaster beyond its death and I delight in curvy bakelite radios but maybe this is says more about my feeling for old design than for old technology.

While I remember...

Raymond Baxter (who also presented reports from the Farnborough Air Shows) was also the only TV Presenter who had ever participated in the interception of a ballistic missile.

As a young man, he had flown Spitfires in the RAF, and in a fighter sweep over Holland a V2 rose out of the woods just in front of them. One of the other pilots let off a burst at it, before it vanished into the heavens.

"I hold in my hand a list of 57 Communist synthesizers..."

Yes, that's how I read it at first. Very confused I was, for a few seconds...

I got my shiny new credit card with 6 months interest free on purchases this morning, and was all set to buy a new 12" powerbook and 20" Cinema Display. And then I suddenly realised that the new 12" powerbook doesn't *support* the 20" Cinema Display. So back to the drawing board.

The sensible thing to do, clearly, would be to wait until after the costs of the Easter trip are paid off, and then buy a new laptop, which, lets face it, I hardly need. But you need to set against that my perfectly justifiable desire to fly across the Atlantic carrying my gorgeous new laptop rather than my ugly old one.

And I do not miss my Psion 5 at all. Turned out I didn't need that keyboard after all. Who'd have thought it?

Alison: I looked into the matter before buying. The 12" powerbook looks like (and is spec'd like) an iBook with a G4. Slower bus, lower upper limit on memory, and so on. Thhe 17" powerbook is still vapourware. But the 15" job grew on me, and there are some bargains out there.

John Lewis stores are selling 800MHz ones off for about 700 quid under their previous price. Meanwhile, I picked this one up on ebay, from a dealer who'd bought a bunch of Apple refurb stock and was selling it at a profit for less than list price. (Refurbs are covered by full Applecare warranty -- Apple treats them as new. You can find details under the Apple online store website for the UK, via www.apple.com, with a bit of poking around; they sell them on a first-come first-served basis only on Wednesdays.)

A USB-powered heated teacup?

You're right, Charlie-san, that's not much power. But I'd guess, from the neat graph at the bottom of the web page, that it's intended to stop the tea getting cold, and possibly well-insulated.

But can anyone read enough Japanese to be sure?

And it works well with the USB-powered toothbrush.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotli...22/image/tooth1.jpg

Japanese apartments must be really small if people keep their toothbrushes next to their computers.

A friend of mine has a USB powered mobile phone charger. It turns out to be an incredibly useful and practical device which I've had to borrow a couple of times.

Interestingly a common complaint about the new Sony Erickson PDA phone is that it DOESN'T recharge from the USB connection.

The UK edition of the AlphaSmart Dana is finally available. See http://www.alphasmart.co.uk/dana/index.html for the skinny. The price is £299 for a single unit, but volume discounts apply. Should you need one for every room of the house, that is. Or have a really big family and expensive taste in gifts.

(What? They're meant for the education market? Oh....)

I dont read that much fantasy, or play D&D for that matter. Is it really that common for authors to do that?

It's quite common. D&D campaigns written up as fantasy tend to form the lower substrata of the high fantasy genre, although sometimes it percolates up a bit; Elizabeth Moon's "Deed of Pansennarion", for example, very strongly resembles one. (The word I heard is that she watched a bunch of D&D'ers and thought "I can do this too, only better".)

<<"It's a bit like GSM mobile phones, all over again -- the rest of the world goes one way, while the US gets a technically inferior, expensive, locally developed substitute that's incompatible with everyone else...">>

Hi, Charlie,

Your meaning escapes me. IN the quoted passage, do you refer to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) or more probably GSM mobile phones?

If the latter, you cannot honestly believe that claptrap, do you? CDMA has a pretty powerful footprint in SouthEast Asia, Japan, and China tilts... Moreover, GSM is an antiquated technology. CDMA is a more elegant solution for many reasons, although the primary is discovered within the acronym(s): CDMA wastes bandwidth by regularly repeating an encoded message whereas GSM (really, TDMA) *manages* time. Now what, I ask, has happened with every prior attempt to manage any resourse, no matter how scarce or abundant?

It seems (to me, at least) that the European rejection of CDMA defaults to the following:

1) "Our network is up & running, and it works very well"

I agree; but this notion fails to account for future growth and demand, which WILL occur.

2) "CDMA has an embedded GPS chip, of which the US DoD (Department of Defense) has ready access. (CDMA was a military technology.)"

This is understandable; I agree. No way around this without changing how CDMA works.

3) "CDMA is... American."

This argument is emotional, and who can argue with emotions?

The truth is, whether CDMA wins or another technology does, GSM and TDMA are in essence defunct. Passé. Something must be developed, universally accepted, and built NOW to satisfy coming demand.


If, on the other hand, you believe GSM (TDMA) to be better due to its inherent characteristic of managing time, well then I offer the next post, unedited.

Best wishes,
David

Unedited, as promised. This published enucleation recalls the impassioned panel at ConJose...
(<http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_up_from_liberalism.html>; Something warns me this post will not be properly formatted.)

Comments?
David


Up from Liberalism
by Janet Daley
  
I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the day was McCarthyism in its final, decaying phase. Accordingly, my senior civics class regularly showed us propaganda films, whose crudeness constituted a provocation to (not to say an insult to the intelligence of) any potentially rebellious 16-year-old. I can remember watching lurid graphics, in which red triangles pierced through defenseless red, white, and blue balloons, and then the slogan "Socialism and communism are the same thing" flashed onto the screen—all accompanied by a triumphal musical score whose climaxes underlined the most unsubtle messages of the narration.

Such films, inevitably, caused the more independent-minded students to think, "Whoa, hang on a minute. What is this you are so determined to make me believe, and why?" As one of my more thoughtful peers put it (in a very quiet voice), “Actually, I think a bit of socialism could help to protect a country against communism by making it seem less necessary."

So it had started. This was the beginning of the skepticism that led to cynicism and then to disaffection: the suspicion that everything your country was telling you might be blinkered at best or malign at worst. But the real damage was done for me by the hugely influential film Operation Abolition. This was the faux documentary made by the House Un-American Activities Committee to celebrate its own procedures. With a patronizing didacticism that would now seem risible, the movie recorded the HUAC hearings in San Francisco, which hauled in “known subversives” to be hectored and pilloried by some of the most unattractive legislators in U.S. history. But the clash between the “known subversives” and the congressmen—who would not allow them to finish a sentence of their “prepared propaganda statements”—was not what affected me so deeply. It was the sight of the protesters against HUAC, who had gathered outside the chamber, being attacked with fire hoses by the police. The film described the demonstrators as “dupes” of a communist plot to abolish the heroic congressional committee (hence the movie’s title). As the water swept them painfully down the marble stairs of San Francisco City Hall, we were, I suppose, expected to cheer. We didn’t. We just thought our own thoughts.

What I thought went something like this: “There is something seriously wrong here. I have been taught that we live in a free country and that, of all the freedoms, free speech is the most important. Whatever it is that these people believe, they ought to have the right to express it without being hounded into silence. And whatever objections they have to this committee, I would like to hear them. And, furthermore, I didn’t know that I lived in a country where people who disagreed with congressmen got flushed down the stairs by fire hoses.” Of course, I was in a minority in these musings. Most students watched the film in trusting passivity. To the extent that they dwelled on the issues that it raised, they were inclined to accept the notion that communism—or socialism, or whatever—was a threat to their way of life.

Their version of the American way of life—which is to say, late 1950s, self-satisfied California affluence—rather appalled me. My family had come from the East Coast only two years earlier. Born in Boston and raised in New York, I had my own version of the American dream: a cross between New England Puritanism and cerebral Jewish idealism. The super-materialism and unapologetic selfishness of the California scene were entirely new to me. The utter incomprehension with which many of my school friends reacted to any suggestion of abstract social conscience genuinely shocked me. It became a (reasonably good-natured) joke at school that my trademark sentiment was the phrase “It’s against my principles.” The idea with which I had been raised—that life was, at least in some sense, a moral mission—was literally unintelligible to most of my friends. One of them responded to my strictures with explicit amazement. “But isn’t the whole point of life to make money?” she asked, ingenuously.

But all of this spiritual isolation came to an end when I arrived at Berkeley as an undergraduate.

For historical reasons that may never be absolutely clear, many young people who had thoughts like mine found themselves in the same place at the same time. Together, we invented the student revolutionary movement in 1964. So many of us have had second thoughts about its three major components—politics, promiscuity, and pot—that it is probably important to recall how serious the civil liberties issue was that gave rise to the original Free Speech Movement.

We arrived back on campus for the 1964–65 academic year to a Board of Regents decree that, henceforth, no political activity of any kind was permitted within the university boundaries. No one could distribute literature on behalf of any political cause. No political society or group could hold meetings. No speaker could address any student gathering on a political issue. These prohibitions amounted to a denial of the most basic constitutional freedoms of speech and association to a community of Americans who happened to live or work on the Berkeley campus. Many of us believed that the university had issued this edict at the behest of Oakland businessmen angry at student civil rights demonstrators picketing their premises in protest of racial discrimination in employment.

There is now a well-established view on the Right that dedicated communists and fellow travelers incited the Berkeley uprising by persuading naive undergraduates to create chaos. That is not how I experienced it. To the extent that I and most of my peers were egged on in our rebellion, it was almost entirely by the ham-fisted actions of the university and its own police. We couldn’t help but feel that it was not us but the Regents who were being manipulated (or at least improperly influenced) by organized business interests. I can remember vividly my own rage and frustration when the Oakland newspaper (owned by some of the same businessmen we believed were pressuring the university) ran the blatantly false headline: 25,000 STUDENTS IGNORE [FSM] STRIKE AT BERKELEY. Lies told about your most sincere and heartfelt efforts do not inspire charitable thoughts. True, I did feel misgivings when the socialist grouplets to which I gravitated spoke of “infiltrating” the Democratic Party and of the “realignment” of liberal politics toward the Marxist Left. But those doubts took many years to mature.

You know the rest of the student revolution story. To adapt a bit of famous rhetoric, the word went out from that place that a torch had been passed to a new generation. At the outset at least, and speaking only for myself, I believe that the intention was to live up to the American democratic ideal, not to undermine it. But it was an easy step from the belief that racist businessmen could suspend your constitutional rights to the conviction that the Vietnam War was being fought as a favor to Dow Chemicals. Corporate capitalism seemed a plausible enough enemy when much of what was then called the Third World seemed to indict it as the cause of their misery.

In that implacably despairing state of mind, I took myself off to Britain, where Harold Wilson’s Labour Party had recently been elected with a tiny Parliamentary majority (which would be vastly increased in the general election of 1966). The possibility of living under European socialism, even of a tenuous kind, seemed too exciting a possibility to miss.

What struck me first about my new life in Britain, as it strikes virtually every American, was the presence of a visible and audible (especially audible) class system. I had never encountered anything like this before. Of course, the U.S. had regional accents, parochial social divisions, and huge disparities of wealth; but what I encountered in Britain was something else altogether. British working-class people were not simply superficially identifiable as being uneducated, provincial, or even poor—as many Americans might be. They seemed to live in a parallel universe to the professional classes: to be consciously and deliberately a world apart, locked into their own self-defeating social patterns, low expectations, and perversely destructive behavior, which seemed designed to prevent them from aspiring to any condition other than the one into which they had been born.

My first job in Britain, teaching “liberal studies” in a technical college, brought me into contact with boys from East London with no occupational ambitions beyond becoming factory hands. They greeted any suggestion that they might consider professional or higher academic training with flabbergasted hilarity. My teaching colleagues made clear that the occasional rescue of a bright student, by persuading him to try for university, was a once-in-a-lifetime triumph. But, I argued, the boys themselves might just be subject to peer pressure. Surely we could enlist their parents to help them see the value of higher education and professional achievement. Hollow laughter: the parents, it seemed, were part of the problem. British working-class parents hardly ever urged their children to do better in life than they had done themselves. On the contrary, the adage was, “What was good enough for us should be good enough for them.” Self-improvement and ambition were not traits to be admired but rather signs of class disloyalty and snobbery. I had never before met people who, when urged to let their children go to university, said, “Don’t go putting ideas in his head.”

All of this was of course benighted, but it could, with charity (and a left-wing conscience), be excused as a lingering consequence of a brutal industrial revolution. These were, after all, the descendants of people who had learned bitter lessons about the dangers of “getting above yourself.” And the British middle and upper classes have perfected lethal cruelties for humiliating those who rise from below them. British manners and social codes, as many a bemused American expatriate has discovered, are almost impenetrably arcane, their subtlety and complexity aimed precisely at separating the sheep from the goats in class terms. The British put-down extends deeper than anything that even the most snobbish American could contemplate, and, most excruciatingly, it is almost always delivered under the cover of patronizing kindness. For example, at a formal English dinner one doesn’t eat one’s salad with the main course, but later, as a freshener of the palate before the dessert and cheese courses. I can recall one painful incident in which a dinner guest who had helped himself to salad along with his meat course (without uttering the disarming disclaimer, “May I be rude and have my salad straightaway?”) receiving the excruciatingly gentle benediction, “You are quite right, Simon. So much nicer not to wait for the salad.” That—in coded British terms—is as cruel as it gets.

But what was less explicable than this working-class defeatism was to hear those who regarded themselves as progressive liberals
conniving in it. The Left in Britain then (and scarcely less now) believed deeply that personal ambition was a petit bourgeois vice to be despised. Such left-wing antipathy to supposedly vulgar social striving became particularly vicious during the Thatcher years. The most telling left-liberal character assassinations of Thatcher herself focused on her being a “grocer’s daughter.”

One of my more vivid 1980s recollections is of an upper-class woman, whose family had been colonial officials in Kenya, saying airily, “When I was a child, profit was a dirty word.” This Jane Austenish disdain for the grubby business of trade strongly marked anti-Thatcherite rhetoric. The notion that private prosperity could transform the lives (and self-image) of ordinary people was viewed as faintly obscene. The great social caricature of the 1980s was “Essex Man”: the quintessentially vulgar upstart who had gotten money and property and was now busily spending (and flaunting) it in a myriad of crass ways. Everything about Essex Man, from his brash manners to his cleaned-up Cockney accent, came in for ridicule. His female equivalent—Essex Girl—was the butt of jokes too obscene to be published here. But Essex Men, with their sports cars and brassy wives, were not just thought to be ludicrous. They were a deeply sinister sign of the times: people without breeding and without the proper class connections were getting money and the confidence to spend it where they liked, for the first time in living memory.

Not only did the left-wing intelligentsia dislike uppity lower-middle-class arrivistes: they positively discouraged the most deprived working-class people from rejecting their “roots.” With a sentimental complacency that astonished me, they venerated the very social habits and attitudes that seemed to me so perversely backward. (A whole school of British film and television drama perpetuates the romanticized myth of working-class life—a kind of “noble savage” genre that utterly falsifies the grim repressiveness that this life actually embodies.)

The left-wing elite castigated teachers for attempting to correct the working-class accents and dialects that help trap children in the limitations of their own backgrounds. Correct grammar and properly pronounced English were, left-wing commentators argued, simply a middle-class dialect, with no claim to inherent superiority over the subliterate speech familiar to working-class children. Therefore, to inflict proper English on children who spoke the systematically ungrammatical dialects of the British proletariat was a form of cultural imperialism. Bourgeois values were the real enemy of working-class self-respect, because they made people who did not subscribe to them feel alienated and insecure. The socialist ideal was not to free people to fulfill their personal potential but to guarantee that no one would ever feel inferior to anyone else in any respect—intellectually, socially, or economically. Marxist veneration of the “working man” meant preserving, as a function of class cohesion, the behavior that I saw as symptomatic of self-loathing.

How had it come to this? Why did liberals who were supposedly advocates of egalitarianism collude in this blatantly repressive aspect of British social and political life? How did they reconcile their commitment to socialism, which I had always understood as being about the liberation of humanity, with a romanticizing of what anyone in his right mind should have seen as a cruelly inadequate and culturally degraded way of life? So much of what passed for left-wing thinking in Britain seemed to be steeped in middle-class guilt and self-hatred.

What decisively transformed my views was my growing understanding of the consequences of the welfare state that Britain had constructed out of a wartime command economy: it both reinforced the fatal passivity of the lower classes and provided a moral justification for the paternalism of the upper classes. The realization was slow but inexorable. It came through concrete example and abstract argument. By the end, it was so blindingly obvious that I wondered how anyone could ever not have seen that the socialist solution—the great, generous dream of perfect fairness—was inevitably destructive of the human spirit.

Welfare programs in Britain far exceeded anything that even the most radical Democrat would propose in the United States. When I arrived in 1965, more than half the population of the country lived in government-subsidized (“council”) housing. Council estates were not simply bigger and more ambitious versions of the housing projects familiar to Americans. Elite opinion saw them not as a stop-gap remedy for the very poor, but as an ideologically preferable alternative to private property. Government effectively seized whole tranches of major cities—including Hull, Sheffield, Liverpool, and East London—and turned them into what can only be described as working-class reservations: social ghettos where people were rehoused in a massive social-engineering exercise that ran roughshod over familiar neighborhood patterns and family networks. Officials often justified this move by the fact that heavy wartime bombing had destroyed vast areas of housing in the industrial cities. But the socialist ambition was not just to build new homes to replace the old, or to alleviate slum conditions. It was, quite consciously, to build a new society, in which the housing of many would be in the hands of the state, whose own commitment to fairness and the redistribution of resources would eliminate the squalor that private landlordism produced. (This mentality survived through to the 1980s—which is why Margaret Thatcher’s belief in a “property-owning democracy” and her policy of allowing tenants to buy their council houses seemed so dangerously radical.)

It is not hard to imagine what happened to people who went to live wherever the state put them, who were not permitted even to change the color of their front doors or to keep pets without explicit permission, and who were surrounded by a neighborhood of similar passive recipients of government beneficence. They did not develop, as their socialist patrons had expected, a stirring pride in their new collective identity. Having none of the rights of ownership over their own property—and no likelihood of escaping from that condition, since being housed by the council was regarded as pretty much a permanent condition of working-class life—they became less responsible and more dependent than ever. The desire and the ability to help yourself was not only unrewarded; it was seen as positively pernicious: a threat to the moral order of public ownership, which guaranteed that no one would go without the basic necessities—at the price of condemning anyone who dared to desire more than the minimum.

In the 1970s, as I clung to my Marxist convictions, I heard an interview with Sir Keith Joseph, one of the great architects of the Thatcherite revolution. He described the dangers of what he called “the pocket-money society.” If the state provided all of the basic human needs—housing, health care, education, care for the elderly—it left nothing for people to provide for themselves, other than the more trivial recreational things. Their own earnings became like children’s pocket money, to be spent on toys or self-indulgence. The state took all of the significant economic choices of adult life out of their hands, diminishing them as responsible, moral beings. Joseph’s words did not convert me on the spot, but they shook my beliefs to the roots, because they chimed so convincingly with the evidence that I saw around me.

This was the reality of the collectivist ethic in which each should be striving for all, not for himself and his own. It amounted to the infantilizing of people, who had come to believe that they could not, positively should not, be making life-determining decisions for themselves, because their choices might deprive someone else. This view permeates the philosophy behind the National Health Service. The present Labour government still mouths the received wisdom that it is wicked to pay privately for an operation (even though you continue to support the state system through your taxes), because doing so will be using some of the finite resources that might have gone to an NHS patient. The reason, of course, that the resources are quite as finite as they are is because the central government controls and rations the entire system. The number of medical-school places cannot expand according to need, as they would in a market system, but can only increase by government order—and economic stringency keeps them to the minimum thought necessary. Better for more patients to wait for surgery than for any of them to have an advantage over others.

The logic is remorseless. What cannot be had by everyone (at the same time) should not be had by anyone. Equality means that everyone should suffer deprivations in a uniformly inadequate service. If improvements are to be made in a public service like health care or education, they must be made universally at the same instant, so that no one, at any moment, can be said to be disadvantaged.

But of course fields like medicine and teaching progress on the basis of individual innovation and experiment. Advanced research by one specialist at one hospital, or an experiment in teaching literacy in one school, might eventually be copied as best practice throughout the entire profession, but in the first instance, there must be the incentive—and the liberty—to deviate from the norm. Centralized uniformity expressly forecloses such deviation, in the name of equality. (Hence the recent cases of hugely beneficial drug treatments being denied to MS patients because the National Health Service could not afford to prescribe them to all patients. Better that all should suffer equally, than that some should receive what others did not.)

Finally, came the infamous winter of 1979, now legendary as the British “Winter of Discontent.” All my political misgivings came into very sharp focus as the militant unions, egged on by left-wing local government, effectively shut the country down. I had two small children. My husband and I, artist and writer respectively, were piecing together a living out of part-time lecturing and free-lance work. We earned less (and certainly had less job security) than most of the striking municipal workers who allowed rubbish to pile up on our doorstep and refused to clear snow from our streets, making them impassable. Our electricity—and with it our heat and light—went off regularly because of the striking miners and their brother supporters in the electricity and railway industries. Living as
we did in a London borough run by Trotskyist councillors, we withstood an exceptionally harsh dose of all this. When the school janitors went on strike, our council obligingly closed the schools “in solidarity” with them. So my elder daughter stayed locked out of her primary school for six weeks.

A bunch of us (incorrigibly upper-middle-class) mothers formed a rota to teach the children ourselves. We asked their regular teachers to come to our houses, or at least to supply books and teaching materials. They would not—because to do so would be, in effect, to cross a picket line. This was what socialist class war meant: not just depriving seven-year-olds of their lessons, but senior-school students of crucial preparation for exams that would determine whether or not they went to college.

It also meant hospitals reduced to emergency cover by striking medical aides, and the dead left unburied by striking municipal gravediggers.

Being plunged into darkness several times a week gave you plenty of time to think. What kind of idyll was it that was supposed to emerge from this ugly, vindictive battle? Was left-wing politics anything more than a gloss for envious vengeance on the one hand, and—on the other—a sinister desire to control the lives of others? And, in the end, wasn’t it the achievements and the nobility of individuals, not collectives, that gave the human condition its point?


The answers to those questions came to me in the darkness of that very cold British winter of 1979. Once heard, they could not be forgotten.

Re GSM vs. CDMA; the problem with CDMA is not that it was invented in the USA. The problem with CDMA is that it was pushed by a single company, Qualcom, who aggressively use their patents to maintain a stranglehold on the CDMA sector of the market. GSM, in contrast, is an open standard with no single monopoly entity controlling it. Which is why there's a hell of a lot more competition in the GSM sector, more companies produce phones, it's implemented in roughly 80-90% of the world where digital cellular telephony is available, and uptake of mobile technologies is more advanced in those countries. GSM is a commons while CDMA has been implemented as a monopoly. Leaving aside any technical considerations -- and I don't consider GSM to be inferior to CDMA, or superior, they're both 2G digital platforms and both already obsolescent -- the point I was trying to make about digital radio is that the USA has strong corporations who have resisted an external commons-based standard because it threatens their local monopoly, and the result will not be in the public interest.

(As for what follows GSM or CDMA, my money is on VoIP, mediated by SIP over 802.16, or a similar second-generation UWB wireless ethernet solution. 3G cellphone systems can't hold a candle to wireless ethernet.)

As for the Janet Daley piece: I never trust a reformed Trotskyite -- they know they've fallen from grace and no sin is too deep to consider. She's deliberately conflating liberalism with socialism, and tarring liberals with the accusatory brush of self-hatred -- both hallmarks of the attack dogs of the neoconservative right. It also looks like she didn't learn a thing from the British people she was dealing with in her teaching role -- deriving only the opinion that any hardship was justified in order to smash the smug complacency of the British welfare state. That's the kind of thinking that led to the attacks on demonstrators by riot police, and the armed assassination squads in Northern Ireland, that typified the 1980's. The willfull blindness of the born-again right is extremely creepy when you see it enunciated this clearly and with so little awareness of the issues they're discussing.

Hi, Charlie,

There are a lot of different points here. Let me try to take them one at a time.
 
<<"... the problem with CDMA is not that it was invented in the USA. The problem with CDMA is that it was pushed by a single company, Qualcomm, who aggressively use their patents to maintain a stranglehold on the CDMA sector of the market. GSM, in contrast, is an open standard with no single monopoly entity controlling it.">>

No argument here. It is a fact that CDMA is owned by Qualcomm and they have been very aggressive in trying to extract revenue from service providers, chip makers, and service providers. Have they been too aggressive? Hard to say. I tend to think they have, but this is purely a business matter. They have every right to maximize their return on CDMA so the only question is whether they have positioned themselves correctly on the curve to maximize revenue.
 
<<"... there's a hell of a lot more competition in the GSM sector, more companies produce phones, it's implemented in roughly 80-90% of the world where digital cellular telephony is available, and uptake of mobile technologies is more advanced in those countries.">>

There's also no question that there is more competition in the GSM world - a direct outgrowth of the lack of a prevailing monopoly. It is also true that there are more countries using GSM than CDMA and that there are more individual users. Is it 80-90%? I have no idea, though that sounds a little high. It is also true that - on average - uptake in GSM markets has been greater than in CDMA markets. This is primarily a result of the inclusion of the US market. I do not think the relatively slow growth (slow only in comparison to other places) in the US has anything to do with CDMA. Rather it has to do with structural and regulatory obstacles and cultural factors. I would also bet that those spreads are narrowing aggressively. Further in other countries and systems using CDMA (Korea comes to mind) uptake has been very aggressive.
 
<<I don't consider GSM to be inferior to CDMA, or superior, they're both 2G digital platforms and both already obsolescent">>

Here I strongly disagree. CDMA is inherently more efficient. It can handle more calls per unit of bandwidth, it requires less power at the receiver end and provides clearer voice signals and better signal to noise ratios. While they are both - strictly speaking - 2nd generation technologies, the migration to 2.5G and even 3G has shown just how superior CDMA is as there is little in the way of new infrastructure required to upgrade and that the current 2.5G CDMA already delivers download speeds and conversation density that GSM can only envy. And, never forget that the path to 3G for GSM runs through CDMA. Europe (largely) has chosen WCDMA - a technically ridiculous solution - in a now defunct attempt to cut out QCOM royalties, and they are now stuck with a more expensive implementation even if it is more satisfying to the collective egos of the service providers, handset makers (Nokia), and European governments. The going-forward costs of GSM providers relative to CDMA providers makes it likely that CDMA networks will move forward more quickly. The main exception to this is Japan which has clear cultural reasons for moving forward regardless of the cost.
 
<<As for what follows GSM or CDMA, my money is on VoIP, mediated by SIP over 802.16, or a similar second-generation UWB wireless ethernet solution. 3G cellphone systems can't hold a candle to wireless ethernet >>

All the multiplicity of 802-based solutions (and there are many) have been variations on a basic scheme. Your comments prompted me to further investigate it. It appears that 802.16 is more ambitious (than 802.11) as it is intended to solve some of the broader issues such as metro access (as opposed to strictly very local access) and apears to have some concepts that imply it might have hand-off capabilities.
 
If I am interpreting this material correctly (and I've only spent a few minutes on it) it would, if deployed, perhaps present a more formidable technical challenge to CDMA. But even so, one needs to look very closely at how far it is into development leave alone deployment. The prevalence of links to such things as working groups suggests to me that is very much a barely emerging standard. It could take many years for a technology - particularly one that requires buy-ins from large companies (which any attempt to provide for metro access would) can often be measured in decades. Even Bluetooth has taken nigh 10 years to start appearing, and that is much more of a simple device focused technology than one that requires organizing metro areas. I don't know exactly but my impression is that 802.11b has been around for many years and only started lifting off this past year or so. So certainly in any timeframe that mattered for investment purposes I think I'll stand by my remarks. From a techno-geek's perspective :-) however, 802.16 looks exciting.
 
As to packet radio, I'm afraid I don't know much about it. I would just warn that - as far as I know - there has been little in the way of true commercialization in this area. I'm sure there are a lot of startups and from what little I know I think there is real potential there, but in what timeframe and whether a portable or a mobile solution, I don't know.

"It's a bit like GSM mobile phones, all over again -- the rest of the world goes one way, while the US gets a technically inferior, expensive, locally developed substitute that's incompatible with everyone else.)"
Um, compared to CDMA?

Um, interesting viewpoint.

Apparently others here have understandably commented, so I'm backing out. I'll say that praising that standard is a, um, interesting viewpoint, from what I've read. Widespread, GSM is; better? A question, at best.

Commons are Good, where it comes to communications.

Do you want me to rehash the VHS vs Betamax argument? It doesn't matter what the technical merit is, if the key issue is interoperability and one 'standard' isn't interoperable.

I think the mini-ITX concept is going to give the edge to efficient operating systems. Which probably points to Linux rather than Windows as the example.

Stuff like real-time video compression needs either dedicated hardware, or most of the power of a sub-gigahertz processor. While the hardware chipsets may be available, you can be sure that they'll have all the paraphernalia of digital rights management. For some jobs (such as storing pictures from a security camera) those features are irrelevant, but can they be turned off?

And an interesting possibility is that the same hardware could do all sorts of different jobs, just by putting in a new set of software. Put a Compact Flash slot in, and you've got these small, robust, and cheap devices that can turn the video recorder into almost anything.

Sinclair was back in the 90's briefly when he was selling an electric bicycle. Don't know what happened to ti although I expect it was as much of a success as all his other gadgets.

Computer wishlist: Something which, when not in use, will fit into a shirt pocket. Take it out, unfold it, and you have a good-sized screen and a keyboard with touchpad.

Plus a lashtop for some purposes.

Presumably a lashtop is something that can be locked down tight and only runs code written in bondage-and-discipline languages?

A lashtop fits on top of your eyelashes.

I gave up on wearing a watch shortly after coming to university, it seemed rather unnecessary and I couldn't afford to replace my (then) broken watch strap anyway.

2 years ago of course, I wound up working in a Fringe venue, and time was suddenly very important indeed but there was never a clock to be found. At this point I had to treat my (then 8 year old) watch to a nice fresh battery and a strap.

Since then I've barely stopped wearing it, it'd just too handy, especially because it also stores phone numbers, and there is nothing more useful than just having the phone numbers of various book distributors and credit card companies permanently attatched to your wrist when working in a bookshop.

Everyone else finds the use of a watch to store telephone numbers very odd, but to me it's a great way to save time so I can slack later, I mean... er.. be more productive and a valuable member of the team.

I use wristwatches without wearing them. Currently, in a belt pouch; before that, in a trouser pocket.

Dan Goodman
dsgood@visi.com
dsgood@blogspot.com

http://www.ledwatches.net/photo-pages/commodore1.htm

Commodore once made promotional watches.

http://www.amug.org/~jthomas/watch.html

Let us not forgetthe glory of nixie tube wrist watches.

To be honest, I prefer digital watches over analogue. For some reason I've always had an issue with analogue clocks, and tend to always misread the time. Ocassionaly My brain will stall so much I'll have to ask the wearer for the time itself.

I've always wanted a clockwork watch with a digital style display.

The BOSTON GLOBE has an article I believe might resonate for you:

<http://boston.com/business/technology/arti...re_all_geeks_now>;

It's both funny and true, I suppose, although _my_ understanding stops at (the) Windows...

David

My Powerbook has also developed a hairline crack in the case, at the left front corner. Since mine isn't under warranty, I'm just trying to live with it, and hoping that it doesn't get any worse.

Congrats on turning in the novel!

Charlie,

Ought to take Sid Meier's Civilization II instead, if you can't find your Alpha Centauri. I just burned the Vikings out of their capital this week.

Respects,
S. F. Murphy

Wine's quite good at the moment, so's winex if you want a copy.

Charlie

Drooling over the Treo. What was the long term verdict on that horizontal PDA thingie a while back - one that was a bit like the Z88 and the Amstrad 'laptop'?

I got to play with a review model for a couple of weeks. The main headache I encountered was that there was no simple way of editing a plain ordinary text file (or in the case of a PalmOS machine, a DOC file, which is near as dammit the same thing). The built-in word processor was a hack on Blue Nomad's Wordsmith (which is an amazingly good tool given the constraints of the hardware), modified to run on the wide screen platform, but they left some bits out -- including a vital one (in my opinion). The actual hotsync mechanism is fine for Word users but a pain for people with weird requirements (Linux on PowerPC hardware? Command-line junkies?). In the end I didn't buy one. However, a new model with double the memory and 802.11b is due out Real Soon Now, and if they've improved the software that, plus a Treo 600, will be a real road-warrior's kit. (And they've been asking the users what changes to the software they want, and my #1 gripe seems to be high on everyone's wish-list.)

Charlie, couldn't make it to TorCon3, but let me know if you can't find your copy of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri for Linux (including Alien Crossfire, too, BTW).

Hi, Charlie,

What is your take on this fellow's comments...

Peter Cochrane's Uncommon Sense: Mobile guesses
Here's what the future of mobile communications will look like...
<http://www.silicon.com/opinion/500018-5000...tml?nl=d20030918>;

...especially in light of our earlier 'conversation' below.

Best wishes,
David

While I can't do the ride, the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field Seattle does have an SR-71 simulator which members of the public can sit in, which is based around a complete cockpit.

Damn thing was closed the day I was there but it does exist.

It's a long way to go, but Seattle's a nice city in and of itself.

http://tiger1.info/fibel/

Instruction manual for Tiger Tank. Note completely bizarre and insane illustrations.

Well you can get a MiG-25 'edge of space' ride. Pity they are so much ulgier!

I did Concorde this year. The Curvature of the Earth is stunning. But sadly, not an option after this week.

A Gulfstream II will get you to 60,000 feet and Mach 0.9 though.

Are there any SR-71s flying that we know about? I thought they were all in museums now. But that's the ones that we know about.

If you go to Thunder City and give them $9,000 they'll take you for a supersonic ride in a classic English Electric Lightning - capable of Mach 2.2 with an initial climb rate of 50,000 feet per minute.

There are indeed SR-71's still flying; NASA inherited three from the USAF, for use in high-speed research, and AFAIK they're flightworthy.

Mary Shaffer on sci.space.policy was an SR-71 engineer and she's said on a few occasions that they aren't flying anymore. :-(

She got to go in one though.

I may have to look at the Lightning. Simon Bradshaw tells a good story about RAF guys placing outrageous bets with US jet pilots on races to 65,000 feet. Apparently the Lightning is still the fastest.

New portable kit: Psion have re-vamped the netBook. It's got an SVGA screen, weighs about 1.1kg, should go for 6 hours on a charge. The down-sides are, a) Psion are looking at corporate sales only, b) asking price is around a grand, c) the OS is WinCE and despite a very polite petition asking for a Symiban OS alternative there are no signs of Psion doing it.

Ah. So the new NetBook weighs more, costs more, runs for less time, and uses the one operating system I specifically don't want to touch with a barge-pole.

This is of course the way to increase revenue: appeal to the corporate buyers, make a machine that locks into the corporate monoculture, and increase prices and profit margins per unit sold rather than passing on the savings gained through Moore's Law to the customers. It's a local minimum in the market algorithm -- one that is very hard to get out of, because the computer/PDA market has a very high cost of entry these days.

I can't fault Psion for doing this -- other than to note that companies that fly in the face of their customers' wishes tend to end up as historical footnotes (c.f. SCO, IBM in the 1980's and early 1990's, etc).

note that companies that fly in the face of their customers' wishes tend to end up as historical footnotes (c.f. SCO, IBM in the 1980's and early 1990's, etc).

 Don't forget that pipsqueak wannabe, MicroSoft. Whatever happened to that deaf idiot Gates anyway? Flipping burgers at McDonald's probably.

I think the verdict is out on Microsoft right now -- I'm still scratching my head over the concept of companies that hire Svengali as head of marketing in order to hypnotize their customers into thinking that what they most want in the whole universe is a handful of possibly-radioactive glass beads ("ooh! shiny! where do I sign?") -- but they have a history of tap-dancing on the edge of the abyss and redeeming themselves in their customers eyes with the 3.0 release. Sometimes it doesn't work, as witness their vast juggernaut-like monopolistic presence in the cellphone market ...

Be careful what you say about their entry into the cellphone market. I'd tell you a thing or two about it at Novacon, only I'm going to be flying out to Redmond...

What do you think of your Dana, Charlie? After trying an acquaintance's and finding that its keyboard feels better than many laptops', I've really been drooling over the wireless version.

I think the Dana is exactly what I expected -- the Cambridge Z88 concept, brought up to date. That is to say: I still own a laptop for doing laptop-y things. The laptop has completely replaced the desktop computer in my life (the last desktop in use in this household is Feorag's big dual-G4, which is her typesetting machine). But when it comes to going away for a couple of days, travelling around and making notes or working on a short story, the Dana is far more portable/usable than the laptop -- and the Treo 600 is just about good enough to use for responding to email. Between them they weigh (and, if lost, cost) half as much as the laptop, not to mention having double or more the battery life.

The tablet iBook you suggest probably needs an optical drive built in, at least as an option, because one of the big uses for it is likely to be watching DVDs on the go. *Unless* Apple can come up with some kind of solution that they can get away with legally to let users rip their DVDs to hard disk.

OSX has had handwriting recognition built into it for ages, but no real application for it has come along. The tablet could easily use that rather than having to pay lisence fees for Graffiti.

Isn't DVD ripping already a standard way of watching a movie on a PB or iB without hammering the battery?

Reminds me of the newton, but bigger.

(My 12" powerbook is giving me techno-joy.)

Your article reminds me of the demo of a tablet Mac I saw at the Apple WWDC in 1991. It was an engineering lashup but was still recognisable as a Mac in the appropriate form factor with pen input.

I wonder whatever happened to that.

I didn't know about the handwriting recognition in OSX -- it's hidden pretty well!

This just seemed to me like one of those ideas that's glaringly obvious. Tablet PCs failed because they were expensive, elaborate, and being sold instead of a PC. A cheap iTablet might succeed if it's sold as a companion to desktop Macs. As far as I can tell, Mac users seem to fall into either desktop user, or laptop user -- it's rare to find someone who routinely uses both. So a way to sell a tablet to every Mac user with a desktop would seem like an obvious strategy for Apple.

Unless they're planning on growing the iPod range into a PDA ...?

Count me in for the tablet iBook.

It's absolutely asinine that Tablet PCs exist and a Tablet Mac doesn't! The fact that boring corporate types have the opportunity to use something us creatives dream about is amazing and somewhat sad.

I use a $3500 Wacom Cintiq every day (connected to a Powerbook) and it is the ONLY way to do graphics work. Period. No question. Wake up, Apple!

Tablets, Tables, and Typing

      DISCLAIMER--Not a Mac user until they ditch that god-awful Aqua style. :)

      The fundamental problem with a tablet form factor comes out of the speed advantage (touch) typing holds over writing. Clamshell laptops exist today allow a screen to stand at a convienent angle to a keyboard. Virtual keyboards would allow tablets to overtake laptops. Sure, we'd get some delay while inventories and habits changed, but I think this could happen within a single HW upgrade cycle. The reasoning Charlie makes about different styles of use doesn't convince me that tablets wouldn't work as desktop replacements.

      I've not used a virtual keyboard. I do use a Fingerworks keyboard (http://www.fingerworks.com). These "no-moving-parts" keyboards lack tactile and auditory feedback, just as virtual keyboards do. I quickly learned to do without it. My hands no longer hurt at night. The right half of the keyboard doubles as a pointing device, so you get a Fitt's Law advantage too!

I am someone who was born late enough to experience the horror that was Standard Grades and Highers and CSYS in Computing studies.

At school, I was one of the only people who used to type his essays. Everyone else wrote them by hand.

We then spent first and second year on bbc micros, learning about Files and Folders. Then we spent third and fourth year learning about BASIC on apple macs, running a BBC Emulator.

I learned in sixth year about 'ARPANET' we were one of the last years to do the syllabus before it was updated.

We had to do a programming project. She made us learn C. Without teaching it. Whee. 17 and trying to learn C, C++ pointers and memory management. And the Pascal Interface to the apple interface. While doing all of the coursework.

So yeah, I failed my CSYS in computing.

The computing teachers were poached from maths, and most other deparments (Especially the science one still had BBC's and they did the job.)

So I can happily say after using computers, often 10 year old ones that would break, in school.

I learned fuck all from it, and it didn't help me get into my degree placement at all.

One of my long-term regrets is that I was born too early.

The obvious constraint-based means to correct this is to have such problems getting born that it would kill you were you born before year {foo}. You will then (from the POV of a `you' old enough to reason about this) be born on or after that year.

I tried this and it worked awfully well at forcing me to be born after 1970. (There was minor collateral damage, to wit, my twin brother.)

Downsides:

- it's hard to choose this method in advance, and conducting research on it (whether with your children or someone else's) is apt to lead to imprisonment, probably because getting informed consent from the not-yet-conceived is so hard.

- there's a possibility that you'll hit the leading edge of the constraint and end up damaged in some way. I can't guess the probability of that because research is so difficult. :)

I learned to type on my Mum's old Imperial Model 55 typewriter. A huge sit up and beg thing, crinkle painted metal with chrome strips, red and black ribbon, big and heavy keys and the entire carriage went CLUNK! when you pressed down the shift key. Marvellous device. It's still there in my Dad's house, the only thing wrong with it is the belt that runs the carriage mechanism is frayed almost through.

Modern PC keyboards are rubbish....

Tef: I missed out the bit about doing the first third of a comp. sci. 'A' level in evening classes after I graduated. With a teacher who actually understood computers, of course. I dropped out not because it was hard, but because it was too easy -- and instead I signed up for a full-time conversion degree.

Nix: maybe if I'd been born a bit later still, both my eyeballs would work properly. Too much earlier and I'd not be here, indeed -- when I was less than a year old I had the kind of bout of bronchitis that used to kill bairns back before antibiotics came along.

Dop: agreed about the modern keyboards. Although if you can find them, an IBM PC AT keyboard from the 1984-87 period is a thing of joy -- they were made by the Selectric typewriter division, have individual microswitches in each key and a steel plate in the base, and they do indeed go CLUNK. I've got to get my USB/ADB converter out and dust mine down and try it with the iBook under OS/X 10.3 ...

Oh, and not on the subject of oooh shiny watches from japan: http://www.tokyoflash.com/

I often feel I was born too late, most of the big advancements were made before my time, and it seems most of the fun was had earlier.

The AlphaSmart Dana is a worthy successor to the Z88.

I look at the wristwatch...

I boggle...

Now all we have to do is implement the electronics with thermionic valves, and we shall have discovered what the Lens of Arisia really is.

Note for new readers:

Charlie weighs the same as a very large duck.

Charlie:

"I haven't sold any novels this week (despite a couple of foreign rights queries),..."


Uh, sorry to contradict you, Charlie, but *I* bought 'The Atrocity Archives', in the US (from Amazon). So you have at least one foreign sale :)

Re. your Geektoys script, the symbol you want is the 'not' sign, ¬ (character 172 in Latin1, 194 in MacRoman).

Nope, I don't know why they didn't just backslash to escape returns instead of inventing their own line continuation sign either, but that's AppleScript for you: occasional sparks of pure genius surrounded by some of the most appallingly bad thinking imaginable. (The sparks, btw, are mostly lifted from Smalltalk and maybe Lisp or Logo. The syntax, Hypertalk. The stupidity? God knows...:p)

Here's how I'd do the same thing in AS, FWIW:

tell app "Finder"
   if exists Finder window 1 then
        set src to Finder window 1's target
    else
        set src to desktop
    end
end
set source_folder to src as alias

Bit cleaner and more robust, and without the redundant crud that AppleScript so seems to encourage. Still looks pretty long, mind you, but compare it to its nearest Python equivalent and you'll realise it's not that bad:

#!/usr/local/bin/pythonw

from appscript import *

fw = app('Finder.app').Finder_windows[1]
if fw.exists():
    src = fw.target.get()
else:
    src = app('Finder.app').desktop.get()
print src.url.get()

Not sure what the Perl equivalent using Mac::Glue is, but I doubt it's any tighter (its reference form syntax isn't as elegant, IMNSHO).

...

BTW, one of the ironies of the AppleScript language is that it was intended to have a replaceable syntax, allowing users to view scripts in their dialect of choice: English, French, Japanese, C-style, etc. However, the only dialect ever publically released was the verbose, HyperTalk-derived English one; and the whole dialect system eventually got canned somewhere around OS8/OS9 IIRC. I think the technology side worked okay, but the sheer logistics of supporting multiple dialects proved too much to be practical. Especially as it would've required scriptable apps to provide multiple localised terminology resources (aetes) to really be of use to users. And since a lot of application developers can't even do _one_ aete right, never mind a dozen of 'em, well, you can probably imagine how that would've panned out... :p

...

Anyway, if you want to check out some of the better developed alternatives to AppleScript language for Mac IAC:

- Mac::Glue (Perl bridge c/o Chris Nandor): http://search.cpan.org/~cnandor/

- appscript (Python bridge c/o me): http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/appscript.html

Both are works in progress so may have their own bugs and kinks that haven't been knocked out yet, and they won't help you any in dealing with the many delightful vagaries of scriptable applications themselves of course, but at least they'll save you having to fight the language at the same time.

HTH
(Greetings from the far west coast o' Embra!:)

Hmm. Learning Python has been on my to-do list for ages; I suspect you've just given me a kick in the pants in that direction -- the python version is much clearer to me than the Applescript one.

Now if only I could find a robot mouse for them to chase while I'm writing ...

Robot mice:
http://www.robotstore.com/catalog/display.asp?pid=28
or R/C mice, maybe your could tie the controller into basic stamp.
http://www.talkingpresents.com/productpages/pet_remotemouse.html
I've seen the later in stored in the U.S.

Of course, a laser pointer with some sort of programmable, oscillating mirrow would be the ideal cat toy. Maybe you could repurpose something like this.
http://www.find-me-a-gift.co.uk/children-g...ome-laser-show.html

Personally, I mostly use my office door to physically keep my owners at bay while I write, then I augment that with a set of headphones to protect against feline memetic attacks.

Ah...the Littermaid.

Or as most owner's of the world seem to refer to it as "That goddamn awful scarything with teeth and claws that scares more shit out of me that I left in it".

Your cats are braver than mine if they use that thing. Not only does it look like some sort of Nazi torture device for felines, but the designer doesn't seem to have taken into acount the general shape and physiology of a cat.

If you ever read the mad rantings of the lads at Penny-arcade, at some point I think they got one.

Their experiences were similar.

If you can mod it to work - tell me. I'm sick of carting out lukewarm faeces in a sandwhich bag!

Anything has got to be better than the current situation.

It's not that Frigg and Mafdet are untidy cats -- far from it -- but they're, shall we say, not small. And they're on obesity control food (prescribed by the vet) that seems to consist mostly of dietary fibre, so they eat as much as they want and still lose weight. Which translates to filling up the two bonus-sized litter trays at a rate of approximately a kilogram per week per cat.

Given that we're thinking about adding a third beast to the herd, our ability to dispose of toxic waste is a critical limiting factor.

Penny Arcade on the Littermaid:

"The thing is, the device really doesn't have a lot of room in it for cats, which strikes me as a design flaw. You would think they would try to put a cat in there, or find somebody who had a cat, shit, maybe just imagine a cat and try to design their litterbox around that hypothetical, hairy customer. But they didn't. Cats must situate themselves diagonally in order to make a deposit as it were, so the container at the end where it's all supposed to go fills up at the sides first and then boils over into your house. This isn't even the worst problem."

More at http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2004-03-15

"When the cats begin to use the Littermaid, my first warning will be a loud rumbling, creaking noise accompanied by metalic squeaking and a light artillery bombardment to soften up the beach-head -- at about four o'clock in the morning. "

This will, of course, be considered a bonus feature by the cats once they realise it annoys you.

WD-40, it is your only hope :)

Stop press: Mafdet's using the thing. And she doesn't seem to be afraid of the kitty-eating machinery, either. (Dunno about Frigg, she spends most of the day sleeping in the deepest shadow she can find.)

I'm going to get a time switch so I can have the Littermaid switch itself off from midnight through 9am -- it automatically cycles once whenever you switch it on, so that'd sort out the overnight use.

All in all, so far I'm not totally displeased with it.

Much thanks for your service as consumer product tester. The ladies of the house (particularly Paula, who is the litterbox Ghoddess) had been considering getting one of these evil-looking devices. Given your elegant description of the thing's operation (and the fact that the litterboxes live in their bedrooms) have put this idea on deep hold.

A grateful nation salutes your sacrifice.

What happened with the Dana Wireless? I remember long ago you were getting one, but not if it was splendid or terrible.

Still very tempted myself.

My new work dual 2.5 G5 and 20" cinema screen might just outshiny your laptop :-)

Michael: still got the Dana. Nothing beats it for banging out text on battery power, but when I actually travel somewhere it's usually with Feorag in tow, and some luggage. In which case, an iBook with fast user switching gives us not only word processing, but also web and email access.

The 17" powerbook is my new desktop box. I'm keeping either the 12" or 14" iBook (not sure which, yet, but probably the 14" model as it's got double the memory) as a backup machine and out-of-the-house-on-trips box. And the Dana as a when-the-power-fails-for-a-week typing machine. There is, as yet, no such thing as a one size fits all computer for me, until someone comes up with a folding keyboard with a projection screen attached that can scale from 4" to 30" diagonal at > 1600x1200 res.

Oh yes. I forgot: the 17" PB is a second-hand 1.33GHz model, not the faster 1.5GHz current model. Which means it has a DVD-RW drive that can be flashed to RPC-1, so I can reset the region coding on it an unlimited number of times (unlike the more recent 1.5GHz model, which has an RPC-2 drive). I reckon being able to stick my thumb in the eye socket of the MPAA's illegal trade cartel is worth about 7-8% off my peak performance.

The dual 2.5/G5 with 20" cinema screen is indeed shiny. However,can you take it into the bathroom and read the Guardian on it while using the loo? :-)

There's certainly no option for the PM and cinema display to go to the loo with me, at least until Apple's much vaunted iAntiGrav comes out. However, I'm not sure I'd want to take a powerbook there either, especially a 17" which are a bit unweildy from what I've seen.

For browsing in the loo, a wifi equipped Palm does just fine :-)

Just in case you wanted confirmation, Charlie, the image is definitely a Fark Photoshop. Still quite funny, though.

Shouldn't you be writing?

No, I'm on vacation, recovering from Worldcon.

Even without tracking down the competition, have a close look at the perspective on that monitor (looks more like an old TV) on the wall. It's wrong. Possibly a camera with a different focal length of lens, as well as being slightly out of true.

Which wouldn't rule out it being an old-fashioned fake, with sheets of photographic paper and sharp knives and glue, instead of electron pushing with Photoshop.

I've done it. It works better when you take the pictures with the same camera, but if you want to put an object into the centre of another image, it had better be in the centre of the photo you take it from.

You should try (or maybe not) Warhammer 40K, The Dawn of War.

I've lost ten hours of solid writing time to that damned thing already.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

Some games are useful, though.

I'm writing military Sword and Sorcery. Medieval Total War is the only way I have to put into practice the tactics and doctrine I've learnt from studying medieval warfare.

If I was doing a modern military, I'd probably clock up some time on an Apache sim.

What I avoid, though, is things which scratch the creativity itch. So no online RPGs for me....

From what I've heard -

Do not, under any circumstances, let anyone introduce you to World of Warcraft. You will never be seen again.

(I've been avoiding online RPGs like the plague since they got graphics. I'd wake up one day to find I had emigrated to a world that doesn't exist.)

You will now play Planescape: Torment. *jedi handwaving*

Best character driven RPG ever. By a longshot.

I was wondering whether I should mention Torment as most people who've played it (including myself) always try to cram it down the throats of those who haven't, but I might as well echo the previous post. In the world of literary video games, it's definitely heads and shoulders above the rest.

Er, remember I'm a Mac guy, guys? Are any of these items available on OS/X?

Uh - if you really want your time to die; start creating your own NWN mods. Simple C+ish kind of language that lets you do all kind of funk in the modules.

I end up making mods more than playing them - damnit. Hey Charlie - come jump on our server some day (when its up)- Server Eggs pass Bacon (That goes for anyone else here too).

>Er, remember I'm a Mac guy, guys? Are any of these items >available on OS/X?

I think we've hit on the real reason why successful creatives reputedly prefer Macs - it's actually the other way around: creatives with Macs don't have any decent games software to tempt them.

Perhaps I should dust down my old BBC B....

You will now play Planescape: Torment. *jedi handwaving*

Best character driven RPG ever. By a longshot.

Yup. I found the running around in the sewers bit at the start a bit slow, but it really sucks you in after that. This was the only game I ever felt any real emotion about the characters (during the split screen confrontations with the big bad guy at the end).

Meanwhile, I have an assignment due, mucho stuff to read - and I'm being continually tempted to continue playing a civilized and rapidly industrializing China in "Victoria".

Oops, sorry, I didn't stop and consider whether Torment was available on other platforms. I really have no idea.

And here's a stop-press announcement: NWN 1.64 bombs like a B-52 on a 17" Powerbook G4. It's insane. At one point I was crashing out every five minutes, and just to make things exciting it threw in a kernel panic or two as well.

Luckily I have a fallback box, an iBook. So after a one-hour copy (five gigs of data?!?) I fired it up. And lo; I now have a choice -- stable gameplay at 1024x768, or a very pretty 1440x900 display that's about as stable as [insert your favourite manic-depressive here].

Humph.

Abort! Abort!

They have sold about 3 million of the LitterMaids so far and I think that it is a very good product. Quite often buyers will throw out a unit and buy another one when the problem could be fixed in less than a minute. The LitterMaid help desk is no help! And, of course, they want you to purchase new one. To find out how to fix your LitterMaid, purchase the LitterMaid Repair Manual that can be found at www.catboxking.com

Delta-wing version of Heinlein's Mobile Infantry?

There was something a trifle fishy about the nun walking down the street, as I staggered out of the Drones. I stood for a moment. Jackboots? The stiff-legged gait? After Spiffy Baldwin's horror stories about his time at the seminary, not even the machine-gun seemed out of place. Then it struck me, with all the force of a mis-directed cricket-ball passing the leg-boundary for six.

Nuns do not have wings.

What coincidence. Just earlier today I ran across this: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/start.html?pg=11 (path: makezine!uberreview!wired).

And a few weeks ago I saw an article on a catapult intended to fire police or fiefighters onto the roofs of buildings.

Maybe it's steam-engine time for a very odd kind of steam engine.

Cute design concept, but I don't see any intake for the purported jets. I'm also somewhat dubious about the aerodynamics of leaving the body dangling in the airstream below the wing - it would make a lot more sense to position the body above the wing, so that the inclined surface facing the windstream (and it would have to be highly inclined to give 200-300lbs lift with that limited surface area) would be smooth. Also, lengthen the resulting lifting body enough to keep the boots out of the airstream. There also doesn't appear to be a huge amount of room for fuel in that package.

Are we sure this is real and not an april-fools joke?

You can already get these things (Sans jet propulsion) on the open market. You don't hang below it though, you're strapped in quite tight.

At the parachute centre run by a relative, someone decided to try one out. It was only when they started to calculate the forward/down ratios that they realised that the guy was going to have to register an actual flight route with ATC - he was going to fly outside of the dropzone boundaries within about four minutes!

I'd say that's the samllest powered plane ever not including the hangglider since you have to measure updrafts. Looks pretty light, must have the nano-materials sprinkled in.

Also E-PAPER is here! No power consumption when not changing the page I think. So it should consume as much as a wristwatch; so it's comfortable for my free books from the Net; maybe should be a boon for trees too.

http://www.faz.net/d/invest/meldung.aspx?id=27219260

Of course, the profit people will want to charge like 300 dollars for a 19 inch monitor version (costing a grain of rice to produce) stating manufacturing renovation costs.
The eteranl manufacturing renovation costs.
And implimenting a terminator-esque autonomous plant would be too dangerous I guess, since robots don't really care about money unless there's something I missed.

Other cool stuff about HHO gas:
http://www.waterfuelconverters.com/

That looks like a really good way to break one's own neck.

A very cool way to do it as well.

Respects,
S. F. Murphy
From Flyover Country, USA

If it's acting as a wing, I think you really do want the body below the wing, in the high(er)-pressure, low(er)-velocity part of the airstream. Putting it above the wing is going to cause turbulence where you don't want it and make it easier to stall.

There's also static stability to consider (if the center of mass is above the center of lift, it might want to flip over).

Small turbojets aren't a problem - you can buy them commercially and hold them in your hand, producing about 15 lbs of thrust (a whole lot more for slightly bigger versions) Check aeromodelling press. I hope the guinea pig has ceramic on the heels of his shoes, because these babyjets run as hot as their full sized counterparts.
I don't notice the fuel tanks either, because they are seriously thirsty (anything that does 120000 rpm consumes fuel at litres per minute, even at these sizes)
Oh, and I hope he has a head for heights, because he'll be jumping from somewhere a long way from the ground. Even with lifting body aerodynamics, all that outfit will give you is a controlled fall maybe a little in advance of a base jumper's flying fox suit. You can miniaturise just about everything except American military personnel and unless you can ignore every law of aerodynamics (a la F104 Widowmaker) this gizmo will be all about power to weight ratio.

I did a post about this here, at the end of May, incidentally.

I was too depressed by the news about the carbon nanotubules and the space elevator to get around to that one, though I really should have. (But who needs an excuse not to blog, really?)

The nanotube news is not terminal; it's just tire-kicking by a materials scientist.