Intel's internal codenames for its products have been the source of much mirth for Sneak in the past, but the latest one to adorn its processor roadmap seems particularly apt. "Smithfield", due in mid 2005, is to be the company's first dual-core desktop chip. As many readers will no doubt be aware, the 4GHz Pentium 4 and its planned successor, Tejas, were unceremoniously given the chop last year in order to bring this product forward.
It seems only fitting, then, that the chip should share a name with Smithfield Market, home to London's meat trade for the past 800 years or so, and therefore the cause of an untimely demise for an uncountable number of unfortunate beasts.
Sneak, for one, is looking forward to demanding "Where's the beef?" from Intel executives if Smithfield is delayed for any reason. Sneak also fancies that Intel will have to work hard to avoid the chip being labelled 'dead meat' in comparison with AMD's Opteron family.

December 15, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Regular correspondent Gerald Oakham contacted Sneak to warn of the dangers that Christmas decorations can pose. As any fan of air-combat countermeasures will know, chopped-up strips of aluminium foil can disrupt a variety of radio systems, whether the foil is deposited by a jet fighter in the form of anti-radar chaff, or by innocent office workers in the form of tinsel wrapped around the aerial of a wireless access point. Interestingly, when tin-foil chaff was first employed by the RAF in July 1943 [date corrected, see comment], to disrupt German radar, it had the code-name Window. Funny how a system designed to bring disruption and confusion should have a name with such a familiar ring to it...

December 13, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

Keen eBayers may have seen kitsch hands-free kits for mobile phones up for sale, fashioned from old rotary-phone receivers hacked to include Bluetooth modules or wired to work with Nokias. Perhaps this inspired Burnside Telecom's Desktop Mobile, a little gadget that takes a standard SIM but lets you plug in an entire desktop phone. Burnside suggests a range of applications, such as providing comms for a building-site office, but Sneak feels the right place for such technology is the car dashboard. After all, it's illegal to use a mobile phone while driving, but nobody has yet suggested it might be illegal to use Sneak's vintage two-handed candlestick-and-shot-glass phone while steering with the knees...

December 10, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Following the news that IBM has finally cut itself free of the boat-anchor that has been its PC division, some of the more, er, imaginative IT pundits have suggested that it might now buy Apple, purveyor of the non-PC PC that is the Mac. Or, given the Mac's popularity among lentil munching right-on types, perhaps that should be the PC PC. Anyway, Sneak feels that an Apple-IBM embrace is unlikely. It's hard to see the youth of today rushing off to IBM's Electric Gramophone Shop to download Snoop Dogg's Drop it Like it's Hot onto their IBM ThinkPod, as the iPod would no doubt be rechristened. No, Sneak would put money on IBM staying out of the PC business, PC or otherwise, and keeping well clear of Apple. Unless, say, Sun happened to merge with Apple, Sun-Apple then merged with Computer Associates, and IBM then bought CA-Sun-Apple. By which time the iPod would be called the BrightStor JavaPod, would be years behind the curve, and nobody would give a damn.

December 8, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak happened to stumble across networking equipment specialist Zycko the other day, and now has just one question. How exactly should Sneak pronounce the firm's not-very-well-chosen name? Is it nearer to "sicko" or to "psycho"?

December 7, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spam filters have become so adept at filtering out email offers of smut, performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals and hoards of Nigerian cash that spammers are having to become ever more inventive. Spelling the name of Pfizer's blue pill "\/1/\GR/\" is no longer enough. As BoingBoing reports, the Ascii-art techniques that once let a generation of text-adventure programmers squeeze a picture of a Middle-Earth into a fraction of a kilobyte are now being employed to slip questionable messages past the automated email border-guards. No doubt virus writers will soon follow suit, Sneak feels, and rather than sending their malware as an easily-detectable compiled binary, will take a tip from the old days of computer magazine program distribution. Look forward to attacks that start: "You've won a prize! To claim, simply open a new file in Notepad, save it as winner.exe, and then paste in the following winner's code (it's four pages long for security reasons): 023AD356FF045BDAA4958739..." etc. etc. You have been warned.

December 3, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Murderers that plead guilty still need defence lawyers, and it is for similar reasons that many firms employ people trained in the art of stretching the facts, ignoring incredulity, and arguing from a position of absurdity with a straight face. They're called marketing managers, typically. And some are better at it - or more brazen at it - than others. Mark Bond, director of enterprise marketing at Vodafone, deserves some kind of award for making the following observation, and seeming like he meant it, on the growing ubiquity of mobile telephony: "There's a generation of people who have never had a fixed-line phone," he began, plausibly enough. "When they see a desk phone, they say, 'What's that?'"
Er, OK Mark. Kind of. Except that the generation of people who genuinely have never had a fixed-line phone and don't even know what one looks like don't actually say, "What's that?" No. They're much more likely to say, "Goo-goo", "Ma-ma" or, at a stretch, "Poo-poo".

December 1, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)