Sneak hears that Japanese firm Vision Optic has developed a pair of glasses that should bring clarity to interminable PowerPoint sessions. A unit built into the frame detects changes in angle and, if your head droops beyond a set angle, will vibrate enough to help you sit up and pretend to take notice.

January 31, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Always keen to be “zeitgeisty”, Apple has hired currently quite popular comedians Mitchell and Webb to promote its line of Mac OS computers - and at the same time to portray PCs as dull, dangerous, hopeless and hilarious. In a series of new ads the two zany comics pretend that they are in fact Macs and PCs - saying things like “Hello, I’m PC. Achoo! Oh dear I’ve caught a virus” and “It’s OK, I’m Mac, I laugh in the face of snot” or something. Sneak couldn’t be bothered to write it down exactly.

Sneak is not sure which is Webb and which is Mitchell, but the duo have very different comedy personas: one of them is a bit dumpy and square, while the other is a bit wanky and full of himself, so there’s probably no need to explain who plays which computer.

Sneak couldn’t help wondering what other double-acts might have been chosen instead. Clearly, the Mac would be Eddie Large not Syd Little. And obviously the Mac would be the annoying one out of Cannon and Ball. Ant and Dec, meanwhile, would have to play a pair of Macs, as they both come across as equally smug gits.

Makes you want to pay through the nose for a Mac all the more, doesn’t it?

January 29, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

As if customers weren’t already confused by Oracle’s Fusion (is it middleware or is it an apps integration strategy?) Sneak hears that big cheese Larry Ellison is to further muddle matters by opening a restaurant specialising in fusion cuisine. Sneak advises giving this upcoming eatery a wide berth - if it shares anything with Oracle’s licensing, you’ll likely choke on the bill.

January 24, 2007 Food and Drink | Permalink | Comments (0)

In times past, marooned mariners might spell out “SOS” in rocks or sticks on a beach, hoping that their message might be spotted by a passing schooner. These days it’s all a bit more high-tech, and a lot more pointless. People with too much time on their hands have begun anticipating the flybys of Google’s flying eye - the aerial photography process that feeds updated geographic imagery into Google Maps - and have begun providing “content”.

A few dozen large sheets of cardboard or bin liners, rocks to stop them blowing away, a few friends (or, perhaps more likely, a bit of time on your own) is all that’s required to lay out a pixellated scene from Star Wars across your local park.

Of course like all innocent technological innovations, the time of childlike delight in the newly possible will be short-lived. Before long Google will be forced to blur out profanities spelled out in weedkiller on waste ground, while the hawking messages of aerial photo spammers will turn the roofs of abandoned warehouses into prime advertising real estate.

Sneak, for one, is planning pre-emptive action. Tonight Sneak will be visiting his roof with a pot of paint. The message: “These tiles are Copyright 2007 Sneak. No reproduction without permission.” Then let’s see how Google reacts to the writ...

January 23, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Online blog-thing The Daily WTF details crimes against sanity perpetrated by clueless pseudo-techies and know-nothing managers. Sneak has seen more than a few CVs boasting of “an eye for detials”, so was particularly keen on a recent post about job interviews. WTF contributor Jeff L relates how his firm had created its own proprietary programming language, called Probol, an oddity that he would explain to potential recruits early in the interview. “One enthusiastic candidate immediately said, ‘Wow, that should be fun. I just finished reading a book on Probol last week!’”, Jeff relates. Sneak couldn’t help agreeing with a follow-up comment. It would be very hard to resist saying: “Oh really, which book? Could you bring it in? We have our own book, but it’s out of date...”
Do tell Sneak your own tales of iffy interviews.

January 22, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak can forgive reader Dave Lee for wondering if Chinese networking specialist Huawei (pronounced “who are we?”) has a low opinion of its target market. “Are they calling their customers what I think they are?” he asks, having perused a Huawei advert in another IT paper that read “the reason Huawei progresses rapidly is that customers are the very fertile soil”.

And all Sneak would add is, what do you expect if you read other IT papers? Talk about crap, that’s what.

January 19, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

As many Apple-fan websites have been pointing out, cocky Steve Jobs may not be 100 percent certain that the iPhone will still be called the iPhone when it ships. The clue? Sneak’s iMac has “iMac” written on its back in big fat letters. Sneak’s iPod has “iPod” etched on its back in similarly prominent type. But if the new Apple iPhone has “iPhone” stamped on its back, then it’s in very small letters indeed, because Sneak can’t see it anywhere. Nope, there’s just an Apple logo and a flat empty space in which to etch an apology to Cisco for purloining its brand.

So, if the iPhone ends up with a new name, what might it be called? Perhaps there may even be money to be made from registering a few speculative domains, before Apple has a chance to announce that the iPhone will henceforth be known as the iBlower, or the iDog-n-Bone.

January 18, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s proof that if you design a better IT security product, the world will beat a path to your door....

January 11, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Billionaire Amazon.com big cheese Jeff Bezos is currently plunging funds into a space tourism startup called Blue Origin - the Earth, geddit - which has just come out of stealth mode and made its first test flight, to the dizzying height of 85m (roughly half the height of the BT Tower and about 99.9km short of space). But Bezos isn’t worried about the modesty of this initial baby step. As well as video of the flight, Blue Origin (don’t call it B.O.) has unveiled its coat of arms. Apparently it’s old logo - a stylised blue swoosh of the kind normally found on a pair of trainers - was not nearly grand enough.

The new logo includes a stylised Earth, Sun and planets, the motto Gradatim Ferociter, which apparently means “step-by-step, boldly”, plus a winged hour-glass, two tortoises reaching for the stars, and a shield emblazoned with what looks like a schematic showing the boundaries of the atmosphere.

In short, the coat of arms is just the thing for a 21st Century effort that will probably take longer than the Dark Ages to turn a profit.

January 9, 2007 Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has spent the festive period munching mince pies and pondering the future. Apparently the pies contained a proportion of spirits. Nonetheless, these forecasts about progress in the IT industry can be relied upon to come true.

Microsoft Office 2007 will arrive, leaving the helpdesks of early-adopters tied up in knots - or rather wrapped up in ribbons - as users fail to grasp the innovative new user interface. Learning to use Office's "ribbon" interface will prove as painless and intuitive as ice-skating.

Google users searching for help with Office 2007 will find lots of links to Google's online apps. Google will insist that such antics cannot be classed as evil, because of Microsoft's monopoly.

Meanwhile, searchers employing the fledgling human-powered Wikia Search will find that attempts to locate help with Office 2007 lead mostly to OpenOffice, to pages that spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, and to blogs about Buffy the Vampire Slayer's inventive use of letter-openers.

Moore's law will continue, allowing AMD and Intel to pile ever-greater numbers of cores onto a single substrate. As its lead in core-count erodes, AMD will rediscover its fondness for marketing-based competition, trumping Intel's new Core 4 DoDeco with the AMD Core Blimey It's Got a Lot of Cores.

Every IT provider will claim its products are the greenest. Each will provide its own benchmark to back up its assertion. Efforts to establish an industry standard for the total carbon footprint of products will founder as participants argue over where to draw the line: whether to consider not just the manufacture and distribution of the product and its components, and the energy expended in designing it, and the energy required by the commuting workforce who build it, and the carbon output of marketing and advertising activities, but also the hot-air produced by pointless talking shops and pompous standards committees.

Oracle will make business history by launching a hostile takeover bid for Oracle. The firm will lend itself the money for the venture in an innovative piece of recursive bookkeeping that will keep the debt forever one quarter in the future. The Sarbanes-Oxley rules on transparency will be revisited as a result, to enforce a new level of openness. Publicly-listed companies will be required to maintain their fiscal files as real-time wikis.

And Microsoft will quietly provide a download to graft XP-style menus onto Office 2007.

January 1, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)