Sneak will be glued to the TV screen tonight for the first episode of The Apprentice, series 3 (it’s on BBC One at 9pm). Although the programme is yet to air, you can already take stock of the preening candidates via the BBC’s web site. Sneak has already taken a dislike to Adam Hosker, the requisite gel-haired used car salesman, who manages to stand out in a line-up of cocky, cocksure cocks by saying, “My strengths and weaknesses are often the same thing, on occasion my confidence can become arrogance.” But on the performance of past series, no doubt Adam will actually turn out to be the kind of laughably overconfident fool you actually end up rooting for, à la the wonderful Paul Torrisi from series 1.

On the basis of job bias, however, Sneak has to root for 25-year-old telecoms manager Lohit Kalburgi, who looks a decent enough chap. He certainly has the ears for monitoring the communications of his rivals.

March 28, 2007 Television | Permalink | Comments (1)

You probably won’t have much sympathy if your name is John Smith, but yesterday Sneak bumped into Duncan Ross of Teradata, who grumbled that another employee called Ross Duncan keeps getting all his interesting email. The problem seems to be that Duncan’s address tends to leap to the front of the automated fill-in queue when colleagues start typing Ross’s name into the “To” field. Or possibly vice versa. Of course mixups in the other direction do also occur, and Ross reports that he hesitated the other day before forwarding on a message meant for Duncan, confirming details of a business trip to Australia. Who wouldn’t have been tempted? No doubt the wrong Ross/Duncan could have breezed through the airline check-in process and enjoyed a stay in a nice hotel near Bondi Beach, with the innocent Duncan/Ross carrying the can for not turning up at some tedious data warehousing event.

March 27, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Radio 4 comedy The Now Show last week wondered why Gordon Brown still holds up a red briefcase on Budget day, given that it might be more appropriate - in this age of the information economy - to attend the photo opportunity brandishing a red USB stick (attended by Ed Balls clutching a copy of Excel for Dummies). But Sneak wonders why it is necessary to physically carry the data to parliament, in this age of instant data transfer, when it could be emailed the 500 yards from Downing Street to Parliament. Then, with the paperwork out of the way, work should focus on some sort of matter transference beam to save the fat controller the trouble of being driven to the dispatch box in his Jaguar. Sneak suggests boffins start by tackling the problem of dismantling the chancellor into his constituent atoms, preferably with a laser beam or some sort of atomic-force-suppression ray. Or, if need be, a chainsaw. Reassembling him again might take yet more research but, you know, Sneak is happy to wait.

March 26, 2007 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you haven't already taken the money and started running, hurry up. According to the plausible pronouncements of venture capital investor Peter Rip, the Web 2.0 bubble is starting to pucker and hiss.

“Much of the ‘easy’ innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave,” Rip writes in his EarlyStageVC blog. “Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn't going to be as easy. The hard problems are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform.”

Sneak hopes that the move to Web-as-Platform will also encompass a rejection of the current tide of amateur know-nothing-nobodies spouting unending torrents of illiterate claptrap. Sneak, for one, preferred it when professional know-nothings got paid to spout the illiterate claptrap.

March 21, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spend too much time watching Google and you might assume that Silicon Valley's next big grab-the-cash-and-skedaddle bubble is the same as the last one - ie Web 2.0. But the New York Times is probably closer to the burning money and has even coined a great new name for the accelerating bandwagon of hopeful new startups: watt-coms. “Out of the ashes of the Internet bust, many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered cars,” the paper says.

And it’s not just crazy startups promising perpetual motion machines - the energy equivalent of first-mover advantage. According to the Times, “lawyers, accountants, recruiters and publicists” are all springing enthusiastically aboard the bandwagon and proclaiming their expertise in the emerging sector.

It’s all a bit of a blow to Sneak. It’s easier to dismiss the moronic wisdom of crowds than it is to work out whether a new focused-solar-energy-powered steam-generating turbine is the real deal - or just smoke and mirrors.

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

In another of the web’s epidemic of viral videos, a beanie-wearing too-cool-for-a-haircut skater dude is pursued by what looks like a Japanese toy robot with helicopter blades sprouting from its stubby neck. When the flying bot catches up with the slacker it unaccountably does not chop off his worthless head, but instead delivers a text message. And by a series of unlikely events in transpires that the slacker in fact works for Microsoft Research, where the bot is being perfected.

The message behind the barely believable clip is that Microsoft is not the kind of place where you’ll slog in a grey cube while a hegemonic, money-grabbing corporate walrus squeezes the life out of your brain, as most slacker dudes might tend to assume, but a vibrant, happy place where you’ll get to play with cool toys.

Hmm. As messages go, Sneak finds helicopter-necked robots slightly more believable.

March 13, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is not entirely sure if this is real or some sort of viral stunt to drum up web clicks. San Francisco-based startup HeadThere has apparently dreamt up a bizarre robotic contraption called a Giraffe, which looks a lot like a motorised hat-stand. At the base, a PC motherboard running Ubuntu Linux, batteries, motors and wheels lurk, to allow the thing to drive around under its own steam and, presumably, work out where it’s going. At the top of its telescopic aluminium neck, a pivoting flatscreen, camera and speaker allow the Giraffe to show images, to video things, and to talk. Only it won’t do the talking itself, because the Giraffe is supposed to be a mobile, Wi-Fi-enabled, remote video conferencing thingamajig - a head-height automated stand-in for a person who can’t, er, stand there in person. It would allow, for example, your boss to simultaneously stay at home while also sneaking up behind you, seeing what’s on your screen, and then taking you aside for a quiet word in a meeting room. That’s assuming it can move silently - more likely it moves with the stealth of large, wobbling vacuum cleaner. It’ll cost $1800 to $3000 and will no doubt make staff assume their employer has money to flush down the loo.

March 13, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak was alarmed to hear that boffins from the Center for Neural Science at New York University are hard at work trying to turn the stuff of terrible Hollywood movies into quivering reality. The white-coat wearers have made the premise of Total Recall or Johnny Mnemonic seem credible by developing a technique for selectively wiping out an individual memory - while leaving similar or related memories intact. They’ve done this not by experimenting on Keanu Reeves’ skull with six-inch nails and a hammer, sadly, but with unfortunate lab rats, drugs and electric shocks. It sounds horrific but can’t be all bad. Sneak for one would certainly be willing to undergo a course of electro convulsive therapy if it could be guaranteed to wipe out any and all recollection of Keanu trying to act.

March 12, 2007 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, so this is nowhere near new, and the footage shouldn’t be on YouTube because it belongs to Honda not to someone called “Surronded”, but Sneak still can’t help watching this short video again and again. Asimo - the human-like robot built by car, motorcycle and aircraft maker Honda seemingly for the hell of it - can run. And not just in straight lines. It can run in circles and in slaloms. It’s hypnotic to watch, even if some voice in the back of Sneak’s head does keep saying, “Run, Forrest, run”.

March 12, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have the US to blame, of course, for speed dating. But the country has not finished yet - its devilish denizens have hatched a new variant of the cringe-making process of meeting new people, deciding if you like or loathe them, and deciding whether to risk giving them access to your bank account. It’s called speed investing. According to the San Jose Mercury News, around 40 hopeful entrepreneurs and similar numbers of wide-walleted angels attended a recent Silicon Valley event where the inventors “talked at a fevered clip as a coordinator flashed two signs, the first reading ‘One Minute Remaining’ and the second ‘Rotate!’”.

As in the dating game, frustration remained rife among those poorly socialised types who manage to turn-off every prospective partner in a lot less than the allotted three minutes. “[The investors were] actually checking their BlackBerrys while I was talking,” bleated one jilted wallflower to the News. “Maybe some of them need to see who's e-mailing them at every single minute of the afternoon, but I kind of doubt it.”

Yes, you poor, deluded, lovelorn fool, Sneak doubts it too.

March 6, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

The most advanced fighter jet in the world, the software-stuffed Lockheed F-22 Raptor, turned out not be so advanced when it crossed the international dateline flying westward for the first time early last month. Somewhere in its complicated bowels a routine noted that the local time really ought to switch from today to yesterday, and on being told that it appeared to be a in a time machine, all the rest of the software on the plane decided that the best thing would be to crash. Speaking to CNN, retired US Air Force major general Donald Shepperd explained the Snafu in military terms: “At the international date line, whoops, all systems dumped and when I say all systems, I mean all systems, their navigation, part of their communications, their fuel systems. They were - they could have been - in real trouble”. Fortunately all eight affected aircraft were able to limp home using old-fashioned eyeballs - following a tanker aircraft back to base.
Still, it could have been worse. According to software risks expert Peter Neumann, code in the older F-16 Falcon would have made that aircraft flip over and insist on flying upside-down on crossing the equator, had the error not been caught during testing.

March 5, 2007 Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)