Charles on… anything that comes along

• Press Your Luck
  How an unemployed ice-cream salesman spotted the pseudorandom sequence in a US game show. He won more than his podium number could show, the episode ran twice its length… but the aftermath is sad, a testimonial to how we can go wrong.
• HMV’s FAQs page for its digital downloads.
  It’s a dog’s breakfast. Horrible font (white on black and tiny?). I was going to quote some of it but no, they’ve prevented that. Plus you have to search around the HMV site to find it. And what’s DRM? A page clearly written by techies, for lawyers. Forgot the users, did we?
  Oh, and the DRM conditions are worse than iTunes; 3 computers, 5 burns, and you can transfer to only 2 “compatible” devices. And people wonder why iTunes claims 80+% of the market?
• The Guardian: leader on Roger Daltrey’s desire for vinyl
  

  “nothing beats the rich sound of vinyl, it’s a fact and you get none of the decrease in quality that you get with other types of modern recordings”. Many musical enthusiasts, classical and pop, would agree with that statement. So would those technical experts who claim that the conversion of a digital signal into the ones and zeros of digital code involves a perceptible loss of quality.

  Ahem. This technical expert can tell you that conversion to digital doesn’t have to involve any loss except at frequencies you can’t hear; it all depends on the sampling rate. Pah! Humanities graduates…

• Dreamsicle: “music phone management software for OSX”
  Hmm, a better way to manage songs from iTunes to your phone - your Sony “Walkman” phone (800 series? whatever). Nice UI. But won’t play iTMS songs of course
• Daring Fireball: The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme
  

  Brushed Metal: I’m the bad-ass theme. I’m the one who flouts the Human Interface Guidelines.
  Mike: This guy [iTunes 5] trashes the HIG the way Johnny Depp trashes a hotel room. He even sports a custom radius on his window corners. No other window on the system has a shape like this. It’s wild. Just wait until the HIG zealots get a load of this guy.

  When Gruber riffs, he does it like Jimmy Page on a custom Les Paul on a hot night. Fantastic.

• Blu-ray players to “punish” users who hack their gear? - Engadget - www.engadget.com
  Yeah, but they’ll have a bigger problem persuading people to buy them anyway. It’s VHS vs Betamax again, done badly
• I am really angry at Palm.
  

  I’d like to mention at this point that Palm just spent a gazillion dollars buying the name “Palm” back from PalmSource (who they just spun off) so they can use the name “Palm” all over. This is one of those Dilbert-style management things, where they’re all, “We should spin off our hardware and software! No, wait, buy back the name! No, sell! License the fromjub! Re-org! Capitalize our key assets!”

  This is always a bad sign for a company. I’m like: Hey, here’s an idea… spend your time and money making your products not suck. Nobody gives a crap if you’re called Palm or PalmOne or Pam or Spam. Your asset isn’t your name, you dickweeds, it’s your reputation for having a cool device, which you are destroying by having the device not be cool any more.

  . He’s really angry. Personally I just do my calendar and useful contacts on my phone - I’ve completely given up having a handheld (Seen at Call Me Fishmeal.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• These things I found interesting.. 4 September 2005 (5 September 2005; score: 56.41%)
• These things I found interesting.. 10 September 2005 (10 September 2005; score: 52.94%)
• These things I found interesting.. 8 September 2005 (evening) (8 September 2005; score: 50.01%)

If you missed Ben Goldacre’s fantastic article on how the media sets up science stories and then gets them wrong, then go and read it. Now. I’ll wait.

Extract:

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science.

All I can say is that it rings true, again and again. Yes, science stories aren’t well-understood by anyone up the chain of command in newspapers. Often the people who are involved with the stories aren’t familiar with how the statistics that are being used in the stories fit together. (I did statistics at A-level, and it gave me a healthy distrust of (1) statistics (2) people who quote statistics - perhaps that means I distrust myself?)

Goldacre:

..people periodically come up to me and say, isn’t it funny how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be Bad Science after all? And I say: no. The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.

Really it ought to be compulsory reading for every news editor and executive editor and editor. And then framed and put over their desks, and re-read occasionally.

Of course the problem is that “news” is stuff that’s surprising, remarkable, and science doesn’t often offer that; as Goldacre points out, science moves by gathering little bits of data, putting them together, creating a matrix.

The other criticism, though, that “authority figures” are quoted too frequently to give a story spurious authenticity, is true too. Sometimes the media create their own authority figures, even if those people have no credibility. It used to incense me that papers would quote the wild and untested (or even untestable) hypotheses of Harash Narang during the BSE crisis. He maintained that BSE was caused by “single-stranded DNA”, and that the disease had passed to chickens. Neither hypothesis stood up to experiment, but that didn’t stop papers seeking a shock-horror comment from someone about how some aspect of BSE/vCJD was being “ignored” from phoning him up. I always resisted any mention or use of his ideas in the paper because I thought it wasn’t science, it was scaremongering.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Gillian McKeith, white courtesy phone please (30 September 2004; score: 44%)
• Guardian reviews X-Factor Live at Wembley.. and gives it no stars (22 February 2005; score: 40.09%)
• On Ballmer and Media Centres, BT's Broadband Voice and how sight kicked off evolution's Big Bang (12 October 2004; score: 35.73%)

How delightful to see that Partygaming has slumped in value after seeing “growth” in use of its service coming to a sharp halt. Yes, as the Guardian notes, perhaps it’s a bubble, or a fad. Most likely it’s been ramped like mad and I think (hope, pray) that this is the finish of it, the point where the growth stops and then goes into reverse.

Empire Online, for which Sportingbet is considering a bid, fell 11%. Online casino 888.com now also faces a struggle to attract investors for its planned £800m flotation.

Aww, my heart bleeds. No, hang on, it pumps delightedly. Of course there’s always the possibility that the “growth” in use didn’t really come from people, but from bots, and that people who knew this bought in early and cashed out early too. (I’m not casting aspersions on the people who operate Partygaming, BTW; I think they’re innocent of that. Guilty of promoting online poker, but not otherwise.)
It makes Om Malik’s query in June of Is there a poker bubble? seem farsighted. Then again. I think anyone sensible could see that these growths couldn’t possibly be sustained, else Tony Blair and George Bush wouldn’t have time to visit each others’ countries because they’d be stuck in front of a screen, yelling “I had a pair!”

See Boing Boing’s Video-poker bots collaborate through back-channels, which refs to a piece in Wired this month about about a pokerbot called WinHoldEm - “a commercial app that automatically plays through hand after hand of video poker, adhering to a strict system and even opening a back-channel to other WinHoldEm bots in the game to collude to bilk the human players out of their bets”.

For years, there has been chatter among online players about the coming poker bot infestation. WinHoldEm is turning those rumors into reality, and that is a serious problem for the online gambling business. Players come online seeking a ‘fair’ shot - a contest against other humans, not robots. But an invasion of bots implies a fixed game (even though, like their mortal counterparts, they can and do lose if their hands are bad enough or opponents good enough). So the poker sites loudly proclaim that automated play is no big deal. At the same time, they are fighting back by quietly scanning for and eliminating suspicious accounts. ‘We’re making sure we never have bots on our site,’ says PartyPoker marketing director Vikrant Bhargava.

PartyPoker, Partygaming, you guys are all toast unless you can solve a method of creating an infallible Turing Tests that won’t also piss off the human punters.

That’s an impossible promise to keep, says Ray E. Bornert II, WinHoldEm’s elusive creator. He’s trying to flood the online world with his bot - and make a killing in the process. Bornert offers an elaborate justification for what many view as outright cheating: Online poker is already rife with computer-assisted card sharks and - thanks to him - a growing number of outright bots. Players should get wise and arm themselves with the best bot available, which is, of course, WinHoldEm.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The Spartacus approach to beating comment spam (9 November 2004; score: 69.79%)
• Another reason to hate online poker sites: credit card fraud and its effects (14 November 2006; score: 47.04%)
• Would you trust a "managed solutions" company that allows compromised PC in its control to sending spam? (26 November 2004; score: 46.29%)

At The Independent’s business pages I’ve analysed Apple’s latest announcements - the work with Motorola to produce the ROKR, and the launch of the iPod nano.

Excerpts:

You could have been trampled yesterday by the herd of analysts rushing to pour cold water on the gadget already dubbed the “iPhone” - the Motorola ROKR, the first mobile phone to incorporate Apple’s dominant iTunes music software, described as “pretty cool” by Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, when he unveiled it on Wednesday.

and:

So why were financial analysts falling over themselves to mark up Apple’s stock, at precisely the same time that others were wondering how soon the ROKR will sell at a markdown?

Two reasons: first, the ROKR does not bear the name of Apple, or the iPod, so its putative failure will not drag down either brand. (In fact in the mouth of Mr Jobs, “pretty cool” is not a compliment at all, especially for something he’s demonstrating. It’s a put-down.)

And:

So who can dethrone the iPod? Sony has tried, repeatedly, and said yesterday that it will launch yet another brace of MP3-playing Walkmans in a renewed effort to create what the industry is seeking - the fabled “iPod-killer”.

But it is possible that no such gadget exists - or that if it does, it is not a music player. Many companies have pointed to their players’ better feature set or lower price, in vain; the iPod keeps outselling them. Two weeks ago, one major maker, Rio, announced it would cease the struggle. Others may follow, for even in an expanding market there is downward pressure on margins, exerted now by Apple.

If I had to guess, I’d say the PSP has almost the best chance of being an iPod-killer. Except Sony has tied one arm, or leg, behind its back by closing the machine up so much.

There’s also a quick bit of hands-on-ness with both. I can attest that the nano is a very compelling little gadget, and as David Card of Jupiter Research notes on his excellent blog, “Apple just re-set the MP3 player agenda. The $200 space now is flash-based, with a color screen. And very small. The “Nano” is thinner than a RAZR or a Shuffle. It does fit in your jeans’ change pocket.

And he adds: “2GB and 4GB is plenty - as we said with the Mini, most people still don’t have more than 1,000 songs in their collections. The Mini outsells the Shuffle and the White models, folks.”

If you don’t read the Jupiter Research blogs, you’re not using your time correctly.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• When exactly did schools become rubbish at medical stuff? (14 July 2007; score: 33.26%)
• Act three in the iPod nano screen drama (28 September 2005; score: 32.76%)
• Meet the new head of the iPod division; and how software designers are handcuffed by success (16 October 2005; score: 31.83%)