marypcbuk | Entries tagged with rant

Ex-Windows chief (as the shorthand goes) Steven Sinofsky is blogging about the principles and techniques of developing products. Hate Windows and Microsoft? Still worth a read because Sinofsky is a polymath and an omnivorous reader. ( was disappointed when he resigned from Microsoft, because he's one of the smart people it's so stimulating to have conversations with.

Yesterday he blogged about the shock horror response to the fact that his blog is on WordPress, using Google's Feedburner for RSS and that he took photos on the iPhone 5 he's currently trying out. I would be gritting my teeth at how much of a non story that is (let alone he no longer works at Microsoft,Sinofsky has frequently pointed out that if you don't know the ins and outs of competitive products you're not going to know how your own compare and Microsoft is no monoculture internally - and if you wonder why Bill and Melinda Gates don't buy their kids iPhones, ask yourself if Steve Jobs would have bought his kids an Android phone if they asked).

But then he casually name dropped Thucydides. Did I say, omnivore? And I thought about my view of Thucydides; that he wrote up the speeches he'd never heard to include what needed to be said. And I thought about Herodotus; father of history, father of lies. And I thought, there's nothing new under the sun.

Thucydides; history is my version of what they must have said that demonstrates the issues.
I see this a lot in blogs from people who believe they have insight into situations they weren't present at, and in conspiracy theories, and in decent op ed pieces too. It's the acceptable form of plot coupon, the dramatization.

Herodotus: history is this really great story I totally don't believe but you know, clicks!
And I see this, well, far too many places ;( But hey, great shaggy sheep tail story!

I've blown away my PC for a clean 64-bit install of Windows 8 for the new year. Doing all the software installs now so I can get past the foistware prompts so the new year has one less annoyance - and getting it done will be something to celebrate ;-)

there's a nice graphic doing the rounds of how to tell whether a toy is a suitable gift for a girl or a boy

I think we need one for adults too.

I've now come across two different Man Tins listed as Christmas gifts. Now I know that labelling a metal box a Man Tin and saying it's for the screws and handy bits and pieces said Man collects is just an exercise in consumerist conspicuous consumption and buying someone a slightly amusing present that doesn't take much thought or knowledge of the recipient (if they really collect and stash bits, they probably have a system and would prefer a case that matches the one they're already using - and if they don't, a box with lots of compartments would be way better than a tin because you can organise the screws). But it also really grates because I'm fed up of the gender roles that say Barbies for girls and Lego for boys, math is hard and women make the tea/sandwiches, that underlie so much of the sexist garbage women face every day - not just in tech, though it seems both worse and better in this industry sometimes. And I haven't gone to look whether there's a Woman Tin to be filled with chocolate and sewing thread and makeup because I like my blood pressure where it is, thanks.

Men don't collect screws. Women don't collect screws. People collect screws - and other people don't. Men don't hoard duct tape and Swiss army knives and handy pliers and spare washers any more than women do, but some people hoard those things in a box under the stairs and some people don't. It's not a gender linked trait; it's a trait somewhere on the spectrum between practicality and thrift and OCD and it is probably somewhere between nature and nurture as well. My grandfather kept (and labelled) bazillions of things; my mother kept things (the stash of brown paper bags was untidy but useful) and so do I (screws, washer, duct tape, multitools, hotel shower caps for covering food in the fridge, beads, things to make into keyrings and a whole lot more, tucked into drawers and jars and tins and compartments in boxes; my life as shed, so to speak).

The other gender role that grates is the whole 'men think about sex' thing (which graduates into the myth of the werewolf male who simply can't control their arousal when there's a woman around doing something that arouses them like, say, breathing and wearing clothes, which is just plain offensive to both genders*). If books like 50 Shades of Tacky Sex Scenes haven't made it clear (and Nancy Friday's books cataloguing female fantasies decades back didn't manage that), women think about sex. In some cases a lot, in some cases not so much. Just like men in fact.

Maybe more men than women collect screws and think about sex 20 or 30 times a day. Maybe not. A Man Tin is just for Christmas but a sexist attitude about what's appropriate for someone based on their gender is for life.

Or in the words of Sandra Bullock; you can take this gender role and shovel it.

*any use of the word gender implies nothing about birth/chosen/presenting gender, chromosomes, the actual number of physical genders or anything but idiot societal views of what's appropriate

I'm continuing to be struck by something that came up in the discussion of the BritRuby diversity fail (which I summarize as: call yourself the most diverse Ruby conference in Europe, have the vast majority of invited speakers be white males, have your diversity questioned by people who've dealt with the issue in their own conference, take your ball and go home^H^H^H^H^H^Hcancel your conference saying you were hijacked by PC).

That sexism/racism/blindness to the sexism or racism in tech is a refusal by those who have privilege in this space to admit that they have privilege because they're used to being the ostracised underdog. That if they can deal with being teased or bullied or ignored, then so can everyone else. That no-one can have had a harder time than them and if they can make it on their merits so can anyone else (my bootstraps were good enough for me), and that if they don't then affirmative action or even questioning the situation is unfair and uncalled for. That if you didn't have privilege once, then you never have it and you never have the responsibility of it.

And I wonder if it goes a step further as well sometimes, into the victim becoming the abuser/offender, into becoming the thing you hate. (It wasn't easy for them/why should they make it easy for anyone else?) I see this with companies like Google, who made Microsoft so much the enemy that it took on the very worst characteristics of the worst era of Microsoft and is reaping the reward in FTC judgements. I wonder if Microsoft, having made Apple the enemy, is picking up the problems of too much secrecy along with the excellent notion that shipping is a feature (cutting is shipping as Windows dev Larry Osterman puts it - incidentally, this and the description of the ideal Windows organisation in Hard Code continue to be good ways to understand how the feature crew approach Sinofsky brought to Windows is supposed to work).

Maybe it's all just Pogo (we have seen the enemy and he is us), because it's one of those really destructive patterns...

Having a cold in Vegas the other week meant a bit more aimless gazing out of the window than usual (instead of charging at speed from place to place). So I was looking at the Hooters casino , which is certainly not the only place to objectify women for the male gaze in Vegas and I was thinking how I have no problem with topless and naked women, I just don't like it institutionalized as a chain. But then I started thinking, how about - institutionalizing the female gaze in the same way rather than being serious and humorless and all the other things feminism is called when it sounds strident and pushy (or authoritative as you'd call a male equivalent). How about a chain of Shirtless Man bars? (I almost said salad bars; how controlled the female appetite is supposed to be, slimming salads rather than rare steak...) Vegas already Stripper Circus with five hunks and one girl, or the campy muscular Thunder From Down Under, now branded as Ladies Night Outback, but that's so much more special occasion, so much less universal and pervasive than a neighborhood bar.

But shirtless man already has an association; Abercrombie and Crotch, as I call it. A gay icon which is still the male gaze, just gazing at men who gaze back with interest. Awesome but not men displayed for the female gaze in the same "have them oiled and sent to my tent" fashion.

Objectifying? Yep. Objectionable? Well, sauce for the gander and all that. Maybe if we normalize female gaze as we've normalized male gaze for decades (centuries probably), after a while it becomes marginal on both sides and we can get on with respecting the other gender as people as well as gazing at them with interest from time to time?

Torn between inspiration that us uppity women (warning, contains irony) are bringing up our issues with sexism and inequality and despair that we not only still have to bring up the issues, we still have to justify them to people (nearly all men, but I typed that automatically) as being 'real' issues', I spotted this lovely phrasing.

"People of color, women, and gays -- who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before -- are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles."
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/1/

How about an example of that? I could take every comment thread from every blog post or article by a woman talking about sexism, in technology or elsewhere, ever, and deconstruct and annotate the derailing, mansplaining, subtle sexism, overt sexism and plain rudeness that proves the points in the blog post or article. But conveniently, Charles Arthur (who edits the tech section of the Guardian) has done exactly that for a recent thread on Twitter in which a woman called Shanley Kane asks the founders of Geeklist politely why they have an ad with their slogan on a T shirt worn by a woman otherwise wearing only her underwear, expresses her opinion a tad more forcefully and asks them to take it down. Ooh, that's too aggressive say the men and there's a classic Internet pileon, including threats about her job, because she wasn't all nice and submissive and well-behaved in the way she complained. Because we women have been told since the cradle to 'be nice'. Sure, it would be great if everyone was nice all the time, but you know what? Real equality means women can choose whether to be nice or not. If their opinion gets thrown back in their face, they can choose not to be nice - and that doesn't give other people the right to ignore the substance of what they say, start with the threats or ignore them. Bad behaviour? We're allowed to exhibit it and still have a valid point, a job, an area of expertise and a voice.

Read Charles's delightful and skewering commentary. The comments? Maybe not so much ;-(

Thank you for your email about the Lords’ amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill.

I understand your concerns about the Government’s welfare reforms, and I have raised my constituents’ views with Ministers on a number of occasions. There is a broad consensus that urgent reform of the welfare system is needed, so that help is better targeted at those who need it, including disabled people and those with long-term conditions. The current financial situation also means that welfare reform must be an important priority.

However, like you, I want to ensure that proposals for welfare reform are implemented carefully, with appropriate transitional measures put in place where necessary. I sat on the Committee which scrutinised the Welfare Reform Bill at its Commons stage, when I took the opportunity to seek such assurances from Work and Pensions Ministers. They have been keen to listen to disability groups, constituents and MPs, and have made a number of concessions in the light of these representations – for example, retaining the mobility component of DLA. This move has been welcomed by, among others, the Leonard Cheshire charity, who described it as “a great example of the Government listening to and working with disabled people and their organisations”. I recently met with representatives from Leonard Cheshire at an event to mark International Disabled Day at the Randall Close Day Centre in Battersea. We had some useful discussions about the challenges disabled people face and what MPs can do to highlight this.

One issue which has been raised frequently with me is the decision to time-limit contributory Employment Support Allowance (ESA) to one year. I was present throughout the debate on the Lords’ amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill, when the Minister for Employment, Chris Grayling, addressed this point. Here is a link to Mr Grayling’s speech; as you will see, he stresses that the Government is sensitive to the varying and individual needs of those with long-term illnesses. I was also encouraged by his assurances, echoed recently by the Prime Minister, that most cancer patients will go straight into the ESA support group indefinitely, and will not have to undergo a face-to-face assessment.

I hope you find this helpful, and thank you for taking the trouble to contact me.

-------------------------------------------------------
Well. It's better than a poke in the eye with a short stick, but I'm not completely convinced. The problem is that unless that sensitivity to the varying and individual needs of those with long-term illnesses is enshrined in law and regulations, it's all going to be down to interpretation. And the last thing someone with a long-term illness or disability needs is to be arguing interpretation and dependent on the whim of the assessor.

If you have a view on this, make sure you email your MP. Tell them what you think and why (politely, with examples) and ask them to support the Lords' amendments and not let Chris Grayling just ignore them.

I've been doing tech journalism for 20 years; I've seen DTP arrive, repro houses shrivel and online journalism go from brochureware to citizen engagement to linkbait repurposing to the reinvention on magazine on shiny tablets.

The pace of online journalism is seductive; you can publish *right now* instead of waiting 2 weeks for the issue to come back from the printer, and someone else is publishing *right now* and you want to have your say, and this other site has a story so you have to have a story so you can just paraphrase theirs and add your telling insight... Seth Godin rather politely calls it 'lazy journalism' and asks for something a bit more useful.

Putting a two-line 'here's my view' shell around someone else's story is infuriating to me, because I don't actually view links that have so much of the story readers don't need to click through to my original as valuable marketing. I don't know about the editors of the sites who pay me to write the stories that 'inspire' retreads (I understand the usual view is that you just have to live with it), but I'd rather like to get a micropayment share from the ads the repurposers sell against what was my original research or the interview I got because I've spent years investing in relationships or the pieces I put together that no-one else had noticed. Maybe the reputation I'm getting from generating stories that do the rounds keeps people commissioning me, but I've never had an editor mention that ;-)

The other infuriating thing is running ludicrous stories with a single source that doesn't know what they're talking about (the predictions that the Lumia 800 would fall flat by financial analysts I'd never heard of were a good recent example, or the rash of stories about who Microsoft might buy and who might buy Nokia and RIM). And sometimes, those analysts cross over into what they call tech journalism and apply those same high standards of deep technical understanding. Go read Ed Bott's glorious account of the ex Lehman Bros analyst who is now a 'journalist' for the The Street, who can't tell the difference between Flash memory and Flash the browser plugin.

Or there's the Indian tech site I'm not going to glorify with publicity (read the Guardian story if you want the name) that 'reviewed' the Nokia Lumia 800 by looking at the specs and comparing them with a couple of other phones and deciding the Lumia didn't compete (not least because they ignored many of the features on the phone). So many people commented about how terrible the story was that the author apparently mistook it for a co-ordinated attack and went through the IP log to see if it was astroturfing. Turns out one commenter had an IP address owned by Microsoft, another had an IP address owned by Nokia and they didn't declare their affiliations when they gave their reactions to the story.

Bad idea? Probably. Understandable? Yes, when you see idiotically bad journalism, keeping to the moral heights can be just too hard. Astroturfing? No, I think that takes rather more than one person per company. Part of a pattern of malicious abuse? The IP address owned by Microsoft has been used for plenty of Wikipedia edits that suggest the user (or users - it could easily be a shared IP address that links to different people) is Indian or based in India, has strong views on football, thinks blogs are useful sources rather than the spurned primary evidence Wikipedia pegs them as - and doesn't understand the difference between editing a story on Wikipedia to correct an error and leaving a comment on the talk page to note that a paragraph is complete and utter bilge. Frankly, if most of what the IP address deleted had been marked with a suitable comment about why it wasn't worth the electricity it took to transmit, the edits would have been improvements.

And the Indian site taking the comments so badly that the writer posted a followup disclosing the IP addresses of the commenters? I think that's the pot calling the kettle black and sooty, but is there an expectation of privacy in comments to a blog or news site? Without a proxy, anonymous you ain't.

At least that means that when you publish trashy, low-quality idiocy masquerading as technology journalism online, people can point and mock and look up your career. It would be nice if that could make this a low point we rise from. Because if what you do brings my chosen profession into disrepute, I am not going to like you.

I spend most of my working and personal life living with the third and most famous of Clarke's three laws, added to make up the numbers ("As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there") but actually fitting the tech we all encounter now extremely well. I often reformulate it as 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo' - which, like magic, is not susceptible to explanation or reproduction.

But I'm seeing a lot of the second law, or at least an unpleasant variation on it.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible is one thing, but both Google and Facebook seem to specialise in discovering the limits of privacy by venturing a little past them - Google's Schmidt talks about getting right up to the creepy line, Zuckerberg says it's OK if people complain and then live with the problem ^H^H^H^H^H discover that they're comfortable with sharing more than they planned. His comments at All Things D make me wonder how long it will be before Facebook wins the same level of privacy oversight Google scored this year, because the crowdsourced panopticon is coming; maybe the first time it exposes something that goes from link to lynch mob in three clicks.

And a discussion with an old friend about whether Freeman Dyson's scepticism about climate change models meant we could just ignore specific data (like 'all summer arctic ice will be gone by 2016', 'the air quality index of pollution only goes up to 500 and Shanghai hit that level in May this year', 'careless coal mining causes statistically significant clusters of brain tumours', 'the amount the US Department of Energy spends on clean tech annually is exactly the same as the coal industry spends on lobbying') and carry on arguing about what we do and don't have covered in the models instead of working on shifting to a low-carbon infrastructure (wind generation already provides as many jobs in the US as the coal industry does), had Simon quoting Clarke's first law at me. 'When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.'

From the man who brought us geostationary satellites, the basis of many of the communication systems that enabled both the tech that enables and the meteorology measurements that track its impact:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

A friend managed to make my blood boil in seconds today by sending a link to a Labour MP (with an MA from the University of Leeds) spouting off the usual rubbish about how you can buy an Oxbridge MA for a tenner and it's Byzantine privilege.

The reason that you get an MA or Msc for your degree at Oxford or Cambridge is that you do the amount and depth of work required for both an MA and a BA as part of your course. Take classics: literae humaniores as Oxford Byzantinely still calls it (perhaps on the grounds that if you don't know what that means you shouldn't be studying the subject). When I took it it was a four year course, split into 5 terms followed by 13 exams in a week and 7 terms followed by about the same number of exams in about the same amount of time (plus exams at the beginning of every term for checking you had done your vacation reading, plus tutorials, essays, seminars, lectures and the rest) - I haven't kept up with whether the balance has shifted to continuous assessment but with two essays a week plus the seminar and group tutorial work on top of that I'd have been happy to get some course credit as I went along.

The teaching at Oxford is primarily one to one, in tutorials. You're expected to provide evidence of original thought and research and to discuss and defend that. As well as the main subject strands you take multiple special subjects in both halves of the course, producing the equivalent of a short dissertation for each. I know the level of work and the grade at which you're working is equivalent to a masters at another university - because I went on to do an Msc in Intelligent knowledge based systems at the University of Essex and I think a lot of the reason I got a distinction in a subject where I had no previous qualifications was that I was already used to functioning at post graduate level because I'd been doing it for over two years. I earned my masters - both of them.

And I know the scope of my degree was equivalent to a BA and MA elsewhere because of the conversation a friend on the same course had when she thought she was only going to get a pass degree and wanted to look into transferring to another university at the end of her first year (so 3 terms into the 5 term first half of the degree). She interviewed at a university with an excellent reputation for its classics department and they said to here 'it's not worth you coming here; you've already covered more than we do in our entire three year syllabus'.

My MA is worth a damn site more than the fiver I paid for it and fixating on the admin charge is rather missing the point (I paid admin charges higher than that at Essex). Oxford and Cambridge award masters degrees because their undergraduates earn them. Perhaps we should be asking other universities to raise their standards? If other universities want to match a historical accident it might be hard for them to do in the current climate but that's no reason to ask Oxbridge to dumb down. Or perhaps we could agree that a spectrum of further education from vocational to standard undergraduate to more demanding degrees is a good thing and that this attack is more about the chip on someone's shoulder than the actual merits of the Oxbridge system?

...is that it seems to have persuaded the BBC that live music discovered by the BBC is all we want to listen to, as the plans for the future of the Beeb online seem to be Sportsnight + News 24 + John Peel = success!

The streamlining of BBC Online is giving me flashbacks to taking the rich and utterly unmanageable diversity of AOL UK in the early days and stuffing the advertising-rich portions of it (News, Sport, Kids, Learning, Entertainment) into the rigid lines of corporate content. Because of that I feel snarky and nitpicky ;-)

There's obviously the issue of competing with commercial news organisations. "The relationship with the wider industry is also important.... we’ll be taking a more open approach on what we are doing, engaging with industry twice a year about our plans. Plus, we’ll double the number of referrals we send to third-party websites." Where in the BBC remit is the 'generate traffic for commercial businesses' principle?

BBC iPlayer is great, so let's change it.
"BBC News and BBC iPlayer are two of our most popular websites... Each has a clear sense of purpose and identity, each has a clear sense of what its audience wants from it and meets that audience need." "Radio and music will come out of BBC iPlayer, and we’ll develop a new stand-alone product... focus on highly interactive live radio, quick and seamless access to programming, support for new music and personalisation - on whatever internet-connected device you happen to have." Cross-platform? Sounds great. But there's no mention of listen-again, just live radio (there's specific mention of on demand TV in BBC iPlayer). And "Radio will focus on live output, and the discovery of new music as played and recommended by BBC DJs and iconic musicians" sounds like all Six Music, all the time. Let's hope listen-again is part of the quality this is about preserving and they just forgot to mention it.

tweets not comments?
"Standalone forums, communities, message-boards and blogs to be reduced and replaced with integrated social tools"; not having to read, approve and worry about being responsible for comments on stories frees up a lot of resources and ~~Disqus has already taken over so many comment systems~~ drawing content from other sources can be a way of tapping into a broader conversation. It can also be an integration, management and relevancy nightmare.

There is good news ;-) "A substantial reduction in showbusiness news on the News website"; I'm sure Lord Reith would also like hearing that "BBC News Entertainment and Arts section will have more culture and arts coverage".

A lot of this is sensible; if budgets have to go down, focusing on news and education and access to programming online is a good core. Interactive sites are a lot of work. Programming information should be automated. There's the spectre of not being too commercial; if the Dr Who site should really be the Dr Who magazine online, should that be something the BBC runs or something it licences to a commercial company? How does the BBC deal with Sky complaining that it's taking too much online traffic? The fact that I'm having flashbacks and that I recognise exactly which Office 2010 diagram templates they've used for the slide deck that those pictures come from doesn't mean there isn't some method here, as well as some madness. H2G2 is a wacky kind of thing for the BBC to run; it should be set up as some kind of foundation - how about a nice donation from the bankers to pay for the servers in perpetuity?

But there's some big holes too (like radio that isn't live and isn't new music). Thanks for the headlines, BBC; now can we have the actual report?

Microsoft is fed up of being told it's dead, dying, uncool, undead or whatever other insult you have in mind. I'm pretty tired of reading stories that tell Microsoft it's dead/dying/uncool/whatever. When I read a braindead comment from "a professional financial modeling person" who says Office is toast because they only use eight or nine buttons in Excel (I think I missed the 'Monte Carlo analysis' button last time I was making a chart), I want to deliver a few well-aimed strokes with a wet fish. But when the next piece I read is rather more balanced and includes the line 'Microsoft declined requests for comment' I tend to go and write long rants about how Microsoft has to be part of even the difficult conversations...

I don't mean to be rude: it's an honest question.

Because they are dumb as rocks, breathe through your mouth, tie your shoelaces together dumb when it comes to anything digital. There are examples going all the way back to the 90s that I know of. Like the consortium of musicians like Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins and likeminded folk who looked at the Internet and said 'hey, opportunity *and* threat; lets do something to avoid the trainwreck of the only digital music being pirate music'. They put together a package of rights and came to AOL just about the time unlimited Internet was arriving and AOL was too busy mourning the loss of monthly fees to want something that would keep people online for hours downloading MP3s on a 56K line for a measly fee share. Now replay that approach if it had been EMI and Polygram and Capitol and all the other record companies saying to AOL 'get in the ground floor, own the digital music distribution market as our partner'. There would have been network costs but if they'd been bundled up with some kind of monthly music subscription, the economics might not have got a flat 'no thanks'. Instead, the record industry had its fingers so firmly in its ears that individual musicians were getting together to try to build a bottom-up system that couldn't work given the network economics of the day. It was one of the most interesting, most depressing meetings I ever took at AOL.

How do I know the record labels were stupid rather than just clueless? Because I know they had been told about the opportunities of the digital era and warned about what would happen if they just did an ostrich impression*. They'd been told by Hilary Rosen, who they hired as a spokesperson and enforcer for the RIAA. Yes, that Hilary Rosen; take down Napster, kill the Rio, sue the downloaders Rosen. I can't find the interview she gave right after she left the RIAA in which she explained that on her first day she arrived, ready to shepherd the industry to a digital future where digital would be another distribution channel, warning the executives that if they didn't embrace it they'd be trampled. They politely indicated that if she wanted to keep the job, she'd be following a different tack and given that she believes in intellectual property much the way I do (if you don't pay the producers enough to live on, you don't get new quality content) she concentrated on enforcement.

But she actually likes Creative Commons and has some sage words pointing out that it's not just record labels who screwed the pooch on digital piracy: "The music publishers wouldn't license, the retailers threatened the labels with retaliation if they distributed online at a cheaper rate than they sold physical products, and the artists wouldn't reduce advance requests to try and experiment more online" (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-08/st_15heroes#ixzz17zsOzaVp)

So why am I rehashing ancient history today? Because I read the story about how the networks are glaring at Netflix and planning to make it way more expensive to offer asubscription to stream video legally. And I got to this paragraph and wanted to beat my head on the table.

"Mr. Bewkes explained that in the late 1990s the media industry embraced Netflix as a new distribution outlet for renting DVDs — without foreseeing that the company would eventually accelerate the decline in the sales of DVDs, which for years had been the lifeblood of the film industry. Now, with its success online, Netflix has raised fears that consumers may stop paying for cable television — the much-debated phenomenon of cord-cutting."

I mean, how entrenched does your viewpoint have to be not to see this kind of disruption when it starts? Stop buying DVDs when you can get a rental system that's convenient enough to actually rely on? Why yes, I think people might just do that...

The video industry doesn't want blu-ray and 3D for increased quality or a more compelling experience; they want them because increased capacity and more compelling experience mean you'll go buy your content again or maybe buy it instead of downloading it, but even so it's about getting your content on the industry's terms in the industry's way - pretty much the way they wanted to handle music a decade ago...

* I know ostriches are actually listening for danger; I still like the metaphor for the way it echoes a body part and being stuck - the record industry had its head firmly inserted into *something* or other...

Among the myriad reasons why I love Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were the irregular verbs.

I have an independent mind; you are an eccentric; he is round the twist

and my all-time favourite

I give confidential press briefings; you leak; he's being charged under section 2A of the Official Secrets Act.

There seem to be a lot of irregular verbs around at the moment, between the protests against student loans and fees, the polite chocolate-bearing VAT evasion protesters and the backlash against companies that stopped dealing with WikiLeaks (and the intimate patdown thing with the TSA).

I'm all in favour of protest; I think we need a participatory democracy as well as a representative one. My life would have been immeasurably poorer if I hadn't gone to university but if I'd been faced with going into debt to do it I probably never would have (and certainly not Oxford; after having upgraded to private schools with scholarships and bursaries, I'd have picked where I could afford to go - not where I would benefit most from studying and while I was good enough to get into Oxford I wasn't a scholar and I didn't take a first so I don't think I'd have got an assisted place). My degree taught me to research, to assemble my arguments, to present and defend them - and to think. If I hadn't been able to get a grant to do my Masters in what was supposed to be computing science conversion but that I parlayed into the subset of AI known as intelligent knowledge-based systems in what I tend to think of as my first act of journalism (talking your way into the interview you need), I would either have gone to a cheaper, closer college with a less interesting degree or taken the first job offered. The job on the original licence of PC Magazine I ceased to pursue to do that degree went to Mick Andon who went on to the heady heights of publisher, but without a decent technical grounding I don't know how much I could have achieved and I don't think I'd have the same grasp of what's actually involved in technology. Which is a long-winded way of saying I have every sympathy with student protesters - especially the ones who are staging teach-ins rather than sit-ins and doing their best to get attention without disrupting other students who want to concentrate on getting their education while they can afford it.

Ditto the UK Uncut protesters; having been on Oxford Street recently I have sympathy with anyone who wanted to go into Top Shop while it was closed by the sit-in (although I'm snobbish enough to not have that much sympathy for anyone going into Top Shop who isn't dragged there by their kids). But the way businesses avoid paying taxes makes society unbalanced. Google pays no tax in the UK and very little in Ireland - ditto Apple and Microsoft and the rest. If Ireland made foreign companies pay up, would they need the bailout? Probably - they'd all go somewhere else, but I'm not sure jobs bought by tax breaks are a long-term economic solution. And having the owner of a company like Arcadia pay so little tax and be an adviser to the government on efficiency and austerity underlines that it may be the same law for rich and poor but it's a lot easier to fall under the helpful clauses if you're rich enough to have an advisor...

So shouldn't I be all in favour of sticking it to whichever man has let down WikiLeaks most recently? Especially when the man is Sarah Palin? (Schadenfreude is such a lovely word) Is taking down Visa or Mastercard or PayPal any different to occupying Top Shop or a college? Should we condemn companies that end business relationships with WikiLeaks because Homeland Security asks them to, because the espionage act might apply? I don't know - and I suspect what you think of whistleblowers and Assange and Operation Payback depends on what you sit and what you do. I think WikiLeaks has handled releasing the information to news organisations that have the skills and resources to dig through and understand the stories reasonably responsibly. I think Assange's personal life has little to do with what WikiLeaks does. I think targetting the Swedish women and their lawyer is despicable. And I have rather less sympathy for WikiLeaks getting kicked off AWS after Assange said "Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit in order to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases."

Deliberately setting up a company to look bad for something they have very little choice about doing? To me, that does cross a line.

I didn't just throw terrorism in the title because of the TSA thing, which I have patted past rather than down. I don't think that killing is anything like carrying a placard or leaking a diplomatic cable. Terrorism is about causing so much fear that you distort your enemy into a parody of themselves and disrupt their life so much that (you hope) they give you what you want. But non-violent protest and campaigns of harassment against occupying troops fall in the spectrum of how you get someone powerful who isn't listening to pay attention to you. If governing is about more than 'might means right', if it's about both benefiting and furthering the aims of an enlightened society, there are going to need to be ways of making voices heard. I think we judge those ways of making yourself heard by what you're saying, who's saying it, how you're saying it and how much collateral damage is involved. But we always judge it from our own perspective - and that makes a lot of the labels we put on these things irregular verbs.

1 protest, civil disobedience et al are nouns; I know this ;-) I use 'irregular verb' as a concept rather than a grammatical definition.

2 The writers didn't just know politics; they knew journalism too.

"an editor isn't like a general commanding an army; he's just the ringmaster of a circus. I mean I can book the acts, but I can't tell the acrobats which way to jump!"

We fly a lot and while I found the puffing scanners much much worse, I put up with the loss of privacy/dignity but I'm starting to freak a little about the breast cancer/melanoma risk from backscatter scanners (less for the fractional additional radiation than for the suggestion from UCSF that the radiation absorption wasn't correctly calculated) - plus I find the things claustrophobic so I'd be glad if this particular piece of security theatre fell to the rising ire of the American travelling public. But I keep hearing people say the TSA opt-out gropes are sexual assault' and I don't think they are. It's intimate and unwanted touch; it's an indignity - and it's not like a visit to the gynecologist because the touch is neither expected nor medically necessary (and I'm not convinced that even an intimate pat down will catch explosives that are tucked away real well, so to speak). But it's not sexual touch; I'm assuming the TSA staff aren't getting any sexual satisfaction either from touching the sweaty thighs of random strangers or from making travellers submit to the pat down (they're not doing it because they can, they're doing it because it's their job) - and I think intent matters very much for the definition of sexual assault. I'm not saying the experience won't be unpleasant, distressing, embarrassing, potentially triggering for people, but I also think that this kind of intrusion is more likely to be done away with if we attack it for what it is rather than giving it a more dramatic label that can't ultimately be substantiated.

What am I missing?

It's hard to get people on the record about things that are controversial to customers and sound business sense to vendors; dubious labour practices in the developing world, the tensions of partnering with competitors, where search engines make their money, bundled applications...

We call it crapware, PC makers call it differentiation, value add and an alternative revenue stream. PC buyers get free, discount or at least pre-installed software, vendors get money; what's not to like? Slowing down your PC, clogging up Windows and requiring you to know what's worth keeping and what you should delete on sight (and how to get rid of the most persistent offenders), that's what's not to like. Crapware makes Windows look bad - and it makes PC makers look bad when grindingly slow security software grinds older PCs to a literal halt. I don't want it on phones either, which is why I'm delighted that all network and OEM apps can be installed in Windows Phone 7 (the HTC Evo I brought back from the US is forever cursed with Sprint sports apps and I used to resent getting out-of-date Yahoo! mobile tools on Windows Mobile, all taking up precious space). Microsoft can't tell PC makers what to put in their copies of Windows (that's one of the results of the DoJ case against Microsoft) but I still expect them to be naming and shaming apps, device drivers and OEM crapware setups that make Windows look bad.

When I praised the Internet Explorer team for doing just that with add-ins, I was delighted to get some hard figures from Mike Angiulo, the corporate vice president of the Microsoft Planning and PC Ecosystem team on where the decisions to do that kind of thing come from. He talked about how things were much worse in the Vista days, calling it "kind of the worst era of PCs when nobody was thinking about the final PC as an end-to-end system" and he's right - but crapware is still endemic. Every new machine we've seen recently apart from the Sony VAIO P has been loaded with a mix of useful tools and performance-killing crapware. Microsoft needs to keep applying pressure, which is what I say in the piece...

I've had some feedback about the headline the piece was published under ('Microsoft slams OEM crapware') being, shall we say, on the negative side. All headlines are there to grab your attention, and I think this is a topic that needs to get some attention. I expect a headline that like will cause some headaches in Redmond if the OEM partners take it personally, but I also know that every time I write a piece on this topic I get feedack from readers that they want the PC makers to hear the pain crapware causes them and the mistakently-bad impression of Windows it gives people. I'm going to keep saying that Microsoft has a hard job to do here, but it has to keep the pressure on.

Windows Phone 7 is doing the right thing here. When I asked Oded Ran about removing network or OEM apps from devices, he gave exactly the right answer. The phone buyer is the customer, it's their phone and they can do what they want; any app can be hidden - or uninstalled really easily. It takes seconds. Getting unwanted extras off a PC should be just as easy and fast. If PC makers want to add value and get their software bounty, create a Device Stage that offers the apps and lets me install them if I want - don't pre-install them, have them all start up and make it hard to unweave add-ins, plugins, toolbars, updaters and the rest just to get back to the Windows should have been when I first turned it on. Or as Mike Angiulo put it, bundled software is great "if it's executed well and it makes sense and it doesn't degrade the core performance of the PC". Maybe a few controversial headlines will make sure the PC makers keep listening to him...

I just had a difference of opinion on Twitter where another journalist disagreed that leaving your review, your benchmarks, your test files and your personal EverNote account set up on a system you'd sent back at the end of the review counted as bad journalism. (I deleted the lot and unlinked the EverNote account). It's just admin, they said; lazy, stupid, unprofessional - but not bad journalism. I'll admit that fitting a pithy saying into 140 loses nuance but I do actually think that the whole process and business of being a journalist is journalism - not just the writing bits. Am I a bad journalist if I don't invoice for my work for six months? Yes, because I'm making it harder to do my job of journalism (either I run out of money or make the account department's job harder or both). Missing a meeting, sending in the wrong images, upsetting someone in PR, hogging a unit at a demo - I don't think I've done any of those any time recently but I'd count them as bad journalism too. Because, as Bobbie Johnson and Paul Ford put it in discussions I read right after my difference of opinion, journalism is a product and a business - and all the parts of your business matter.

Texas GPO recriminalising sodomy, Idaho GOP banning transfolk from marrying. It seems like the republican party is veering over to the bigoted religious right as far as it can turn. Is this the voting base that's left after the centrist republicans have gone elsewhere? Is it just the regular homophobia bursting out like a boil under pressure? Is it the whole hate the sin, hate the sinner religion thing? Is it one state's GOP bigotry urging another on? Is it in some bizarre way hopeful because they're spelling out long-held and formerly unspoken prejudices - and having ordinary people stand up and say 'that's unnacceptable'?

Why I want to engage about what I watch after I watch it; I'm with Matt Weiner, the producer of Mad Men. A long way into this semi-verbatim report of the Bing entertainment news, (so far in that I'm going to quote it) he's discussing audience engagement and real-time audience reaction with Biz Stone of Twitter. And I agree with with Weiner completely; I pick the shows I want to watch crefully and I treat them like a film, not like background music. If I put a show on I want to watch it, I want to be immersed. If I miss a line, I'll rewind to catch it. I want the nuances, but I don't want to talk about them while I'm enjoying them. With a book, I'll often quote the snarky lines that make me laugh to Simon - he had to start rading Jennifer Crusie books because I was quoting so many lines from them - but I don't want to stop halfway through the big buildup to the final scene to discuss the book (or dinner or the news or anything less immediate than the house being on fire). I'm an immersive reader and an immersive watcher; I'm caught up in the experience. Anything else is a distraction. Matt is exactly the kind of person I'd want to watch TV with!

Danny Sullivan reporting
Biz says notice many TV shows before about to air start to trend. More people enjoying watching a show togetehr and twittering about it in the back channel. Not just sports. Lets watch the show together.
Matt, that bugs the crap out of me. Turn off the lights, pay attention to what you’re doing. Give the artist the attention for what they’re doing. Just watch it and talk to people after.
Todd but when people talk in a theater….
Matt … and you hate it….
Todd but the reason these experiences you have is the shared experience, the laughing or screaming together. That’s something television doesn’t have.
Matt, oooh ahhh is one thing.
Ryan, doesn’t it make you a little happy to know the audience is engaged.
Matt, it sounds really ugly but part of being a writer is that you do want to speak uninterrupted for a period of time … then when it’s over, then maybe you could talk to people.
Ryan, you have kids? Matt, yes. Ryan, how do they watch TV with those rules. Matt, they hate watching it with me.

Already? As elinor just commented, this is so soon. Labour ran slick adverts on shopping benefit fraudsters, but there was something particularly distasteful about the Conservative politician on radio 4 a few minutes ago saying MPs know there are lots of people out there who don't deserve their benefits - because they found them at home while they were out campaigning. I mean I agree you can't possibly be a contributing member of society if you have the time to open the door and talk to candidates, but suppose it was a courier delivering your next piece of work - you'd have to answer the door bell and then you could hardly slam the door in their face... Are these people completely out of touch with modern working habits? Freelancers, contracters, the self-employed, remote workers, workers from home: if you're not in the office like a good little wage slave, you're obviously some kind of benefit fraud. What's next - cracking down on those who aren't visibly disabled? But we still have Chateau Lafitte aging in the cellar of the House for foreign dignitaries (and when I heard that one, I had to wonder why we don't serve them a good English wine like Nyetimber? Or would that be champagne socialism?)