Despite occasional lapses in taste compared with our more refined northern hemisphere’s and their irritating rising inflection and clipped vowels, you’ve got to hand it to our colonial cousins down under. In two quick steps they have pitted themselves against the world’s biggest brands.

Kiwi schools lose parrots and eye-patches
New Zealand’s Ministry of Education has just announced that Microsoft software has to be removed from the 25,000 Apple Macintosh computers in schools, here. The reason behind this is to save the $2.7 million, roughly £1 million or £40 per computer, that Microsoft want to charge for the licences.

Education Minister Steve Maharey told the New Zealand Herald that Microsoft demanded a licence fee for each copy of the software, not a massively unreasonable request one would think. Steve went on to explain that the free NeoOffice was available for schools as was a ’similar’ Macintosh program. Without discussing whether the software should have been on the computers in the first place one assumes that New Zealand wouldn’t be pirating Microsoft Office, would they?

One critical voice has been from school principal Julian Le Sueur, who complained that the NeoOffice website warned users to expect problems and bugs. No change there then from Microsoft Office’s err… idiosyncrasies.

Next Aussie millionaires in the making
Google has a careful eye on a small Melbourne company who have announced it is about to make existing search engines obsolete. Robert Gabriel developer of MyLiveSearch told The Age, here, they will be going live with a public beta this month.

According to Gabriel the new search engine, the result of two years work with his younger brother Mark and systems engineer Mende Jurukovski, will give better, more relevant results because it will include the 80% of the web that Google doesn’t index. Current web search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live all send ’spiders’ which crawl through billions of web pages a year, indexing their content. They cannot include the most up to date information or sites where the information is created for each individual browser.

MyLiveSearch works as a small web browser plug-in that uses the results from a search engine as a starting point, crawling through hundreds of web pages connected to those starting points to find the most relevant information. Results are gained in seconds and are always richer, more detailed and useful than a standard index-based search. Plus the results include the invisible web of dynamically-generated pages that search engines have trouble indexing.

Google have a track record of loving the Aussies, Google Maps coming from another small Australian start-up company, and especially if the technology could help a competitor. A recent new employee at Google’s HQ is University of NSW graduate Ori Allon who sold them his advanced text-search algorithm.

New Tricks for Old Dogs
When Bulldog’s high-speed Internet service became available in my town, I was an enthusiastic customer. Joining as a business and paying a little extra, in return got my very own Relationship Manager to smooth the way. They were very good, too, and sorted out a host of problemettes. When BBC’s Watchdog approached customers for Bulldog dirt I wrote telling them how pleased I was with the service.

Bulldog shifted ownership, staff were ‘lost’ and services gradually deteriorated. Where once a telephone number went straight to a named person one had to join the queue pressing buttons and listening to Vivaldi play through a full year, a decade even sometimes. If the phone was answered, Bulldog’s staff were as helpful as they could be, from call centres as diverse as the North of England and Mumbai. But too many billing errors and an 8Mbps line running at less than 2Mbps saw us paying BT for ADSL. Plus a complaint to my card company to recover the money Bulldog had whisked away in error and wouldn’t give back. Suddenly, the same piece of cable coming from the same exchange gave line speeds at almost maximum and seldom less than 5Mbps.

Bulldog have changed hands again but too late for Pipex, the new owners, to recover lost customers. Pipex were surprised at the drop-off when they took over from C&W and lowered the price eventually paid for Bulldog. According to thinkbroadband here, 30% of Bulldog’s clients have voted with their feet since January 2007. The latest news is that the remainder of Bulldog’s call centre staff have been told their jobs are at risk when Pipex closes Bulldog’s support lines. Hard luck for the staff and signs that the new free services from Sky and Carphone Warehouse are biting deep into the profits of the original broadband suppliers. Pipex were among the first to offer a cheap 0.5Mbps at £23.44 in 2002 at a time that others were asking up to £100 for the same.

Pay as you go turns new corner
Much has been written about the idea of road pricing, a lot of it more rabid reaction rather than reason. This includes the column inches an undemocratic ‘petition’ on Number 10’s web site gained because 2% of Britain added their names to it and national press journalists jumped on the bandwagon.

The BBC showed ‘typical’ drivers would in reality be better off in most cases, by measuring the mileage of a group of factory workers and calculating how much they would be charged if road pricing were introduced. In the program, the one driver who ought to have been paying more actually came off best even though he drove his gas-guzzling 4×4 hundreds of unnecessary motorway miles instead of using public transport. The remainder broke even or would even have paid less than Road Tax and could influence exactly how much they end up paying by avoiding busy periods and urban roads.

The government’s draft bill published on May 22 prepares the ground for local authorities to develop their own pay-as-you-drive charging in England and Wales. Pilot projects are already underway in 10 local authorities backed by £14m from the Transport Innovation Fund. Naturally, the Federation of Small Businesses and others predict doom and gloom. As a small business, I cannot agree with them, especially as working from home means I drive less than 5,000 miles a year. Any money paid for pay-as-you-drive will, in any case, be tax deductible.

But, if road pricing results in the catastrophic computer mess-ups which seem all too common place in Britain, that would see me signing every petition I could find. Bulldog couldn’t even get it right for 110,000 customers, what sort of mess will a nation of individual road pricing projects get into?

Chairman of IBM, Thomas J. Watson has been famously misquoted for his alleged 1943 statement: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Three of these would fill all of Britain’s needs according to Cambridge mathematician Professor Douglas Hartree who said: All the calculations ever needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which are (in 1951) being built – one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No-one else will ever need machines of their own, or will be able to afford to buy them.

If both of those luminaries were correct, I’ve owned and thrown away at least twice the world’s total supply of computers, each time wincing at the technological marvels no-one wants any more.

Turbo 264
El Gato, here, are makers of TV and video capture devices which made Macs “Home Entertainment Centres” long before the name was invented. Their latest gadget, the Turbo 264, is basically a hardwired, one-solution computer that does exactly what it says: compress video to H264 in turbo time. It usually takes longer to compress video than it does to view it, so anything helping the process is bound to be a winner. Especially when it’s just a cheap(ish) USB plug and play device.

If manufacturers follow El Gato and produce a lot more, single-function, plug and play devices, it could ease the way for simple computers such as laptops, gaining the sort of power reserved for far more sophisticated machines. We are used to plugging in our cameras, phones, media card readers, whatever, along with printers, scanners, external disk drives, speakers and so on. Why not have little boxes plugged in on demand to accomplish one task or process, instead of relying on increasingly powerful CPU’s and expensive software for the same?

It would go a long way to eliminating software piracy and be cross-platform because the devices are completely self-contained. Flash ROMs and web-based interfaces solve any updating necessary in exactly the same way modem manufacturers have been using for years. The gadgets themselves can be bought as needed rather than paying out in advance for more expensive computers, often with capabilities never used. Then disposing of them as the computers become obsolete.

There is nothing like the aroma of fresh burned Spam
My desktop has got one of those little stocks and shares counters, the sort that check-in every five minutes to see what price shares are selling at. In this case it’s the free ones which Standard Life tried to buy us off with when they stole…err…sold the company we used to be a part owners in. Part owners with with all the others with Standard Life Mutual pensions and investments, which by gross mismanagement went pear-shaped. The funny thing is the guys who created the screw-ups in the first place all retired with pension increases larger than any money we are ever likely to get for the whole of our retired lives.
The interesting and often depressing thing to see from the little shares application is how easy it is make or lose money. You can start the day with five grand in shares, by coffee time it’s only worth four thousand and something and bums haven’t left seats. Equally, by dinner time they might be worth quite a bit more than five grand. Today I popped out to the shops and lost the best part of two hundred quid while gone.

The situation gets worse
At the same time, the junk mailbox emptied earlier that morning will have quietly filled with another couple of hundred spam mailings. Checking while writing this, another 88 arrived in the last two hours with only two of those incorrectly identified as spam by the ISP’s filter and accepted as such by the filters this end.
According to latest data from various sources such as here total spam has increased by 222% since 2005 with 125% in the last six months alone. Worse still - for Windows users that is – malware threats in the first quarter of 2007 doubled to nearly 24 thousand over the same quarter last year. Infected e-mails dropped to “only” 1 in every 256 e-mails, down from 1 in every 77. As another 6 junk mails arrived while typing this paragraph, there must be a huge amount getting through to me every week, part of the hundreds of junk mailings arriving every day.

Nuts screws washers and bolts
Which brings up the point of this blog. The mail filters in most e-mail packages are a bit lightweight. A free additional one called JunkMatcher, here is proving to be a virtually zero-configuration solution and pretty much stopped all junk mail from day one, including those from Screwfix which I need.
Written by Ben Han, currently a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon, JunkMatcher works well with Mail.app on Mac OS X, filtering spam by using a naive Bayesian filter, a blacklist look-up and by spotting regular expressions. It even writes its own rules for Mail.app.
As it does exactly what it says it will do, there isn’t any more to say…

We couldn’t care which chips are in our computers. As long as they do the job they could be any brand. After all, we’ve lived with two or three Zilogs, a MOS Tech, umpteen Motorolas, and two matched pairs of IBMs. Each was better than their predecessors and when new, seemed amazingly more capable.
By a bit of inspired forward planning, we’d got dual-processor computers before the operating system would support them. This was a year prior to Apple’s switch to a Unix-based OS and when it did, our Macs just flew. They could run just about every application we had, all at the same time. This was even though half were still running in the emulated Mac Classic – which ran them with more stability than native Mac OS 9. As far as we were concerned, any chip was as good as the others. Then we got our first Intel computer.
Intel-igence
When it arrived our MacBook seemed to be rapid and capable, if a little hot. Give it a task to complete and it zooms away, the Core2Duos seemingly faster than a same-speed G5 twin processor. Until, that is, we piled on a few more tasks. Then the computer becomes unresponsive at times, the pointer doesn’t move and you get the feeling it couldn’t be bothered to put up a spinning beachball even if it had time to do it.
Testing time
We decided to delve a little deeper and compare the Macs we had on hand to see whether our feeling the Intel CPUs were bogging down was correct when compared with our Motorola and IBM powered alternatives. For this we looked at the total maximum tasks each is capable of plus the number available to the user. These are set at the time applications and systems are compiled although they can be changed temporarily. It should give a rough idea how the CPUs will handle multi-tasking, dealing with the frontmost while at the same time getting on with all the System applications and any other jobs it has been given to do.
The testing was done simply by entering sysctl kern.maxproc in Terminal to find out the maximum tasks the computer can handle and sysctl kern.maxprocperuid the maximum available to the user. Enter man sysctl kern in Terminal for more details.
A big surprise
Our results were surprising. A G5 2.3 GHz dual processor gave exactly the same result as a G4 800MHz single processor, each is capable of 532 total maximum processes with 100 available for the user. The Intel 2GHz Core2Duo achieved 532 maximum with 266 for the user so it should be as capable if not doubly so. Finally, our first generation G5 2GHz twin processor is the biggest surprise of all. It can handle 512 maximum processes with a massive 512 available for the user.
This reflects our real-life experience with the computers. The little G4 iBook is an excellent laptop for general tasks and despite its relatively slow chip (by modern standards) is capable of just about anything thrown at it. The G5 2.3GHz flies through heavy-duty Photoshopping with one hand behind its back while the G5 2GHz is our best server and all-round workhorse. It can compress movies to H264, at the same time streaming live TV and playing the same shows, download mail, web browse, file serve, housekeep, back-up, virus scan and all the rest we throw at it, yet it still plays a mean high-res Call of Duty. All at the same time. It’s fans spin a lot more than the others but not intrusively so.
Heard it on the pipeline
All the blurb about pipelines, threads and other geeky jargon was just that as far as we were concerned. For all we know, all the above may be a load of rowlocks. But it seems to us that Intel’s CPU’s are brilliant at doing single tasks very fast but not so good at doing loads of things all at the same time. Didn’t Apple have a video of Avi Tevanian showing blue blobs moving through tubes and demonstrating shorter tubes move blue blobs more quickly than longer ones? He explained this was why the G5 is better than Intel chips – Big Blue moves blobs more easily.
That all seems to have been forgotten in the hype about Intel inside Macs.

DigitalArts magazine issue 1 (formerly Digit) arrived today complete with reviews of the MacBook Pro laptop and Mac Pro 8-core computers. Both trashed their competition not only in performance but on price, easily winning Best Buy recommendations from a magazine usually geared towards the Windows world.

The reviews showed the Mac Pro is massively cheaper than equivalent workstations from the likes of HP and Dell with the latter being nearly a whopping two grand more. So much for the “expensive toys” label often used to describe Apple’s products. However, the reviewer marked down the MacBook by suggesting it needs a second trackpad button. This fetish for buttons seems to be almost am addiction for some computer users. Macs have been able to use virtually any USB mouse for years, including Microsoft’s.

This looks like a job for Mighty Mouse
It is only recently that Apple shipped computers with their Mighty Mouse. This can be used as an up to five-buttoned beastie but on appearance looks buttonly challenged. It looks as if it were just a single-button-plus-nipple device. The rubber-coated nipple is in place of a scroll wheel and works as another button as well as for 360 degree tracking. The main left and right buttons don’t actually exist, instead the front of Mighty Mouse each side of the nipple can be pressed so that the mouse clicks and dips down to give feedback. In reality it is touch-sensitive and the nipple’s clicks are from a tiny speaker. All of the ‘buttons’ are user-definable.

Give the right gestures
As far as trackpads and laptops needing more than one button, this is something beyond our comprehension. When our new MacBook arrived recently, the lack of a second button hadn’t occurred to us, even though we each use a Mighty Mouse most of the day. Apple’s laptops have a trackpad that accepts one and two finger scrolling and ‘gestures’. Clicking a second mouse button – right clicking – can be done by using two fingers on the trackpad. Or pressing the Control key and clicking or tapping on the trackpad.

The other thing we find weird about this insistence on two-button mice and trackpads is the main buttons are on the left. We find it far more comfortable to reverse the buttons so the most-used is on the right and both buttons are pressed with the same finger, either the index or middle finger. They can be far back from the front of the mouse, well away from where ‘real’ buttons would force them to be. This means the hand holding the mouse is more relaxed, there is no tension in whatever tendons it is controlling that part of the hand.

The two-fingered approach is something we find very easy to live with because it also works for 360 degree scrolling. Some rumour sites are saying the next Apple mouse will have a trackpad style top instead of a nipple. This sounds very interesting and it will also stop and mechanical problems occurring from dirty nipples. In any case, they can be cleaned by turning the mouse upside down and rolling the nipple around on a clean piece of paper.

All very reminiscent of the days when real mice had balls.