Archive for December, 2004
See you next year
This’ll be my last post before Hogmanay, the Scottish version of New Year. Being Scots we take New Year very seriously, and on New Year’s Eve we resolve to cut out bad habits, embrace a healthier lifestyle and become better people. To demonstrate our commitment to these lofty aims, we then try to kill ourselves with alcohol poisoning, get into huge drunken arguments about nothing in particular and catch pneumonia after spending the night comatose in a ditch. It’s great :)
Here’s hoping that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing and whoever you’re with, you have a great Hogmanay and that the New Year hangover isn’t too debilitating. Slainte mhath, slainte mhor!*
* A Gaelic toast that roughly translates as: “Good health, great health!”
Is a headless Mac on its way?
I got slammed a few months back for suggesting (in print) that Apple needed to sell a cheap and cheerful Mac without a monitor, and for suggesting (in this blog) that Macs were too expensive compared to PCs. However, according to Think Secret, a super-cheap headless Mac is on its way.
With iPod-savvy Windows users clearly in its sights, Apple is expected to announce a bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display at Macworld Expo on January 11 that will retail for $499, highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret.
…
Apple has been working on the low-end Mac for almost a year, sources report. Indications are Apple has been working mostly on finding the right mix of price, performance and features that would motivate Windows users to consider a Mac, and less on the actual engineering of the product. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to design a bare-bones PC,” said one source familiar with the project. “What it takes is a team of marketing and software experts to find the right mix to convince Windows users to buy a Mac at a price that is not much more than the cost of an iPod.”
Sources familiar with the product cautioned that the low-end Mac will be marketed towards a totally different audience than those who traditionally buy even a $799 eMac. “This product is not going to be about performance,” said a source close to Apple. “This is going to be the basics, but with just as much of a focus on software as any Mac could ever be.”
It might not be a flying machine, but a G4’s still fast enough for media recording and playback; depending on the outputs, it could double as a PVR or media centre. That’d be fun.
A Mac for less than a Dell? Yes please.
Update, 11.30am
The Register’s Tony Smith comes to the same conclusion as me:
One other thought occurs to us. While the reports of the new machine are pitching the box as a low-end personal computer, we recall recent Wall Street analyst suggestions that Apple is well placed to capitalise on the emerging ‘living room PC’ market. A Mac sold without a display would make a good candidate for connection to a TV, particularly if it comes in a slim, DVD player-style casing. Apple is expected to promote the new machine more for its software and functionality than performance. What if it’s got media streaming via Wi-Fi and TiVo-like PVR features? All for half the price of a Media Center PC - and with Apple’s stylish, more living room-friendly looks…
Incidentally, if the rumours are correct then the headless Mac will have a 1.25GHz G4 chip. That’s essentially the same chip that’s in my PowerBook, which is no slouch.
Crippleware
Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow makes some good points about BitTorrent, DRM and the role of tech magazines:
…the recent Wired spin-off, Wired Test, featured page on page of reviews of music players, media PCs, and PVRs with hardly a mention of the fact that all of these devices were fundamentally crippleware, and all controlled by entertainment companies who can and do arbitrarily remove functionality from them after they have entered the marketplace, so that the device that you’ve bought does less today than it did when you opened the box. If you’re publishing a consumer-advice magazine, it seems like this is the kind of thing you should be noting for your readers: “If you buy this, your investment will be contingent on the ongoing goodwill of some paranoid Warners exec whose astrologer has told him that your pause button will put him out of business and must be disabled.”
Pointless gadget joy
One of the great things about the festive season is gadget joy, when you get a pointless gadget that you really, really want. My gadget joy this year comes from a Starck Weather Station:
It tells the time, the air pressure, the current moon phase, the temperature and the humidity, and thanks to the included remote sensor unit I can bore my wife senseless by telling her not just that it’s cold, but the precise level of coldness in this room and whether it’s warmer in the living room. Hurrah for pointless gadget joy!
Digital music: Flat Fee Futures
Writing in The Register, Andrew Orlowski writes about the way in which radio-style royalty arrangements could solve music and movie piracy.
Journalists are bad for your health
The Guardian’s Bad Science Awards give a well-deserved kicking to some of the charlatans, snake oil salesmen and clueless hacks who fill page after page of our newspapers with health news that’s wrong in many cases and completely invented in others. But it also raises a serious point: journalists are bad for your health.
There are exceptions, of course - the Guardian’s Ben Goldacre, for example, does a wonderful job of skewering health hackery in the aforementioned Bad Science column; some of the health correspondents for the more serious newspapers are incredibly knowledgeable - but in many cases, the people who write health stories and features for newspapers and consumer magazines have qualifications in writing, not in medicine. That’s why every day or so there’s a “cure” for cancer, and why every drug is a “miracle drug”.
Incidentally when I mention a product or health issue here, it’s not from a position of knowledge: I’m as clueless as, well, a youngish hack on a newspaper writing a story about the latest health fad, desperately trying to write 500 words on something they don’t really understand on a half-hour deadline.
Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that if you go to the doctor he or she won’t tell you what you want to hear. We don’t want to be told to change our diets or our lifestyles, to take more exercise or to cut down on the things that are bad for us; we want a quick fix, a miracle drug, a magic bullet. That such things rarely, if ever, exist doesn’t stop newspapers from levelling entire forests to bring us articles expounding the virtues of assorted quackeries.
Before his death, John Diamond began writing Snake Oil, a broadside against some of the quackery that’s printed without qualification in newspapers. He recalls a visit to the GP when he was suffering “one of the routine bouts of vague and minor mental and physical distress which strike most men as they slip out of young manhood”:
What I needed was somebody to tell me to stop working fifteen-hour days and playing twelve-hour nights; what I wanted the doctor to say was “Ah! Chronic Farnsbards Syndrome! Take this linctus twice a day for a week and you’ll feel better again.”
In many cases, newspapers do just that: Chronic Farnsbards Syndrome makes a better story than “stop overdoing it, you silly sod”.
The list of examples is depressingly long. Faddy diet after faddy diet, alternative treatments that are presented as cast-iron cures when the evidence for their efficacy is questionable at best and entirely absent at worst, “breakthrough” after “breakthrough”. Soon afterwards, the backlash. For example, Goldacre writes:
The Daily Mail… made big meat of a scientific study proving that the Atkins diet worked. The study, which only lasted six months, showed that the Atkins group lost just 4% more weight than the control group. A month later the paper turned on the Atkins diet as a result of a passing comment from an expert who had worked for the carbohydrate-peddling Flour Marketing Board.
Do you remember the Zyban hype, and the Zyban scares? They’re fairly typical of how tabloid and middle-market newspapers report health stories.
First, the hype: a new miracle drug stops people smoking, by removing the desire to smoke. It’s amazingly effective! It’s the drug everyone who’s tried and failed to stop smoking has been waiting for! Hallelujah! Look at all of these case studies! Zyban changed their lives!
Such claims were largely lifted from press releases - and when Zyban was made available on the NHS, GPs were inundated. But as GPs tried to explain to their patients, Zyban wasn’t a miracle cure: its success rate was one in three - still double that of nicotine replacement therapy, but hardly miraculous - and for it to be effective, you also needed to take part in counselling sessions. There was also a serious risk of side-effects: where most drugs have side effects that affect 1 in 1,000,000 people, Zyban’s side-effects seemed to affect 1 in 1,000.
(I have first-hand knowledge of this: I took Zyban and it plunged me into the worst depression I’ve ever experienced.)
Soon afterwards, the backlash came. Zyban is dangerous! It’s killing people! It’s plunging Scottish hacks into severe depression! It doesn’t stop everyone from smoking!
True enough, some people did die while taking Zyban - by 2001, the toll was 18 people out of the 1,000,000 Brits taking the drug. Most of those deaths were unlikely to be connected to Zyban - people whose doctors urge them to stop smoking because of serious heart disease or other severe health problems, people with underlying and undiagnosed health problems and so on - and people also die while taking nicotine replacement therapy, or going cold turkey, or while merrily puffing away on a cigarette, or while living a virtuous, smoke-free life.
The truth about Zyban is that it’s neither a miracle cure nor a tool of the grim reaper: it’s a drug that in the right circumstances and with the right support and attitude, can improve someone’s chances of stopping smoking; its side effects can be nasty, and it should be prescribed with caution. But “new drug slightly improves your chances of binning the cigs, but you’ll still need determination and willpower; it isn’t suitable for everybody and you really need to talk to your GP about it” doesn’t make a good headline.
You can see the same trends in other health stories: the Atkins diet, MMR jabs, cosmetic or eye surgery, miracle homeopathic treatments, magic drugs that shift weight, improve your skin and make your hair glossy, and so on. The hype is usually based on press releases and the excitable claims of people with something to promote - self-appointed health gurus, pharmaceutical companies, beauty firms - and the backlash is the inevitable result of the products, services or treatments failing to live up to the ridiculous claims parroted from the original press release, or made by a well-meaning but clueless “expert”. Most of these stories are flatly contradicted soon afterwards: coffee kills you, coffee is good for you, no, coffee kills you, oops, we meant it’s good for you… and so on.
In many cases the problem is that the writer doesn’t understand what he or she is reading. Goldacre again:
The Daily Express [declared] in September that “recent research” has shown turmeric to be “highly protective against many forms of cancer, especially of the prostate” on the basis of laboratory studies into the effects of a chemical extract on individual cells in dishes, and no (zero) trials in humans.
One of the most worrying developments is the way in which information about alternative treatments is often presented. If that information you’re given is wrong, it could kill you. As Goldacre explains:
Ah, Susan Clark of the Sunday Times (What’s the Alternative?), how I love her. This time she’s giving advice about which natural substances are safe to take with warfarin. First, she bemoans the dearth of research on the subject. Then she ignores the useful stuff in what we do know. “As a simple guideline, patients who are taking warfarin should avoid any natural remedies that have an action on the cardiovascular system.” I have no idea where that idea came from: but warfarin is famous for being interfered with by other drugs. St John’s Wort, for example, is a very popular drug - herb, collection of drugs in a plant, whatever - that reduces the plasma concentration of warfarin, along with phenytoin and rifampicin: that’s not because they’re active on the cardiovascular system, that’s probably because they interfere with liver enzymes, which means it makes them work harder. Those enzymes also break down warfarin, so if they’re working harder, they break down the warfarin more too, so there’s less of it around in your blood, and you’re more likely to have another nasty clot and die. Likewise, ginseng reduces the plasma levels of warfarin, so they shouldn’t be mixed either. And lots of others.
This is serious. He continues:
In a recent study, 2,600 patients on warfarin were sent a questionnaire on what alternative therapies they took: 1,360 responded (believe me, that’s a high response rate) and a whole 19.2% of those responders were, it turned out, taking one or more complementary therapies. Ninety-two per cent of them hadn’t thought to mention this to their doctor. Only 28.3% of all respondents had even thought that herbal medicines could interfere with prescription drugs. Because hardly anybody’s telling them.
That doesn’t mean that all of the claims made by alternative health “experts” are without merit; the problem is the way in which they’re reported. As Diamond points out:
Alternative medicine in Britain is a business with a turnover of billions of pounds and an establishment all of its own, a business which gets regular and often uncritical coverage in most of our popular papers and magazines, which regularly makes - or allows to be made on its behalf - remarkable claims for its abilities, which are often untested, let alone proven, which has no independent body monitoring its activities and which from time to time kills its customers as a direct result of the advice or actions of its practitioners.
Of course, traditional medicine often kills its customers too - and not just when your GP is Harold Shipman. But to become a GP or a hospital consultant you need to undergo years of intensive study followed by a tough apprenticeship, and you need to stay on top of developments in medicine.
A quick quiz for you. You’re ill - who do you ask for advice?
(a) a qualified medical professional who spends all day every day dealing with health issues
(b) a journalism graduate whose last assignment was comparing lipsticks
(c) a self-appointed health guru with a mail-order PhD
(d) Big Dave down the pub
I’m a simple soul: if my car’s knackered I call a mechanic, if the central heating packs up I’ll call a plumber, and if I want advice on interviewing techniques, subheadings or newspaper style I’ll ask a journalist. But if I’m sick, I’ll go to the doctor.
You learn something new every day
Sometimes when jet planes take off or land, or do dramatic aerobatics, they create clouds of condensation on their wings. This gallery of such clouds is strangely fascinating, as is the gallery of clouds caused by supersonic flight.
[Via MetaFilter]
A f–king disgrace
Warning, contains lots of swearing
A recent issue of the Rocking Vicar newsletter included a tale from one reader describing how the world is going to hell in a handcart: out shopping with a friend and the friend’s 10-year-old daughter, the reader was in a boutique where the in-house sound system played - at high volume - the uncensored versions of Eamon’s “Fuck It” followed by Khia’s “My Neck, My Back”. A firm fan of swearing, the reader nevertheless described it as the most excruciating eight minutes of his life.
If you’re unfamiliar with the songs, here’s the chorus of Eamon’s song:
Fuck what I said it dont mean shit now
Fuck the presents might as well throw em out
Fuck all those kisses, it didn’t mean jack
Fuck you, you ho, I dont want you back
And here’s an excerpt from the Khia song:
Lick it good suck this pussy, just like you should
Right now, Lick it good
suck this pussy just like you should
My Neck, my back
Lick my pussy and my crack
What’s significant about both of these songs - other than the context in which the Rocking Vicar contributor heard them - is that other than their “controversial” content, they’re notable by the complete lack of talent in their songwriting, production and performance. Eamon’s voice is a nasal, monotonous whine that’s reminiscent of a two-year-old demanding sweets, while Khia’s song has all the wit and style of lard. Compare that to Eminem’s The Real Slim Shady which manages to combine obscenity with comic timing to great effect: you’ve suffered from a major sense of humour bypass if you don’t spit beer through your nose the first time you hear the couplet
Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records
Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too
Sadly Eminem is the exception (and even he’s patchy of late); these days, the obscenity is all that matters. Hence the “edgy” branding campaign for French Connection UK, which sticks the prefix “FCUK” on various phrases in a way that’s supposed to show cool, cutting-edge hyper-awareness of something or other, but whose purpose is simply to act as an idiot detector: if someone’s wearing a t-shirt that begins with FCUK, you can be confident that anything they say will be a fcuking waste of breath. Or the “edgy” campaign for Pot Noodle, which brands the barely edible gloop as “the slag of snacks” and portrays Pot Noodle consumption as a vice akin to visiting prostitutes for unspeakable perversions.
As a big fan of vulgarity, swearing doesn’t really bother me - other than irritation at the belief that vulgarity is in itself funny; it isn’t, it’s the timing and context that matters - but I do feel that it’s gone too far. For example, the rules used to be simple: if a song contained a sweary word, it wouldn’t be broadcast. That’s why Radiohead’s Creep had to substitute the line “you’re so very special” for the original, “you’re so fucking special”. But now there seems to be some wrong-headed pursuit of cool, of street, of authenticity, so obscenity-laden tracks aren’t banned from Radio 1, or from kiddie-targeted channels such as The Box; instead, the offending words are simply silenced (and in most cases, blatantly obvious despite the censorship). To be fair, that’s sometimes a bonus: for example, the Eamon song benefits dramatically from the removal of almost all of the whining sod’s whingeing.
The main problem I have, though, is that the increasing vulgarity of pretty much everything removes any shock value; it becomes a depressing background hum. An unexpected “fuck” in a literate pop lyric is like a bomb going off; it makes you jump up and go “whoa!” if it’s used for dramatic effect, or makes you shoot beer through your nose if it’s for comedic effect (see “Wrong About Bobby” by Eels for a great example of the latter). The “fucking” in Creep is a story in its own right, laced with self-loathing, envy and other unpleasant emotions. Compare that to chart-topping gurning chimp Eamon, who manages to use some of the most offensive words in the english language without any effect whatsoever. The impression is of someone desperately trying to be controversial, and failing dismally - but this is music aimed at teenagers and children, which inevitably means it becomes the soundtrack to all of our lives. Whether you think that such content is inappropriate for 10-year-olds is irrelevant: your sensibilities come second to the advertising aims of FCUK, or of record labels’ desire to make money.
As Adbusters magazine put it back in 1998:
It’s as if 75% of us are being forced to listen to the soundtrack of the world way louder than is comfortable for us because the volume has been calibrated to the damaged eardrums of the other 25%… What shocks us now? Maybe nothing. We can be titillated, still, we can be amused, but perhaps we can never really be shocked. To be shocked requires a measure of innocence you rarely find these days in people over five.
Sympathy for the record industry
I’ve been pretty scathing about the music business in this blog and elsewhere, which raises the obvious question: “why do you hate the music industry so much?” And the answer is: I don’t. I’m actually a big fan.
Music matters, whether it’s U2’s Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own catching you at a vulnerable moment and making you burst into tears, or Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out convincing you that it’s a very good idea to dance like a chicken. For 50-odd years, the music business has been an important part of the economy and has contributed greatly to the gaiety of nations. It’s also very, very good at spotting and honing talent, which is a tricky thing to do: of the thousands of bands that you’ll find in any city, only a handful are worth paying attention to, and the music business (in its various forms, major and indie) is very good at snapping them up and nurturing their talent.
You’ve got to have some sympathy for the record industry, because it’s an incredibly risky business: there’s no way of knowing what’s going to sell and what isn’t until the records are actually out there. And the chances of success are absolutely tiny: of the bands that get deals, 95% of them sink without trace; very few of the remaining 5% go on to become the next Radiohead, REM or U2, let alone the next Beatles. Manufactured pop helps reduce the risk somewhat, but even then it’s a gamble: how many faux-britneys have sold even 1% of what Hit Me Baby One More Time sold?
You’ll find a lot of people moaning about manufactured pop or corporate rock, but not me (beyond the odd bad-tempered moan about Westlife or Nickelback). That’s partly because I love a lot of “manufactured” stuff - you’ll find Tatu, Dream, Britney, Backstreet Boys and even Daphne & Celeste on my iPod - and partly because the obvious evils of bands such as Westlife is tempered by the fact that the truckloads of money they generate pays for the less commercial and more interesting acts on the same label.
People in the industry aren’t baby-eating monsters, either: the various music business people I contact via work - the BPI, indie musicians, people at labels, publishers, people from the various licensing agencies - and that I’ve encountered in my non-journalism activities - promoters, managers, studio engineers, bands, DJs - are generally decent people with an abiding and obvious love of music. Which is why it’s so frustrating when they do dumb things, such as artists refusing to let their songs be sold individually (hello, Radiohead!), labels releasing albums with two good songs and 12 unremarkable filler tracks, or industry organisations suing schoolchildren and pensioners - or in one particularly despicable example from Down Under, threatening to sue the Red Cross because it accepted donations from Kazaa’s parent company.
Pundits are predicting that 2005 will be the year of digital music, and I sincerely hope that’s the case - but if the prediction is to come true, some things still need to change. The biggest change is that the industry needs to stop viewing its customers as thieves; by limiting what you can and can’t do with legally purchased music, all the labels are doing is driving people to other, illegitimate download sources. And the music format war needs to be sorted out too. As long as iPods only play songs from the iTunes Music Store and Windows Media Players only play songs from Windows Media shops, we’ve got a problem. If the labels address both of those issues in 2005 then they won’t just have my sympathy; they’ll have my outright admiration.
Merry Christmas, everybody
Blimey, where’s the year gone? Last time I looked it was February.
Just a quick note to wish you all a very merry Christmas, a hugely entertaining Hogmanay and a happy and prosperous 2005.
