This is Dave. You probably don’t know him, but believe it or not he’s about to become Intel’s very favourite person in the whole wide world. You see, according to my exhaustive research (well, having my eyes open in StarBucks yesterday), he’s just single handily doubled the sales of MiDs in the UK… by actually buying one.
It was always going to happen. After absolutely slating the concept with a fair degree of gusto on this week’s podcast (which you should listen to because it’s funny, and informative, and I’m northern and sound a bit like Ringo Starr), my best mate immediately goes and buys one, despite the fact that outwardly he appears perfectly sane.
For anybody not au fait with Intel’s current 15 million market terms, MiD stands for mobile internet device, a rather awkward halfway house between a smartphone and netbook which doesn’t so much fall between two stools as dig its own hole between two very useful products and gleefully chuck itself in.
There’s nothing quite like strapping a jet-powered wing to your back and soaring over the majestic snow topped alps at 180mph. We at PC Pro do it every morning, in between our 12,000 push ups and warm-up half marathon. Or at least we would, if we didn’t eat quite so many pies and spend half our time lookng for minuscule David Bayon down the back of the settee.
However, there is hope for the jet-powered wing part of this dream thanks to Swiss daredevil Yves Rossy (no idea how you pronounce that), who intends on crossing from Calais to Dover on just such a device. No, rowdy English tourists for this chap, just the clear open skies, smell of jet fuel and the hope of not dying horribly when the wing bursts into flames and sends him plummeting into the icy depths of the English channel.
Gordon Brown is a very intelligent man. Unfortunately, this is tempered by the fact that he has the charisma of a bag of cabbage. However, somebody in Downing Street clearly saw an opportunity to rectify this when they responded to little England’s petition to make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister with a video posted on YouTube.
If you’ve not seen it, watch it here. Otherwise, bear with me for a thirty-second summary: The video opens with the words: “Thanks to the 49,447 people who signed the petition to make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister. You make a compelling case… ”
We then see the doors to number 10, which open and we pan up the staircase, which is lined with photographs of past prime ministers before we arrive at the top, and a picture of Clarkson. This is then followed by by the words: “But on second thoughts… maybe not.”
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not barrelful of monkeys, farts in the bath, Arrested Development funny, but it’s worth a wry smile and a blog post. It’s a sign that this Government does have some charisma about it, and, perhaps more importantly, imagination.
Let’s get this straight, Gazza did it. There’s no second gunman lurking, he wasn’t framed by the mob, nobody forced, threatened or otherwise made him hack into US military computers. He was bored and decided to peek up America’s skirt. 97 times.
Happily though, Gazza, the cheeky little scamp he is, decided that merely hacking into their machines wasn’t enough and also left mocking little messages critiquing US foreign policy, which is a bit like kicking a big, angry bear in the bottom and then sticking your head in its mouth when it doesn’t immediately bite your foot off.
Granted, McKinnon has suffered some misfortune. His case dragged on just long enough to see the US Government royally embarrassed by Chinese hackers, an enemy it had no chance of striking back at. Make no mistake, McKinnon is a statement. However this started, the US now wants to make an example of somebody, to prove it’s not so impotent as the Chinese have made it appear - and now McKinnon has obligingly climbed on the pyre.
Back in January I decided to chase up a rumour that the Government was planning to radio-tag serious offenders so it could track their movements. So, I did my research, wrote some words and rang the prison’s service to see if anybody fancied having a chat about it - confirm, deny, ignore. Whatever. Seven months later, I got my response.
Seven months… that’s 213 days, 639 meals, five and half million breathes, 1,704 hours of sleep. Empires have fallen quicker than that.
Don’t get me wrong, I quite like technology. I’m the kind of person who’d be admiring the massive metal foot of the Terminator even as it stomped my skull into the dirt. But when it comes to eBooks, not only am I not sold, I’m sat on the shelf hiding my price tag behind my back and shooing people on towards the muffins opposite.
And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them - digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.
First off, I’m not paranoid. I don’t have a tin-foil hat, subscription to conspiracy weekly, or a pressing need to take a different route to work every day to stop people following me. I genuinely believe Diana died in a car crash, Elvis died on the toilet, and the lone gunman actually did it. I understand that Governments cover things up, and I’m happy with that because I suspect their secrets are either a) boring or b) terrifying - both of which are covered in my life by a) tax returns and b) overdrafts. There’s no such thing as aliens, and even if there were, I certainly wouldn’t believe they travelled all this way to stick something unpleasant up my bottom. And if they did, why is everybody in such a hurry to meet them?
But I am scared of Google. Not because of the conspiracy theories, or because it’s fashionable, but in the same way I’m scared of the sea. It’s huge, mostly benevolent, and unpredicatable - and the vast majority of us depend on it far too much.
Ironically on the day it’s announced that Facebook has never been more popular, I appeared to have stopped using it. I say “appeared” because it took me a long time to realise I’d given up on it, which is my friends fault, because they didn’t realise they’d abandoned it either.
I expected more. Not the sounding of trumpets and a rain of angel feathers necessarily, but very definitely a last straw. I really wanted a last straw. I wanted Facebook to introduce a Beacon mk.2 system that rummaged through my personal details, worked out my bank details and advertised them on an RSS feed, allowing some unwashed malcontent to nick the last and only tenner from my account. Or, a virus wave to sweep over the entire thing so that every game of Scrabulous became akin to dancing barefoot with Typhoid Mary in a gutter filled with used syringes. I wanted to storm away from its charms in a huff.
I wanted it to do… something. But it hasn’t, it’s just continued. And gradually myself and my friends have simply drifted away from it. A peaceable parting of the ways. It’s not that I don’t particularly like it, for a while there it was pretty much our entire social calendar. Every party was arranged, discussed and dissected on the walls. If somebody was telling me a story, it was common for them to give up halfway through with the line: “just go and look on Facebook, I’ve stuck all the pictures on there.”
This is a piece of class. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team has sent the Firefox pack a congratulatory cake to celebrate the launch of Firefox 3. Say what you want about their browser and Microsoft as a whole but it’s a grand gesture between two extremely fierce rivals.
We’re an argumentative bunch at Pro. Finding two people who agree on anything, even the colour of the carpet, is something of a chore but put a new piece of hardware in front of us and it’s worth ducking for cover unless you’re a fan of vitriol showers. However, aside from the green issues (brilliantly covered in comrade Sparkes’ green gadgets feature this month), the one thing that’s brought us closest to laughably inept fisticuffs is the hideously expensive GeForce GTX 280.
This is Dave. You probably don’t know him, but believe it or not he’s about to become Intel’s very favourite person in the whole wide world. You see, according to my exhaustive research (well, having my eyes open in StarBucks yesterday), he’s just single handily doubled the sales of MiDs in the UK… by actually buying one. 
