Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
The Onion News Network is doing some excellent work – very classy production values, brilliantly tight scripts. See, for example:
and the seminal:
Heaven knows how they’re paying for this stuff, but I love it.
Wait a second. What’s the message of this film, again? That Samsung TVs, right at the critical moment, make everything look unbelievably faked? Am I getting this right?
See, Sony understood the concept here; they really did bounce a huge number of balls down a street in San Francisco, and fire gallons of paint off a tower block in Glasgow. Sure, there was lots of processing on the final films, but the concept was actually carried out, and the films had verisimilitude because they looked real. They were, simply, awesome.
This, conversely, is a great idea made to look like crap. Which is not, I suspect, the take-home message Samsung wanted from this viral.
This is:
Gaaaaah! Nothing screams ‘Fake!’ like a cut to close-up just before the pay-off. When everything else is in (or at least looks like it’s in) one shot, it’s plain nuts.
Worth watching, but you have been warned.
One of my big regrets was not ditching a crappy job back in the late 90s and gadding off to Nevada to help out with the ThrustSSC project. While I tend towards the cynical about some aspects of the successor project Bloodhound, they’re going about demonstrating their excitement in a wholly admirable manner.
Example: this Guardian article from the engineering director. Terrific, involving, emotional writing. Great stuff.
You’d think, given the horror stories about plummeting new car sales and all the rest, now would be a good time to walk into a car dealer and say ‘I’m looking to buy a car. What have you got?’
Sadly, no. That would be neglecting to consider the standard atmosphere and approach of British car dealers, who appear universally suspicious of anyone who so much as hints towards interest in their products, rather than, say, a BMW. There’s obviously something wrong with you – you’re mad, or skint, or both – so there’s no point trying to make a rational deal. Thus, they may as well ignore you and go back to their newspapers.
Take Volkswagon, for example: after a thirty-minute wait while the assistants all moved bits of paper around, the salesman who finally looked at me noted my interest in the Scirocco, listened to my story of liking the Mégane Coupé and Volvo C30 but also being impressed by the Fiesta… and hence tried to sell me a Polo.
Yes, yes, very nice, I said, and tried to steer the conversation back towards diesel Sciroccos. Twice. Each time, the salesman moved me down the Polo range. I tried to feed him lines about depreciation, and why initial price can be less important than lifetime cost; he pitched me the Polo 1.2 E, with wind-up windows, a radio/cassette player, and floor mats (extra-cost option). I walked out before he started pointing me to high-mileage Lupos.
At the Volvo showroom my interest in the C30 eventually prompted attention, but it turned out that they can’t sell me one. The C30, it transpires, really is a concept car – pretty to look at, supposedly production-ready, but they’re not actually making them. Or at least, this particular dealer barely ever sees them.
What they do get, rarely, are base-spec ‘R-Design’ models, which are decent value but neither quick nor frugal; the diesel equivalent is both. Probably. The dealer described the oil-burner as ‘hypothetical’: he’s heard of them, but isn’t sure if they’re real or mythical. As far as I can tell, the C30 exists only to lure people like me into Volvo dealers, to give us something pretty to look at before we remember we have kids and responsibilities and really need a sensible saloon.
Except that I don’t have kids or responsibilities, and quite fancy a little 2+2 shooting brake/grand tourer. But they’re just to look at; I can’t actually buy one. Heavens, no, what gives me that idea?
Ford, meanwhile, looked reassuringly scuffed and threadbare. The manager greeted me jovially at the door, then a sneezing sales assistant walked me through the bafflingly-complex Fiesta range with sufficient vagueness I began to suspect he’d spent less time with the brochure than I had. For example: the base-spec 1.25 ‘Style’ looks like remarkably good value, but I was concerned about whether it sported the low- or high-output version of the engine. I enquired. Checks were made. I still don’t know.
The entire mid-range is unavailable for months to come, leaving just the top-of-the-range diesel, which costs a whopping 50% more than the base model. Gosh. That’s quite a lot, but run the numbers for me – what does that mean per month?
Not sure. Come back tomorrow, maybe? Perhaps Friday?
Does it have a particle filter? “What’s one of those?”
Er… p’raps not.
Renault, meanwhile, were incredibly keen to get me in a 5-door Mégane. So keen that before I’d even seen one we were £2,500 below list price. That I’m completely disinterested in a bland family car was, it seemed, irrelevant. There proceeded a bizarre little dance, in which I enquired about engines and prices of the dashing little Mégane Coupé, but could only elicit answers in reference to the five-door sister car. It’s still not clear to me if the Coupé is actually available, or merely a balsa wood mockup plonked in the showroom and painted orange to look appealing. It certainly looks a bit like a C30.
Now, doubtless I’d receive much better service if I shaved and wore a suit, rather than looking a bit scruffy. However, in a Jaguar dealer I had a delightful conversation with a middle-aged and sharply-dressed businessman. He walked in excited about what might turn out to be his first Jag. Twenty minutes later we were still playing ‘spot the salesman’, and it transpired that this was the third dealer he’d walked into, and the third where he’d encounted intangible service. He left muttering something about Lexus.
As for me: by the end of the day, I’d walked into half-a-dozen showrooms with money (metaphorically) in my pocket, and walked out of each with no enthusiasm at all for the products. Not one salesman really listened to what I wanted, nor helped me shuffle through the ranges. None could give me even rough finance examples unless we properly specced a car. Nobody offered coffee, let alone a test drive. My casual but distinct interest was turned not into a sale, but into frustration and weariness.
Car dealers of Glasgow: if you want my business, try harder.
I’ve been waiting six months for the new Mac Pros, which finally appeared last Tuesday. Today, I’ve been trying to find anyone with remaining stock of the old ones. Why buy now something I could have bought six months ago? Why not buy the latest and greatest? Well, here we go…
The centrepiece of the new model is the ‘Nehalem’ processor, a significant advance on the Core 2-based units in the old Mac Pros. It benchmarks around 50% faster, clock-for-clock, when doing video processing sorts of things. Great. That’s what I’ve been waiting for. But there’s a catch: Nehalem is expensive.
The desktop-class ‘Core i7’ chips are quite keenly-priced, but Mac Pros use server-class processors in order to sport two chips – hence eight cores rather than four. The catch is that server-class Nehalem processors seem to be vastly more expensive than the units they replace. So much more expensive, Apple has dropped the base spec to just one processor – four cores.
System price break down like this (approx., including VAT)
The 8-core, 2.2GHz machine might – just about – match the performance of the old 8×2.8 model for the sorts of things I do. For memory-intensive operations (Photoshop?) it should pull ahead, but for processor-bound operations it’s going to be close. But it costs more than 45% more than the old model. Whaaaaat?!
To really extract more performance than the old model, I’d need 8×2.66GHz, but that’s another £1,120. Double the total price, for maybe 20% more oomph? Gee, thanks, but… uhh… no.
Calling around this morning, it seems there was a rush on orders for the old models last Wednesday – lots of people in my position, waiting for the new ones, seeing them, and putting their cash into something they could have had six months ago. The only model I could get my hands on is an 8×3.2Ghz box, but at £2,699 that’s not exactly an impulse purchase.
Apart from, arguably, the period when the Mac Quadras were replaced by Power Macs back in 1994, I can’t recall a time when Mac prices have gone up, and performance-per-pound has gone down quite so dramatically. It’s particularly strange when one considers the forthcoming ‘Snow Leopard’ Mac OS X release, which was supposed to trumpet major advances in utilising multi-core architectures.
As it stands, Apple looks like it’s claiming ‘8 cores good, 4 cores better.’ Sorry, but that’s just nonsense.
For the record – and since the irregular reader might take my previous post to be somewhat, er, rude about the British Council – I had a blast on Wednesday. A bunch of International Climate Champions have this week gathered in Edinburgh for a week of workshops run by Laura and Sarah. They roped me in to do some media and journalism stuff on Wednesday, mostly (I think) to give themselves a break.
It was… interesting. It’s very hard to pitch that sort of thing, given that all one knows about the participants is that their backgrounds vary and their ages range from ‘late high school’ through to ‘recent graduate’. Hence, they span just about the fastest rate of change of knowledge one ever achieves.
So I think my workshop was perhaps a little simplistic. On the other hand, I don’t think basic journalism is rocket science, and sometimes it’s important to be reassured that the bit you need to know really isn’t any more complex than bearing in mind a couple of handy maxims.
Anyway, the really important part of Wednesday was nothing to do with me; the British Council had arranged an afternoon visit to the Scottish Parliament. 50 of us were, it transpired, too large a group for most of their rooms, so we convened in… the debating chamber. Ah, OK, that was cool. The Scottish Minister for Climate Change, Stewart Stephenson, did a cracking job of speaking little and listening lots.
The most significant aspect, however, was that the visit happened at all. When you’re 17, the idea that decision-makers are just older versions of you is completely gob-smacking. It was lovely to watch the realisation dawn on so many faces.
Climate Champions: great project. Sure, it struggles with being trapped in the sort of baroque structure favoured by any globe-spanning organisation – but that doesn’t stop it being a terrific thing to do. Finding exceptional individuals and bringing them together is rarely a bad idea.
“The effort [of writing] is too much to make if one has already squandered one’s energies on semi-creative work such as teaching, broadcasting or composing propaganda for bodies such as the British Council”
George Orwell
Recently, I’m spending chunks of time more-or-less teaching; in the past, I’ve done lots of broadcasting, and I continue to do the web equivalent; on Wednesday I’m working for the British Council.
Huh.
It’s a relief to know I’m in good company in finding such endeavours detrimental to my general creativity. The concept of ‘semi-creative’ work, meanwhile, is one I shall shamelessly appropriate.
One of the things television engineer Jem Stansfield and I have spent many a happy hour sketching is a reaction-thrust flight system using water as the propellent. We had all sorts of plans, but could never quite convince ourselves it was worth doing on, say, Scrapheap Challenge.
I’m rather delighted, then, to see the JetLev Flyer. A 100+ horsepower pump, housed in a little boat, shove water up a hose and into a backpack at stupid pressures. Which you then use to blast yourself upwards.
It’s ridiculous, but apparently it works – film here. Brilliant.
Oh, and the Telegraph are all over the story again. They’re hot today.
Congrats to the Newcastle Science Festival team first on their dashing new website, and also for their neat little splash story which has gone a bit bonkers this morning – they’re running a survey to see if Geordies really do go out without their coats more often. A delightful bit of fluff which the Telegraph appear to think is proper, serious science. Scientists don’t have a sense of humour, obviously. The story also made the Sun.
[Update: BBC Look North piece. Yay!]
Secondly, Bletchley Park hosted a twittering geeks meetup yesterday, which I wish I could have joined. @StationX is Our Man Inside Christian Payne/Documentally; Sue Black is also campaigning on Bletchley’s behalf; she has an article in today’s, er, Telegraph. I’m not a fan of that article, as it happens, but don’t let it put you off signing the petition.