This Christmas I'll be spending a lot of time with my friends. Some of them have got flu, but they still spend time with us unless we tell them to go to bed. Some will be drinking a lot, and while I don't drink, I appreciate having the freedom to have a cigarette while I drink my tea. Lucius and Lila (not their real names) will be there, although Lucius will probably go off at some stage to put the turkey on - they are traditional like that. Jasper (real name) prefers noodles.
You might be wondering how we can spend the time so differently while still being together. The answer is, we are all online together, but in our various houses and countries we can make personal choices about how to spend the time. Lucius and Lila live in Wales, and Jasper lives in the Netherlands, yet I still count them as friends even though I haven't met them face to face, and possibly never will. I don't have to dress up to impress them, and I don't have to worry if someone's a vegetarian or who takes sugar in their coffee.
You might argue that not spending time together - physically co-located, if you will - reduces the value of a relationship. How often do you get to spend time with friends? And is it always convenient to do so? There are pros and cons on both sides of the argument, but for me, having that link to real people (via voice chat software called Ventrilo) is indispensible. I can moan at them about my family, we can talk about the weather, what's on TV - any number of subjects. Meanwhile, we are engaging in a fun activity - in this case, Warhammer (see Shopper, Issue 250) - that is also mentally stimulating and engaging.
A recent study has shown a lot of stereotypes about gamers (as lonely, middle-aged male geeks) to be false, showing that for example there is a healthy population of women in the online gaming community. As gaming grows in popularity, it's becoming clear that gamers are just normal people who choose to spend their time doing something different. Rather than soaking up the Sound of Music on the telly this Xmas, a lot of gamers will be actively engaged in filling out their fantasy worlds, solving complex problems and role-playing their online characters.
The study also shows that gaming, rather than being lonely and geeky, is increasingly a social and fun pastime. If you're sat watching another repeat of The Great Escape, with family you've maybe seen enough of already for one year, and craving a drink, a cigarette or a cup of tea, maybe you should consider spending some time with friends instead - wherever they are.
Computer Shopper has been trawling across the internet to find you some of the best remakes of classic movies, posted by video-sharing site users. Within just a few minutes you can get up to speed with films you’ve been meaning to watch, but have never got round to, or just refresh your memory of a great film that you loved, but just haven’t found time to watch again. Alternatively, some of these are listed for their sheer comedic value.
This short version of the Arnie classic will serve to fill you in about what actually happened to the current governor of California when he visited Mars. If at all he did actually visit Mars.
What was it about Eddie Murphy that made him such a celebrated comedic actor in 1980s and made the Beverly Hills Cop franchise so successful? Was it his versatility, his hilarious stand-up shows or was it simply the way he laughed?
If you like the occasional dose of mindless slapstick comedy, chances are you’re a fan of the Scary Movie franchise. Relive some of the hilarious moments from the fourth instalment.
2008’s biggest blockbuster attracted a lot acclaim and a lot of attention across the internet- in fact we probably could have done a top 10 of Dark Knight-themed videos on the net, but perhaps the pick of the bunch is this spoof of the trailer.
Mouthmaster Murf and Dj Mayhem - members of rap band The Anomalies – spent about nine months creating this video, and you can see why, when you view the slick, well-made finished product.
This video tells the tale of Tony Montana – a man whose life isn’t going too well until he meets the love of his life, Elvira. His friends help him in his quest for the lady’s heart, and they all live happily ever after. No, that’s not how we remember Scarface either.
Meet Jack Torrance. He’s a writer looking for inspiration, who just can’t finish his book. This spoof of the Shining trailer somehow manages to portray Kubrick’s chilling horror as a feel-good family comedy.
Made by the people who brought you the Predator remake, this video features a hip hop remix of the Robocop theme music, which Mouthmaster Murf raps narrative over, chronicling Officer Alex Murphy’s transformation into the iconic RoboCop.
As Mel Croucher points out in Rants & Raves in the current issue of Shopper, EM Forster’s The Machine Stops is an incredible prediction of our globally networked society, despite the book being written a century ago.
The internet has certainly been one of the most significant inventions of the last 100 years, and has radically altered many aspects of our lives. There’s no longer any need to visit a library, as the internet provides free access to more information you could ever hope to find in your high-street library. You can now keep in touch with far-flung friends and family thanks to webcams, and there’s no need to fight the Christmas crowds on Oxford Street as you can simply make your purchases online.
However, it’s the immediacy of information on the internet which is often staggering. Take Sunday’s incident at a press conference in Baghdad, where an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush. Naturally, news stories appeared instantly, but just a few hours later, you could visit websites like Sock & Awe! and play a Flash game re-enacting the event.
A ton of amusing animations appeared at the same time, including a superb parody of The Matrix by b3ta.com user printmeister, where Keanu Reeves dodging bullets on a rooftop has been replaced by Bush dodging flying shoes.
It isn’t just Presidents that get the Flash treatment. Back in March, Heather Mills threw a glass of water over Paul McCartney’s lawyer during the pair’s divorce, which resulted in the Mucca Chucka game, which is included below for your enjoyment.
Whatever the next week’s news brings, you can be sure there will be a rash of games so you can enjoy them again and again.
Beloved Shopper readers, as much I’ve enjoyed my time working at this publication and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting your feedback and comments on the News section, I have just received an email that will change my life forever.
According to Mr Ebu Ahmed, I have been listed as the heir to a whopping US$10.6 million – almost £7 million!
Who Mr Ebu Ahmed is – I don’t actually know - as he’s neglected to mention anything about himself in the email. Nonetheless, he tells me that I am set to inherit this staggering fortune from a relative of mine who is recently deceased, and who Mr Ahmed says can’t be named, for security reasons (apparently, it was already mentioned in an earlier email – I don’t remember seeing that one though).
I did find this very strange at first, to be honest. I don’t know anyone who has passed away very recently – and I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone that had £7 million to their name; certainly no-one who would name me as a sole beneficiary to their fortune. So naturally, I was a little sceptical, but I've just put it down to fate – I guess I must have been doing something right all these years.
Anyway, I’ve emailed him back with my contact details – and I’m just waiting to see where it goes from here.
The initial email exchange is posted below – and if Mr Ahmed plays ball, we may be able to have a little bit of fun over the coming weeks - we'll try to get to know this scammer better and expose him for what he really is. But if you’re impatient and are already salivating at the prospect of retribution for some of those pesky – nay, malicious and deceitful - 419 scammers, you can check out this 419 ‘scambaiting’ website.
-----Original Message----- From: Ebu Ahmed [mailto:ack@telefonica.net] Sent: 14 December 2008 08:11 To: ebu.ahmed02@hotmail.com Subject: Re-Notifying You Again!!
GREETINGS.
We wish to notify you again that you were listed as a heir to the total sum of Ten Million Six Hundred Thousand US Dollars in the codicil and last testament of the deceased. Name now withheld since this is our second letter to you. We contacted you because you bear the surname identity and therefore can present you as the heir to the inheritance.
We therefore reckoned that you could receive these funds as you are qualified by your name identity. All the legal papers will be processed in your acceptance. In your acceptance of this deal, we request that you kindly forward to us your letter of acceptance; your current telephone and fax numbers and a forwarding address to enable us file necessary documents at our high court probate division for the release of this sum of money.
Please contact me via my private email so that we can get this done immediately.
Kind regards, Mr.Ebu Ahmed
-----Original Message-----From: Dawinderpal Sahota Sent: 17 December 2008 10:40To: 'ebu.ahmed02@hotmail.com'Subject: RE: Re-Notifying You Again!!
Hi Mr Ahmed,
That is great news - however, are you sure you have the right person? I didn't receive your first email, in which you mentioned the name of the deceased.
Obviously $10.6 million is a lot of money, and I just want to confirm I am the right person. If that is so, I'd be thrilled to hear back from you. My contact details are below. Please let me know what I would need to do next.
Dawinderpal Sahota XX XXXXX Street London WXX XXX Tel: 020X XXX XXXX Fax: 020X XXX XXXX
This month we were looking at the new Nokia N96, a review of which will appear in the next issue of Shopper. We were intrigued to find a link on the Home screen: “Share online”. This takes you to a menu where you can choose a number of online services that allow you to share your content. For the moment, these seem to be limited to Yahoo!’s flickr photo sharing service, the Vox blogging site, and Nokia’s new Ovi.com portal.
Ovi.com (ovi means “door” in Finnish) isn’t as much of a household name as Facebook, but by including a link to it on its phones, Nokia is evidently pushing its adoption as a personal sharing site. It has sections for sharing contacts, maps, multimedia, game data and other files, and launched in August this year. The gaming section is powered by N-Gage, which already has mechanisms for sharing gaming information, while the Files section is powered by technology acquired from Avvenu last year.
It's obviously designed to be a hub for personal information, and driven by content from users' mobile phones. However, the site seems to be a bit slap-dash, with some sections not linking back to the main site, and without a unified interface across each sub-section. This makes it load slowly as well, and there's a distinct lack of integration. A lot of functions are duplicated across sub-sites, such as photo sharing.
It's certainly not the slick, Web 2.0 experience we've come to expect. Nokia will need to put much more effort into it if it hopes to pull users away from established sites, mainly MySpace and Facebook. With such tough competition, Nokia should invest more in the design and functionality of the site, and hope that Web 2.0 doesn't turn into Dotcom Bubble 2.0. If that happens, Nokia better hope the Ovi doesn't hit it in the arse on the way out.
When Jurassic Park came out it blew everyone away. Rather than the slightly jerky go motion puppets - Phil Tippett of ILM’s version of stop motion but with motion blur to make model movements look more natural - audiences were suddenly face-to-face with smooth-moving, ultra-realistic (we presume) computer-generated dinosaurs. It was incredibly, and suddenly computers were propelled to the forefront of special effects, but was this a good move?
Special effects used to be incredibly time-consuming and expensive to produce, so they were generally saved for big moments; nowadays, even the cheapest, low-budget sci-fi caper splurges stunning amounts of cheaply-generated effects across the screen. To me, it feels as if the magic has been lost along the way, as you can spot these effects a mile off. As everyone knows, the best special effect is the one that you don’t notice.
Computers should be there to help enhance a scene, not steal the lime-light and break your bond with the film. Too often film makers are simply using computers to replace what should be shot normally; what they should be doing is using a blend of techniques.
Take Jurassic Park, for example. A lot scenes actually used models, such as the shot where the T-Rex attacks the car in the rain. This means that everything you see on screen is actually happening, and the actors all have something to respond to. It’s brilliant, and it works. The film also has some subtle uses of CGI that you won’t and shouldn’t spot. The best example is when Lex (the girl in the film) is moving through the crawl space in the suspended ceiling. When a velociraptor jumps up and knocks a ceiling panel, she falls down, just saving herself by gripping the surrounding panels. When this scene was shot, Lex was played by the adult stunt double who, quite naturally, looked up as she fell. This, of course, ruined the shot, as you could clearly see that it wasn’t the same actress playing Lex. The solution, was to use a computer to take Lex’s face from the main actress and graft it onto the shot. The result is a more gripping scene and a brilliant use of computers. It’s a similar technique that makers of The Crow used to put Brandon Lee’s face in a smashed mirror for a scene filmed after he’d been tragically shot and killed on set.
Fast-forward a few years to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and things have gone downhill. There’s a lot that’s wrong with this film and its two sequels, but the main culprit is George Lucas’ over-reliance on CGI. Rather than use real locations and build real sets, actors had to stand in front of green screen, while everything else was dropped in later. The result is twofold: the actors had nothing to act against, so the performances aren’t as good as they could be, and every planet they visit looks like it’s been generated by computers. The climax of the film (if it can be called that) is the worst, as it ends up with computer-generated Gungans fighting computer-generated robots against a computer-generated backdrop: it’s like Toy Story only without the fun.
In the film’s defence (you won’t hear that sentence often from me) it can at least claim to be a science-fiction film that’s supposed to have all of these incredibly things going on. That’s not an excuse that can be used by action films, such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The first films in the series were known for their incredible, but real, action scenes. The scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones slips underneath the truck, cracks his whip to the underside and gets dragged behind is one of the most iconic scenes in films. It was also actually shot with real actors, a real truck and a real road. The scene in the latest film where Indiana Jones gets blown up by a computer-generated atom bomb and flung into the air in a computer-generated fridge is just stupid. There’s no sense of reality into the shot and the film suffers for it. Even worse, is the part when Mutt learns to swing through the trees, as he’s just seen some computer-generated chuckling monkeys (this has to be George Lucas’ fault) do the same thing.
There are some films that mostly get it right. Lord of the Rings is a prime example. The sets are all real, models are mostly used for the towers, castles and some other scenery, and the characters are primarily real actors. Computers are generally used to enhance scenes and fill in missing details. Where computer-generated characters are used, it mostly pulls them off - Gollum is one of the most-engaging and memorable characters. The main reason that he, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, works is because we have no frame of reference for how a creature like Gollum should move, look or react.
It’s a different story with human (or human-like characters) and where Lord of the Rings has one of its few special effects failings is with Legolas. Every time he does something super-human (or, I guess, normal for an elf), such as jumping onto the cave troll or climbing around the oliphant, Orlando Bloom is replaced with a computer-generated version of himself, and it shows. With our brains so used to recognising how people look and move, computer-generated people like this just stick out and look like video-games characters.
It’s a failing that’s plagued lots of films, such as the The Matrix Reloaded. Produce Joel Silver promised that you’d never be able to spot the difference between the real Agent Smith and computer-generated Agent Smiths in the big fight with Neo. Sadly, the fact that the computer-generated characters were all too smooth, too shiny and too obviously computer generated made that part of the film look like someone playing the latest version of Mortal Kombat.
This insistence on using computers for everything seems to be the main problem with effects in Hollywood films. The makers are so intent on making each scene look more and more impressive that they’ve lost track of what makes films so much fun in the first place: believing that what’s happening on screen could really happen. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against computer-generated effects, but they have to be used in moderation and to enhance what’s already there. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, such as the way that David Fincher used computer-generated camera movements in Fight Club to produce impossible shots. The key difference is that this was an artistic decision to use computers to produce a look to the film that you can’t get using normal shots.
So, with all of this in mind, here’s what I think film makers need to do:
Build actual sets or use real locations. You can’t generate something that’s more real than something that actually is real.
Don’t user computer animation for people. Either get actors or stunt-people that can do the stunt, or don’t bother.
Ask, is the scene we’re currently about to generate remotely believable? If it isn’t, don’t bother. Rewrite the script and put in a stunt that you actually have to film.
Finally, and most importantly, keep George Lucas away from computers. In fact, could someone rebuild the Star Wars Cantina, fill it full of the aliens again and take George for a drink there? Perhaps if he saw what he was missing, he’d make amends and bring out special editions of the new Star Wars films, replacing the computer effects with actual film footage.
Laptops with built-in wifi are great. Shopping on-line, updating your Facebook status or just checking email from the comfort of your own laptop, even when you’re away from home at a café or airport, is very convenient.
Unfortunately, many wifi hotspots tend to be horrifically overpriced when compared to using a PC in an internet cafe. 90 minutes of access at a BT Openzone hotspot will cost £5.88. 60 minutes of access at a T-Mobile hotspot costs £5. By comparison, an independent London internet café charges just £1.50 an hour when you use one of their PCs.
Does running a wireless network really cost four times more than running a wired one? I doubt it. It seems nonsensical to be charged more to access the internet when you’re providing your own computer.
Hotspot providers probably think that most of their customers are ThinkPad-toting businessmen traveling on expense accounts or Vaio-carrying brats with trust funds, so they can get away with charging such silly prices. However, the increasing popularity of netbooks and wifi-equipped smartphones surely means that lots of normal people want to use those hotspots. Given the current economic climate, they probably won’t want to when faced with a price gouging.
There are numerous websites, such as www.free-hotspot.com, which help you find wireless hotspots which don’t charge a penny. Unfortunately, they’re not much use when you’re actually out and about trying to find a hotspot.
Imagine the scene. You’re standing in front of the stage waiting for your favourite band to come on, surrounded by hundreds of other fans. The lights go down. The crowd cheers as the band step out on stage. And all around you, a forest of hands rises into the air, grasping mobile phones and digital cameras.
With the rise of Flickr and YouTube, people have become so obsessed with documenting every event (significant or otherwise) in their lives that it seems they no longer bother experiencing anything fully first-hand.
Instead of going to a gig and watching the band, they go to the gig and video the band on their mobile phone before going home and uploading it to the internet. I find this incomprehensible.
I’m as wedded to my phone and net connection as the next geek, but that’s part of why I enjoy live music so much. It’s an emphatically real experience. You’re actually there in the moment, rather than one step removed. That's important to me in a world where more and more of our lives revolve around instant messaging, TV, social networking, phone calls and a dozen other things that only seem to separate us from the real world.
Why would anyone choose to be somewhere in real life and still watch events through a screen, even if it is only a tiny one held in their hand?
Stop trying to live your own life vicariously. You’re already there. You don’t need to prove anything. YouTube is packed with grainy, low-resolution gig videos that consist of crowd noise and other people’s arms. Yours isn’t going to be any different.
And in the mean time, you’re blocking my view and getting in the way of the mosh pit.
In the last week, I've spent a lot time looking at, listening to, and at times thoroughly enjoying, things with the Dolby logo on them. This week I got a new AV amplifier to play with, courtesy of Onkyo, and I visited Dolby’s London offices, thanks to Medion. But more on those later.
The Dolby name and logo have appeared ubiquitously on audio and video equipment, and the media we play upon them, for my entire life. Going back as far as Dolby Noise Reduction reducing the hiss on cassette tapes, and Dolby Stereo at my local single screen cinema. More recently, Dolby Digital from games and DVDs has become a cornerstone of home cinema surround sound.
PC surround sound and home cinema surround haven’t always worked together. PCs didn't support home cinema standards, like Dolby Digital, instead using their own Soundblaster-derived standards which dated back to the multimedia PC boom in the nineties (when CD-ROM drives and soundcards became popular). The PC's soundcard would do the crucial digital to analogue conversion process, and then the analogue audio would be output to a surround sound speaker system, which included a built-in amplifier.
Over the last few years compatibility with home cinema standards, like Dolby Digital, has been provided by DVD playback software like WinDVD and PowerDVD. We've also seen S/PDIF outputs become commonplace on PCs and laptops, making it simple to pass digital audio out to an AV receiver. However, I doubt that many people used these connections, with the obvious exception of media centre PC owners, simply because having to connect your laptop to your TV and an AV receiver to watch a DVD seems like a lot of hassle.
Things have improved of late with the introduction of HDMI. This digital equivalent of the SCART cable provides audio and video over a single connection perfect if you want to plug your laptop into your HD TV. It’s also a requirement if you want to use the uncompressed digital audio on Blu-ray movies, as S/PDIFs simply don’t have enough bandwidth for all that data. Because of this, it was decided we should update our test home cinema test equipment.
Japanese home cinema specialists Onkyo seemed like the obvious choice. In recent years they've pushed the home cinema market forward with some staggeringly good, but very aggressively priced hardware. They slashed hundreds of pounds off the price of an AV Receiver with support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio (the high-quality uncompressed audio standards found on most Blu-ray movies) and won numerous awards from the Hi-Fi press. This combination of high-quality and low prices seemed to fit best with Shopper's outlook, and so we were delighted when Onkyo agreed to supply us with their latest budget model, the TX-SR606, for testing purposes. It costs around £350 inc VAT from www.superfi.co.uk.
The SR606, like many AV receivers, is a truly massive device. I do a lot of our home cinema testing at home, as the office isn't an ideal place to be testing high-end audio equipment, as there's simply too much background noise. Having hauled this monster piece of kit home, it then took a whole evening to plumb the thing in (sounds like a pain but if you don’t masochistically enjoy this kind of thing then home cinema is probably not for you).
The results are, predictably, stunning. The Dolby TrueHD soundtrack on the Iron Man Blu-ray was bursting with detail. It’s hard to describe high-end audio in text without sounding like some idiot on a wine programme, but if you’re considering upgrading your home cinema kit then my advice is to go ahead and treat yourself for Christmas – you won’t be disappointed.
As I mentioned earlier, I went to meet the nice people at Dolby last week. Medion, the German PC manufacturer who has won a few Shopper awards recently, was launching its new laptop. It includes a Bu-ray drive and a HDMI output, so you can hook it up to your HDTV, or a receiver like the SR606, and appreciate the full video and audio resolution of your movie.
With The Dark Knight out on Blu-ray today, this Christmas could be the make or break time for the HD movie format. It’s success certainly isn’t guaranteed, though with players coming down to £150 inc VAT, it certainly has an opportunity now to break out from its current enthusiast niche. A lot has been made of the enhanced picture quality on these discs, but I think that the superior audio is just as impressive.
When we’re recruiting for editorial positions on Shopper we always ask candidates to first send us a short piece on their favourite gadget. Inevitably, most people choose their iPod, although most also fail to convey exactly why it’s so brilliant.
As regular readers of this blog will know, there’s something of a divide in the Shopper office between those that love Apple and those who don’t. I’m currently sitting on the fence, partly because I’ve recently spent actual money on an iPod Touch.
I have many gadgets, but the Touch is without doubt my favourite. Previously, I was a big PDA fan, but eagerly awaited the day that someone brought out one with a decent operating system. Palm started well, but quickly dropped the ball, while Microsoft started badly and never improved.
When the original iPhone arrived, I couldn’t quite believe how good it was. Unlike Microsoft, Apple had clearly sat down and put itself in the shoes of a user. Put simply, everything works just as you’d want it to work. There’s no need for an instruction manual because you need only use your intuition. Want to skip to the next photo? Just drag your finger. Photo the wrong way round? Just turn the Touch 90° and the image now fits.
Plus, as far as I’m concerned, Safari is the only mobile browser that actually lets you use the ‘real’ internet, and not a special cut-down version. The multi-touch interface makes it incredibly fast to zoom in and look at the part of a page you want, and it makes light work of keeping multiple pages open at once. It’s a similar story with music and video playback, with a slick, responsive interface at all times. Some may hate the on-screen keyboard, but even if you make mistakes, they’re often automatically corrected without you even realising you’ve made a typo.
The worst part of the iPhone, of course, was the cost. Luckily, the Touch is almost identical, but without the phone functions, and monthly contract. The real draw of the Touch for me was the ability to ‘jailbreak’ it and install a multitude of free applications, making it nearly as versatile as any PDA I’ve owned. With firmware 2.0, though, the App Store meant I could get free applications through an official channel, and although most apps cost money, they’re also sensibly priced at between 60p and a few pounds.
Being a commuter, I love the ability to instantly check on tube and train status – all you need is a public WiFi hotspot, and there are plenty around. When there isn’t, there are other apps that make the life of the Touch user more pleasant, such as offline website readers, games and puzzles.
I’m under no illusions that there are flaws with the Touch – the non-replaceable battery being the biggest – but it remains my favourite, and is sure to be for some time to come.
As the only Mac-owning member of Shopper's editorial staff, I've had to put up with a lot of mocking for my choice of personal computer. Unlike the legions of rabid Mac fanatics that lurk in forums and newsgroups across the internet, I don't feel the need to defend my choice since I'm not some sort of diehard. After all, I greatly prefer my Vista Media Center PC to my Apple TV when watching movies and TV shows on my HD TV.
I therefore read Dave Ludlow's post about why he hates Macs with a great deal of amusement.
I could respond to his post point-by-point but it's nearly the weekend so I can't be bothered. I do wish though that Mac-bashers would make the distinction between criticising Apple and criticising the products it makes.
I will also point out that many of the criticisms about the way Macs and the MacOS work are down to personal preference. Whether it's the traditional one-button mouse or having application-centric instead of window-centric windows management, it usually comes down to personal taste rather than an objective quantification of what is or isn't "better".
I'll end with an example of why I generally prefer Macs to Windows PCs. Dave's Windows Vista office PC takes a long time to boot up, which annoyed him greatly. However, he didn't want to leave it in Hibernation or Sleep mode overnight wasting electricity. He therefore built an energy efficient mini ITX PC (about the size of an Asus Eee Box) that is left on all night. At a preset time every morning, it sends a signal over the network to Dave's PC, telling it to boot up.
Although this is an impressive achievement, getting a Mac to turn on at a specific time of day is a lot easier. It's a simple series of options in a dialog box in the MacOS Energy Saver control panel:
In this case, the Mac's well thought-out design in integrating hardware and software has saved me a lot of hassle. Like building one computer to turn on another.
I’ve recently bought the excellent Nokia E71 on 3, mostly because for £25 a month I get 300 minutes of anytime texts or voice calls, 1GB of 3G downloads and, most importantly, unlimited email. For the most part the service is excellent and I always seem to have a signal and 3G coverage.
One of the things that attracted me to 3 was the Email on 3 service, which provides push email via a small application that installs on the handset. For well-known accounts, such as Gmail and Hotmail, it’s incredibly simply to set up: I just had to type in my account details to get my email pushed directly to my handset.
Brilliant, I thought, time to set up my work email, which should have been easy. Email on 3 supports Outlook Web Access (OWA) - the web front end to corporate Exchange servers. It should connect to this service and synchronise so that email read or deleted on the phone is marked as read or deleted on the server.
Now, while it seems to work with some OWA accounts, it decided not to work with Computer Shopper’s email. Unfortunately, this is where it all gets a little bit Groundhog Day.
Before you select that your company uses OWA the on-screen instructions read: “Select Options -> Use OWA if your corporate Exchange server allows Outlook Web Access (OWA). Otherwise, select Options -> Sign up now.”
With OWA not working, I decided to select Sign up now, where I was asked: “Enter your work email address on the next screen. An email message with sign-up instructions will be sent to you immediately.”
I did that and got the following helpful message: “On your PC, please follow the instructions in the email you just received to connect the Email on 3 service to your email account.” I waited, excitedly, for the promised email to turn up with my full instructions, when this comes through: “To get started with Email on 3, open the application on your phone and select ‘Add Account’.”
What a stunningly brilliant bit of advice: I should just use the option that I’ve already used to get it to send me an email telling me to do what I’ve already done. I don’t think that could be any clearer or any more helpful.
Surprisingly, things can actually get worse if you use the Sign In on this Device option instead of trying to add an account. This brings up the: “Enter your User Name and Password on the next screen. The User Name and Password are those you use to access your email at work.” Sounds good, so far...
It continues: “You selected the connector ID when you set up your service, or it is shown in your welcome email.”
Sadly, neither of the above cases is true. So, what to do? The obvious answer was to search the internet for some help, only there’s one problem: Email on 3 as a search phrase doesn’t work very well as 3 has chosen a non-search-engine-friendly name for its service. You see, searching for this term, brings up any matches that use that sentence, such as forum posts asking ‘Can I get email on 3?’ or new stories saying ‘Get unlimited email on 3’. In fact, there are millions of hits out there that link to loads of bits of information that are of no practical use in this situation. Why couldn’t 3 have called its push email service, 3mail or Push3, or anything that would actually turn up a decent hit in Google? Adding ‘Connector ID’ to the search term brings up exactly nothing, as does searching 3’s own website for this term.
Sighing, I decided to turn to the last resort: phoning for technical support. Unfortunately, 3, like a lot of companies, has decided to out-source its call centre to a foreign country. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle, but practically I may as well have dialled a random number and asked whoever answered the phone for help.
The main reason for this is that I couldn’t really understand the person on the other end of the line, while they found it difficult to understand exactly what I was asking. This situation was amplified by the fact that I needed help with something that wasn’t on the standard problem solving flowchart that call centres tend to have.
In my case, a very slow conversation (if that’s the word for it) took place, where I’d say something and the call centre guy would repeat it slowly back to me. It was like talking to an old and slightly deaf aunt, only I wouldn’t pay that aunt £25 a month for the privilege. I would say that I got nowhere fast, except it took an excruciatingly long time.
The upshot was that the call centre didn’t have any idea what Email on 3 was, what a Connector ID was or how it was all supposed to be set up. Talking to someone that doesn’t have English as a first language also meant that it was practically impossible to describe exactly what the problem was and where I should go for help. So, I gave up.
Fortunately for me, Nokia is brilliant and the E71 has an application called Mail for Exchange. Once installed, this will connect to an Exchange server via OWA, synchronise email, contacts, calendar and to-do lists without sending me a pointless email or making me phone anyone. Why couldn’t I have just used that in the first place?
The new Feelix Growing project represents a potentially drastic change to the way society functions – where robots will eventually become companions to all of us – just like pets.
We’ve all fantasised about having an R2-D2-type friend of our own – and the robots being developed as part of this project could see a lot of the sci-fi ideas from the silver screen played out as part of our own lives. It wouldn’t be the first time sci-fi writers have given us an accurate insight into the world of the future. A couple of months ago (Shopper 249), we had a look at sci-fi predictions, and how films and TV shows of the past have played a part in shaping what the future looks like. While, we’re still light years away from having flying cars and teleporters, it’s frightening how similar the worlds of our imagination 20-odd years ago and the one we live in today have become.
Blade Runner (1982) - Shanghai (2008)
And if the future plays out like our imaginations have predicted, there’s no reason why robots can’t become a part of our lifestyle.
But while there have been some lovable robots:
Not all robots have turned out to be quite so friendly:
And it’s intriguing to see if, when and how our own lives will eventually be affected by the Feelix Growing robots - because let’s make no mistake – these aren’t the same sort of robots we’re used to seeing in toy stores that have pre-programmed actions and very limited responses – they’re much more intelligent.
Feelix Growing group coordinator, Dr Lola Cañamero , told Shopper that the robots can’t just be taken off the shelf and put into a real-life setting, they need to interact with humans to adapt to our environment. They can recognise your facial expressions, judge your mood according to your voice, and learn about human relationships, such as the one between a mother and child.
Cañamero also told us that the team is working on robots with human appearance. Not only will they understand your emotions, but when they express their own mood, they'll be able to provoke emotional reactions from their owner.
But - let's stay realistic - isn’t this all just a bit of harmless fun; having a robot around the house to interact with, that can help you do your washing up and laundry, and keep you company when you’re bored? Of course it is.
For now, anyway.
But anything that paves the way to developing entities with recursive artificial intelligence is potentially very dangerous. If you were looking for one person in the UK who can tell us about the threats that robots could pose to the human race, they don’t get much better than the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford – Dr Nick Bostrom. A little while ago (Shopper 248) he told Shopper:
“If you consider our own history, there was once a thriving species of Neanderthals and they’re gone. It’s the same factor that gives human beings a dominant position on this planet. It’s not because we have stronger muscles or sharper fangs, but because we have brains that enable us to develop culture, science and technology.”
“Anything that has more brains than us can develop more technology, more quickly – including powerful weapons technologies. It could also come up with strategies and plots far more quickly and would therefore be extremely powerful, for the same reason that human beings are very powerful relative to bears and lions.”
But for now, we're just too excited at the thought of our own personal R2-D2s to even care.
This Christmas I'll be spending a lot of time with my friends. Some of them have got flu, but they still spend time with us unless we tell them to go to bed. Some will be drinking a lot, and while I don't drink, I appreciate having the freedom to have a cigarette while I drink my tea. Lucius and Lila (not their real names) will be there, although Lucius will probably go off at some stage to put the turkey on - they are traditional like that. Jasper (real name) prefers noodles.
