The Weekly Round-Up: 04.03.05

"And what do you do...?" "I monopolise, your Majesty..."

Bill Gates was back in London this week to meet the Queen and collect his knighthood at Buckingham Palace.

Sir Bill – as he won't be allowed to call himself, outside any role-playing him and the missus may get up to in the privacy of their own home – collected the honour from her Maj' and enjoyed the full glory of British pomp, which is certainly something to tell the folks about back home.

Because, let's face it, they love that stuff.

The exact honour bestowed upon him is Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire – which sounds more like something his West Coast peers may have come up with.

"Most excellent, Bill!"

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said of the decision to give Gates the honour: "He is one of the most important business leaders of his age. Microsoft technology has transformed business practices and his company has had a profound impact on the British economy."

So well done Bill. And his royal-Gatesness wasn't the only one getting a gong or two this week.

The Round-Up is typing this with a slightly befuddled head, having been at the Bafta Interactive Awards in London and having celebrated late into the night with the winners.

The bash is the new media industry's night of crowning glory (unlike other ceremonies in this industry which claim to be like the Baftas but for technology... these really were the Baftas), when the great and the good are rewarded for all their hard work, asymmetrical hair cuts, thick-rimmed spectacles and predictable failure to adhere to the 'black tie' dress code. (How difficult can it be? But, oh no, these new media types need to show everybody how different they all are.)

Many of the winners were fairly predictable.

And speaking of predictable, there's little in this world as predictable as the BBC's tendency to write about how great the BBC is. The corporation certainly relished winning the several gongs it collected at the show.

But when reading such coverage the Round-Up always imagines a heavyweight boxer bragging about winning a fight with a six-year old. After all, it's not exactly surprising that with an almost bottomless pit of funding and no commercial concerns the BBC could come up with a prize-winning website.

Well done ...no, really.

It would have been more surprising, if despite those incredibly stacked odds, the corporation couldn't turn in an award-winning performance.

(However, the Round-Up knows better than to criticise the Beeb too heavily as silicon.com readers tend to get fiercely protective whenever Auntie's name comes up... so heaven only knows quite what you lot will make of 'Brussels' telling the BBC what it can and cannot do this week.)

Among those taking prizes back to White City were the BBC sport interactive team for their online coverage of England's poor performance at Euro 2004.

Thanks so much for reminding us of that.

The site enabled users to watch David Beckham sky his penalty from all manner of angles at all manner of speeds. But no matter how many times you watched it, or from what angle you watched it, there really was no getting away from the fact it was probably the worst penalty kick ever.

The acceptance speech was similarly off-target, illustrating perfectly exactly the kind of specialist knowledge we all pay our licence fee for.

Having apologised for the fact the Beeb couldn't swing a win for Beckham and co the recipient from the BBC sport team expressed his hopes for a better showing at the World Cup "in two years time".

Nice touch. (Tip to the BBC. The World Cup is actually next year... not 2007. You might have a better chance of scooping another award if you don't cover the event a year late.)

Very few of the Beeb's recipients covered themselves in glory when collecting their award.

Collecting an award for the interactive offering for BBC TV show Spooks, the wit on stage thought it might be a good idea to announce: "By the way... I'm single."

We guessed.

It didn't really need saying. In fact, the few women who were present at this very male bash could actually be heard to mutter "I wonder why" in a fairly obvious, cutting tone.

You probably had to be there, though the Round-Up is not convinced that even a different gentleman making the same announcement was really ever going to be seconds away from lady-heaven.

Though the Round-Up thinks it was slightly cruel of one attendee to suggest all winners would have managed to scrap the word 'Interactive' off their Bafta before the night was even over. These were still very impressive wins... in their field.

Other recipients managed to conform to a number of other awards-bash stereotypes... such as liberal use of the 'f' word when making a speech... that's how crazy these media types are.

Perhaps the most popular win of the night was the BBC's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy website, which incorporated the original – and devilishly difficult – text adventure computer game.

And on the night, the late, great genius of writer Douglas Adams was rightly praised above and beyond the tinkerings of the techies behind the site who could, let's face it, only work with the material he provided.

The compere for the evening was Radio 4 stalwart Jeremy Hardy who struggled to contain his total lack of enthusiasm for the task at hand, while trotting out a series of jokes and quips which have doubtless served him well over the years – irrespective of the subject or the event he was addressing.

The Round-Up suspects a new media audience probably got the same speech as the Towns Women's Guild, Gloucester rugby club or National Union of Students would have been treated to. In fact we were just touched he didn't begin:

"Well, it's great to be here at insert name of event... oh, sorry, at the Bafta Interactive Awards."

However, credit where it's due, he did suffix every mention of the Guardian, who were up for several awards, with the word 'bastards'. It appears he's still a little bitter about getting the sack from the newspaper but the Round-Up really won't hold that against him.

A propos of nothing, at this point in the writing of this newsletter the Round-Up stopped to do a word count – not that it's been a laboured task with a slight hangover – only to find the running count was exactly '666'... spooky.

(Don't go and check – because it's been edited and chopped and changed a little since.)

However, 666 is a number we're quite familiar with in the silicon.com office... not because one among us is the devil and wears the mark of the beast but because we always get feedback to any story on RFID tracking chips – such as the M&S implementation mentioned last week (see Storm in a D-cup: Marks & Sparks expands RFID trials) - which cites the book of Revelations and warns that implementing technology to streamline supply chain management is actually indicative of mankind putting one foot in the unholy apocalypse.

Many readers, as mentioned once before in the Round-Up, bring up this passage from Revelations:

"And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their forehead [or in their M&S undies]. And that no man might buy or sell except he that had the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name [multi-format, multi-protocol, see – say what you like about the Devil but he was all for future-proofing his blue sky thinking]. Here is wisdom. Let him that has understanding count the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man and his number is 666."

However, not all feedback is so extreme – and one female reader commented on the Marks & Spencer implementation, thusly.

She began: "If I go into ANY store and see any chips on anything, I shall not buy it."

The Round-Up assumes she isn't counting any electrical stores, such as Dixons, PC World or the Apple store, whose high-end goods largely all ship with chips as something of a necessity.

Similarly the Round-Up assumes she will be required to show a little more leniency on this stance in a fish and chip shop or similar eatery. We won't sure how literal she was being.

But her sentiment is all well and good. She's certainly entitled to make such decisions, as we all are as informed consumers. But simmering beneath the surface of this apparent anti-RFID angle is a whole other agenda.

Our reader continued: "M&S have never stocked my bra size anyway."

Aha – now we're getting into the nitty-gritty of this weighty tech issue.

"They keep saying they make them bigger now but I have never even seen a D cup bra in M&S never mind my size (a double D). As for their knickers - don't make me laugh!"

Well quite.

Our enraged reader signed off with a dismissive: "They can keep their knickers and bras and their snoopy labels!"

Fair enough. The Round-Up hopes you feel better for getting all that off your (ample) chest.

And while our reader bemoans the lack of decent undies at M&S, it is not just push-up bras which have been making things go 'tits-up' this week. (For example, there was the email security company which deleted its customers' emails.)

Technology and its ability to meet human error head-on has also played a part – not least of all at Bank of America where it's reported sensitive data relating to as many as 1.2 million credit card accounts went missing when data tapes were being transferred to a data centre.

Oh dear.

A statement from the bank read: "Federal law enforcement officials were immediately engaged when the tapes were discovered missing..."

Which the Round-Up think is a little oxymoronic – to "discover" something "missing" but we digress. The statement continued: "...and subsequently conducted a thorough investigation into the matter, working closely with Bank of America. The investigation to date has found no evidence to suggest the tapes or their content have been accessed or misused, and the tapes are now presumed lost."

Well that's alright then. That clears that up – they're just "lost".

Rest easy Bank of America customers, though you'll note the assumption they have not been accessed or misused is based on the fact they don't have a clue where they are... so it's safe to assume they actually don't have a clue either whether they have been accessed.

And there was the Round-Up thinking this was all a bit of a pickle.

Moving on, and back – at the same time – to the issue of tracking. This time it is lorries, rather than undies, which are going to be monitored on a high-tech level.

Trucks and other heavy goods vehicles will be monitored so that their operators can be charged under new government guidelines related to mileage. (Rather than the Round-Up's preferred metric of Yorkie consumption, based on the fact lorry drivers get an average of 42 miles to the Yorkie... which was just made up on the spot.)

The Round-Up suspects Tony Blair has never really forgiven Eddie Stobart for stealing his thunder during the general election of 1997 when a cavalcade of lorries which should have spelled out 'Vote' 'Tony' 'Blair', was reportedly interrupted by another road user, providing at-hand journalists with the chance to capture a wonderful 'Vote' 'Eddie Stobart' photo opportunity.

(And with hindsight, don't we all wish we'd had that opportunity.)

The tracking system will use on-board units, satellite GPS technology and mobile tracking technology to trace the vehicles as they move around the country – a high-tech reworking, we presume, of the 'red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry' tongue twister of old.

Capita, IBM and Siemens have been shortlisted to run the IT infrastructure. Contracts are expected to be awarded by the end of 2005.

Oh, and the scheme is already running two years behind time – which is the kind of tardiness even those lorry drivers most prone to stopping at the Little Chef will tell you is thoroughly unacceptable.

And finally, we end on something of a sad note with news of the death this week of Jef Raskin, the man who launched the Macintosh project for Apple way back when, before a falling out with Steve Jobs saw him leave the company.

Raskin died of cancer, aged 61. To read more about Raskin and his work for Apple, see 'Minority Report' by silicon.com columnist Seb Janacek.