The Weekly Round-Up: 15.09.06

When Microsoft said this week it hopes the European Commission will not require the removal of important security features of Windows Vista it certainly wasn't talking about the shrink-wrap covering the box containing the discs.

Last week, the software giant said it might delay the introduction of Vista in Europe because of the EC's pesky antitrust demands. In response, the Commission said it was totally misleading to imply it could be the cause of delays. (This week's Round-Up is brought to you in glorious Spat-o-rama, by the way.)

The company raised the stakes this week by suggesting that compliance with the EC's requirements might compromise the security of the new operating system, which sounds a lot like getting in an excuse ahead of time.

Either way, a delay in Europe might not matter that much - silicon.com's CIO Jury recently advised businesses not to take the plunge into Vista right away.

Every member of the 12-strong user panel said they don't believe there will be enough benefits to justify the risk of being an early adopter of Vista when it is first released. And presumably even less so while the to-ing and fro-ing with the EC is going on with the s-word being mentioned.

The broad consensus is that Windows XP is currently already delivering enough functionality and reliability for their needs, thank you very much, and they don't care how shiny Vista's buttons are - or its lovely translucent Dock, sorry, Windows Sidebar.

Meanwhile, reviews and reports abound online about the recent Vista release candidate and they're less than complimentary, with complaints about performance, compatibility with key software and hardware and issues with system resource management - it's a hell of a RAM hog apparently.

With Vista now absolutely, definitely pencilled into the diary for a worldwide release in January 2007, it may just be that the sales and marketing divisions of Microsoft EMEA can afford to take an extra week of leave over the Christmas period and raise a glass of sherry to the tenacious civil servants of Brussels...

Next up this week is the ergonomic apocalypse that is the new iPod Shuffle.

The long-running US comedy staple Saturday Night Live was responsible for establishing the careers of John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray. And Chevy Chase. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

A couple of years back one of the show's skits lampooned Apple CEO Steve Jobs for releasing and evangelising ever-smaller iPods in the name of product development. In the sketch, the iPods diminished in size until they were almost at a molecular level.

Anyway, 'where is all this exposition leading?' the exasperated reader might justifiably ask with a tuna-mayo sandwich poised before expectant lips? Merely that it provides further evidence that art holds up a mirror to nature. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," as the conveniently diminutive poet John Keats once penned.

The point is that the iPod Shuffle is now smaller. Very small. In fact it's so ridiculously small that if you've ever looked at your fingers and thought how nice it would be to have sausages for dinner you might struggle to change tracks.

The very thought of operating the device leads the Round-Up to imagine that having double-jointed digits might be a distinct advantage. Just take a look at the mangled-looking fingers of the model in the picture below the banner on this Apple webpage. It's a triumph of industrial design over anatomy.

A couple of years ago everyone was poking fun at Apple for changing the colour of its range of translucent iMacs under the banner of innovative product development. This was despite the fact the iMac was the most innovative product out there at the time, irrespective of whether it was Bondi Blue, Strawberry or Blue Dalmatian. Now, 'small' is the new black and the new MP3 player has demonstrably gone well beyond 'small', sailed casually past 'diminutive' and settled contentedly in the environs of 'titchy'.

The Round-Up has the deepest admiration for Apple's engineers and indeed any manufacturer of personal technology who can pack so many features into such a small form factor.

However, when it saw the new Shuffle the Round-Up felt a tinge of nostalgia for the time when handheld devices meant that the device needed one hand to hold the gadget and a second hand to support the wrist of the first hand. The same sort of nostalgia that leads men of a certain age to look at waif-like supermodels and reminisce about the time when 'real' ladies were rounder and curvier, like Marilyn Monroe or that Swedish actress who used to fling herself with gay abandon into Roman fountains in Federico Fellini flicks.

In a week where a Madrid fashion show made an admirable stance by banning stick-thin models from its catwalk maybe it's time for a consumer electronics champion to rise from the huddled masses and tell the industry: "Stop making everything so bloody small, it makes our fingers hurt!"

Apple also announced its long-predicted entry into the movie downloads market. At first glance the company's opening gambit offering movies from a number of studios seems like Apple has pulled off the same trick as with the record companies until you realise that actually they're all part of the Disney stable, of which Jobs is the major shareholder following the sale of Pixar.

The company insists more studios will jump on board - the Kevin Costner-patented "if you build it, they will come" approach.

This is clearly what the company is betting on, given it's taken the very rare step of pre-announcing a product - a media centre device which won't be ready until next year.

Amazon has already launched its own Unbox movie download service, featuring content from six major Hollywood studios.

You can see why Jobs needed to take drastic action to get the movie store out there or risk being left behind. Unlike with music downloads, Apple now has some serious competition. The next six months are going to be very interesting...

In other movie-related shenanigans this week, police are investigating whether hackers illegally downloaded a private taped conversation of California terminator, sorry governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger from state computers.

In the tapes, California's celebrity governor and erstwhile body-building champion, barbarian and futuristic killing machine spoke of Hispanic Americans, including a state lawmaker, as having "hot" blood, or being passionate.

Democrats have predictably rebuked Schwarzenegger - albeit from a safe distance - calling the comments offensive and embarrassing for the governor of an increasingly Hispanic state.

A spokeswoman with the California Highway Patrol - the agency in charge of the investigation - said: "We can confirm that we are looking into the security of the governor's office computer system."

Of course, the California Highway Patrol was the agency featured in the classic 70s buddy-cops-on-bikes series CHiPs.

Given the celebrity connection you'd have thought Erik Estrada could have been drafted in as a guest spokesman. Particularly as he's Hispanic. But sadly not, we're stuck with a boring spokeswoman and not officer Francis Llewellyn 'Ponch' Poncherello - who may actually be of Latino-Welsh descent.

Schwarzenegger's legal affairs secretary Andrea Lynn Hoch, who hasn't starred in any homoerotic buddy-cop TV shows either, as far as the Round-Up is aware, said the IP address used to hack the computer system had been identified.

"As a result of the governor's office internal audit, this office discovered that on 29 August and 30 August 2006 an unknown person or persons downloaded an audio file from the governor's office computer system," she growled as the governor strapped an unfeasibly large gun to his back and smeared some camouflage stuff on his face.

Thankfully Dan Schnur, a Republican consultant and certainly no stranger to hyperbole, was on hand to put everything in perspective.

He whispered from the shadows of an underground car park: "This is the technological equivalent of what the Watergate burglars did in 1972."

It's not really like Watergate, is it Dan?

The Watergate scandal led to the resignation of the President of the United States. This is just some minor embarrassment for a state governor but the Round-Up applauds your valiant attempt to inject gravitas into a minor brouhaha.

Arnie has apologised for the comments. Which is just as well as he faces re-election soon.

At which time all of this will no doubt be laughed off with the aid of a few movie-related one-liners from the barrel-chested 'governator' as he seeks a second term.

In fact, the Round-Up could make an "I'll be back" gag here but quite frankly it has too much self-respect...

Oh...

And finally this week, the end of the world.

Residents of a tiny Kenyan village are pleasantly surprised this week after a local sect's doomsday predictions failed to materialise. Happily, the day of predicted doom came and went without incident.

The BBC article covering the news is notable for one sentence: "Mr Kamotho said the end of the world was still imminent but he refused to give a deadline."

Eagle-eyed readers may suspect there's no technology angle here whatsoever. And they'd be right. However, loyal Round-Up reader Richard Frankel was kind enough to email the quote and given that the Round-Up had one final bit to fill, it slipped it in and hoped its editor wouldn't notice.

We could invent an IT angle if you like. You might say the predictions of cataclysmic significance from sect leaders in a small Kenyan village sound a bit like the marketing messages coming out of any number of Silicon Valley software vendors over the last couple of years. But that would be a really cheap shot.

Meanwhile, if you want your name to appear in the Weekly Round-Up send in your daft tales and quotes (preferably with an IT angle). If you send a couple of hundred words of pithy copy you can have the by-line, too...

In case the world does come to an end, book a holiday to Thailand to swim with some dolphins, go skydiving nude, spend some quality time with your loved ones and ensure you arrive at the pearly gates informed and entertained by checking out the top tech headlines of the week.

The RUp will be back next Friday. Hopefully.

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