The Weekly Round-Up: 04.01.08

In January 2007, Microsoft underwhelmed the world with the public launch of Windows Vista. On New Year's Day 2008 reports of another damp squib emerged from Seattle.

Revellers on the 600ft Space Needle enjoying a fireworks extravaganza to mark the new year were left disappointed when the entire display ground to a halt.

Everything had started so well, hundreds of rockets fired off into the night sky as music from famous movies swelled and boomed from huge speakers.

However, just as the theme from Jaws - providing a neat bit of foreshadowing - gave way to the Star Wars score, the fireworks stopped abruptly.

Except for the music, which carried on playing. If you'd braved the elements just to enjoy the music then you'd have been happy. Mad, but happy.

The problem was quickly identified as being a glitch in a computer program that coordinated the detonation display.

After twice rebooting the computer running the display, the three-man fireworks crew were forced to detonate the remaining rockets manually.

The Round-Up likes to imagine this involved running (or driving?) around frantically lighting thousands of fuses with damp boxes of matches - but apparently it just involved hitting thousands of buttons to fire off rockets while dramatic music plays around you. Which, all things considered, sounds like a hell of a great way to spend an evening.

In the right circumstances, which wasn't the case on the Sky Needle at two minutes past midnight on 1 January 2008.

Seattle, lest we forget, is the home of Microsoft, and many have speculated as to the operating system installed on the computer that caused the display sequence to fail and then start again hopelessly out of sync with the music.

As any fool knows, the most popular fireworks applications FireOne and PyroDigital both run on Windows XP and Vista, at least according to one helpful news report.

No one has confirmed whether the guilty computers were running Windows but it's a pretty safe bet the fireworks application was running on Redmond's finest. Hardly an auspicious start to the new year but it does help put the average IT problem in a bit of perspective.

So next time you complain about having to patch dozens of computers in the office, take a moment to think how tough it is to try and reboot a PC and get it to fire off tens of thousands of dollars worth of fireworks in front of thousands of spectators. Then have to fire the remaining rockets manually 600 feet into the air in the howling wind and rain above a braying, booing crowd.

It kind of puts installing SP2 on a few dozen PCs into the shade, doesn’t it?

On a related note, the first silicon.com poll of the year asked readers to give their thoughts on the most underwhelming event in 2007.

And the winner, and also the loser, was the launch of Vista, which garnered 43 per cent of the vote. Bet you didn't see that coming.

The heavily delayed OS from Microsoft utterly failed to wow in 2007. Despite being quite shiny and available in six different flavours, it had all the charm and allure of gastroenteritis for silicon.com readers who responded to the poll.

Following a poll in December, two-thirds of respondents vowed never to migrate to Vista.

A month earlier, silicon.com readers ranked it below Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux as their operating system of choice.

Hardly the kind of endorsement you'd be looking for from a community of business and IT decision makers.

Second place in the poll of underwhelming tech events was the launch of the iPhone from Apple. It was a close shave for the 'revolutionary' device from Cupertino with 42 per cent of the vote, just one per cent less than Vista.

The device was launched in January and released in the US in June. Between those dates, there was a massive amount of hype, partially from Apple, but mostly from the technology and mainstream media, which fell head over heels for the device.

Ultimately, it's probably the price tag and the service limitations that led people to vote for it. Or possibly bitterness after not getting one for Christmas. Hard to tell.

The other two options in the poll - Second Life and Facebook barely got a look in.

Now that the horse has long since bolted, MPs have decided to take action over all this bothersome loss of personal data.

A parliamentary justice select committee has proposed that the act of recklessly or repeatedly mishandling personal information should become a criminal offence.

The committee said organisations should be obliged to report losses and expressed concern that further cases of data loss are still coming to light, saying there is evidence of a widespread problem within the government.

This is exactly the kind of thing that MPs like to make a song and a dance about and exactly the kind of thing that strikes cold fear into the hearts of civil servants, for it means one thing - the 'A' word. Accountability. Clearly, any move to criminalise data loss could potentially put senior civil servants and public sector IT departments at risk of prosecution.

Currently only third parties can be prosecuted under the Data Protection Act for offences such as unlawfully obtaining or disclosing personal data. This does not apply to the data controller, the individual given nominal responsibility for managing an organisation's data assets. So large businesses or government departments cannot currently be held responsible for breaches. All things considered, it's a bit daft, really.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) welcomed the calls to make itself far more relevant and reiterated its support for the government decision to give the ICO power to inspect an organisation without having to get its consent.

This is all very admirable but so far it's been the industry and the legal profession that have called for caution over rushing to legislate before a proper analysis of the implications.

The other thing that needs to be considered is that if it's the government that's losing most of the data, should it be the government that leads the debate on how to protect the privacy rights of citizens?

silicon.com's Full Disclosure campaign aims to make businesses and government take data security more seriously by improving the reporting of serious information security breaches.

One of the tricky things about rounding up news from over the Christmas and New Year period is the absence of news.

Not deterred, the Round-Up spent much of the festive period nibbling cuts of cold turkey and browsing RSS feeds looking for leads and was rather relieved when it found the technology news equivalent of a sixpence inside a brandy-soaked Christmas pud.

Legendary 1990s bopper MC Hammer is back. And if that news doesn't warm your cockles, the Round-Up doesn't know what will.

Hammer has reinvented himself as a dot-com entrepreneur. No, really. So what can Hammer bring to the technology industry other than an enormous pair of glittery trousers?

Glad you asked. Hammer - real name Stanley Kirk Burrell - has announced his latest project, DanceJam.com. Basically a website that allows budding dancers to upload footage of their best moves and rate other users in a 24-hour dance-off. Sounds horrendous, doesn't it?

He's clearly hoping to create some sort of community-generated web 2.0 behemoth and make it rich off the advertising revenue. A nice bit of thinking from the former musician who made millions of dollars in the 1990s despite some accusations that he’d merely borrowed musical ideas from other people.

So will DanceJam become a rival to web 2.0 colossus YouTube? The Round-Up's sure the Google boys are shaking in their Dunlops. But good luck to Hammer, anything that keeps him out of the recording studio has to be a good thing.

During its extensive research for this section, the Round-Up also uncovered a few other fascinating facts about Hammer. Two of which have a technology angle, which will please the silicon.com editors no end.

First, he became a TV preacher when his pop career came to an end and ran up debts after blowing about $30m on cars, helicopters and other essentials.

The second is that he used to hang around outside computer makers like Silicon Graphics and Apple picking up tips on how technology might help his music career. There are some things a Mac just can't help with.

The most interesting Hammer-related factoid is he was called in as a consultant on grass roots marketing techniques by Salesforce.com during the company's early days.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told AP: "We really learned a lot from Hammer. He is the most entrepreneurial individual I have ever met."

Jobs? Pah! Zuckerberg? You're having a laugh! Gates? Lightweight.

It's Hammer-time!

And finally a confession: when it isn't researching the early pop career of MC Hammer instead of watching the Bond film and eating mince pies, the Round-Up enjoys pretending to be Steve Ballmer.

On that bombshell that's it for another week. In the meantime, don't forget to pit your wits against fellow readers in the first caption competition of 2008.