At the request of New Scientist magazine, betting-shop giant Ladbrokes has opened a book on some of the key conundrums in science, Sneak hears. Several bets are on offer, such as whether the origin of cosmic rays will be uncovered by 2010 (with odds of 4 to 1), or whether gravity waves will be positively identified by the same date (6 to 1). Six to one odds are also on offer for punters willing to wager that the elusive Higgs boson will be winkled out before 2010 by the Large Hadron Collider - the 17-mile-wide particle-smasher currently under construction at CERN. "I'd be tempted to take a bet on the Higgs at 6-1," boffin Brian Foster told the magazine - he heads the particle physics group at Oxford University. "I've been quite instrumental in betting the taxpayers' money on us finding it, so I'd better put my money where my mouth is."

August 31, 2004 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's funny, silicon chips are just like people, it seems. Millions quietly get on with their jobs all over the world, day in day out, and never become famous. But the odd few, often with no discernible talent, somehow manage to get their pictures in the papers with surprising regularity. Like one particular, old-fashioned-looking 22-pin component that has somehow got itself high profile spots in both a major section of business daily the Financial Times and in the pages of earnest science journal Nature. What's this chip's secret, Sneak demands to know.

August 27, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

How to tell when your boss thinks you're a cloth-brained technophobe who can't be trusted to sit the right way round on the lavatory? When your company-issue mobile phone is a MyMo.

August 26, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may feel that the safest place to put your hard-earned cash is in a big bank. Well, Sneak is not so sure. The US Secret Service and the CERT computer emergency co-ordination centre recently released details of a study into finance sector IT crimes committed by insiders. And the two agencies uncovered a remarkably lax internal culture behind the toughened glass and reinforced concrete walls of the average finance institution. The situation was neatly summed up by a motivational sign hanging on the office wall of one convicted insider: "It's only money. And it's not even ours."

August 26, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparently a new version of the Rbot worm has the ability to take over user webcams and use them to spy on people in their offices and homes. Sneak is not too worried, being as most of the time Sneak sits dormant in front of the screen, perhaps occasionally twitching or scratching an itch. Some of his peers, the ones with the nocturnal risqué browsing habits, were more concerned, though. But only until Sneak assured them that most webcams are incapable of following speeds rivalling those of a hummingbird's wings, so it would merely look like they were very aggressively brushing some crumbs off their jumper.

August 25, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak hears that scientists have uncovered a correlation between people with lopsided bodies and people with tendencies toward violence. Apparently, in tests, subjects with mismatched ears, hands and feet used much more force when slamming the receiver down at the end of a carefully-orchestrated frustrating phone call. The boffins go on to discuss the likely connections between disadvantageous conditions in the womb and a subsequent lack of impulse control. Now, it may be true that Sneak takes a size 15 boot on one foot and a size nine on the other, but that does not mean Sneak will necessarily act on the impulse to hunt down the lead author of the study, Zeynep Benderlioglu, and produce an acute case of asymmetrical nose. No, Sneak will act with restraint. As long as Benderlioglu will hand over one of the force-measuring phones, so that Sneak can wire it up to the mains and zap the ears of cold callers in precise proportion to how firmly Sneak cuts off the call.

August 24, 2004 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month the UK missed the deadline for implementing the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) Directive, a set of European rules that will force suppliers of electrical products to recycle obsolete appliances. Sneak was about to dust off his biodegradable soapbox and sound off at the professional foot-draggers staffing the DTI, but then discovered that the UK is not alone in filing this particular directive in the round receptacle. Every other EU country is in the same boat, or bin, with all the various member states being as tardy as the UK. All, that is, except Greece. It seems the Greeks alone have taken to heart recent EC rants against landfilling and incineration, which apparently "set free pollutants that contaminate air, water and soil and can have adverse health effects". Presumably Greece was happy to sign up because it can avoid the above techniques by sticking to the ancient Greek waste disposal method so familiar to tourists visiting the Hellenic peninsular: find the nearest cliff and hoick those old PCs into the sparkling blue Aegean.

August 23, 2004 Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two articles on the BBC's news site caught Sneak's eye today. One, Weather gets 3D gaming makeover, explains how the BBC is adopting new high-resolution graphics in its TV weather forecasts. "It works a bit like a computer game," said Colin Tregear of the BBC's Weather Centre, comparing the current clunky visuals to a game played on the Super Nintendo game system, rather than the X-box or PlayStation 2. However, almost exactly a year ago, the BBC was busy reporting on how better graphics had become a dead-end pursuit in the game development fraternity. "If you're going to beat Gran Turismo 4, you're not going to do it by having shinier cars," asserted James Rubin of games developer Naughty Dog. "You need to come up with a better game experience." Sneak wholeheartedly agrees with Rubin. What Britain needs is not better weather graphics. What we need is better weather.

August 23, 2004 Television | Permalink | Comments (1)

Troubled phone firm Nokia has lured a new head of brand management away from Coca-Cola, Sneak hears. A shrewd move on the face of it: the brown, fizzy tooth-rot is, after all, supposed to be the world's number one trade name. But a closer look at new hire Keith Pardy's CV reveals a role at Coke in charge of global brands for non-cola products - such as, say, Dasani, the not-exactly-pure bottled water that flew off retail shelves in much the same way that, say, carbonated cat's piss might. No doubt Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung will be the first to raise a glass of something rather more tasty than tap water to toast Pardy's arrival...

August 20, 2004 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

You might have thought that the prison time earned by corrupt executives at Enron and WorldCom, and the fines handed out to investment banks like Merrill Lynch for dot-com dodginess, might have persuaded City types and financial wheeler-dealers to clean up their acts. As if. What it has persuaded them to do, of course, is to look for new ways of not getting caught. After email proved to be a blabbermouth medium capable of delivering still-smoking guns to prosecutors, in the form of logs of deleted messages, the slippery suits have now switched wholesale to instant messaging. One investigator told the FT that he was "fairly certain" that City traders are using the technology to cut deals behind bosses' backs, and to leak insider-trading tips to external accomplices. "We hear lots of stories from dinner parties where people boast that if they want to say something improper, they do it on [IM]," the investigator added.

August 20, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Engineers at Japanese firm Epson have unveiled a tiny, battery-powered flying robot just 8.5cm tall, which can whiz off under its own steam and snap pictures, beaming them back using its built-in Bluetooth transceiver. Sneak is suitably impressed by this exercise in miniaturisation, but is sad to learn that the robot is not for sale. Although, thinking about it, at just 12.3 grams including battery, the μFR-II is not likely to last long against Sir Killalot and his heavyweight chums in Robot Wars...

August 19, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sneak was well aware that Microsoft is prepared to go to great lengths to make users adopt the latest and great... er, most-up-to-date version of its Windows platform. But thanks to one of Sneak's many loyal informants, it is now clear exactly how far the software giant will go in its efforts to persuade the world to ditch older Windows and upgrade to XP SP2.
"Whilst recently reinstalling Windows 2000 Pro, the installation stopped at 12 percent with the following message: 'Setup cannot copy the file: driver.cab. To retry, press ENTER. If you are installing from a CD, make sure the Windows 2000 CD is in the CD-ROM drive. To skip this file, press ESC'," reports reader Mark Locke. Of course his forlorn pressings of the suggested keys did nothing to fix the problem, or to remove the error message. "The CD was one that I'd used loads of times before, so I thought that maybe a little dirt had got onto its surface," Locke adds. He ejected the CD and found that Microsoft has clearly been taking a tip from Mission Impossible. "Windows had not just crashed, but totally shattered!"

August 18, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

What the world has long been waiting for, obviously, is the ability to go swimming without getting wet. No, not taking a dip in dry-cleaning fluid, but virtual-reality swimming. At the recent Siggraph convention in Los Angeles - an event devoted to cutting-edge computer simulation and general silliness - geeks from the University of British Columbia demonstrated a "new locomotion interface". According to the researchers, this consists of an eight-foot cubic wooden box frame, decked out with a system of pulleys, cords, straps and harnesses capable of suspending the victim - sorry, user - in a prone position. Sandbags at the ends of the cords provide pull at the shoulders, midriff and ankles to simulate buoyancy. Once strapped in place, the user's struggles are captured by motion sensors while a head-mounted display renders fake waves closing overhead as the user sinks like a stone to the rendered seabed, accompanied by the sounds of fish laughing. Or something. "Preliminary user testing suggests the system has great potential as a general purpose navigation system," the boffins state. "[It] could replace a positioning device, such as a mouse." Well, it could, but Sneak might need to clear a bit of space in the office first, if a four-inch mouse is truly to be supplanted by a room-sized bondage scaffold.

August 18, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Cassini spacecraft has allowed astronomers to detect two previously unseen moons circling gas-giant Saturn, Sneak hears. The pair were pinpointed by Dr Sébastien Charnoz, part of a team of boffins scrutinising Cassini imagery at the University of Paris. Or, rather, the elusive moons were spotted by Charnoz's faithful laptop while Charnoz was off enjoying himself. "I had looked for such objects for weeks while at my office in Paris, but it was only once on holiday, using my laptop, that my code eventually detected them," he said. "This tells me I should take more holidays."

August 17, 2004 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the whole concept of Amish.com - "Your site for everything Amish" - given that the Amish are a quiet folk who shun the modern world and all its gaudy, commercialised trappings. But it could be worse. It could be Amish.net.

August 16, 2004 Religion | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is it just Sneak, or is the trident-wielding cartoon Poseidon gracing Google's front page today, in honour of the swimming events in the Olympics, just a tad too pleased to see us? Or is that just a bunch of share options in his pocket?

August 16, 2004 Sports | Permalink | Comments (3)

Who says hackers and virus writers are all flabby, unattractive, American teenage boys who get up to no good in their bedrooms?

August 13, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak is alarmed by a report from science journal Nature today. Apparently boffins in the US have found a way to turn ordinary, lazy, work-shy monkeys into obsessed, compulsive, workaholic monkeys. And no, the researchers did not recruit the simians as IT managers. Apparently a simple injection of genetic material directly into the brain is all it takes to switch off the bit of the mind that makes monkeys - and perhaps people - slouch towards an easy life. OK, so an injection in the brain is not actually that simple - you'd probably notice if your boss nonchalantly sidled up and stabbed you in the head. But it can only be a matter of time before the treatment is reduced to something that people can swallow. At which point Sneak will cease drinking the complementary corporate tea and start bringing bottled water to work...

August 12, 2004 Science | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak has recently and somewhat reluctantly become a user of AOL Instant Messenger. Among the AIM client's many annoying "features" (such as its tenacious ability to load automatically on start-up, despite Sneak's persistent attempts to persuade it otherwise) is the automatic replacement of text "smileys" in messages. If you type in, say, :-) -- or more probably in Sneak's case >:-( -- then the software automatically converts it into a little yellow graphical picture of a face. These kinds of "helpful" automated changes are, of course, an absolute blight if you can't turn them off using something more subtle than uninstalling the whole useless pile of bugs. The true scope of the problem is highlighted by this recent post to the always-excellent Risks list:
"A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan [a US pension policy] with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss's instant-messaging client was rendering the '(k)' as a big pair of red smoochy lips."

August 11, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Critics often suggest that the formerly British systems integrator ICL, now known as Fujitsu Services, has lost all traces of its identity since being taken over by the Tokyo-based technology giant. However, Sneak can confirm that this is not entirely the case. Meeting Fujitsu Services chief exec David Courtley earlier today, Sneak noticed a distinct lack of bowing, for example. Indeed, as the meeting progressed, Sneak was surprised to see Courtley fiddling with Sneak's business card, curling it up in his fingers and generally manhandling it as if it were an old bus ticket. As many business travellers will be well aware, in Japan such rough treatment of a person's card would go down about as well as sneezing into your palm before shaking hands. Still, this was London, so it didn't really matter. And the card could have suffered a worse fate. At least Courtley didn't eat it.

August 10, 2004 Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, Sneak stumbled across a guide to better networking. Sadly, nothing to do with upgrading to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, or even taking the kinks out of your patch cables. No, this was the kind of networking where you meet strangers, feel incredibly uncomfortable, mumble a lot, and utterly fail to form any lasting business relationships. Or maybe that's just Sneak. Anyway, the self-described Mingling Maven offers a round-up of the characteristics shared by successful networkers. Apparently they all:
1. Possess the ability to make others feel comfortable
2. Appear to be confident and at ease
3. Have an ability to laugh at themselves (not at others)
4. Show interest in others; they maintain eye contact, self-disclose, ask questions, and actively listen
5. Extend themselves to others; they lean into a greeting with a firm handshake and a smile
6. Convey a sense of energy and enthusiasm - a joie de vivre
7. Are well-rounded, well-informed, well-intentioned, and well-mannered.
8. Prepare vignettes or stories of actual occurrences that are interesting, humorous, and appropriate
9. Introduce people to each other with an infectious enthusiasm (there is no other kind) that motivates conversation
10. Convey respect and genuinely like people.

Yes, we've all met these types, and "magnificent minglers" is not the phrase that Sneak would choose to describe them. "Grinning gargoyles" is closer. But wait, the Maven, Susan RoAne, has more wisdom to impart. "When was the last time you attended a professional luncheon, spotted a member in the corner frowning, and thought: that's someone I'd like to get to know?" she asks, rhetorically, presuming the answer must be "never". But she's wrong; that's just the kind of person Sneak would cross the room to meet. At least they'd be a kindred spirit...

August 9, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Temporally speaking, you're always less than half a year away from Sneak's birthday. And in case you were wondering, Sneak would like a new watch, thank you very much. Not any old watch, obviously. One that has geek appeal. Preferably with blue LEDs. Even more preferably, one that doesn't have ark-fashioned analogue hands. Or, to be absolutely precise, one that doesn't have hands and also doesn't have any digits, either...

August 6, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Popular blog BoingBoing has highlighted an article from the EE Times about Skinplex, technology from German startup Ident Technology that uses the skin as a data highway. The article suggests devices worn about the person and external devices such as, say, a digital car ignition system, could use Skinplex to communicate. As BoingBoing notes, the ideas will seem familiar to fans of MIT's Media Lab, which had "BodyNet" projects as far back as the late 1980s, and in the mid-90s demonstrated Nike-sponsored shoes that could exchange 100kB of data between two wearers in the time it took to shake hands. Odd, then, that Microsoft managed to secure a patent on very similar-sounding technology in June this year. Anyway, sooner or later skin-to-skin networking is bound to catch on and every touch will bring the possibility of data interchange. So, of course, it will be good news for antivirus makers, who will have yet another platform to safeguard from malicious malware-mongers. Sneak predicts a profitable future in digital soap, integrated into bathroom handwash dispensers, to let people clean up after an unsavoury handshake. Or, given that prevention is better than cure, perhaps washrooms will in future feature wall-mounted vending machines dispensing digital prophylactics...

August 5, 2004 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Company executives could no longer stand being asked for Grand Theft Auto tips" jokes Good Morning Silicon Valley, the semi-hilarious blog over at the San Jose Mercury News, commenting on the news that Rockstar Software is to change its name. Well, close, but no cigarillo. Sneak suspects that the US-based company may have been encouraged to slap on a different brand by something a little more pressing, like the fact that namesake Rockstar Games is, after all, being blamed for all manner of ills up to and including murder. The new name, Aramova, is Latin for "secure movement" according to the firm. Sneak would welcome corrections from more learned Latin scholars, but that looks like a pretty loose translation to Sneak. The root, ara, literally meaning altar, does infer protection, which is kind of like security. However, it means protection in the sense of sanctuary, so Sneak suspects that a closer translation would be that Aramova means to run away to a refuge. An oddly appropriate choice, if so.

August 4, 2004 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

People with rather more money than sense can now inch yet another step closer to owning a little piece of Google, following the opening of the special Google IPO registration site. Or rather, to be exact, US citizens with more money than sense - surely all of them - can now go there. To participate in the upcoming share auction you need to prove that you are a "U.S. Person". Sneak has no real facts about why Google has chosen to exclude the rest of the world, but is surprised at the move. After all, surely Google ought to at least tap into Nigeria's vast reserves of venture capital, ready and waiting to be invested in just such a foreign business proposal of mutual benefit...

August 3, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)