Sneak is gutted to learn that the beautiful friendship between those two titans of modern office life, Ricky Gervais and Microsoft, has come to a sticky end. They really were so well suited: one's a globally recognised comedian with a bit of middle-aged spread and a rampaging God complex, and the other's Ricky Gervais.

Apparently Gervais is less than happy that a training video he and comedy partner Stephen Merchant created for his erstwhile corporate backer three years ago has been leaked onto various video websites. The comedian had originally only agreed to do the video, in which he stars as the infamous David Brent, on the condition Microsoft would never release the material.

According to one report a spokeswoman for Gervais said he was concerned the release of the videos could make fans think he had gone back on his decision to retire Brent. Which may be the case, but could the uncharacteristically reticent Gervais also be fearful that confirmation he was willing to take the Microsoft shilling doesn't really chime with the countless interviews he has given claiming he wants to avoid over exposure and stay true to his comedic genius.

A great example of which appeared in last week's Saturday Guardian where in a fawning puff piece Gervais was quoted as claiming "You have to discipline yourself and you have to ration yourself. I can get sick of someone I like within the space of a weekend if I see them on two quiz shows and then in the Sunday paper".

Well Sneak just hopes Microsoft staff aren’t sick of Ricky's training videos because it doesn’t look like they're going to get an updated version any time soon.

August 25, 2006 Television | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak can’t help feeling that Taiwanese chip company VIA should have sat down and brainstormed for a little longer before settling on a name for its new competition, designed to promote female involvement in computer gaming. It’s called “Get the Girls into the Game”.

Sneak is now wondering exactly what VIA means when it talks about "pro gamers".

August 21, 2006 Games | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week’s furore du jour - banking details being stripped from obsolete PCs in foreign climes - prompted discussions in the office about the best way to erase data. The problem is that modern drives are so capacious it can take days to overwrite every sector the required seven times - or indeed the paranoid 30 times - needed to put data beyond magnetic microscopy. Exposure to a high-power alternating magnetic field is one option - cuddling the amp-stack at a heavy metal concert, say. Those who prefer a Latin American vibe can instead prise open the drive casing, dump in a handful of coarse grit, and play maracas. But a look back through the Sneak archives brings up one technique that’s hard to beat. From the 10 March 2003 edition of Risks Digest: “When I was working in the aerospace industry, the method [used to ensure] magnetic media no longer contained classified data was very simple,” advised Edwin Culver. “Remove the platters from the disk drives and sand-blast the magnetic coating off.”

Of course an alternative is simply to install your obsolete drive in a Dell laptop, boot up, unplug the power cable and wait for the battery to spontaneously erupt into flames. This approach can have drawbacks, particular as it may delete not just the data but the drive, screen, keyboard, casing, desk, carpet, curtains, walls, roof and building. But you can never be too careful when it comes to keeping shadowy hackers off your crown jewels.

August 21, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

New Scientist helpfully trawls the patent applications each week so Sneak doesn’t have to. The latest bonkers breakthrough concerns conference calls, and the confusion that can result when two people sound alike. IT Week’s own David Neal has already solved this problem - by mandating that participants choose a distinctive animal noise and then whoop, honk, snort, bark, meow or cluck at the start of each sentence. The patented equivalent deploys pitch-shifting technology, originally developed to pound the howls of pouting popstars into tune, to shift clashing voices a couple of semitones apart. This leaves everybody distinct, without anyone sounding like Pinky & Perky - sadly.

August 17, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a seasoned business traveller, Sneak has become numb to the inherent discomforts: too little room to swing a rat; screaming brats kicking the back of the veal-class seat for seven hours solid; Steve Martin “comedies” as a means of “entertainment”; meals that would make a billy-goat skip desert; stewed coffee spilt in the lap during sudden bouts of turbulence; and the withering contempt of middle-aged American air hostesses when Sneak attempts some light-hearted repartee, or indeed when Sneak calls them hostesses instead of stewards.

But enough is enough. News that aircraft will soon offer mobile phone access in the skies over Europe is a torture too far. It will doubtless mean sitting next to loudmouthed idiots arguing with the office, discussing ETAs with spouses and what to do for their dinners, or delivering high-volume soliloquies about the airlines having screwed up their non-existent business-class bookings. Seriously, there are extraordinary rendition flights that are probably more enjoyable.

August 15, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is it just Sneak, or is there something odd about the latest BT TV advert? The useless, floppy-fringed thirty-something male plus new partner (mother of a brood of sullen sprogs) tour a trendy house for sale, guided by a clipboard-clutching pipsqueak of an estate agent, only to stumble across a white IP-phone, whereupon the pipsqueak agent launches into a sermon about the wonders of BT’s Total Broadband package. That one.

Why, if the bleeding IP-phone is so great, have the previous owners left it behind in their otherwise stripped-bare house?

And why, exactly, does BT think it a good idea to use an estate agent to extol the virtues of its services? That profession does, after all, enjoy a reputation for being about as trustworthy as a hoodie’s promise to tidy his room. Plus, estate agencies are universally loathed and despised for creaming off huge profits from customers that they pretty much have over a barrel.

Ah... suddenly Sneak sees the connection.

August 8, 2006 Television | Permalink | Comments (0)

The PC is 25 years old on Friday (counting from the unveiling of the IBM PC, rather than the doubtful boxes of dodgy soldering that went beforehand). Sneak wonders what the many avid readers of IT Week were doing 25 years ago, on 11 August 1981. Sneak was living in an upturned oil drum scavenging for curled-up leftovers from the many Royal Wedding street-parties of a fortnight earlier. It’s good to see that the PC fared rather better than Charles & Di, even if there were three in that marriage. That’s Intel and Microsoft making whoopee while IBM blubbed to Martin Bashir, obviously.

August 5, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Intemperance societies the world over will be raising a glass to researchers from the University of Wales, who have developed a computer program to help alcoholics stop drinking. The software aims to help heavy drinkers ignore alcoholic stimuli - adverts, pubs, a bad day at work, a cool and tempting glass of cold beer on a hot day with plump beads of condensation running temptingly over its lickable curves like hot sweat sliding over the thighs of a dusky... sorry, where were we? Er, yes, the software uses a range of cognitive training regimes. For example, one module features a screen showing an alcoholic and a non-alcoholic drink, each surrounded by a different colour. The drinkers are then made to repeatedly identify the colour around the non-alcoholic drink, thus training their brains to shy away from evil booze. Amazingly, after just four sessions the sample group were consuming less alcohol. And there was Sneak thinking alcoholism was a complex psychological and sociological problem - when all that was needed was a dull computer game.

August 1, 2006 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)