Macs are not twice the cost of PCs. People who say that sort of thing are not comparing like with like.

I encountered such a claim the other day, when a friend of mine, talking to another friend, claimed that Apple kit was twice as expensive as the Windows equivalent.

That’s certainly true if you mean “you can get a Windows laptop for pretty much bugger all compared to an Apple laptop”. That’s because Apple don’t do low-end el-cheapo stuff, nor do they make machines with anything but the latest technology. But what happens if you compare like with like?

13” laptop

Apple’s entry-level laptop, the MacBook, comes with a 2.2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB, 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm, SuperDrive 8x DVD+/-R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW, and a 13” 1280 x 800 screen driven by a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M.

After battling manufacturer’s websites, I went to Dabs.com, a leading PC website that’s been around for ages, sells PCs and Macs, and crucially has a good comparison feature where you can choose features and filter the initially daunting list of laptops down to a manageable list.

Narrowing down the search to 13.3” screen, Core 2 Duo, 2GB, I see the MacBook at £808.57, with exactly one machine cheaper, a HP laptop at £682. It’s got a much cheaper on-board Intel chipset (GMA 4500MHD), a slightly larger and faster drive (320GB / 7200rpm), and no DVD drive.

Other than that, the other machines listed were all more expensive - sometimes significantly so.

15” laptop

Moving on, let’s look at the introductory 15” MacBook Pro. It’s got a 2.53Ghz processor, 4GB RAM (you can upgrade to 8GB but at current RAM prices you’d be daft to), 250GB disc, has an SD slot, FireWire 800 and the screen resolution is 1440x900. You can get a version that has a second video card that takes over when you’re plugged into the mains (in cases where performance trumps power consumption), but I suspect the comparison sites will be bamboozled by that so let’s stick to the basics. Apple’s price is £1,328, Dabs’ £1,318.

Toshiba and Dell have some significantly cheaper laptops, but they have 14” screens. There are plenty of cheaper 15” laptops, but their screens are significantly more lower resolution (e.g. a 15” Toshiba which sells for £874, but only has a 1280x800 screen, slower RAM and an Intel graphics chipset). The closest that comes to the MacBook Pro’s specs is a Sony Vaio at £1,146 which is at least 50” thicker, has slower RAM, Intel chipset, and claims half the battery life. At least it has a 500GB disc, which is nice.

17” laptop

OK, surely it’s the top-end kit where Apple makes all of its margin, so you’d expect to see the top-end MacBook Pro outperformed by other manufacturers.

The 17” MacBook Pro has a 2.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard disc and is otherwise specced the same as the 15”. It comes with two graphics cards, an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M and a 9600M GT with 512MB. Screen resolution is 1920 x 1200, and it’s set you back £1,871 at Dabs.

Again, while you can find a number of cheap (e.g. £569 cheap) 17” laptops at Dabs, as soon as you select any three of 17” screen, Core 2 Duo, 1920 x 1200 or 4GB RAM, it turns out that it’s a three-way fight between Apple, HP and Lenovo - and only one laptop is cheaper than the MacBook Pro, at £1,732. It’s almost 2/3rds thicker, has a smaller but faster disc, a worse DVD drive, and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 2700M rather than MacBook Pro’s two graphics cards.

So: Apple kit twice as expensive as PC kit?

Not true in the slightest. With identical specs, Apple is, if anything, cheaper than similar kit from other manufacturers. And that’s before you go into build quality, or the way hardware and software go together and Just Work.

Now, it’s quite possible that if you’re prepared to buy machines that aren’t as cutting-edge, they’ll be significantly cheaper than Apple kit and not feel significantly worse - there’s a premium on new technology, as the prices for upgrading a MacBook Pro to 8GB indicates.

But it’s one thing to say “Apple don’t make the cheap machines I’m quite happy with”, which is almost certainly true for many people, and another entirely to say “Apple kit is ludicrously over-priced”.

It may well be comparatively expensive - but if you were in the market for a computer like the sort of things that Apple make, that’s the sort of money you’d pay. From anybody.

If you're trying, a known but badly-performed song.

Why? Simple: Yesterday is a fantastic song. Evocative lyrics, rich in chord progressions (play it one day and count them - there’s at least one every bar or two), simple but effective in arrangement (guitar, string quartet and nothing else), heartfelt vocals; there isn’t anything technically wrong that you could put a finger on; and it’s so simple, yet so effective, that you can either reproduce it badly, or paraphrase it (badly, again, because this was the Beatles, after all) into another musical genre.

And if you do that, the chords will resist you every step of the way.

Probably the best cover you could do is a 6:8 Miles Davis Someday My Prince WIll Come sort of cover, but you’d be straining really badly at the rhythm of the melody and it would sound dreadful.

So probably 30+ of the 3,000 cover versions that Guinness lists are like that, then.

What of the Beatles can you cover, then?

Precious little.

Joe Cocker famously covered “With a Little Help From My Friends” (which is slightly cheating as that was a song written for Ringo), and he pulled it off by making it radically different; he slowed it down and scored it in 3:4, amongst other things.

The Beatles Love album very successfully mashes together Within You Without You with Strawberry Fields Together, and by all means download merely that track if you’re not convinced of the idea of an entire album of Beatles-with-Beatles mashups on behalf of Cirque du Soleil.

I think “I’ve Just Seen A Face” from Help! is just right in that sweet spot of enough talent but not enough recording or arrangement savvy that it’s due for a cover.

But in general, if the artist or band you’re covering is any good, then you’d better find something unusually bad, or a really distinctive, possibly comedy, way of covering them (this means you, Paul Anka or Max Raabe - Youtube them if you haven’t heard them before, they’re comedy genius). Doing a straight cover of someone who’s better than you is doomed to failure.

What brought this on?

Peter Gabriel recently released an album of covers, “Scratch my Back” (the idea is that people he’s covered will in turn cover songs of his on a future album release). For very probably a limited period all the songs are available via a Flash player thing at the Guardian’s website.

I didn’t like the album at first, probably because the two tracks I checked out first, the ones that I knew, were the least successful. Peter Gabriel covers Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” - you remember, the intro track from Graceland that started with accordion, followed by a couple of emphatic drum beats, then an unusually up-mixed bass line, as if to say “OK, pay attention, this is not a normal Paul Simon record”. So he ditches all of that, and preserves only the lyric line, set to a random slow piano line. It’s not very good.

Oh, and he ends the album with a slowed-down and more-depressing version of Street Spirit (Fade Out) from Radiohead’s The Bends, except without the tune. Which, you know, made it bearable.

But the other tracks are much better.

How to do a decent cover, part 1: the easy way

Take a very well-written song, e.g. The Magnetic Field’s The Book Of Love, and then remember that a) you’re a better vocalist (e.g. you’re Peter Gabriel), b) the original song has a fairly straightforward chord structure without any meaningful dynamic progression, which means that c) if you slap an orchestra with damn good brass section on top, you’ll end up with something qualitatively better. Especially if your daughter’s doing some damn good backup vocals, and you can find a spot for the orchestra to do its bit.

How to do a decent cover, part 2: cover Lou Reed

Lou Reed is trickier, because sometimes he bothers to sing (e.g. Satellite of Love), and he can produce things of wonder. Even on cases where he doesn’t stick to pure notes, he’s still accompanying the melody enough that you know what note he’d have sung if he meant to.

On other songs, though, he doesn’t bother with a tune; he just randomly mumbles like a beat poet.

Now, you could argue that his intention is to produce beautiful background music while he chants in scansion (in which case his live band should be a lot tighter - compare Youtube’s idea of the studio album version with the live version).

But when it comes to something like “The Power of the Heart”, arguably Peter Gabriel deserves a co-writer credit, because he’s come up with a melody line that blatantly wasn’t there in the original. Oh, and he’s seen Lou Reed’s string quarter and raised it a bunch of extra string players and a brass section.

Also, he manages to replicate somewhat Lou Reed’s conversationalist singing style, which is bizarre, because he didn’t even attempt that when he covered Paul Simon.

Or pretty much all of them if you ignore politics, weird shit and industry shills.

1. Plucky Allies defeated the Nazis something rotten.

2. Everyone was in it.

The closest you’d come to it these days would be Ocean’s 11, but that’s in itself a throwback to earlier days. We’re talking about a film that would come on TV and you’d say “Oh, it’s an everyone film”.

Well, in this new and exciting era of the blogosphere, such a film has been made once more. It’s a bunch of Internet-famous people re-enacting a webcomic riff on a cable TV station advert. Obviously.

Backstory, Video, Cast list.

What intrigues me is how this happened: Olga Nunes is previous webelf of Neil Gaiman’s, so did she come up with the idea, Neil said yes, and then suggested to all the people he knew that they take part? Or did it start with talking to famous bloggers (e.g. Bruce Schneier), and then blossom from there?

Either way, consider how long it would have taken to organise and film this before the Internet. And how trivial it is nowadays.

That includes hurting businesses policy-makers think should be hurt.

Christopher Ogden, chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers Association, said the plans would “do nothing to meet public health policy objectives, but will instead impose further unwarranted restrictions on legitimate businesses and private citizens alike”.

Ahem. From earlier in the article:

Firm action against smoking during the past decade, such as banning advertising and raising the age of purchase from 16 to 18, has reduced to 21% the proportion of people who smoke. Ministers now want to get that down to 10% by 2020.

Imposing restrictions on businesses and private citizens is very clearly part and parcel of public health policy objectives.

Would you notice it if was gone? And would you care?

Margaret’s didn’t care; why should you?

My late mother came to computers reluctantly, when she was in her 60s, and a number of things that seemed natural to me, a computer professional, or her nephews’ and nieces’ children, because they were young, she never really got. She had to write them down so she’d remember when she next needed to know. She never really got used to what a computer geek would consider fundamental - window management. She just muddled on.

If you use Windows you get used to having windows maximised full-screen, because Fitt’s law and the paucity of drag and drop make it most efficient to your window maximised, so the menu bar is at the top of the screen. If you use Mac OS, there’s less pressure to maximise everything, because the menu bar is where you want it (at the top of the screen), so you can have overlapping windows aplenty. Still, this is very much a power-user thing.

Or, should I say, a geek thing. There are enough word processors specifically designed to run in full-screen mode, without anything else distracting you, that arguably it’s not just the IT-poor who don’t need all of this extraneous cruft distracting them.

Margaret didn’t have many problems with saving and loading files, but then she never really did anything other than save a few files in her Documents folder. Thankfully, the File->Open and File->Save dialogue boxes in the programs she used remembered where she last went, so that was fine. I think she made the occasional sub-folder, but that’s as far as things went. And really, why would you want to consider whether your word processor could load your system-wide-installed printer driver for a printer you don’t even have?

How much of this stuff do we need?

Matthew Thomas wrote an influential article about UI cruft way back in 2003. I expected at least one of the bullet points on his list to jibe with the new iPad interface. I didn’t expect all of them.

His first point: don’t make me save regularly, just bloody well do it. I haven’t seen the iPad version of iWork, but given that there’s no multi-tasking, an application needs to be ready to quit at any moment’s notice, and that in turn means saving every time anything happens. (Which, it turns out, is really easy and fast if you’re saving to Flash RAM.) So I’m guessing iWork on iPad Just Does It.

His second point: don’t have a Quit menu option. The iPad doesn’t have it; or rather, it has it for every application; it’s called the Home button. And you don’t care, because the application saved anything you cared about before it quit, to be replaced by whatever came next.

His third point: don’t have a lobotomised file manager; use the proper file manager for everything. Here Apple have chosen a third way, which is to assume that the application you used to create the file will be used to edit it in the future, so therefore any application only needs to know about files in the file system that match its creation criteria. And while you may be able to create sub-folders and the likes, they’re all in the context of the application that created the files in question.

And his fourth point is obviated by the file system not being exposed to users in any way.

So what would you use an iPad for?

I’m guessing that the immediate target market is people with a 30 minute or more commute per day, or regular airline travellers. If you’ve ever tried to read more than about 10 minutes of websites in bed, for instance, you’ll appreciate the various docks or stands that let you read something without arm-strain, not to mention the eye-strain in holding a small device at a varying distance from your eyes (because you can’t hold your arm straight for a decent length of time).

That’s before we get into ebook territory.

I can also totally see an iPad used as an “OK, work done, I need a beer” way of relaxing with the Internet. Sitting in a chair with an iPad, typing occasionally but otherwise navigating a number of web sites with touch gestures pretty much fits what I do with the Internet.

Oh, and I saw someone on twitter suggest that the iPad has graphics as good as the Wii. And the iPad is going to be viewed far closer than any TV-based console, so its resolution actually looks better, even if you compare screen sizes resolution-by-resolution.

It’s going to be interesting.

At least we won't have to do that any longer.

But how does he manage to make it do this to everyone in the world?

The answer is quite simple. The Master’s satellite network, which he spent 18 or so months developing, which he used to sway the entire world to his bidding in the last season finale, and which the Doctor neglected to disable.

You not only have a shout-out to previous RTD Who events, you also highlight the Doctor’s growing (and possibly fatal) arrogance, similar to when the Ninth Doctor thought that shutting down a malign news network would be enough to restore history to how it should be, not thinking about what would prosper in its place (endless game shows and, eventually, Daleks).

Don’t have time for this in the running schedule? Just throw out the stupid Timothy Dalton voiceovers that don’t advance the plot one whit. Show, don’t tell.

"If we wanted to listen to someone murder a Miley Cyrus record, we'd buy a Miley Cyrus record"

Last year, when people tried the same trick, the alternative single was obvious - the X-Factor was covering Hallelujah, so let’s go out and buy the Jeff Buckley cover instead. This year, while the idea is also pretty simple - buy a song that repeatedly says “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” - and good enough that you can see why it went viral, it’s sufficiently non-obvious that someone had to come up with the idea.

It reminds me of when John Glenn went into space for a second time back in 1998: suddenly Usenet was full of people saying “We only have a few days before John Glenn comes back to put on monkey masks and bury the Statue of Liberty up to her neck in sand”.

That one at least I could find out, because Google has all of Usenet archived. If it’s true that this started on Facebook, it’s going to be much harder to find out whose idea this was, because so much of Facebook is friends-only. Which is a shame: this person deserves their small slice of Internet history.

Hey, you kids, get off my browser history!

I started casting around mentally, but to no avail. I quickly realised that it was late, I was tired, and I was probably not going to think of the right word on my own. I’d have to either put in some awkward paraphrase in what I was typing (“er, I can’t remember the word, you know, that sort of thing where blah”), or give up.

Or, failing that, I could refer to Google.

]

So I did. After a couple of unproductive search queries, I came up with “bullshit theory concentration of water”, which, in search queries #5, #7 and #10, produced web sites whose summaries included the word “homeopathy” or suitable variants, which was the word I was looking for.

This took me less than a minute. After a brief tentative thrashing around in search query failures, I found what I was looking for, and got back into what I was trying to say. Hooray for human ingenuity, the outsourcing of memory to the Internet, and boo to those poor taxi drivers who finally passed The Knowledge in 2005.

Had I not spent the last half hour chasing up references and permalinks for stuff I meant to refer to as part of this blog post, I might even have deemed myself to have come out ahead.

Squeezes all your windows to ridiculous sizes.

I played it for a bit, then quit - to discover that all of my windows on my main screen had been squashed and/or moved.

I have 8 virtual desktops (what Apple calls Spaces), and this machine was last rebooted a fortnight ago. That’s a lot of windows.

The basic problem appears to be this: World of Goo changes the screen resolution to something smaller, and switches to full-screen mode, but doesn’t do this in the right order, or misses out some other switch or API call. So Mac OS thinks it’s like you decided to change the screen resolution permanently, and goes through every window that doesn’t fit on the screen and resizes it.

Those many, many 80x40 Terminal windows? Resized to something like 80x30. Safari windows taking up most of the screen? They’re now shrunk down to half depth. A bunch of page scans open to pretty much full-screen, carefully positioned next to each other so I could flick from one page to another by clicking on the next available window? Again, cut to half size.

This is a basic issue of programming games on Mac OS X. Many, many other games get it right. There’s no excuse to botch something as fundamental as this.

World of Goo is now permanently gone from my machine.

You look tasty

Your only defence, in situations like this, is to be concave, so the sharks can’t find anything sticking out to bite (something I know thanks to Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach). Given that sharks also need to travel forwards constantly or they’ll suffocate, this suggests that sharks would be a rubbish enemy for Katamari Damacy.

Cleodhna regularly wishes that she had some.

Heaven forbid policies have purpose and consequences.

Says The Guardian:

Overall, local government spends 18% of council tax revenue on dealing with rubbish, but that masks a lot of variation between regions and councils. The English district councils spend 32% of their council tax take on waste, while Aylesbury Vale in Buckinghamshire spends 36%, Cambridge City Council 43% and Berwick-on-Tweed 37%. […] The UK currently landfills 57% of its waste, recycles 34% and incinerates the rest. Landfill is expensive, almost full and contributes to climate change. The landfill tax paid by councils to central government is currently £40 per tonne of waste, rising to £48 in 2010, and the methane emissions from organic waste breaking down in landfill account for 3% of the total UK greenhouse gas emissions. […] A spokesperson for the [Local Government Association] added that councils would prefer to keep the money they pay to the Treasury in landfill tax and spend it on better recycling services.

Of course they would, but that ignores the fact that this is the Government’s chosen policy. The fact that there is such a high (and rising) tax on landfill is deliberate. It’s to make the cost advantage of recycling, incinerating, or otherwise doing something other than burying household waste greater. Asking for a policy to be rescinded because you haven’t found a way of taking advantage of it is petty, weak, and deserving of contempt.

It’s like complaining that you can’t afford to pay more money to buy cigarettes, but if your local corner shop dropped their prices, you’d so totally spend that saved money on patches.

My mate Jamie, when running a game for us, would dole out experience points at the end of a session and ask if anyone had any reason for getting any extra. The more self-serving justifications he’d rebut with “that’s its own reward”. In circumstances where an island nation can no longer afford to wastefully bury what could more efficiently be re-used or turned into energy, complaining that, despite Government-led distortions of the market, you cannot find a way to accomplish what policy has made artificially cheaper, well, that should be a matter for all to despair. To decide that the solution to your inadequacies is to pay PR flacks for a random trade body, well, it fills me with no great confidence.

Also? I want to believe in journalism. But on checking the figures for Glasgow City Council, I find that I cannot.

I downloaded the latest financial statement from glasgow.gov.uk, which detailed expenditures of £16m for refuse collection, and £16m for street cleansing. Now, total income from government grants and local taxation was £1.393bn, which makes the amount of money spent on waste etc. look laughable. Confused, I double-checked the document, and then realised that only £168m of revenues was council tax, which made waste expenditure a far more expected ratio of 19%.

OK, so the Guardian’s story sounds like it makes sense. Except that the whole point of the landfill expenditure divided by council tax revenues metric is wrong. It implies that councils are only funded by council tax, which is clearly not the case (council tax is the third lowest of the 8 revenue sources listed by Glasgow City Council, of which “Rents (after rebates)” is lower by an order of magnitude than any other revenue source). So the metric of expenditure on x vs revenue on y is artificial, lazy, and misleading.

I despair again.

Really? This is a threat?

Senior Conservative sources say that Cameron will abandon a referendum on Lisbon if the measure enters EU law because he had accepted that it would be virtually impossible to unpick the main institutional EU changes in the Lisbon treaty. These are the new president of the European council, a new “high representative” for foreign affairs and greater powers for the European parliament.

One well placed Tory said: “There is virtually no hope of changing the main institutional architecture of the EU once Lisbon enters into force. If the treaty enters EU law you will find that a Conservative government will want to focus on repatriating powers that affect the UK. This is not going soft. If other EU leaders say they will not accommodate us, then we have the threat of a referendum on our reforms.”

So: the Tories want to change parts of the treaty, and that will require all 27 EU members to agree. If they don’t, they’ll hold a referendum in the UK. But so what? How will that do anything other than saying “Look, our citizens agree with us” (if they win the referendum)?

The sad (for the Tories) fact is that the UK has ratified the Lisbon treaty, and there’s no going back on it. Saying “we’ll have a referendum anyway” is childish and nonsensical, and as such is tailor-made to appeal to the Conservative base.

In times of unusual economic crisis, we must continue our ages-old policy of making life difficult for people who have nothing.

David Cameron today announced he would impose a £25-a-week benefit cut on as many as 500,000 incapacity benefit claimants to fund a £600m back-to-work programme.

[…]

The “tough and tender” approach was being signalled by the Tories to show the party was willing to address the victims of the recession by offering extra apprenticeships and training and by modernising welfare.

The Conservatives claimed that medical assessments designed to test whether incapacity benefit claimants are fit to work will lead, on the basis of government research, to at least 500,000 current claimants being shown to be capable of working.

Labour say that they’re doing some of this already, and that there just aren’t the doctors etc. to fast-track all of this (and never mind that incapacity benefit has traditionally been used to park problem people so the dole figures look better). But that’s not what concerns me most.

The economy is currently in the shitter; nobody’s buying or selling much, house prices that were previously over-inflated are now coming back down to something approaching reality, companies are sitting tight and hoping that they’ll make it through without having to sack too many of their work force.

And David Cameron thinks the solution to all of this is to create more and cheaper labour for the employment market?

The policy appears to be two-pronged: 1) force people who could afford to live on incapacity, but not on jobseeker’s, into the employment market; and 2) try and train up existing long-term unemployed.

#2 will probably do as well as any such policies tend to do, which is to say somewhat, but not in a way that would startle the horses. (Assuming it only targets the long-term unemployed; there are plenty of people who have been laid off for no fault of their own, and will almost certainly be hired again once the economy takes off, and making them jump through hoops going to rubbish training courses is hateful and counter-productive.)

But #1 is either an act of class-based vindictiveness or a phenomenally bad understanding of the economy that asserts that, in a time of general bad times, what we really need is more competition at the bottom of the jobs market.

Actually, knowing the Tories, it could easily be both.

How compartmentalisation (very occasionally) fails

Whenever I leave for London I tell Cleodhna I’ll miss her, and it’s true, but in many ways this is so unlike the rest of my life that it’s easy to get into a “OK, I’m in London, things are different here” vibe. When I’m back I’m grateful to extremes that I’m home with my wife, but for the most part I just carry on in London-mode. Tonight, though, I think for the first time ever, I just did the lifestyle equivalent of breaking the fourth wall. (NB: tvtropes.org is addictive, like a sarcastic pop culture wikipedia; click at your own risk.)

I was playing The Sims 3, and my teenage Sim who, for reasons that weren’t quite clear, was hanging out in a gym, had a wish to become BFF with this other teenage Sim. Said Sim wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but when I clicked on my Sim’s mother, it turned out she was talking to the prodigal. So I switch over to their conversation to see what’s going on, and it turns out that, thanks to a few hacks I downloaded the other day, the teenage Sim my own teenage Sim wants to be BFF with is randomly, and blatantly, topless.

My instinctive reaction is to turn to my left and call out to Cleodhna, saying something along the lines of “You need to see this” - and then I realise that I’m staring at a hotel room.

And that hit me. I think for a brief moment I was genuinely befuddled.

I wonder if this sort of catastrophical failure mode is something that liars and cheaters strive at all costs to avoid? I remember when John Major did a conference speech about Back to Basics, which I think he meant to be about going back to core Conservative principles but the tabloids meant being honest and pure and not in any way corrupt or dodgy, and so on the Monday of the conference they produced headlines about how Steven Norris had a mistress. On Tuesday it turned out he had a second. By Friday, they’d found five. And none of them knew about each other.

(From memory, a fellow MP said something along the lines of “To have one mistress is a peccadillo; to have five is a matter of the most profound admiration”.)

It turns out that he basically rota’d his time with each of them; they each had a consistent day, and he rented five separate flats to be lovenests for each of them, all of which were laid out and furnished identically so he’d never look in the wrong places for anything, or behave as if he wasn’t perfectly at home.

Similarly, Michael Crick’s biography of Jeffrey Archer was memorably described by The Guardian as “the stuff you just couln’t make up and the stuff Jeffrey Archer did just make up”. (But at least Jeffrey Archer eventually went to prison - as did Jonathan Aitken. How good it was to be a Labour party sympathiser in the mid-1990s.)

Thinking about it, the most reassuring thing about this event is how alien it felt. I’d hate to be one of these people who divide their lives into carefully-planned lies and deceptions.

As it is, I fly back to France tomorrow, and all will be well.