Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

UAVs and Self-Deluding Companies

The War Room has an interesting post focussing on the surge in both supply and demand of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): the high-tech remote-controlled (mainly) reconnaisance vehicles that the US in particular uses.  At any given time, there will be plenty loitering over Iraq, relaying back detailed, real-time imagery.  Some, now, are beginning to carry limited munitions loads, with intriguing possibilities for command and control having arisen in Afghanistan, in particular.

Anyway, there is a hugely interesting comment in the article:

Lockheed had been hesitant to support the UAV market for “fear of undermining its franchise business in fighter jets"

This sort of thinking amazes me when I see it.  I thought that IBM had provided the starkest of lessons in this area of technology when they tried to protect mini-computers by under-investing in the desktop.

As Sun Tzu might put it: if you see a potential product threatening your core business area, invest in it.

After all, someone else is certainly going to invest in it, and if it is someone else then, instead of the discomfort of changing business model, you have unemployment.  Better to be the one dominating the new area.  As Brad points out, Lockheed has given the competitors - especially the relatively small General Atomics who make the Predator - the chance to steal a march on it in this area.  However, that needn't be fatal to Lockheed.  One option, as mentioned, is throwing the problem at the Skunkworks group who gave us the Blackbird, the F117 and other technological advances.  But I suspect that this will not be enough in itself.  Lockheed will be looking around for acquisitions that will allow it to buy the technology to catch up and compete in this area: the Microsoft Defence.  I wonder if General Atomics themselves might not be a tempting prospect.

Beauty and the Geek

Isn't memory a wicked little tinker?  About ten days ago I saw a snippet for a reality TV show on E4 called "Beauty and the Geek".  It looked awful, and I quickly moved on after seeing only two people walking into a room.  Then my aunt, at the weekend, started speaking about having seen the castle I hired for the weekend of my marriage on the television.  I immediately remembered the clip, and knew which program it was.  How odd.

In a spirit of "oh look, there's our room", I watched it last night.  The premise, so far as it goes, is not really that bad if sniggering at others is your thing: half a dozen pretty but vacuous girls and half a dozen geeks are placed in a castle, paired up, and compete against the other resulting couples in competitions where the geeks must demonstrate social skills and the "beauties" must demonstrate learning (be it e'er so rote).

One drawback is that the beauties are not universally beautiful.  One has a genuinely stunning face but is a touch bulky for someone being presented as a "10".  All are pretty much standard Essex nightclub fare.  Only one seems truly dim (one has a maths A-Level - unattainable if stupid).  Similarly, only one of the men is actually what I would call a socially unskilled geek (and he was chosen as partner by the dim girl in question).  The others comprise two dorks, a wimp, and a geek with a good haircut who is just a bit awkward around girls.

At least they look more true-to-type than the original US series, developed by Ashton Kutcher, where the girls are mainly meh and the blokes just a bit preppy.  I think, in both series, the producers bottled it when presented by true, Babylon 5 T-shirt-wearing, milk-snorting geekery.  And they fail to play it cruelly enough for hit-dom, either.  The girls are not exposed as sufficiently shallow and vacuous nor the men as sufficently gawky and awkward for truely toe-curling horror.  And where is the other side of each coin: the tanned adonis paired with the white-trainers-and-metallica-loving female chemical engineer?

The programme is presented as a social experiment.  Uh-huh?  What I can't help but see is the future.  A decade from now, when these 23-year-old beauties are suddenly feeling the pressure of time and biology, the fact that they never had to try - that they truly thought that their conversation was interesting (all the men seemed intrigued) and all their jokes funny (all the men laughed) - will not have prepared them for a time when their looks would no longer do, and when our Kev has run off with Shaz from the local.  One of these girls says "I was popular at school and everyone knew who I was. I don’t have any nerdy or ugly friends. Why would I have? Ugly people get you down."  How popular you were at school, honey, will be colder and colder comfort with time.

In the meantime, the geeks will be a bit older, too, but time is kinder to men.  They will wear good suits, earn a lot of money, and be on their way to wielding power and influence in their respective spheres.  And while they'll be delighted to find those same girls suddenly see them, not as figures of fun, but as desirable providers of security, they're probably happily married to the chemical engineer in the white trainers and the metallica t-shirt, who shares their taste for Babylon 5.

That said, Blairqhuan (pronounced "blare-whahn", FYI) Castle looks gorgeous.  Shame about the lunatic, comedy butler they've shipped in for the series.

Call Centre Hell

The BBC News website has a piece, today, about hostility experienced by Indian call centre staff dealing with western customers.  While interesting, the piece seems unusually "fluff" or human interest for the BBC's news page, packed with unquestioned opinions, and with no interest shown in inquiring into the motivations of either the customers involved, nor the interviewees.

As is obligatory, let me state for the record that anyone using the quote in the piece that "Indians are dirty and that they don't have brains and they are illiterates" is in the wrong, no matter what their motivations.

But look at the story.  Remove the racy and racist ineterpretation.  It says "people are being rude to call centre staff."  Twenty percent is the suspiciously round number. Well, fan my face and pass me a glass of water, I think I am on the edge of fainting.

Tony Benn stated a rule which deserves wider currency: he said that, if you want to know if something is worthy of being a news story, try reversing its meaning and see if that is not a bigger news story.  In this case "customers universally polite to Indian call centre staff" would be a big story for the business community.

The fact is that people hate call centres.  They loathe being called by their staff just as they sit down to dinner.  And a very large proportion of people are calling call centres because something is wrong, and are therefore entering the conversation frustrated in the first place.  For somebody who has not been exposed in their upbringing to a variety of accents - and not all those calling these centres is a cosmopolitan world-traveller - understanding somebody from Mumbai can be a genuinely difficult task.

I, myself, if called by a call centre employee of any nationality, will make the experience unplasant for them.  Thay have taken a job which involves invading my privacy and I make no apologies for using consumer-guerilla tactics to make their job correspondingly unenjoyable.  This will make it harder to get staff, which will raise the cost of the business model and eventually lead to less spam-calling.  And yes, I am on the "don't call" list, so I am talking about unethical companies here.

And when it comes to Indian staff, while I would never hurl racial epithets in their direction, I do resent the need to spell my name in full, my address in its entirety (including street and town, and Edinburgh is not an obscure village), and so on.  Is this unreasonable?  Their English is a thousand times better than my Urdu, for instance, but I'm not holding myself out as potential call centre staff.

And this is natural.  It is recognised by the provision of "local" staff for premium services.  Platinum American Express card services give me a UK call centre.  If forced to use the green card number, I am directed to India.

As an economist, I know the law of competitive advantage perfectly well.  I know that if we have more productive tasks for our ex-call-centre staff then we should be glad to offload such menial and skill-free tasks to lower-cost countries, so as to focus on higher-value areas where we have an advantage.  What did we have an empire for, after all, if not for such advantages?  But I rather think that this may fall on deaf ears to a middle-aged woman from a Sunderland housing estate who just saw her job head east.  I am firmly in favour of globalisation, and of sharing our wealth by employing those willing to do what we do not wish to do.I will not support protectionist legislation, but I think that some companies will gain customer goodwill by using local call centre staff.  This is why Mahal, in the BBC story, cannot complain when a customer politely enquires as to where the call centre is based, then chooses to boycott that company's services by discontinuing the call.  That person may be misguided, economically, but politically they are making a rational and understandable choice.

And ask the UK call-centre staff: they get equally rude people calling them, frustrated at getting their cable disconnected and lashing out at them.  The insults may not be racist, but they will be targetted as well as the customer can muster.  Until we find a better paradigm than sticking a few hundred unhappy employees in a large, air-conditioned, soulless warehouse and giving them scripts, then such abuse will continue.

TV Go Home

Oh, sweet,  After several years of absence, the TV Go Home archives are back online.  I cannot swear enough to do them justice.  But start with the early 1999 ones and read forward, watching Charlie Brooker turn from hilarious, through biting, to scathing.  Each issue is presented as a jpg, which makes  them safe for every work filter I've every been subjected to.

I honestly believe that TV Go Home was the finest example of popular satire in the 90's.  Appearing, at first, to be a fun mickey-take of the old British Radio Times tv listings magazine, it evolved into the vehicle for attack after attack on the state of populist entertainment, on the media, on the idle young rich, on the newspapers of both left and right and more.

And yet most weeks would have a scattering of hilariously geeky in-jokes as well, as befits a production with ties not just to Chris "Brass Eye" Morris but also the wacky, free-software-loving, techno-libertarian funsters at http://www.ntk.net (irregular providers of high-tech inside info since they got a bit bored of it).  So we have (woth December 1999):

8:15 Film Premiere Ken Loach's Tron - Science fiction thriller starring Peter Mullan.  When hacker Kevin Flynn violates the ENCOM mainframe, a laser blast transports his body inside a computer simulation of a Glasgow housing estate in which he must battle heartless council officials and his own alcohol addiction while maintaining a sense of working-class dignity throughout.

...

02.30 LOOK Box GET Key - Solutions to old-school computer text adventures read by Brian Blessed.  Week 4: a walkthrough of The Hobbit

These appeared in the same issue as the ongoing series "Sting Cares", where Sting would visit an African village "to be filmed playing football with a lovable little black boy".  Other films included "Bad Lieutenant 2: Worse Lieutenant", not one word of the description of which can I repeat here.  Which is slightly better than the long-running program following Nathan Barley - later to get his own (real)  TV Series on Channel 4 - the very name of which is unrepeatable.

Aeon Flux Review

Dungeons, Dragons, Warcraft and Sandboxes

Almost a couple of years ago now, I started reading the Dungeons and Dragons Online and Middle Earth Online forums.  I was so sure that one of these two would be the breakthrough world that would finally displace Everquest as the Big Cahuna of the MMO world, and surge through the 500k subscribers mark.  Perhaps even the million-subscriber barrier.

Of course, as Ren Reynolds points out in yesterday's posting on Terra Nova, I was so terribly, foolishly wrong.  My aversion to real-time strategy titles had led me to view the buzz about the World Of Warcraft game that was nearing launch with a sort of saddened tolerance.  I had no idea what was coming, and when I saw the cartoony graphics I had no temptation to try it out in a hurry.

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis*.  I am now a convert, on my umpteenth (20th?) alt in World of Warcraft, for one thing (I get bored circa level 30).  And while I pre-ordered my copy of Dungeons and Dragons Online at the weekend, I greatly fear that the implementation will fall short of what the D&D IP deserves.

The arguments are well-rehearsed, and I've said them before: several key design elements of the game are flawed.  But I had hoped they would be mitigated by later design decisions.  I don't, now, think that will turn out to be the case.

The setting of Eberron - one of ultra-high magic with substantial technology - is a problem.  I don't really like the Deeprun Tram in WoW, but electrical railways in D&D are just plain wrong.  To the game designers it gave a clean page to work on, I know.  But Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms had plenty of "this page intentionally left blank" areas specifically left there for DMs (be they private or corporate) to use without retcon issues.  Clearly, Wizards of the Coast wanted to sell plenty of rulebooks for their new setting, and I think that their choice was for the second-worst world they've ever released.

Other decisions are probably even more important.  This is not really a world.  DDO has a central location: Stormreach. Then it has a bunch of dungeon instances for individual parties to explore.  You cannot explore the rest of the world, because it doesn't exist.  All travel is "red-dotted-line", a la Indiana Jones or the WoW inter-continental ships.

This is not a huge issue for many people, I know.  I may be a Bartle Explorer, but that's a rare type.  Remember, though, that no form of PvP exists.  This may be a decision I agree with - PvP in pen and paper D&D is tremendously rare and even more rarely fun - but bang go the Bartle Killers.  Then you have the relatively small amount of content to worry about.  In order to gain levels (up to the cap of level 10), you absolutely must repeat the same dungeons several times: there are simply not enough otherwise.  This will, presumably, change over time, but with the pre-orders giving one beta access, I think a degree of early churn is an issue, especially with Bartle Achievers who will devour it in days.  And having plenty of cnotent available at launch is important, as it represents a substantial reserve when you discover that you cannot create new content as quickly as it is devoured by players.

That leaves the Bartle Socialisers, for whom the game, with small gameworlds, restricted shard populations, and a single central "home" zone seems perfectly designed, but for the limited appearance customisation (a decision perhaps borne of seeing the lag results in SWG where vast amounts of appearance info is sent from client to client).  This focus on socialisation may make DDO very sticky, but I seriously doubt if a game can be built wholly on socialisers and casual achievers.  The D&D IP will bring in huge numbers of players (if word of mouth on Penny Arcade and elsewhere is not truly awful), but I suspect that, as with the recent Star Wars Galaxies NGE, this strong newbie hose will only provide massive churn.

Recently-ish, Timothy Burke wrote on Terra Nova that a strong, well-known IP can be, essentially, a huge problem.  I think that, amongst gamers, this is the biggest IP of all: bigger than Star Wars, Star Trek and (in this marketplace, not amongst non-gamers) maybe even Lord of the Rings.  I gather that the implementations of the D&D rules themselves are actually pretty good.  But I wonder if wider design decisions will not overshadow that element.  After all, the game mechanics in combat are not the defining element of a virtual world, where only gold farmers spend the bulk of their time fighting.

Dungeons and Dragons Online, an implementation of the first sandbox game, should have been the ultimate sandbox title, with a huge playspace, players able to build castles, rule domains, roam the wilderness and so much else.  Of course, the technology isn't quite there yet for a complete sandbox, but games like Dark and Light are getting closer, while DDO is moving further away.

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*"Times change and we change with them".  Although, since Gaius Marius was in a kinda glass-half-empty place in his life, and shared the universal Roman Republican view of the world as a declension narrative, he actually said, in full, Sunt lacrimae rerum.  Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.  Which translates as "These are the tears of things: times change and we change with them."

Rugby and Scotland

From the coverage in the papers yesterday and today it would appear that I am alone in thinking that Scotland played superbly at the weekend, and that Wales are in deep trouble.  Until Murray got sent off for a soft infringement but one that was predictable under the new zero-tolerance rule, I was growing more and more confident that we would win.  Our line-out was beginning to come together, the early Welsh scrummaging advantage was on the wane, and we were consistently doing in the loose what they could not: crossing the gain-line.

Too many rugby writers either don't play the game, or haven't played recently enough to know the result of playing five-eighths of the game a man down.  As soon as Murray went off, the game was over.  Even New Zealand would have lost that match.  That Scotland came within ten points at the end was astonishing.  I have played in quite a few 15 vs 14 games in my time, and I have only once seen the under-strength side win (and that was because we were about three divisions above the opposition).

In the medium-term, I think that, despite losing 28-18, this will be a very bad result for Wales and a pretty good one for Scotland.  The Scottish players will know how dominant they would have been with even teams.  The Welsh, on the other hand, rather than wringing their hands and wondering what was wrong with their much-vaunted running game that they couldn't score with consistent 4-on-3 overlaps on one wing, seem delighted with the result, with coach Ruddock stating that their season is back on track now.  My thought is that they're lucky they're playing the Italians in Cardiff, because the Welsh were a shambles in the second half, and would certainly have lost to any other team in the Six Nations that were playing with even numbers.

In my own game, a mid-day friendly on Saturday, we won by a wide margin.  My own most-enjoyable moment was a bit of a flashback: I tapped a quick penalty on halfway when the opposition turned their backs, ran the fifty metres for the line, drew in all three nearby tacklers, drove on a bit to tie them in, placed the ball behind me and watched Cakes pick up and fall the last metre for the score.  Me running forty-to-fifty metres then Cakes doing the last one for the glory was very much a recurring theme when he played regularly.

In rather a change from tradition, Alan Davidson didn't get injured.  Inconceivable!

Fo Shizzle

I have to admit that this site looks rather better in this format.  With yet more thanks to Random Thoughts at Random for the gizoogle link.

Goth Eucharist

With thanks to Random Thoughts at Random for the link.

Despite the fact that I shudder with positively Presbyterian horror at what the Anglican eucharist involves (give me a service that includes a decent hunk of bread and a cup of wine any time, preferably with some meat, some cheese, some fish and more), especially where it heads off into the non-Biblical doctrine of the transubstantiation, I surprise myself by wholly approving of the gothic eucharist currently being offered by a vicar in Cambridge.  I approve partly because I believe in adapting the medium to the audience.  If we don't do that then we should celebrate communion in Aramaic, and that would, frankly, impact a little on Sunday turn-outs.  But I also approve because I am a goth, for all that those who know me from rugby, football, surfing or work may have trouble with thatt concept, and I'll happily bend principles where it suits me ;)

I just wish that I was anywhere near Cambridge a little more often.  Perhaps next time I visit relatives near Stanstead I should hire a car and pay a visit.

Arcade Fire - Funeral review

In places, with their layered, complex, slightly ambient sound, Arcade Fire sound a bit like Sonic Youth's Hoarfrost or Diamond Sea. But the addition of strings, multiple percussionists and the occasional accordian, the comparison is not perfect. Similarly, if you liked some of the Icelandic band The Sugarcubes' earlier work, then you'll probably like Funeral. But that's not to say that they're the same.

In places, the intentionally formless and flowing nature of their songs akes them sound a little like The Fall, but scored for performance by strings, acoustic guitars, multiple voices and the like.

The closest comparison is with the song Hoppípolla by another bunch of Icelanders, Sigur Rós, currently getting a lot of MTV2 play (the ones with the video of old folks playing at pirates and jumping in puddles): gentle, melodic and tuneful.

You can tell that it's a struggle. Arcade Fire are - and this phrase is overused, I know - quite unlike anyone else in the mainstream music scene right now.

The tracks exude joy (surprisingly for a record largely inspired by loss). You will know Wake Up when you hear it - beautiful, uplifting and accessible, unsurprisingly the trendier end of the ad agency has lept on it, using it for a BBC season trailer.

In The Backseat is another cracking track: you think you have a grip on it - a strong feeling of the Cocteau Twins from their Blue Bell Knoll period, although with an occasional guitar line closer to the late 80's or early-90's post-Manchester indie scene of someone like Ride - and then suddenly you have tympanies, a Beatles-esque cello line and some melodic violin scoring. It's like a brilliantly accomplished band started jamming with the string section of a chamber orchestra after the recording session. It finally dies away with pizzicato strings, fading into the silence.

Rebellion has been overshadowed by the radio-friendly, hook-rich Wake Up for a long time, but may perhaps prove to be an even better song, with a driving, repetitive bass, piano and drum combination driving the song along: a whirling, spinning, racing joy of a song.

This slow burner of an album has been around since 2004 in the USA, and has gradually built up a following through internet word-of-mouth and, more recently, MTV2 first playlisting it then making it their album of the year. I've never given five stars in an Amazon review before, but I did for this album.

Fetch me my (Danish) bacon roll...

That sound you heard over the weekend was of European popular opinion shuffling self-consciously several steps to the right.

I am not a habitual consumer of Danepak bacon and Carlsberg beer, but I think that I'll pop past the shops on the way home and buy both, tonight.  After all, in the face of widespread boycotts across the muslim world, the Danish pork and alcohol industries must really be feeling the pinch.  And it well help ease my conscience, which is currently embarrassed by the craven kow-towing of the British government to the sheer, unbridled fascism of the Islamist extreme right. The British government in general, and Jack Straw in particular, a man whose principles disappeared with his glasses in his pointless pursuit of an utterly unattainable prime-ministership.

I particularly resent the fact that the islamist response to the printing of some not-terribly-funny cartoons in a Danish paper is so extreme, so apparently universal, that I find myself sounding like a member of the BNP.  For instance,  I honestly believe that if people come to our country, with its long-established traditions of liberty and free expression, then they have no right to attempt to terrorise that society into conforming with the political and religious traditions of the dictatorships, gerontocracies, kleptocracies and assorted other murderously authoritarian regimes which they saw fit to leave behind.  This from a person who believes in free immigration without quotas!

I have had two discussions in the past twenty-four hours with baffled, liberal, middle-classed Scots, each openly feeling hurt by the islamist reaction, and wondering aloud how such a huge chasm could "suddenly" have appeared.  Of course, this is no sudden disjunction.

Our political traditions are traceable to 5th century BC Athens and her struggle against the Persian Empire: to what we see as the band of free citizens defending their liberty, their rights and their democratic traditions against the forces of despotism and oppression.  This is, of course, an arguable proposition on many grounds, but one grounded on truth, and important as our founding myth, still powerfully repeated again and again in every artistic sphere (Minas Tirith, anyone?).  And our traditions are shaped by the French and American revolutions, by the free pursuit of happiness, by liberté, egalité and fraternité.  They are refined by the political thought of a score of generations, of Locke, Hobbes and Payne.

All this has always been alien to islam, which absolutely and explicitly demands, in the qu'ran, a theocracy.  In muslim political terms, this would be the restoration of the Caliphate, which is a prospect too depressing to warrant discussing, but would involve an awful ot of hangings in Soho and liberal stonings of women throughout suburbia.

We already live in a state of fear.  We are already terrorised.  Why else have British newpapers and the BBC fought shy of publishing these cartoons?  I wouldn't post them on my site!  We accept the possibility of bombings on the tube in London with a stoic resolve, primarily because we're a well-educated citizenry who, in the main, know that we won't win the lottery and we won't be the ones that get blown up on the 09.34 to Ruislip.  But we also know that if we go drawing attention to ourselves then there's a far better chance that we'll end up getting stabbed, beheaded, or otherwise given the opportunity to go chat with muhammed directly about his madder disciples.

So long as our pussillanimous government finds some backbone - oh, the shame of being shown up by the French for moral courage - then this is a struggle that liberal democracy will win.  Not just because of our technological and organisational advantages, but because huge segments of society cannot allow us to lose: women, gays, Christians, Ba'hai, Bhuddists, Hindus, libertarians, would-be leaders of the Liberal party...  we all have too much to lose.

I hope that it is true, and that these people are not representative of the wider muslim community.  Lets see the much larger counter-protests.

Big Brother.. another ending

I can't help myself.  Michael Barrymore as evil genius is just too funny.

Of course, just in case Michael Barrymore's hot'n'juicy lawyers are interested, nothing was ever proved, and people end up dead in each others' pools during cocaine-and-GHB-and-cannabis-fuelled orgies all the time with no foul play in sight.