These poor, exploited girls are walking the streets of Auckland, handing out blue squeezy balls to advertise a new website.

I'm joking of course. Promotional marketing is an extemely valid vocational choice. However, if Ryan's Angels are looking for a career switch to IT - or indeed you yourself, dear reader, have come back from the break with itchy feet - there is only one place to head: our new, better, bigger JobUniverse, created by the people behind PC World, Computerworld, CIO and Reseller, and the nation's only employment site dedicated to ICT. Some more scenes from today's launch:

This woman is not actually employeed by Vodafone - in front of whose HQ she's pictured on the Viaduct - or indeed any ICT organisation. All the more reason to head for JobUniverse.

A career in banking, sir? Or should you be heading toward JobUniverse?

This gentleman appears to already work in ICT, and is carefully protecting his identity behind sunglasses. However, with 3% unemployment, any time is a good time to review your options at JobUniverse.

Not everybody can be a Calvin Klein model. If not, you know where to head.

Residents of nearby buildings spontaneously unfurl JobUniverse banners.

"You can let go of the squeezy ball now, sir."

Posted by Chris Keall at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

We've previously reported in how US armed forces have used a modified version of Quake in troop training. Now comes the the slightly alarming news that the US Navy is testing a real-world, ship-to-land version of a railgun - an electro-magnetic weapon popularised by Quake and other shoot-em-ups, albeit in make-believe worlds.

In thoroughly modern Web 2.0 fashion, the Department of Defense is offering comprehensive multimedia coverage of Friday's test here (I'm no mililatry intelligence expert, but is it a good idea to be that public?).

The Jan 31 (US time) test will be of an 8-megajoule railgun. That is, producing enough energy to hurl a small car around 600km. A 64-megajoule version is due to be tested by the end of the year. I guess that will be useful if they need to drop a bus on a group of Bagdad street fighters from a few thousand kilometres away.

In Dr Strangelove fashion, the DoD explains to media on its website:

What is the electromagnetic railgrun? In a word, innovation. This weapons system will bypass the traditional use of chemical propellants or rocket motors for firing projectiles or missiles. Instead, electromagnetic railguns mounted on US naval vessels will use electricity to launch projectiles farther and faster than any ship in today's fleet. When fully operational, the electromagnetic railgun (EMRG) will:

- Deliver hypervelocity projectiles at Mach 5 on impact in support of Marines and ground forces.
- Strike within 5 meters of a pinpointed target from distances in excess of 200 nautical miles.
- Maximize damage through kinetic energy

Life in the slow lane
Speaking of destructive technology, we've had a number of issues over the past week with the company that serves ads to this site, Accipter, resulting in pcworld.co.nz and pressf1.pcworld.co.nz at times being excruciatingly slow to load. We apologise, and we feel your pain. It's driving us bananas too. Unfortunately our friends at Accipter still haven't got to the bottom of the problem. In the mean time, we've turned of ads altogether on Press F1, so members can enjoy some faster surfing for while.

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

A big day for us here at PC World Towers as the 500,000th reader post was left on our Press F1 help forum. That's one heck of a lot of messages from readers helping other readers (with occassional diversions into politics, arguments over the best sci-fi film of all time and so fourth).

For helping make Press F1 one of the fastest-response, best-populated PC help forums on the planet, you are all winners. But in another, more real way, their are three winners in our competition to mark the half-millionth post. They are, as selected by PC World editorial staff:

Most helpful users of all time:
F1 heroes JenC and Chilling_Silence, who both collect a Crumpler Backpack, an 8GB MP3 Sansa player from Sandisk, and a 4GB Ducati Flash Drive. While so many readers have given so much, our super mods have been in a class of their own, not only for helping with questions (and, um, our clock) but keeping things running smoothly on the admin front, and helping to create F1's unique sense of community - Christmas Day included. Thanks on behalf of everybody.

Most helpful new user
The super-humanly (or super-mousingly) prolific Speedy Gonzales, who gets a Crumpler bag, a 2GB Sandisk Sansa MP3 player and a 4GB Ducati Flash Drive. I know that Speedy didn't join yesterday, but in the context of a 15-year-old forum, Mr Gonzales is a relative toddler.

Being a self-aware, self-organising beast, the Press F1 community naturally also awarded its own popular-vote accolade for the most-helpful user of the year, in typically racaus and entertaining fashion. The gong went to wainuitech, who received a Microsoft Live Chat headset plus a selection of games.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

I'm not making this up. You'd think with the $190 million our govt is giving Eden Park that New Zealand is the global capital of middle class welfare. But it looks like the title will have to go to the US.

Today's Wall Street Journal carries a Lee Gomes Tech Talk interview with Jason Oxman, head of communications at the Consumer Electronics Association, discussing how the US Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all TV broadcasts be digital by February next year. We pick up the action mid-way:

Q: ... 50% of Americans don't have digital TV sets. That seems like a high number, considering how in 13 months all analog over-the-air broadcasting will stop.

A: It's true that 50% of American homes have digital TV sets. But more than 85% subscribe to a video provider, such as cable or satellite. None of those 85% will be affected by the digital transition, because they don't receive their television signals over the air. The only households that will be affected are those who don't have a digital TV, and who also receive their television signals over the air. That's about 11% of American households today.

Q: Will that 11% be left high and dry?

A: Not at all. The households in this category will be eligible for a special program set up by Congress. They will all receive from the Department of Commerce two coupons, each of them good for a $40 discount on a special converter box that will allow traditional analog television sets to receive the new digital signals. Converter boxes will be priced at between $40 and $60. That means the coupons will offset most of that expense. The coupons don't get mailed until a few weeks from now, and by then, the digital converter boxes will be in thousands and thousands of stores. [Read the full interview here. Subscription required]

Talk about Baby Boomers with their fingers on the purse strings. What next? Tax breaks for upgrading to a universal remote?

In New Zealand, we have the opposite problem, with successive governments showing little interest in nudging along the quality of our TV broadcasts - though new broadcasting minister Trevor Mallard has at least drawn a line in the sand for a 2012 analog switch off. More on that here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

"It's likely that the Internet will soon experience a catastrophic failure, a multi­day outage that will cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars ... ." Yikes. Computerworld US is quoting informed sources who think the web's heading for an imminent meltdown.

Not everyone agrees, but of those who do:

The threat is "urgent and real" says The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of large U.S. companies. The Washington-based public policy advocacy group says there is a 10% to 20% chance of a "breakdown of the critical information infrastructure" in the next 10 years, brought on by "malicious code, coding error, natural disasters, [or] attacks by terrorists and other adversaries."

My immediate reaction was that productivity would skyrocket, what with cubicle drones not longer able to find succor in Facebook or Trade Me. But apparently with email, ecommerce and software-as-a-service it wouldn't be such a good thing (read about the full horror here).

Speaking of software-as-a-service - and horror - here at PC World Towers we've been experimenting with Google Spreadsheets to share a planning document. The team complained - correctly - that I hogged it and never closed it. Plus, we're often far-flung. Spreadsheets held the promise of all of us editing simultaneously, from anywhere.

Alas it didn't work. It's quite a large spreadsheet, so we didn't want to start it again from scratch, but importing any of the Excel version's formulas into Google Spreadsheets proved a no-goer and drove me crazy. Google admits there are a number of "known issues" with Spreadsheets. And of course we have to wait for Google Gears before we can do anything off-line. Read more about software-as-a-service in NZ PC World February, on newsstands January 29.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Due to recent liquid mis-adventure, I'm now using a loaner notebook that won't fit my old docking station. That leaves me trying to plug my printer - a speedy and reliable yet ancient HP LaserJet 1100 with a parallel port - into my laptop's USB port.

Such a beast as parallel-to-USB converter cable does exist, but no-one seems to have it in stock. Help me out by naming an e-tailer or bricks-and-mortar outlet that could ship it to me today, and I'll post you a copy of Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare 2 (I have a couple left over from what publishing commentators are already calling the most successful competition in online history).

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 6 )

Our stablemate Computerworld finds that Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec's products are all more expensive here than in the US (read the full report here), leading some punters to head for Amazon.com. Buying hardware from overseas is problematic of course, with different power adapters, warranty issues and that pesky customs GST on items over $50. But for software, it's more tempting to hit the web.

Keen readers will have seen that I did some book shopping online over Christmas, and found it's not just software that's much, much cheaper on Amazon.

Posted by Chris Keall at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

If you pirate movies on an industrial scale, then you've got to be prepared to get caught and banged up, like the gentleman operating out of a video store on Auckland's Dominion Road who was busted yesterday with 30,000 knock-off DVDs and 10,000 video tapes.

Apparently the guy's not-so-little back room project was revealed when a Sony Pictures-produced Bollywood movie, not due on NZ shelves for five months, became a wildfire hit for his bootleg operation.

My question is: if so many people in the local Indian community wanted to buy the movie on disc (or tape), why wasn't Sony Pictures selling it to them?

Movie studios have their reasons for staggering DVD releases (they want you to pay to see a flick on the big screen first), or not releasing a number of titles in NZ at all (our population's too small too be hassled with it).

But in the digital age, you can't be at war with your own customers. People have become attuned to getting what they want, when they want.

It's good that more and more big titles are getting simultaneous worldwide big-screen release, giving pirates outside the US no time to themselves before the movie hits the provinces.

Now studios should go the next step and abolish moronic DVD zoning system - which has been widely ignored by DVD hardware makers, but which is now returning in an "enhanced" form for regular discs, and reasserting itself with the new high def formats. Plus the associated practice of staggered releases around the world. It feels like we're being infantalised. It's just asking film fans around the world to hit the Torrents (or Dominion Rd, if you prefer hard copy).

It's good to see movie downloads picking up steam in the US, where at MacWorld yesterday Steve Jobs announced a new iTunes service that will let people "rent" movie downloads from Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney, Warner Bros, Paramount or Sony Pictures for $US2.99 or $3.99. You get 24 hours to watch the film.

There is still an element of compromise; movies will only be available on iTunes a month after their DVD release.

Still, hopefully it's a system that will migrate to iTunes services all around the globe, and other legit download sites. By the time National Treasure 5 comes out, maybe they'll be one (download) release date for the planet - and it won't be up to local distributors doing they're sums when or whether Kiwis get to see a movie. It'll be up to the customers. Imagine that.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 )

A lot of people moan about txt. I know, I'm one. Yet language is open source, and today's smartarse abbreviation is tomorrow's mainstream verbiage. For example, "hello" was rarely said as a greeting before the invention of the telephone, says The Economist:

When the telephone appeared in the 1870s, people worried about receiving calls from people to whom they had not been properly introduced. And what should one say when picking up the receiver? Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, suggested "Ahoy, ahoy";. But as in many other respects, his ideas lost out to those of Thomas Edison, who preferred "Hello", an expression that was rarely used before the telephone but is now ubiquitous.

The Economist reveals the above as part of segue into how a number of airlines are now experimenting with cellphone and/or data services on their planes. US carrier JetBlue is offering free but limited wi-fi, aimed at CrackBerry junkies; Air France will shortly test cellular broadband, data-only; Qantas is trialling a data-only service on one of its 767s; and Emirates is kitting out a plane to try out a voice and data service.

The old myth about mobiles interfering with avionics has finally been put to bed. The two remaining issues are cost - Irish discount carrier Ryanair will allow voice calls on short flights, with the airline taking a cut from telcos' nosebleed global roaming charges - and of course whether non-cellphone users will strangle their mobile-totting co-passengers.

Mind your step
I have a theory that people who love danger sports have a near-sociopathic lack of imagination. The same goes for dangerous jobs. Bad things do happen. Walking to work around 8am I merrily ploughed through some traffic cones on the corner of Wellesley St East and Queen St. "Stop! Do you want that to fall on your head?" asked a fireman, rushing toward me. Looking up, I saw that the window washing platform parked to the top of the corner office tower had broken free, crashing down onto a ledge above the main street shops. Here's some pics from my phone:

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

How's your New Year going? Mine's seen me spill a glass of Oyster Bay sav blanc across the keyboard of my notebook, which keen readers know has already been in the wars with a dead hard drive. I thought there would only be about a 1 in 10 chance that it would actually kill the laptop, what with a membrane under the keyboard and such, but in fact the vino seeped into the motherboard and optical drive, among other components.

The manufacturer's service centre estimated repairs at at least $1147, so my publisher has ordered a replacement laptop. It turns our company's insurance policy doesn't cover the mishaps of suburban drunks, so we'll have to pay the full cost of a new notebook ($2600). That's if the people upstairs approve it. Currently I'm using a lamo loaner.

Luckily, this came along to cheer me up.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )