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The return of Mandelson

It was a weird moment to see Peter Mandelson of all people return to the cabinet. Particularly weird, for me, because I had been half-heartedly composing a mental list of the celebrities I would most enjoy seeing on Strictly Come Dancing*, and so far the only people definitely on it were Christiano Ronaldo, Rachel Weisz and Peter Mandelson. He is, one way or another, one of the most intriguing political figures of the last fifteen years.

All the analysis in the papers has been focussed on the electoral logic of it — the need to build bridges within the Labour party seems to be the popular explanation — but I’m not sure I buy that; he’s certainly not someone the voting public have ever warmed to. Perhaps Gordon Brown really does just think that Mandelson is the right person for the job.

Which scares me a bit. Not because I have any doubts about Mandelson’s competence and expertise; on the contrary, because he is associated in the public mind primarily with spin and internal party feuding, I suspect he’s never been given enough credit as a talented politician. No, it’s because if the seriousness of the economic situation was measured in terms of things Gordon Brown is worried enough to do, then ‘cut a fraction of a percent off interest rates’ might be economic DEFCON 4, with ‘nationalise a high-street bank’ as DEFCON 3, and if everything we’ve ever been told about their relationship is true, ‘give Peter a job in my cabinet’ must be about DEFCON ‑27⁑.

* note for Americans: what you call Dancing With the Stars.
⁑ Amusing trivia I learned from the Wikipedia DEFCON article: the British equivalent is called the BIKINI state.

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The iPhone, Top Trumps, and widescreen TV

The BBC’s tech blog has posted a piece about the new iPhone, and, inevitably, the comments are full of people whining about how the iPhone is rubbish because it lacks some feature that competing phones have, or has inferior specs, and that people only buy it because of they are stupid fashion victims. 

This comment provides a particularly classic example:

What about MMS support -sure no one really uses MMS, but it’s kind of a missing feature don’t you think?

I’m not sure that people outside the UK ever had the pleasure of playing ‘Top Trumps’. The way it worked was that you had a themed deck of cards, which might be cars or footballers or whatever. And each card was scored with various qualities:

from the Pointless Museum

You had to turn over your next card and try to win your opponent’s card by challenging him to beat a particular score. With this set, the Horror Top Trumps (which I remember playing at primary school, incidentally), the scores are out of 100, so it’s very obvious that if it’s your turn to play and you have Dracula, you should challenge on ‘Horror Rating’. The winner gets both cards and gets to play again. Naturally enough, different sets had different kinds of scores. I assume that for Prehistoric Monsters, older is better.

from the Pointless Museum

This was all good clean fun, but it wasn’t a very subtle or nuanced way of evaluating which prehistoric monster (or sports car, or footballer) was really ‘better’. And I can’t help feeling that all those BBC blog commenters are just playing technology Top Trumps.

The idea that a technology product is more than the sum of its features is not a new insight. I’m just one of the many people who have been banging on about it for years. But it’s always worth reiterating because  those who are most fascinated by technology, and are the most vociferous about it, are exactly the kind of people who don’t get it. They are, in fact, the kind of people who would probably rather enjoy playing Tech Specs Top Trumps.

I have a favourite new example of the distance between those technology enthusiasts and the bulk of the public. I watched the Champions’ League final in a pub in Wales. The football was on a nice big widescreen plasma TV, and the signal was coming from Sky, so I know it was being broadcast in widescreen — but the picture was distorted. Presumably, at some stage there had been something on TV which was in a 3:4 ratio and they had changed the TV settings so that the picture was stretched to fill the screen, and had never changed it back.

I tried to explain what was wrong and offered to fix it, but unsurprisingly the barman was reluctant to hand over the remote control to a random stranger just before the biggest match of the season started. So Wayne Rooney looked even shorter and squatter than usual, and the ball was oval.

In other words, they’ve spent many hundreds of pounds on a TV, and however much it costs to get a Sky subscription for a pub, and are using it to distort the picture and cut off the edges. Because they can’t tell the difference? Because they don’t care? Or the most worrying possibility: perhaps they think that’s what widescreen is — a normal picture, stretched a bit.

There are probably many many people, all around the country, doing the same thing: using their expensive new equipment to distort the TV they watch. And the biggest favour you could do those people is not to provide them with more features: it’s to make sure they can use the features they have. If that’s true for something as simple as a TV, it’s even more true for a sophisticated smartphone. Ease of use and good interface design are so much more important for most people than the sheer number of features.

Look, it’s a good thing that there are people who go over these kind of technical specifications with a fine tooth comb and compare products against each other. It’s a valid kind of critique and provides useful information. But brandishing these numbers as though they are irrefutably The Final Answer is like saying “obviously the woolly rhinoceros is better than the archaeopteryx, because it weighs more”.

» All the pictures are taken from The Pointless Museum.

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Mark Lawrenson: just SHUT UP already

It’s not that I want the football commentators to try and sell every game as a classic even when it clearly isn’t. I appreciate their willingness to be honest about their product. But having bloody Lawro gloomily commenting about how bad the game is every 30 seconds for the whole bloody match really doesn’t add to its value as a piece of entertainment. It’s like watching football with Eeyore sitting on your shoulder.