Maybe I should go on the Apprentice
More or less every week on that show, Alan Sugar asked one contestant or other[1] "hang on, if you're so bloody brilliant and your track record is so bloody good, why have you thrown it all in to work for me on a one year contract for £100 grand?". He never once got a satisfactory answer and never seemed to notice that this totally undermined the premise of the whole show, rather as if Trinny and Susannah had ever said "Of course, there is basically not all that much we can do about your face".
I think everyone on the show took the wrong approach. Sugar says at the very start of every program that he doesn't like arselickers, and yet every single one of them licked his arse. I think I would do well in the boardroom by simply holding my ground and coming armed with a few home truths ...
SAS: Well you made a right old cobblers of that one, didn't you, Digest?
D2D: I don't think it was all that bad.
SAS: Look at this bloody product you chose! Never seen such a load of old toot in me loife[2]
D2D: Perhaps so, but at least it's not a telephone with a cheap LCD screen attached that charges you 20p to send an email.
SAS: What?
D2D: You heard. Wasn't it like three or four times you tried to launch that joke? What a dog.
SAS: We're still selling it actually
D2D: This is clearly some strange use of the word "selling" I hadn't heard before.
SAS: Shut up. Your management of that team was hopeless! They couldn't stand you!
D2D: Do you mean ordinary hopeless, or "Spurs in the 90s" hopeless?
SAS: You delegated everything to Tre and he naused it up!
D2D: Well I'm sorry, Terry Venables wasn't available.
SAS: Listen, mate, in business
D2D: Property investment.
SAS: I said in business
D2D: Property investment. That is, in fact, how you've made your money for the last ten years. Nothing wrong with that but it is like a fact.
Duncan Bannatyne: Wull ah saeh ...[3]
D2D: I'll deal with you later.
SAS: Now what I'm looking for in an Apprentice
D2D: Is apparently a London Transport clerk or a saucy blonde with a hard luck story. And they were both complete washouts. Fair do's to Tim, nobody was ever going to be able to sell that ludicrous electronic facelift thing but Michelle Dewbery was an unforced error on your part; somehow it escaped your notice that she had got pregnant by one of the other contestants.
SAS: I hired Simon this year
D2D: Well exactly. As a selection process, this is one that only the Camridge office of MI5 in the 50s could like.
(and there the reverie ends; anyone who was hoping for a woefully forced lead in to the punch line "you're fired" is invited to consider that Week Ending was deservedly cancelled fifteen years ago)
[1]I can't do the accent, sorry.
[2]No, sorry, I really can't do the accent.
[3]Now that one is spot on
Sugar says at the very start of every program that he doesn't like arselickers, and yet every single one of them licked his arse. I think I would do well in the boardroom by simply holding my ground and coming armed with a few home truths ...
ReplyDeleteDo you believe everything your boss tells you? : )
Otherwise, spot on. Although all is forgiven about SAS when he fired Piers Morgan on Comic Relief.
And since you have time to watch TV and muck about on google, can I put in a request for a review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan? It could well be this year's hand waving nonsensical summer blockbuster, and finance related too!
This one is actually on its way, and might be a bit sympathetic. I have already started writing the review, and as soon as I manage to get hold of a copy of the book and with God's help read it, I'll be in business.
ReplyDelete1. How is 1998 "fifteen years ago"?
ReplyDelete2. I wrote my only published book on an Amstrad. For some reason, among its many design faults appeared to be that a proper printer couldn't be attached and it was necessary to use a daisy-wheel printer that not only clattered so you could hear it outside the house, but would only take one sheet at a time so that I had to feed each sheet of paper in after the previous one had been printed. As I recall the process took three days.
That is brill, to use an Ind Coope retro adjective. I remember the PCW8256, which packed the power of a BBC Micro into a PC-like form factor. That one did have a dot matrix printer that you could even use as a scanner with a third party kit.
ReplyDeleteBut, however, it did have a THREE INCH DISK DRIVE! The most appallingly stupid thing ever invented in the history of computing! Shared only with the CPC464 if memory serves!
Business genius, my arse.
How is 1998 "fifteen years ago"?
ReplyDeleteEJH is currently "King Of Pedant Hill", until someone else spots the other error.
No, those PCW8256 machines were brilliant for their day (1984). The first affordable and usable word-processors. CP/M was a decent operating system (as decent as MS-DOS of the era) and the 3-inch drives helped to keep the price down (iirc).
ReplyDeleteSugar kept that line going far too long (PCW9512 + daisywheel) but it was a much much better product than some of the other tat he's foisted on people.
Ah, I see it was 1985 not 1984. The wikipedia has a reasonable summary of the PCW
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW
(Including the fact that he kept the line going until 1996, which was definitely an insane thing to do.)
I remember the howls of anguish from PCW users when he finally gave it up, as one result of their PCW ownership was that the mouse revolution had completely passed them by.
ReplyDeleteThe PCW and BBC micro live on, btw, in the still quite prevalent belief among lots of computer end-users that the keyboard is "the computer" and the computer is "the hard disk drive".
Bollox. There is simply no excuse for the three inch drive - I mean, what saving could there possibly have been in developing a complete proprietary disk drive for a dinky widdly UK production run over buying the world standard ones?
ReplyDeleteBut one thing they did have was a decent mouse, tho' it was a third party product. Three buttons, maan! (Never mind that the buttons were reversed in comparison with PC rodents..)
PCWs were also pretty damn rugged. My better 'alf and half her year wrote their undergrad dissertations on our 8256, so that little DM printer was chugging away pretty much 24 hours a day in the week before deadline. Nary a hiccup, which wouldn't have been the case with the OKIs we had at work, which misfed and packed up regularly.
ReplyDeleteMost geek shops in the late 80s would make you up a cable to attach a more sensible drive (5 1/4", for example) for a few quid, but IIRC most people kept so little data in those days that reinputting made just as much sense.
No Alex is talking bollocks ...
ReplyDeletewhat saving could there possibly have been in developing a complete proprietary disk drive for a dinky widdly UK production run over buying the world standard ones?
1. There weren't world standard ones at the time, there was still a format war between 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch disks.
2. They didn't develop their own format iirc. Because the 3inch format had basically lost out in the format war above, Sugar was able to buy in an enormous stash of 3inch disks from somewhere in the Far East for practically nothing. He didn't develop them - they were surplus stock.
There weren't world standard ones at the time, there was still a format war between 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch disks
ReplyDeleteSomebody care, please! Either would have been far more useful, and cheap as they were both produced on a hugely greater scale.
But they made it impossible to exchange data with anything other than a CPC. Cheap opportunistic shit is still shit, as well as being a brief description of Alan Sugar's career.
a calumny, Alex! The 3" disk format was also compatible with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 (me neither, apparently Sugar bought the license and was selling these things long past the point of anyone caring). Looking at the picture of the Em@iler, that too has an ominous-looking slot on the side, so maybe you could exchange information by email at a bargain rate of 20p?
ReplyDeleteI think, in future, when anyone talks about "thin clients" or "appliances" in an IT sense, I am simply going to say "Em@iler!"
ReplyDeleteThere's a reason why nobody wants computers with the compute taken out. You may debate it, but every attempt since 1976 has failed. The market has spoken, fucko, as Melody Maker's Mr Agreeable put it. Now there's retro for you.
Oh yeah, unintentionally hilarious Wikipedia reference to 3" disks: here.
ReplyDeleteAmstrad's idiosyncratic choice of Hitachi's 3" floppy disk drive, when the rest of the PC industry was moving to Sony's 3.5" format, is often claimed to be due to Amstrad bulk-buying a large consignment of 3" drive units in Asia. The chosen drive (built-in in later models) was a single-sided 40-track unit that required the user to physically remove and flip the disk to access both sides. Each side had its own independent write-protect switch. The sides were termed "A" and "B", with each one commonly formatted to 180 kB (in AMSDOS format, comprising 2 kB directory and 178 kB storage) for a total of 360 kB per disc.
The interface with the drives was a NEC 765 FDC, used for the same purpose in the IBM PC/XT, PC/AT and PS/2 machines. Many of its features were unused in order to cut costs, namely DMA transfers and support for single density disks; they were formatted as double density using Modified frequency modulation....
... The original interface came with a "Book of Spells" for facilitating data transfer between other systems using a proprietary protocol in the device's own ROM, as well as terminal software to connect to British Telecom's Prestel service. A separate version of the ROM was created for the U.S. market due to the use of the commands "SUCK" and "BLOW", which were considered unacceptable there.
This apparently, is the 'first' PCW emulator for a PC.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.zophar.net/pcw.html
Talking of Sugar crap products, he also, about 1993 I think, launched a PC (or was it a PCW) which could play Sega Megadrive games. Doesn't sound ridiculous, except the way it did this was because it has a Sega Megadrive inserted into it.
Ah, it was a 386 PC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_Mega_PC
The perfect comment on Thatcherworld, really. Rather than a computer industry, we got a pretend computer industry.
ReplyDeletethat required the user to physically remove and flip the disk to access both sides
ReplyDeleteahhhh yes. How many 3.5 inch disk drives do you think were ruined by ex-PCW owners trying this one?
I am simply going to say "Em@iler!"
ReplyDeletepronounced "Ematiler"?
Spot on my arse - your Bannatyne was Elvis, as I live and breathe.
ReplyDeleteGod, you people are old. I've never even seen one of these dreadful things in my life.
ReplyDeleteMy guesses for the other error:
1) You can send more than 1 email for 20p (the website did say 1 email session for 20p)
2) Simon Ambrose is way too tall for the MI5
3) The Cambridge spy ring was formed in the 30s and 40s. By the 50s, they were dismantling due to soviet infiltration.
4) "Camridge"?
5) "Dewbery"?
Okay, am tapped out.
Spot on my arse
ReplyDeleteJust the one?
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/taleb_on_black.html
ReplyDeleteThis is very listenable interview with Hassim Nicholas Taleb
No, those PCW8256 machines were brilliant for their day (1984). The first affordable and usable word-processors.
ReplyDeleteCompared to TASWord on the Spectrum, oh yes. I'm sure there are a few authors still tapping away on PCWs just as earlier ones cling to Olivetti typewriters.
Indeed, I remember a certain don with a natty line in neo-imperialism delegating the conversion of many, many old Locoscript documents on 3in disk to one of his undergraduates.
There's a reason why nobody wants computers with the compute taken out.
Ah, but there's degrees of thin.
Anyway, Britain didn't have a 'pretend' computer industry by any stretch. The Amstrad takeover of Sinclair was, however, the substitution of boffin culture with barrow boy culture, which is pretty much symbolic of Thatcher's priorities.