I threw the world’s most wanted information freedom fighter into the Smeg. Mindful of my last air incident, in which we had to eat some of the young entrepreneurs on our flight, I was better prepared. มาลัย had assembled an emergency pack.“Ed, I’ve got everything we need to see us through. Scopolamine, DMT, a crate of really rather excellent craft IPA brewed back home in Shoreditch using only organic Cascade, Amarillo and Summit hops, and a six-pack of one litre bottles of Puyehue water. Oh, and the latest Cory Doctorow, just as you requested.”It was hard to say exactly how much time had elapsed. If a DMT trip lasting 15 minutes seems to last an afternoon, and one internet year is seven real years, and a cat has nine lives, then I calculated that we must have been in the fridge for … around about two days.
During that time, Ed had confided in me. He told me his story.Ed had innocently enrolled in a superpower spying agency, as one does, but was shocked to discover that the public communications network, designed to be entirely open with no security whatsoever and that was used for sharing absolutely every intimate personal detail, was being watched. Sometimes the most intimate information we shared was even recorded. After several years of looking at all this personal information, the realisation struck him like a bombshell. It was Luluvise that had finally broken him.Now all Ed wanted to do was flee for a country that didn’t digitally oppress its citizens.“I want a country that truly respects real freedom – real digital freedom,” Ed told me. “Like Venezuela or Cuba or Ecuador. OK, they may arrest so-called dissidents, and Cuba may persecute its homosexuals, but their policy on DRM is quite clear, their commitment to liberalising out-dated intellectual property laws is strong and sincere - and they don’t intercept their kids’ SnapChats,” he explained. “If you’re going to host an unconference, that’s where you need to be.”“When you think back to what the founding fathers, the inventors of the internet, people like John Perry Barlow and Professor Lawrence Lessig truly believed in - they wanted us to share, but they didn’t want anyone to watch us sharing except anyone who wanted to watch," he continued. "God, I despair of the USA. It’s finished.”
Just then, two taps and one loud KERLUNK resonated through our unlit but completely secure sanctuary. It was a signal – the all clear, at last.The shaky footage scanned up and down a line of casually dressed Westerners. It was easy to spot the veteran investigative journalist John Pilger, chatting to media freedom fighter and Hacked Off supporter Jemima Khan. Was that ..? Yes, it was Channel 4’s Jon Snow joking with Hollywood star Sean Penn and Britain’s leading cyber-intellectual, Doctor Aleks Krotoski, PhD. And that whippet – that could only belong to the brilliant Oscar-winning film-maker Ken Loach.Lending diplomatic support from the UK was Ambassador Ben Hammersley, and behind Ben was Billy Bragg and a modest crew of about 950 BBC News and Current Affairs production staff, looking bored. From the sudden surge for the piroshki counter, I could tell that Billy was about to start singing.
“It is Glastonbury weekend. Jemima has arranged a luxury yurt with some close friends including George Osborne, Hugh Grant and the little guy from Muse. They wouldn’t miss it for anything. The Stones are playing.”Something for the Weekend, Sir? Shut up shut up shut up. Some annoying tit is typing away on his laptop as I’m trying to snooze on the train – except it doesn’t sound like he’s typing so much as rummaging through a bag of Scrabble tiles. It’s a horrible clattery, clickety, plasticky noise. Shut up shut up shut up, you twat.I’m on the train heading home after attending an industry summer ball at a swanky central London hotel. I confess that the industry in question was not related to IT. Actually, if you’d been there with me, you could have guessed straight away that it wasn’t a computing event: there were women in attendance. I’m not talking about a few token fe-nerds, either, but a good 60-70 per cent of the revellers, most of them CEOs and senior managers in their businesses, accompanied by their male staff underlings.
The organisers had chosen to give a ‘James Bond’ theme to the event, which is pretty easy for us blokes in black tie. A smattering of bald blokes chose white tuxedos and carried fluffy toy cats, thus transforming themselves effortlessly into Ernst Stavro Blofeld.It turns out that, dressed up in an evening suit and dickie, I muster a passing resemblance to Daniel Craig. Either that or a bunch of random people who’d never met each other before had spontaneously chosen to take the piss. Anyway, the 20th person to tell me this ends up sitting next to me after we boarded my train home. He then launches into a loud, five-minute monologue about the relative merits of every James Bond film.This brings the one-sided chat to a close, allowing me to slouch into silence, perchance to kip. I have already staked out my surroundings: practically everyone is fiddling with their mobiles of course, but thankfully they are all touchscreen iPhones and Androids and none of those Blackberrys with their excruciating snippety snappity buttons.
Two minutes into a peculiar reverie involving a sinister Mollie Sugden as a kind of Mrs Slocombe/Blofeld crossbreed, stroking her pussy menacingly, I am awoken by the aforementioned computer user clattering away at his laptop keys like he’s stacking Mah Jong bricks – right behind me, at top volume, at 11:45pm.Why do people attack their keyboards in such peculiar ways? I work with a guy who types slowly but with perfectly regular taps. It’s like someone set off a metronome in the office and left it ticking for up to 15 minutes at a time. This only slightly offsets the whack-a-mole colleague whom I have mentioned before in this column.Perhaps it’s how they were taught, or not taught, to deal with keyboards in general. Older geezers tend to be quite violent, I suspect, because they learnt using rusty Petite typewriters. Personally, I try to be as soft as possible, in rebellion against my mum’s overly physical teaching method while giving me piano lessons when I was a kid. If I hit a bum note, she’d shout “No, not there!” and grab the offending finger before insisting “Here!” while hammering it repeatedly on the correct key dang-dang-dang-dang.
That said, geezers get the job done and it’s usually spelt correctly. Youngsters have the disadvantage of having learnt to type using their thumbs, which explains a great deal when you think about it. One wonders how the heck they manage to cope with the two kinds of numeric keypad: the one on their computers with 7-8-9 on the top row and the one on their phones with 1-2-3. Boring them shitless with tales of the origins of counting machines is not going to help.Illustrating the challenge was an incident observed at first hand this week. A clunky old mail franking machine refused to load up with more credit and we suspected a problem with the online connection. To cut a dull story to its tedious essentials, the machine housed an appropriately ancient modem so customer support suggested we test the line with an analogue-only phone.Rooting around the hoarded junk still blighting the office, we found an old dial phone. The office boy took one look at it and pronounced it to be unusable as it was “some kind of special handset”. He failed to see how we could tap in a phone number without any number keys. I kid you not, he was goggle-eyed as I dialled. I rather enjoyed the retro experience, to be honest, telling the lad this was how all home phones used to be when I was little. He just shook his head and said: “Unbelievable.”
He’s right, it is - or was. This was also the first time I noticed that the numbers are arranged anti-clockwise around the dial, which makes even less sense than designing counting machines to have 7-8-9 on the top row. Clearly, in the old days, product design for numeric-entry devices was pants and no one knew what they were doing.Perhaps the most significant change in the latest Sputnik is that it's now powered by a fourth-generation (aka "Haswell") Intel Core processor – either an i5-4200U at 2.6GHz or an i7-4500U at 3.0GHz, depending on configuration – up from the third-generation "Ivy Bridge" chip in the last model.That means the onboard graphics get a slight upgrade as well, from Intel HD 4000 to HD 4400. Benchmarks show the newer graphics core gives maybe a 20 to 30 per cent performance boost versus the old one.The display is the same 13.3-inch, 1920-by-1080, LED backlit panel as the earlier model, but it has now been upgraded to a touchscreen.
The other specs are all similar to the last Sputnik's. The new model comes with 8GB of dual-channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz, either a 128GB or a 256GB mSATA solid state drive, and Intel dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.0.As before, the installed operating system is Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – the most recent long-term support version – and Dell has made sure all of the hardware works with Linux out of the box. For example, Dell reportedly collaborated with Canonical and Synaptics to get the new touch display working.If anything does go wrong, however, each laptop also comes with one year of Dell professional support, including on-site service after a support tech diagnoses the problem remotely.In addition, the machines come with Dell's Profile Tool and its software for deploying applications to the cloud, for which the Sputnik team stepped up their development efforts earlier this month.The new Sputnik model replaces the old one and it's available for preorder in the US beginning on Friday for $1,249 with a Core i5 and a 128GB SSD or $1,549 with a Core i7 and 256GB. Preorders will open to Canada next week, and as it stands now, the machines are expected to begin shipping on December 16.
UK and European customers will be able to order the systems, too, but a little later, and they will only be able to get the higher-end, Core i7 version. Dell will begin taking orders from the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland by the end of November, with Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden to follow in December.Even as Dell prepares to start shipping these latest XPS 13–based machines, however, its engineers are already working on finding another Dell model that could form the basis of a new, even more powerful Linux laptop.The Sputnik models have so far been designed with portability in mind, but a vocal segment of Dell's Linux customers have been clamoring for a system with a larger screen and an emphasis on workstation-like power, rather than mobility.To that end, Dell Linux engineer Jared Dominguez has been testing the Precision M3800 with Ubuntu, with promising results. In a nutshell, most of the hardware works with the exception of the SD card reader, but a few items needed some additional software tweaks to function well. You can read his full report here, along with some advice if you want to try it on your own.