By silicon.com, 6 January 2006 11:40
Happy New Year to one and all. The Round-Up hopes you all had a wonderful Christmas and that Santa brought you everything you wanted.
Of course if you didn't like anything, then, in the true spirit of giving and receiving, eBay is currently recommending through its TV advertising that you put all the presents you really didn't like up for auction and buy something you actually do want with the proceeds.
Like a digital SLR camera perhaps. Apple has certainly been advertising one on its website recently for a bargain price of £98.70 and a number of happy shoppers were quick to take them up on the offer.
They would have been even happier if they knew the same camera - the Olympus E-1 - was retailing elsewhere for £600-plus.
Shortly after placing their orders, customers received a confirmation email which made it clear they were benefiting from a £420 discount and they then, apparently, saw the money taken from their cards and bank accounts by Apple.
But if it looks like a sale and it smells like a sale, it's apparently not necessarily a sale, because Apple then reneged on the offer and said the sales had all been cancelled because the camera was no longer available.
That excuse seems a little questionable as shoppers placing the orders had been told in their confirmation emails the item was in stock and ready to ship within 24 hours.
One customer told silicon.com he was even informed by a member of Apple staff that the camera "is no longer made", which would be news to Olympus, for one, who continues to make the camera (and they should know).
All this hoo-hah led many to assume Apple was attempting to cover up for the kind of pricing blunder which has previously caught out online retailers such as Amazon, Argos (twice) and Thai Airways.
Sadly, Apple is petulantly tight-lipped on any issue they don't want to talk about and in this instance the company certainly failed to respond to questions from silicon.com about what had gone wrong.
So we can only assume the company doesn't particularly care.
And for the handful of Apple fanatics who will now write in, teary-eyed, accusing the Round-Up of picking on Apple: 'no', we didn't try to buy the camera and 'yes', we would most certainly, gladly, lay into Microsoft if it also committed the same kind of mistake and subsequently handled it so incompetently.
The other, more reasoned defence of Apple is of course that there will have been shoppers who knew the price was too good to be true and looked to exploit it (some have since admitted trying to buy one for themselves "and one for eBay") but there are also those who, during the January sales, when digital camera prices are falling sharply, will be forgiven for thinking this was a great bargain rather than blunder.
And even if it wasn't a pricing blunder - which still seems the likeliest option - the company is guilty of confirming sales it couldn't honour and failing to remove an unavailable item from its website.
Either way it's not a ringing endorsement of Apple's ability to sell items online.
However, fair's fair and while we think Apple deserves its time on the naughty step for the above we're not sure it quite deserves to be blamed for making kids deaf.
This week, Pete Townshend, the guitarist from The Who (or 'the who?' depending on your age), has joined the growing list of people eager to have their say on why the iPod isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Townshend's own doubts - based he admits on nothing more concrete than his own "intuition" - relate to concerns that iPods may be driving up instances of hearing impairment because of users listening to loud music through their ear buds.
Townshend blames headphone use for damage to his own hearing and expressed fears he won't be the last to suffer, thanks to the booming popularity of the iPod and all digital music, which listeners now enjoy on the move, at their desks and in their home.
Townshend is quoted on the BBC as saying: "Hearing loss is a terrible thing... If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you may be OK. But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead."
He added that headphone use and time exposed to digital music will continue to increase because "the computer is now central to our world".
("Terrible trouble", "child", "computer" and 'Pete Townshend' all appearing in the same paragraph... ? That's all very 2003.)
The Round-Up, in its own humble opinion, feels iPods and other MP3 players are probably taking the rap for users being too inconsiderate to those around them to keep the volume at a level which won't damage their own hearing. But what do we know?
On a related note, the Round-Up is sure many of you will have already heard the major news breaking in the UK political arena, with revelations coming out of the opposition benches.
No, we're not talking about Charles Kennedy's drink problem but rather the altogether more surprising contents of new Conservative leader David Cameron's iPod - a Christmas present from his wife.
Apparently the new Tory Boy on the block likes The Smiths, which is all a little ironic given the fact their brand of miserable pop music was emblematic of the Thatcher-era despondency which engulfed Britain under Conservative rule.
He's also downloaded some of his other faves - such as Blur, Pulp and Radiohead... or at least his image consultant has told him to say that's the case.
Moving on, the inevitable gluttony of Christmas is beginning to put a strain on a number of things in the New Year, not least of all buttons and waistbands.
But the internet itself is also feeling the strain, with searches for diet advice among the fastest growing online queries over the past week.
According to web monitoring firm Hitwise, many staff around the UK - predominantly women - spent much of the first day back in the office looking online for information on how to lose weight. Google meanwhile supported such claims, revealing that 'weight watchers' and 'weight loss' were among the fastest climbers in its own search index.
Heather Hopkins, director of research for Hitwise, said: "Typically, the first day back at work after New Year's celebrations is the busiest day. Resolutions are made and people try to form good habits before they get back into their regular routines."
By now those resolutions have doubtless all been broken but rather than dieting, anybody out there looking to shed some pounds could do worse than get up off their backside and make their colleagues a round of hot drinks.
Research out this week from Canon, whose ulterior motive we'll get to in a second, has revealed that by modifying our office behaviour marginally we can all improve our health considerably.
For example, just 10 minutes each day spent on your feet making hot drinks and ferrying them back to your colleagues will burn around 82 calories. (So you can afford to pop some extra biscuits on the tray.)
And, for those of us in multi-storey buildings the stairs will be our saviour. Climbing the stairs for 10 minutes each day for example will burn more than 100 calories for the average person.
Also, if you can somehow work it into your average day (or if you happen to work in a warehouse, shoe-shop, couriers, post office or stationery store) carrying boxes around for 20 minutes each day will burn 166 calories.
Meanwhile, walking to speak to your colleagues rather than emailing them, and possibly passing by the printer in order to physically hand them a document you may otherwise simply have attached to the email could burn up to 150 calories each day (even more, we presume, if your colleagues happen to work in other cities or countries).
In fact Canon says trips to the printer, and a walk while reading, rather than reading documents on-screen at your desk, is a great idea for staying a little bit healthier (and a fabulous way to kill the planet's few remaining trees).
So use your printer more and you'll be a better person, says printer-maker Canon.
Funny that.
Students of the classics will know, probably better than the Round-Up whose knowledge of this area is patchy at best, that January is named after the Roman god Janus, the gate keeper, whose two faces were believed to be symbolic of his looking forward to the New Year and backward to the year past.
As such it seems fitting that one of the most bizarre stories of the year (a claim which should still stand come December) features the attempted sale of a two-headed animal.
In fact it is a very rare two-headed albino rat snake, called rather wonderfully if a little eerily, 'We', which is being auctioned off by the 'World Aquarium' in the (you are not the 'World') US city of St Louis.
'We' has lived there for the past six years but the aquarium now requires a fundraising boost and has decided that selling off its most unique specimen is the way forward.
And despite claiming the sale is to fund conservation, the aquarium has decided to eschew a responsible restricted sale and has instead expressed its intention to put 'We' on eBay at a reserve of around $150,000 (the poor little mite).
But eBay is having none of it, saying it will take down the lot whenever the aquarium puts it up, as the sale would breach its rules about the sale of animals.
However, of course, the knock-on effect of this is that whether or not the 'World' Aquarium thought it would get away with the sale, the hype which surrounded its intended auction means everybody now knows they have a rather freakish two-headed snake on show, which in turn may be a factor in increasing attendance and raising cash.
Did somebody say publicity sssssstunt?
And finally, speaking of publicity stunts, silicon.com is being inundated each week with emails from witless optimists hoping to repeat the huge success of the 'Million Dollar Homepage' project which was run by Alex Tew and caused something of a sensation last year.
You may remember the Round-Up mentioning Tew's plan to sell 1,000,000 pixels on his website at $1 a pop.
Tew's success is wrong in so many ways but mostly because it is a reflection of our culture and consumer society. You can't blame him for exploiting that and at least it was original... unlike the dozens of wannabes now coming out of the woodwork asking silicon.com to help promote their near-identical ideas.
While they try to spin it differently, essentially they are all saying 'I'd like a million dollars for doing nothing'. Well, stop the presses, wouldn't we all?
Take Anna Elkina, a 22-year-old from Russia, for example. Elkina works for the emergency services in Siberia and contacted us this week.
We can certainly understand that she wants to find a way out. After all, working for the emergency services must have its bleak moments in the most exciting of regions but in Siberia it must really have its 'pass the vodka and razor blades' moments.
However, we really can't promote her project, or even tell you what it's called because we'd never be able to live with ourselves if Anna made her money and left the emergency services, where she is doubtless performing a more worthwhile service than simply ripping off somebody else's idea in the vain hope of stumbling upon an undeserved fortune.
But we would urge everybody else trying to get rich through this idea: 'Please, please do not contact us.' We're not going to write about it and we're not going to put a link on our site.
Until next week the Round-Up is off to graft second heads onto neighbourhood pets and put them on eBay.
How hard can it be?
Comments
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1. Nicky
Inconsiderate not to put picture of said 2 headed rat snake onto the RoundUp! Have enclosed a link below:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=1466711
As an aside, the one sponsored link this yielded was to the eBay website (not to buy the snake itself unfortunately though you can pick up an acrylic painting of said animal for a bargain $55!)