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EARTHDATE: April 2, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

Happy Birthday Apple Computers - 30 years old this week. In this day and age it's not all that common to see a tech firm riding the crest of a wave on its 30th birthday. Come to that, it's not that often we see a tech firm lasting 30 years. The only other one that comes readily to mind is Microsoft, who may have more money than Apple, but are well on the way to being four years late with their latest version of Windows.

Apple on, the other hand, are launching new and derivative successful hi-tech devices at a rapid fire rate. Long may they continue to introduce style and class into the grey box milieu!

Good news for coders. It's official - coders like coding to music! Microsoft surveyed UK developers and discovered that 80 per cent liked listening to music when they coded. The most popular music category was 'rock' (multitude of sins covered in that category). Least liked was rap and hip-hop (29 per cent) followed by country music (12 per cent), ambient (9 per cent) and opera (8 per cent). Rock on!

There was a lot more stuff to go in than I expected this week, so let's get down to the nitty gritty...


Shorts:

Sun are not having a lot of success with their 'grid computing' system. First announced in late 2004 it promised to make supercomputing power - in this case thousands of processors - available on the entry of credit card details at the web site. Unfortunately, things didn't turn out to be quite that simple. Apart from the obvious teething problems of making that sort of computing power accessible over the web, the US government took umbrage at the plan.

Apparently the government had got it into their collective heads that terrorists might use their Al-Qaeda corporate credit cards to buy time for designing nuclear weapons. Alternatively, members of the Axis-of-Evil might be tempted to run atomic bomb simulations in their spare time. Sun eventually managed to overcome this by making the grid a US only thing. After all, we all know that the US has no home grown terrorists, don't we?

Finally, all obstacles overcome, the thing went live... only to be hit be a distributed denial of service attack by hackers within hours! I'm not that enamoured of Sun, but you have to feel sorry for them. Maybe they'll have better luck next time.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/21/sun_fires_grid/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/sun_grid_hacked/

"Bring out your dead DVDs." Online service Peerfix have a neat scheme going - trade in your unwanted DVDs for someone else's unwanted DVDs. Using a variant of the peer-to-peer approach, their service allows you to take the old DVDs you have laying around and trade them with someone who wants your DVD and has a DVD you want to watch. And all for a mere 99 cents, plus the cost of postage. Sounds great to me - much better than paying $20 retail for a new version. in fact it's such a good idea, that I don't doubt that the media companies will do their utmost to stop it! I'll let you know what they come up with. In the mean time mosey on down to http://www.peerflix.com/ (that's a digital mosey, of course) where they have a free trial on!

http://www.physorg.com/news12167.html

Good news for console owners - Sony says its forthcoming PS3 console will be region free. Hooray! At last, common sense is starting to prevail. There is, and has never been, any justification for enforced regionalisation in either games or in DVD movies. Will the media companies follow suite? Probably not immediately, though I suspect other third generation consoles may well be forced to follow suit in the not too distant future. Still it's a start - ten house points and a gold star for Sony on this one.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03/24/sony_ps3_region-free/

The EU is introducing a new twist into the battle over computer printers and their consumables. The problem for manufacturers is that there is no profit in printers because of the cut throat nature of the market. So, manufacturers sell the printers cheap and make the toner and ink cartridges expensive to make up their profits. Indeed someone once calculated that inkjet ink was more expensive, drop for drop, than vintage champagne!

This, of course, rapidly led to third party suppliers who make a nice profit undercutting the inflated prices of the printer manufacturers. The manufacturers retaliated with scare stories about third part products damaging the machinery, and when that failed, by making the cartridges more difficult to duplicate.

For the last year or so there has been an ongoing arms race on this front with the manufactures making cartridges more and more difficult to manufacture and refill, and the third party suppliers resorting to ever more ingenious strategies to get round the problem. The situation is currently that at the bottom end of the inkjet market it is often cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy a new set of cartridges from the manufacturer...

Enter the EU, stage left, with a directive demanding that printers be properly recycled, and that cartridges be refillable. Ooops! The more complex the cartridges are, the less easy it is to refill them. The less complex, the easier it is for third party suppliers to refill them. A nice neat catch 22 for the printer manufacturers to resolve. More on this issue as things evolve.

(Source: paper version of Computing trade magazine)


Roundup: More Microsoft tribulations

I reported in the last issue at some length on Microsoft's decision to delay the launch of the new Windows operating system, Vista, until next year. Since then it has added Virtual Server to Vista and Office 2007. Like Vista, Virtual Server was supposed to ship at the end of this year. It is a product intended to compete with VMware and the open source Xen, allowing a single computer to be partitioned into multiple virtual machines. This delay means that Microsoft will have no competing product for at least another year. Not good.

Piling on the woes, a new critical Internet Explorer (IE) bug has come to light. Microsoft admits it could put PCs and data at risk (see my comments last week about why a bug in this application can bring down the whole operating system). However, they have yet to issue a fix, and are instead advising customers to avoid untrusted web sites. Gee! Thanks Microsoft! Just as well I use Firefox as my browser.

Still on the subject of IE, Microsoft has created a bug database for IE7, which it is encouraging people to add public feedback to. This is something of a departure for Microsoft, and a welcome one at that. However, one should not exactly jump for joy. You have to use the notorious Microsoft Passport to access the site, and you can't post about security or about earlier versions of IE. Oh, and btw, IE7 is only available in beta - as far as I'm aware it doesn't get properly released until next year with the much delayed Vista. Perhaps we should give Microsoft one star for trying...

Microsoft and the EU are still talking about Microsoft's failure to meet the terms of the EU anti-trust ruling, and now the US mission to the EU has sent a letter to the EU Competition Commissioner, saying it would have 'substantial concerns' if Microsoft was being treated unfairly. Interesting. I wonder who defines 'unfairly'? We shall see.

Well that's not all, but it's enough about Microsoft for one issue. If you want to know more, browse through the URLs.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/ms_virtual_delays/
http://www.physorg.com/news63040772.html
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/evQw0FypUC0FrX0EO1M0AQ
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/vista_eu_antitrust/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1877123-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/another_ie_security_flaw/
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=118838C:1F69382


Homework: Artificial Intelligence

ZDNet recently ran a three part series about artificial intelligence (AI), which makes interesting reading for the non-specialist. The first part is a brief history of AI research, while the second looks at where we are now, and the final part takes a look at what is likely to be coming up in the foreseeable future.

AI in the 1980s was a bit like Dot Com in the 1990s - overhyped and unable to deliver on its grossly inflated promises. When the bubble burst at the start of the 1990s, and funding, both government and private, dried up, AI settled down to a more mundane existence, and we are now starting to see the fruits of that research into specialist areas, rather than grandiose plans to produce a machine that passes the Turing Test.

This is an excellent summary of the field. Recommended.

http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/112353/921984/109309/0/
http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/112353/921984/109310/0/
http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/112353/921984/109311/0/


Technologies to Watch:

InPhase Technologies have reported that they have achieved a data recording density of 515 Gigabits per square inch. That's the highest achieved by a commercial technology, so far. InPhase plan to deliver a holographic drive later this year. This first generation drive will have a capacity of 300 GB on a single disk, with a 20MB per second transfer rate. Wow! My first hard drive was only 10MB total capacity - everything on it would have transferred in half a second! Future plans include drives ranging from 800GB to 1.6 Terabytes (TB). Just think: over 100 DVDs on a single holo disk - assuming you can find 100 DVDs worth watching, that is :)

http://www.physorg.com/news12169.html

E-paper micro capsule technology is poised to hit the big time. The technology relies on tiny globes of plastic that can have their state changed from black to white by an electric field. Once changed they stay the correct colour until a new field is applied. This means that unlike traditional LCD screens they only require power when changing, not once they've changed.

Add this technology to the ongoing tendency towards smaller, longer lasting power sources, and you finally have a recipe for e-book readers to be convenient enough, and clear enough, to be practical. E-books have long been a staple of Sci-Fi, but currently, they've never been able to compete with paper and ink for cheapness, convenience, and clarity. I suspect this is about to change.

http://www.physorg.com/news62943824.html

And talking of batteries, MIT researchers have come up with a new way of storing power using capacitors based on nanotechnology. Capacitors store charge on a pair of conducting plates separated by an insulator. The charge a capacitor can hold is proportional to the surface area of the plates. What the MIT researchers have done is to massively increase the area of the plates by lining them with carbon nanotubes stacked vertically on the surface of the plates.

The new style capacitors have 1,000 times the power density of conventional batteries, and 10,000 that of fuel cells. Commercialisation is estimated to be three to five years away, but the technique is one to watch.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/84646/batteries-to-get-boost-from-nanotechnology.html


Geek Toys:

Fancy yourself as a cypherpunk? I have just the toy for you, if you hurry. A nearly mint condition German WWII Enigma coding machine is up for auction on eBay. The closing date for the auction is tomorrow, Monday 3 April, so you need to get in fast to secure it.

It is the three wheel version, rather than the four wheel naval version, and comes with two spare code wheels. And it's in full working order. All you need is a mate with another one and you can exchanged coded messages with one another. Whether they will be secure is, of course, a different matter!

When Hugh Sebag-Montefiore's book about Enigma came out in paperback I did a review. The review is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/reviews/enigma.html if you are interested in the subject.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/enigma_for_sale/


Scanner - Other Stories:

Happy 30th Birthday Apple Computers
http://ct.cnet-ssa.cnet.com/clicks?c=1905430-7863277&brand=cnet-ssa&ds=5&fs=0
http://www.physorg.com/news63006815.html
http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?c=1911742-7863277&brand=news&ds=5&fs=0APPLE

Fujitsu's 200GB serial ATA hard drive for notebooks
http://www.physorg.com/news62777354.html

EU calls on members to close digital divide
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2153036/eu-calls-members-close-digital

Panasonic Blu-ray player to cost 'under $1,500'
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03/29/panasonic_dmp-bd10_pricing/

GPL 1, FUD 0 in court decision
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060320201540127

Metered web services - a new business model
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=117A8FC:1F69382

eBay in Supreme Court test of patent system
http://www.physorg.com/news62861894.html

Data theft: Suffering in silence
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1888031-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

UK 'Transformational Government' IT plan
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/features/2145782/strategy-set-transform

Richard Stallman: "The Future of Free Software"
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060330094249412

U.K. Biometric ID cards face questions
http://www.physorg.com/news62943442.html

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
2 April 2006

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


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