WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Seems to have been a relatively quiet week here. Our MPs are all keeping their heads below the parapet, the weather is too hot to indulge in too much in the way of protests, and everyone is packing ready to fly away on their summer holidays...
Your faithful scribe is doing none of these things, he is scouring the internet for stories to bring you. Ahhhh... It's such hard, thankless work. Which reminds me, I'm currently sorting out the material on Microsoft's add-in to Firefox that I promised last week, but I haven't finished it yet, because real life work has rudely intruded into my schedule. I'll let everyone know once it's up on my web site.
And so to this week's take on the news...
Shorts:
Have you ever wondered why you never seem to get the advertised battery life out of your laptop? It's because the tests that show battery life are rigged to produce figures that look better. The standard was created by a consortium of computer makers and other tech companies - like Intel and AMD - called BAPCo. BAPCo's tests involve running the computer with the screens dimmed to between 20 and 30% of full brightness, the WiFi turned off, and the main processor chip running at 7.5% of capacity!
When was the last time you tried to read stuff on a screen running at 20% of its normal brightness? I bet most people have never even tried that, let alone running a word processor with the CPU chugging along at 7.5% of the rated speed. As Newsweek so aptly put it, that's like the auto industry calculating the mileage on their models by running the tests only downhill with the engine idling!
I don't often advocate calling in the lawyers, but this sounds like a really good case.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/202572
The city of Bozeman, MT, made the news last week when it became known that they were making some interesting demands of people applying for jobs with the city authorities. It seems that to even get considered, you would have to "...list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc...".
But that's not all - the application form doesn't just want to know where you post, or watch, it also wants the user names, log-in information and passwords. Yes, passwords too. You really do have to hand over the passwords.
Or, rather, did have to hand over the passwords. Once the story broke, emails decrying the practice started arriving in the email box belonging to the city's attorney at the rate of one a minute, and by 3pm on Friday, the city had backed off, holding a press conference, admitting that the requests "...exceeded that which is acceptable to our community...". The requirement to provide such details was withdrawn with immediate effect.
I guess it just goes to show that the effect of the strong searchlight of publicity on the actions of democratically elected representatives and bodies - as British MPs have also been finding out to their cost these past few weeks - is definitely positive. Oh, and for those, like me, whose first reaction was " Bozeman???", it's to the right of Butte, down a way from Great Falls, and up a bit from the left hand side of Yellowstone National Park, on Interstate 90. Anyone who's played Sid Meyer's 'Railway Tycoon' (original version) will have no difficulty finding it :)
http://montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=10551414
http://montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=10558291
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Bozeman&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:
en-GB:official&client =firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=uk&ei=
7dM9SqO7Oojj-QbM_sHGDA&sa =X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1
Our Post Office parcels delivery division, Parcelforce, has managed to screw up its web site so you can get personal details, including the signature of the person who signed for the parcel. I think we here in the UK can claim a first with this one. While other companies have managed to lose vast quantities of people's personal data before, as far as I'm aware, no one else has handed out digitised customer signatures to go with it.
I laugh at your American TJX, LexisNexis, and Heartland Data Services; we in the UK have Parcelforce, which trumps your puny data breaches!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8107737.stm
IT World has just produced a list of the nine strangest software glitches ever. Nine?? I can only assume that someone in the editorial department has lost a finger (maybe in a gardening accident...). Anyway, the list is worth a read if only for the smirk that's generated as you read about other people's misfortunes. The one you will probably remember happened this year - Google classified every site in the internet, including its own site, as malware, and issued warnings to everyone who used its search engines.
http://www.itworld.com/software/69414/bizarre-bugs-9-strangest-software-glitches-ever
?source=altit
I see that power companies in the US are making a rod for their own backs by rolling out 'smart' meters to millions of homes and businesses. (In case you haven't already figured it out, in the IT business, 'smart' is a euphemism for 'idiotic'.)
The problem is that the meters allow two way communication between electricity users and the power plants. You would have thought that with over a decade of malware to draw lessons from, somebody high up would have been smart enough to suggest that allowing access to the meters from outside was not a smart idea.
Far from it. It seems that not only is the roll out forging ahead, but the firmware in the meters is based on buggy software that is easy to hack. As security consultant Mike Davis put it, "We can switch off hundreds of thousands of homes potentially at the same time. That starts providing problems that the power company may not be able to gracefully deal with." He's right; that sort of level of fast demand change is just the sort of thing that brings down power distribution networks.
This may cause the power companies problems, but I bet it'll be nothing compared with the problems they will have when the resulting class action suits get going! You never know, maybe the power companies will resort to putting 'dumb' meters back in. Well, at least it's an interesting, if expensive job creation scheme - all those workers replacing meters, and those lawyers running class actions kept in business. Yep, maybe it does have something going for it!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/12/smart_grid_security_risks/
It seems the Wikipedia is about to move into the 21 Century, with (Ta da!) video clips. It seems that the organisation's plans to allow users to find, edit, and embed video clips are coming to fruition. I'm sure you can see the potential problems with this bright idea. Hang on to your seats for a fast moving re-run of all the problems they've had with the text stuff to date!
So who's going to post the first Ayn Rand video, I wonder :)
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22900/page1/
I've received a number of requests to report a little more on how British politics work, so here is a quick note about one of this week's little hi-tech shenanigans in Ye Olde England's so-called 'mother of parliaments'.
Here in the UK, something interesting is stirring within the depths of British politics. It's because the ruling Labour Party are due to lose the election next year. At this stage I should just point out that for something like 30 years, no one has actually won an election, the defeated parties have succeeded in losing, by being too awful to contemplate voting for. This was most spectacularly demonstrated in 1992, when Labour leader Neil Kinnock managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
OK, so people here may not particularly want the Tories in power, or even know what they stand for, but they do know that they don't want Labour, with its shambolic leadership and creepy invasive big brother society, back in power. Labour knows this, of course, so they are handing out 'poison pill' contracts for their favourite schemes, like the national identity card scheme, left right and centre, in an effort to tie the hands of an incoming government.
This has often been a favourite tactic of governments on the way out, but this year something different happened. The Tory shadow justice minister has written to the bidders for the national ID card technology contract - IBM, Thales, CSC, EDS, and Fujitsu - telling them quite bluntly that the project will be scrapped immediately the Tories get in.
To say this put a damper on the governement's plans is a mild description! In fact, it was such a dampener that the Home Office (our equivalent of the Justice Department) has actually announced that the contract for this project, originally scheduled to be awarded this autumn, will not be awarded until next year - which, effectively, means after the elections!
http://www.kable.co.uk/chris-grayling-id-card-contracts-conservatives-17jun09
http://www.kable.co.uk/identity-card-contract-delay-18jun09
In the meantime the spin off from the MPs expenses fiasco continues, with the release this week of the 'official', and heavily redacted, version of the expenses claims - all 457,153 pages of them. That's a lot to work through, so the Guardian newspaper has hit on a novel way to deal with the sheer amount of material.
Crowdsourcing!
What the Guardian is doing is simple, and effective. They have placed all the material online, and have provided facilities for anyone to review any part they choose, and tell the Guardian about anything that looks interesting and would warrant further investigation. I wonder what new things this little exercise will turn up?
http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/
Homework:
If you're looking for data to back up the contention that file sharing helps the creators, even if it messes up the business methods of big media, then you may want to look at some recent research by Harvard Business School economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf.
In the paper they point out that file sharing has definitely not discouraged the production of new albums - quite to the contrary. As the paper puts it, "In 2000, 35,516 albums were released. Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008). Even if file sharing were the reason that sales have fallen, the new technology does not appear to have exacted a toll on the quantity of music produced."
And it's not just music. The paper notes similar expansions in the number of books and films produced. Of course, revenue is down - massively down. That's a problem for big media, but not necessarily for the performers and artists, most of whom never got more than a pittance anyway. As long as the creators can find somewhere to show and perform their art, then they can make money that way. In the case of musicians, a number of bands already fund the production of CDs by soliciting advance, paid, orders from their fans. The freshly minted CDs - hot off the presses - are then mailed out to the fans, and sold at gigs and on the internet.
I personally know of at least two bands who do quite well, thank you with this cycle. Marillion, sadly without singer Fish, have been doing this for a few years, while my favourite rockers, The Hamsters, who play more gigs than you've had hot dinners, have been doing that for at least fifteen years. I'm pretty certain that there are many more artists in a similar position.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/ipod/showArticle.jhtml?articleID
=218000206&cid=nl_tw_weekly
http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-132.pdf
When you were at school and doing science, do you remember those colored pictures of the Earth with a slice cut out of it, to show the different layers down to the core. Some of them also showed the Earth's magnetic field being generated by molten iron flowing around the core. It all looked very neat and plausible, and in my class at least was presented as though it was a proven fact.
Actually, it's only a hypothesis. There are no facts, except for the actual existence of the Earth's magnetic field, to back it up, since we can't actually get down there to take a look!
Now a paper in the New Journal of Physics suggests that sea water, rather than molten iron may have something to do with the magnetic field. It's an interesting idea, since sea water, being salt water, is also a conductor of electricity, and there's a lot of seawater around on this planet, unlike, say, Mars, which has no magnetic field.
The author, Professor Gregory Ryskin, has applied equations from magnetohydrodynamics (that's a really nice word, rolls off the tongue) to the oceans' salt water, and has linked variations in the earth's magnetic field to changes in ocean circulation.
It's an interesting idea, and even if the oceans are not the prime mover in creating the Earth's magnetic field, it suggests that they may well have a profound effect on the shape and intensity of the field.
http://www.iop.org/News/news_35352.html
Geek Toys:
Ever wanted a real chunk of gold for yourself? Fly to Frankfurt - the airport there has gold on sale in vending machines! It's currently 30 euros for a 1 gram wafer, 245 euros for a 10 gram bar, or, if you want to be really fancy, you can buy gold coins. Germans have long been interested in holding some of their personal wealth in gold, unsurprising when you think of the hyperinflation in the 1920s.
For those whose school history books failed to mention it, the situation was so black that in 1923 the republic was issuing two-trillion Mark banknotes and postage stamps with a face value of fifty billion Marks! Workers were being paid daily with a wheelbarrow full of paper money. No wonder people rushed to get their hands on gold . Things like that bite deep into the national psyche, even though most people who can remember it from personal experience are dead now.
Going back to the vending machines, one of the more interesting things about them, is that the prices for the gold are updated to reflect market prices every few minutes. Mind you, there is a mark-up of 30%, so even if you had some red hot arbitraging algorithms, you probably wouldn't be able to make any money playing the vending machine market!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5554972/Gold-sold-like-
chocolate-from-German-vending-machines.html
Scanner: Other Stories
Fifteen classic PC design mistakes
http://technologizer.com/2009/06/14/fifteen-classic-pc-design-mistakes/
Study: PowerPoint animations are comprehension killers
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/06/study-powerpoint-animations-are-comprehension-killers.ars
Virgin to offer unlimited, DRM-free music
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/15/virgin_universal_unlimited/
The next generation of gaming consoles
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31331241
Senators challenge AT&T's exclusive iPhone deal
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/06/18/senators-challenge-ts-exclusive-iphone-deal
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
21 June 2009
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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