WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Congratulations to Macy's on the spectacular July 4th fireworks display on the Hudson river yesterday. Hope all my American readers enjoyed their Independence Day festivities, even in these straightened times.
And since it's now the 5th, on with the business of winding down...
Shorts:
Probably the most impressive launch of the week was that of the IT dashboard for US citizens (non-US citizens can also play with it, but will eat their hearts out because they've got nothing like it in their own countries). What Uncle Sam's IT dashboard does is to allow citizens of the USA to find out, visually, what the federal government has been doing with the tax dollars it spent on IT projects.
This is a massive, and true (as opposed to propaganda) increase in open, transparent, government. The dashboard has been designed with flair and imagination and allows online manipulation of the figures to produce different charts and figures - including whether the projects are behind schedule. The video URL shows it in use.
Awesome! All it needs now is for my own secretive and manipulative government to follow suit - some chance...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fe39dh6xFQ&eurl=http://it.usaspending.gov/&
feature=player_embedded
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/uncle-sams-it-dashboard-your-tax-
dollars-work-778?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-07-01
Oh no! Amazon are at it again. They've just filed a patent for a syste m of sticking adverts into print on demand books. I can just see it now, I'm reading a print on demand detective novel. We're coming up to the denouement, and the detective, who has been working massive amounts of overtime, is taken out for a romantic candle-lit dinner at a very classy French restaurant by her husband. During the meal something will happen that triggers the solution in the mind of the detective.
The dinner is lovingly described in detail, an aperitif, kir royal, then the starter, foie gras with a smidgen of shaved truffle and a glass of Barsac. Next, a wine, a 14 year old Margaux, is tasted, accepted, and poured, and after a few minutes of idle conversation, the main course arrives - chateaubriand, with fresh green beans (served al-dente, of course) and dauphinoise potatoes. The steak is prefect, and a silence descends on the diners as they savour the food.
Suddenly, the detective sits bolt upright, "Of course, that's how they did it," she blurts out. You turn the page to get the benefit of her revelation, and what do you find? An advert for McDonalds...
Lets hope this patent is one bright idea that falls by the wayside!
http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=
PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=
%2220090171750%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20090171750&RS=DN/20090171750
Here's an interesting, and somewhat alarming proposal for the use of GPS technology. It seems that with the combination of the depression - sorry mustn't mention that word, how about 'severe recession' - and expensive gasoline, people are actually moving towards driving more fuel efficient cars.
Sounds good, but every silver lining has an attached dark cloud. And in this case the dark cloud is a loss of taxation revenue due to people buying less fuel! So a US federal commission, set up a couple of years ago, has been looking at alternatives to simply jacking up the tax on each gallon of gasoline. After a two year study, the 15-member National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission has come to the unanimous conclusion that the best way to raise funds for highways and transportation projects was to bill cars by the mile travelled.
And, of course they want to use GPS to do it. Which means that the authorities will have a record of everywhere you have travelled in your car. I suppose, logically, it is the only solution. I mean fitting pre-payment meters to everyone's car is just not a goer. "Honey, have you got some quarters in your purse? I think we are going to run out of road tax before we reach the mall..."
I'll be interested to see what goes when this plan becomes a little more widely publicised!
http://www.kansascity.com/business/story/1299981.html
There was good news for Manchester, England, motorists this week. An infection of the city's computers with the Conficker malware earlier this year, meant that it was unable to issue 1,609 parking tickets within the statutory limit of 28 days. That saved motorists fines totaling some 43,000 UK pounds (about US$70,000). The Conficker worm, which caused the entire system to go offline, is reckoned to have cost the city some 1.5 million UK pounds (about US$2.5 million) to sort out.
There is no truth in the rumour that police are searching for a hacker with lots of cars and no off-street parking!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/01/conficker_council_infection/
Ah yes. And while we are in the UK let's talk Google. Google Earth to be precise. It seems that koi carp rustlers in the Humberside area are using Google Earth to identify ponds that would be suitable for their activities. The gang strike at night after casing the joint via Google Earth photographs, making off with the expensive fish, and the classy (and also expensive) equipment used to keep the pond environment suitable for koi carp.
I'm beginning to wonder just how much we are eventually going to regret this playful little wheeze called Google Earth.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/29/carp_rustlers/
Still on this side of the pond, an announcement this week means we are soon coming to the end, at least in Europe, of the necessity of keeping loads of different cell phone chargers. With a little encouragement (backed up by a big stick) from the EU, the cell phone manufacturers have agreed on a specification for chargers that means that you will, eventually, be able to charge all phones off the same charger. Well, actually 90% of them. I'll let you guess who's not involved (and no, it isn't Microsoft).
The standard comes in with new phones next year, and by 2012 it's hoped, given the rate at which people junk phones for new varieties, most phones will use the charger.
This is a good step forward, so I'd now like to make some suggestions, for other basic failures in mobile phones that need rectifying. First of all I want good quality sound, with a user settable volume, when I'm talking to other people. I also want full-duplex, so that when both sides of the conversation talk at the same time, one side or the other isn't cut out, and finally, I want the delay eliminated, as far as is possible, within the laws of physics.
None of these requests are technologically beyond the realms of possibility - they've been available on land lines for nearly a century, so let's have them on white hot heat of technical revolution brand new mobile phones. And if this means that, in order to keep the price within reasonable bounds, you have to junk my ability to have the ringtone set to play the 1812 Overture in full polyphonic sound when the bank manager rings me up about my overdraft, so be it.
http://www.eetimes.eu/uk/218101720
Homework:
Oh Wow! Here's something to keep an eye out for. Associate Press (AP), have just discovered a forgotten archive of historical film footage from the 1960s and 70s.
The archive includes color film recordings of a young Yasser Arafat, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi immediately after taking power, Richard Nixon with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro meeting Latin American and Eastern European leaders, as well as a young Saddam Hussein in Paris.
It seems the stuff has been sitting in a bunker in central London - the very bunker from which Eisenhower directed the D-Day landings. Why you would put films in a Second World War bunker, I have no idea. The films are in good nick, but AP is having to work hard to recover the associated documentation, which is scattered over the UK and the US. Recovery of the documentation is necessary to accurately identify the films before they are digitised. Once this stuff becomes available it should be a treasure trove for researchers.
There's something about looking at the original material, that sets it completely apart from just reading a book. When I was at college, researching for an extended essay, I was allowed to look at the University's archive of 'North Star' newspapers, the oldest in England. The security involved meant I was locked into a sort of cage, in the underground stacks of the library, with just a desk and the bound volumes.
While turning the pages of the 1825 issue, I came across a report of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway. This was the first passenger railway in the world. It was an incredible feeling, sitting there, reading the story in a faded and brittle newspaper that was issued at the time the event took place!
So, I really want to see this new film material - direct from my youth - see the light of day.
http://www.physorg.com/news165765844.html
http://www.railcentre.co.uk/stockton/opening.htm
In another discovery, NASA has got its hands on a number of boxes of notebooks belonging to German V2 rocket scientist and former head of the Marshall Space Flight centre Wernher von Braun. They are appealing to the public to help them with ideas for the best way to analyse and electronically catalog these notebooks.
Those of you old enough to remember the songs of Tom Lehrer will be aware that the notes only contain information about rockets going up...
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/nasadata-2/
http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/t/tom_lehrer/wernher_von_braun.html
Did you know that mobile computing started around 1968? Yes, I kid you not. OK, you couldn't actually take the computers with you - they were rooms full of valves and early discrete transistors and massive air conditioners (some things never change), but you could, after suitable weight training, take your teletype with you!
Technologizer has a picture of a case you could use to lug the 60-70 pound teletype around. I think suitcase would have been a more accurate description, and you could buy wheels for it as an optional extra.
Once you set up the teletype you could dial in to the mainframe using a 75bits/second acoustic coupler, which was a sort of rubber mask that fitted over the telephone handset. Ah, those were the days...
http://technologizer.com/2009/07/04/the-laptop-circa-1968/
A minute's silence, please for the last rites for CompuServe, granddaddy of all the online services. The CompuServe consumer online service went online in 1979, although it had been around as a commercial service for the previous ten years. For many years it was the dominant service, in spite of a somewhat user indifferent, if not actively hostile, interface. It also cost an arm and a leg to use, which is why I could never afford to try it out.
Eventually, its usage declined in the face of the dot com boom, and it was eventually bought by AOL (I've no idea why they wanted it, it was the complete antithesis of everything they stood for), who allowed it to spend its declining years in peace. The most recent version of its client interface is dated 1999. So, farewell then, CompuServe, passing with a whimper, not a bang. As the average man in the blogosphere would say, "CompuServe? Is it still going?".
http://paperpc.blogspot.com/2009/06/compuserve-classic-so-long-old-friend.html
Reader Jason sent me a URL to a fascinating snippet indicating that Twitter users buy 77 percent more digital music than the non-twits. It doesn't really surprise me, you can't get much digital music into 140 8-bit ASCII words (that's only 1,120 noughts and ones), so they would have to go and buy it elsewhere.
Winding Down Warning: The story pointed to by this URL contains well in excess of 140 words
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3826536/Twitter+a+Boon+for+
Digital+Music+Sales.htm
Geek Toys:
This is not so much a toy as robots jamming. Scientific American has a piece on a forthcoming album currently being recorded by Michael Hearst of the band One Ring Zero. The fascinating thing about the music is that the instruments are all robots that play themselves. It's difficult to explain in words, since it's music! Have a look at the video and the slide show, to see for yourself.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=michael-hearst-lemur-robots&sc
=CAT_INNO_20090703
Scanner: Other Stories
Amazon.com dumps North Carolina affiliates
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/29/amazon_dumps_north_carolina_affiliates/
Comics artist Mark Sable detained for 'Unthinkable' acts
http://sfscope.com/2009/05/comics-artist-mark-sable-detai.html
Cablevision remote DVR stays legal: Supremes won't hear case
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/06/cablevision-remote-dvr-stays-
legal-supremes-wont-hear-case.ars
DARPA: Can we have a one-cabinet petaflop supercomputer? With 'self-aware OS' so anyone can program it, please
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/darpa_supercomputer_slim_size/
London Stock Exchange to abandon failed Windows platform
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_
windows_platform
UK Police officers 'told to use Wikipedia when preparing for court'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/wikipedia/5726944/
Police-officers-told-to-use-Wikipedia-when-preparing-for-court.html
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
4 July 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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