The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 9, 2009

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

August is skive time in the UK. Accordingly I will be skiving off and taking a break for three weeks after next week's issue. I realise this is going to cause serious emotional problems for my loyal readers. Therefore, I recommend that when you open your mail on Sunday morning on 23rd August and discover there is no Winding Down you pour yourself a stiff G&T - Bombay Sapphire or Plymouth gin. Remember, the sun is always over the yardarm somewhere in the world!

So to keep you going for the next week here is a 1,916 word version of Winding Down, which is my compromise between the 140 characters of Twitter, and the 20 page document the UK government produced advising its component parts on how to use Twitter!


Shorts:

Ever tried comparing the prices of hotels on line? The Detroit Free Press did. They looked up the Ft Wayne Marriott hotel for August 19-20 and found that Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline, Travelocity and Cheaptickets.com all quoted $149 before taxes. On the other hand, Hotels.com, Lastminute.com and Marriott.com all quoted $119 before taxes.

Only two prices between eight different booking companies? What's going on?

Well you may think that you were searching for the best price on a bunch of different companies, but in fact after a spate of recent takeovers, a mere four corporations own most of the big online booking sites. The corporations are Expedia Inc., Orbitz Worldwide, Sabre Holdings, and Priceline.com Inc.

It's interesting to see how easily one of the much touted benefits of the internet - the ability to shop around for the best price - can be subverted. If you'd like to see who owns what, take a look at the URL.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009907190311

There have been low key suggestions of exploding iPods around for some time. It's a bit like it was in the period before that picture of an exploding Dell laptop was published. Which is when Dell did a massive recall. In the case of the iPod though it's not just denial on the part of Apple. An article in the London Times OnLine reveals that Apple are trying to make refunds for exploding devices dependant on signing an agreement to keep quiet.

The latest victim, whose daughter's iPod exploded, refused to play ball and instead publicised his experience. Apple seems to be pretty desperate to hush the problems up. A US reporter who applied for 800 pages of documentation on cases from the Consumer Product Safety Commission using the Freedom of Information Act had to wait months to get the documents, because Apple lawyers kept filing for exemptions.

That's not all, in Japan the government warned that the iPod Nanos were a potential fire risk saying that there had been 14 cases in the country where the players had caught fire. I suspect that what's behind this (apart from Apple's normal secrecy and paranoia) is the spectre of being forced to recall all iPods for battery replacement. So far they've sold 173 million iPods worldwide, and that's an awful lot of batteries to replace!
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/personal_tech/
article6736587.ece

Microsoft's new version of its operating system, Windows 7, has been declared ready and complete and has been sent off to the manufacturers to be put onto new machines. Now it looks as though it's going to have to be patched even before it's shipped. Something of a record, even for Microsoft, although I have a vague memory that something similar happened with Vista.

InfoWorld found the problem with one of the disk utilities which under certain, not all that unusual, circumstances can leak memory and crash the system in a matter of seconds. One can only wonder how many other bugs are lurking in the system. I guess we will find out once it's shipped
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/critical-windows-7-bug-risks-derailing-
product-launch-330?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2009-08-05

I was slightly amused to see that the quarterly report from Electronic Arts (EA) reported a net loss of US$234 million. Judging from the report the company was only saved from even more serious losses by the success of it's Sims 3 franchise, which launched on 2 June.

I'm not surprised it's not doing all that well. Over the years it's bought up many of the independent studios and then proceeded to crush their creativity, while relying on producing new versions of its existing catalog. It's difficult to think of the last original game it managed to produce.

I admit I'm biased. This is the company that a few years back interviewed me for a network programming post by giving me a written test of my ability to do 3-D arithmetic. The follow-up interviewing panel knew nothing about network programming, or even what they would do with whoever they appointed. Over the years I've had some very strange interviews, but none of them beat EA for sheer incompetence.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-10303188-235.html?tag=nl.e703

Last week at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas someone tried placing a fake ATM in the hosting hotel. Silly boys. It didn't last too long before it was spotted by the eagle eyed maestros, who called in the local law enforcement. The offending machine was immediately hauled off to the local clink. How the perps thought they could get away with a fake ATM in a conference of 8,000 security professionals, I really don't know - though it would have been a classic heist if they had succeeded!
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136179/Fake_ATM_doesn_t_last_
long_at_hacker_meet


Homework:

The EE Times has an interesting piece on pico projectors. You've never heard of pico projectors? Well you will soon. These are very small projectors (hence the 'pico' sobriquet) which will fit in your hand. More to the point, they are soon expected to be small enough to be built into mobile phones.

Samsung has already shown off a mobile phone containing a pico projector which can show a display at 320x480 pixels. Not exactly high definition, but still pretty impressive.

My take is that the idea that you can show what's on your phone to other people without everyone having to hunch over it will be a real driver - a cool feature loved by the digerati. The analysts think it will appeal mainly to the enterprise market. I disagree. The resolution needs tarting up considerably before it starts to appeal there.

However, in either case the critical issue is going to be size and power consumption. It's no good having this feature if it turns your mobile into a ravenously power hungry brick sized slab!
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219100339&cid=NL_eet
http://www.t3.com/feature/everything-you-wanted-to-know-pico-projectors

The draft for the new version of HTML, known as HTML5, has been released, and some of the browsers are already supporting many of its features. The '9elements' web site has produced a display of the sort of things that are possible using the new audio and video tags. I tried it with Firefox 3.5, and it displayed/played with no problem at all. This is the sort of thing that you could previously only get with Flash plugins, and it's impressive.

Just one thing. Don't waste your time trying to play it with Internet Explorer, Microsoft is only gradually coming round to the idea that it might need to support HTML 5. Not exactly a big surprise...
http://9elements.com/io/?p=153

News Corp are heading for a punch-up with Amazon. Their operating income was over 30 per cent down year on year, something which they announced at a recent press conference. They have already promised that the online versions of their newspapers will start charging soon, and now they are demanding that Amazon hand over the names of the Kindle subscribers to the Wall Street Journal.

I'm not surprised. We had a similar problem with AOL in the late 90s. After it had been running third party games for a year or so, AOL started to realise that the people who played their games didn't consider themselves AOL members but saw themselves as game players who happened to use AOL as an access point. In practical terms it meant that AOL couldn't make any secondary income out of those subscribers. Especially after AOL went flat rate. This realisation was one of the factors that triggered the decision to get rid of all the third party games.

I think the question of who owns subscribers is going to be a much bigger issue (and not just for News Corp) than arguments about how the income is split. Amazon may have some immediate advantage because they are first to market, but eventually the issue will rear its head for potential new providers, and when the initial agreement runs out.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/05/murdochs-ultimatum-to-amazon-
give-us-the-names-or-else/


Geek Clothes:

This is a real 'show your age' piece of clothing. Those of you that played Pac Man in your (misspent) youth will recall two things about it. First that there was an overflow bug in the 256th level (a geekily significant number) that corrupted the right hand half of the screen. Second that the maximum score, if you managed to eat everything on all the other 255 levels, was 3,333,360.

Now you can purchase a T-shirt that figures the 256 level screen, with the score set to 3,333,360. Elegant attire for the discerning (and aging) geek.
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/geeky-clothing-the-256th-level-pac-man-t-shirt/


Scanner: Other Stories

Associated Press will sell you a license to words it has no right to sell
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090803/0344305756.shtml

UK national ID card cloned in 12 minutes
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/08/06/237215/uk-national-id-
card-cloned-in-12-minutes.htm

Mouse trouble: 20 weird pointing device patents
http://technologizer.com/2009/08/05/mouse-patents/

Judge rebukes SCO, blocks sale, appoints bankruptcy trustee
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/08/judge-compares-scos-
litigation-hopes-to-waiting-for-godot.ars


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, DJ, 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
9 August 9009

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! 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.


Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page