The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 20, 2009

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

Well it took somewhat longer than was intended to get this copy to the Winding Down starved masses! A combination of summer hols, broken computers and real life late working, meant that Winding Down was off the air for an extra week. But we are back, and hopefully we will be able to resume publishing on a weekly basis!

I'd like to wish a slightly belated Happy Birthday to the Internet. This month marks its 40th birthday. On 2 September 1969, at a lab in the University of California, Los Angeles, a pair of computers passed test data through a 15-foot gray cable. A month later Stanford Research Institute joined the fledgling ARPANET network. UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah joined by years end, and the internet net was born.


Shorts:

I see that Hasbro and Google have got together to try to simultaneously monetise Google maps and push the forthcoming release of the digital version of Monopoly by inventing an online version. ' Monopoly City Streets' attempts to turn Google maps into a giant Monopoly board, where you can buy up chunks of streets, and develop them.

Unfortunately, they seem to have failed to employ anyone on the project who knows anything about online game design. Apart from the usual problems of overloaded servers being unable to handle the initial rush, they have tampered with the Monopoly design to allow players to destroy one another's buildings. They have also introduced a rule that says that if you don't reply to an offer from another player to buy your property, then after a certain time you are deemed to have accepted the offer. If you want to play this game, don't go on holiday!

Those who didn't manage to get in before the account creation servers slowed to a crawl found that when they did get there, all the prime property was taken by players who did get in early. This annoyed the late comers so the game was reset. That annoyed the early comers!

Is there anyone left to annoy? Not an auspicious start for a clueless game team.
http://www.monopolycitystreets.com/
http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com/
http://www.mymonopolycitystreets.info/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/09/monopoly_city_streets_google_maps/

And talking of Google maps, I see that it is still tagging some shops with the phone numbers of their rivals. Actually it is more pervasive than that. My other half was recently trying to get a map of the area of London around Piccadilly tube station (that's the London subway for my US readers). Google maps kept coming up with the area around the nearby Leicester Square, where there was a business with the word 'Piccadilly' in the name.

The problem is that Google is using one of its famed algorithms to figure these things out, and it appears to be over-clustering the data by pulling together things that are closely related physically or by name. While that might be acceptable for things like the Piccadilly case, it's clearly not acceptable to give people competitors' phone numbers.

However, it's likely that Google don't even know that there's a problem, since their Mountain View fastness has no communication facilities with humans. If you write to them you will get an answer (if at all) from one of their programs, giving you the nearest matching answer it can find.

The whole process reminds me of something I encountered many years ago when I was working on a DEC10 belonging to a well known salary processing company. The machine suffered system crashes at intervals, but no one ever seemed to do anything about it.

When I enquired about this, it was explained to me that management had decided that when a machine crashed, as part of the restart the operator had to enter a code to specify what had caused the crash. Each month management went through the records and prioritised what needed to be fixed first.

Sounds good. Except that the system development people wrote the start up program and they made sure that you couldn't enter a code that indicated a system crash! Funnily enough, the company closed up its European operation a year or so later...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/17/google_maps_glitch/

Ever wondered what sort of information the US Department of Homeland Security keeps about your travel? Apparently, it is possible to find out, and one anonymous person has allowed an annotated version of his (or her) info to be posted to the web.

The information includes credit card, IP address, hotel, personal, airline, cruise ship itinerary, and home and business phone number info. It also included every frequent flyer and hotel number associated with the subject, even ones that haven't been used for that reservation.

I expect this sort of crass behaviour from the UK's big brother state, but I was stunned to find out that the US government also watches the private business of its citizens in this way.
http://philosecurity.org/2009/09/07/what-does-dhs-know-about-you

Do you use Verizon for your mobile telecoms? If so, you will probably be interested in a piece on Infoworld about overcharging. It seems that Verizon have a nasty habit of including small (US$1.99) data usage charges on many of their bills. If you query it, then they will be told that you must have 'accidentally' accessed the internet for a single minute.

Actually, this often turns out not to be the case. It seems that some people get charged $1.99 for a contact backup service (whatever that is) in spite of the fact that it's free! Time to pull out all the old bills, and check them out!
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/verizon-billing-error-may-be-rampant-
852?source=IFWNLE_nlt_gripe_2009-09-01

And while we are on the subject of telecoms operators, South Africa's Telkom ISP is somewhat red faced after is was discovered that it was faster to send 4GB of data by carrier pigeon than to use its service!

An IT outfit, Unlimited IT, dispatched Winston, an 11 month old pigeon from its call centre in Howick to its Durban office, 60 miles away. The data was stored on a memory stick attacked to the pigeon's leg. At the same time a download of the same data was started.

The pigeon took one hour and eight minutes to make the journey, and it took another hour to retrieve the data from the memory stick. At this stage a mere four percent of the same data had arrived over the broadband connection!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/10/pigeon_v_broadband/


Homework:

Earlier this month there was an interesting report circulating in various journals about monopoles. Those of you young enough to remember your school days will recall that magnets always come in pairs - a north and a south. Monopoles are either north or south, and unpaired with their opposite. They were predicted in 1931 by the legendary theoretical physicist, Paul Dirac, but have never been seen (his other great prediction, the positron, was discovered four years later).

Now scientists have discovered something that is, if not a monopole, something very close to it. Using a form of matter called spin-ices the scientists have created something very like the fabled monopole. It's not quite there, but it's very close and may soon prove to be a way of separating out the elusive beast.

In the mean time, players of my online Federation 2 game have been happily hauling 75 ton shipping containers of the stuff around the solar system and the galaxy for the last 23 years!
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/904/1
http://www.ibgames.net/index.html
http://www.ibgames.net/fed2/guide/trading/commod.html

The Economist has an interesting piece about Andy Grove, the former boss of Intel. The article covers Mr Grove's views on government bail-outs, risk taking and patents, and the ideas he expresses make refreshing reading. Well worth your time to read it.
http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=
14299624&subjectID=348909&fsrc=nwl

The US National Security Agency has helped create a list of the 25 most dangerous coding errors. To me the interesting thing was that over half of them were web coding errors, while a number of the others could be both web or traditional program errors.

This is interesting. I wouldn't say that programmers writing non-web based applications are in the clear - far from it. However, having worked with both types I'm definitely left with the feeling that web programmers are much more laissez-faire about their coding practices.

Most of the time the assumption seems to be that the code is only going to be there for a few months, and then it will be replaced, so there is no need to do it properly.

There are two things about this. First it takes only a few seconds connection to the internet for a machine to be compromised through unsafe code.

Second it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the code is so badly structured that it really is quicker to completely rewrite it than to try and fix the problems! Web programming seems to be the one place where the spirit of the dot com boom still pervades everything.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7824939.stm


Geek Toys:

This isn't really a toy, but I couldn't resist drawing your attention to a web page that gives the true background to how a number of the most famous video games came into existence. The games featured are Arkanoid, Pong, Super Mario, Sonic, and my personal favourite, Tetris.

I'm not going to spoil it by telling you, just click on the URL.
http://amusement.fr/index.php?/gallery/made-of-myth/

While I'm recommending URLs but not telling you what they are, take a peek at the URL for this story. Geeks will appreciate it - especially sysadmin geeks! (Note: you will probably have to enlarge the pic to read the detail.)
http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/ticket.gif

All geeks know how to order take-away pizza, but how many of you know how to cook food on your own? Hands up. Hmm... Not very many hands there, so here's a little something for those of you who can't cook - Cooking in C++: Ground Beef with Bell Peppers.

The recipe follows good programming practice, with re-usable functions such as init_meat(). I'm sure you will all find it immensely useable and easy to follow.
http://knol.google.com/k/usman-ismail/cooking-in-cground-beef-with-bell-pepers
/34oprzanmpe7q/ 12#

And while we are on about nibbly things, I'd like to warn you about the potential for injury of something the English call 'biscuits'. My US friends should note that in England biscuits are what you call cookies. What you call biscuits is something entirely different.

A recent survey has revealed that around 25 million Brits have been injured by biscuits. Significantly, it didn't say what period this covered. Most of the injuries seem to have come from scalding when dunking the biscuit into overly hot beverages, but three percent managed to fall off a chair while reaching for their biscuits. One man actually got stuck in wet concrete while trying to retrieve an errant biccie.

Some biscuits, though, are more dangerous than others. In particular, custard creams have the highest rating on the 'Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation' scale. Never insult a custard cream wielding ninja! On the other hand, I can think of several people who will be relived to hear that Jaffa Cakes came in with the lowest threat rating!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/08/killer_biscuits/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscuit_%28disambiguation%29

And here's something with which you can while away hours of time while you wait for your magnum opus to compile. It's the iconic map of the London Underground (subway) system, with all the station names turned into anagrams. Most people try and spot stations they know and see what they have become. It's addictive, because you then tend to start trying to figure out what the real names of the stations that you don't know are...
http://www.maproom.co.uk/maps/anagrammap.gif


Scanner: Other Stories

Browser speed tests: Chrome 4.0 and Opera 10 take on all challengers
http://lifehacker.com/5352195/browser-speed-tests-chrome-40-and-opera-
10-take-on-all-challengers

When space and art intersect
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1460/1

How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/351331/how-uk-government-spun-136-people-
into-7m-illegal-file-sharers

Did FairPoint fake readiness?
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=278890

Ottawa killed cellphone cost calculator
http://thestar.com/article/688547

World faces hi-tech crunch as China eyes ban on rare metal exports
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6082464/
World-faces-hi-tech-crunch-as-China-eyes-ban-on-rare-metal-exports.html

3D may fall flat
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/08/entelligence-3d-may-fall-flat/


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
20 September 2009

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.


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