The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 10, 2011

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

Something of a celebration this week. It's Winding Down's 400th issue - not bad for a piece of unpaid journalism! I have to confess that when I wrote the first issue, the week before 9/11, I certainly didn't expect it to last this long. Perhaps a year or so was my intention. Somehow though, it seems to have lasted quite a long time...

So, I'd like to say a thank you to those who've written in to me with snippets, mistakes, brickbats and bouquets. Remember, every bit of work I can trick someone else into doing gives me free time to indulge myself in other activities.

Over the years there've been quite a few changes in the net. If I was a real hack, I would save myself a lot of work and produce a 'best of' issue. But I won't for two reasons. One because I'm not a typical hack. Two because all my work is 'best of', As I'm sure you will agree! (Any correspondence disagreeing will be immediately discarded.) If you really want to see what I've written over the years, the archives are here.

And for this week, another piece of analysis, with a few cautionary tales of times past thrown in...


Analysis: A cloud for all seasons

Most of you have probably heard of the 'Cloud' by now. For those who haven't, it refers to massive quantities of computing and storage power accessed via the Internet. The weird name comes from the way network engineers use a sketch of a cloud to represent the Internet on their network diagrams.

There has been a lot of buzz about the cloud, but up until recently it's mostly been about businesses using the cloud to smooth out fluctuating loads. This is possible because you only pay for what you use in the cloud.

For instance, Green Man Gaming, where I work, is giving away three free games* this weekend, and our usage has gone up by several orders of magnitude, so we fired up a bunch more web servers to handle the extra load. That was on Friday. Tomorrow morning (Monday) we will kill them off, because the offer ends. We will only pay for the storage and processing we used during the three days. The alternative would have been to buy extra servers ourselves which would cost us capital up front, and result in them being completely idle except for a few days each year.

It took a while for businesses to be convinced, and most applications need at least tweaking, if not some rewriting to run in the cloud, but businesses, especially startups, are starting to make fairly steady inroads into the cloud. The result of this is that the cloud vendors (who are all the usual suspects, Amazon, Google, and Co) are starting to look for new markets.

The one they have identified is consumers with smart gadgets. As these gadgets gain more and more of their owners' vital information, why not have them backed up to storage in the cloud? And that's what all the latest razzmatazz is about.

There are, though, two problems. One is the perennial problem of payment. The fact is that people don't like paying for mere services. I know we online service types are generally considered to be a dodgy bunch but it's not just that. People like something physical for there money. They will happily pay for a USB stick or an external hard drive to do back up, but wibble about paying just as much for online back up.

Years ago, when I worked for the Commodore 64 UK network, Compunet, we were getting nowhere selling modems with a free subscription to our service. My then boss had a brilliant idea - sell the subscription and give away a free modem with every subscription. The cost was the same whichever way you did it. Now, however, we could not open the boxes of modems fast enough. People went away happy because they got a freebie they could get their hands round and fondle! The intangible 'subscription' had no meaning, a modem you could see and hold did.

The other problem is a little more subtle. The whole premise of consumer continuous backup to the cloud relies on unlimited bandwidth. However, consumer unlimited bandwidth, especially uploading bandwidth, is exactly what the phone companies, cable carriers, and ISPs are currently fighting to eliminate, because it screws up their business model. How likely are people to use constant backup facilities when they have to pay significant amounts of hard cash to bandwidth to handle that back-up.

My time with Compunet holds a lesson on this issue as well. When Compunet was running, back in the 1980s, phone calls in the UK (even local ones) were charged by the minute. I once worked out that for every penny the average user paid Compunet, they were paying the telco 5 pennies. The heavy users (mainly people using the chat and playing multi-player games) would have quarterly phone bills in excess of 600 UK pounds. Their quarterly subscription to Compunet was about 25 UK pounds. An extreme case, maybe, but it gives some indication of the problems faced by the cloud vendors.

So can the vendors make money out of it? Not directly, I suspect, but they might be able to make the service fly as part of a more integrated system - the one to watch on this is Google (who else!). We shall see, only time will tell.
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/excited-about-the-cloud-get-ready-for-capped-data-plans/
http://www.64apocalypse.com/compunet/compunet.htm (Federation 2 players, see if you can spot the young Hazed in the photos section...)

*OK, OK, for those of you who like freebies... The games are Arma II, a first person shooter and military simulator, Men of War, a strategy title, and Tower Bloxx Delux, an amusing little puzzle game. Go here <http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/fun/gaming/3681414/Games-for-gratis.html> to get the voucher codes, and then here <http://www.greenmangaming.com/> and click on the Sun Readers box to get to the games. Note that these are all digital downloads, so you need a decent bandwidth link.


Shorts:

I was fascinated to read the results of a couple of surveys done recently. It seems that Facebook is hated more than the Bank of America. And you can add to that the fact that a different survey indicated that mobile providers are considered less trustworthy that banks! Given the all time low reputation of banks after their prominent role in the recent financial crisis, this is no mean achievement. No wonder Facebook is hemorrhaging US users like there is no tomorrow. And the irony is that I don't even have to write a piece about why this is the case. Anyone who uses them knows why.

Clearly there is something rotten in the state of the online market.
http://www.itworld.com/software/178661/facebook-really-hated-more-bank-america
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/06/21/mobile_providers_more_untrustworthy_than_bankers/

Our leaders in the EU are a technically illiterate bunch, as ignorant as you could find anywhere in the world. Recently they decided, in their ignorance, that it would be a good wheeze to force EU web sites to display notices about their use of cookies. Ignoring all reasoned arguments from people who do know, they forged ahead with this, and the whole thing became law, in the UK at least, last month. Our 'Information Commissioner's Office' (ICO) produced advice on what was needed - a document clearly knocked together by the office junior following a quick scan of Wikipedia.

Fortunately, someone in the office had the sense to allow a year's grace period before the enforcement sets in - I guess this is how long they reckon it will take to figure out what cookies are all about. In the mean time, they (quite commendably, actually) decided to set an example, by displaying one of the notices they are going to require on the front page of their site.

Now a canny member of the public has made a Freedom of Information request asking for details of their web site usage before and after the notice was put up. Surprise, surprise, usage had dropped by 90%! So much for their assurances that everyone who opposed the cookie directive was massively over-reacting...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14016794
http://www.ico.gov.uk/about_us/how_we_comply/disclosure_log/~/media/documents/disclosure_log/IRQ0397602.ashx

I see the Swiss have a new political party. It's the Anti-PowerPoint Party (APPP). They are campaigning for 100,000 signatures to get a referendum banning the use of Power Point in Switzerland, so far they have 245 signatures...

But, as The New York Times warned last year in an essay on the U.S. military’s use of incomprehensible slide presentations to convey its strategy: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.” Hey, maybe these guys have a point.
http://www.macworld.com/article/160931/2011/07/antipowerpointparty.html


Homework:

No homework this week - you can all take an evening off and play WoW...


Geek Toys:

Chair wheels. Let's face it, for geeks used to wheeling themselves in their chairs between monitors, the usual castors don't really cut it. What we need is a hover chair, and I've got just the thing for you. Apart from the chair, all you need is a chunk of plywood, staples, duct tape (gaffer tape to the Brits), a leaf blower, and a shower curtain.

The instructions are all in the video. I would just add two cautions. One, take the castors off your chair before you mount it on the hovercraft bit. Two, based on the racket made by the leaf blowing gardening droid near my apartment, I would suggest the additional purchase of a set of ear defenders might well be in order.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/231169/hack_turns_your_lawn_chair_into_a_hovercraft.html

For those of you who prefer gadgets that stay put, how about the latest little number from Cray's custom engineering department? It's a microserver computer. It can take up to 46 twin core i7 based nodes packed into a package 4" high x 12" wide x 26" deep. Just the thing to run the latest first person shooters on. Cray haven't given a price for this little number yet, but I can tell you one thing - you probably won't need any heating in your study this winter...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/06/cray_xes_microserver_prototype/


Scanner:

Dropbox vs. the Alternatives: Which Online Syncing Service Is Right for You?
http://lifehacker.com/5818908/dropbox-vs-the-alternatives-which-online-syncing-service-is-right-for-you

Optus’ filter can be defeated by ‘trivial’ DNS change
http://delimiter.com.au/2011/07/04/optus-filter-can-be-defeated-by-trivial-dns-change/
http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/opendsn-what-is-opendns-why-required-2/2587/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, 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
10 July, 2011

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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