The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 14, 2011

Official News page 16


WINDING DOWN

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

This is your 14 August edition of Winding Down, brought to you from riot torn London. Well not exactly. Most of the rioting (actually, looting would be a better term) was carried out in peripheral areas of the city, and only took place over a tiny proportion of London's total area - though you wouldn't guess that from the media coverage. Everybody and their dog (remember, on the Internet no one knows you are a dog) has a different explanation of what caused the riots. In fact the BBC actually did a round up of some of the more popular arguments. You can take your pick, depending on your political outlook, or create your own, if you prefer. My take? There's probably a little bit of truth in most of the suggested causes. Always be aware of ascribing single causes to socio-political events.

On a different topic, Winding Down wishes Astrid Byro good luck on her Mount Everest trek to raise funds for the Bletchley Park Trust (think cracking Enigma WWII coding machines). You can follow her climb to the base camp half way up Everest on her blog and donate via the Just Giving site.

And last, but not least before moving on, happy birthday to the World Wide Web - 20 years old this week...


Shorts:

I see that Microsoft has come up with the suggestion that people should heat their houses and water by hosting a 'micro data center' consisting of, perhaps a couple of racks of servers. A lot of people have scoffed, but I think it's a neat idea, and a classic example of lateral thinking. I'm all in favor of distributed data centers, and this solves two problems at one go by cutting down on heating bills.

Of course, there are a whole bunch of problems to solve before the idea could get off the ground: fiber links to multiple dwellings, physical security, data security, upgraded power supplies, and server physical management. None of them are insurmountable - in fact solutions already exist for all of them, it's just a case of the will to do this and getting the infrastructure together.

I like it. You just have to remember that not everything that comes out of Microsoft is automatically bad! But for now, a glass of jasmine tea heated up by the processor working on the P versus NP problem would go down nicely...
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90992-microsoft-suggests-heating-your-home-with-data-furnaces
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-microsoft-paper-cloud-servers-homes.html

Akamai's quarterly report on the state of the Internet came out at the end of last month. Akamai are well placed to make such reports since they carry somewhere between 15% and 20% of the world's web traffic on their platform (100,000 servers in 72 countries).

Globally, speeds are up 23% - 2.1 Mbps - on this time last year with South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Netherlands and Romania as the top five. The USA is loafing around the middle at number 14. Really interesting, though, is the fact that the breakdown of attack traffic shows Myanmar (aka Burma) right at the top, generating 13% of all such traffic. By comparison, Russia, frequently quoted as a major source of attacks only managed to host just 7.7% of the attacks. Interesting, to say the least.
http://www.gizmag.com/akamai-state-of-the-internet-report/19349/

Something interesting happened here in the UK recently (apart from rioting, that is). Our Land Registry, the government body that keeps track of who owns what land in the UK, scrapped its electronic land transfer system, e-transfers. It seems that it wasn't what people wanted. I guess that's understandable - I know I would want a paper document showing that I owned the land on which my house was built, even though I'm considered to be something of a geek! (Actually, what I'd really like is a really classy ownership document - you know - something like a yak skin vellum scroll with copper plate handwriting and a large purple wax seal on the bottom, all tied up with a green silk ribbon.)

Anyway, I digress. Having discovered no one wanted to transfer land digitally, the Land registry consulted the land owning masses to find out what they really wanted. And lo and behold, the masses turned out not to be complete luddites. Yes, they wanted paper documents, but they wanted to be able to submit the docs by scanning them and sending them in electronically. So the Land Registry used the money they saved from abolishing the e-transfers system to set up a system that allowed people to easily file in the way that they actually wanted to!

As Malcolm Dawson, the chief executive so aptly put it, "I think that the positive out of this is that we absolutely have listened to what people have said and we've taken action. We got very strong feedback that this [e-transfers - AL] was not what people wanted us to do at this stage and so we said, 'Right lets stop here, there's absolutely no sense in us trying to flog a dead horse at this stage.'" Lots of kudos to them for doing what people want and need, rather than trying to force feed them what's convenient for the department!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2011/jul/25/malcolm-dawson-land-registry-online-services?&


Homework:

Last month was the centennial anniversary of the discovery of the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu high in the Peruvian Andes. Scientific American has a neat slideshow of the city and the Inca trail that leads up to it. Machu Picchu was one of the few cities not found, and therefore not despoiled, by the Spanish during their conquest of South America, so it represents an almost unique opportunity to study the Inca civilization.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=machu-picchu-bingham-centennial&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20110727

Scientific American also has a couple of rather stunning visuals up at the moment. The first is a reproduction of Haeckel's Lacertilia, a classic example of a beautifully accurate, but harmonically balanced scientific drawing of various reptiles. The other is an amazing three minute video of a ferrofluid in motion. (Wikipedia ref supplied for those who wish to know more about ferrofluids.)
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/image-of-the-week/2011/08/08/haeckels-lacertilia/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/video-of-the-week/2011/08/11/ferrofluids-in-motion/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrofluid

And for those of you who get your homework finished on time, why not treat yourself to a Schrodinger's cat T-shirt? Definitely the coolest T-shirt I've seen for a long time!
http://www.snorgtees.com/wanted-dead-and-alive


Geek Toys:

Woo-eee! Take a look at this nifty flying sphere drone developed by Japanese defense researcher Fumiyuki Sato. It's beachball size, jet black, and can crash into walls and bounce off the floor without damage. Best of all, the researcher obtained all the electronic components at the local electronic 100-yen (US$1.00) geek stores. In total the whole thing cost about US$1,332. I definitely want one for next Xmas...
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/bouncy-60-kilometres-per-hour-flying-sphere-drone-debuts-20110805-1iezz.html

Any retrogeeks out there? Remember the fantastic X-COM UFO series? Take a trip down memory lane with the register's Hardware section (no, I don't know how a game came to be in the hardware section, either) and relive the time spent playing it - rather too many all-nighters in my case!
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/07/20/antique_code_show_xcom_ufo_enemy_unknown/


Scanner:

London Looting

CCTV cameras finally come in useful for crime fighting!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gmpwanted
http://www.flickr.com/photos/metropolitanpolice/

Rioters using Blackberry Messenger (not as wise as they thought!)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14462638
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/08/blackberry_riots/

Government mulls social media controls
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14493497


Other

UK MPs slam government's 'obscene' IT spend: Gov pays 7 to 10 times the going rate
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/28/mps_slam_government_it_spend/

Ownership ties among global corporations strangely resemble a bow tie
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/08/08/ownership-ties-among-global-corporations-strangely-resemble-a-bow-tie/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_TECH_20110809

Worldwide web celebrates 20th birthday
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14430076

The Fate of the first black hole
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/the-fate-of-the-first-black-hole.html?ref=hp


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
14 August, 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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