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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 3, 2013

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news

by Alan Lenton

This week we look at CPU designers ARM, UK government online services plans, prediction of the future, computer science students gaming the system, Van Allen belts, climate change surveys, Steampunk events, Audi RS4 Avant paintball equipped cars, an escape ring, and Tizen. URLs in the scanner section will lead you to stories on Machiavelli’s arrest warrant, a diabetes cure for dogs, Amazon reviews’ trustworthiness, and the Bundestag and copyright law.

So, on with the show...


Shorts:

While catching up on news that had slipped past me earlier this month I noticed that chip company ARM have had a very good 12 months of trading. Arm are a UK chip company that don’t make chips! Yes, you read that correctly, they don’t make chips, unlike, say, Intel or AMD. What they do is design low power processors, and license the designs to people who do make chips. ARM specialize in low power high performance processors, originally for embedded uses, and they’ve been in the business for years.

Intel’s Atom chip was supposed to directly compete with ARM’s designs, but failed to make the grade. It’s likely that you are already using an ATOM chip - in your phone or tablet. The CPU in my Galaxy Note 1 is a Dual-core 1.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A9, for instance. But, it’s not just in small devices that low power chips are used these days. They are becoming increasingly popular in kit destined for data centers.

If you can use low power chips in your servers, you get a double bonus. When you use chips they give off heat - usually lots of it. So you end up paying for the power that’s turned into heat, and for the power that’s needed to run the air conditioning to remove that heat so the chips won’t melt down. Cut down on the chip power used and you not only need to buy less power to run it, but you also use less air conditioning to keep things cool - a double bonus.

This means that the sort of chips that ARM has years of experience designing are increasingly in demand as power prices soar. No wonder that in spite of the recession ARM’s profits jumped nearly 20% last year. And all that without making a single chip!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/05/arm_numbers/

Bad news for the UK government this week. For some time now it’s been trying to cut costs by making its services available online so it can get rid of staff who man (and women) the counters in local communities. Unfortunately, a recent survey indicates that there are still about seven and a half million citizens who have never accesses the internet. That may not sound too bad, until you look a little deeper into the figures.

It turns out that the vast majority of those people fall into one of three categories: the disabled, the over 75 and the poor. Exactly the categories of people who are most likely to need the use of public services. Now don’t misunderstand me on this, I’m all in favor of putting government services online. However, doing it as a money saving device is just a complete failure to understand what’s going on. If you put services online you end up not only paying to keep online access to the services in good order (which is in itself more expensive than politicians think), but also to maintain a parallel traditional service for those who lack access to the online services for one reason or another.

It’s also worth remembering that online services include losses as well as gains when compared to traditional counter services. Online services are brilliant when you want exactly what they are programmed to handle, but useless when something goes wrong or you need something off the main line. That’s why people use online services to make claims or payments, but when they have a problem they reach for their phones...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/22/ons_internet_access_figures/

For those of you who like smirking at other people’s attempts to predict the future, here’s something for you to smirk about. The URL gives some earlier predictions by the famous that were massively wrong. My favorite? Movie producer Darryl Zanuck: “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/02/the-daze-after-tomorrow.html


Homework:

The New York Times has an interesting piece on how a class of computer science students managed to all get A’s in their final exam by not attending, thus displaying their understanding of both game theory and the use of grading curves. The article has a good explanation, so I won’t repeat it here. Significantly, the student’s professor let the A grades stand.

However, the trick is not repeatable, because the rules are to be changed, not because, as the article suggests, the original scheme was inherently wrong, but because future uses of the strategy would be copycat rather than showing an understanding of, and ability to solve, a problem that arises in computing!
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/gaming-the-system/?src=rechp

I see that NASA scientists have discovered a temporary third Van Allen belt around the Earth. The original two belts were discovered in 1958 by satellites carrying experiments designed by James Van Allen and his students. There were thought to be two of the belts of charged particles, but NASA scientists recently discovered a third belt, which vanished after a few months as a result of a shock wave released by the sun.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9902765/Third-radiation-belt-discovered-around-Earth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Van_Allen

Bad news for the climate change industry - an analysis of surveys taken over the last 17 years has shown that people not only don’t care about climate change today, but that they never did, even when the going was good and they were much better off than today. Needless to say the state of the economy came first, while the environment came sixth out of seven in the list of concerns. Oh dear! Full figures at the URL.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/27/17_years_of_surveys_people_dont_care_about_climate_change/


For Geeks:

Attention all Steampunks! The organizers of the modestly named ‘The Most Splendid Steampunk Festival in the World!’ have added na ew festival to their events calendar. It’s called ‘Steampunk at the Seaside’ and runs from March 22 to 25 at Camber Sands, in the UK. Personally I have no idea why anyone would want to go to the seaside in March in the UK, but there’s no accounting for taste...
http://steampunk.synthasite.com/

Perhaps paintball is more your style? In that case you need to see this Audi video. Two Audi RS4 Avant cars are fitted with paintball guns on their bonnets, and face it off in an aircraft hangar. Go For It!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rxhif43pLJ0

On a slightly more sedate note, how about a tiny projector to throw your smartphone pictures onto the wall where the appreciative masses can view them? Rollei have just introduced a projector which is smaller than the size of a Rubik’s Cube and which is claimed to be able to throw images of up to 60 inches in size with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Interesting, and worth keeping an eye open for.
http://www.gizmag.com/rollei-pico-projector/26453/

Those wishing for a little more, how shall I put it, excitement, may want to consider the Titanium Escape Ring, which comes complete with a hidden saw and a lock picking shim, to help you escape your foes. Of course your chances of using it depend on whether you are captured by an someone who knows their job, and has you shot immediately, or in 007 style arranges for you to be terminated at some stage in the future, giving you time and space to use your ring...

Programming geeks who like to take a risk on a long shot might like to keep an eye on Tizen. It’s a new open source smartphone/tablet operating system based on Linux. Web based development tools have been available for it for some times, but recently they have released version two of their SDK, which includes native code (C++) facilities using the Eclipse IDE. That’s good, but just as interesting from an app developer’s point of view is that Docomo, Orange, and Samsung are all promising to have phones based on Tizen later this year.
https://www.tizen.org/about
http://www.intomobile.com/2013/02/18/tizen-launches-new-version-its-magnolia-sdk-and-source-code/
http://www.intomobile.com/2013/03/01/docomo-orange-samsung-all-promise-tizen-devices-later-year/


Scanner: Other stories

Briton finds 500-year-old arrest warrant for Machiavelli
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/9871527/Briton-finds-500-year-old-arrest-warrant-for-Machiavelli.html

Type 1 diabetes cured in dogs with one treatment
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/02/type1diabetescuredindogs.html

Can you trust an Amazon review?
http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/geek-life/tools-toys/can-you-trust-an-amazon-review/

Bundestag holds ‘unusual’ hearing on German Copyright Act
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/22/outlaw_germany_copyright_reform/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi 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
3 March 2013

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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