WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Lotsa snippets this week: Music ‘piracy’ helps Iron Maiden make a profit, Apple squeal, brussels sprouts power, Grace Hopper, NSA and online games, school science labs, a 3D-metal printer, the Linux Counter, a 21 inch tablet, cool drumming, and climate modeling Middle Earth.
Only nice things in store for you all this week. Well I guess there’s a little bit of schadenfreude, and well, perhaps a touch of amused cynicism. But mostly positive, since it is only 10 days till Christmas. I don’t know about anyone else, but I sure need the break from real life work. I will, however, be bringing you one further issue before Christmas – next Sunday. Hopefully, such dedication will put me on Santa’s ‘nice’ list.
Let’s go...
Shorts:
Congrats to heavy metal band Iron Maiden, who have managed to resoundingly dispel the myth that ‘pirated’ songs are the cause of the record industry’s decline. In spite of having some of the most frequently ‘pirated’ music in their catalog, they had no problem turning a profit last year, with a turnover in the US$10m-20m bracket. If heavy metal can make this sort of money by not ripping off the fans, and selling music at sensible rates, so can the rest of the music business. Of course, the fact that heavy metal is much better than most of the usual pap that big media push may have something to do with it!
http://www.deathmetal.org/news/heavy-metal-shows-piracy-is-not-killing-music-offers-new-business-model/
I see that Apple, purveyors of classy looking devices at vastly inflated prices, are complaining about how much the court imposed antitrust overseer is costing them. The guy appointed by the court to make sure they don’t try anything like their book price fixing trick is charging them for everything he can. He already racked up charges of a cool $138,432 in the first two weeks. Welcome to the taste of your own dog food, Apple!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/29/our_ebook_antitrust_regulator_is_too_expensive_complains_apple/
OK, here’s something for the eco-people among my readers – a Christmas tree lit by a festive food. Brussels sprouts! Take a look at the URL – there’s a picture and a video to prove it...
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/brussels-sprouts-light-christmas-tree-article-1.1532806
Last Thursday would have been Rear-Admiral Grace Hopper’s 107th birthday. Google celebrated the birthday of the inventor of Cobol, and the first person to use the term ‘bug’ relating to software with a nifty doodle. When she found a moth in a relay in the computer, and reported she’d found a ‘bug’ which she preserved by pressing it between the pages of the computer’s (written) journal! Would that modern bugs were so easy to track...
The article has technically a not too brilliant video of Grace explaining the realities of physical laws to an audience of top brass, and why that meant that they couldn’t get their information via satellite instantly. The Letterman interview is technically better quality, and explains the same thing to David Letterman, and a much wider audience. Well worth a look if you’re wondering why you get so much lag when you use a World of Warcraft server half way around the world.
http://www.google.com/doodles/grace-hoppers-107th-birthday
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/grace-hopper-doodle-by-writing-computer-language-pioneering-grandma-cobol-helped-rewrite-the-history-books/2013/12/09/72a80e36-60bf-11e3-8beb-3f9a9942850f_blog.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ (Letterman Interview)
One of the latest NSA snooping stories to be leaked is hilarious. Apparently they’ve had agents in World of Warcraft trying to detect terrorists passing info on to one another. I’m sure players, past and present, of Federation, my multiplayer game, will want to know whether we suffered the same problem. I doubt it, because when Federation was in its heyday, the security forces had no idea what a personal computer was, let alone an online game.
As far as World of Warcraft goes, there were so many spies that that the NSA had to set up a “de-confliction” team to stop them from spying on one another. Clearly no one in charge had read G.K. Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/09/nsa_spooks_infiltrated_world_of_warcraft/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Was_Thursday
Homework:
Wow! My memories of school labs are of dreary benches and steep lecture theatres with boring lectures. Though one was enlivened by the headmaster, a chemistry teacher by profession, demonstrating how to produce chlorine gas, while lecturing on how poisonous it was and how you must make sure everything it airtight when doing this sort of experiment.
The most compelling part of the lecture was him being half carried off by one of the lab assistants after the apparatus leaked. He was off work for nearly six weeks with ‘breathing problems’.
Hardly any of the class were affected. Because the classroom was steeply banked and, being skoolboys, we naturally all filled it up from the back, leaving the front half a dozen rows empty, apart from one swot who sat, on his own, about three rows up from the bottom – he was only off for a week. The whole process also showed us that chlorine is a heavy gas. We all thought it was very funny, (children can be very cruel) but I doubt if anyone in the class has ever forgotten that chemistry lesson!
But I digress. What I wanted to tell you is that High School labs are getting more interesting and full of hot geek toys – laser cutters, 3D printers, 3D scanners, 3D milling machines, robotics, and programming tools. Hot stuff – reminds me more of the metalwork workshop at school.
It’s all part of a program which originally started as an idea that small digital workshops should be made accessible to all. Of course, there aren’t many of these labs around at the moment, but with any luck, as the prices of 3D-whotsits come down, then, hopefully they will spread.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/budding-scientist/2013/11/29/a-high-school-lab-as-engaging-as-facebook/
And talking of 3D-whotsits, I see that you can now get 3D-metal printers for less than US$1,500, thanks to a team at Michigan Technical University. That’s moving into the affordable range. I don’t think it’ll take that long – a few years, maybe – for a factor of ten price drop to bring it into the current 3D-printer range. Even now it’s cheap enough for the establishment of an outbreak of Kinko or Call Quick style 3D-print shops.
http://www.gizmag.com/low-cost-open-source-3d-printer-metal/29998/
I’d like to remind Linux users out there about the existence of the New Linux Counter Project, which has taken over from the original Linux Counter. It was started in 1993 as a way of estimating how many users there are out there. Obviously there are many people who don’t even know about the project and some who do may well choose not to register, but at least it provides a bottom bound.
I registered in 1994, by which time we’d been using Linux to develop my Federation online game for some time. We weren’t able to use it for production work until after we left AOL and connected directly to the web.
My registration number is #6822, and the numbers run sequentially starting from either zero or one, I can’t remember which. That makes my number a very early one, because there are over 120,000 registered users now.
So if you are a Linux user and not already registered, why not register now? It costs nothing and only takes a few moments of your time. Not all users can help with creating Linux, but everyone can register!
http://linuxcounter.net/
For Geeks:
As Country Joe and the Fish once sang, “Be the first one on your block...” – to get a 21 inch tablet! Yep there really is a 21 inch tablet out there in the wilds. It’s the HP Slate 21 (not exactly a snappy name, but HP have grown old, staid and boring over the years). It weighs 4.9kg and measures up at 531 x 354 x 67mm – about the same size and weight as a budget 21-inch telly. If you took it into work with you, you could use it to read the morning paper in its full format on the subway... And it’s a snip at a mere £349 (US$399).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/26/review_hp_slate_21_tablet/
How about some cool drumming? Literally cool – 20C below freezing cool, to be exact! A group of Siberian percussionists have made a video about drumming on the ice covering Lake Baikal – substituting the ice itself for their drums. Cool, man, really cool.
http://www.snowaddiction.org/2013/11/the-coolest-music-in-the-world-listen-to-siberian-ice-drummers-use-frozen-lake-baikal-as-an-incredible-musical-instrument.html
And now over to the UK’s University of Bristol, where the wizard Radagast the Brown has applied the climate model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to model the climate of Middle Earth. Given the current success rate of the model in predicting the changes in the regular Earth’s climate, my advice would be – do not plan for an unexpected journey using the IPCC model! Oh, and by the way, what has it got in its pocketses?
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2013/10013.html
Scanner: Other stories
Airline makes passengers’ Christmas wishes come true
http://gawker.com/airline-makes-passengers-christmas-wishes-come-true-1479882861/@neetzanz
UK.gov declares digital success as PR, food shops redefined as ‘tech’ businesses
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/09/uk_gov_defines_pr_food_shops_as_digital_businesses/
DARPA seeks game players to join bug-hunt
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/09/darpa_seeks_game_players_to_join_bughunt
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
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 Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
15 December 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.
