WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
All systems are go... This week we have items on HUD technology for cars, Windows 10 readiness, Apple Watch sales, a brick-laying robot called Hadrian, flu vaccine, Samsung’s Safety Truck, July 4th at the Empire State Building, rescuing a typeface after 100 years in the River Thames, and an info-graphic of air traffic over London. On the URL front we have links to the global domain name count, the OPM hack, security experts v. the government, Windows 10 Wi-Fi keys, black phosphorus, digital amnesia, and Ellen Pao is out as Reddit CEO. Not bad for a Sunday morning!
So, let’s get down to it...
Shorts:
I’ve always thought that it would be really nice to have HUD technology to throw information onto the car windscreen so I don’t have to take my eyes off the road in order to check my speed, or for warning lights. I know some top end cars are starting to implement this, but a recent study suggests that this sort of head up display may not be such a good idea.
Apparently, the constant stream of information causes distraction, rather than just being there when you need it. Drivers tend to split their focus resulting in impaired reactions when a fast reaction is needed. I have to say I’m not totally convinced. Obviously, having to focus on two different things at wildly different depths can cause problems, but from the description of the study, it seemed to me that problem was too much information – both recommendation and warnings were being displayed, requiring additional brain processing to figure out what sort of information it was.
Clearly much more research is needed in order to find out whether Head Up Displays are -always- distracting, or whether there is an optimum display set which helps make driving a vehicle safer.
http://www.gizmag.com/hud-technology-driving-safety/38204/
Windows 10 is due to go live at the end of this month. Microsoft have already annoyed me by pushing a marketing icon into my system tray under the guise of being an ‘important update’. And there seems to be no way of getting rid of it either. I was not amused to discover that they plan to force Windows 10 users to install updates whether they want to or not, unless they are enterprise users who have paid a lot for Windows 10.
Not only that, but they are boasting to enterprise users that business can wait until the updates have been ‘tested’ by being used by ‘ordinary’ users, who will have no choice. So, no, I don’t intend to switch to Windows 10 in a hurry, and that decision was reinforced by a serious review from Andrew Orlowski in The Register, indicating that, with a mere two week to go, Windows 10 is definitely not ready for prime time. Take a look at the URL and see what you think.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/07/windows_10_for_windows_8_and_7_users/
http://blogs.windows.com/business/2015/01/30/windows-10-for-enterprise-more-secure-and-up-to-date/
I note that there has been a massive drop in the sales of the Apple Watch according to consumer data company Slice Intelligence. A 90% drop to be exact. During the launch week Apple sold about 200,000 watches a day. Until the end of May sales were about 20,000 day, and by the middle of June they were heading for around 2,000 a day. The drop was so big that the graph on which the sales line was drawn had to be logarithmic!
Apple, which normally updates Wall Street on new launch sales figures shortly after the launch has failed to produce any figures for the watch sales.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-watch-may-not-be-ticking-with-customers-2015-07-07
Gizmag has an interesting story about an Australian-designed brick-laying robot called Hadrian (after the Roman wall of the same name). It’s pretty impressive, running as it does at 1,000 bricks an hour. I can see that building companies would be interested in this, existing bricklayers less so. Where exactly it would take off, I’m not so sure. In the UK, for instance, house building is moving away from bricks and towards prefab factory wall sections, and on-site concrete pouring using wooden shutters, which is a much, much, faster way of erecting buildings.
It’s a neat idea, but whether it will ultimately prove to be viable is, I suspect, an open question.
http://www.gizmag.com/hadrian-brick-laying-robot-fastbrick/38239/
Homework:
Bio-researchers (my spell checker suggests ‘biro-researchers’) have just discovered why last year’s flu vaccine wasn’t so effective as it usually is. It seems that there was a single mutation in the virus that enabled it to beat the vaccine. Last year’s vaccine turned out to be only about 20% effective, as opposed to around 60% for most vaccines over the last 10 years.
Flu viruses mutate very fast, and at any one time there are a number of different strains in the wild, which makes deciding which one to protect against a real headache for those who have to make the decision. Still until last year they managed to get it right most years, and it’s worth getting vaccinated each year, if you can.
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9735039/just-a-single-mutation-helped-last-years-flu-virus-to-gain-advantage-over-vaccine/
Geek Stuff:
I haven’t really been impressed with much that Samsung has done since it came out with the Galaxy Note 1 smart phone, but last month I came across something that did impress. It’s the prototype of their new ‘Safety Truck’ . It’s a large truck which has a screen at the back, on which is displayed an image of the road ahead of the truck in real time. In other words if you are behind the truck you can see whether it’s safe to overtake, or whether there is a vehicle coming the other way – and you don’t have to pull out to check!
The technical details are simple, mount a video camera on the front, and a large screen on the back. The only real question I have is, ‘What’s in it for the trucking companies to pay the extra cost?’ I suspect the system will have to be legally mandated for new vehicles before it really takes off.
http://www.gizmag.com/samsung-safety-truck-cameras-screens/38122/
Now here’s a really cool video. It’s the Empire State Building on the evening of July 4th with its lights synced up to the Grateful Dead playing ‘US Blues’ live in Chicago. Not very often you get to experience something like that!
http://gothamist.com/2015/07/05/video_empire_state_building_light_s.php
London:
I like good typefaces. I suppose it comes from my stint as a graphic designer in the days before personal computers. Thus it was that I was fascinated to read about the discovery and rescue of a font that was lost in the River Thames in 1917 – nearly a hundred years ago. The font matrices for ‘Doves Type’ were thrown into the River Thames from London’s Hammersmith Bridge after a dispute between the partners who owned the Doves Press.
Last year some of the type was discovered on the river bed and the Thames Capsule Font Project was formed to recover the rest of this very classy looking font (typical of the William Morris led ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement).
The font has now been digitized and is commercially available for use on web sites. If I was running a high quality commercial web site, I’d certainly buy a license, and use it!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31188255
http://thames-capsule.co.uk/
Transport in London is a big thing – subways, overground trains, buses, cars, commercial vehicles, boats, helicopters and planes. Lots of planes. Indeed so many planes that there is a major row going on over whether or not to build another runway at Heathrow Airport.
I live under the flight path, and though our current apartment is much farther out than where I used to live, it can still be noisy in the early morning. I used to live really close to Heathrow, and we would tell people that some strange looking black marks on the roof were caused by planes lowering their wheels a little too early... You’d be surprised how many people found that totally believable!
There’s a video on The Londonist that shows very clearly just how much activity there is in the air over London in a 24 hour period. Take a look, and see what you think – it’s a nice example of infographics.
http://londonist.com/2015/07/animation-shows-busy-skies-over-london.php
Scanner:
Global domain name count hits 294 million mark
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9735966/global-domain-name-count-hits-294-million-mark/
US govt now says 21.5 million people exposed by OPM hack – here’s what you need to know
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/09/opm_data_breach_21_million_people/
Security experts oppose government access to encrypted communication
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/08/technology/code-specialists-oppose-us-and-british-government-access-to-encrypted-communication.html?_r=0
Windows 10 will share your Wi-Fi key with your friends’ friends
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sense/
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9735894/microsoft-windows-10s-wi-fi-sense-feature-share-keys-friends-contacts/
Black phosphorus could spur the next wave of tiny transistors
http://www.gizmag.com/black-phosphorus-next-gen-microchips/38378/
Welcome to the age of digital amnesia
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9735877/welcome-to-the-age-of-digital-amnesia/
After a user revolt, Ellen Pao is out as Reddit interim CEO
http://www.cnet.com/news/ellen-pao-out-as-reddit-ceo/
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
12 July 2015
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/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
