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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 13, 2016

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WINDING DOWN

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

The USA elections this week have knocked nearly all other news out. The first part of the week was spent making wrong predictions, and the rest of the week was spent bewailing the result. Everything else took a very, very distant back seat. I should have realised and taken a break this week, but since the last US presidential election was four years ago, it slipped my mind! So, it’s a very slim line issue this week, containing material on Apple and Ireland, audio data transmission, programming problems, and two videos – one on a David Bowie painting and one a trailer for a film coming out next year. Scanner points to URLs containing information on selfie vandalism, ownership in the digital age, smart windows, Google’s latest brain wave, crappy software, and Windows 10’s Market share.

Next week, things will, hopefully, have returned to normal, and I’ll have a full version of Winding Down for you!

Shorts:

Most of you will know that the EU has told Ireland that its tax deal with Apple amounts to state aid to Apple – which is illegal under EU rules. Ireland is now supposed to get this money from Apple. Frankly, if I was in charge of Ireland, I would leap at the opportunity to get my hands (with reluctance, of course) on an extra 13 billion euros (about US$14 billion), and be able to pass it off as being the fault of EU bureaucrats.

Not so the Irish powers that be. Instead of sending round the tax collector, they plan to spend their own money to take the EU to court and get the court to say that they don’t have to collect the cash from Apple. Weird. I’ll tell you what, though, Ireland. If you don’t want 13 billion euros, I’ll take it off your hands – I’m sure I can find something to spend it on.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/09/ireland_to_fight_against_billing_apple_for_backtaxes/

Homework:

Now this is interesting. Data transmission over audio. A company called Chirp seems to have cracked it and have a system that can transmit 50 bytes as a quick burst of sound that resembles a bird’s tweet. 50 bytes may not seem to be a lot of data, but it’s enough for many of the applications that need to trigger something that needs an authorisation – like getting though a ticket barrier. And of course it’s a one to many type of communication. Neat.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/10/chirp_lets_hear_it_for_data_over_audio/

Geek Stuff:

InfoWorld recently had a piece on the seven most vexing problems in programming. I have to say, as a programmer, that I really tend to agree with their choices. For the record they are multithreading, closures, data that grows bigger than memory, NP-complete problems, security, encryption, and identity management. And one extra – measuring how hard a problem is going to be!

Anyway, if you’re a programmer, or even if you are just an interested geek, take a look and see what InfoWorld have to say about each of the problems.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3138572/application-development/the-7-most-vexing-problems-in-programming.html

Pictures:

Two videos this week. The first is a great time lapse picture of a David Bowie/Major Tom mural being painted on the bottom of swimming pool. I really wish I could do that sort of thing!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFDtUJbuvBI

The second is a really cool trailer for the picture ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ from the French director Luc Besson. If the trailer is anything to go by, I might actually watch this, even though I’m not really a movie person!
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2016/11/valerian-trailer-is-sci-fi-visual-feast.html

Scanner:

Selfie-seeking tourist topples 18th-Century sculpture
http://hyperallergic.com/337047/selfie-seeking-tourist-topples-18th-century-sculpture/

The digital age has destroyed the concept of ownership, and companies are taking advantage of it
http://qz.com/766535/terms-of-service-agreements-are-destroying-the-concept-of-ownership-for-digital-goods/

New flexible material can make any window ‘smart’
http://phys.org/news/2016-08-flexible-material-window-smart.html

Obey Google, web-masters, or it will say you can’t be trusted
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/31/google_certificate_transparency/

Software Crisis: The Next Generation
http://habitatchronicles.com/2016/10/software-crisis-the-next-generation/

Windows 10 market share stalls after free upgrade offer ends
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/02/windows_market_share_nov_2016/

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
13 November 2016

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.

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