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The
weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames EARTHDATE: March 12, 2006 OFFICIAL
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 WINDING DOWN An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news by Alan Lenton Hmmm - my short pieces seem to be getting longer. However, they are still shorter than the long pieces, so I must be doing something right. It's gone back to being cold, miserable and wet here, but we are still, it seems in the grip of a drought. The Thames is at its lowest level for many years, and there are talks of banning using water on gardens. The water table is dropping and soon Armageddon will be here, or not, as the case may be. In the meantime, to distract you, here is a sampling of what is going on in the lesser known corners of the hi-tech environment. Have fun...
The Japanese authorities are having a bad time at the moment. The most popular file sharing system in Japan, Winny, is so popular that even bureaucrats have it installed on their laptops. Unfortunately there are viruses that can take advantage of Winny to spread themselves and to transfer data around. The net result? Classified and sensitive data appearing on public web sites. Ooops. Interesting items making a public appearance so far include armed forces warfare training info and call signals, information about prison inmates, and the leaking of confidential police data. On the non-Governmental front leaks include a school with information about 400+ students being posted to a public web site, and a similar case involving 2,800 hospital patients. The authorities are trying to stamp on the use of Winny, but I suspect they have an uphill struggle on their hands, since there is nothing else available that is as convenient and easy to use. http://www.physorg.com/news11600.html Ah! Time for another snippet on our old friends SCO. The company just published its quarterly results. I have to tell you that SCO's campaign to make money out of Linux users is not going well - you are the back, stop smirking! Hopefully, SCO's eventual demise will make other companies think twice about groundless legal cases, although SCO's legal case against IBM is still grinding on, with the judge betraying increasing exasperation at the time it's taking. And the quarter's results? Revenues down by US$1.5 million and a net loss that grew to US$4.6 million against a loss of US$3 million for the same period last year. It seems that even less people are using SCO's version of Unix these day - I really can't imagine why! Anyway, the bottom line is that the company took in a mere US$30,000 on their Linux threats, and spent US$4 million to get that much. That's almost as good accounting as the old dot com companies used to put out! http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/03/09/sco_q1_drop/ AOL's nifty wheeze to make extra cash by fast tracking the mail of spammers, oops, sorry, 'legitimate companies', who are prepared to pay AOL for the privilege, is attracting increasing opposition from all sections of the community. Already 500 organisations have signed a letter to AOL demanding it give up the idea. AOL is trying to create a two tier system in which anyone with the money to pay will get preferential treatment when they send e-mail to AOL customers. I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that AOL's customers have no say in whose mail -they- want fast tracking into their mailbox. AOL is obviously worried by the opposition, it's already making offers to allow 'qualified' charity organisations to join the fast track with out paying. Who qualifies the qualifiers has not been revealed. This crude attempt to split the opposition has led to a further growth in opposition, and presumably AOL customers will want to have their own say when the news percolates down to those who pay subscriptions. More about this as the story unfolds. http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_03.php#004461
Good software developers are like gold. Study after study shows that a good software developer can be an order of magnitude more productive than an 'average' developer. How, then, does a company get its hands on good software developers? Most companies have a policy of trying to buy them in , but they then find either that they can't get any on the market, or that they can't recruit or keep the ones they do find. An interesting piece in Tech Republic last month suggests that this is the wrong strategy, and that the very best developers are 'built' in house, not bought. If you work in the field, either as a developer or as a non-pointy-headed-manager, then this short piece is well worth taking a look at to see what you can do about improving your company's profits by improving your developers' skills. http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-3513-6038687.html Still on the subject of software development, this next paper takes a look at how you figure out what it is you should be writing - aka software requirements. To my mind, this is one of the most difficult things in the whole process, and most people haven't even come close to understanding why that is. It's because the act of creating software changes the environment for which the software was created, rendering the initial environment for which the software was developed invalid. Sometimes that change is relatively small, and if we build flexibility into our software we can change the software to accommodate it. At other times the change is so massive that we are into the realms of emergence theory, and the behaviour changes so radically that our new system, having engendered the change, is next to useless. OK - that isn't what the paper says, it's my take on what is going on! The paper I want to recommend is actually about using simulators to figure out what new software should be doing. For those who like buzzwords it's called Model-Driven Software Realization, and if you are in the realm of large government style projects, which have a strong tendency to become unmanageable, then you should probably look at the lambda initiative proposal from Larry Bernstein in Ubiquity on-line magazine. http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i06_bernstein.html And finally in this section, an alert for the more ecologically inclined amongst my readers. What do you think is going to happen to the Arctic once the already observed effects of global warming start to take increased effect? The Greenland glaciers are already shedding ice at nearly four times the rate 30 years ago, and the arctic ice pack is retreating further and further each year. Well you may not know, but big business already has its own ideas - especially the big energy companies who are desperate to start exploiting the natural resources the melting ice is starting to reveal. Then there is the possible opening of the fabled North West Passage round the northern end of Canada. There are already hard words being spoken between the USA and Canada about whether such an open water strip between the Atlantic and the Pacific would count as Canada territorial waters or whether it should be considered international waters. I'm sure you can guess who is on which side. The North West Passage would cut down the trip from Europe to the Pacific coast of both North America and Asia by a substantial amount. (Remember, the distance is a lot smaller than it looks on a map, because most map projections stretch out horizontal distances more the further away you are from the equator. In far northern latitudes, which is what we are talking about here, distances can be as little as half what they appear to be! You have to look at it on a globe to get an idea of the true distances involved.) So, I'd suggest you might like to take a look at the report of the speeches made by key industry figures at the World Economics Forum in Davos in January. Clearly big business see global warming as an opportunity, not a problem. Quite who they think they are going to sell their goods to, when 90% of the most heavily populated areas vanish under water, I'm not sure... [Editor's note: this story was taken from Physorg.com, but they seem to have moved the original story and I can't find the URL. If we find it then we'll print it in next week's Winding Down.]
U.S.-European GPS
rivalry heats up Borland gambles without
developers Microsoft tries to sell
its XML standard to the EU Commission digital library Wild ride over for
Google? MSN promises
Google-beating search
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. 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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