WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
First the bad news. No Winding Down for the next two weeks. It's not my fault, honest guv, I fought against it strenuously (well maybe not too strenuously). The problem is that the proofreading and copyediting droids are taking a two week holiday, supposedly to rest their tired memory cells and recharge their batteries. The latter apparently involves a lot of lying around in the sunshine, preferably on planets circulating blue giant stars. The former seems to involve oily saunas. I didn't enquire too closely.
The net result of all this dubious behaviour is that Winding Down will be back on July 20th. In the meantime here is a nice solid Winding Down, with lots of Homework to keep you going until the droids return!
The End of an Era?
Which university drop-out became, for a while, the richest man in the world?
Yes, it was Bill Gates, who worked his last day at Microsoft this Friday. There are lots of tributes, both on the net and in the conventional media. There are also hordes of analysts trying to figure out exactly what it's going to mean for the future of Microsoft.
Some indication of the importance of Bill Gates to Microsoft can be judged from the fact that they have replaced him with three people - Steve Ballmer as CEO, Craig Mundie as chief research and strategy officer, and Ray Ozzie as chief software architect. His replacement as the Open Source fount of all evil has not yet been finalised!
Will Microsoft be the same after Bill Gates? Probably not, because he is leaving as the world on which Microsoft was founded is undergoing dramatic changes. Microsoft would have to change even if Bill Gates was still at the helm.
It was Microsoft's aim to put a computer in every home and on every desktop (a Microsoft computer, they hoped). Figures published this week suggest that something like a quarter of the world's population now has computers and is connected to the Internet. That's not exactly 'every', but it's a pretty good achievement for one lifetime!
I haven't exactly seen eye-to-eye with Microsoft over the years, and neither, it seems has Bill Gates. Take a look at this internal memo from Gates to the XP development people! It reminds me of some of the memos that have come to light over the Vista development!
A few years back I was sitting in a pub with a group of programmers discussing some crass thing or other that Microsoft had just done. There was much rolling of eyes and calling for more beer, and the topic drifted over to a consideration of the heads of the major computing companies - Bill Gates, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Scott McNealy of Sun and Steve Jobs of Apple. None of them were exactly popular, but as one programmer put it "At least Bill Gates is one of us. If Ellison was in Gates' position, we would be paying rent for Windows on the basis of the number of computer clock ticks used!" There was general agreement.
One of us? I think that's a pretty fair thing to say about Bill Gates, and a serious compliment, coming as it did from a bunch of programmers.
So farewell then, Bill Gates - one of us. Have fun in your retirement - maybe even do some Open Source programming...
http://www.physorg.com/news133324640.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7465485.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7462156.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7464704.stm
http://www.newsweek.com/id/142636
Shorts:
Students in IT are getting their experience of outsourcing early these days. It turns out that a significant minority of them are outsourcing their coursework and theses to foreign IT graduates! Academics at Birmingham City university have tracked at least a thousand students worldwide using outsourcing, which costs as little as US$10 a time for undergraduate coursework. Postgraduate theses come a little more expensive at US$200.
The fascinating thing is that it's working just like 'grown-up' outsourcing. The students post their requirements on any of a number of websites brokering these services, and those wishing to compete for the work tender for the contract.
I don't know about in the US, but over here in the UK companies are always demanding that university courses become more 'practical' and 'meet the needs of industry'. I think maybe they need to be careful what they wish for, since they may well be getting a taste of 'practicality'.
http://management.silicon.com/careers/0,39024671,39250909,00.htm
What do you think is the most annoying thing about IT companies? Crapware on new computers? Unrecoverable, purchased, downloaded music? Maybe a canned e-mail response that bears no relation to your enquiry? Well you'll be pleased to know that PCWorld has done a round up of the top ten most annoying tech company habits. So, click on the URL and find out whether other people share your pet peeve!
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,146201/article.html?tk=nl_pvwrvw
Microsoft have announced that they will be supporting Windows XP all the way through until at least 2014. That's 13 years after the operating system was launched - normally support is for no more than ten years. I guess that the message from non-buyers of Vista is getting through.
Talking of which, I see that no less a company than Intel has announced that it will not be installing Vista on its computers, because there is "no compelling case" to do so. Well the writing really is on the wall.
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBJ3c0HiOOq0G4S0GBEY0EA
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/26/intel_says_no_to_vista/
If you want a fine example of bureaucratic complacency, take a look at this week's El Reg article about the cloning of Transport for London's (TfL) Oyster travel card. The problem is that the chip used by the card is 1990s technology and easily hacked. TfL don't seem to see this as a problem, though, saying that it was not a hack, but a single instance of a card being manipulated. This is in spite of the fact that the researchers used one of their hacked cards to travel on the system.
Oh, and by the way, TfL is pushing for people to load money onto these cards so that they can be used to purchase goods in shops. You've got to be joking, TfL!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/dutch_clone_oyster_card/
One of the more interesting reports to come out last week was from StopBadware.org. It revealed that almost half of the sites pushing malware on the web are tied to just ten networks. Of those ten, six were Internet service providers or backbone providers in China. Also on the list was Google, whose blogs hosted over 4,000 sites (around 2% of the total). I thought Google's slogan was 'do no evil'?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/24/stopbadware_report/
Ever wondered what sort of data traffic the Wikipedia handles, and what it uses to process that traffic. Well now you can get a peep at just how they manage to squeeze a quart into a pint pot. To give you a flavour for what's involved, Wikipedia gets something 50,000 http requests a second, which generates 80,000 database queries a second, and they deal with all this using less than 300 servers! Pretty amazing, if you ask me. More details at the URL.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jun/24/a_look_inside_
wikipedias_infrastructure.html
Home Work:
The O'Reilly web site has a fascinating interview with Gordon Mohr, Chief technologist for Web Projects at the Internet Archive. This is a massive project dedicated to preserving the material on the web by taking snapshots at intervals. You may have used their WayBack Machine to look up material that's no longer current. The Archive is the nearest thing the web has to a library, and as such has a set of challenges all of its own. Definitely worth a read.
http://news.oreilly.com/2008/06/gordon-mohr-takes-us-inside-th.html
http://www.archive.org/
If your work has anything to do with IT projects you just have to read 'Anatomy of a runaway IT project'. It is a report that was written for a company about one of their projects which had gone completely out of control. The report pulls no punches, although the names have been changed to protect confidentiality. I'm sure you will recognise the analogs of the people referred to and described in the report in your own company.
http://brucefwebster.com/2008/06/16/anatomy-of-a-runaway-it-project/
OK. It's not very often that I recommend a paper for which you probably need a PhD in quantum mechanics to read, but Seth Lloyd's 'Ultimate physical limits to computation' is one such paper. Yes it has a lot of Greek letters in it, but I was able to follow its arguments even though I dropped out of university physics after a year.
What's really fascinating is that it turns out that maximum speed of computation is determined by the energy of the computer. Lloyd uses a 'standard' of a laptop weighing one kilo, having a volume of one litre. The hotter it is, the faster it can run. (Those of you who have Intel chips in your computers will have noticed the corollary - the faster it runs the hotter it is!) The top speed for our laptop is about 10^50 operations/sec.
On the other hand memory is limited by the entropy of the computer, which (I'll spare you the computation) gives a maximum memory of 10^31 bits for our laptop.
There is a problem though...
If we run our computer at anything like full speed and memory, a typical state of the laptop's memory looks like plasma at a billion degrees Kelvin. This leads Lloyd to suggest that 'packaging issues alone make it unlikely the limit can be obtained...' You bet they do - a billion degrees Kelvin is the temperature of the Big Bang that started the universe.
Hmm... Maybe 'The Matrix' was closer to the truth than anyone thought!
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9908/9908043v3.pdf
Ever wondered what it's like to be an open source program author, rather than just a user? Laurent Cohen has written about his JPPF (Java Parallel Processing Framework) project. It makes for an interesting read about the sort of things that happen when you open source your work and move from being a lone programmer to being part of a distributed team. Worth a read, especially if you are a programmer yourself.
http://www.jroller.com/jppf/entry/what_does_it_mean_to
Those of you who read this newsletter regularly will know that I'm more than a little ambivalent about the 'net neutrality' campaign. The campaign has some very vocal and high profile figures supporting it, but my problem is that I can see a number of reasons why the net shouldn't be neutral. Indeed, owing to flaws in the algorithms that handle Internet bandwidth allocation, the Internet is already far from being neutral.
Network engineer Richard Bennett recently put the case against network neutrality in a very cogent fashion at a session of Innovation '08. I'd recommend it as essential reading for anyone interested in the debate, which has already reached up to the US Congress, to read the transcript .
http://www.circleid.com/posts/86147_net_neutrality_innovation_081/
Geek Toys:
Want to spruce up your finding of books on Amazon a little? Why not try Zoomii - but only if you've got plenty of bandwidth. Zoomii displays the books as though they were sitting on shelves in a real bookshop, so you can browse the shelves. It's a nice idea, but I suspect that it needs work before it is ready for public use. Still it's worth a look at to see how things might be done to improve online buying experiences.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080624-hands-on-zoomii-breathes-
life-into-amazons-bookshelves.html
And talking of things that are not quite ready for the big time yet, you might want to take a look at a review of OCZ's Neural Impulse Actuator. The idea is that you control your computer by wearing a headband which tracks your facial muscles and brainwaves and turns them into computer game commands.
The review concludes that although the technology does mostly deliver what it promises, setting it up and training it is just too much hassle for most people. Maybe something to watch for in the future, I think.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14957
Now, here's something for those of you who grew up in the 1980s - the Knight Rider satnav! Yes it's a satnav with the voice of Michael Knight's artificial intelligence KITT car. I wonder if it calls you 'Michael' every time it gives you instructions...
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/23/knight_rider_satnav/
And finally, for the young at heart, the ultimate Lego vault! Did you know that Lego have a special storage vault with a copy of every different Lego set that they've ever sold? Talk about bringing back memories. Toys site 'gizmodo' were given a tour of the little known vault and came back with the story, a video, and a bunch of pictures from the time capsule. Fabulous!
http://gizmodo.com/5018990/lego-secret-vault-contains-all-sets-in-history
Scanner: Other Stories
Open Source data recovery tools to the rescue
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBJ3c0HiOOq0G4S0GBEX0E8
Merchants call credit card industry's bluff on compliance
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/24/pci_dss_compliance/
Bizarre properties of glass allow creation of "Metallic Glass"
http://www.livescience.com/technology/080623-glass-wings.html
How the iPhone puts a bomb under mobile networks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/20/iphone_sets_the_standards/
South Korea ponders a closer watch on the web after a surge of protests
http://www.physorg.com/news133324915.html
Ruby flaws send security researchers into shock
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/group_patches_ruby/
H-1B visas do not create new jobs
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3312521/121542018/122342/0/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois and Slashdot's daily newsletter 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
29 June 2008
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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