WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Happy Xmas everyone - I hope you have lots of turkey and stuffing. This is the last Winding Down of 2008 so I guess it's time to wish everyone a happy new year as well. Hopefully, 2009 will not be as economically fraught as 2008 has been.
There's not a lot of news this week, because most publications have moved into recycling this year's stories mode. However, I've made up for it by treating you all to a lesson about the Internet. I know you'll just lurve my deathless prose.
Winding Down will be back on 18 January. See you all again next year!
Shorts:
I guess I should tell you the bad news first. There are four major undersea cable cuts in the Mediterranean, there are causing severe problems between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Sixty five percent of India's traffic is down, and services to Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan are seriously affected. The knock on effects could be bad as the Internet tries to route traffic the other way round the world - for instance Saudi Arabia to Japan, to the US west coast to the US east coast, to the UK, to Italy. Call centres in India are really suffering, but I doubt that anyone will notice.
It looks like it's going to take until at least the new year to fix all this, so don't expect any improvement soon.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7792688.stm
If like me you suffer from a massive tangle of wires with different chargers for different phones, netbooks, MP3 players, notebooks, etc. then help may soon be at hand. Eight major manufacturers have formed the Wireless Power Consortium to provide a common standard for wireless charging devices. If they are successful then you will be able to just have one charger onto which you just put your device to recharge. The first set of standards will be for low power devices like mobile phones and MP3 players. Lets hope that this is one consortium that works!
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/131451,wireless-power-consortium-pushes-
for-standard.aspx
The other day I got an e-mail about my Amazon Prime account. That's the deal where you pay a flat rate each year and get the postage free. But the e-mail wasn't from Amazon, it was a spam trying to direct me to a malware web site. And, no, I didn't get caught by it, but it was clever. However, the web site address was obviously not Amazon.
This was a prime example of a new class of personalised spam that uses information the spammers have been able to glean or steal about you in the mail. This sort of material is much more difficult to filter than spam mass mailings, and it's on the increase. Spam is now up to 200 billion messages a year, and a growing proportion - 800 million a day - are these personalised messages, known as spear phishing.
Be very careful about clicking on links in e-mail - where possible always type in addresses, and preferably only ones you already know.
http://ibtimes.com/articles/20081217/personalized-spam-rising-sharply-study-finds.htm
Microsoft and Mozilla both put out emergency browser patches this week. Both were patches for serious problems. You can judge just how serious the Microsoft patch was from the fact that they didn't wait till their once a month 'all patches' schedule came up. If you use Internet explorer, please get this patch immediately, even if you think you only browse 'safe' sites.
The Mozilla Firefox patches are also important, so if you use Firefox, get it patched if you haven't already done so. You know it makes sense!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/17/mozilla_3_0_5_and_2_0_0_1_9_updates/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/17/emergency_microsoft_patch/
http://www.physorg.com/news148667921.html
OK - here's a little story about the UK that will give my overseas readers a smirk and a laugh. Our government's Department for Transport decided to save 57 million UK pounds (US$85 million) of taxpayers' money by using computers to centralise a lot of its facilities - human resources, for instance. Very laudable, I'm all in favour of government bureaucracies saving money.
Unfortunately...
It turned out to be another ill conceived, unsupervised project. The system, only partly complete, is now up to 121 million UK pounds (US$190 million) and is only producing 40 million UK pounds (US$65 million) in savings. That means the system designed to save money is costing taxpayers 81 million UK pounds (US$125 million) more than when they started. And to add insult to injury, the software has taken to sending messages to its users in GERMAN!
The chairman of parliament's Committee of Public Accounts (roughly the equivalent of the US's GAO) described it as 'stupendous incompetence'. Difficult to disagree with that.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/british_computer_system_budget_overrun/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/pac_dft_mess/
Microsoft is wishing everyone a happy Xmas by tripling the price of downgrades from Vista to Windows XP on new machines to US$150. They are desperate to force people off XP on to their Vista dog of an operating system. One has to wonder just how successful this is going to be. One thing is for sure, it's certainly going to make people pissed with them (pissed off as we Brits would put it - pissed over here means drunk). If Microsoft carry on like this, people may even get annoyed enough to look for alternatives to Windows... Merry Xmas Microsoft.
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,155473/printable.html
Homework: Of lag, throughput and jitter
In my article on ViaSat-1 last week I used the terms lag (also known as latency) and throughput without explaining them. Several people asked me to explain the difference between these concepts, so, here for your edification is the Winding Down guide to latency, throughput and, as a special bonus, jitter!
Perhaps the best way to explain it is using an analogy. Suppose we have a wedding party, The bride and groom have exchanged their vows, the photographs have been taken and it's time to travel to the reception. There are 24 limos to take the party to the reception., Everyone gets in. The cars line up behind the happy couple's car and it's time to move off.
Now, as it happens there is a single lane highway that just happens to go from where the party are now, to the hall where the reception is being held. As luck would have the highway is empty and the cars are able to proceed single file at top speed (70 miles/hour where I come from) to the reception. The time it takes each car to get to the reception (let's say 16 minutes) is the latency.
Of course, getting the whole party there takes longer than that, because the cars are spaced out for safety, so lets say it takes another 12 minutes between the time the first car arrives and the last one discharges its passengers. This is the throughput - two cars/minute. So in this scenario it takes a total of 28 minutes from the time the first car departs to the time the last car pulls in, the passengers get out and we can toast the happy couple with Verve Clicquot champagne.
OK - now let's look at a scenario where the road making machines have been busy during the wedding ceremony and have widened the highway to a two lane affair. This time the cars line up two abreast and set off. It still takes the same time for the first cars to get there, 16 minutes, but since they are arriving two at a time it only takes half the time, six minutes, between the first and last car's arrival - giving us four cars/minute. That makes a total of only 22 minutes for the whole caboodle.
Of course, if we had a six lane highway we could get all the cars through in two minutes bringing the total time down to 18 minutes. That's probably as much increase in throughput as is worth doing at this stage since the time cost of the latency is now much greater than that of the throughput.
So how would we reduce the latency? Well, we could try and reduce the distance travelled - take out all the bends in the highway and have it made into a straight line between the start and the finish. That's probably a little excessive, so the most obvious way to reduce the latency is to speed up the cars. So let's assume that there are no highway patrols and no speed cameras so we can double the speed. That means that it only takes eight minutes for the first cars to arrive - if you happen to have a six lane highway the total time comes down to ten minutes from start to finish. That's not bad!
And jitter? Now this is interesting. In this case, imagine everyone has been sloppy about setting their cruise controls so that the speeds of the individual cars are slightly different. Not a lot different, just a tiny difference. This means that by the time the cars arrive they are just a little bit out of formation and the time between the arrival of each car is slightly different. We call this difference jitter. If the jitter is really bad, some cars might arrive out of order, and those of you who have attended weddings will know that this is serious and can cause undying feuds...
So we now have latency, throughput and jitter. How do these apply to the Internet?
Well, modern networks divide the stuff you are sending (or receiving) into packets of data (the cars) and send them off to their destination. Network latency is considered to be the time it takes for you to send a packet and to receive an answer (a round trip, rather than a one way trip we used), throughput is considered to be the amount of data you send each second - usually measured in bits (zeros and ones), and jitter is a measure of the time between the arrival of packets.
And how does it affect you?
If you are playing an online game the most important factor is latency (lag in the common parlance). The longer it takes for you to get a response to your command to the game, the more difficult and frustrating it is to play. Of course, the acceptable lag/latency is different for different types of games. For a turn based game a lag of several seconds will not make any appreciable difference, but for an on-line shoot 'em up, even a few tens of milliseconds can be too much.
If you are downloading a large file, the important factor is throughput. Large files have hundreds of thousands of packets. A several second initial lag when you ask for the file is nothing compared for the tens of minutes it takes between the first packet to arrive and the last one. The more packets you can get through the pipe at the same time (the more lanes), the shorter the download.
Finally, jitter matters if you are receiving streaming video and audio. In video if the packets are arriving at slightly different intervals, and you are watching them in real time, them the picture will appear jerky. In audio the voice or music will be distorted by the timing.
There are solutions, of course, and the most common is called buffering - you don't start playing the video until you have a chunk of it already downloaded, so you are never in a state where the next packet isn't already there, and each packet can be displayed at the correct time. Unfortunately, you can't delay people's phone calls in this way, which is why Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is still in its infancy.
So now you have more than you ever wanted to know about latency, throughput, and jitter. Think of it as a little something for you to use to demonstrate your superiority when there's nothing worth watching on the box over Xmas!
Geek Toys:
Ever wanted to shove an exhausted and uncooperative battery in the toaster? Join the club. And now here is your chance to do just that. The Toasty Charger is a charger capable of charging different types of those flat, rectangular, batteries so beloved of mobile devices. Just shove the battery into the toaster, press down the lever on the side, and when it's charged up it pops. Unfortunately, Toasty is not out for Xmas, but I'm sure you will be able to put it onto your birthday list.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/16/toasty_charger/
Alternatively, if your problem is always getting speeding tickets, then perhaps what you need is GPS Angel. This neat little gadget uses your the GPS systems to warn you when you are near speed and red light cameras, and it claims to be completely legal. There's a video of it in use at the URL, picking up a hidden camera - I got the impression those doing the demo almost crashed the car trying to spot the camera after the GPS Angel beeped a warning...
http://www.physorg.com/news148626662.html
Scanner: Other Stories
IBM claims fastest graphene transistor
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBOG80FypUC0FrK0G5kT0EC
Researchers create graphite memory ten atoms thick
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=9123838
Google cranks up the Consensus Engine
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/12/googlewashing_revisited/
Law suites or not, the RIAA still doesn't understand us
http://ct.cnet.com/clicks?t=73167921-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&brand
=NEWS&s=5
The 7 deadly sins of IT managers
http://ifwnewsletters.newsletters.infoworld.com/t/4021808/250590949/157172/0/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, lois, and to 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
21 December 30008
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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