WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
There was something of a first for the open source business this week. Red Hat made it into the Standard and Poor's 500 Index. This means that the fate of open source can now be read in the day-to-day fluctuations of the S&P500 index. Alternatively, it could mean that Red Hat has sold out to those nasty capitalists on Wall Street. Your choice, depending on your politics.
Incidentally, on the subject of big finance, I was fascinated to discover that Wells Fargo Bank is suing itself. Yes really, there's a URL in the scanner section if you think I'm making this up to fill space. I wonder which bit of Wells Fargo will win the case? The discovery part of the trial should be fascinating.
Finally, and most importantly, before we move on to Winding Down proper, I'd like to draw your attention to a magnificent new piece of prose on my web site. Comparisons have been made with Shakespeare's sonnets, Hemmingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', and Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'. [By whom? And what did they say? Ed]
The piece was originally published in CVu magazine in three sections. It's now been put back together, as a single piece, with some added material that the print copy didn't have room for. So if you want to both find out about some of the trials and tribulations of being interviewed for job, an analytical look at the process, and more, just point your browser here, when you finish Winding Down.
And now for the main course...
Shorts:
Well if ever there was a need for a wake up call on download Digital Restriction Management (DRM), Amazon have just provided it! With a complete lack of any sense of irony, they remotely deleted e-books purchased by their customers from the purchaser's Kindle e-book reader. And which books did they delete? George Orwell's '1984' and 'Animal Farm'.
Note that these were legitimately purchased copies of the books, and Amazon gave no warning, and didn't ask for permission - it just deleted them and replaced them with a purchase credit. It's equivalent to the manager of the local book store employing a burglar to break into your house and remove a book you bought from his shop, just leaving an IOU redeemable at the shop. Would you want to carry on shopping at that shop?
Amazon has said that it won't do this again, but, frankly, it's enough for me to have scrubbed Kindle off my wish list, and to make sure that I never buy anything involving an electronic download from Amazon.
Oh, and what was the job of the chief character, Winston Smith, in '1984'? Deleting the 'unacceptable' parts of history from databases, if my memory serves me correctly! Classic, Amazon, truly classic, although I'm surprised you missed out Ray Bradbury's 'Farenheit 451'.
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000597.html
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showArticle.jhtml
?articleID=218501227
There was an interesting little take on so-called 'online-piracy' in the EU this week. No less a personage than the EU's telecoms chief, Viviane Reading, blamed the current media business model for the rise in 'piracy'.
At an event hosted by the Brussels-based think-tank, the Lisbon Council, she stated, "In my view, growing internet piracy is a vote of no-confidence in existing business models and legal solutions. It should be a wake-up call for policy-makers." She did, however, refuse to take sides, suggesting that both parties in this ongoing saga had painted themselves into a corner.
The EU plans to open up a consultation period on its 'Digital Europe' strategy next month, and the remarks were part of a discussion on the fact that the strategy will include providing greater access to good quality online content. File this little snippet under 'putting the cat amongst the pigeons'...
http://euobserver.com/9/28438/?rk=1
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3i8a6a2617e4c
79ad16bbe4a72cdaf2199
In another first, the ailing General Motors is planning to sell its cars on eBay. I suppose this qualifies as 'getting with' the digital world. At this rate we can expect to see a report that GM are talking to Rock Star Studios, creators of 'Grand Theft Auto', about designing digital cars for use in cyberspace. According to the report, GM also has ambitions to make cars that users want to buy. What an unusual ambition for a manufacturer. Pity they left it till after they went bust before discovering this unique selling point.
http://www.physorg.com/news166470821.html
Visa credit cards did their bit to rack up the US national debt last Monday. They hit a number of users with a transaction for US$23 quadrillion. Oh, and there was also a US$15 charge for going over the limit! It seems that only in the game 'Monopoly' (and New Zealand) do you get bank errors in your favour...
The exact figure was US$23,148,855,308,184,500 (the geeks among you can turn that into hexadecimal to figure out what happened - no cheating by looking it up on Google). This is roughly 2,000 times the size of the current US national debt. If you are going to make a mistake in a financial statement, then this has got to be the way to do it with style.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/15/quadrillion.dollar.glitch/index.html
I note that the credit crunch has finally caught up with the video games business. Sales in June dropped by a third. The last time anything like this happened was in 2000, when sales dropped 40%. There's a lot of reasons behind the fall. The two most obvious are the credit crunch, which is stopping people waving their credit cards at the drop of a hat, and the fact that June last year was a very good month for the sale of video games.
I suspect what's really behind it, though, is that with all the financial retrenchment people are just no longer prepared to buy games on the off-chance they might be good. Also a lot of the current 'block-buster' games are re-hash 'sequels', whose only real addition is 'better' graphics, for some definition of better. Given this, why should cash strapped customers buy more of the same?
I don't think it's going to improve much in the future.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/071709-us-video-game-sales-sink.html
Which brings me to another interesting games happening this week. Microsoft is drastically reducing the number of slots for independent developers on its Xbox Live Arcade site. It also has a different set of much harsher 'rules' for accepting games from independent studios, as opposed to the big publishers. For example, indies are told that that their games are too similar to existing ones, but there are no such restrictions on the big publishers.
The independent studios are important. They write most of the games - especially the new ground-breaking ones - but it's the publishers that get the lion's share of the profit. Until a few years ago, the independents had to go to the publishers to get their games into the shop and sold, but with the rise of the console online shops this started to change.
Now, however, it seems that, under pressure from the big publishers, who are seeing their cut whittled away, Microsoft are moving to restrict the presence of indies on Xbox Live. It should be noted that at the same time the publishers are moving to try to buy up the independent studios. No surprises there then, and it shows in the poor quality and recycling of ideas that is now going on in the mainstream games business.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-9754-Seattle-Video-Game-Industry-
Examiner~y2009m7d16-Microsoft-to-shut-out-indie-developers-from-Xbox-Live
http://kotaku.com/5313864/indies-being-shut-out-of-xbox-live-arcade-%5Bupdate%5D
And talking of Microsoft, most of you will have had undoubtedly have had your personal cyberspace invaded by the hype surrounding the new Windows 7. It either has been, or is about to be, released to the computer manufacturers, depending on who you talk to. I'm using Vista at the moment, and I don't really like it, but I personally won't be upgrading, because the price is much too high for what is, essentially, a bunch of fixes for things that are wrong with Vista.
The bad news, from Microsoft's point of view, is that many businesses are still using XP, and see no reason to spend what little cash they have upgrading to bug fixed version of Vista - i.e. Windows 7. A newly published survey indicates that that nearly 60% of IT professionals polled from right across the company size spectrum have no plans at all to deploy Windows 7. Some 34%, the bulk of the rest, said they would probably move over to it at the end of next year. The diehards who said they would deploy it this year came to a mere 5.4% of the poll, while the remainder claimed to have already gone live...
Microsoft have already deemed Windows 7 to be a success, so this could be something of a blow, if it's putative customers really do follow this pattern or lack of upgrades.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/07/13/windows_7_scriptlogic_poll/
Homework:
There's an interesting little proposal just got funded by the Pentagon. It's to use tiny 'cyborg crickets', the insect, not the game, to build up a distributed network for emergency communications. The really interesting thing is that it will be using the same sort of communication facilities that the biological insects use - 'chirps' generated by wing beats. Each 'insect' will pass on the chirp until it reaches a base station receiver, where it can be decoded.
You can see why the Pentagon would be interested. Such a distributed system doing battlefield reconnaissance would be very difficult to completely silence (so to speak). It would also have uses in disasters, especially in the search for survivors. It's an interesting idea and I look forward to hearing more as the hardware develops.
http://www.physorg.com/news166715517.html
With Microsoft relaunching its 'new, improved' search engine and Google launching an operating system (Bing and Chrome respectively), the world seems to be standing on its head these days.
Just how seriously are they taking making inroads into one another's core business? Not very seriously at all, in the opinion of Robert X Cringely in the New York Times. His take is that the main purpose is so that each keeps the other on its toes. Which is fine for all of us - Google for instance, have now allocated some of their top software engineers to working on their search algorithms, something which, rumour has it, has been neglected for quite a while.
Cringley's point is that both Microsoft and Google are very similar, in spite of the difference in size. Both make a lot of money from a core product - Windows/Office combo in the case of Microsoft, internet advertising in the case of Google. Both of them spend a large chunk of money on other products in an attempt to diversify, and end up losing what for anyone else would be vast amounts of money, on those products.
It's an interesting op-ed piece, well worth a read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13cringely.html?_r=2
The DC Metro crash in June was the subject of a number of items in the latest issue 'Risks Digest'. It's clear that there was a failure of the computer software, which resulted in a train vanishing completely from the system. Fortunately, it turned out to be possible to replicate the failure a few days later.
This is fortunate for two reasons. First, it clearly takes any blame off the driver of the moving train, who, as I understand it, gave her life trying to reduce the impact, instead of trying to save her own life.
Second, it means that it is much easier to find out exactly what went wrong with the software in question. The biggest nightmare for a computer programmer is trying to find a bug that only happened once, and can't be reproduced. Any time you can reproduce a bug, you can fix it, though with badly written software, the fixing may not exactly be the easiest thing in the world.
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.72.html
(Note there is a later mailed bulletin, but it's not online yet)
Geek Toys:
Obviously you need to be a true geek to appreciate the items in this section of Winding Down. Now, I'm pleased to tell you, you can calibrate your geekiness level with Wired's on-line '100 Essential Skills for Geeks'. To be a true geek, apparently, you should be able either to perform the tasks on the spot, or know how to get the info needed to carry it out.
There are some I clearly fail at - item 12, for instance, since I have neither a TV, Tivo, or an Xbox! Some I can do, like the stuff using the 'vi' editor, but personally I consider that to just be posing, rather than true geekiness. Real geeks don't opt for the hard way if there is an easier way to do the same job, they need to get back to their 'leisure' activities.
Also, I'm sure item 99 is a trick question. No self respecting geek would admit to being able to talk about things that aren't tech related!
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/100-basic-geek-skills-for-geeks/
Scanner: Other Stories
Wells Fargo - the bank that sues itself
http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/al-lewis-wells-fargo-bank-sues/
Red Hat to join S&P 500
http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1612209.html
How to use electrical outlets and cheap lasers to steal data
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/070909-electrical-data-theft.html
The end of driving?
http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/the_end_of_driving_mike_
and_maaike_introduce_the_autonomobile_13908.asp#more
iPod fingered in car inferno
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/10/saab_inferno/
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
19 July 2009
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.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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