WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Sheesh! It's a month since the last edition of this splendiferous organ, no wonder begging letters are pouring in demanding to know where their weekly fix is. Joking apart, the extended delay was caused by illness (some of mine and more because the person who handles the distribution was really quite ill) and by the fact that I just got promoted at work. Fortunately I survived the first week!
Hmm... Lotsa stuff piled up while I was 'away', I'll have to be very selective this week I suspect. In particular I'm not covering the stuff about net neutrality, because that is being discussed to death in the 'popular' press.
So here are a few bits and pieces to bring you up to date...
Shorts:
The record companies are having problems with digital stuff. And I'm not talking about P2P free downloading. No, I'm talking about the digital masters of material recorded a few decades ago. It turns out that they haven't been storing them very well, and whole chunks of their back catalogues have been disappearing from the digital tapes.
The masters for records used to be recorded on analog tapes which were then stored in vaults and played back when they were needed. In the 1980s there was a change to digital mastering, and it is those masters that haven't been looked after properly. Only now, after too much has been lost, is the music business starting to take storage seriously, and taking a leaf out the banks' books. The banks use a heavy duty tape system called LTO to back up their data. EMI and Universal, for example, are finally starting to do the same, storing the tapes in vaults around the country.
So, if your fave music from the 80s and 90s isn't available, you now know why...
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/file-not-found-the-record-industrys-digital-storage-crisis-20101207
And while we are on the subject of the music business, I want to talk about Spain. There was a law due to go through Spain's parliament around Xmas that would have given the government the power to close down sites that link to 'infringing' content. Not that carry such content, note, just that link to it. Pretty nasty stuff.
So why was it dropped? Protests from musicians? Nope. Protests from the listening masses? Nope. Rioting on the streets? Nope.
It was, in fact, material from the big Wikileaks release of diplomatic material from the USA. It turn out that the real reason for the clause (known as the Sinde law, the name of Spain's current 'culture' minister) was the result of some heavy leaning on the Spanish government by the US government. This sort of thing happens all the time of course, and the USA is by no means unique in indulging in such activity. However, much as they would like to comply, no sovereign government can afford to be seen to be carrying out the wishes of another country, and so the Sinde law was quietly dropped.
I understand the big media companies are not happy - with both the US and the Spanish governments. I'm sure they're already working on a way to get round it, though.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/how-wikileaks-killed-spains-anti-p2p-law.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/not-so-gentle-persuasion-us-bullies-spain-proposed
Want to know what the USA's Transport Security Administration (TSA) spends its money on - apart from producing naked pictures of travellers, of course? Well the government finally got round to auditing TSA expenditure, which was, shall we say, revealing. Actually, it turns out that it should really be the TSA saying "Don't touch my junk!", rather than the passengers. In fact the TSA has been buying quite a whole heap of junk machinery. They seem to be real suckers for purchasing unproven machinery.
For example, they spent US$30 million on machines that puffed air at the passengers and then sniffed it for explosives smells. There are apparently warehouses full of these machines which didn't work. This little affair was only the most prominent example in the auditor's report, all of them a product of the TSA's desire to find a tech silver bullet that's the answer to airport security.
So why not ask your congress critter who is supposed to have oversight of this little spending bonanza? It's all taxpayer dollars, and after all many of them stood on a platform of reducing spending...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/20/AR2010122005599.html?sid=ST2010123005248
On a less serious note, I found Robert X Cringely's 12 tech predictions for 2011 most amusing. I particularly liked the prediction that the face of Steve Jobs will be seen on a tortilla, which will later be donated to the Computer History Museum in San Jose!
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/12-tech-predictions-2011-279?page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_wrapup_2010-12-31
I guess we all like a little smirk when something not too disastrous goes wrong for a government. My smirk this month was the news that the US government's document on how to prevent leaks was itself leaked! Yep they're trying to stop further WikiLeaks style revelations (no big surprise there), but they can't even keep those plans under wraps. Doesn't bode well for the future chances of avoiding leaks.
http://www.techspot.com/news/41889-leaked-us-government-strategy-to-prevent-leaks.html
And now for a little something closer to my heart. Wine! It seems that what may be the oldest grape winery in the world has been discovered in Armenia. The ancient empire of Armenia was located between the Black Sea, The Caspian Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea - sort of around the northern Middle East.
The winery has been dated at around 4,100B.C., so it's over 6,000 years old. The winery vat is in a cave which is also a burial ground. I guess they must have enjoyed holding spectacular wakes in those days! And no doubt the wine was full bodied.
OK. OK. No more bad jokes about old wine. It's interesting though because this site is at least a thousand years older than any previously discovered, and making grape wine is both an art and a technical skill, which indicates that humans were mastering complex technical skills over 6,000 years ago. So, who's for a glass of Armenian red, 6,100B.C. vintage?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704458204576074141252276326.html
Finally, in this section, something that's much, much older than the Armenian winery - Hanny's Voorwerp. Take a look at the picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. It's a weird blob of greenish gunk a long way away. It's apparently gas illuminated by a beam of light from the core of the galaxy IC2497. The details are in the accompanying blurb.
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/10/5806236-weird-voorwerp-in-the-spotlight
Homework:
Most of you will have read about the huge newly complete neutrino detector at the South Pole. However, you may not have realized just how big it is, so here is a URL that gives some idea of the scale by stacking up some of the world's biggest buildings to make it more obvious!
http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/info/scale.php
The IEEE's Spectrum on-line magazine has an interesting piece for the non-techie about how the coming of the free (deregulated) market in electricity in the US led to the rolling blackouts and massive hikes in bills. It wasn't supposed to happen that way, quite to the contrary, it was supposed to make it cheaper.
The article explains succinctly why this all went wrong, and it's well worth a read.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/how-the-free-market-rocked-the-grid/1
This is a bit belated, but if you want to understand the science behind Santa's annual jaunts take a look at a set of reports from North Carolina State University on the Santa's Workshop Visiting Scholar's Program. For a slightly different view of the subject, check out the xkcd view (and hold the cursor over the final panel to get the tool tip)!
http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/tag/science-of-santa/
http://xkcd.com/838/
A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an interesting piece about how the circle of poverty is being broken in poorer countries. It's not really a tech issue, but I though it would be of interest to people who read this rag. It's called conditional cash transfers, and it actually seems to work. What it does is to use relatively small amounts of money as leverage, and, in general, make sure it goes to the women.
But the money isn't just handed out, in order to get it you they have to attend classes on nutrition and disease prevention, keep their children in school, go regularly to the doctors, and a whole host of other things that first world countries tend to take for granted. I found it fascinating - take a look if this sort of thing interests you.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/to-beat-back-poverty-pay-the-poor/
Here's one in the eye for the old stick-in-the-muds. It seems from research done in the UK's Coventry university that texting improves childrens' language skills. I have to confess that I thought it only improved their ability to type consonants with their thumb. But I was wrong (cue gasps and swooning all round).
What it actually does is to improve their literacy skills, because you have to have a good understanding of the English (or American for those of my readers who live on the left hand side of the pond) language to be able to decipher txt messages.
I did consider, as my contribution to helping readers of this magnificent organ improve their grasp of the English language, writing the whole issue without using any vowels, and substituting numbers for common letter sequences - for instance '8' for 'ate'. A little bit of experimentation, however, convinced me that this would not be a good idea, since it suffered from the same problems as computer scripts written in the Perl language. Without external referents, it's impossible to tell whether you are looking at the original text, or a version that has been encrypted. So you can all think yourself lucky!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8272502/Text-messaging-improves-childrens-spelling-skills.html
Geek Toys:
How far back can you remember disk drives? I can vaguely remember disk drives in cabinets about the size of a small fridge. The first ones I actually used, though, were 8' hard sectored floppies (cue stories of walking miles in the snow to hand in punch cards). The floppies had holes punched in them at intervals so that the read/write heads could find the start of the sectors. However far back you go, InfoWorld has a slide show of drives starting with punch cards and then running through drives from 1956 to the present day.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/storage/the-evolution-hard-drives-886¤t=1&last=12#slideshowTop
Dum De Dum Dum... How would you like to have on your desk a big red button of the type used by Bond villains to destroy their secret hideaway/private island/country/planet/solar system/galaxy/universe/multiverse? Well OK, maybe not the multiverse. USB Geek have just the thing - a genuine big red button you can plug into your computer, ready for the next time your boss hassles you. It comes complete with sound effects. and puts graphics with black and yellow stripy lines on the screen. What more could you want? A snip at a mere US$20.
http://usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=1400
Scanner:
Homeland Security presents 'Evidence' for domain seizures; Proves it knows little about the Internet - or the law
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101217/01190512310/homeland-security-presents-evidence-domain-seizures-proves-it-knows-little-about-internet---law.shtml
'Great Garbage Patch' in the Pacific Ocean not so great claim scientists
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8241265/Great-Garbage-Patch-in-the-Pacific-Ocean-not-so-great-claim-scientists.html
Library of Congress gets a 'Mile of Music'
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/arts/music/10masters.html
Scientists create 'dry water'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7964109/Scientists-create-dry-water.html
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, 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
23 January, 2011
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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