WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
For your edification this week we cover, so to speak, Amazon, Commodore, 3D printers, Minnesota, Coursera, an evil hideaway, future iPhones, Sci-Fi, real life tractor beams, Baen Books, Manning Publications, Parsing HTML with regex, Windows 8 Tiles patent, Ceefax, and industrial espionage at Dyson.
Winding Down is a little on the short side this week, because I was employing my +4 bed building skills when I should have been writing it. It’s perhaps also more geeky than usual too, but we are getting towards the end of the year, so maybe that’s excusable...
There won’t be an edition of Winding Down next week, because I’m out of town for the weekend. If you get desperate, play Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ (the original singles version) a few times!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBR2G-iI3-I
So, until the 18th of November, you will all have to make do with the following...
Shorts:
I see that Amazon is rumored to be looking at buying a mobile chip business from Texas Instruments (silicon chips, not fish’n’chips). This is the sort of really clever move that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos specializes in. it’s exactly the sort of move that enabled Commodore to produce the bestselling home computer of all time, when CEO Jack Tramiel purchased chip maker MOS Technology, whose award winning 6502 was the CPU for the Commodore 64, a computer for which I still have a soft spot.
Owning their own chip maker ensured that Commodore was always able to meet demand for the C64. If the Amazon/TI deal goes through, then Amazon will be in a similar powerful position, although I suspect the more short sighted among its investors will moan about the effect on their dividends. A brilliant move from Bezos if he can pull it off.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/15/amazon_texas_instruments_buy/
3D printers are definitely coming up in the world. The 3D Print Show held recently in London demonstrated a whole range of things that can be made with just such a printer, including guitars, bras and high heels. I’m not sure that I would want to go on stage with an obviously plastic guitar, it’s not exactly cool. But tastes change and you never know, one day it might be the ultimate in coolth. And I suppose it’s one way to get a clean bra if the washing machine is broken...
Homework:
Live in Minnesota? Then you’re out of luck if you want to take free university courses from the aggregator Coursera. Coursera offers 33 free University courses from highly respected academic organizations like Stanford University in California and Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Coursera itself is not a university, it merely facilitates people taking the courses.
Now Coursera have been told they can’t offer the courses to Minnesota residents because of the consumer protection laws. Minnesota seems to think that the sort of people who want to take university courses are too stupid to be able to spot fakes! Sad really, because the Coursera courses are tailor made for people like me who want to learn but aren’t interested in taking exams. I signed up for a course a couple of months ago, and it starts in January.
For those of you who don’t live in Minnesota, here’s a list of their current offerings - I’d like to take at least a quarter of them!
https://www.coursera.org/courses
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/19/minnesota_bans_free_online_education/
Geek Stuff:
Are you sitting evil (i.e. with a white cat on your lap)? Then I’ll begin. The US government is putting up for sale one of its former anti-ballistic missile sites - the former Stanley Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in North Dakota. Apart from the usual missile silos - a little waterlogged, but they can be pumped out, of particular interest to evil villains is the fact that it has its own pyramid!
Also of interest is the tactical area. To quote from the sales pitch, “The Tactical Area offers the Missile Site Radar Building, power plant, universal missile building, warhead handling building and access sentry station. The tactical area also offers 30 Spartan and 16 Sprint missile silos.” Sadly the missiles have been removed, but given how cash strapped the US government is at the moment, you might be able to persuade them to sell them back to you.
Altogether a superb hideaway for an evil villain looking to establish world domination!
http://gsaauctions.gov/gsaauctions/aucdsclnk?sl=FTWOR713001005#.UHcOKEFGiNY.email
By the way, if you’ve now got your iPhone 5, you might like to take a look at mlk-shk’s take on future iPhones. Personally, I was rather taken with the iPhone 20...
http://mlkshk.com/p/JCCI
Here’s a story for Sci-Fi fans - scientists at NY Uni have succeeded is creating a tractor beam. It’s just a tiny one at the moment, though, but it’s a start. The description of how they did it - two Bessel light beams - is complex, but the important thing is that they were able to pull in tiny silicon spheres. It may not seem much, but this is just the beginning. As the saying goes, from tiny acorns, mighty oak trees grow.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/22/tiny_tractor_beam/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22406-tractor-beam-built-from-rings-of-laser-light.html
Still on the subject of Sci-Fi, I discovered talking to someone at work, the other day, that there are still some fans who are not aware of Baen Books’ superb e-books offerings. Not only do they have excellent cheap bundles of books available, but some of their older books are available as free downloads! It’s called the Baen Free Library, and the books are available in a wide variety of e-book formats.
Good heavens - it’s enough to make you -want- to pay for the newer e-books!
http://www.baen.com/library/intro.asp
And for the techies among you, I’d suggest you take a gander at Manning Publications’ books. They too have an interesting deal. Whenever you buy one of their paper books, you can get the e-version from their site. This is regardless of where you bought the paper one. I discovered the deal when I bought Anthony Williams’ ‘C++ Concurrency in Action’ on Amazon. (Incidentally this book is a must for C++ programmers.)
http://www.manning.com/
http://www.manning.com/williams/
And finally, also for the programmers, just take a look at what must surely be the ultimate answer to a question about parsing HTML with regex. You want to look at the answer after the line that says ‘36 Answers’. Stick with it, it’s a fantastic build-up. This one will go down as a classic!
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454
Scanner: Other stories
‘We invented Windows 8 Tiles in the 1990s’, says firm suing Microsoft
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/31/microsoft_sued_over_tiles/
Ceefax service closes down after 38 years on BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20032882
Dyson alleges spy stole ‘leccy motor secrets for Bosch
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/10/25/dyson_claims_bosch_acquired_motor_designs_unlawfully/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Astrid, Andrew, Barb and Fi 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
4 November 2012
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.
