WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well, we’re back, and with a varied selection of goodies this week. There’s Apple, Samsung, author Neil Gaiman, fines for losing data, life expectancy, Dreamweaver, political campaigns, backing up to the cloud, sofa beds, Intel’s Xeon Phi, Windows 8 and drunks, an Android mega-tablet, and government snooping stats from Google. And, as a special bonus, James Bond, NASA and their relationship to 3D printing!
My best wishes for a speedy recovery go out to all our readers who suffered the blows of Hurricane Sandy. Hopefully, the wreckage will be cleared rapidly and home and businesses rebuilt in double quick time.
And now for the hard stuff...
Shorts:
I’ve covered issues of so-called ‘piracy’ many times in this rag, so I’m not going to expound again at length, but I would like to point you at a fascinating video interview with the very successful author Neil Gaiman on this subject. His explanation, towards the end, of what internet ‘piracy’ is really about is one of the best analogies I’ve ever come across. Special thanks to reader Chandra Argentis for pointing me at this excellent, short and to the point, interview. Highly recommended.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI&feature=youtu.be
Another thing I’ve mentioned in Winding Down recently is Apple’s use of the Swiss railways clock face without permission. Given how hot Apple is about enforcing its own patents and copyright, some might be surprised at the cavalier attitude it takes towards other people’s intellectual property. Anyway, the bill is now in for this little piece of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ - a cool US$21 million for a license to use the clock face. OK, I admit that reporting this is pure schadenfreude, but we all have our weaknesses.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/12/apple_payout_swiss_railways/
US21 million may be a drop in the ocean for Apple, but there’s more woe coming from the direction of Korea. Samsung, who are already engaged in a patent battle with Apple, have hiked up the cost of the A6 processors used in Apple devices by 20%. That Apple would start a fight with the only people who currently have the capacity to produce their processor chips beggars belief, but then Apple works in mysterious ways. I guess it must be part of the legacy of Steve jobs.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/12/samsung_hikes_apples_prices/
Oh, and while we are on the subject of Apple, have you seen the details of the latest patent they’ve been granted? It’s a real doozy. They have been granted a patent for animated page turning of electronically displayed books. E-books might well be a recent invention, but the idea, and creation of animated page turning goes back to the dawn of computer role playing games. How many times has a game started with the scene setting history of the ‘land’ you are about to adventure in portrayed as a book with the pages animated? Only a gazillion times or so. Nice try, but no cigar for Apple if its stupid enough to try to enforce this one!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/13/apple_page_turn_design_patent/
A couple of stories in the UK press about fines levied on public bodies for losing confidential data got me to thinking about just how useless these fines are, and how they end up punishing the wrong people. The cases were fairly straightforward. In one the Manchester police force was fined 120,000 UK pounds (US$190,000) for losing a USB stick with a drug probe suspect’s details. In the other, the city of Stoke-on-Trent was fined the same amount for failing to ensure that its email was encrypted after child protection information was sent to a wrong address.
The problem is that the people who are punished by this sort of fine are not the perpetrators, but the local tax payers who have to make up the shortfall. It seems to me that the only real way to stop this sort of carelessness is to rip the facade off faceless bureaucracy, and introduce the idea of individual responsibility for those who are careless or break the rules in this fashion. In this sort of case, I would suggest, the way to go is to mandate the sacking of the person concerned and his/her line manager, and their barring from working in local or central government for at least five years. Such an action would not only cut out the element of penalization of the local tax payer, but would make those entrusted with looking after other people’s data a lot more careful in the future!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/26/ico_fine/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/15/invest_data_breach_fine_gmp_security_training/
Homework:
Here’s an interesting measure of progress over the last 40 years, from an unlikely source - Chemical and Engineering News. The editor was looking through old issues from the 1960s and he came across the obituaries page in the August 1967 issue. He compared it with the obituary page in the December 2011 issue. To quote the author:
“In the Dec. 5, 2011, issue the youngest person we ran an obituary for was 74 years old. And that’s not an anomaly. We are running nine obituaries in this issue, and the ages of the individuals are 92, 93, 59, 90, 86, 71, 71, 91, and 97. By contrast, in 1967, five of the death notices were for men in their 40s, three were for men in their 50s, and three were in their 60s. Of the 13 death notices that listed an age (a few did not), only two were for men over the age of 70.”
The figures may be anomalous, but I doubt it, and it opens a window on the size of the changes in life expectancy in the Western world.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/89/i51/Measure-Progress.html
How many people do you know who look after websites, who use ‘pirated’ copies of Adobe’s Dreamweaver software? I think that just about every webmeister I know who doesn’t work for a big corporation falls into that category. Dreamweaver is a really nice piece of software, but the problem is that it’s eye-wateringly expensive. Until now.
Adobe seem to have finally realize that no individuals are likely to buy it at its normal price, So, very wisely in my opinion, Adobe have introduced a monthly subscription at a very reasonable price. Reasonable enough, in fact, that most of the people I’ve spoken to have indicated that they will probably take up the offer next time they want to move to a new version. A shrewd, if belated, move on the part of Adobe, who stand to gain much from it.
http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/dreamweaver/buying-guide-subscriptions.html
(This is the UK details. I can’t access the US stuff.)
Those of you who like numbers and politics will find a recent article about how much (or how little) presidential campaigns influence how citizens vote may like to take a look at an article on the subject in ‘Pacific Standard’. It makes for interesting reading. As an ex-politico, myself, I’d just add that you need to understand that if people don’t like what their party is doing, they will rarely vote for another party - they just don’t vote. I’d also point out that, in my experience, the last section, entitled ‘So, did the campaign matter?’ is absolutely spot on.
http://www.psmag.com/politics/the-presidential-campaigns-didnt-really-matter-heres-why-49383/
Geek Stuff:
Do you back your stuff up to the cloud? It’s a kinda geeky thing to do, but have you ever stopped to do the sums on how much it really costs? I suspect not... Well you can’t claim ignorance any longer, because The Register has published an analysis that does just that. It’s for business back-up, but I think you’ll find it useful for finding out just how much your habit of backing up over the internet is costing you.
I think you’ll find it’s costing you a lot more than simply buying a terabyte USB 3 drive would cost, and it’s a lot less convenient than just plugging the drive into a new computer!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/15/cloud_storage_costs/
I know I’m always banging on about 3D printers being an up and coming thing, but here are a couple of interesting uses for you to mull over. The first is from the latest James Bond movie - Skyfall. For the scenes where Bond’s car is blown up, the film makers used an 18 piece, one third scale model. The pieces were created using a 3D printer. You didn’t really think they blew up a real Aston Martin DB5, did you?
The second use was even more interesting. NASA is currently testing the use of 3D printing for rocket engine parts. I was pretty stunned about that. It never occurred to me that 3D printers could make stuff that would stand up to those sort of stresses. But apparently they can, and do. Take a look at the Scientific American article and see for yourself.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/14/skyfall_makers_printed_db5_for_destruction
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nasa-3-d-printing-sls-rocket-engine&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SPC_20121115
I hate sofa beds. They are uncomfortable to sit on and pure murder to sleep on. Now, however, Fanny Adams (yes that’s a real name) a student at the Ecole nationale superieure des Arts Decoratifs has come up with the idea of adding a work station to a sofa bed. A truly nasty idea. I trust that none of the readers are considering buying me one of these monstrosities for Xmas!
http://www.gizmag.com/story-sofa-bed-workstation-in-one/24761/
Those of you who want more processing power, and what true geek doesn’t lust after more processing power, might care to take a look at the specs for Intel’s Xeon Phi 50 core co-processor. Slurp! But these cores aren’t just weenies like the cell processors in the PS3. These are the real thing. Each one is capable of booting Linux and running x86 software. It’s called a co-processor because it’s a card which you plug in to your kit and the kit’s main processor effectively becomes the controller.
At a suggested retail price of US$2,649 it’s a snip. Now that, dear readers, you -can- buy me for Xmas! In the meantime here’s the rest of the spec, courtesy of DrDobbs website: ‘Each processor supports four threads, making for 200 threads for the initial Phi. The cores run at 1.05 GHz and sport a 512-KB L2 cache each. They collectively share 8 GB of GDDR5 memory.’ What more could a geek want!
http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/intels-50-core-xeon-phi-the-new-era-of-i/240105810?cid=DDJ_nl_upd_2012-11-13_h&elq=61cf5a73ead945a58bb31018371c9679
Scanner: Other stories
A drunk person tries Windows 8 for the first time (video)
http://gizmodo.com/5958794/
ViewSonic VSD220 22in Android mega tablet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/15/review_viewsonic_vsd220_aio_smart_display/
Google stats show government net spying on the rise
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/transparency-report-government-requests.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/14/google_transparency_report_nov2012/
OEMs and sellers must pay refunds on software faults says UK Office of Fair Trading
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/30/digitalrefund/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb, Chandra 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
18 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.
