WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
As the old year goes out, never to return, we take a look at e-book readers, the demise of Apple's attempt to keep e-book prices high, Amazon's strategy, broadband caps, life as a computer simulation, the Fermi Paradox, elevator shafts and rubber ducks. If that's not enough to keep you going over Christmas, there are some URLs pointing to such diverse issues as false DMCA take down requests, the Kodak patents, new semi-conductor materials, magnetoelectric computer memory, hackable hotel door locks, a 25-GPU cluster for cracking passwords, and a massive 1.47 billion Euro fine for price fixing.
As I mentioned last week, we will be back in the new year on January 13. Until then, Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year to all our readers.
E-books
A book! A book! My kingdom for an e-book!
Let’s start the last Winding Down of the year with a look at e-Reading. I know I've covered e-books before, but it's my belief that 2012 was the year that e-books and e-Reader devices really hit the mainstream. Travelling on the tube (subway to my American readers), and the overground rail system, I now see more people reading e-books than paper books.
What hasn't been cracked yet is newspapers. Everyone still reads paper newspapers, as far as I can tell. I'm not surprised. Newspapers are still extremely convenient in their paper form. Also, interestingly enough, the other week I abandoned reading a paper book not because it was uninteresting, but because the print was too small to be comfortably read. That's not a problem with an e-Reader because you can change the size of the print.
There are differences, though, that might be worth thinking about. I use my reader mainly for reading novels (usually sci-fi - take a look at Baen Books site for free and DRM-free sci-fi <http://www.baen.com/library/>). The reason for this is that e-Readers really tend to enforce the linear reading of the book - you can't really flip through it in the way you can a paper book. To give an example, I was recently reading a book called 'Fatal Colours' which is about the English Wars of the Roses, and the battle of Towton (my review of it is here <http://www.ibgames.com/alan/morereading.html>). One of the key things about the War of the Roses is that the members of the English Aristocracy, who are all related to one another, kept changing sides. As a result of which you need to keep referring to the genealogical charts towards the end of the book. This is not easy with an e-Reader, you really need the paper version. There is a similar problem with diagrams in technical books, and in reference books the issue is even worse.
When it comes to take a bunch of novels on holiday, though, the e-Reader really scores, especially for me, given that I can get through the average novel in about six to seven hours.
If you haven't yet succumbed to the siren sound of the e-book, but you're sorely tempted, then let me introduce you to Gizmag's round up of the major e-book readers, where they cover the three Amazon Kindles, the two Nook readers, and one I've never heard of before called the Kobo Glo. But before I go on to tell you my favorite, there is the question of why you would use an e-book reader rather than a full blown tablet like the iPad, or a smartphone? I think this is best answered by a comment in the Gizmag article. "As much as smartphones and tablets have become integral parts of our lives, there's something to be said for eReaders. They're lighter, easier on the eyes, and better recreate the feeling of reading a book. Not to mention, they contain fewer distractions."
Personally, I use the Kindle Paperwhite. I used to have one of the original Kindles - the one with the funny little widgey keyboard on the bottom. I never used the keyboard, and happily moved on to the button-less Paperwhite. I love the Paperwhite. It's light, easy on the eyes, and I can read it in bad light conditions. So, obviously, my vote goes to the Kindle Paperwhite, but take a look at the article, you might have different needs to mine.
http://www.gizmag.com/ereader-comparison-2012/25124/
Moving on in the e-book universe, I'm happy to say that the attempt by Apple to force the likes of Amazon to charge high prices for e-book, similar to those charged by Apple's iTunes store, is finally coming to an end. I've covered the issues in previous versions of Winding Down, so I won't go through them again, suffice to say that the companies involved in trying to drive up the prices of e-books, including Apple, are in the process of settling with both the EU and the US department of Justice. Hopefully this means a drop in the price of e-books in the near future...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/14/apple_publishers_eu_okthen/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/19/penguin_settles_us_ebook_case/
And now for a completely gratuitous e-book plug! Some of my readers who have played my game, Federation 2, may remember Clem Chambers, who was the third member of ibgames, together with Fi Craig and myself. Well Clem went on to become a millionaire, which I put down to the opportunity to hone his trading and financial skills in Federation 2! Anyway, Clem now also has articles in such prestigious rags as Forbes Magazine and also writes e-books, while acting as CEO of ADVFN Stock Charts in his spare time. More to the point, last week he bought Fi and myself a slap up meal in a posh restaurant just opposite the Bank of England. Well it wasn't massively posh - to get into really posh restaurants in this country you have to possess something more sartorial than jeans, T-shirts and trainers - but it was reasonably posh. Anyway, if you want to read a book about trading by a person who makes money from trading rather than making money by telling other people how to do it, I suggest you take a look at Clem's two Kindle books “101 Ways to Pick Stock Market Winners” and “A Beginner’s Guide to Value Investing”. He also has a new book called “The Death of Wealth: The Economic Fall of the West” coming out in mid-January.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0062F6LIM/a0d23-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007HAZV0K/a0d23-20
Shorts:
And while we are on the subject of e-books, you might like to take a quick look at this short piece about Amazon's selling strategy on Cnet. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos puts it so pithily, "People don't want gadgets, they want services."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57552160-93/jeff-bezos-wants-amazon-in-every-pocket/?tag=nl.e703&s_cid=e703
One of the bigger stories of the last week was the revelation from a report by the New America Foundation that broadband limits don't address network congestion or cover higher operating costs. It's an interesting argument, and no doubt the powerful broadband operators will be trying to refute the study's conclusions in the new year. I think this argument will run and run, but for what it's worth, my feeling is that there is a lot more bandwidth out there that the carriers are admitting. They're just not using it properly, either deliberately in order to prop up an incorrect business model, or unknowingly because no one has ever done anything like this before, so there is no way to know how things should be organized for optimum efficiency.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/wireless-broadband/study-data-caps-bilk-users-and-stifle-competition-209500
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/18/us_telcos_data_caps/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/senator-introduces-bill-to-regulate-data-caps/
Homework:
The idea that we might be living in a computer simulation has been around for some time. I can remember players pondering the issue when my Federation 2 game opened on Compunet in 1986. Various sci-fi authors had explored the idea even before that, and, of course, more recently, it made it into the movies.
It's an interesting idea, but no one could think of any way to tell whether it was true or not. Until now, when scientists think that by extrapolating from how supercomputers currently model the universe, it might be possible to tell if we are part of an advanced simulation. Basically, the idea is that if you have a computer with finite resources, there will be limitations caused by the resources available, and that this will be the case no matter how much you scale things up - sooner or later you will run up against a resource limitation. Once that happens there will be traces of those limitations that can be discovered from inside the simulation.
Of course this carries the classic problem that you can only ever prove that we do live in a simulation if you find such traces. If you can't find the traces, it doesn't mean we don't live in a simulation, only that there -may- be traces that you haven't yet discovered. I wish the team that came up with the idea of the test the best of luck, but I'm not convinced that most people will want to know if it turns our universe, and ourselves are just an experiment which will be turned off when it's finished!
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-simulation-idea.html#nwlt
As the Centauri Dreams blog notes, we are all still here after the putative end of the world, which I forgot was happening. (Two Mayans are standing outside a pub. One says to the other, "Coming for a drink?" The other replies, "I've got a calendar to finish... Oh, alright, it can wait...") However this particular blog entry is an interesting discussion on the Fermi Paradox. For those of you who haven't met this idea before, it was postulated by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. Fermi wanted to know why, if a multitude of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations exists in the Milky Way galaxy, evidence such as spacecraft or probes is not seen.
Usually the paradox is taken as an argument for the 'we are all alone' hypothesis, but the blog looks at a couple of papers that put more sophisticated lines of reasoning, ones which suggest that we may indeed have interstellar neighbours, and that there are reasons why they are hiding from us. Interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_Paradox
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/ (It's the entry entitled 'New Models of Galactic Expansion.)
Geek Stuff:
This must surely be the ultimate gadget for a geek to play with - a 350 meter elevator-shaft sunk into the ground, complete with multiple express elevators to play with! Its real purpose is to test out skyscraper elevators before they are installed in the skyscrapers. Oh boy, I wanna play - take a look at the video.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20504312
If zooming up and down elevator shafts isn't your thing, then how about a giant (and I mean giant) rubber duck. It's 50 ft high, and spent Tuesday 11 December floating down the Thames, where they had to raise Tower Bridge to let it through. If you've got a bath big enough, I'm sure you could get one for yourself!
http://metro.co.uk/2012/12/11/giant-rubber-duck-sails-down-the-thames-3311508/
Scanner: Other stories
Google starts reporting false DMCA takedown requests
http://torrentfreak.com/google-starts-reporting-false-dmca-takedown-requests-121213/
Apple, Google, Microsoft join forces to buy Kodak patents
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/09/apple_google_microsoft_buy_kodak_patents/
Indium gallium arsenide transistor could boost microchip performance
http://www.gizmag.com/indium-gallium-arsenide-transistor/25443/
Engineers develop new magnetoelectric computer memory
http://phys.org/news/2012-12-magnetoelectric-memory.html#nwlt
Lock firm Onity starts to shell out for security fixes to hotels' hackable locks
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/12/06/lock-firm-onity-starts-to-shell-out-for-security-fixes-to-hotels-hackable-locks/
25-GPU cluster cracks every standard Windows password in less than 6 hours
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/25-gpu-cluster-cracks-every-standard-windows-password-in-6-hours/
Record 1.47 BILLION Euro European Commission fine for price-fixing display cartels
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/05/eu_fines_crt_cartels/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers 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
23 December 23012
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.
