WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Welcome back to Winding Down - we start the new year with bumper crop of different topics: Java, steam whistles, Samsung v. Apple, wind farms, Google/YouTube v. Microsoft, a break in at Microsoft, a new type of fan, slinky springs, anti-bacterial wars - copper v. stainless steel, the Fermi Paradox, interviews, and Adobe CS2. We also have URLs leading to articles on Amazon/Kindle, small scale hydro-electricity, touch screens, downgrading to Windows 7, PaperTab, the Razer Edge, and journalists’ nightmare.
So all in all a little bit of catching up after our three week Xmas holiday. It’s cold and wet here, which makes a change, because normally it’s wet and cold. If you ever wondered why the British Empire was made up mainly of hot bits of the world, just take a trip over here at this time of the year... But enough of my whingeing, and on to this week’s Winding Down.
Shorts:
First off in the new year is a piece of grim news - Oracle screwed up badly with the latest release of Java, and there is a major security hole in it. I’d advise all my readers to turn off any Java based plugins installed in their browsers. You can find the details at the URL, and it’s so bad that even the US Department of Homeland Security have recommended that you make this change.
Not what I’d call a nice Xmas present, thank you, Oracle.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/10/java_0day/
OK, it’s a bit late, but here’s a little something that I thought was great - ear splitting steam whistles greeting the new year. Fabulous video and stills from the Gothamist, just don’t turn the volume up too loud!
http://gothamist.com/2013/01/01/photos_pratt_steam_whistles_greet_2.php#photo-1
I see that Samsung is now the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, having finally overtaken Nokia, who have held that title since 1998. Samsung are good (looks fondly at his Galaxy Note 1), but the change in fortunes is as much to do with the demise of Nokia as it is Samsung powering ahead. The question of whether Samsung are beating Apple in the smart phone market is still up in the air. A lot of analysts seem to think so, but when I dug into it, all of the articles I read seemed to refer back to one source - an analysis by Strategy Analytics.
Unfortunately, looking at that analysis, it becomes clear that they are comparing sales reported by Apple with numbers shipped by Samsung, who haven’t yet provided sales figures. This is like comparing apples with pears, OK they can both be fermented into cider, but they are still completely different. Sales means someone put up hard cash - kerrrching, that’ll do nicely - for the device. Shipped means that the retailers (or ISPs) have agreed to stock them in their shops, not that they’ve been sold and paid for. Shipping is easy, selling is just a leeettle more difficult!
So, as far as I’m concerned, until we get some hard sales figures from Samsung, the jury is still out on this one. Having said that, I strongly suspect, given the profile of Apple’s sales (strong in the US, weaker in Europe and elsewhere) that Samsung will have overtaken Apple. But you never can tell.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/19/nokia_loses_phone_crown/
Oh dear, it looks like wind farms are not quite the panacea that they have been touted to be. The finances of these beasts are based on an assumption that they have a lifespan of 20 to 25 years, and, at least in the UK, they are paid a subsidy on that basis. It’s a subsidy that is currently costing electricity users something in the region of one billion UK pounds (US$1.6 billion) a year. But now these wind farms have been in operation for some time, and it’s possible to refine the figures.
Oops! It turns out that their practical life is more in the region of 12-15 years, by which time their output has dropped dramatically. Of course, this completely changes the economics of wind farms, making them nearly twice as expensive a way of generating electricity than was thought. So who is going to pay for this? Ordinary people in their electricity use, that’s who.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9770837/Wind-farm-turbines-wear-sooner-than-expected-says-study.html
http://xkcd.com/556/ (A brilliant cartoon featuring wind farms!)
Microsoft is complaining that Google is blocking its Windows Phone access to YouTube. Microsoft is demanding that Google open up its YouTube API. Wow! This is hot stuff from the very people who invented the art of blocking competitors by concealing parts of their API...
As Google pointed out, they aren’t stopping Windows Phone users from watching YouTube in their browsers. Microsoft’s beef is that they can’t get access to the meta-data that would allow them to build a high grade app for the purpose. I don’t actually agree with what Google are doing, but it’s difficult to blame them.
So, Microsoft, how do you like the taste of your own medicine?
http://www.infoworld.com/t/windows-phone/in-blocking-windows-phone-access-youtube-google-delivers-rough-justice-210116
I couldn’t resist this story - thieves break into a Microsoft research campus in California. What’s unusual about that, I hear you ask? Ah well, it seems they stole US$3,000 worth of Apple kit, and left all the Microsoft kit untouched! How embarrassing...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/07/ipad_theft_microsoft_campus/
Homework:
As electronic gadgets like laptops and tablets get more powerful, they are increasingly running up against two interrelated problems. More powerful CPUs need more battery power, and more of that battery power is dissipated as heat. The first problem is being addressed by the battery makers - indeed they have made massive strides over the last ten years - but removing the unwanted heat remains a problem. In desktop and server machines it’s not too much of a problem because you can install multiple fans to keep things cool.
But fans are bulky, and difficult to fit into the likes of tablets without massively increasing both the weight and the form factor. This means that devices we carry around tend to be under-powered or run hot (or both).
Now, however, a possible solution is at hand in the form of a thin piezoelectric device from researchers at GE. The ‘fan’ consists of a couple of disks that can be made to move away from one another - thus sucking air in - when a current is applied one way, and then moving towards one another when the current is reversed, this time expelling the air previously sucked in. So, all you need to do is attach the device to an alternating current, and you have a very thin compact, scalable, fan. Nifty!
How long it will take to bring to market I don’t know, but hopefully it won’t be too long.
http://www.gizmag.com/ge-dual-piezo-cooling-jet/25447/
Here’s a little experiment you can try out with that very long slinky spring you’ve got in the toy cupboard. Hold it out of an upstairs window letting it fully extend, then let go. Get someone to point a video camera at it, so that you can see all the slinky. If you look very carefully (a high speed camera would probably help) you can see that the when the slinky is released the bottom of the slinky remains stationary, instead of falling, until the top of slinky reaches it, when it does start to fall.
If you lack the means to do this, there’s a good video showing it in the article the URL points to. More to the point researchers at the University of Sydney have now explained why this is happening, and why the slinky is not defying gravity. Which is a great pity, because I remember that when I was a kid, I had ambitions to use this effect as an anti-gravity device to power a flying saucer. Spoilsports!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/14/falling_slinky_defies_gravity/
This is worrying. Researchers at Southampton University have been looking at the propensity of bacteria to survive on different surfaces. The bad news is that with the modern taste for stainless steel we are building up serious problems for ourselves. It seems that while bacteria die within minutes on copper surfaces, they can linger for weeks on stainless steel surfaces. Furthermore, on the stainless steel surfaces, even after the bacteria have died they can leave behind DNA which can be taken up by other bacteria, thus providing a method of transferring antibiotic resistance.
Hopefully, the health authorities will take some notice of this, at least when they plan new hospitals, but also by replacing fittings in older ones. It sounds expensive, I know, but surely, it’s got to be cheaper than treating the 43,000 people a year that are infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria each year. As someone who had a relative die from an infection picked up while he was in hospital for tests on a completely unrelated issue, I can tell you the money would be well spent.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9762689/Fit-brass-fixtures-to-cut-superbugs-say-scientists.html
I see that the latest news from an analysis of results from the exoplanet hunting Kepler telescope is that there are something in the region of 100 billion planets in our galaxy. That’s nice, but it just makes the Fermi Paradox even more puzzling. You may not have heard of this paradox before, so for the uninitiated, here is is (courtesy of the Wikipedia):
1. The Sun is a young star. There are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older than the Sun;
2. Some of these stars are likely to have Earth-like planets which, if the Earth is typical, may develop intelligent life;
3. Presumably, some of these civilizations will develop interstellar travel, as Earth seems likely to do;
4. At any practical pace of interstellar travel, the galaxy can be completely colonized in just a few tens of millions of years.
If that’s the case, where is everybody?
Previous arguments about why we haven’t been visited by extra-terrestrials have tended to turn around whether there are indeed lots of planets out there. I think that’s resolved now - 100 billion could legitimately be called ‘a lot of planets’. So, the question remains - ‘Where is everybody?’
Your guess is as good as mine. Enrico Fermi asked the question over 50 years ago, and we still don’t have an answer, but it’s worth giving it some thought.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/01/08/earth-like-planets-fill-the-galaxy/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_SPC_20130110600
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Geek Stuff:
Have you always wondered what sort of kit other people use to get their work done? Then you need to mosey along to ‘The Setup’ web site and take a look through their interviews with actors, artists, developers, designers, drummers, journalists, librarians, photographers, sysadmins, writers and a whole stack of other people about the kit they use. It’s fascinating - 323 interviews so far - and still climbing. I’ve already got a bunch of ideas for some new software that I hadn’t come across before. Highly recommended.
http://usesthis.com/interviews/
And for those of you who’ve used up all your dot com money here’s a little post Xmas bonus - Adobe, a firm notorious for its expensive products, is GIVING AWAY downloads of CS2... Unbelievable. OK, I know Adobe are up to CS6 at the moment, but even CS2 was a pretty useful piece of kit. Get it now, before they change their mind!
https://plus.google.com/114753028665775786510/posts/NWQgkGifHk4
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html
Scanner: Other stories
Kindle tops Amazon’s sales rankings
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/kindle-tops-amazons-sales-rankings-102757
Ibasei’s Cappa provides hydroelectricity on a small scale
http://www.gizmag.com/cappa-compact-hydropower-generator/25430/
Why touch screens will not take over
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-touch-screens-will-not-take-over&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20121226
How to ‘downgrade’ to Windows 7
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/how-downgrade-windows-7-210685?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2013-01-11
Ultra-thin, flexible PaperTab redefines tablet form and function
http://www.gizmag.com/papertab-flexible-tablet/25680/
Razer Edge becomes reality at CES: Hands-on with the tablet-PC-game console
http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/razer-edge/4505-3126_7-35561052.html?tag=nl.e703&s_cid=e703
Every tech journalist’s worst nightmare
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/every-tech-journalists-worst-nightmare
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
13 January 2013
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.
