WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Easter’s been and gone – back to work for us all. And we’re also back with Winding Down. This issue, the French turn their phones off when they finish work, Google maps of the Crimea, crooked drones search out cannabis farms to raid, supporting old software (like Windows XP), Pathe News on YouTube, the biggest 3D printer, free speech, and a Sci-Fi version of Civilization. URLs will take you to a secret campaign by Intuit, developer ethical dilemmas, a great picture of Saturn and Titan, inventions that owe their success to World War I, and sneaky Dell charges.
So, let’s get started!
Shorts:
I see the wily French have managed to stymie the idea that they should have to answer business calls on their smart phones after working hours. I bet there are plenty of my readers who wish fervently for a similar system in relation to their work. As Charles De Gaul once put it, while talking about his country, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
http://www.theguardian.com/money/shortcuts/2014/apr/09/french-6pm-labour-agreement-work-emails-out-of-office
You’ve just got to look at these pictures of Soviet Sci-Fi art. They’re from the covers of the magazine ‘Tekhnika Molodezhi’, really, really cool!
http://gizmodo.com/23-amazing-soviet-visions-for-the-future-of-transportat-1566015295
And talking of Russia, you and I may be under the illusion from watching the news that the Ukraine crisis has yet to be resolved. However, Google it seems has no doubt – at least in the Russian version of Google Maps, where it shows the Crimea as part of Russia. For those of us in the rest of the world, though, things are not portrayed as quite as cut and dried. Take a look at the maps shown in the URL.
And my take on the whole thing?
- The US doesn’t have any interests in the Ukraine that would justify deploying troops.
- The EU would be best served by expending its energies speeding up the construction of a gas pipeline that doesn’t traverse the Ukraine.
- The Ukraine should start paying back some of the billions it owes Russia for natural gas that it sold on to the EU and didn’t pay for.
- Russia should stop supplying gas to the Ukraine until it starts paying.
But who am I to argue with the wrong end of a T72 tank gun?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/22/google_maps_russia_crimea/
The shape of things to come... Here, in the UK, criminals are using heat seeking drones to locate illegal cannabis hydroponic ‘farms’ by the heat given off by the hydroponic lights. Once located, the farms are either ‘raided’ by the gangs, or have to pay extortion to avoid being brought to the attention of the local constabulary.
Actually I suspect that the number of people involved in this activity is overstated – possibly wildly overstated. What is does indicate though is the continued erosion of privacy by modern technology. It’s probably time we stopped and thought about it, before taking things to their logical conclusion...
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9710188/crooks-use-drones-target-cannabis-farms/
Homework:
I finally got round to looking at the March usage stats for desktop operating systems. I was a bit stunned to see that something like one in five desk top computers out there are running Windows XP. No wonder Microsoft is unhappy about it. It was launched in October 2001 – nearly thirteen years ago. All that lost upgrade money!
As everyone knows, Microsoft just recently stopped supporting XP, leaving the owners out in the cold. If you are a big enough organization – like a bank using XP to run your ATMs – you can buy continuing support. There are quite a lot of good reasons why people might still be running XP – including ‘it does what I want’.
This raises interesting questions for the future. The current system of updates and software life cycles for things like Windows operating system is predicated on a three to five year cycle. This made sense when hardware was rapidly increasing its capability, and the new systems were being written to take advantage of that – Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, for instance.
But somewhere in the last five to ten years (exactly when is debatable) desktop hardware reached the point where it could smoothly and efficiently run all the applications that most people used. Hardware also became much more reliable. People didn’t need to write off their computers every three years or so – they started keeping them.
For Microsoft this posed a dilemma. Their business model was built on the assumption that people would continue to replace their software every three to five years. To counter this they moved to trying to produce new models, rather than just improvements. This lead to a series of disasters – think Windows ME, Windows Vista and Windows 8. It also caused wailing and gnashing of teeth among the hardware people, but that’s another story.
The result was that many people, myself included, moved on to upgrading every other operating system, which tied in with their needs. In the future people will wait even longer, probably until the hardware starts to wear out. This has interesting implications for software houses in general, and Microsoft in particular.
Let me use an analogy. Cars. I have a car that was built in 1997. It’s not trendy, but it is waterproof, has four wheels, an engine and a standardized user interface. It gets me from A to B without giving me any aggro. I expect it will run for at least another 10 years, assuming some idiot doesn’t run into me. That’s over 25 years. I confidently expect the makers to continue to manufacture spare parts for it for most, if not all, of that lifetime.
Microsoft’s dilemma is that originally its software was pretty rocky – it had to produce fixes for its products, and it had to give the fixes away for free. Its products are now much better, but it still needs to provide fixes, and given the history involved, if it tried to charge for them, like car spares, it would run into major problems. It can get away with it to a certain extent with XP, because, truth to tell, and in spite of everything, XP is recognizingly near the end of its life.
But what of something like Windows 7? It’s easy to see that lasting into the mid-2020s, that’s 15-20 years...
I suspect the industry, Microsoft included, has yet to come to grips with what it means to produce software with a lifetime in excess of ten years. Like the car industry, the software industry would prefer you to buy the latest model each year. Like the car industry, the software industry is going to have to cope with the fact that most people don’t!
http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-monthly-201403-201403-bar
Those of you with a penchant for history might like to take a look at some of the archive material recently released by Pathe News on You Tube. I can’t even start to describe the breadth of material, but here are some URLS that will give you some idea!
https://www.youtube.com/user/britishpathe (home page)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILiLaRXHUr0&list=PL3kG3TM8jFKiuaGCl1IPBH9iEZCZj3oH2 (mobile phone 1922)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5o-fhBKf8Y&list=PL40A6146642DEAF47 (Wright Bros first flight)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t19kvUiHvAE&list=TL9TlTIfRCd8H4PqxjcA5oDZUNaDs7lOQg (Hiroshima 1945)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Suf7Wa2keQ&list=PL3kG3TM8jFKjj9vC0z4cGXcqATTDreYxy (Beatles concert 1963)
For Geeks:
There’s an interesting piece in Gizmag about a Chinese company that’s using a 3D printer to print out enough parts to build 10 houses a day. To western eyes, it looks more like 10 garages a day, but when housing is as short as it is in China, or the developing countries, even a garage sized house is a luxury. Take a look – you don’t often see a 3D printer that’s 22ft tall, 33ft wide and 105ft long!
http://www.gizmag.com/china-winsun-3d-printed-house/31757/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SObzNdyRTBs
This is for all US Citizens who play multi-player games – and possibly quite a few others as well!
http://xkcd.com/1357/
And for all of you waiting for the next installment of Sid Meier’s ‘Civilization’, we are about to get a new ‘Sci-Fi’ Civilization. Take a look at this review for some of the details...
http://kotaku.com/were-getting-a-sci-fi-civilization-and-it-sounds-fant-1561510976/+rtgonzalez
Scanner:
Intuit’s secret campaign to block free tax filing
http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/intuits-secret-campaign-block-free-tax-filing-240663
12 ethical dilemmas gnawing at developers today
http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/12-ethical-dilemmas-gnawing-developers-today-240574?page=0,0
Saturn and Titan in living colour
http://www.gizmag.com/saturn-titan-color/23968/
10 inventions that owe their success to World War One
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26935867
Dell charges £5 (US$8) to switch on power-saving for new PCs (it takes 5 clicks)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/24/dell_charges_five_pounds_to_change_power_settings/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
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 Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
27 April 2014
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/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
