WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
As all those around me are slobbing in bed enjoying a long weekend holiday (Monday is a public holiday here in the UK), I’m slaving away to bring you all another instalment of Winding Down – the 618th issue, as it happens. I hope you all appreciate my dedication! In the meantime, I have the rest of the catching up stories from the extended break. Normal service will be resumed next week. This week, however, we have Uber out of Denmark, prisoners build their own computer, PC sales ‘slumping’, 1K+ of free movies, and Microsoft telling people not to download its new version of Windows 10! URLs in the Scanner section point you to Apple lawyers unable to tell the difference between apples and pears, IKEA and IoT, Facebook and Google as scam victims, the Museum of Failure, and the potential demise of Net Neutrality.
Shorts:
I see Uber has given up in Denmark, where it has, or rather had, 2,000 drivers and about 300,000 riders. A new law came into effect last month which mandated things like fare meters. I don’t doubt that Uber, or some iteration thereof, will win out in the end , but as always when challenging entrenched interests, the road promises to be rocky.
I always think of the taxi business in cities to be the modern equivalent of medieval trades guilds. For instance, here in London, to become a licensed taxi driver you have to have what is called ‘The Knowledge’. The Knowledge is an almost encyclopedic understanding of how to get from A to B in the shortest possible time, where A and B are any two points in the London metropolitan area chosen at random. It literally takes years of riding round on a motor scooter, with a clip board attached to the handlebars, to learn it.
Unfortunately, the knowledge became more or less irrelevant the day the first functional car navigation devices, for instance TomTom, became available. That meant that anyone with a relatively cheap device could get you from A to B in a reasonable time , maybe not the absolute optimum time, but a reasonable time. And for most of the time, reasonable is good enough. Black cab drivers invested a lot of time and money in becoming a licensed cabbie so, not unnaturally, they are fighting back with all the legal options at hand.
Looked at historically, though, they are unlikely to prevail in the long run, any more than the guilds did as the industrial revolution took off.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-denmark-idUSKBN16Z10G?il=0
It’s a bit like a plot for a movie. It seems that in Ohio prisoners used their work in an electronic waste workshop as an opportunity to smuggle out parts to build their own computer! The computer was hidden in the ceiling. After which, they networked the computer using a stolen password and ran a credit card fraud scheme. Eventually they were caught because they used a guard’s password on a day when he was off duty.
Ironically, with that sort of talent they would probably have done very well for themselves if they’d gone straight and used their talents to do things acceptable to society.
http://boingboing.net/2017/04/12/mother-necessity-where-would-w.html
It seems that the number of PCs being sold is continuing to decline. The pundits are all waffling on about the move to tablets (also declining in sales, incidentally) and powerful smart phones. They’re missing the point. The true reason for the decline is that the previous generation of computers, coupled with later, stable, iterations of Windows 7 applications, were:
(a) capable of doing everything the average user wanted
(b) relatively easy to use
(c) had a much longer physical lifetime than earlier computers
The result is that people don’t -need- to upgrade to a new computer, and they are choosing not to, since they are happy with the one they already have.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/pc_shipments_report/
And talking of PCs, Microsoft is asking people not to download and install the new edition of Windows 10 (Creators Update). Apparently it’s more than a little bug ridden. Not surprising really, since Microsoft uses home users as unpaid testers before releasing new stuff to businesses. They usually force it on home users first and then wait for several months as the bugs show up to be fixed. When they’ve fixed the bugs they then hand it to business users. A nice cheap way of testing your software if you can get away with it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/26/stop_downloading_win10_creators_update/
Pictures:
This week we feature moving pictures – yes, movies. The ‘Open Culture’ web site has links to over 1,000 legit, free to watch, movies. So, if you are a movie buff, or just a casual watcher, take a look at this collection.
http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline
Scanner:
iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/27/apple_lawyers/
Cheap, flimsy, breakable and replaceable – yup, Ikea, you’ll be right at home in the IoT world
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/ikea_smart_home_products/
Facebook and Google were victims of $100M payment scam
http://fortune.com/2017/04/27/facebook-google-rimasauskas/
Would you believe it? The Museum of Failure contains quite a few pieces of technology
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/22/museum_of_failure_includes_tech/
FCC’s Pai: I am going to kill net neutrality in US
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/26/fcc_pai_kills_net_neutrality/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers 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
30 April 2017
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.
