Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
24 January 2021
Someone asked me the other day if I’d kept my New Year’s Resolutions. The answer is ‘Well yes, you could say that’. You see some 40 years ago I made a New Year’s Resolution never to make any more New Year’s Resolutions. I’m happy to tell you that I’ve kept that resolution ever since!
We have a mixed bunch of material this week. There are a couple of essays, one on lockdowns, and one on the implications of the Solar Winds hack for security.
Then there is material in which the CTO of Dell Computers shares his view of the coming year, and we take a look at Red Hat’s action on CentOS.
Pictures includes an unusual railway line, and illustrations from Dante’s Inferno, while the quote is from a discussion on surveys.
Finally, Scanner contains pointers to material on Apple’s M1 chip, Tabby’s Star, privacy pilfering, world globe making, and coin blunders.
Have fun, but stay safe!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Erratic...
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi, Barb and Lois, for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Essays:
Like a number of Western countries the UK is currently in a lockdown with COVID cases and deaths now exceeding those of the first lockdown. The Conversation takes a look at the genesis of this lockdown and suggests that the problem isn’t just the rapid spreading nature of the evolved virus, but the way in which the lockdown was organised and started.
The article suggests that a number of factors were involved, the government hesitating to take immediate action after its experts had warned it, the advanced leak of the information about the forthcoming lockdown, the role of schools as superspreaders. This sounds fairly convincing to me.
As far as I can tell, we don’t really have much in the way of reliable figures which would tell us just how big a role schools play in the transmission of the virus. Perhaps it’s time to take a closer look...
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-new-study-claims-that-a-five-day-warning-ruined-the-last-lockdown-152719
The SolarWinds security breach wasn’t covered in this rag, because it fell into our Christmas break in publication. But the sheer scale of the event and the way in which it came about through the breach in some library software was a major, and very unpleasant surprise.
The fact is that most software these days uses a substantial amount of library code written by third parties – thus avoiding re-inventing the wheel. That’s not going to stop any time soon, if at all. TechXplore has an interesting essay on how this hack could change the nature of security practices.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-solarwinds-breach-reshape-cybersecurity.html
Computers and Computing:
John Roese, Dell’s Chief Technical Officer, recently shared his thoughts on what the main trends are for the new year. They made interesting reading.
First off was that eternal chestnut, quantum computing! Popular as it is conceptually, Roese is of the opinion that viable quantum computing is still a long way away off. Can’t say I disagree with that! I also think that a lot of people are going to be disappointed when it does get off the ground and turns out not to be the answer to all their computing problems.
Next in line was 5G, where he pointed out that it wasn’t for consumers. 4G was for consumers, 5G was for businesses, and a number of them were already starting to invest in private 5G networks. I confess this hadn’t occurred to me, but I suspect it may well be true.
The third point was that he expected a move away from data centres being general purpose to developing more specialised equipment for specific computing tasks using specialised processors alongside the general purpose CPUs. The interesting point about this was that the enabler for this shift is a drive for software modernisation. Without that the transformation won’t happen.
Finally, Roese drew attention to edge computing. Don’t mentally switch off. I know ‘edge computing’ has been flogged to death for years and never really worked, but Roese is not talking about internet linked doorbells, he’s talking about the “need to distribute the processing capability of the multi-cloud world into the real-time domain, i.e. into factories and cities and hospitals.” An interesting point – take a look at The Register’s report for more details.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/15/dell_roese/
Programming:
Some time ago Red Hat took over the CentOS project, which is/was a free version of Red Hat’s pay-for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). CentOS is used by a lot of smaller companies for whom RHEL is overkill – for instance we ran Federation on a CentOS computers for many years. Like other users we didn’t need the support and expense of the RHEL version, though if we had become a multi-million dollar business we would have moved up to RHEL.
However, shortly before Christmas Red Hat changed this so that instead of being a clone of the stable build it became a showcase for future builds, trying out things that may or may not make it into the final, supported build. Not what you want if you are trying to build a small business!
The general consensus seems to be that Red Hat is trying to kill off CentOS, and this is reinforced by the fact that Red Hat was taken over by IBM a few years ago. Already various groups are announcing that they plan to either switch to some variety of Ubuntu Linux or rebuild a new version of what the original CentOS was.
It will be interesting to see what really does happen!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/09/centos_red_hat/
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/rocky_linux/
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/15/centos_alternatives/
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/22/red_hat_defends_its_centos/
Pictures:
A railway line running through the middle of London’s Westminster Abbey? Yep! Take a look at these pictures, and an explanation...
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2021/01/19/the-year-a-railway-ran-inside-westminster-abbey/
And going just a tiny bit further back in time I’d like to draw your attention to some amazing illustrations of Dante’s Inferno.
https://www.uffizi.it/en/online-exhibitions/dante-istoriato-hell
Quotes:
“The problem with an online self-selecting survey is that they generally don’t include people not interested in the topic.” – Point made in a discussion of an online housing survey. In this case the topic was moving out of London...
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2021/01/11/londons-population-to-start-shrinking-says-report/
Scanner:
Apple’s M1: the fastest and bestest ever silicon = revolution? Nah, there’s far more interesting stuff happening in tech that matters to everyone
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/07/apple_silicon_column/
Tabby’s Star: The mysterious ‘Alien Megastructure’ star is not alone, astronomers discover
https://www.sciencealert.com/boyajian-s-star-isn-t-alone-astronomers-have-just-identified-a-binary-companion
Nice one CHAPS: how Bank of England card data are telling us more about consumer spending
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2021/01/20/nice-one-chaps-how-bank-of-england-card-data-are-telling-us-more-about-consumer-spending/
Privacy pilfering project punished by FTC purge penalty: AI upstart told to delete data and algorithms
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/13/paravision_ftc_settlement/
Take a peek into one of the last studios still making globes by hand
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/take-peek-into-one-of-the-last-studios-still-making-globes-by-hand-180976571/
HG Wells fans spot numerous errors on UK Royal Mint’s new £2 coin [I thought the four-legged tripod was of particular note! – AL]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/05/hg-wells-fans-spot-numerous-errors-on-royal-mints-new-2-coin
Footnote:
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
24 January 2021
Alan Lenton is a retired 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.
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