WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
It's another quiet week, though there was one bright spot - a new virus that drains cell phone batteries. I can immediately think of a number of people I would like to see as recipients of the virus! I can see this particular virus being very popular in the future... The URL for the story is in the Scanner section.
The recent series of laptop battery recalls raises deeper issues than just bad quality control, so I've taken the opportunity of having not much hard news to have a look at what's behind this problem.
And, of course, no issue of Winding Down would be complete without a swipe at the Brit government's lousy record on implementing computer projects :)
Story: Come on baby, light my fire
Last week I reported on Dell's recall of batteries after some rather spectacular examples of its laptops bursting into flames in public. One has to wonder whether there would have been a recall if the conflagrations had not been so public, especially given that it turns out that Dell were discussing the problem with manufacturer Sony some ten months ago.
Now another user of the Sony batteries, Apple, has announced that it will recall some 1.8 million batteries supplied with its Powerbook series of laptops. That covers nearly a third of the laptops shipped during the period covered by the recall.
To my mind a major problem is going to be that historically only about 10-25 per cent of customers respond to these sort of recalls. That means that even at the best three quarters of the customers will be walking around with laptops using potentially dangerous batteries. Significantly at least one major airline has decided that laptop owners will have to remove the batteries from laptops before bringing them onto its aircraft.
While the current problem is caused by faulty quality control, it has to be said that the real problem lies at a deeper and more complex level. Laptops are becoming more and more complex and powerful and as a consequence using more and more power.
My laptop, for instance has a 2.1 GHz processor, 1 GB of memory, 64Mb of Video memory and a whole slew of peripheral chips not to mention a hard drive and a CD writer. And it is nowhere near what I would call 'cutting edge'. Nonetheless, I suffered a couple of thermal shut downs while playing the 'Oblivion' game. (I was just checking it out, you must understand, not actually -playing- it. It was a purely professional matter.) I now run a fan to ensure that there is plenty of airflow when I run computationally intensive programs, like compilers.
All this kit requires more and more powerful batteries to drive it, and a large chunk of that power is wasted as heat. Frankly, it's only a matter of time before designers are going to have to start thinking very careful about what they actually need in the computer, rather than what the marketing department would like in it.
There may be some small relief on the way with the announcement from researchers at Tel Aviv University that they have developed a battery nano technology that is capable of supplying high power densities without the risks of short circuiting posed by conventional lithium-ion batteries.
That's good, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem of developing and using more efficient components in laptops, servers and desktops.
Fortunately, the sheer cost of the wasted power generated in server farms is driving the development of low power components. Big server colocation facilities receive a double whammy from the waste heat generated by the thousands of computers they house. Not only do they have to bring in power to run the computers - and generate the wasted heat - but they also have to provide power to run ultra-powerful air-conditioning units to get rid of the heat.
And this costs big bucks, so it's no surprise that chip manufacturers are starting to produce chips that use less power and run cooler, and they are finding that the reduced power consumption is a big selling point. At the moment this is mainly confined to the server market, but it is only a matter of time until these developments spin off into other computer markets, with laptops heading the list.
http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?t=6353344-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eyp50FypUC0FrK0EjCi0Ew
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&ctl=1395F16:215D3E184FC552DC80C9574FD388F7F7EFF29049075316B4
Shorts:
I came across a classic example of life imitating art this week. When I re-wrote my space trading game, Federation, a couple of years ago, I added a new trading commodity - nanofabrics. The premise was straightforward. Clothing made from the fabrics could reconfigure itself into new colors and styles at the owner's whim.
What do I find now from electronics giant Philips but a range of fabrics that can change their color surfaces! The technology, called Philips Lumalive Fabrics uses tiny LEDs rather than nanos to change its colors, but, so Philips claim, the LEDs do not compromise the softness or texture of the base fabrics. Philips are pushing the fabrics as such things as mood enhancing chair coverings and advertising jackets (a sort of hi-tech sandwich board, I guess).
I suspect, however, that the first important use for the fabric will be high visibility vests for the likes of those guys that cone off large chunks of highways for no apparent reason...
http://www.physorg.com/news75654944.html
The UK government screws up yet another computerisation project! This one's a classic, though. They decided to make the debt recovery arm of the government 'more efficient'. The Debt Management Unit is part of the Department for Work and Pensions. The software part of the department's centralisation program was budgeted at 1 million UK Pounds (about US$1.75 million) but by last November 21 million UK Pounds (about US$38 million) had been spent.
And the debt recovery part? Well according to the users the software isn't fit for its purpose, and the figures definitely bear that out. The unit has a backlog of half a million cases and missed its target of 200 million UK Pounds (about US$360 million) by 26 million UK Pounds (about US$47 million). Not what you'd call a good track record!
http://Mail.computing.co.uk/cgi-bin1/DM/y/etYR0BsjfA0S5e0DLdi0Ec
I see that Boeing has decided to get out of the in-flight broadband market. I'm not really surprised, the recent hand luggage restrictions must have been the final nail in the coffin for in-flight on-line services.
Over the last six years Boeing is reckoned to have spent something in the region of US$1 billion developing its Connexion in-flight broadband service. Unfortunately for Boeing, not only was the service not taken up by the major transatlantic carriers, it was also very expensive - US$10 for the first hour, or US$27 for 24 hours - making it unattractive to passengers.
What laptop owners really want, assuming they are ever allowed to use their laptops in-flight again, is not so much broadband Internet access but power for their machines, and this is gradually coming to long haul flights. At the moment it's not available for economy passengers but I suspect that will come in the not too distant future.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/18/boeing_ditches_connexion/
Geek Toys:
Fancy the idea of owning a Swiss Army knife? Then we have just the thing for you - the ultimate army knife. Billed as the 'Most Incredible Knife', this one has no less that 85 gadgets for you to play with, and it looks a little like half a dozen regular Swiss Army knives welded side by side. It has all the usual tools - corkscrew, no less than seven knife blades, toothpick and tweezers to name but a few. I'm not sure whether it has a device for removing boy scouts from horses hooves, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did!
http://www.outdoorlife.com/outdoor/photogallery/article/0,20036,1145810_1304110,00.html
MIT's computer science department has come up with the ultimate geek computer. it's a 1,000 processor machine called RAMP. The acronym stands for Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors, and it's designed to allow research into multi-processor systems cheaply. Well, cheap is a relative term you understand. In this case it case it means it 'only' costs between US$100,000 and US$200,000 compared to US$50 million for a machine from SGI or Sun, or even US$3 million for an Intel based Linux machine.
The processor nodes in the RAMP machines are made from FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). They don't run as fast as regular processors, but they can be configured to mimic different processors allowing research into different types of multi-processor machines. So, if you decide to get rid of your Google shares, consider buying a RAMP machine for your next server!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/22/ramp_mit_fix/
Scanner: Other stories
Stealth attack drains cell phone batteries
http://www.physorg.com/news75654459.html
What the heck was on that stolen laptop?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/19/laptop_loss_survey/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barbara, Fi and Lois for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
27 August 2006
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. 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.
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