WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
I afraid it's a somewhat shorter issue this week - real life intruded into my comfortable digital existence, and this coupled with some of my e-mail getting wrongly deleted, left me with less than usual to report.
One of the items that did survive was a report spotted by reader Fancy indicating that I wasn't the only one not to be impressed by Apple's much touted iPhone. Remember you read the cynical assessment here first!
Incidentally, two cheers for the much over-hyped digital environment for those who don't have a first life, Second Life. They showed that they have an excellent sense of humour this week. Blogger Darren Barefoot created a parody on his site GetAFirstLife.com. The site invited 'Comments or cease and desist letters'. Lawyers for Linden Research, perpetrators of Second Life, were quick off the mark. They wrote, 'Linden labs objects to any implication that it would employ lawyers incapable of distinguishing such obvious parody ... your invitation to submit a cease-and-desist letter is hereby rejected." Wow! If nothing else it shows Linden have very a very clever marketing department :)
And now, ladies and gentlemen (and geeks), for your edification, education and enlightenment (not to mention cat-calls), I give you... Windows Vista...
Roundup: Vista - Breaking all records...
No it's not the sales that are breaking all records. Vista already holds one record - it's the first operating system to have a security patch released before its official public release. That happened last year. This year it becomes the first operating system to have its first service pack in preparation before the official release date! I'm not sure that these were the records Microsoft was looking to break :)
In the meantime a study by Webroot suggests that Vista's Defender anti-virus software stops a mere 16 per cent of spyware. Admittedly, Webroot is a somewhat tainted source, being itself an anti-virus vendor. However Microsoft's riposte, that Vista was '...the most secure version of Windows to date...' is rather disingenuous. Previous versions of Windows had virtually no built in defences against malware, so 16 per cent would indeed be an improvement over nothing. I think this one will run and run!
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, the launch of Vista was greeted by the EU with a new wave of anti-trust concerns. The big bugbear at the moment is the documentation for Microsoft's XML-based office document format OOXML. it's not just that Microsoft is trying to rush it through the standards bodies, it's also that the 6,000 page document contains no information on certain key areas like scripting and rights management.
Even more bizarre, the document mandates the replication of certain very old Microsoft bugs - like, for instance a bug that marks 1900 as a leap year (which it isn't) and the use of the WEEKDAY spreadsheet function which is known to assign incorrect dates to some days of the week. Perhaps the real reason that Microsoft was three years late with Vista was that they were using their own date functions for project management!
And finally, the news from fortress Redmond is that the chief Windows honcho Jim Allchin is bowing out now that Vista is out of the door. It seems like Allchin has been in charge of Windows development forever, so his passing will represent the handing on of the baton to a new generation. Will they be any better than the last generation? Only time will tell.
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=16007F9:215D3E184FC552
DCFD7F3515504DD98CEFF29049075316B4
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/26/ecis_hello_vista/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/26/vista_sp1/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=27634898-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
Shorts:
Do you use Wi-Fi at home? You may want to reconsider when you come to replace the kit, or if you are thinking of installing Wi-Fi. Leaving aside the fact that it is more difficult to make secure than cable networks, other problems are raising their ugly heads these days.
For instance, one of the most frequent problems reported by people playing my game Federation 2 was sudden dropping of the connection. We spotted early that all the people with these problems were using Wi-Fi. What took us much longer to figure out was that all the people with problems also had digital cordless phones. The line dropped when the phones were in use, because the frequencies the phones were using conflicted with those used by Wi-Fi. Needless to say, neither the phones, nor the Wi-FI kit carry warnings...
Now another problem is starting to appear as more and more people install Wi-Fi routers. It seems that once a certain density of Wi-Fi routers is installed, they start to interfere with one another and begin to drop connections randomly. I would guess this isn't a problem in the suburbs, but in the cities it will soon become a nightmare for apartment dwellers.
As for me, I'll stick to cable networks for now, until the problems are properly ironed out - something that requires the manufacturers to acknowledge that there is a problem, so don't hold your breath...
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/26/headaches_missing_wifi_connection/
I note that eBay has now banned the sale of virtual game loot. I doubt that it will stop the trade in the digital drek - other sites will take up the slack. eBay have nothing against selling the stuff, per se, but there is, it seems, some doubt about the legal status of such material - does it belong to the game proprietors, the owner of the avatar that won it, or maybe even to the avatar itself! Lest you think the latter unlikely, I'd draw your attention to the fact that there is already one type of non-human entity that is considered the same as humans in the legal system - corporations - so adding another would set no new precedent...
http://www.theage.com.au/news/games/ebay-bans-sales-of-virtual-game-loot/2007/01/31/1169919383349.html
And talking of eBay, a whole bunch of voting machine equipment turned up for sale recently. It was from DeKalb County, Georgia. The stuff was obsolete, or so it's claimed, and included encoder machines and voter access cards.
Apparently it was found in unwanted office furniture, and was put up for sale by a liquidator, since it was thought that the equipment was also unwanted. I can well believe that it was unwanted - I don't know anyone who wants Diebold voting machines except extremely naive election officials! In the event Diebold itself bought the items back in an effort to stop them getting into the 'wrong' hands.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=
viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=it_in_government&articleId
=9010019&taxonomyId=69&intsrc=kc_top
http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770130003
Scanner: Other stories
Intel teaches IBM how to reveal chip breakthroughs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/28/intel_ibm_highk/
Publish and perish - the problem with peer reviewed articles
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v8i03_fabio.html
TomTom includes Trojans with satnav device
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/29/tomtom_malware/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barbara, Fi DJ, and Fancy for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
4 February 2007
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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