The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 16, 2007

Official News - page 11


WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

I finally managed to squeeze in the reading needed to write Winding Down, after a longer break than I expected. We had a major problem with our game server, and although we had the server back up reasonable rapidly, the clean-up took up most of my available time.

There's plenty of things happening out there in cyber-cuckoo land at the moment, ranging from the important, through the sublime to the ridiculous. And an example of the latter is the news that Pitzer College are now offering credits for watching YouTube and posting comments...

An example of the sublime is the news that the Doctor Who television series received a Hugo award for one of its episodes. For those of you who don't indulge in Science Fiction, Hugos are one of the most prestigious awards available. They are named after Hugo Gernsback founder of the Amazing Stories magazine. Hugos are much more important than the Oscars :)

Returning to reality, I've just finished reading Patrick Dillon's book, 'The Last Revolution'. It's about the 1688 ousting of the Catholic Charles II from England and the installation of the Protestants, William & Mary, as the monarchs. It was a time of much change during which the foundations of modern society were laid - religious toleration, parliamentary power, joint stock companies, the foundation of science, and technical innovation based on science. A fascinating story.

And now for some 'important' stories...


Story of the decade:

Yeeees! Finally! SCO have filed for bankruptcy protection!

Nuff said :)

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/09/14/sco_bankruptcy_protection/


Shorts:

Houston, the Sabre has landed. Yes, Luke Skywalker's original Light Sabre has been successfully transferred to the NASA Space Centre at Houston on the first leg of its trip to the International Space Station. The security at Houston airport was, to say the least, unusual. But I'll let the pictures at the URL tell the story. Go look!

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-082807a.html

The headline said 'Wikipedia Publishes 2-Millionth Article In English'. What it should have said was, 'Wikipedia Publishes 2-Millionth Urban Legend - It Must Be true!'

Well, perhaps I'm being a little unfair (but not much). Their technology articles are normally pretty reasonable, as, so I'm told, are the articles on Ayn Rand. The problem is that the people who contribute to Wikipedia on social, political and historical issues inhabit a completely different universe to the rest of us, and never the twain shall meet.

I suppose I should be a little less scathing about it since I discovered a few months ago that I have an entry on the site (it's not easy for individuals to get entries, the rules are very strict). The problem is one of frustration, I guess. I once went to a talk by Jimmy Wales, one of the Wikipedia founders, and his description of what he wanted to do was brilliant. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details, and the colonisation of parts of the 'pedia by similar thinking obsessives destroys the possibility of handling issues that have no clear right and wrong. It's sad, but maybe one day we will learn how to wean people from their desire for absolute certainty.

http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBCyJ0HiOOq0G4T0FVnn0EA

The Firefox web browser recently hit its 400-millionth download. That's in about three and a half years. Impressive, although the figure should not be confused with the number of users. Most users will have downloaded it a number of times in that period as they purchase new machines, or have more than one machine.

Still, my experience is that a lot more people than I expected use it. I've been using it for several years now, and it's been mostly been trouble free, with far less security updates than Microsoft's much maligned Internet Explorer. Hopefully Firefox will keep up the good work!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/12/firefox_milestone/

And while we are on the subject of Firefox, I foresee a falling out between Firefox and the likes of the ad-driven Google. The bone of contention is a little Firefox plug-in called AdBlock Plus. This is also something I've used in its various incarnations for some time. Basically it blocks all those really irritating ads that make browsing so tiresome - it's a superb piece of user-driven software.

Needless to say the people who make their money from these execrable ads are not happy. Last week the New York Times ran an article suggesting that AdBlock Plus threatened the ad-driven business model of web commerce, thus dragging the whole issue out into the light. So what's the problem? It's that:

1. Google is Mozilla's (Firefox's developer's) major funder.
2. Google make their money from ads (and investors with more money than sense, but that's another
story)
3. Mozilla officially recommend AdBlock Plus.

Interestingly enough, neither Mozilla or Google are answering calls about this issue. I wonder why not!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/12/firefox_google_marriage_threatened_by_adblock_plus/

A research paper just published in the UK claims that IT cost overruns are costing UK and Irish business 375 million euros (about US$400 million) a year. It suggests that a quarter of the projects end up 50 percent over budget, and the rest somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent over budget. The study argues that one of the main reasons for this is that half the companies investigated are controlling their projects with spread sheets. That wouldn't surprise me - Microsoft built the dominance of Excel by building in features that helped you do things for which spreadsheets are totally inappropriate.

I don't think that's the real reason, though. Most IT projects over run their budgets because they take longer than planned. Why is that? Well I had a typical example last year when the company I was working for (who shall remain nameless, since they are no worse than anyone else) started to set up a new project. The project manager (who did use a spread sheet!) broke down the project into tasks and asked the programmers how long the tasks they, the programmers, would be doing would take.

The conversation went something like this:

Project Manager: 'How long do you think it would take to do this?'
Programmer: 'Hmmm, let me see. Probably, about three weeks.'
Project Manager: 'That's completely unacceptable. A week is the maximum we can allow.'
The programmer shrugs.

And how long did that task take? Why, three weeks. Multiply this sort of estimating over all the tasks the project manager thought of, and add in some time for the things that cropped up unexpectedly and you have some idea why the project took a year instead of the projected three and a half months! Of course, in any survey this would have come out as an over budget project, since the main costs are technical staff costs.

For those of you who aren't in the software business, it would have been much better to figure out how long it would really have taken and then cut out features until you got the time down to the 'must ship' date. Note that adding more programmers would have just increased the time taken - but that's another story!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/13/business_it_shambles/
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20070903.html

Sigh. Microsoft are at it again. Did you tell the Windows automatic updater to ask you before it updated anything? So you think you've now got control of that side of things? Think again. It turns out that Microsoft ignore your instruction and go ahead and update the updater program without asking you. This is, of course, done for your own good! As Microsoft put it in one of their blogs, 'We believe that the updates in question are so important that we need to install them regardless of what user option settings actually were set in Automatic Updates.'

I guess it's time for Microsoft executives to hark back to the feminist slogan of their college days. Listen up Microsoft: 'No means No!'

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000289.html


Geek Toys:

Ever suffered from problems with your PC being contaminated with nerve gas? Have I got just the thing for you! General Dynamics have a new offering - the GoBook MR-1 rugged Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC). Not only can it cope with nerve gas, it's possible to use it with rubber gloves (kinda essential if the keyboard is full of nerve gas), and it can cope with having bleach poured over it to neutralise the nerve gas.

More to the point it laughs at having coffee and sticky soda spilt over it - not to mention particles of food in the keyboard. Actually I seem to remember that sometime last year I read an analysis of the contents of the average office keyboard which pointed out that under US federal regulations such keyboards should have a biohazard sticker slapped on them!

At around US$5,000 the price is pretty rugged too, but for those who came out of the dot com book smelling of roses (or nerve gas) this should be a snip. I foresee one problem though: 'I'm sorry, sir, you can't board the plane since your computer appears to be a weapon of mass destruction. Please step this way...'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/11/general_dynamics_mr1_rugged_umpc/

The UMPC isn't the only toy that turned up this week. Over on this side of the pond it's been DSEi exhibition week. DSEi is a government sponsored arms manufacturers exhibition of James Bond toys for admirals and generals. The toy that took my eye was a set of stealth jetplane wings for penetrating deep - 100+ km - into enemy territory (perhaps searching for weapons of mass destruction!).

The wings come with their own jet engine. Oh, and you will need a regular plane to fly you up 33,000 ft on your side of the border. You can probably borrow the 767 from your old friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin - they keep it parked at the NASA base next to Google HQ (cost, a snip at a mere US$1.3/year).

I don't have a price for it yet, but I'm sure they'll rectify that soon. In the mean time, potential purchasers should note that you do have to walk home - there is no return trip!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/12/stealth_jetplane_pack_special_forces/


Scanner: Other stories

Group sued over NAND computer memory price fixing
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBC1u0FypUC0FrK0FVz30Er

SoCal college offer YouTube classes
http://www.physorg.com/news108974845.html

Apple restricts ringtone rights
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/11/apple_restricts_iphone_itunes_ringtone_rights/

US car drivers like to have three parking spaces for each car...
http://www.physorg.com/news108747253.html

Purdue announces cold fusion investigation findings
http://www.physorg.com/news108713949.html

US DoJ questions 'Net neutrality' rules
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=196BFDD:215D3E184FC552DC2E9BF9DAEC4CFC6BEFF29049075316B4

ISPs turn blind eye to million-machine malware monster
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/10/isps_ignore_strorm_worm_and_other_malware/

Monster Data Theft Also Hit U.S. Government Job Site
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBCW40HiOOq0G4V0FUAJ0Es

Tech giants and banks win out on patent reform
http://www.physorg.com/news108449242.html

Ericsson fined over Olympic phone tap scandal
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/07/ericsson_fine_greek_phonetap/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, DJ and F for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
16 September 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


Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page