The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 27, 2009

Official News page 11


WINDING DOWN

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

OK. Right. Super. Jolly good show. We've managed to get this newsletter written two weeks in a row without any glitches. Statistically this mean we have a 100 percent record of producing Winding Down over the last two weeks. Using the methods pioneered by marketing companies and global warming enthusiasts, I can confidently predict that by 2012 winding down will be appearing in 8,000+ word editions every five minutes!

Or not, as the case may be.

In the meantime, here is the current edition of Winding Down, weighing in at 2,135 words, to keep you going for this week...


Shorts:

It was nice to see Google paying homage to H G Wells on its front page this week - with a picture of the logo made of crop circles and being invaded by flying saucers! There was also a set of latitude and longitude coordinates for Horsell Common, the location of the Martian landing in his most famous book, "The War of the Worlds".

H G Wells was born on 21 September 1866, so last Monday marked his 143rd birthday. "The War of the Worlds", has been published in an enormous number of editions; the first URL is to a web site that has no less than 364 covers of different editions. It also inspired a very fine piece of music from Jeff Wayne, using artists of the caliber of Richard Burton, Justin Hayward, Phil Lynott, and David Essex.
http://drzeus.best.vwh.net/wotw/
http://www.physorg.com/news172771063.html

On a less happy note, I see that my old ISP, Demon, has managed to mail out thousands of business and government customers with an attached file giving the details of more than three and a half thousand customer accounts. The file includes details of names, email addresses, telephone numbers and what looks suspiciously like user names and passwords.

Fortunately, I left Demon a year or so ago after being a customer for many years - Demon was the very first ISP in the UK, although in those day the term ISP hadn't yet been coined. It's been dwindling for a number of years, ever since the original founders cashed in and sold it. I suspect this little disaster will only hasten its decline. It's sad, but not entirely surprising.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/23/demon_password_giveaway/

Users of Mozilla's Firefox browser may well get a new 'ribbon' style interface in the not too distant future. The matter is under discussion at the moment, with it first seeming to be a done deal, and then just a leeeeeetle bit of back-tracking suggesting that the matter was merely a topic for discussion amongst the developers.

I had to use Microsoft Word 2007 for three months, for a job. I stuck with the nursery frieze ribbon interface for that length of time, because although I disliked it at first sight, I thought I might get used to it in time. I didn't, and when the job finished, I reverted to the tried and tested Office 2003 with a sigh of relief.

The truth is that I loathed it, and found it the most cumbersome user interface I had ever used. Nothing in it was spatially referential. Even when I knew where it was, I had to make wide sweeps with the mouse to the opposite side of the screen just to do a common action, like inserting a page break.

Microsoft decided to force this abomination on its long suffering users, by deliberately not including an option to revert to the old style interface. Fortunately, it looks as though in the event that Firefox does go ahead with a ribbon interface, then there will be an option to use the old interface.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/351808/firefox-tidies-up-with-office-2007s-ribbon

I know a lot of my readers are interested in space exploration, so I'd point you to an interesting article in 'The Space Review'. It covers an especially timely question, given the recent release of the summary report of the Augustine Committee on the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans.

The issue is, why send humans into space? And the common answer, "because it's there", is not really considered viable given the billions of dollars it costs to do so, and the other problems facing humanity.

The article takes a serious look at this question and comes up with some answers of its own, and from those answers it derives a program which will support those goals. The piece is well argued, and deserves a read by those on both sides of the current debate.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1472/1

My favourite columnist, Robert X Cringely is at it again. The headline is 'Twitter is Dead' - Cringely is nothing if not provocative. And actually for all the deadpan wit, he offers a serious argument that anyone who uses the net can understand.

Among other things he notes a comment from the IDG news report that someone has 'invested' US$100 million in Twitter, and that "The money will give Twitter more time to figure out a business model." Like Cringely, I'd just love to have someone give me US$100 million to figure out a business model!

But it's not just that Twitter is burning up more and more venture capital with no possibility in sight of earning money. As the dot com boom showed, there are plenty of people with more money than sense who are willing to plow cash into the digital equivalent of a black hole. No, per Cringely, it's the fact that spammers and scammers now completely control Twitter that marks its demise, even as it reports a 1,700 percent increase in users, year on year. Read it. It's funny and right to the point.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/twitter-dead-299?page=0,0
&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-09-25

And finally, in this section, here's a little coda to the Sony rootkit affair from several years back. As we all know the law grinds slowly, but it grinds exceedingly small. Finally, a district court in Germany has ruled that the retailer who sold one of the affected CDs must pay compensation to its customer.

The customer in question was self-employed, and claimed 200 euros for 20 hours wasted dealing with virus alerts,100 euros for 10 hours restoring lost data, 800 euros paid to an expert to repair his network, and 185 euros in legal costs - not to mention a claim for loss of profits. This came to around 1,500 euros (about US$2,200) all told.

The court came to the conclusion that the CD should be considered as being faulty and awarded the plaintiff 1,200 euros (about US$1,750). That's for just one case. This could be very expensive for Sony once the word gets round, because the retailers will undoubtedly be claiming the money back from the makers...
http://torrentfreak.com/retailer-must-compensate-sony-anti-piracy-rootkit-victim-090914/


Homework:

Los Angeles seems to be discovering the law of unintended consequences. The problem is water. There isn't enough of it, so they decided to institute rationing, and now you can only water your lawn on Mondays and Thursdays. It seems like a rational enough decision, except that...

The number of major blowouts of the water system has substantially increased in the last couple of months, since it was instituted in June. The first three weeks in September alone saw 34 of these monsters with water from the broken pipes forcing its way out flinging paving materials up to 10 feet into the air, and flooding the surroundings. Last year there were only 21 such problems in the whole of September, so it's on course to double this September.

Of course, all major cities have problems with aging infrastructure, especially water and sewage, but this seems a little too extreme for that to be the only reason. The suspicion is that the rationing system is causing substantial pressure changes, as people all turn their lawn sprinklers on and off at more or less the same time. The pressure waves then put additional stress onto the already seriously stressed water pipes and after a few cycles of this sort of thing the pipes give way.

Well, water rationing seemed like a good idea at the time!
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water-main19-2009sep19,0,88564.story

The newspapers are having problems surviving in the current nasty economic climate. (That's a euphemism for depression - wouldn't want to panic anybody, would we?) Combine this with a culture that expects anything on the web to be free, and you can see why the problem is especially acute at the moment.

There's been a lot of debate recently about what can be done about it, with the Murdoch media empire announcing that it intends to charge punters for the privilege of browsing its online sites. More generally a debate has started about whether 'micro-payments' for looking at articles are a viable way forward.

This debate on how newspapers can survive is not an academic luxury, it's life and death for the newspaper industry, whose monopoly on the tools for production of news, and means of distribution has come to an end. Their classic business model relied on using that monopoly to create an artificial scarcity, which allowed them to charge for their product. Without the scarcity, people won't pay - why should they?

Like the music business, the newspaper industry need a new business model; unlike the music industry, newspapers (well most of them, anyway) are discussing the issue and trying to find a solution that doesn't involve using the government as an enforcement mafia.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/micropayments-for-news-the-holy-grail-or-
just-a-dangerous-delusion/


Geek Toys:

Looking for a fast, high capacity drive to store all your digital goodies on? Then have I got an offer for you - just launched by Seagate, the Barracuda XT. Weighing in with a two terabyte capacity, it eats movies for breakfast, and spits them out again at 6 Gigabits a second. Sounds to me like it's a dead ringer for a spot of video editing .

At US$299, and with a five year warranty, as opposed to the usual three years, sounds like a good option to me! Incidentally it has a 64Mb cache on board - that's 100 time more memory than my first PC had as its main memory!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/21/seagate_six_gig_sata/

To go with your new hard drive you might like to take a look at SGI's offering in the personal supercomputing market. Starting at US$8,000 for a system with one Xeon 5500 processor, the series runs up to a cost of US$53,000 for an 80 core, 240GB of memory and integrated Gigabit ethernet machine.

Kerrrching! That'll do nicely sir.
http://www.physorg.com/news172765794.html


Scanner: Other Stories

Lawsuit tied to bank Gmail error can't be secret, judge says
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=220100410&cid=nl_tw_security_txt

Net neutrality
http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/open-letter-enemies-net-neutrality-764?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-09-23
http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/fcc-calls-formal-net-neutrality-rules-511?source=IFWNLE_nlt_networking_2009-09-22

Authors ask court to delay Googlebooks hearing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/google_moves_to_postpone_book_hearing/

Intel debuts optical link for PCs
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220100942&pgno=1

New technology cleans up Visalia Superfund 100 site years ahead of schedule
http://www.physorg.com/news172765794.html


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

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 Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
27 September 2709

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.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


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