Official News page 14

WINDING DOWN

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

Gotta hand it to the organisational powers of atheists. Christian outfit The Alpha Course were unwise enough to set up an online poll with the question 'Does God Exist?' Currently the atheists are winning 98% to 2% with 154,500 votes cast.

Which reminds me, I once saw a classic piece of graffiti that made it clear the atheists don't always get things going their way. It said 'God is Dead', and was signed 'Voltaire'. Underneath, in a different hand, was written 'Voltaire is Dead'. This one was signed 'God'.

Anyway, back to tech issues and this week's Winding Down. I thought it would make a nice change to do an analysis piece, since I haven't done one for a while. So I've taken a look at a newly developing situation in the market for microchips that's a result of the explosion in mobile devices.

Fear not, though, geeks are well catered for with pieces on desktop supercomputers, hovercrafts and the ultimate in Swiss Army knives.

But first...

Story: David and Goliath - but which one is which?

A new battle is developing which will decide whose chips will power the coming explosion of small and portable devices. These chips are usually known as 'embedded' chips, and the number of them in use, in everything from automobiles to zeppelins, far exceeds the number of the processor chips used to power PCs and servers.

These chips have a number of totally different requirements to the general purpose processors we normally think of when people talk about microchips; in particular, they have to be low power chips.

Until recently Intel produced nothing much for this market, but that changed with the arrival of the Intel Atom chip. However, unusually for Intel, it doesn't control this market. Indeed, currently it is a very small player, especially compared with the top dog - ARM.

ARM and Intel are very different beasts. Intel produces microchips - lots and lots of them. ARM doesn't. Nope - it doesn't sell chips at all. What it does do is to license its chip designs to people who produce their own chips and it allows them to customise its core designs to meet their own requirements. And it is very successful at this.

How successful? Well, Intel sold its billionth x86 chip in 2003. AMD, its nearest rival, managed to pass the half million mark just this year. ARM, on the other hand expects to see 2.8 billion of its processors shipped just in 2009. And there are already 10 billion ARM based chips out there powering everyday objects.

If anyone is likely to be able to take on ARM successfully, then I would guess it would be Intel with its massive resources. However, Intel has its own problems. Politically, there are the problems that Intel is currently having with the regulators. Few of the pundits seem to be taking this into account - perhaps because they are fundamentally techies.

It's not illegal to be a monopoly. Far from it. What the regulators really don't like, though, is companies that use their monopoly in one market to dominate a different market. This is where Microsoft's legal woes came from. There was little objection to their domination of the desktop market, what they were hauled over the coals for was using that domination to dominate the browser market and to try to dominate the server market.

Intel will have to be very careful how they use their strength in the PC and server markets to gain leverage in the embedded market.

But Intel's problems don't end there. Their first entry into the mobile devices market is the Atom chip. It's a pretty good first cut, but it isn't anywhere near the power characteristics of the current generation of arm chips.

Presumably, Intel can improve that, but doing so could be a catch 22 situation. Embedded microchips are cheap, very cheap. You don't sell 2.8 billion chips in a year if they are expensive! Roughly speaking, the Atom sells for around one tenth of the price of one of Intel's standard laptop chips.

You can probably see where this is going.

As ARM continues to improve its chips, making them faster and more versatile, Intel will be forced to follow them if it wants to stay in the market. But if Intel makes the Atom based chips more powerful, and in order to compete, at a tenth of the price, then it will start to cannibalise the market for its higher end chips, starting with the 'standard' cheap laptops.

The reason ARM chips aren't cutting into Intel's market at the moment is simple. Microsoft doesn't provide a port of Windows to the ARM. But the Atom is based on the x86 chip, which is both its advantage and its curse. An advantage because it can run Windows in low power environments, and a curse because it can run Windows and is massively less profitable that regular x86 chips.

The underlying problem for Intel is that with the move towards mobile devices, the rise of the netbook, ebook readers, green IT, smart phones and such like, the whole ecosystem is changing to one in which there is already a very successful top dog. Intel can't ignore this, but competing is going to play havoc with its business model.

We live in interesting times!
http://www.infoworld.com/d/hardware/arm-vs-atom-battle-next-digital-frontier-
762?page=0,4&source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2009-10-28

Shorts:

It was the Internet's 40th birthday on Thursday. It was on 29 October 1969 that a team at UCLA first persuaded a UCLA computer to talk to one at a different research institute. The message was supposed to be 'log' and the reply 'in'. However, the software suffered from... <cue trumpet fanfare> ...a buffer overrun bug and crashed after the 'o' of 'log'. Clearly not much changes! Thus it was that the first message to be sent on the internet was actually 'lo' (as in 'lo and behold'). Useful trivia question there...
http://www.physorg.com/news176059520.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/29/internet_celebrates_second_fortieth_birthday/

Typical, isn't it. You wait ages for a decent e-book reader, and then three come along at once! After the Kindle and the Nook, ladies, gentlemen and gentledroids, I give you the nifty looking Entourage Edge.

The Edge is not cheap at US$490, and comes in a variety of non-grey colours. Interestingly enough it has two screens hinged at their common edge. One of the screens in standard e-paper black and white, while the other is a 10.1 inch LCD touch screen which acts, among other things as a web browser.

It really looks rather interesting, and I'd rather like to get my hands on one to try out.
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Entourage-Systems-Entourage-
Edge/?kc=LNXDEVNL102809

Data losses are in the news again. Zurich Insurance managed to lose tapes containing the personal details of something in the region of 640,000 customers in the UK, South Africa and Botswana. This happened over a year ago, but it's only just come to light.

The UK government has reported no less that 356 data losses over the past year. Of this 127 were due to stolen hardware, 71 were 'lost', and 24 were caused by courier or mail getting lost. Clearly secure online transmission of data (scp anyone?) and encryption of data storage devices haven't yet made it into the collective consciousness of the government bureaucracies.

Still in the UK, the Guardian newspaper's job website managed to allow hackers to make off with some half a million CVs (resumes to US readers). It claims that the attack that resulted in the theft was "sophisticated and deliberate". Yes... Most attacks that steal ID information are deliberate! Sophisticated? I don't think so, otherwise the Guardian wouldn't have noticed it. Clearly the newspaper's name 'Guardian' is not exactly appropriate!

And not included in the 356 losses above is the UK government's Rural Payments Agency (RPA), which had at one stage managed to lose no less than 39 backup tapes. The RPA blame the loss on IBM, who are claimed to have misfiled the tapes after they were transferred between offices. Eventually 37 of the tapes were found, but the remaining two are still missing. They contain details of payments to 100,000 farmers.

In the meantime, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) of which the RPA is part, is telling people not to worry because anyone trying to get the data off the tapes will need specialised equipment. Presumably they mean a tape drive and backup software. And were the tapes encrypted? You've gotta be joking!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/23/zurich_data_loss/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/27/data_losses_growing/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26/guardian_jobs_data/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/29/defra_tape_loss/

There is a very funny spoof film on Net Neutrality from Lauren Weinstein. Purporting to be a recently discovered 1950's public information piece from the DoD, it fooled enough people that Lauren was forced to add a subtitle that indicated it was a satire.

Entitled 'Is Net Neutrality a Communist Plot?', the video is a wry comment on the net neutrality debate currently hotting up in the US, and has the style and graininess of 1950s propaganda films right down to the countdown numbers at the start. Definitely recommended.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=4fCLFKlYW3c

You've got to hand it to the breadth of imagination of our loony UK government, when it comes to 'protecting' our children from grownups. Their latest data base has, it seems, been designed to protect children against zombies! There is no way of getting people who die off it, so even if you are dead the government will know if you are a good corpse or a bad corpse. Words fail me...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/29/dead_stay_on_database/

Homework:

If you really feel like stretching your brain, take a look at the URL below this item. It's about one of the premier unsolved problems of computer science - does P=NP?

To give some idea of the difficulty of answering it, the Clay Mathematics Institute will give you a million dollars for being the first one to come up with a proof or disproof. I can tell you that Fermat's Last Theorem was a trivia question compared with this one!

Let me explain a little more. It's all about how long it takes for a computer to solve a problem. Computer scientists define the time taken by a particular method of solving a problem (called an algorithm*) in terms of the number of elements to be processed.

I'm not going to explain the maths - there's a good non-techie explanation in the article. However, to give you some idea of the importance, a P type problem involving 100 elements might take one second, but if it was an NP type problem it would take longer than the life of the universe to solve.

The real hook for mathematicians and computer scientists is that NP problems can be verified in P type time, but take NP lengths of time to solve. Add this to the fact that if you can solve one of the NP problems, you can adapt the solution to solve all of them!

If you can crack this one, then travelling salesmen all over the world will bless your name!**
http://www.physorg.com/news176037013.html

Geek Toys:

Feel like doing a good deed, but only in the virtual world? Well you could donate some of your PC processing power to a good cause. But perhaps you find Seti@Home so passe, darhling. In that case you need to take a look at InfoWorld which has some suggested alternatives.

I particularly liked Aqua@home, which would use your donated computing power to help build a quantum computer. They're currently trying to figure out how running time scales with the size of the input problem, aiming for 200-qubit and 240-qubit problems.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/communication-and-collaboration/12-cool-ways-donate-
your-pcs-spare-processing-power-802&current=1&last=13#slideshowTop

But perhaps you feel that your current computer hasn't quite got the oomph to participate in the above '@home' activities? then you will be delighted to hear about a new product from Asustek and NVidia. It's the desktop sized, 1.1 teraflop ESC 1000 supercomputer.

With a 3.3GHz Xeon processor and 960 NVidia graphics processing cores the ESC 1000 is a nippy machine - almost fast enough to run Windows 7, I guess.

No price or launch data is available yet, but I suspect that this sort of machine is going to seriously drive departmental supercomputing in educational and research environments. Look for a massive explosion of new discoveries in fields like nano-science, physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, and statistics five years down the line once these machines become generally available.
http://www.goodgearguide.com.au/article/323713

And for those who have everything, here's something you haven't got (yet) - it's a Excelsior Dawes hovercraft. It needs a 31 man crew and comes equipped with two multiple rocket launchers and four portable air defense missile systems.

Oh, and it can carry 140 troops and three armoured vehicles, but you have to provide those yourself! It's just the thing to impress your significant other - 'Hi honey, want to go for a ride?'

All you have to do is to cough up a mere US$65 million...
http://dvice.com/archives/2009/10/for-sale-31-man.php?p=0&cat=undefined

On the other hand, if you're a bit strapped for cash, this ultimate Swiss Army knife might be more to your taste. It has 87 'implements', 141 'functions', weighs 2 pounds, and only costs US$1,400. It should prove quite a conversational piece as you use it to remove boy scouts from horses hooves.

Just one piece of advice. Don't try and take it with you on an airplane!
http://www.wengerna.com/giant-knife-16999

Scanner: Other Stories

Atheists smite online god poll
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/23/god_poll/

Achtung! Criminal investigation against YouTube underway in Germany
http://newteevee.com/2009/10/23/achtung-criminal-investigation-against-
youtube-underway-in-germany/

Industry hit with memory failures, 'techno-stress'
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220900419&cid=NL_eet

Six net neutrality principles proposed
http://www.physorg.com/news175767162.html

The Crapware Con
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/352927/the-crapware-con

*Named after the Baghdad mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi (780AD to 850AD)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, 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
1 November 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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