The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 29, 2011

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

Well, it's break time, it seems. The proof reading (essential for any writer - especially me) and distribution departments are closing down for a two week holiday. This means that you will be without this magnificent missive for the next two weeks.

So I guess I'd better get straight down to this week's snippety bits of news...


Shorts:

The New York Public Library is 100 years old, and to celebrate they organized a book discovery/writing night last week. Five hundred lucky people took part in a scavenger hunt, and used their experiences to collectively write a 600 page book about the night's work. They had to find, given a bunch of clues, 100 artifacts from the library's archives. The resulting book was supposed to be printed and bound, that night, by a bookbinder using a medieval technique. Sadly technical printing hitches hit that part of the idea, but the book is being produced and the participants will get to each sign it.

Happy birthday NY Public Library, I hope you like your present!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20065225-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&tag=nl.e703

Do you use LinkedIn? Most professionals I know do tend to keep an account marginally active on it, mainly in case they need it for job hunting. It went in for an IPO recently, and I gather millions were made by some people. The IPO was pretty predictable, because over the last year or so LinkedIn has become more and more useless as it tries to become a 'social networking' site for 'professionals'. The result is that my mailbox is filling up with pleas from recruiters looking for senior/lead programmers in Mumbai ( Bombay), India. The outsourcing machines are obviously desperate for people who can design programs rather than just produce bad code to other people's specifications.

But I digress. What I really wanted to do was to warn any readers with an account on LinkedIn that there is a security problem with LinkedIn cookies, which allows people to access others' accounts. I guess LinkedIn might be another organization having problems getting senior programmers that appreciate security! In the meantime, I'd suggest avoiding using your LinkedIn account for a couple of weeks, while they get their act together and fix the problem.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/24/linkedin_cookie_vulnerable/

At last, something that gives me some hope in the fight against spam. Given the following figures: 74.8% of all e-mail messages are spam, the largest spam category is for unlicensed pharmaceutical sites, 95% of credit card payments for these sites are handled by three payment processing firms, located in Denmark, Nevis (an island in the West Indies, where an ex-girlfriend of mine came from) and Azerbaijan, compute the best way to eliminate pharmaceutical spam.

Yep. You got it. Get rid of the payment processors, and make sure that other payment processors don't handle the orphaned business. Let's go for it!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/23/spam_economics/

When do you think the first video game was invented? And, no, it wasn't the Johnny come lately 'Pong' game in the 1970s. Give up? It was in 1947 that Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann submitted a patent for a '"Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device'. Yes - that 1947 wasn't a mistake. The device used knobs to control missiles to knock down a plane represented by a point on the CRT. There's nothing new under the sun!
http://www.gizmag.com/first-video-game/18695/

Ever wondered what it's like to work from home? Well we just had the National Work from Home Day, here in the UK, so quite a few people tried it, and silicon.com had their senior staff write up their experiences. All in all it comes out quite favorably. However...

As someone who worked from home for over 15 years, I can tell you that it's not all as rosy as it seems from the descriptions. Yes, it's easy to work quite productively from home for a day, or even a few days. The real problems come from extended home working. First there is the problem of missing out on the general level of office gossip and effectively ceasing to be part of a team - out of sight, out of mind, really applies in this case. That's not such a problem if everyone works from home, though.

A more serious problem is self-discipline. All jobs include a part that is hard, boring and tedious. The problem is how to motivate yourself to do those parts when no one is looking over your shoulder. I can tell you that the average household is absolutely stuffed with must-do chores that are marginally less boring than current work...
http://www.silicon.com/technology/mobile/2011/05/20/shutting-down-the-office-siliconcoms-wfh-experiment-39747433/?s_cid=145


Homework:

Ooops! Here's some research that Apple fans won't want to know about. It seems that if you show pictures of Apple products to heavy duty Apple fans while they are in an MRI scanner the same bits of the brain that trigger in religious people when they see religious images are triggered by the Apple pictures. I've seen comparisons of Apple to a religious cult before, but I thought it was all hyperbole. Now I'm not so sure... (This snippet is brought to you on an Apple MacBook Pro, running Windows 7.)
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-causes-religious-reaction-in-brains-of-fans-say-neuroscientists/

A clever piece of work by radio astronomers has produced a fantastic image of the radio galaxy Centaurus A, some 12 million light years away. The scientists managed to stitch together data from radio telescopes scattered over the world to effectively create a telescope the size of the Earth itself. The galaxy, and the jets of matter it spews out are so big and bright that if we could 'see' radio waves it would appear bigger and brighter than the moon in the night sky!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/23/extragalctic_black_hole_snap/


Geek Toys:

Want to see a video of a really nifty piece of Lego building? Try the Super-8 movie projector built by Friedemann Wachsmuth, which really works. The only non-Lego bits are the lens, the reel spindles and the lamp.

For the benefit of my younger readers I should explain that in days long ago, before the engineers put movie cameras into your phones (incidentally, hands up those who remember the discussion about why on earth anyone would want a camera in a mobile phone), people made home movies with some stuff called 'film'.

Film was a long reel of plastic (in this case 8mm wide, hence Super-8) coated with a silver colloid and various dyes. You pointed the camera at the scene and shot the movie. Then you took it to a shop (walking bare foot through the snow, etc, etc) to have it 'developed', by running it through a bath of rather unpleasant chemicals, and eventually returned it to you. You then needed a piece of equipment called a projector to bore the pants off family and friends with your attempt to emulate Steven Spielberg - some aspects of this process never change!
http://www.peaceman.de/blog/index.php/lego-technic-super-8-movie-projector

Perhaps you'd prefer something a little larger, built with something a little tougher than Lego? Maybe something to go with 'Big Becky', the 4,000 ton Canadian tunnel boring machine, described in last week's issue? I've got just the thing for you. It's the world's biggest chain saw. It weighs 45,000 tons (bigger than Becky) and needs 27 people to control it. It's used to saw through hills in search of coal. I should warn you that it's currently in Kazakhstan, so you would have to arrange shipping if it ever comes up for sale on eBay...
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/864429-introducing-the-worlds-biggest-saw-that-can-cut-through-mountains

Here's something a little more to my scale, and very, very cool. It's a massively powerful PC built into a glass topped desk, with triple monitors. The glass and aluminum desk houses 10TB of disk, and a Core i7 processor. Since the system uses water cooling and 17 ultra-quiet fans to keep the temperature down, it is almost silent. I really want one of these, it's the coolest computer I've seen for a long time!
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/05/modder-stuffs-a.php


Scanner:

National Jukebox: Historical recordings from the Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/

Medieval tally stick discovered in Germany
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/medieval_tally.html

Websites complain about fake Takedown Notices being used on Facebook
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-websites-complain-about-fake-takedown-notices-being-used-on-facebook/

Knowledge as Sacrilege: The criminalizing of links and search engines
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000853.html

Sharing information corrupts wisdom of crowds
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/wisdom-of-crowds-decline/

Cybercrooks turn Eve Online into botnet battlefield
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/23/eve_online_botnet_mayhem/


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
29 May, 2011

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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