WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well I was going to talk about the Internet neutrality debate this week. Google and Verizon's open letter sparked a storm last week, and I was waiting for it to die down so I could provide readers with a cool, calm, and considered view about what is a genuinely important issue. Unfortunately, there is still more heat than light out there, so I've put it off for another week.
Other things have been happening in the hi-tech world though, and here are some of them for your edification...
Shorts:
I don't really like starting the shorts section with legal news, but there is an interesting little spat going on in the courts over on this side of the big pond.
British Gas, one of the major retailers of natural gas - the stuff you burn to cook, keep warm, etc, not the liquid you put into your auto tank - is filing against consultants Accenture for 182 million UK pounds (about US$285 million) for badly screwing up its new billing system.
According to British Gas not only did the system cause millions of errors, and caused huge disruption to the company and its customers, but the company lost hundreds of thousands of customers because of the problems.
Interesting.
I hold no brief for British Gas, but it's long overdue for the big software consulting companies, and Accenture is one of the biggest, if not the biggest in the world, to get their come-uppance for crap work. I'm going to be following this case with interest.
Oh - and a little bit of history. Accenture started out as the business and tech consulting division of Arthur Andersen. Remember Arthur Andersen? It was one the five biggest accounting firms. Still doesn't ring a bell? OK. They were Enron's auditors! Not surprisingly Accenture don't like to be reminded of their origins...
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/08/09/british_gas_accenture_high_
court_appeal_rejected/
I gather a lot of you in the US (not to mention in the UK) have been watching the BBC's latest Sherlock Holmes mini-series. I'm sure you will have heard about the failure of the BBC powers that be commission a full series, because they didn't think it would be very popular. What a bunch of dorks.
The BBC ('beeb' or 'auntie', as it's known over here), is in dire need of a Sherlock Holmes for its own affairs, it turns out. In the last two years it's lost nearly a quarter of a million pounds (about US$375 million) worth of laptops and mobile phones! To be fair it did manage to get 19 of them back, but that still left 209 unaccounted for.
Asked what action had been taken over the missing kit, the BBC indicated that -one- employee had been investigated over a stolen laptop. What the outcome of the investigation was is not known. In the meantime I'm sure all those who pay TV licensing fees in this country will be reassured by the BBC statement that "...The BBC takes theft very seriously..."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/09/bbc_lost_laptops_blackberrys_mobile_
phones_foi/
Ever heard of the term 'geotagging'? No? Well if you commonly post pictures to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, you need to learn about it fast. It seems that most cameras and phones these days use their embedded GPS units to add 'tags' giving the co-ordinates of where the picture was taken.
So if you proudly upload a picture of your newly refurbished kitchen and its expensive new equipment (think of pro versions of Kitchen Aid and Sabatier knives), you are telling the local criminal fraternity where the best pickings are, and specifying the location down to the last few meters. A pretty chilling thought.
The really worrying thing is that it's not usually obvious when you look at the photos. In fact most people don't even know that the feature exists, let alone how to turn it off. And if you do turn it off, you can often screw up other functions which also depend on access to the GPS unit.
Another fine mess, like Google Street View, that was thought to be a good wheeze, but which was not thought through properly, and which turned out to be more of a boon to criminals than useful to everyone else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/technology/personaltech/12basics.html?
_r=2&src=me&ref=general
On a nicer subject, the venerable Scientific American magazine is 165 years old this month. That's quite a long time for a magazine to be running, most last no more than 30-40 years, assuming they make it past the first year.
To celebrate the occasion Scientific American's web site has a slide show featuring 20 illustrations and covers of the magazine. I particularly liked the 1860 projection of flying machines of the future!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=a-visual-history-of-science&
photo_id=1FA07B94-EFBD-C1FC-2787EAF133C1BFD6
Homework:
There is an interesting article about solar sails in the Space Review this week. For those of you who haven't come across the idea before, solar sailing is a method of propelling lightweight spacecraft by means of a large, highly reflective 'sail'. Photons from the sun bouncing off the sail impart momentum and you get a small acceleration. A very small acceleration, but it's free, and after a while even a small, but continuous, acceleration can create high speeds.
The main problem is that you need a BIG sail - as in big as an acre - to get a useful acceleration, even for a 50kg micro-satellite.
Until recently the idea of solar sailing remained a nice idea and the stuff of sci-fi, rather than a proven concept, but on June 11 the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) 'Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun' (IKAROS - definitely a brilliant acronym) successfully deployed its solar sail and moved under the power of the sail.
Take a look at the article, the topic's been around for a long time and lots of people have been working to make it a reality. I'd also recommend a sci-fi book which is, in my opinion, one of the best ever (even though it's over 30 years old), and which has an interesting use of solar sailing in the opening few chapters - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 'The Mote in God's Eye'. It seems to be out of print in the UK, but it's still available in the US from Amazon.com.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1677/1
http://www.amazon.com/Mote-Gods-Eye-Larry-Niven/dp/0671741926/
ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281856322&sr=1-1
I seem to be mentioning video clips on TED more often these days. That's probably because they have some very good talks by people who know what they are talking about!
This week I'd like to point you at a talk by none other than Bill Gates. It's about mosquitoes, malaria, and education, and includes an episode of uncle Bill releasing mosquitoes (non-malaria carrying, I hasten to add) into the audience, so that they can sample what the poor have to put up with... At 20 minutes the talk is a bit longer that the usual clips, but it's well worth a listen.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html
Bad news if you become a missing person, or suffer from identity fraud. It seems that the FBI is too busy pursuing copyright infringement to be able to offer you much in the way of assistance.
Personally, I think it's weird that what is essentially a civil law issue should be taking priority over criminal cases for the national law enforcement agency, but I'm not a US citizen, so I may be missing some cultural issue here.
I have suffered from copyright theft in the past - the Amiga version of my single-player 'Frontlines' game earned only half of what other versions did because of extensive copying from bulletin boards. I have to say, though, that I wouldn't have been very happy if I'd found that a police investigation of my problem had used up resources that would otherwise have gone into investigating a missing person case.
All too often missing person investigations lead to murder or other criminal acts, and timely investigation can stop further crimes of this nature being committed.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100809/17262010563.shtml
Geek Toys:
Mmmm - this sounds interesting. A 200 core chip from Tilera. Tilera are relative newcomers to the business, and it's an announcement of what it will do over the next few years. On the other hand is does already have 64 core chips...
The 200 core announcement caught my eye because of the fact that the chip will include memory and peripheral controllers and a mesh network linking the chips.
For some time it's been my contention that the current methods of multi-threading are merely a temporary transition which is only usable because of the low number of cores on the processor chips.
It's a matter of chip architecture. The current system where the chips share memory is OK when you don't have too many cores, but once you get past (say) 32 cores - maybe even lower numbers - then there is no gain with this layout, because of the amount of time the cores spend waiting to access the memory. OK, you can add increasing numbers and sizes of caches for each core, but the more of these you add the more time and processing power is spent keeping all the caches in sync, and the resulting mess becomes horribly complex and easy to make mistakes with.
I think what will eventually happen is that each core will get its own memory and pass messages to other asynchronously to other cores via the on chip equivalent of a mesh connected network. No threads just message passing.
I was hoping that multicore chip development would proceed fast enough for me to be able to skip the multi-threading bit completely, since I'm already familiar with asyc message passing, having been programming multi-player games for over two decades. No such luck. Sigh. I blame Intel for not being fast enough!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/22/tilera_quanta_server_stratton/
I see that Google's computers have been used to resolve the thorny issue of what the minimum number of moves needed to solve any Rubik's Cube puzzle is. I guess this is a somewhat less harmful use of Google's computer than some of their other projects.
For the curious, answer is... Ta Da... 42.
Just kidding, it's actually 20 - to my mind a suspiciously round number, I'm sure 42 would do much better. On the other hand my faith in the solubility of the problem was dented some years ago when I discovered the kids were peeling off the colored labels and sticking them back on to complete the puzzle!
Anyway, here are the details:
http://www.physorg.com/news200889568.html
Scanner:
Coffee shops are taking Wi-Fi off the menu
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cafe-wifi-20100808,0,2492467.story
Bound robbery victim IMs for help with toes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/06/toe_typist/
Jaguar XJ Super Sport goes all Blue Screen of Death
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/cartech/jaguar-xj-super-sport-goes-all-blue-screen-of
-death-on-us-50000329/
Rupert Murdoch 'to launch US digital newspaper'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/13/rupert-murdoch-us-digital-newspaper
Startups or Behemoths: Which are we going to bet on?
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/14/startups-or-behemoths-which-are-we-going-
to-bet-on/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Occy, 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
15 August, 2010
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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