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WINDING DOWN

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

Hi team, Welcome to this week's edition of Winding Down. But first, here's a URL that's got the most spectacular set of pictures of mountain goats climbing the near vertical face of an Italian dam. Nothing hi-tech about it, but it is a reminder that nature can still do things that are truly amazing!

Actually, I did wonder if the images had been photoshopped, but if they have it's well done, and I couldn't spot any artifacts that would have revealed it. Mind you I'm not an expert.

In the mean time I've been climbing the north face of the Internet searching out goodies for edification of my readers, and this is what I've come up with this week...

Shorts:

The iPad's sales have now passed the 3.5 million mark. It's clearly a success, and in the run up to Xmas that very success is likely to unleash a plethora of imitators onto the market. The key question is, how successful are they likely to be?

A piece by Stewart Wolpin on the Dvice web site looks at this and comes up with some intriguing points which readers may want to take a look at. His main point is that, unlike the iPod and the iPhone, which created new markets - for MP3 players and touch phones - the iPad may have created a market just for iPads, rather than for tablet PCs.

This is an interesting point. Tablet PCs have been around for years, without much success. This may be because people expect them to behave like laptop, or even desktop, computers, which they aren't. There is also the fact that most of the putative competitors to the iPad have considerably less screen real estate. Most of them are only a few times the size of the equivalent smart phone. The iPad screen is nearly eight times the size of the iPhone screen. iPad competitors are touting this as an advantage, but why would you want to buy something that is in effect an oversized smart phone?

Take a look at the piece, it makes for interesting reading, though I doubt if the tablet makers will bother - they are too far down a different road to make serious changes at this stage.
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/10/what-other-tabl.php

Oh, and talking of e-reader type thingies, I note that you can now play the aging, but venerable Zork game on the Kindle - assuming, of course, that you don't get eaten by a grue... I'd be happy to a receive a review for Winding Down from any vintage game loving Kindlistas out there!
http://www.gamepron.com/news/2010/10/07/kindle-text-adventures-in-the-21st-century/

It was a mere 53 years ago when Russia won the first space race with the launch of the Sputnik satellite. Most of you are too young to remember that and the staggering effect it had on western society. You can however get a mild flavor of the event from a recently released US newsreel reporting the event, complete with an artists impression' of the launch - although what the Soviet controller is doing with an IBM computer console remains to be seen!
http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/10/8/new-moon-reds-launch-first-space-satellite-
the-first-american-newsreel-about-sputnik

I'm sure you've read all the speculation about the Stuxnet computer virus. Who made it, who it was aimed at, what it might be intended to do. It's all speculation, we actually don't know, and according to computer security guru Bruce Schneier, we are not likely to find out either! Schneier has an interesting, and very sane piece about the whole issue in Forbes magazine. Take a look - it's not often you get the chance to look behind the computer security hype. If you like it, you might also be interested in hearing Schneier give a talk next month at Bletchley Park. The details are here. (Disclaimer: I am one of the organizers of the conference. All the proceeds go to the Betchley Park Trust, and the UK National Museum of Computing.)
http://www.forbes.com/2010/10/06/iran-nuclear-computer-technology-security-
stuxnet-worm.html

I was fascinated to hear that the US Federal Government has 1,100 more data centers than it thought it had! Yes, really. Apparently they've just been updating their inventories ready for a planned consolidation to reduce duplication. It's a good idea in theory, but anyone who has ever tried to do this for even a moderately large company will tell you it's not easy, and you always find a few servers and the like that you didn't know about (but not usually whole data centers). Actually it's the servers you discover that no one seems to know about that are the worse. It's not till you switch them off that you discover just how critical, but not glamorous, a service they are providing. Like the lock-on-fail door security for the data center, for example...
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/10/13/feds-discover-
1000-more-data-centers/

There is a classic bad article in Security Week this week with the headline 'Survey Reveals How Stupid People are With Their Passwords'. The article is about yet another survey reporting the stupid things people do with their IT passwords.

The article completely misses the point. The fact that so many people do so many stupid things with their passwords doesn't mean most people are stupid. It means that the system of using passwords for security is fundamentally flawed and that security professionals are too stupid to come up with a system that does work properly.
http://www.securityweek.com/survey-reveals-how-stupid-people-are-their-passwords

Homework:

I guess anyone who has been following the climate change debate will be aware of the arguments about the contribution of the solar cycle to global warming. For those of you who haven't come across it, the sun's output of radiation varies in what is roughly an 11 year cycle, and we are currently coming out of an unusually prolonged minimum. The argument is about how much contribution to global warming this cycle has been making.

Now, it turns out, there is yet another variation to add to the discussion - the type of radiation the sun outputs. Radiation from the sun covers a wide chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum, but here we are looking at a band ranging from the ultra-violet through to the far end of the visible spectrum. It turns out that not only does the total output vary, but so does the type of the radiation. Atmospheric scientists at Imperial College, London have been examining the records and found that in the period 2004 to 2007 the sun put out less ultra-violet light, but more visible light.

You may be wondering why this is significant. The answer is because most of the ultra-violet is blocked high in the atmosphere, while the visible light makes it all the way down to the surface. The consequence of more radiation reaching the surface is that the surface is heated up more that it would otherwise be - i.e. the sun's contribution to the global warming of the surface increases. The key question, of course, is by how much, and what else in the sun's cycle is affecting the weather and how.

The truth is that we don't know nearly enough about the different factors affecting the Earth's weather, and matters haven't been helped by the climategate scientists destroying their original data, so their work can't be scientifically verified.

Add to that the fact that politicians have seized on 'global warming' as an opportunity to control the behavior of their electorates, and you have a fairly toxic mixture. In spite of that, some serious work is being done on both sides of the debate, and this latest research is a reminder that what happens in global scale physical processes is rarely reducible to a simple political slogan.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=weaker-sun-may-
equal-warmer-earth&sc=physics_20101008

FT.com has an extended piece about who controls the Internet. And it doesn't make very happy reading. The article mostly covers events in the US, and starts with the appointment of general Keith Alexander as the head of USCybercom, the new Pentagon Cyber Command unit. The article is too big to cover in depth in this rag, but I really would recommend it for those who take an interest in how the web is used and how it will soon be policed.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3e52897c-d0ee-11df-a426-00144feabdc0.html

I spotted two really interesting videos from TED.com this week. The first was from Melinda Gates suggesting that non-profits can use the same techniques that Coca-Cola uses to get its product everywhere to get things like vaccinations to the places where they are urgently needed. Coca-Cola is ubiquitous, maybe she has a point here!
http://www.ted.com/talks/melinda_french_gates_what_nonprofits_can_learn_
from_coca_cola.html

The other interesting talk was from plant neuro-biologist Stefano Mancuso talking about nothing less that plant intelligence. Stefano's talk is about the evidence for this fascinating hypothesis. Definitely worth a look.
http://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_intelligence.html

Scanner:

Rare Earths: Elemental needs of the clean-energy economy
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=rare-earths-elemental-
needs-of-the-clean-energy-economy

U.S. takes the prize for most infected PCs
http://www.infoworld.com/t/malware/us-takes-the-prize-most-infected-
pcs-893?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2010-10-15

Sony further delays release of Gran Turismo 5
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-sony-gran-turismo-5.html

Rogue engineer supplied dodgy power to 1,500 homes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/12/dodgy_electricity/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Jason, 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
17 October, 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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