WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well, I see that the internet is back in Egypt. I can only assume that someone high up in the Mubarak administration finally realized cutting people off from playing World of Warcraft merely brought even more angry people out on the streets! More to the point here in the west, it provided a lesson for Twitter/Facebook mystics: you don't need either of them to organize a rebellion.
Anyway, dear readers, once more unto the breach...
Shorts:
This week I have two videos from TED to recommend to you. The first is a talk by Dale Docherty, publisher of Maker magazine, who argues that we are all makers and tinkerers at heart. He looks at some of the weird things people have made - think motorized cup-cakes, and The Sashimi Tabernacle Choir - and takes a brief look at some cool new tools, such as affordable 3-D printers and DIY satellites!
http://www.ted.com/talks/dale_dougherty_we_are_makers.html
The second video is very different, and totally fabulous. It is by New Yorker cartoonist Liz Donnelly, and it's about using humor to break out of the rules that keep women in their place in society. This six minute talk, illustrated by some of Ms Donnelly's cartoons is so good that I found myself watching it for a second time when I came to write this piece!
http://www.ted.com/talks/liza_donnelly_drawing_upon_humor_for_change.html
This week saw the last of the old style (IPv4) internet addresses dished out. The response was pretty much summed up by The Register with its headline 'World shrugs as IPv4 addresses finally exhausted - Arpageddon postponed'. Yes, we've finally (well nearly finally, there are still blocks of addresses floating around in the regions) run out of addresses.
Does this mean that your fridge won't be able to talk to the blender? Possibly. What it really means is that the networking world will finally have to get its act together and make up for 10 years of neglect. The core gear on the net will have to be upgraded to accept new style addresses (IPv6) as well as the old style ones.
I suspect what will also happen is that people will also find ways of using existing addresses efficiently. By one estimate only about 14% of the addresses dished out are actually being used. Some of the usual suspects are sitting on large blocks of addresses that they were given very early on when 4 billion addresses seemed to be plenty to play with. There is no way, short of passing a new law, of getting those addresses back, and once the shortage bytes (geddit?), these addresses will become a very valuable asset because of their resale value.
So now we are down to our last 90 million or so addresses things will probably have to change, but for most people it will seem to be business as usual. My advice? Take an electronic leaf out of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - DON'T PANIC!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/02/ipv4_exhaustion/
How do you know the billing for your mobile phone is correct? Do you trust your provider to be honest? At least one person in California didn't, so Patrick Hendricks attorneys set up a test account for an iPhone, closed all the apps and left the device unused for 10 days. In spite of this, AT&T billed them for 2,292 KB of usage!
The aforementioned attorneys promptly filed a suit on behalf of Mr Hendricks claiming that, "A significant portion of the data revenues were inflated by AT&T's rigged billing system for data transactions". And they are planning to have the case moved to class-action status...
I wonder how many other carriers are being subject to the same experiment even as I write this piece?
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2011/02/01/ATT-faces-lawsuit-over-
billing/UPI-87561296594363/
The Sacramento Bee newspaper has an interesting article entitled "'Death by GPS' in desert" (I think they lost the definite article there to fit in the headline...). It's a story about the dangers of using GPS units in areas like Death Valley. Here in the UK we all laugh at people who get into weird places - like rivers - by blindly following their GPS's instructions. In places like Death Valley, redolent with place names like Deadman Pass, Coffin Peak, Funeral Mountains, and the Devil's Golf Course, the penalty can be death.
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/30/3362727/death-by-gps-in-desert.html
Homework:
And now for something low-tech! Aerial ropeways. Nowadays aerial ropeways are used almost exclusively for transporting skiers, but that wasn't always the case. Low-tech Magazine has a nice piece on the history of ropeways from the Middle Ages to recent times, complete with contemporary pictures. Ropeways are starting to make a comeback, since they are efficient, and gravity driven ropeways are even able to generate electricity while moving the goods around using gravity.
Ropeways have been around in one form or another for at least 2,000 years, and in that time they have been used as transport for both people and goods. They can carry goods for enormous distances, the biggest one built in Europe was a 39 kilometer link in Granada, Spain, used to carry goods from the city to the harbor in Motril.
Take a look, it's fascinating.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/01/aerial-ropeways-automatic-cargo-transport.html
The news that China is committing to a new energy program based on thorium nuclear reactors is currently hitting the press. Unlike uranium, thorium is a nuclear fuel that produces little in the way of nuclear explosives as a by-product, and the leftovers tend to be less long lived. In addition to which thorium is much more abundant than uranium.
One of the more interesting things about thorium reactors is that they look like being economic at much smaller sizes than conventional reactors, and they are safer, since they run in low pressure vessels. This may be why both India and now China have programs to develop them. It's going to be interesting to watch how the programs proceed, and try to predict what gotchas will emerge as they develop. Not mentioned, of course, in press coverage, is the fact that if these types of reactors live up to their promise, then they will be ideal for powering nuclear powered shipping - especially warships.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/china_thorium_bet/
Even if you can't afford to go globe trotting to visit all the world's art galleries, there is still hope. Google has got together with 17 (why not 42?) of the top galleries to let you take a virtual tour and view something in the region of a thousand high resolution art images. Galleries participating include MoMA, the Tate, the Hermitage, and the Rijksmuseum, to name but a few. Nice work!
http://www.gizmag.com/google-art-project/17760/
http://www.googleartproject.com/
...and I have a large print of this one on my bedroom wall!
http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/vangogh/bridge-in-the-rain-after-hiroshige-42
There's an interesting article by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson in Slate. It's about path dependency and lock-in in the rocket industry. Path dependency is difficult to describe. The best I can do is to say that it suggests that we are trapped in a particular way of doing things, and unable to find new ways, because the route we took to get to where we are now has locked us into a specific way of doing things - in this case getting satellites into orbit.
I would suggest that anyone with an interest in space exploration should take a look at this brief and pithy article, and ponder on what it has to say.
http://www.slate.com/id/2283469/
Geek Toys:
Not so much a toy as a lecture by an enthusiastic geek... Xiph.org has a digital media primer video for geeks - delivered by a geek, and illustrated by a number of very uncool whiteboard drawings. In spite of which, if you have half an hour to spare, it will give you a useful basic introduction to the world of audio and video codecs. And the geek presenter does have some rather cool looking electronic test equipment!
http://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
Almost by definition network admins are geeks, though not all geeks are network admins, but it helps to be one. So for those of you who are new to network admin, I'd like to point you in the direction of InfoWorld's Top 10 free open source tools for network admins. It has all the old faithfuls, such as dig, nmap, and IPplan, not to mention Tcpdump and Wireshark. Whenever I have to do low level network programming I almost always end up using Wireshark to find out what's actually going in and out over the wire.
Take a look, you never know, you might actually decide you want to be a network admin :)
http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/top-10-free-open-source-tools-network-
admins-146?page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2011-02-02
Scanner:
New transistors: An alternative to silicon and better than graphene
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-01/epfd-nta012811.php
Google claims Bing copies its search results
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20030206-264.html?tag=nl.e703
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000809.html
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000810.html
UK probes ebook pricing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/02/ebooks_investigated/
Statistician cracks secret code behind lottery tickets
http://www.lotterypost.com/news/227079
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
6 February, 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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