WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well, Winding Down is just about staggering back into existence. Originally there was going to be no Winding Down last weekend because I was working. Unfortunately, on the Friday I went down with a bug that's been circulating here in the UK, and wasn't able to get back to work until this Friday. Even so I still feel washed out, although, from all accounts I was lucky, since I've heard, online, from several people who were knocked out for two or three weeks, and others for whom it morphed into bronchitis bad enough to require heavy duty antibiotics to deal with. All this just the week after getting a flu jab that was supposed to stop this sort of thing!
All this is by way of explaining why this week's Winding down is so short - basically I was too ill to do very much research this week, so most of my material is stuff left over from previous weeks.
RIP John McCarthy, inventor of LISP, and coiner of the term 'artificial intelligence' in his 1955 research proposal - see the 'Geek Topics' section for more details.
I was wondering whether to include an RIP for Rim's Blackberry after their latest three day down time, but eventually decided against it, because it is the communication device of choice for the UK's rioters, as evinced in the last batch of rioting over here. Clearly it does have a riotous future.
Anyway, here's what I've got for you this week:
Shorts:
Whether you are a Jobs/Apple fan boi or an Apple hater, you might like to take a look at c|net's review of the new biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. According to the review the book doesn't pull any punches, although the author is basically a Steve Jobs fan. Steve Jobs, along with the UK's Richard Branson, is probably the best known of the hippy entrepreneurs to come out of the 1960's hippy scene, and Isaacson's portrait, it seems, accurately reflects the contradictions inherent in the status. Sounds interesting to me, even though I'm no fan of Steve Jobs.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20124694-264/steve-jobs-an-apt-portrait-of-a-jerk-and-a-genius/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&tag=nl.e703
I see that the Swedes have suffered from a massive hacking scandal recently. It seems that nearly sixty high profile web sites in the country have been hacked recently, including the popular Bloggtoppen site, resulting in the exposure of login credentials and other personal information for something in the region of 180,000 individuals, including politicians, celebrities, and journalists. 180,000 may not sound like much to those used to seeing hacks in the likes of the US, but in a small country like Sweden it's an awfully large chunk of the population.
The real problem, of course, is not that someone could log on to the hacked sites using the passwords made public by the hackers, but the fact that most people use the same password for all their net logins. This could have serious implications for a lot of Swedes, who haven't really had to face these sort of problems before. Welcome to the 21st Century.
http://www.thelocal.se/36970/20111026/
Now here's an interesting snippet. Apparently, during the Blackberry phone outage earlier this month, traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi dropped by 40%. That's interesting, very interesting. It also seems to confirm the claims of campaigners and police forces that using a phone while driving causes accidents. Declaration of interest: I firmly believe this is the case, and that it should be a criminal offense to use a phone while driving.
The real question, though, is whether this is just a one off cultural effect or redolent of a more general effect. The roads of the United Arab Emirates are reckoned to be some of the most dangerous in the world - could it be that this effect is just confined to the sort of driving, or is it much more general? Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any similar figures for elsewhere, although, since this outage also affected Europe for several days, it might be possible to get figures for some of the European countries. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for this one.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/10/abu-dhabi-traffic-accidents-dropped-40-during-blackberry-outage/43784/
I really like my mobile phone - an HTC Desire - but my all time favorite phone was my Motorola Razr, which I used before I moved over to smart phones. Now Motorola have resurrected the Razr brand as a smart phone. And it looks very tasty! It has the same very thin (0,28 inch/7.1mm) Razr profile, it's fast, and it's well designed. It's an Android phone (no surprise there), with a dual core processor and an 8 mega-pixel camera. Interestingly enough it also has an HDMI out socket and Bluetooth 4.0. It also comes loaded with goodies for the workplace and government markets, with facilities for remote wipe, PIN lock, and what it claims is government-grade data encryption. Definitely one to watch for in the near future - as Bonnie Cha, one of c|net's senior editors puts it in the video, "fast and gorgeous"!
http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/motorola-droid-razr-verizon/4505-6454_7-35033947.html
And from the small to the very large. Get an eye full of this video of the breakthrough of a 10 meter tunneling drill breaking through in a new tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland. The breakthrough is spectacular, the wittering of the commentator is definitely much less so!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11553369
Do you ever wonder just how your government is behaving when it comes to the Internet? Now is the chance to take a peek at one element of government behavior. Google have just published some new tools that use Google maps to list take down requests from governments around the world. Here's a few highlights from June to December last year: USA 5,950 requests, India 1,739, France 1,300, Great Britain 1,273, Germany 1,060. Interesting... very interesting... Freedom of Information requests, anyone?
http://techleash.com/2011/10/google-warns-the-governments-are-seeking-information-about-you/
Ever screamed in frustration as you struggled with the vagaries of yet another online checkout system? Yes? Then you will absolutely love this video made by Google to push their 'Analytics' system. I nearly snurfed my coffee the first time I saw it. I love the time out bit!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sk7cOqB9Dk
Geek Topics:
Another piece of sad news arrives with the death of John McCarthy, the creator of the LISP programming language and the father of modern AI. It seems like all the founders of modern computing are currently passing away these days. I guess it's a function of that massive burst of collective creativity in the 1950s and 1960s that laid the foundations of much of modern computing,
John McCarthy's work in AI kick-started many of what are now important fields in their own right - robots, logic programming and computer modeling, to name but a few. As early as 1961 McCarthy was discussing what he called 'utility computing', a way of making CPU cycles available on demand to customers. This was eventually brought into existence as time sharing.
My first experience of using a computer was using the UK Open University's timeshared computer the year the Open University opened its doors to students. My first program - printing out a properly formatted version of Pascal's Triangle on the ASR33 terminal I had access to. The language - Dartmouth Basic! Time sharing went out when the personal computer came in, but the idea of utility computing is back in the form of cloud computing these days.
McCarthy's language, LISP, has had a profound effect on modern computer language design, although it tends to go in and out of fashion as each successive generation rediscovers it. He was also the first person to raise the vexed, and much debated question of 'garbage collection'! And no, I'm not going to open that can of worms here.
So, farewell John McCarthy, only one question remains. We all know that you can't take your money with you when you go, but the real question is, can John take his brackets with him?
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/creator-of-lisp-john-mccarthy-dead-at-84/
http://drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/231901597?cid=DDJ_nl_mdev_2011-10-26_h
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/index.html (John's Home Page)
http://xkcd.com/297/
Scanner:
Dracula vs. Nosferatu: A true copyright horror story
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosferatu-a-true-copyright-horror-story/
New ultra-high speed network connection for researchers and educators
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-ultra-high-network.html
DeLorean to be resurrected with US$100,000 EV
http://www.gizmag.com/delorean-to-be-resurected-with-us100000-125-mph-ev/20188/
Robot resolves Rubik's Cube in record time
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/10/18/lego_robot_resolves_rubiks_cube_in_record_time/
Amazon profits dive after heavy Kindle investment
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15455938
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
30 October, 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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