WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
The Milky Way, Java, e-book price fixing, Apple and Google, Web chat, manybooks.net, Cthulu, turmeric, and more. All life is there - well, a small amount of it, at any rate.
Welcome back to Winding Down on Labor Day weekend. We had our holiday last weekend. It rained, of course, following a hot week when everyone was at work. No change in the traditional weather patterns there!
So, on with the show...
Shorts:
It’s many generations since we stopped believing that the earth was the center of the universe. It’s a hundred years or so since we realized that our sun is only one of a very common class of stars. And it’s only in the last few years that we have started to find that lots of stars have orbiting planets. Now however, astronomers have found something about our neighborhood that is, if not unique, certainly unusual.
It seems that very few spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, have satellite galaxies similar to the two Magellanic Clouds. Most galaxies have much smaller satellite galaxies, but they tend to be much smaller and consist of old stars. The Magellanics, on the other hand, are large and are still forming new stars. In fact, astronomers have only been able to locate two other galaxies that are a close match.
You’d better make the most of it, though. The current configuration of the Milky Way and its companion Magellanics is only likely to last for another couple of billion years!
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=24222
I see that a number of security firms are advising their customers to stop using Oracle’s Java programming language, following the discovery of a number of unpatched security holes. Java, like Microsoft’s C#, runs on a virtual machine, and the problems are with the virtual machine.
Let me explain. Languages like Java are designed to run on a theoretical computer, which we call a virtual machine. The Java program tells the virtual machine (VM) what it wants to do, and the VM, then translates this into language that the underlying computer understands. This has the advantage that once you have a version of the VM on a machine, all the programs written in that language, Java in this case, will run on the new machine without needing to be changed.
That’s the theory anyway. In practice things are not quite so rosy, but that is another matter. The problem here is that once you get a security hole in the virtual machine, -every- program written in Java becomes a security problem. Contrast this with what are called ‘native’ languages like C++ which compile down to machine code for that specific machine. If a C++ program goes rogue, then is it only that program that is the problem, not every C++ program ever written.
At a minimum, security professionals are recommending that everyone disable Java browser plugins, but many of them would like to see their clients stop using regular Java programs as well. The latter just ain’t gonna happen, though. That’s because the Java language is widely used by industry for their major enterprise wide programs.
Sometimes, when I look at how pervasive computers and their programs are in western society, I am reminded of a quote from a US astronaut who was asked what he was thinking about as the last seconds of the countdown ticked away. “Well”, he said, “You tend to think about the fact you are sitting on the top of a vast amount of explosive material, in a machine with millions of parts, each made by the company that offered the cheapest price!” (Quote from memory - I’m not sure where the original is - AL.)
http://www.infoworld.com/t/web-security/security-pros-advise-users-ditch-java-201457?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2012-08-31
I mentioned a couple of months ago that both the US and the EU authorities have been looking into e-book price fixing by a number of big publishers over the deal they signed with Apple. This last week, three of the publishers settled a US case by ponying up a total of US$69 million. This doesn’t actually sound like a lot of money to me, but at least they, presumably, won’t continue to force resellers, like Amazon, to sell at the price the publishers decide. There are still another two companies that have refused to settle in the US, and the case against those two will go to court in the future (hopefully before the heat death of the universe). In the EU, the investigation is still under way.
Years ago, long before e-books, and before even Amazon was a twinkle in Jeff Bezos’s eye, I was the manager of a small specialist bookshop in London. At the time this sort of thing was legal in the UK - supposedly to ‘protect’ small sellers from undercutting by the big chains. In fact it was nothing of the sort. It prevented all bookshops from being able to choose business models that fitted what they wanted to do. I would hate to see this perfidious practice come in again through the back door.
For the record, the three who settled are Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. The hold outs are Macmillan and Penguin, and, of course, Apple who set up the offending retail agreement in the first place.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/31/ebook_price_fix_settlement/
One bit of potentially good news. It seems that the heads of Apple and Google, Tim Cook and Larry Page, are actually talking to one another in an effort to find a solution to the current patent war over the Android mobile phone and tablet operating system. It seem that now Steve Jobs has shuffled off this mortal coil, sanity is starting to prevail.
Most patent cases tend to be heavily one sided from a cost point of view, with the loser effectively running out of money. This case is different, though. Apple may have a pile of cash and believe it is in the right, but Google also has a lot of cash in hand, plenty more coming in, and a long term strategy to defend. A court battle could be long drawn out, bloody and expensive. And the only people who will benefit from it will be the lawyers. Fingers crossed that something useful comes out of this outbreak of sanity.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/30/apple_samsung_peace_talks/
Homework:
Dean Bubley has an interesting blog piece about the effect of web based real time chat (WebRTC) on the subscription model of traditional telephone companies. He points out that a lot of web applications now have built in chat facilities, and that over the last few years people have come to use them much more that phone calls, or even SMS texting. While I was originally reading the blog, I realized that I was also having a discussion with a friend on Google Chat!
This move towards real time chat, the blog suggests, is going to hit the telco traditional subscription model hard. However, Bubley goes one further, and suggests that within the next few years, voice chat will become just as pervasive - think Siri and in-game voice chat - which will screw up the traditional providers even more. The downside, from the user’s point of view will be targeted voice adverts, like you get over the tannoy in supermarkets. imagine browsing Amazon and suddenly hearing a voice saying, “Hey, congratulations to all of you browsing right now - there’s a 10% discount on everything for the next 5 minutes!” You think that’s unlikely? You can bet your bottom dollar it’s already under development...
http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/telcos-will-suffer-because-of.html
Geek Stuff:
Want to look for e-books that are out of copyright and free? Then you’ve probably heard of the Gutenberg Project, which digitizes out of copyright books. What you may not have found yet is manybooks.net, which is a user friendly front end to Gutenberg. I certainly hadn’t, until a friend recently pointed it out to me. I’d recommend it any day, and I was surprised at just what books are out of copyright. I immediately snapped up a copy of H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary ‘The Call of Cthulu’ to replace my battered paper copy.
As the bumper sticker in the US presidential election so aptly put it, ‘Why vote for the lesser evil? Vote Cthulu’...
http://manybooks.net/titles/lovecrafthother06cthulhu.html
And talking of Cthulu (very quietly, don’t want to wake him, do we?) Grab an eyeful of Spanish artist Maximo Riera’s latest little offering - an octopus chair. Not quite Cthulu, but very creepy. Not exactly my choice for the dining table - I would be too worried about becoming the main course!
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/12805/maximo-riera-octopus-chair.html
Scanner: Other stories
Turmeric spices up virus study: New research shows curcumin stops virus cells
http://phys.org/news/2012-08-turmeric-spices-virus-curcumin-cells.html#nwlt
Midata project plan for compulsory customer data
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19331302
The Media Cold War
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-media-cold-war-by-anne-marie-slaughter
Why I pay for content (and why that makes me feel like a sucker)
http://gizmodo.com/5939580/why-i-pay-for-content-and-why-that-makes-me-feel-like-a-sucker
Logitech’s washable keyboard can handle your spills
http://allthingsd.com/20120822/logitechs-washable-keyboard-can-handle-your-spills/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb and Fi 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
2 September 2012
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.
