WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Second hand sales of software, ice, Ralph Oman on innovation (Yuk!) , superconductors, non-rotating Earth, rare earths, the Bossie awards, meteorite artifacts, 1930s robots, typefaces, information decay, Big Data, Samsung, Verizon and Facebook - something for everyone this week.
As I mentioned last week, no Winding Down next week, since I will be out of town for the weekend. But we will be back the week after with another cornucopia of tech news for your edification
Shorts:
Last July The Court Of Justice of the European Union made a very important ruling. Basically, what it said was that you can legally sell second hand computer programs, and it made it clear that included ones that had been downloaded as well as ones bought on physical media, like DVD. The ruling was lost in the fanfare associated with the Olympic Games, and only reported by a few, mostly games, sites.
A long time ago, at the dawn of the shrink wrap software business, software providers came up with the bright idea (from their point of view) that they only licensed you to use the software, they didn’t actually sell it to you. This, theoretically, allowed them to prevent you from selling on the program second hand, since, they claimed, you didn’t actually own it.
Ever since, this has been a gray area of contention, especially in the field of games and heavy duty business software (think databases, operating systems and things like CAD software). People -do- sell their old games, although the ability to do so is an arms race between the publishers and the customers, often driving people who would prefer to pay into the arms of the ‘pirates’. In the business field, the very way licensing works - the more licenses you buy the cheaper they are per license - has led to the growth of a secondary market to sell excess licenses.
It was the business market that led Oracle to take the German secondary market broker UsedSoft to court seeking an order forcing UsedSoft to cease its second hand selling. Unfortunately for Oracle, the result was exactly the opposite, with the court not only refusing to make such an order, but also clarifying the precedent that it is setting so it also applied to downloaded software! In the last couple of months I’m sure the lawyers have been examining every word of the court’s judgment to see how they can weasel out of it by changing the licenses, so I doubt that this is the end of the line.
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/03/crikey-eu-rules-you-can-resell-downloaded-games/
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/eu-court-decision-on-sales-of-used-digital-games-means-big-changes-for-steam-origin/
There’s been a lot in the newspapers over the last month about melting ice at the North Pole. I’m not going to repeat it all, ice at a 30 year low, etc, etc. What doesn’t seem to be making the papers, who all seem to be panicking over the issue, is that the sea ice at the South Pole is growing. Not only that but even as the Arctic sea ice starts to grow back for the winter, the Antarctic ice may well not have yet reached its own maximum thickness.
Normally the planet has between 15 and 23 million square kilometers of sea ice. It’s currently standing at about 18 sq km. That’s slightly below average, although earlier this year it was slightly above the average.
Sometime I think that when people scream ‘Climate Change’ they forget we are in the middle of an ice age, and just happen to be, at this moment, in what is known as an interglacial warm period. Frankly what worries me much more than climate warming is the fact that we are well overdue for the north and south magnetic poles to reverse, but that’s another story...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/21/arctic_antarctic_sea_ice_record/
Former US Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman has been making it clear just how the copyright and patent establishment view the world, and it’s a very scary view indeed. Ralph Oman was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993, and he has recently filed an amicus brief in an ongoing copyright case. He is absolutely clear in his brief about what his views are on innovation. As he says in the brief, “Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.”
In other words, anyone who produces anything that might be disruptive and innovative should have to convince Congress that it should be allowed, and that until that is done it should be considered illegal. Wow! No mobile phones for a start, no commercial internet, no home computers, no video recorders. Come to think of it, I’m pretty certain that the invention of the wheel must have been pretty innovative and disruptive when it was invented! I really can’t think of a better way to reduce the USA to a third rate has-been country, than to take Mr Oman’s ideas seriously!
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120927/00320920527/former-copyright-boss-new-technology-should-be-presumed-illegal-until-congress-says-otherwise.shtml
Homework:
Ever since superconductors were first discovered, the hunt for the grail - a room temperature superconductor - has been on. Superconductors are materials that pass electricity without any resistance. All other conductors have a resistance to the current passing through them, which appears as heat. For instance, when you’ve been on your mobile phone for a while it becomes hot, and that is because of the heat generated by the current flowing in the electrical components of the phone. If superconductors were used then the phone wouldn’t waste so much of the battery power generating that heat.
The problem with existing superconductors is that they need to be chilled to very low temperatures before they start superconducting. Even the highest temperature superconductors we know about need to be more than 130 degrees Celsius (Centigrade for those of you who are as old as me) below the freezing point of water. This makes them rather difficult to use in everyday things like mobile phones and power transmission cables.
For some years now there have been tantalizing hints that carbon treated with various other substances might be showing some of the signs superconduction at room temperatures. But not enough for anyone to stake their reputation on! Now, however, a group at the University of Leipzig have treated graphite with water and detected, at room temperatures, signs of phenomena that are normally present in superconducting materials. The effect is weak, it looks as though only a tiny part of the material is actually superconducting, but, if repeat experiments can reproduce the effect, then the hunt will be on to figure out what is happening.
It’s very early days, and the whole thing may well turn out - like faster than light neutrinos - to be a problem with experimental set up. But, if it does prove to be true that room temperature superconductors are possible, then we could look forward to a massive increase in the efficiency of electrical devices that will completely revolutionize the amount of electrical energy we use.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=graphite-powder-stirs-up-hints-room-temperature-superconductivity&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_physics_20120921
http://phys.org/news/2012-09-doped-graphite-flakes-superconductive-properties.html#nwlt
Here’s an interesting question: ‘What would happen if the Earth didn’t rotate?’ ESRI have an article looking at what would happen. It’s a fascinating example of how to use known principles to extrapolate to different situations. The main obvious difference would be in the distributions of the oceans, since it is the effect of the rotation that keeps the water where it currently is. If you stop the rotation, the water would end up in two bands at the north and south end of the globe, with the land as a band in the middle. Of course, that’s not the only thing that would happen, but the article concentrates on this issue, with interesting results (and diagrams).
http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html
Over the last six months there have been lots of items in the news about the ‘shortage’ of the rare earth elements needed for modern engineering and electronics. Lots of items and not very much information, so it was with some relief that I came upon a piece on Cnet which takes a look how the minerals are extracted and the risks involved in their processing. It’s well worth taking a look, and it’s written for the interested, not the techie.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57520121-37/digging-for-rare-earths-the-mines-where-iphones-are-born/
Geek Stuff:
Hi, geeks. Have you been following the 2012 Bossie awards for open source fun and games? No? Then take a look at this collection of time wasters put together by InfoWorld. Calibre I already use - it’s a excellent set of tools and cataloging facilities for dealing with an extended selection of e-books. The game 0Ad I seem to have missed in the past, but I will definitely take a look in the not too distant future! Take a little browse, I’m sure you find something that grabs your attention - and time!
http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65168/bossie-awards-2012-now-something-completely-different-202541
I see that researchers have discovered that a 1,000 year old statue discovered in Tibet by a Nazi expedition in the 1930s is made from a rare type of meteorite that hit the planet about 15,000 years ago. As all AD&D players know, meteorites are an important source of magical artifacts so I guess a whole statue must be quite a find. For an alternative view though, you might like to take a look at a recent xkcd...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19735959
http://xkcd.com/1114/
And finally, a nice bit of retro for you all - building a robot the 1930s way. Pacific Standard managed to get their hands on a copy of the July 1931 issue of Radio-Craft magazine (Editor - Hugo Gernsback), whose lead story is ‘The Radio Robot’ which included ten schematics, showing how to configure the basic electronics. Should you choose to build your own copy, then good luck at getting your hands on all those valves!
http://www.psmag.com/blogs/time-machine/build-your-own-radio-robot-46894/
Scanner: Other stories
The New York Times data center debate:
Data barns in a farm town, gobbling power and flexing muscle
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/technology/data-centers-in-rural-washington-state-gobble-power.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www&_r=0
Power, pollution and the Internet
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Geeks cry foul at the New York Times’ ‘Big Data’ series
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/geeks-cry-foul-at-times-big-data-series.html
+
The disappearing web: Information decay is eating away our history
http://gigaom.com/2012/09/19/the-disappearing-web-information-decay-is-eating-away-our-history/
How sans-serif typeface styles affect readability
http://uxmovement.com/content/how-sans-serif-typeface-styles-affect-readability/
Samsung slaps swift patch over phone-wiping Galaxy S III vulnerability
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/26/samsung_fix/
Verizon: Would it benefit from bumper iPhone 5 demand?
http://www.advfn.com/newspaper/ed-liston/10963/verizon-would-it-benefit-from-bumper-iphone-5-demand-vz-aapl-t
Facebook shares drop 10%, trip NASDAQ ‘circuit breaker’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/24/facebook_trips_nasdaq_circuit_breaker/
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
30 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.
