Thursday 22 November 2007

Ebooks. Not again...

Yes, again. But this time, there's a difference.

A difference which — at first — may not seem very important. You see, up until recently, say the last year or so, electronic displays were seriously hampered. They were bulky, needed lots of power for backlighting and switching thousands of pixels on and off all the time, their resolution was — to be honest — pitiful for the crisp rendering of well formed letters and words.

All of these problems have now been solved by the invention of E Ink. Allowing a resolution of around 160 pixels per inch, it is high enough to render text with enough definition to allow swift reading without the squint of working out whether you're looking at 'rn' or 'm'. You can work it out with close scrutiny, but when you're reading and don't want the technology to get in the way, a higher resolution is the only answer.

Also, the new technology doesn't need power to maintain an image, only to change it. A practical application of this in an ebook device means that it is only powered for a fraction of a second as you 'turn the page'. Once the new page has been rendered, the device can effectively power off until the next page.

The technology inherently shuns the need for a backlight, being an entirely reflective medium. This means that reading in bright, direct sunlight is most preferable whereas with TFT or similar technologies, bright sunlight drowns out the pitifully dim screen. Reading by artificial light will be just as easy as with a book.

So where does this leave us? With a choice, of course.

Sony's Reader, which sells for around $300-$350, depending on which review you see, looks quite sleek and certainly seems slim and small enough to fit in an inside pocket or a bag. Amazon's Kindle at $399 is a bit more expensive, but has the advantage of an effectively free cellular broadband connection, allowing you to download books wherever you are without having to cable connect to a PC as with the Sony device.

Myself, I'm sure that within a year, we'll see the kind of diverse and cheaper market that we now have with MP3 players.

Sure, you can buy the original branded iPod in various incarnations for anything up to £150, maybe more, but £30 will get you a cheap alternative that works, albeit with fewer features.

My money's on the wait.

Tuesday 20 November 2007

25 million records. Lost...

What are we to think from this? Of course, the Conservatives are all over it like a rash, but I do think there are bigger issues at stake.

While it's true that the current government are still trying to get ID cards legislated into existence, and that a similar 'accident' with the records for such a system is also very possible, I reckon — even assuming that this kind of mishap never happens again — that these particular bits of plastic would be better off as crisp packets,
SD cards, cheaper Blu-Ray movies, anything other than ID cards.

The reason is quite simple. Despite what we're told about this system's security, the database and the people who work with that database are still fallible. It's all well and good having 'procedures in place', but people are inventive things, which is why they're so good at everything.

If someone can find an easier way to do something, like update a record in a database, he or she will do it. Even if this is at — perhaps microscopic — risk to security. To that person, it's really not a big deal. I bet you've done it yourself to get the kettle on earlier or make a meeting on time. Not to mention that the whole process relies on the ID card being in the possession of the person to whom it is administered. The whole system is a mockery of the intelligence of the people it is pretending to protect, and if we're not careful, Mr Orwell's futuristic vision will begin to look like the good old days.

DNA archiving for the purposes of solving crimes is another example of a misguided project. The best way to remove oneself from suspicion of a crime or from mistaken identity — indeed to protect one's identity — is simply not to take part in it. The more people there are on such a database, and the more people that are employed to maintain and to administer it, the greater chance of error. That is the most basic assumption anyone should ever make about any system and is self-evident. Anyone who says that their system is foolproof, or that they have every eventuality
covered, is a person to whom one should never trust the responsibility.

There has to come a point where the balance fundamentally shifts and the system starts to work at the expense of the individual, rather than for the individual.

I have to say that if this government carries on shifting the balance, I for one will be changing my vote at the next election, although I'm not even sure that that will change anything these days.

Seems to me that in a Democratic society, 'I' am always in a minority...

Thursday 8 November 2007

The Global Politics of the Internet

So. Hotmail and Yahoo have both withdrawn access to their free webmail services from Iran. No surprise that Google's policies regarding this country haven't changed.

I believe we are seeing something of a cultural or political shift towards a have and have-not global society where countries are being either denied access externally or are internally filtering the Internet and its related services, such as email and the web.

Both of these situations are of course undesirable.

I'm happy to live in a country where I can openly write on a blog things that might portay my government as selfish, misguided
or less than competent. It's called free speech and it's such a fundamental building block for an open, constructive society that it would go without saying if it weren't for lawyers. My Internet — once I've admitted a monthly usage charge — is essentially free. I use it like water. It's part of the make up of my life. To know that the greatest educational and social tool on the planet was being even partially denied me would be a massive issue, I'm sure most people would agree.

However, Hotmail and Yahoo's motivations here are the American Government, not the Iranian Government. This is essentially America saying 'Deny this part of the world access to that Internet resource.'

What does America think it's playing at here? It's only two out of countless services, but they are two of the largest in the world. If this isn't an proclamation of global superiority — even a very specialised and subtle one — I don't know what is.

In Iran, information denial is in place in the shape of Internet filtering as well as, more famously, the Great Firewall of China, but at least these policies are their country's own. Looks to me as if we are seeing the symptoms of the start of a cultural split on a scale hitherto unimagined in human history.

Wednesday 7 November 2007

Flock. Posting blogs from...

Well, if you're reading this it means that the Flock browser has done one thing well.

Browsing the web, all I've done is click a button in Flock's toolbar and started typing. Of course, I had to sign in once, but it looks as though that's all I've got to do.

I'm hoping that we won't see a sudden, short-lived flurry of new 'social browsers' and instead will see these features implemented on existing browsers. This sounds a bit harsh, but the browser wars are already tiresome enough without adding another one to the battlefield. At least using Firefox means that it's easy to add this kind of functionality without too much hassle.

Flock is a relative newcomer to the browser market, and has just released it's version 1 on a rather suspecting public. I've yet to take it for a full test drive, but it seems to render styles and pages well enough, even if it did take a little while to start, and the features I haven't even touched yet but I'll be looking at them in more depth as I use it more and more.

If you're looking for a new slant on how to browse the web with a few social features thrown into the mix, this might just be what you're looking for with integration into Facebook and other social sites included in the install. One thing, though, is that these aren't intrusive and only make their presence known if you decide to use them. As this blog entry is testimony, these additions seem to be quite constructive and usable.

Although it seems to be just another Mozilla engine in a pretty wrapper, it might just prove to be a springboard for a fresh way to browse the web.

I, for one, am not holding my breath.

Check out Flock here.

And the award for best gameplay goes to...

...Portal.

I'm a bit drunk, but listen...

The cake is a lie. The game is sweet, though.

Really, I've not played (or deemed playable) anything this good for quite a while. I'm not exactly a seasoned gamer, but this game just seems to have something that so many games these days don't have.

It's not particularly large, or even that difficult. It's a bit contrived in places, but the sense of humour more than makes up for that. What's the fuss about?

Well, imagine being able to make a hole in a wall and then make another hole in the floor. So you jump into the hole in the floor and pop out of the hole in the wall. Imagine now having to puzzle your way through 19 levels full of traps, laser-sighted gun turrets, rocket launchers and other surprises armed with nothing more than a gun which makes these holes, or Portals.

It's pretty good and visually it's a bit like Being Maurits Escher. The physics of the game are stunning and will take a while to master but the result, once you complete the last level, is absolutely worth it.

Remember, the cake is a lie...

Tuesday 6 November 2007

Playstation 3 Distributed Computing

I've read a bit recently about the 'Folding@home' project — indeed I have the screensaver installed on my work machine — and I never thought that a gaming console would make such an impact in this area of research.

The global network of PS3 machines recently set the world record of 1 petaflop for the speed at which they calculated the solutions to one of the most difficult problems facing scientists today, that of protein folding.

Due to the immense complexity of the problem, huge amounts of computing power are needed and — rather than buy their own petaflop computer — the team at Stanford University decided to use the world's Internet-connected computers to help them achieve this computational milestone.

Ray Kurzweil estimated the computational capacity of the human brain at about 16 petaflops meaning that we are not that far away from at least real time simulation of a full human brain.

There is a problem with this comparison, though.

The Folding@home project is aimed at a very narrow area of expertise, that of simulating protein folding. Unlike a brain, a computer system — even a distributed computing system — will only ever be good for solving the problem it's been programmed to do. The human brain is capable of at least contemplating a huge number of different concepts so computing power alone seems to be in this case a false ideal.

Should we be looking at ways of changing the way these machines can talk to each other, as well as just how many are talking? A new, underlying and powerful means of allowing computers to connect and share chunks of memory, caclulations and even computational methods needs to be devised if we are ever to see machines move beyond the rigid, preprogrammed lumps that process our words and serve our web pages.

But, way to go Sony for at least opening these channels of communication in the first place.

You can download the Folding@home client for your machine (whatever it is) here.

No idea what to call my first post here...

...so I'll just say hi.

This is the other blog. I already have a blog on the front page of my website but this is for a different subject entirely.

Seeing as I spend my working life developing/maintaining two websites for a large school, it's no surprise that I have an interest in the techy side of life, hence this blog, the one you're now reading.

I felt I needed to express my geeky side without alienating readers of my motorcycle blog.

So, here it is. Hopefully I'll post another entry soon after this one. Then another one after. Anything more than that is too far down the timeline to make any serious judgements but I hope I regularly fail to disappoint my legions of reader.

Check back soon, if only to kick my ass for not posting anything.