Quotulatiousness

November 21, 2012

Upgrading the Coyote

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Strategy Page has a bit of Canadian content now and again:

Canada has ordered upgrades for another of its 66 LAV III wheeled armored vehicles. These 66 will be equipped for reconnaissance as was its predecessor the LAV II Coyote. This vehicle went to Afghanistan a decade ago and proved enormously useful by doing long range surveillance of Taliban and al Qaeda suspects. The Coyote reconnaissance system mounted on a wheeled armored vehicle. The recon gear consists of a nine meter (30 foot) telescoping mast that contains a Doppler radar, laser rangefinder, thermal imaging sensor and video camera. The mast mounted sensors can see clearly out to 15 kilometers and identify targets (day or night) for artillery or air attack. The radar can spot targets out to 24 kilometers, but can only distinguish vehicle types (wheeled, tracked) beginning at about 12 kilometers.

[. . .]

The Coyote was originally conceived as an inexpensive replacement for air reconnaissance. But the ability of a Coyote vehicle to stay in one place and carefully track movements over a wide area for days, or weeks proved very useful for intelligence work. Five years ago Canada began a $5 billion to upgrade and expand its fleet of LAV III wheeled armored vehicles. Over the last decade, Canada has replaced its 1980s era MOWAG and older LAV II vehicles with the locally built LAV IIIs. Canada donated many of the older wheeled armored vehicles (mostly 11 ton Grizzly personnel carriers) to nations performing peacekeeping duties.

November 19, 2012

Space-Age technology on Earth, but not so much in space

Filed under: Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

In The Register, Shaun Dormon explains why almost all the electronic components used on modern spacecraft, satellites, and the International Space Station (ISS) are actually not cutting-edge, top-of-the-line items:

I hate to say it, but most of what you think about space-age technology is a total fabrication. It’s the stuff of sci-fi.

Perhaps the biggest misconception of all is that spacecraft are equipped with cutting-edge computing platforms that any self-respecting technophile would commit unspeakable acts to get their mitts on.

If only. The fact of the matter is that even the most advanced chips up there were considered obsolete ten years ago down here. Although it’s true that in space no one can hear you scream, outer space is actually a very noisy place, electromagnetically speaking.

The computer on your desk is very unlikely to experience much in the way of EM radiation unless someone cuts a hole in the side of the kitchen microwave. Out in orbit, though, there are many sources of radiation, ranging from the relatively mundane stuff pouring out of the Sun and collecting in the Van-Allen radiation belts to more exotic things such as cosmic rays and other high-energy particles that cause so-called “single-event effects”.

[. . .]

The damage is cumulative. Individually, an impact causes the ionisation of a single oxide molecule present in the semiconductor. It’s not enough to cause instant failure, but as more and more impacts take place, the effects combine to significantly alter the electrical properties of the circuit until it can no longer function correctly.

More exciting dangers arise from exposure to gamma or cosmic rays. These ultra-high energy impacts cause localised ionisation which results in an unexpected flow of current. In the case of a lower energy event, this may result in a “single event upset” or “bit-flip”, and data corruption can ensue. These are not usually fatal to the system. No so the worst case “single event burnout”, which creates such high currents that the very circuitry itself is burned out almost instantaneously.

November 17, 2012

“3D printing will be bigger than the web”

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:46

While I’m not quite willing to go as far as Chris Anderson (quoted above), I do think 3D printing is going to be a fantastic development in our very-near future:

Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing — Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine — to pursue the life of an entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new phase of the industrial revolution.

He spoke at a Wired “Culturazzi” event, at the Marriott Union Square and to sign copies of his latest book: Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.

Mr Anderson is always an excellent speaker and his talk covered the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, which he picked out as the invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1764 — a hand powered machine for spinning yarn.

I’d have pinned the start of the Industrial Revolution to the invention of the steam engine and its ability to power large numbers of machines thus enabling the first factories — which represented aggregated labor energy. Scale makes factories viable.

But I can see why Mr Anderson would favor the Spinning Jenny as it was a high-tech machine that was kept in a home — just as 3D printers are home based, completing a neat cycle of history.

A new low in patents?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Apple has patented the “page turn”:

If you want to know just how broken the patent system is, just look at patent D670,713, filed by Apple and approved this week by the United States Patent Office.

This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application.

Yes, that’s right. Apple now owns the page turn. You know, as when you turn a page with your hand. An “interface” that has been around for hundreds of years in physical form. I swear I’ve seen similar animation in Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons.

(This is where readers are probably checking the URL of this article to make sure it’s The New York Times and not The Onion.)

November 15, 2012

I, Pencil: The Movie

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

A film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, adapted from the 1958 essay by Leonard E. Read. For more about I, Pencil, visit www.ipencilmovie.org

Latest advances in “trouser-cough suppression”

Filed under: Health, Japan, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:34

Lester Haines has a bit of fun with this “news” article:

Pairs of fart-absorbing underpants designed to contain the copious trouser cough output from Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers have proved a hit with Japanese businessmen.

Manufacturer Seiren expressed pleasant surprise that their guff-busting smalls had attracted the attention of suits more accustomed to allocating most of their underwear budget to schoolgirls’ used knickers.

Spokeswoman Nami Yoshida said: “It took us a few years to develop the first deodorant pants that are comfortable enough to wear in daily life but efficient in quickly eliminating strong smells.

November 14, 2012

Enter the real Facebook business model

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

Facebook is changing, and lots of folks have ideas about what it is changing into. Here’s Dalton Caldwell‘s interpretation of the new business model:

Several prominent people are up in arms about Facebook charging for access to users who have already Liked their page.

I believe this debate is missing the big picture, and what we are in fact witnessing is the unfurling of the full-fledged Facebook business model. Facebook is showing us how they will cross the chasm from low-CTR low-CPM ad-units into what investors have been waiting for since the beginning: a Facebook analogue to Google Adwords.

[. . .]

From a Facebook user perspective, we don’t really know how the algorithm works, and are already trained to understand that some things magically show up our newsfeed and some things don’t. If a normal user sees that one of their friends bought a LivingSocial deal at the top of their feed, they may/may not click on it, but they certainly won’t question how it got there.

Facebook newsfeed is an embodiment of our war on noise. We depend on the newsfeed optimizer to protect our limited attention span, and as a consequence, Facebook gets to choose what stories we do and don’t see, just as Google chooses which search results we do and don’t see. Conceptually, this seems very lucrative: Facebook is auctioning off our limited attention span to the highest bidder, as long as the bidder has a candidate newsstory to promote.

This is what Like-gate is about.

Welcome to the attention economy.

H/T to Tim O’Reilly for the link.

From strategic nuclear bomber to “bomb truck”

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

The B-52 is still in service with the US Air Force and still finding roles to play:

The U.S. Air Force is continuing to upgrade its fifty year old B-52s. The latest upgrade will enable each B-52 to carry over 110 of the 130 kg (285 pound) Small Diameter Bombs (SDB, also known as the GBU-39/B). Six years ago the rotary bomb rack inside the B-52 was modified to carry 32 SDBs instead of 15 larger bombs.

The SDB was designed from the bottom up as a smart bomb. The SDB has a more effective warhead design and guidance system. Its shape is more like that of a missile than a bomb (nearly two meters, as in 70 inches, long, and 190mm in diameter), with the guidance system built in. The smaller blast from the SDB resulted in fewer civilian casualties. Friendly troops can be closer to the target when an SDB explodes. While the 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs have a spectacular effect when they go off, they are often overkill. The troops on the ground would rather have more, and smaller, GPS bombs available. This caused the 500 pound JDAM to get developed quickly and put into service. But it wasn’t small enough for many urban combat situations. The SDB carries only 17 kg (38 pounds) of explosives, compared to 127 kg (280 pounds) in the 500 pound bomb. The SDB is basically an unpowered missile, which can glide long distances. This makes the SDB even more compact. The small wings allow the SDB to glide up to 70-80 kilometers (from high altitude.) SDB also has a hard front end that can punch through nearly three meters (eight feet) of rock or concrete, and a warhead that does less damage than the usual dumb bomb (explosives in a metal casing.) The SDB is thus the next generation of smart bombs. The more compact design of the SDB allows more to be carried. Thus F-15/16/18 type aircraft can carry 24 or more SDBs. The SDBs are carried on a special carriage, which holds four of them. The carriage is mounted on a bomber just like a single larger (500, 1,000 or 2,000) pound bomb would be. However, this feature was rarely needed in combat situations.

This makes the B-52 even more effective as the cheapest to operate and most reliable “bomb truck” the air force has. With a max takeoff weight of 240-250 tons the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fellow) is basically a large aircraft designed to carry bombs cheaply and efficiently. Last year the readiness rate of these bombers was 78 percent. Although a half century old, most of the internal fear has been replaced with modern electronics and furnishings. It’s all flat screens and modern gear. Look closer and you see fifty year old metal.

November 13, 2012

Protecting children from online pornography – the impossible dream

Filed under: Britain, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

In the Guardian, Cory Doctorow talks about the actual scale of effort the British government is attempting to mandate to “protect the children from pr0n”:

In order to filter out adult content on the internet, a company has to either look at all the pages on the internet and find the bad ones, or write a piece of software that can examine a page on the wire and decide, algorithmically, whether it is inappropriate for children.

Neither of these strategies are even remotely feasible. To filter content automatically and accurately would require software capable of making human judgments — working artificial intelligence, the province of science fiction.

As for human filtering: there simply aren’t enough people of sound judgment in all the world to examine all the web pages that have been created and continue to be created around the clock, and determine whether they are good pages or bad pages. Even if you could marshal such a vast army of censors, they would have to attain an inhuman degree of precision and accuracy, or would be responsible for a system of censorship on a scale never before seen in the world, because they would be sitting in judgment on a medium whose scale was beyond any in human history.

Think, for a moment, of what it means to have a 99% accuracy rate when it comes to judging a medium that carries billions of publications.

Consider a hypothetical internet of a mere 20bn documents that is comprised one half “adult” content, and one half “child-safe” content. A 1% misclassification rate applied to 20bn documents means 200m documents will be misclassified. That’s 100m legitimate documents that would be blocked by the government because of human error, and 100m adult documents that the filter does not touch and that any schoolkid can find.

In practice, the misclassification rate is much, much worse. It’s hard to get a sense of the total scale of misclassification by censorware because these companies treat their blacklists as trade secrets, so it’s impossible to scrutinise their work and discover whether they’re exercising due care.

November 12, 2012

Firefox users more likely to stay on old version longer than other browser users

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

John Leyden summarizes the recent findings about how quickly users update their web browsers after a new release:

Nearly one in four netizens are using outdated web browsers and are therefore easy pickings for viruses and exploit-wielding crooks.

The average home user upgrades his or her browser to the latest version one month after it is released, according to a survey of 10 million punters. Two thirds of those using old browser software are simply stuck on the version prior to the latest release — the remaining third are using even older code.

Internet Explorer is the most popular browser (used by 37.8 per cent of consumers), closely followed by Google Chrome (36.5 per cent). Firefox is in third place with 19.5 per cent.

Firefox users tend to be the worst for keeping up to date with new software releases, according to the survey by security biz Kaspersky Lab. The proportion of users with the most recent version installed was 80.2 per cent for Internet Explorer and 79.2 per cent for Chrome, but just 66.1 per cent for Firefox.

Old-codgers Internet Explorer 6 and 7, with a combined share of 3.9 per cent, are still used by hundreds of thousands of punters worldwide.

November 11, 2012

The natural lifecycle of a “monopoly”

Filed under: Asia, China, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

In Forbes, Tim Worstall celebrates the natural end to a “monopoly” — the quasi-monopoly of Chinese exports of rare earth compounds:

These past several years I’ve been shouting to all who would listen that while China does indeed have a stranglehold on current production of rare earths that’s not something that we really need to worry about. For the important thing about rare earths is that they’re not rare (nor earths either). There are plenty of deposits around and we can get all we need from other areas of the world if we should care to.

    The same cannot be said of Kuantan, the Malaysian locale where Lynas plans to build a rare earth processing plant, a type of facility residents and Australian supporters say, in online campaigns, will result in “millions of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste left behind”.

    Residents took Lynas to court in Malaysia, resulting in the suspension of its operating licence. That decision was overturned yesterday.

Lynas is the company desiring to mine the Mt. Weld deposit (a nice rich one it is too). They are going to separate the RE concentrate at that plant in Malaysia. There’s been a vocal campaign against the licensing of that extraction plant and Lynas has, as above, just succeeded in over-turning a previous license refusal. Once up and operating fully the plant should supply some 20,000 tonnes a year of REs. This is a substantial portion of demand outside China: it’s some 15% or so of entire global demand in fact.

And thus we again see how an apparent monopoly isn’t really all that much use to the supposed monopolist. It certainly was true that China supplied 95-97% of the world’s REs. Largely because they were willing to mine and supply at prices that made it not worth anyone else’s while to do so. But when they tried to constrain supply, to exercise that monopoly, instead of being able to exploit us all they simply encouraged the competition that destroys that monopoly.

Markets do indeed work and the only monopoly that can really be exploited is one that isn’t contestable. And an attempted monopoly in something as common as rare earths simply is contestable and thus cannot be exploited.

November 4, 2012

The last of the Vulcan bombers to be grounded

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

The RAF took the Vulcan bomber out of service in the 1980s, and the last flying example of the aircraft has been kept up by a trust organization since 2005. The trust has concluded that they can’t afford the necessary repairs to keep the aircraft airworthy:

They were once the UK’s most potent nuclear deterrent and were on standby for a role in the Cuban missile crisis.

But in recent years there has been just one that kept the flag flying for the Vulcan Bombers.

XH558 is the final airworthy aircraft of its type and has been admired by thousands of people each year at air shows as a result.

But soon it too could be grounded like all those before it.

The “tin triangle”, which is more than 50 years old, needs “challenging modifications” to both wings which the trust that owns it has decided cannot be funded.

The Leicestershire-based Vulcan To The Sky trust, which bought the aircraft in 2005, says escalating costs and limited engine life mean soon it will be confined to the runway for limited displays.
[. . .]

The XH558 is now used to woo the crowds at air shows but keeping the 52-year-old aircraft in working order is a constant challenge for the engineers who work on her.

Chief engineer Mr Stone said he has had to have “words” with some of the pilots over the years who have pulled manoeuvres and airborne stunts which have made him “almost fall off his chair” as he watched from the ground.

Rethinking software patents

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Software patents are becoming a clear and present danger to innovation:

The basic problem being that there are so many patents, covering so many things, that the system is in danger of eating itself like Ourobouros.

    When Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation studied one large program (Linux, which is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system) in 2004, he found 283 U.S. patents that appeared to cover computing ideas implemented in the source code of that program. That same year, it was estimated that Linux was .25 percent of the whole GNU/Linux system. Multiplying 300 by 400 we get the order-of-magnitude estimate that the system as a whole was threatened by around 100,000 patents.

    If half of those patents were eliminated as “bad quality” — i.e., mistakes of the patent system — it would not really change things. Whether 100,000 patents or 50,000, it’s the same disaster. This is why it’s a mistake to limit our criticism of software patents to just “patent trolls” or ”bad quality” patents. In this sense Apple, which isn’t a “troll” by the usual definition, is the most dangerous patent aggressor today. I don’t know whether Apple’s patents are “good quality,” but the better the patent’s “quality,” the more dangerous its threat.

It’s near impossible to develop new software when there are so many such patents out there. Further, even if you tried to get clearance (or signed up to licenses and so on) to use them it would be near impossible.And we do need to recall what the purpose of a patent system is. No, it isn’t to provide and income to those who create inventions. That’s only the proximate aim: the ultimate aim is to maximise the amount of invention and innovation.

The economics of patents accepts that there is a tradeoff here. Yes, we’d like people who come up with useful new things to make money. Because that incentivises people to work on coming up with interesting new things to all our benefit. However, we also want people to be able to create derivative innovations and inventions. If our protection of the original inventors is too strong then we limit this. What we want is a system that hits the sweet spot, of encouraging the maximum amount of both, original and derivative. The problem of course being that to encourage one we weaken the incentives to do the other, either way around.

November 1, 2012

The development of personal computing

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:09

At The Register, Tony Smith charts twenty significant items that lead to modern personal computers:

Personal computing. Personal. Computing. We take both aspects so completely for granted these days, it’s almost impossible to think of a time when computing wasn’t personal — or when there was no electronic or mechanical computing.

To get from there to here, we’ve gone from a time when ‘computers’ were people able to do perform complex calculations themselves, through mechanical systems intended to do the work for them and then to powered machines able to automate the process. These led to systems that could be programmed to perform not only mathematical tasks but to store and retrieve other forms of data, taking us right up to desktop devices for a one-on-one interaction with computing power.

Since then, that power has been compressed into smaller, more convenient packages: laptops, tablets and smartphones.

What a trip. In memory of the many people who have help us along, here then are some of the key stages of that journey, represented by the 20 objects that, to us, most embody the steps that brought us to where we are today.

It’s not a comprehensive list — and feel free to comment with the devices you think we should have included — but here are the first ten of our 20 items, from the early days up to the end of the 1970s. Part two will bring us from the 1980s to the present day.

October 31, 2012

The economic problem with recycling is that it’s the inverse of retail value

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Tim Worstall at Forbes:

We all understand how pricing in the retail chain goes. Each unit of something in a shipload of them is worth less than each unit when there’s only a container of them, and so it goes on. As we get closer to the retail point each unit rises in value. As we break down the shipment from tens of thousands of units, to a truckload, then a pallet load, finally to the one single item sitting on the store shelf. If you agree to purchase 5,000 iPads you’ll expect to pay less for each one than if you tried to buy just one.

We get that: the thing about recycling is that pricing works entirely the other way around. To a reasonable approximation the value of one unit of anything for recycling is worth nothing. The value of each of 1,000 units in the same place is higher than that solitary one. One scrap car in the middle of a field isn’t worth much if anything. 1,000 cars in a scrap yard might be worth $300 a tonne for the steel content (don’t take these numbers too seriously by the way, they’re examples only). Precious metals refining, scrap metal, recycling: they all share this same economic point. The more of something you have then the more each unit of that something is worth.

[. . .]

… the way we tend to look at the economics of recycling. We hear a great deal about how recycling plastics, or cooking oil, metals, electronics, you name it we hear the same thing, “saves resources”. Sometimes this is absolutely true. Other times however what we get shown is the value of the actual recycling being done. And we’re not told about the costs of collecting what is to be recycled. And as above it’s those costs of collection that are really the key to the whole enterprise.

Just as an example there’s value in 1,000 tonnes of used plastic bags. Among other things you can burn them in a power station and get some energy. Great: but what is the cost of collecting enough used plastic bags to make 1,000 tonnes? That’s the part that seems not to get into the calculations that our green friends present to us.

Cash4Gold seems to have gone under because the collection costs of the materials were higher than the value of recycling those materials. What’s really rather worrying about the larger recycling movement is that this can be/is often true of other materials. But because we don’t properly account for the collection costs we don’t see this as clearly as we do in the accounts of a (failed) for profit company (OK, would be for profit company).

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