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Justin's Linklog Posts

More on Software Piracy figures

Published June 17, 2003

In response to this post regarding Ireland’s piracy rate of 42%, Simon pointed out a possible flaw in the methodology on the forum;

‘Although they could be comparing high software usage to negligible software sales in Ireland. Anyone with a half decent purchasing dept will buy from the UK or US to avoid ridiculous euro pricing. Compare prices on the Macromedia Store’s shop, Studio MX in International English for $899 in the international store, $1133 in the UK store, or $1180 in the Euro store (all prices ex-taxes).’

So I took a look over the weekend. Here’s the page on the survey. In the PDF, page 12-13, they describe the methodology. my comments:

  • ‘To estimate software demand, IPR developed ratios for the amount of software installed on each PC. This was developed from market research on the U.S. market.’ Do all markets really use the same software on their PCs? e.g. Asian markets will use text-entry apps, US markets will not.

  • ‘the difference between software applications installed (demand) and software applications legally shipped (supply) equals the estimate of software applications pirated.’

  • ‘Uplift factors’ are applied to generalize software shipment data from the participating companies, first to the entire US industry, then to the world. ‘These uplift factors include estimates for open-source software. For this study, IPR has assumed that open source software is free and not pirated.’ eh, thanks ;)

    I’m not quite sure what this means, but I think it means that they make an estimate of how much of the software shipment data represents OS software, and then add that to the ‘legally shipped’ side.

  • ‘IPR believes that certain software shipments in the data collected from participating companies are reported for one country, but the software is exported and used in another country. In order to account for this and to eliminate this effect from the piracy study as much as possible, net import estimates were developed on a country-by-country basis.’

    This covers Simon’s point — but it’s not 100% clear, since those biases aren’t listed. I wonder if it takes into account Ireland’s paradoxical situation; while Ireland is (or was, at least) the world’s top exporter of software, it’s still cheaper for Irish users to import software applications from overseas ;)

Dublin: the new bridge just down the road from my house has finally been completed — in time for Bloomsday it seems, since it’s named after Joyce. Obligingly, the Dublin traffic camera operators have got a great night shot of it:

Wind Farms

Published June 16, 2003

NYTimes via jwz: dude, you can’t build a wind farm where it would mess up the view from the Kennedy Compound!

Cape Wind Associates hopes to build America’s first offshore wind farm: 130 windmills, spaced a third to a half of a mile apart, across a shoal seven miles off the coast of Hyannis. Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 RPM. The wind forest promises to provide Cape Codders, on average, with 75% of their electricity, 1.8% of the total electrical needs of New England. (…)

Soon, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound was filing lawsuits, mounting political pressure in Boston and Washington and, to bolster its legal case and maximize public anxiety, generating volumes of doomsaying critiques: (…) The yacht-club set opened its checkbooks, donating money and stock to cover the 100,000-a-month bills for rent, three full-time salaries, television and radio time, two lobbyists and three law firms. (…)

I think I may be one of a small number here, but I’m a huge fan of how wind farms look. It’s a similar thing to seeing pictures of the space shuttle; gigantic technological structures are cool! Maybe that’s just me though. ;)

European Software Patent amendments contd.

Published June 13, 2003

Arlene McCarthy is the MEP proposing to amend the operations of the European patent office, and permit software patents in Europe.

Last week, the Guardian printed this story by Nick Hill and rms setting out the free software position on why software patents should be avoided.

Now, McCarthy’s response:

We have an obligation to legislate not just for one section of the software industry who seeks to impose its business model on the rest of industry, which moreover is not ‘free’, but is actually a different form of monopoly by imposing a copyright licence system on users.

No comment…

Software piracy figures – pass the salt

Published June 11, 2003

Hmm. The Irish branch of the BSA claims that the percentage of illegal software used in Ireland stood at 42 percent for 2002.

Does that mean 42 percent of all software running in Ireland is a pirate copy? I wonder if anyone ever audits this figures — qui custodiet etc. The article continues:

‘The lack of improvement on Ireland’s piracy rate can be attributed to the proliferation of Internet piracy … and a certain amount of apathy,’ said Julian McMenamin, BSA Ireland chairman. ‘But whatever the excuse, a piracy rate of 42 percent is appalling.’

Is internet piracy really that widespread in the workplace? I can imagine your typical 15-year-old firing up KaZaa or whatever, but is this really likely for your typical Irish IT staffer? I doubt it, to be honest.

And given Ireland’s broadband woes, it’d probably be cheaper to hop in the car, drive to the local Compustore, and buy it over the counter, just to avoid paying those ISDN charges. ;)

Just to contradict the ‘internet piracy’ statement, in this story, McMenamin then states that ‘a particular problem in Ireland was small and medium-sized companies purchasing a licence that is too small, or not upgrading their licence as their companies grow. An offending company might typically have a 10-user licence but allow 50 people to use the software.’

This is a hell of a lot more likely than the ‘scary internet’ bugbear, but I would still find it very hard to imagine that this is a uniquely Irish problem that could account for Ireland supposedly having nearly twice the rate of piracy of the UK (42% in Ireland vs. the UK’s 26%).

While taking a look at the BSA site, I note that their automated tool, GASP, now exposes the illegal distribution and storage of copyrighted music, apparently: ‘new features in GASP v6.5 include reports that show a complete listing of MP3 files on audited systems’.

I wonder if my collection of MP3s downloaded from eMusic.com, and ripped from albums I bought, would set off its alarms. Given that the MP3 format has no way to differentiate between pirated and non-pirated music, I would imagine so. False positives a go-go!

Patents: Eamon O’Tuathail’s call for action against software patents. The vote of the Legal Affairs Committee of the EP was yesterday, apparently. Wonder how it went…

Boca Raton’s rep gets a battering again

Published June 10, 2003

The Miami Herald: Bogus Boca: the spa for spam:

Poor Boca. It’s as if infamy has taken up permanent residence. Such a startling number of Boca Raton firms have been linked to fraudulent schemes.

The article then lists the past scams operated by Boca Raton firms; a mind-boggling list. It then notes the press Boca’s been getting in the UK:

“Golden beaches, palm tree-lined streets, manicured golf courses and giant motor yachts moored at the marinas: Boca Raton in Florida is a millionaire’s paradise. It’s also the spam capital of the world.”

(Guardian story here).

ReVirt, Patents, and Spandex

Published June 10, 2003

ReVirt is very, very cool security functionality:

ReVirt (part of the CoVirt project) is a complete Linux-on-Linux virtual machine with replay capability: you can explore the state of the entire virtual machine at any point in the past. For example, if you discover an intruder, you can ‘go back in time’ to see how they broke in, watch the exploit in progress, and discover what was compromised. The overhead of virtualization and logging is only 15-30%, even for kernel-intensive applications.

Can’t wait until this is stable…

Games: The Body Behind Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti (Escape Mag): an interview with the guy who did the motion-capture for Vice City:

What advice do you have for any readers interest in doing motion capture?

… Stuff your Spandex mo-cap suit. That’s the key.

Patents: SFGate: Inventors patent ideas to pre-empt their rivals: ‘(IP lawyer) Dennis Fernandez has come up with an idea for TV sets with built-in cameras and small screens that would let viewers talk to one another while watching a show. … Fernandez has no intention of actually building such a device. But the idea is his — and he has a certificate from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to prove it.’

And there was me thinking these things had to be non-obvious, and have novelty, to be patentable. :( What is the US PTO up to? And what’s going to happen if the European Patent Office get their way?

I’m beginning to think a pro-bono collection of freely-licensable defensive patents, filed by the FSF or similar, is the only way to work around this brokenness.

[IP] do read last Para. Time to correct the record re. the pillaged Museum in B (fwd)

Published June 10, 2003

Lost from the Baghdad museum: truth (Guardian). hmmm! It seems we’ve been had:

(In April, it was widely reported that) 100,000-plus priceless items were looted (from the Baghdad museum) either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks.

Incredible — it seems (a) the museum was looted — to a degree; the vast majority of ‘missing’ items had actually been moved into safe storage, and ‘most of the serious looting was an inside job’.

And (b) the academics and journalists who reported ‘170,000 items … stolen or destroyed’ had been led by the nose by Dr Donny George, the museum’s director of research. It just wasn’t true:

Over the past six weeks it has gradually become clear that most of the objects which had been on display in the museum galleries were removed before the war. Some of the most valuable went into bank vaults, where they were discovered last week. Eight thousand more have been found in 179 boxes hidden ‘in a secret vault’. And several of the larger and most remarked items seem to have been spirited away long before the Americans arrived in Baghdad.

George is now quoted as saying that that items lost could represent ‘a small percentage’ of the collection and blamed shoddy reporting for the exaggeration. ‘There was a mistake,’ he said. ‘Someone asked us what is the number of pieces in the whole collection. We said over 170,000, and they took that as the number lost. Reporters came in and saw empty shelves and reached the conclusion that all was gone. But before the war we evacuated all of the small pieces and emptied the showcases except for fragile or heavy material that was difficult to move.’

This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his ‘great bewilderment’. ‘Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of (his) knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects,’ says Flynn. ‘Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting.’ To Flynn it is also odd that George didn’t seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. ‘There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out,’ he suggests.

Poland, and Irish Internet round-up

Published June 10, 2003

So, Poland just joined the EU – welcome! ;)

Meanwhile, time for a trawl through IrelandOffline news.

Boards.IE have had enough of crappy internet from the telcos — they’re hoping to launch an ISP. Given one company’s continuing stranglehold over the Irish internet, they’ll need every bit of luck they can get. Good luck guys.

And, in case anyone’s swallowing that ‘there isn’t the demand’ line, check this story out:

The story goes how Old Man Kennedy was getting his shoes shined back in ’29 and the shoe-shine boy was telling him what stocks looked good and what didn’t. Old Man Kennedy knew the game was up and it was time to get out of the market.

I got my hair cut this morning and the middle-aged man beside me was telling the barber how he had downgraded his ISDN line to get DSL but the DSL failed the test and now he’s stuck with a normal line. The barber was asking him what company he applied through, told him of the others, asked how far from the exchange he was, told him where the exchange was (as he didn’t know), said ‘mmm, that’d be about 3km, as the crow flies. But it’s not as the crow flies – it’s the turns in the road and that.’

Now if my barber can give me the technical requirements for DSL and people are talking of stimulating demand, you have to realise that something fishy is going on.

Forfas delivers damning broadband report : ‘Irish DSL prices for small businesses are about five to six times higher’ than other European countries. Hmm, I wonder why the telcos are reporting a lack of demand.

IrelandOffline’s Broadband – The Next Steps for Ireland document, which was presented to the Dail’s Joint Committee on Communications last week. Conclusions:

  • Prioritise Wireless: ‘it is no longer time for trials’

  • Increase Availability of Affordable Backhaul

  • Raise Public Awareness of Alternative Technologies

And how’s about this for an Alternative Technology? Tethered balloons trialing in the North. Genius. The company is called Skylinc, and uses blimps flying at 1500m; each provides a coverage area of 80km diameter. The result is ‘fibre rate service at DSL prices’; non-contended for 30,000 customers, with 1-10 MB/s throughput. I really hope they can pull this off….

‘A land where all the children smell of petrol’

Published June 9, 2003

The Observer’s ‘state of the union’ report from Baghdad. Summary: total anarchy:

A hundred and fifty dollars or so for an AK-47, double that for a pistol because it’s easier to hide. You can buy them rather easily from the street-markets. These are patrolled hourly by US forces whose job is to check for people selling guns. The traders get round this with diabolical cunning by looking at their watches and, once an hour, hiding all the guns. The liberating forces offered a cross-Baghdad amnesty a couple of weeks ago: the grand total of guns deposited was a magnificent none. … If a silhouetted someone tries to wave you down, with a gun, in a long hot road full of heat-mirage and six-year-olds siphoning petrol, you have to choose: chances are it’s a Bad Person so you keep the foot down, but if it’s the Americans and you race past, they’ll shoot at you, lots, because they’re as scared as everyone else in this shambles of a city.

Then a classic story:

One night I visited a friend about a mile away, and foolishly stayed up talking, and ended up trying to get a late taxi home. Outside the hotel they shrugged, and then one brave young thing disappeared for a minute and came back carrying lots of guns and walked me through the blackout for 10 minutes until we came across a darkened little street party of severely scary drivers, the fat moon winking its light off a battery of gold teeth and metal teacups and, for all I’m really sure, recently bloodied scimitars. Not for 10,000 dollars, I was told. ‘Ali Baba, Ali Baba,’ they repeated. Some Iraqis get annoyed by this – the thief of the 1,001 Nights was Kuwaiti – but the verbal shorthand is fast and always works: the thieves are out, and have guns, and even though we have guns too we’re not going to risk it. Are you mad? Where are you from?

I mention Scotland, and we have one of those extremely odd late-night conversations, this time about Mel Gibson. Apparently one of the very favourite films in Baghdad is Braveheart, because Saddam used to show it repeatedly, nightly, with furious subtitles, to demonstrate just what bastards the English were. I explain that few Scots have a television because most are still running around in woad, thanks to the English. We raise a happy toast – sticky, sweet tea – to the general fog of historical propagandising and the more specific idea of ‘Freedom!’. Somewhere nearby – a mile away? A street away? – another stupid pop-pop gun battle breaks out, and they really won’t take me home, and so I say I might walk, and they raise their teacups again and say you must be either very brave or very stupid, when the truth of course is that I am neither, but something else again relatively new to them, which is very quietly drunk. I bravely wake up my friend and sleep on the sofa.

SpamAssassin in Playboy

Published June 6, 2003

Jeremy Kister on the SpamAssassin-talk mailing list notes:

In an article written by Randy Cassingham, Randy describes ‘why e-mail abuse should be a crime’ and suggests ways to stop spam. His fifth suggestion states Ensure that your ISP is taking steps to combat the problem, such as installing SpamAssassin…

This is in Playboy July 2003 pg 53 (bottom). (and no, i usually dont read it for the articles ;) )

Plus a pretty good article in Forbes, too. A good news week for SpamAssassin…

Security Issues

Published June 6, 2003

funny quote on the ‘nmap in the Matrix: Reloaded‘ thing at the Reg:

But then, the film does take place in the future. Is (security analyst Michal Zalewski) surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? ‘It’s not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution,’ he says. ‘I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years.’

The Today Programme

Published June 5, 2003

The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 has been my main news source for several months (at least since I moved to somewhere with decent broadband, and didn’t have to contemplate getting up at unearthly hours to listen to it ;) .

In the past week or two, they’ve broken a major story, the ‘sexing-up’ allegations against the UK government’s Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier (yes, that’s ‘sexing-up’.)

There’s transcripts of the interviews here and on the Times website (thanks to P O’Neill for the pointer to the latter). Well worth a read, if you enjoy hearing evasive politicians getting skewered by a skillful interviewer. ;)

Nice Guys Win

Published June 5, 2003

That’s the message from Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford and neurology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, from his studies of baboon behaviour in the Serengeti:

For the humans who would like to know what it takes to be an alpha man–if I were 25 and asked that question I would certainly say competitive prowess is important–balls, translated into the more abstractly demanding social realm of humans. What’s clear to me now at 45 is, screw the alpha male stuff. Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept socially cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough that’s not what pays off in that system. Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the male crap. I could not have said that when I was 25.

A handful of (the baboons) simply walked away from it over the years. Nathaniel was one, and Joshua was another. They had the lowest stress hormone levels you’ve ever seen in male baboons, and outlived their cohorts. The fact that this alternative strategy is actually the more adaptive one is one of the good bits of news to come out of primatology in quite some time. If that’s the future of primates, this planet is going to be in great shape in a couple of million years.

A great article, and pretty funny in places — especially where he discusses the results of baboons’ lack of a developed frontal cortex:

Even though there are tremendous individual differences among the baboons, they’re still at this neurological disadvantage, compared to the apes, and thus they typically blow it at just the right time. They could be scheming these incredible coalitions, but at the last moment, one decides to slash his partner in the ass instead of the guy they’re going after, just because he can get away with it for three seconds. The whole world is three seconds long–they’re very pointillist in their emotions.

More at the Edge Magazine site.

Bumper Stickers

Published June 5, 2003

My try-out SpamAssassin bumper stickers from BumperActive just arrived, along with a hand-written note stating that they taken the liberty of trimming them down for me — nice touch ;)

The resolution isn’t great, but then the source image wasn’t either ;) Print quality, however, is a beaut. Recommended. Now to get sticking!

SCO’s Hand-Waving Drags On

Published June 4, 2003

Ho hum… SCO staggers on. Snore. Quick links:

    • Analysts to SCO
    : ‘don’t drag us into this’. Also, a good quote from Linus: ‘Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other.’

  • Some unintended side-effects in Germany: LinuxTag launches ‘anti-competitive’ suit, SCO shuts down their German website in response. (Mind you, I doubt it’d make any difference. I don’t think they actually have any customers at this stage, so the only people who’d notice would be reading about it in the news sites anyway ;)

  • Slashdot roundup — mostly worth reading for the top 2 comments ;)

  • arie.org’s take on the issue.

    • Dublin — Apparently

    Published June 3, 2003

    JA forwards a link to Veronica Guerin, the new movie by Joel Schumacher, based on the life of the eponymous Irish journo. It boasts this beaut on their official ad website:

    In the mid-1990s, Dublin was nothing short of a war zone, with a few powerful drug lords battling for control. … Based on a true story, this powerful, emotional film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (jm: oh no) … and producer Joel Schumacher … gives unique insight into a fascinating and complex aspect of the Irish conflict …

    My emphasis. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Somehow or other I must have missed all the warzone stuff… I wonder if they’re confusing it with Bogota?

    Salam Pax, P. K. Dick fan

    Published June 2, 2003

    Slate with a fantastic article about Salam Pax:

    His latest post mentioned an afternoon he spent at the Hamra Hotel pool, reading a borrowed copy of The New Yorker. I laughed out loud. He then mentioned an escapade in which he helped deliver 24 pizzas to American soldiers. I howled. Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter. The New Yorker he had been reading–mine. Poolside at the Hamra–with me. The 24 pizzas–we had taken them to a unit of 82nd Airborne soldiers I was writing about. …

    I needed a new interpreter to fill the gap for two weeks or so, and the colleague mentioned that he had just met a smart and friendly guy named Salam. I quickly traced Salam to the Sheraton Hotel. Salam–this is his real first name–was sitting in a chair in the lobby, reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I knew, at that moment, that I would hire him.

    … we’ll all be hearing more from Salam: He has signed up to write a fortnightly column for the Guardian, and he continues to blog. He also continues to be surprised by the reaction to his work. When he was told by the Austrian interviewer that his fans had begun making ‘Salam Pax’ T-shirts and coffee mugs, his response was frank–‘Are you kidding?’ Nobody is kidding. The coffee mugs are for real, and Salam Pax is for real.

    Thanks to Ben for another top tip. Ben, start a blog!

    ‘There is no reliable information’

    Published June 2, 2003

    Karlin forwards a good round-up from Conor O’Clery, the Irish Times’ Washington correspondent, on the WMD evidence issues:

    At one point during rehearsals at CIA headquarters in Washington for that speech, Mr Powell threw several pages into the air and declared: ‘I’m not reading this. This is bullshit,’ according to today’s US News and World Report.

    The most overblown conclusions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction came from a ‘mini-CIA’ set up in the Pentagon by the Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, according to an army intelligence officer who told Time magazine: ‘Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence.’ ….

    A classified assessment of Iraq’s chemical weapons by the Defence Intelligence Agency in September 2002, obtained by US News, stated: ‘There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons …’

    Challenge-Response: Patent Fireworks!

    Published June 2, 2003

    A timely reminder for the European Commission, while it considers permitting software patents.

    In the US, software patents have been permitted for years, with hilarious results. Here’s a good example.

    Back in 1997-98, spam was a minor irritant, but the practice of ‘listbombing’ (forge-subscribing one’s enemies to lots of mailing lists) was more troublesome. As a result, several mailing-list manager programs like Majordomo added challenge-response to their subscription process; this is why, when you sign up for a list, you have to click on a link in the mail you get, to ‘confirm’ you really asked to be signed up. (Here’s a mail detailing how LISTSERV had this feature in March 1996.)

    All very clever, and it solved the problem nicely.

    Some bright sparks then noticed this, and decided it was non-obvious somehow to apply this to spam filtering. They overlooked the prior art (more listed here) and registered some patents.

    Fast-forward to 2003, and we see that there are now no less than three pretty-much-identical anti-spam C-R patents which have been granted:

    Oops! Where’s the popcorn?

    (Thanks to this posting from RFG for spotting this.)

    Google News Censors Indymedia

    Published May 30, 2003

    Google News has been forced to remove IndyMedia from Google News’ feed of sources, by an email campaign.

    I’m in two minds about this — I can see Google News’ point. If an unmoderated feed allows crap like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to get through, then GN obviously doesn’t want that turning up in their ‘news’ search results. But removing IMC altogether seems suboptimal; I would assume the front page newswire — or at least the features — is a bit more moderated, and therefore trustworthy.

    Getting balanced news — and that means lefty IMC along with neocon Fox — is key, and Google News was doing a pretty good job up ’til that point.

    Interview with nmap author

    Published May 30, 2003

    a good interview with nmap’s Fyodor on /. Snippet:

    1. During your time running Honeypots, you’ll have seen a lot of compromised systems. Is there any incident that’s really stuck in your mind because of the audacity of the attempt, or the stupidity of the person attempting the breakin?

    2. On the humorous front, one attacker was was running a public webcam during his exploits, so we were able to watch him crack into our boxes in real time :). I will resist the urge to link a screenshot. His rough location was determined when we noticed Mrs. Doubtfire playing on his TV and correlated that with public schedule listings. He was working with a Pakistani group, but was actually on the US East Coast.

      In the ‘disturbing audacity’ front, this year we found that a group of crackers had broken into an ecommerce site and actually programmed an automated billing-sytem-to-IRC gateway. They could obtain or validate credit card numbers by simply querying the channel bot! Expect a more detailed writeup soon.

    Depleted Uranium

    Published May 29, 2003

    temporary politics break. ;) This story was big news in the UK a few weeks ago, but never made it into the news over here. Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a former US Army advisor, sent a team to Afghanistan to test civilians for uranium contamination after the war there:

    Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination. … the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999. (jm: also on average 26 times the maximum permissible level in the US)

    ‘If (the) findings are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster… Every subsequent generation is at risk.’

    Also, a very interesting interview with Major Doug Rokke, who worked on the cleanup procedures during the first Gulf War, dealing with DU and other contaminants.

    Slashdot, and Electric Vehicles

    Published May 28, 2003

    current /. poll: what SpamAssassin setting do you use? Cool! (but who are the nutters voting ‘less than 0’?)

    Tech: Danny blogs about fuel-cell vehicles, linking to the DrivingTheFuture site. I met Doug Korthof of DTF a month or two ago — a nice guy with a persuasive case, namely that electric vehicles work, and the current concentration on fuel-cell and hybrid vehicles is a diversionary tactic.

    The facts of the matter really are quite wierd, as the OC Weekly interview notes:

    • When (Doug) first got the (GM) EV1, the lease allowed for unlimited mileage. But the car came with something else: a defective lead-acid Delco battery that took a couple of trips to the mechanic to get replaced. GM wound up replacing all the Delcos with Panasonic lead-acid batteries. But there was an unanticipated consequence: the Panasonics got such dramatically better range than the Delcos that GM took all its EV1s that had not been leased off the market and forced existing drivers into new leases that did limit mileage.

    • Korthof experienced even better mileage with a nickel-metal hydride battery that allowed his 1997 Honda EV-Plus to run for 140 miles without a recharge. Honda took the car back in 2002 and junked it. No subsequent electric cars had nickel batteries, and Chevron Texaco Corp. since acquired the worldwide patent to nickel-metal hydride batteries, which the company is partly using to satisfy the burgeoning hybrid-car market.

    I took a look at the EV1 myself, and talked to Doug about the recharging system he uses. He recharges their 2 EVs directly from a plug socket in his garage, and with his house fitted with solar panels, it costs about 25 bucks a month to keep them charged. Of course, there’s a lot of up-front cost to install the solar panels and buy the EVs, but IMO it would be worth it.

    A moot point anyway — most EVs (with the exception of the Toyota RAV4-EV) can no longer be bought, even second hand. Instead, there’s a recall in operation, and existing EVs are being recalled and dismantled. Even purely from a ‘cool tech’ POV, this is a shame.

    e-voting in Ireland ‘poses a threat to our democracy’

    Published May 28, 2003

    Margaret McGaley has been investigating the Nedap/Powervote e-voting system that’s recently come into use in Ireland, as part of her undergrad thesis, and the conclusion is not good: ‘E-voting poses a threat to our democracy’. She goes on:

    I hope to mount a campaign over the next few months with the following goals:
    • to prevent the use of the Nedap/Powervote system in Irish elections,
    • to prevent the purchase of any more equipment or software from
      • Nedap/Powervote by the Irish government, and
    • to convince the government that any electronic voting system used in this country should be developed here, using formal methods and the Mercuri method, and should be open source.

    More info at the the report site.

    The Nedap/Powervote e-voting system is the one that the Irish government never bothered getting a copy of the source for, instead doing a basic under-NDA source audit. Reportedly, there were comments in the resulting review doc along the lines of ‘The source code and comments for this section is in Dutch, so we’re not sure exactly what it does’. And if that’s not bad enough, it runs on WinCE, with the votes tabulated in an Access database. ;)

    Let’s hope Nedap/Powervote use their election-fixing powers purely for good, and not for evil! ;)

    BTW, myself, I’m surprised the Irish government (a) went to a Dutch company for the technology to do this, and (b) didn’t get hold of the entire system’s components and source, or at least do a stronger audit, given their experience of imported computing devices including some ‘bonus functionality’ in the past.

    Eurovision Scandal

    Published May 27, 2003

    No, not the supposedly politically-motivated nul points for the UK, the much more scandalous way that RTE ignored democracy and the popular vote in favour of their own autocratic ‘Star Chamber’ jury. Outrage! Boo!

    ‘Voters had a five-minute slot in which to register their selections after all of the songs had been performed. Because Ireland was third of the entries to disclose its voting, the phone lines could not be kept open for any longer than the five-minute slot. Eircom, which operated the phone lines, had agreed with RTE’ that it would collate all of the votes within nine to 10 minutes of lines closing. While the company fulfilled its obligation, RTE’ decided to use a jury verdict rather than phone votes. …

    (My emphasis.) Hmm… methinks the journo doth protest too much.

    Eircom said its decision not to charge voters for their calls was a goodwill gesture and should not be interpreted as an admission of failure on its part regarding its role in the voting. ‘The system and the technology on our part worked as it should have on the night,’ a spokeswoman said.’

    Aaaaah. I get the picture.

    GTA3: Vice City secrets

    Published May 26, 2003

    Hmm. I don’t remember spotting a tiki bar in GTA3:VC… must go searching when that VGA adapter turns up. ;)

    I’ve been repeatedly struck, while in California, what an incredible job the GTA3:VC designers did with the graphics and level design. It evokes so many visual aspects of US cities, perfectly, and this is pretty impressive when you consider they’re a Scottish games house. This interview details how they did it:

    GS: Did you do any on-location studies of any areas to help with the design of Vice City? If so, where did you go, and how helpful was it?

    AG: After the near-death experience that was the development of Grand Theft Auto III, the entire team flew out to Miami to recover and soak in the atmosphere of the area. While the rest of the team sunbathed or propped up the News Bar, the ever-industrious art team headed out onto the baking hot Miami streets armed with digital cameras. We split up and covered every area we were interested in using for Vice City. The animation team armed with digital camcorders spent time examining exactly how women in bikinis and roller skates moved, and the city modelers braved both the seediest, scariest parts of Miami and got kicked out of all the best places. By the time we returned to sunny Scotland, we’d amassed countless hours of video and close to 10,000 digital photos. When scouting locations, we tried to get a cross-section of shots — a good few were wide angle to remind us how the place fit together, and the rest were details to aid in modeling and texture usage. The guys in the New York office also sorted out some professional location scouts from the film industry for us who provided us with some really excellent locations for any areas we hadn’t managed to get enough detail on. I can’t imagine capturing the feel of a city without all this resource material, never mind actually spending time in the place. Sending the entire team rather than a few leads allows everyone to understand what it is they are trying to make. We couldn’t have done it any other way.

    PAL vs. NTSC: a maze of twisty turny passages

    Published May 26, 2003

    A cautionary tale of consumer electronics regional lockdown follows. Hopefully Google’ll pick it up and it’ll help someone else in the same boat.

    So I brought my PS2 with me from Ireland, along with a few good games, figuring that it’d be cheaper, and simpler, to bring them and buy a few bits of converter hardware here, rather than buy the lot from scratch.

    How wrong I was. :(

    So I’ve already spent about 50 bucks on a step-up transformer to convert US 110v to the 220v my European PS2 requires. Of course, the European PS2 outputs in PAL rather than NTSC, and most US TVs, including my one, accepts only NTSC input.

    So the next step is a PAL to NTSC converter. Sounds like a pretty simple piece of equipment, right? Well, nope. Most pages out there that deal with this recommend either (A) buying a multi-region DVD player that’ll convert PAL to NTSC on the fly — which won’t work for me, as I’m not looking to play DVDs per se — (B) buying a converter like this one for about 280 dollars, (C) buying a new TV (even more expensive), or (D) buying a VCR that’ll convert on the fly, like the Samsung SV-5000W, for about 350 dollars. (forget it, that’s more than the price of the PS2!)

    However, there does seem to be another option: a PAL-to-XGA converter, allowing me to display the PS2 output on my PC’s monitor. Still pricey at 152 dollars though.

    One more: I could just buy a new PS2 over here for 180 dollars and install a multi-region mod chip. But my soldering skills are rusty, and license-wise, it’s iffy. :(

    Finally, though, the winning option seems to be this: Lik-Sang.com sell a PS2-to-VGA output converter box for about 50 dollars plus shipping. Given that the display quality is improved — and my monitor is sharper and bigger than my TV anyway — I think I’ll go for this.

    LPR as a general spooling and queueing mechanism

    Published May 25, 2003

    Good article on the use of LPR/LPD as a general-purpose distributed queueing mechanism for non-printing applications.

    I maintained PLP (the predecessor of LPRng , which the author uses) for a while, and this kind of thing was one of the main featuresets I wanted to enable.

    I know someone in (if I recall correctly) BASF was using it to generate movies, from frame-grabs individually LPR’d by a network of machines. As a result we had to add sub-second accuracy to the queueing; not sure if that made it into LPRng though ;)

    What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailors

    Published May 24, 2003

    The story of the U.S.S. Constitution and her drunkard sailors. A great story, so I forwarded it on, and what do you know, Ben debunks it thoroughly:

    What a load of bollocks.

    As to the alcohol detail, working it out on fingers and toes, it comes to over 3 gallons of liquor per person per day. 12 pints of rum would be a big day for me and I probably wouldn’t want to get up and do it all over again the next day. And by day 100 …

    But the big honking red flag here is that the US was at war with FRANCE, not Britain, at the time. Ponder for a moment the concept of a US ship (when the US Navy was brand new and very small) sinking this many British ships and, ahem, sailing up the Firth of Clyde to — this gets good — raid a distillery. I think some response from the Royal Navy would have been considered …

    And the ship was launched on the 22nd, not the 27th.

    Of course, this wouldn’t stop, oh, the SECRETARY OF THE NAVY from repeating it as fact!

    Ben, you should start your own blog.

    Caelen and Barbara’s Adventures

    Published May 24, 2003

    Caelen and Barbara’s travelogue from Luang Prabang just fills me with reminiscence for Laos — I’d go back in a shot, it’s an amazing country (well, for tourists at least, not sure about the folks living there).

    Also interesting to see that Caelen went for some minor surgery while in Bangkok. Great idea — 150 bucks is a hell of a lot cheaper than you’d get it pretty much anywhere else, and the Bangkok hospitals that cater for tourists are, by all accounts, super-swanky. Great idea!