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- Sir Tim Berners-Lee and W3C sold humanity down the river
- NSA denies power arcing problems
- Hydra head considers buying Blackberry
- UK mobile companies face fee hike
- Rubbish chips save power
| Sir Tim Berners-Lee and W3C sold humanity down the river Posted: 11 Oct 2013 02:48 AM PDT Moves to install DRM functions within the web standards have been slammed by a top IT author and developer. Simon St. Laurent, who is the co-chair of the Fluent and OSCON conferences and the writer of books including Introducing Elixir, Introducing Erlang, Learning Rails 3, XML Pocket Reference, 3rd, XML: A Primer, and Cookies is furious with Sir Tim Berners-Lee for allowing the W3C's to focus on digital rights management (DRM). He said that programmers who design and build Web systems, are going to be forced to use something which could be very onerous in many ways and get nothing in return. Writing in his bog, St. Laurent said that the W3C has surrendered without asking for anything in return. He said Sir Tim is well aware of the tarnish he's applying to his creation and is saying that no-one likes content protection, or the constraints it places on users and developers, or the over-severe legislation it triggers in countries like the USA. But he said that the saddest part of that discussion, is that users or developers get nothing out of bringing in DRM. St. Laurent said that most of my technical work still revolves around the W3C, so he is at crossroads. It was the first time he had ever doubted the intrinsic goodness of the W3C. "While HTML5 and CSS3 certainly reinvigorated public interest in the W3C, this is yet more reason to pick and choose the useful bits carefully," he said. At the moment the only think that anyone is getting from DRM being installed under the bonnet of the world wide wibble is that there is a strong message not to trust anyone, St. Laurent said. |
| NSA denies power arcing problems Posted: 11 Oct 2013 02:47 AM PDT The NSA has denied allegations that its new "spy on everyone" data centre is being plagued with power problems. Last week there were rumours that the Utah Data Centre was being damaged by power arcing and would not be online in time. The National Security Agency responded saying that reports of damage were overblown. However many of the details came from an unreleased report from the Army Corps of Engineers, summaries of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal so it is a little harder to discount. Still that has not stopped Harvey Davis, NSA director for installations and logistics having a crack at denying it. He claimed in a letter to Congress, published by Slashdot, that the electrical problems are far less severe and the damage much more contained than media reports indicated. Arc flashes were discovered during testing of the electrical and generator-backup systems, but the problems were isolated to circuit-breaker and failsafe systems. "No NSA mission systems were damaged, nor were any additional costs incurred by the government," Harvey's letter as saying. Contractors have doubled their warranty from five years to 10, cached replacement breakers at the facility and agreed to provide three years of quick-response service, Harvey wrote. We guess that is in case that they haven't fixed it He said that the Wall Street Journal story was based on a draft version of the Corps' evaluation of the facility, he said. Although we would have thought that even if it were a draft, the site would still have a few problems, even if a report into the matter had a few spell checking problems and a couple of split infinitives. Harvey's letter to Congress added that the problems will be fully resolved, mission systems will be installed on schedule, and the project will remain within budget. |
| Hydra head considers buying Blackberry Posted: 11 Oct 2013 02:45 AM PDT One of the heads of the two-headed hydra responsible for running Blackberry into the ground is seriously considering buying the company. For years, BlackBerry co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin ran the company. Fregin acted as the company's VP of Operations until he retired in 2007. Lazaridis became co-CEOS with Jim Balsillie and for a number of years the pair earned the title of worst CEOs in the world. RIM suffered so badly that when they stepped down the new CEO Thorsten Heins had a nearly impossible task of fixing a broken RIM. Now Lazaridis and Fregin are back offering an alternative to a $4.7 billion offer led by its top shareholder. Lazaridis signed a confidentiality agreement with BlackBerry on Monday, according to the filing. If a takeover is successful, Lazaridis would become chairman, and Fregin would appoint a director, it says. Techcrunch did not say if the pair wanted to join or to present an alternative to a tentative $9-a-share bid by a group led by Fairfax Financial Holdings. Lazaridis and Fregin control some eight percent of BlackBerry, and can nearly match the 10 percent controlled by Fairfax. Lazaridis has been buying up more than 60,000 shares since last year and was BlackBerry's co-chief executives and co-chairmen. Word on the street is that he is considering "the widest range of options possible". Fairfax might not have enough cash to buy the company anyway and indeed at this point it does not have any funding lined up. It is expected that it, or Lazaridis and Fregin will be heading to the Canadian pension funds with their caps in hands asking for cash. Fregin recently teamed up with Lazaridis again to start Quantum Valley Investments to fund quantum physics and quantum computing initiatives. |
| UK mobile companies face fee hike Posted: 11 Oct 2013 02:43 AM PDT UK mobile network operators may face a four-fold increase in licence fees to rent the radio spectrum, under plans unveiled by Ofcom. Ofcom said that the new fees were in line with what other countries paid, and it thought that the UK operators had been getting off lightly for a long time. Britain raised a less-than-expected £2.34 billion in a 4G spectrum auction for airwaves to carry high-speed mobile Internet traffic, so it appears that Ofcom is looking to make up the shortfall. Vodafone, Telefonica's O2, EE and H3G pay about £64.5 million pounds in total for using the 900 megahertz and 1800 megahertz spectrum bands. Any changes would result in a £309 million increase. Ofcom said in a statement that spectrum is a valuable and finite national resource, and charging for it can incentivise the optimal use of frequencies. The telcos can blame the British government for the rent hike. It asked Ofcom to recalculate the fees to reflect "full market value" and Ofcom said the new rules were expected to take effect next year after a consultation period that ends in December. The telcos are still reviewing the new bill, but Vodafone has said that it “disappointed” that Ofcom is proposing a 430 percent increase in its fees. Apparently, it thinks that the regulator should be encouraging such private sector investment in infrastructure and new services like 4G. |
| Posted: 11 Oct 2013 02:43 AM PDT A top researcher says that it is time to stop making chips super-precise and start allowing them to make a few mistakes. Christian Enz, the new Director of the Institute of Microengineering, taling to Extreme Tech believes it is time that chip designers started to adopt a "good enough" approach. He said that this could save lots of power. For example if software can tolerate "3.14″ as opposed to "3.14159265358," you can save quite a bit of power in computation, he pointed out. Enz said since chips are extremely complex and defect densities are notoriously difficult to control, engineers have to compensate with additional circuitry that adds die size and reduces the performance and power consumption benefit of moving to a smaller process node. He thinks that one way of fixing these bugs is to intentionally create imperfect designs. This does not mean that they are broken, but that imperfections are placed extremely carefully in areas where humans can control the final output. Enz said that the problem with allowing imperfection is that chips have to be capable of detecting the difference between a "good enough" answer and a wrong answer. "There are a huge number of areas — GPS navigation, autopilots, robot-assisted surgery, spreadsheets, and scientific computing, for example — where "good enough" simply isn't an option," he said. But crucially there are an equal number of areas where "good enough" might be just fine. Audio/video playback, web browsing, gaming, and other casual uses all involve trade-offs where people might choose "good enough" as a way to improve battery life. This is not the first time that imperfection has been seen as a possible design tool. Intel looked at an idea of a variable FPU that can drop to 6-bit computation when a full eight bits isn't required. This power saving option relies on circuit gating to shut parts of an individual function unit off rather than power gating a larger element. Of course there might be a problem marketing such a chip to the great unwashed. How do you sell a product which is "near enough" while accuracy and perfection is praised. We guess you could call it "human." |
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