Capacitors are extremely simple devices and the number of potential ways of making them is in all practical terms, infinite!  All you need is two materials that conduct electricity (usually metal plates but even a liquid will do) separated by an insulator.  When you connect a voltage across them a stable charge is built up between them due to electrostatic attraction.  But as with most things, the devil is in the detail.

If we consider two hypothetical metal plates separated by an insulator the amount of charge that can be stored (the “Capacitance”) is determined by three things.

1.     The Surface Area of the plates.  The larger the area the more charge can be stored.

2.     The distance between them.  The closer the plates are to one another the more charge can be stored.  Of course the plates must be insulated from one another. 

3.     The characteristics of the insulating material which separates the plates.  This insulating material (which could even be air or a vacuum) is called the “dielectric” and the important characteristic for capacitors is called the “dielectric constant”. 

It seems obvious that to make a capacitor of any given value, the closer we can put the plates to one another the smaller the device will be.  Also, if we can do something to the surface of the plates to increase their area (such as corrugation or scoring) this will also make the device smaller.  If our “dielectric” (separating insulator) has a high “dielectric constant” then again the resulting device will be smaller.  Tantalum is a wonderful material for making capacitors because it lends itself to a unique construction method.  You take a fine powder of pure Tantalum and compress it into a small

“slug” around a piece of Tantalum wire.  Then you “sinter” it by heating to about 1800 deg C (very hot but below the melting point of Tantalum).  The material forms a “sponge” with Tantalum particles stuck together but with plenty of space in-between.  The slug is then immersed in a liquid bath and a current passed through it.  This forms a uniform coating of Tantalum Oxide on the surface throughout the sponge. Tantalum Oxide is an excellent insulator AND it has a high dielectric constant (24).  All that needs to happen now is fill the spaces in the Tantalum “sponge” with a conductive material (usually manganese dioxide), seal it in a package, and you are done.

The “sponge-like” configuration of the Tantalum produces an enormous surface area.  The tantalum Dioxide dielectric is very thin, a good insulator, and has a high dielectric constant.  Thus in terms of capacitance per unit volume (i.e. efficiency), Tantalum is the material of choice.  In addition Tantalum capacitors are extremely tolerant of high-temperatures and thus can be used on circuit boards that are immersed in a bath of molten solder during the manufacturing process.  In addition, being completely solid-state they are extremely tolerant of mechanical shock and vibration and seem to last forever (some alternative capacitor types do not).

Of course there are negatives:

1.     The TaO coated Ta will conduct current very well indeed in one direction (as will all electrolytic capacitors) but the capacitors are absolutely intolerant of reversed voltage polarity (they can explode).  Thus you have to be very careful with circuit design to ensure that they never see reverse current.

2.     Even used as designed, Ta capacitors can only be used at relatively low voltages (maximum 35 volts today).

3.     You don’t get too much benefit from Tantalum versus other capacitor designs at low capacitance values (below about 1 micro-farad).  “Ceramic” capacitors are lower in cost and not much bigger.

4.     They can cost a lot more than competitive devices.

In the consumer electronics world of today there are three major uses for capacitors:

1.     Coupling high-frequency signals in Radio-Frequency transceivers.  Capacitors used here will typically be quite small and usually NOT a candidate for Tantalum devices.

2.     “De-coupling” digital chips as they mount on a circuit board.  Every large chip on a modern circuit board requires external capacitors to “short-circuit” unwanted high-frequency components to ground and to smooth power supply currents.  A quick examination of one modern circuit design shows a large ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) requiring 10 decoupling capacitors.  Based on the required values, four of these could be Ta devices.

3.     “Smoothing” to output of “chopper” power supplies.  These are the small, light power supplies used for mobile telephones, laptop computers and similar things.  This applies especially where size and weight is a factor, such as where a power supply is integrated within a portable device itself.  You often need quite large capacitance values here.

However, the use of capacitors in general in computer devices is reducing quite quickly.  If we remember any old computer circuit board (PC mother board etc) of the 1980’s, it had lots of large components on the top surface - but if you turn it over you find dozens - even sometimes approaching 100 “small components” connected to the underside of the board.  These were almost always very small capacitors and resistors used to smooth and distribute power and to “decouple” unwanted high-frequency noise.  NOW - as technology has progressed, many of the functions that were once performed by several interconnected chips, have been bundled up onto a single chip - these days a modern laptop has far fewer major chips - thus fewer interconnections and fewer points that require “decoupling”. 

Of course there are critical applications where reliability is of critical importance.  Implanted medical devices (such as pacemakers) are one example.  The spacecraft designed by NASA for the mission to Pluto uses tantalum capacitors exclusively.  Also, there are many military applications were ruggedness and reliability outweigh all other considerations.

So what if the world supply of Tantalum ran out or became unavailable.  In the short term some products would need to be re-designed to use other capacitor types.  This might result in these devices becoming a bit larger and/or heavier.  In the longer term there is an infinity of possible capacitor designs.  Niobium is a lot more plentiful than Tantalum and it looks promising as an almost direct replacement.  (Of course Coltan contains niobium too). 

However, there are other minerals that contain Tantalum and many of them have not been exploited.  We are told that (in theory at least) tantalum should be plentiful.  In addition it seems questionable that the electronics industry is even the largest user of Tantalum.  Because of its very high melting point and its other metallic characteristics, tantalum is in heavy demand for use in heat-shields.  It would be surprising if Ta were not used in at least some parts of modern jet engines and rocket motors.

Throughout history human conflict has been fueled by the desire for resources.  Today there is a continuing insurrection on the island of Bougainville (part of Papua New Guinea).  Bougainville has a very large and profitable Copper mine.  Many local Bougainville people want the money for themselves rather than see it go to the wider Papua New Guinea  government. Gold and diamonds were the root causes of South Africa’s problems over the years.  The Japanese involvement in WW2 was primarily motivated by a quest for resources.  The list goes on - today many believe that the “troubles” in the Middle-East are caused by the desire for oil and consequent profits.  But you can make a case against almost anything! Last week a newsletter arrived in the mail suggesting that I shouldn’t buy soap that contained palm oil (most do).  This is said to be because people are cutting down the Amazon forest to plant Palm trees for oil!

Many “rare earth” elements used in current electronics.  Some people feel that continued technological development is threatened by shortages in supply.  As recently as this week a bill has been introduced into the US Congress aimed at ensuring continuing supply in the face of shortage and monopoly suppliers.   Currently 95% of rare earth supplies come from China but the Chinese Government has stated that when their domestic demand becomes great enough to use all of the available supply then they will ban exports!  They could potentially “take over” the world technology industry by controlling the supply of essential raw materials! In many applications it seems possible to replace rare earths with other, less scarce, materials.  Indeed there is a big race on to find a replacement for the rare-earth metals used in large screen TVs.  Change of this nature of course takes time. 

In the immediate future I would think that the supply of Tantalum and of the ore Coltan is not our greatest concern.  After all. Tantalum is NOT a “rare earth”.

Unfortunately the new booking process seems to be more hassle and slower than the old one. More than once when I used it recently I had to hit reload to get a page to display or to get the next page to show up.

I’m not singling out Easyjet for criticism here, I’ve seen similar “improvements” on other sites, both eCommerce and general interest. Part of the problem is that web 2.0 seems to load web servers differently (not necessarily more but placing the load in different places) and so when a site moves to the new interface various services are hit harder than they used to be and get overloaded. In particular web 2.0 sites seem to make more, but smaller, database transactions and I suspect that this is the heart of the problem as the existing database will be tuned to larger but fewer transactions.

To add to this it is entirely possible that Web 2.0 sites get hit by a perception in slowness that is in fact due to their attempts to provide a faster service. Because a Web 2.0 page will load (as far as the browser is concerned) quicker the delay as the bits of the middle of the page are loaded on top becomes noticeable. When there was just one loading thing at the top even if it was as slow or slower we put it down to network issues as opposed to something on the page, thus we were more tolerant of the slowness.

Of course sometimes it is the lack of horsepower in the client that causes the slowdown. By moving more of the processing to the client, web 2.0 sites suffer when clients lack the speed and resources needed to display the page. Some sites with masses of Web 2.0 content such as facebook and gmail have come up with special “lite” versions which load faster and do not place such a burden on the client browser. We may well see more of this as time goes on.

One of the big problems of the ebook world is format conversion and here is where Calibre scores highly because it can create very good (not perfect but good) versions of the same book in multiple formats and convert between formats. Amusingly it seems to do this so well that Adobe now recommend that content creators who use Adobe InDesign and Adobe Digital Editions, should install Calibre to handle the conversion from the ADE standard output (epub) to the proprietary Kindle/Mobipocket (mobi) formats.

Given that currently the two major standards seem to be epub and mobi this white paper endorsement of open source software is somewhat surprising as it would seem to indicate that neither Amazon nor Adobe have put much thought into how to create multiple formats of ebooks. One can only hope that this attitude continues and that just maybe Adobe will donate a little money to the Calibre project.

This has had an effect with most major browser providers increasing the speed of their offering (interestingly while earlier tests had Chrome fastest, in a recent benchmark Apple’s Safari betas seemed to be slightly faster that Chrome) but it isn’t the only way that Google has influenced the browser wars. The other thing Google has done is given a kick in the pants to a number of HTML 5 features that might otherwise have languished.

Interestingly one of those features - downloadable fonts - is not yet supported by Chrome (though it is supported by Opera’s v10 beta and Firefox 3.5 (and supported differently by IE 8)). A couple of other features - the video and audio tags - are only available in the Chrome 3.0 alphas. While downloadable fonts are probably not that exciting - though this page explains why designers should cheer - the video and audio tags clearly have a major potential hit on Adobe because it pretty much removes one of the main drivers for flash. This recent Cringely column points out a related attack on flash via the codecs used and should probably be read as well.

Indeed the combination of downloadable fonts, javascript to download XML etc. and these tags mean that flash becomes almost entirely superfluous for web site creators. If web viewers don’t need flash for video or audio and web creators utilize HTML 5 to make flash like page effects natively in the browser then flash loses its status as a default plugin that all browsers have. Amusingly this may end up helping Microsoft because it potentially allows Silverlight to compete on a more level platform. On the other hand it is extremely unclear to me what benefits Silverlight will bring to the table that the same combination of natively supported browser features cannot also deliver.

The problem here, for both Adobe and Microsoft is that their proprietary development environments now look less like a basic requirement for a full service deb design house and more like an optional extra. It will be truly fascinating to see whether or not sales of Flash and Silverlight development tools drop.

On the other hand Adobe’s AIR potentially allows non browser based applications and applets to use the same AJAX and flash technologies that are used in web pages. The question then becomes whether users prefer to have 101 browser tabs/windows or 101 separate applets?

For the most part these features sound like the ones you get from a very high-end PBX which has been outfitted with speech to text voicemail handling and a bunch of other bells and whistles. However Voice works for individuals not companies and it is, currently, free. Unless Google figures out a way to make users get ads on the system I don’t see how it can possibly remain free unless the purpose of Google Voice is to kill the voice revenue of major operators and/or the IP PBX market. However it is quite possibly a service that I would be willing to pay money for and I suspect others would too, hence I will not be at all surprised if Google starts offering monthly subscriptions.

One thing is for sure, it won’t fly well in Europe or many other places outside the USA. At least one of it’s major features - the ability to redirect calls to a cellphone - will cost google serious amounts of money since, outside the US, calls to cellphones are significantly higher than calls to landlines. On the other hand if Google offers a subscription model where the subscriber pays for cell phone minutes then it could end up finally killing the rip-off roaming charges that many mobile subscribers gripe about. All a traveller would need to do is buy a pre-pay SIM in his new country and tell Google to forward calls to that SIM.

All of the features seem to come from an Internet view of the phone system. Essentially Google Voice adds a layer of virtualization to the phone system so that users have one number but depending on their mood, who is calling etc., callers get different service - including a fake “this number out of service” message for people you really don’t want to talk to. One suspects it wouldn’t be too hard for Google to extend this so that call forwarding would include forwarding to/from VOIP services like GoogleTalk (or Skype).

Finally I have to say that some of the call-forwarding by group and voicemail features would actually be interesting for pure IP services. If Google Voice could add some kind of chat feature (i.e. integrate Google talk) then this would quite possibly kill Skype and many other IM applications.

Memory states are represented by the physical position of an iron “nanocrystal” inside a hollow carbon “nanotube”. If the iron crystal is at one end of the tube then a “1″ is represented. If it is at the other then we have a “0″ state. It is said that an expected data density of 1 terabyte per square inch can be expected in practical devices!

To me this seems a major breakthrough. Long-term storage of digital data is a serious problem for the whole of society. Most records today are created in digital form. In addition, all around the world people are digitising old (paper) records and making them available on the Internet. The problem is that we really don’t have a good technology for storing digital information reliably for any reasonably long period of time.

• Data stored on any magnetic medium (tape or disk) does decay over time. Personal experience shows that “Floppy Disks” recorded in the 1990’s have already decayed to the point where they cannot be read. Some people claim that magnetic tapes might last for 100 years - past experience suggests that this is more like 20 years. Albeit if someone came up with an archival magnetic tape storage technology using a serious amount of “Forward Error Correction” then perhaps we might think about 100 years.
• CDs can be very good. But plastic decays and deforms over time and the reflective backing (critical to the operation of the CD) is usually made of aluminium. If air can get to the aluminium it decays and you get the phenomenon called “CD Rot”. This has been a problem for CDs already. However, the CD architecture contains a very high level of “Forward Error Correction” (FEC). Originally intended to overcome the problem of dust and scratches on “music CDs”, the FEC technology used is brilliant! Kodak claims a 300 year life for its archival CD’s with a “gold” reflective layer (which will not “rot”). Of course then there is the potential longevity (or lack thereof) of the dyes used in “recordable” CDs. Of course to get any kind of longevity from a CD you have to store it in a dark place with stable temperature.
• One of the ways that DVDs got their higher capacity (versus CD) was to remove some of the “Forward Error Correction”. Thus Kodak only claims 100 years for its recordable DVDs.
• Flash memories will also decay over time.

Many people make the (legitimate point) that in years to come it is very unlikely that hardware will be available that can read today’s media or that there will be software that understands it. A good point! They say that all digital media should be refreshed (by copying and perhaps re-formatting) at 10 or 20 year intervals. Most of us do this with our business information simply because we change computers every 5 years and have to migrate the data. But how many businesses just store old tapes and disks expecting that the data will be recoverable if/when the time arrives?

Nevertheless - problems of reading the media and understanding the data formats are problems for the people of the future. Today’s problem is to save the information.

With “Carbon Nanotube Storage” it seems that we finally have a way.

Developing a blue semiconductor laser was a “very good trick”, but there is no “rocket science” about the idea of using blue light in a disk recording system.  The principles are exactly the same as before.  The red light used in a regular DVD has a wavelength of 650nm.  In the last few years low cost semiconductor lasers with a wavelength of 405nm have become available.  Wavelength limits the resolution of the light beam and the shorter wavelength means higher data density and therefore greater capacity.  Of course, while we are in the process of inventing a new standard, changes can be made in other areas of the protocols in line with experience gained over the years with DVD and CD. Blu-Ray gives about 6 times the data capacity of DVD (around 25 GBytes) with something less than half of this improvement coming from the change in wavelength.

Gone unnoticed in the hyperbole is a “feature” called “Region Coding”.  DVD’s had it too.  Region Coding is a totally artificial system which has only one purpose - to restrict international trade.  Players are manufactured with a “Region Code” theoretically “hardwired” into them. Disks are also encoded
with a Region Code.  If you try to play a disk with a region code that is different from that of the player
then it won’t play!

It must be emphasized that Region Coding has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with preventing people from making unauthorized copies.  Nor does it have anything to do with the technical standards used by the various TV systems.  Most TV sets and DVD players (outside the US) will play disks of any of the common technical standards.

The idea of Region Coding is to segment the “world market” into regions so that different prices can be
charged in different regions.  The Film Studio mouthpieces say that they just want to control release of new films into different regions at different times.  In the world today many people travel and if they see a DVD or Blu-Ray at a good price it is perfectly reasonable that they might want to buy it and take it home to use.  Region Coding prevents that.  It also prevents retailers in one country from buying their disks wholesale in another country - in most countries this is a perfectly LEGAL activity. Yet another effect is that it hampers Internet retailers like “Amazon” from selling “cross-border” - another LEGAL activity.
It is critical to realize that we are talking here about legally purchased disks with all royalties
paid - these are NOT unauthorized copies!

Clearly there is only one aim here - to charge different prices in different countries according to what producers think “people can afford”.

From the manual of a popular player

In the DVD world, most DVD players adopted Region Coding and after a while dozens of sites popped up around the Internet which gave easy directions for circumvention of the system in most popular players.  Usually this involved some patching of the player software - a one-time job which is easy enough to do from the remote control. Sony saw all this and just abandoned Region Coding in its players.

Enter Blu-Ray.  Apparently if you want to build a Blu-Ray player you have to enter into a contract with the
Blu-Ray Disc Association that guarantees that you MUST support ALL of their “Digital Rights Management” protocols.  Thus today’s Blu-Ray players enforce DVD Region Coding (when they play “regular DVDs”) as well as Region Coding for “Blu-Ray” disks.

It is true that about 70% of the Blu-Ray disks on the market are coded so that they will operate in any region. It is also true that “illegal hacks” for Blu-Ray players are becoming available from many web sites that circumvent the problem.  That is not the point.

How is that a technical consortium can get together with the objective of RESTRICTING world trade and
actually put it into practice!  To a simple Engineer it would seem that the restriction of trade conflicts with various “Trade Practices” laws and laws against anti-competitive practice enacted in most civilized countries.

The EU persues Microsoft and Intel for “restrictive practices” why not the “Blu-Ray Disc Association”.

For me - I am NOT buying one until I can have one that is totally Region Coding free.

On the other hand the announcement of SaaS/cloud interoperability between Google and Salesforce.com, which doesn’t sound particularly novel, may in fact be truly revolutionary for the users. By combining the clouds it becomes possible to write applications that use numerous Google tools and utilities (including I suppose Google Wave) and access the business data in Salesforce.com. This sort of integration may end up having a signficant effect on the business world at large because it permits even very small companies to have the seamless IT backend that hitherto have required large MIS organizations and have therefore only been possible for large enterprises. Indeed many large organizations have problems integrating customer facing sales and support data/applications with internal ones so it is possible that this integration may actually tip the balance in favor of smaller nimbler companies.

The one downside I can see with this integration is that it potentially leads to worse security breaches because a poorly written google API app could now expose all the salesforce.com data to an infiltrator. This, on the other hand, is something that the Wave team seem to have thought about since Wave will, we are told, not be tied to Google’s servers and can in fact be installed inside the company firewall.

This would seem to be a major problem for all those who use these DNS servers (including unfortunately Extendance).

More irritatingly there seems to be no network solutions support page which will reports the status of its DNS servers - even to those of us who are customers of it. This makes it hard to be sure that this is the problem and even harder to tell whether it is a known issue that is being worked on or not. On the other hand the nwtwork solutions account page is extremely keen to sell the customer more services. One wonders whether these sales tools also use network solutions hosted DNSes…

Edit: Shortly after I wrote that everything started working again. However I repeat that it would be NICE if network solutions had an easy way to check status…

Edit2: Network Solutions’ blog has some kind of coverage of the issue - though that coverage appears to have showed up after the problem was resolved. In addition the two tickets I raised (for 2 domains) were only handled (and marked resolved) 22 and 33 hours later respectively. The 22 hour later response apologized, said that “Network Solutions encountered DNS issues at the time you submitted your support request” and then gave tips for help if there were still problems. The 33 hour later response was rather less helpful and made no mention of the DNS problems.

The speech is about the future of computing, and particularly gaming, over the next 20 years and it has a number of somewhat controversial predictions. One of which is that Mr Stross predicts that we are approaching the end of Moore’s law with regard to chip power and density. Another, perhaps less controversial point, is that the race for CPU manufacturers and architectures appears to now be at “Game over” with two winners: Intel and ARM. What Mr Stross points out that is frequently missed though is that if one counts raw numbers then ARM is in fact the out and out winner. This is because ARM utterly dominates the modern embedded CPU market and embedded devices are far more numerous than PCs, laptops and servers. ARM’s numerical domination has actually been true for (almost) all of the last decade although in the beginning the major CPU types were venerable 8-bit designs. These days new designs all use ARM cores primarily for power reasons as it is rare than a controller actually needs the memory and CPU power of an 32 bit core.

More interestingly he points out that while processing power may be plateauing network bandwidth still shows plenty of potential for multiple generations of growth. Current bandwidth is in the Gigabit/second range and physics only starts predicting problems when we get in the multiple terabits/second range. Of course some media are probably almost maxed out (copper wiring for example) but wireless and fiber transmissions still have a long way to go before hitting limits.

I won’t descibe much more, really it is better to read the original and the comment thread it inspired.

Destructive Recovery

To backup a bit. The reason why I made Ubuntu my primary OS was becasue that update failure forced me to reinstall windows and in the process I discovered that the Siemens “Recovery CD” uses the word “recovery” in a fashion somewhat different normal usage - since it “recovers” your system by deleting all the files on it and reinstalling a blank windows XP from scratch. Fortunately I had almost everything either backed up or on the linux partition before I ran the “recovery” CD - I only lost some of about 3 years worth of digital photos which somehow had been omitted from the back up process - but when I discovered what it had done I decided that henceforth I was going to leave the Microsoft world as far as possible. Thanks to the power of this laptop and the ability to run virtual machines that is precisely what I have done. I have a VM image of Windows XP that I fire up for those applications and tasks that require windows and for everything else I use linux

A Year in Linuxland

So after my annoyance with the lack of control etc. in windows, how has Linux been? Pretty good actually. The biggest problem I’ve had to date has been with some of the non open-source but free things such as VMWare’s player and server - and in fact I’ve moved to Sun’s Virtualbox recently because of the problems I had. I’m not sure if this is a fair assessment of VMware - the problem seems to have been because I upgraded from Server 1 to server 2 and then installed player and then did something else (I forget exactly what I did in what order) - but the new XP image I created in Virtualbox a couple of months ago is much better.

Similarly I’ve had issues with Skype - resolved, usually by searching for other people who have had the same problem - and of course Skype hasn’t updated its Linux client in the last year or two so it looks very basic compared to the spiffy new Windows versions.

One obvious problem has been Microsoft Office. I usually run Open Office but there are incomatibility issues - particulalry when documents pass through different Microsoft versions (e.g. Mac and XP) and then Open Office. The only totally unresolvable problem (which may have now been resolved, I’m not sure as I haven’t needed this for the last 11 months) was with a powerpoint presentation that had embedded Visio objects in it.

On the whole Ubuntu 8.04 has been very very stable - I’ve suffered no more than two or three system crashes over the last 12 months - but some things have not worked that should have such as the hibernate to disk option. Fortunately Ubuntu boots up quickly so this isn’t a major irritation but it has been annoying now and then. Another thing that never quite worked properly was PPTP tunneling which I only got working after a lot of effort and searching and which was never the automated one click thing it should have been.

Upgrading to Jaunty

I upgraded to Jaunty by creating a new partition (reusing the former windows one actually) and installing there. This may not have been the simplest way to do things but it worked for me and did allow me the option to go back if things really didn’t work. The one somewhat minor issue was that I then had to manually set up the mount points for the other partition and think about linking settings in my /home/user directory. However the upgrade took me about 45 minutes for the main OS plus another hour or so of tweaking by downloading the applications I needed and so on. I would say that if we include absolutely everything the process took about two and half hours because over the last couple of days I’ve remembered other applications to add. Compared to the process one would go through with windows - well there is no comparison, it was painless, smooth and I never felt like I might end up trashing things completely.

Running Jaunty

At first glance 9.04 doesn’t seem like a massive improvement over the older version but things are just smoother and better. PPTP tunneling worked almost out of the box (trick is to enable MPPE encryption and disable EAP authentication - both in the advanced settings). Virtualbox’s USB support was enabled with a single line in /etc/fstab

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=123,devmode=664 0 0

and it now works flawlessly. I had an issue with Skype and sound (again) which I now seem to have resolved - skype seemed determined to set sound settings to 0 for some reason - overriding that has resolved the issue.

Other changes: the wonderful (Quick)Synergy tool to share keyboard and mouse between computers is less clunky. Bluetooth support now works well - beforehand it was a bit iffy. Hibernate almost works (I thinkI will get it to work with a bit of playing as it isn’t crashing horribly the way it used to) and so on. None of these things are big issues but they were niggles and now the niggles have almost all gone. There has been only one new niggle - for some reason my Mindterm Java SSH client seems to have a line spacing issue which I can’t figure out and it now seems to display with lines separated by a half line of padding.

So to conclude, Ubuntu’s latest release is really good and worth trying. For people who haven’t used linux it is a viable alternative which some earlier versions haven’t quite been. For people who have used Linux the upgrade means just about everything “just works” the way it should do.

There is, of course, much outrage - particularly because Amazon’s “glitch” excuse simply fails to meet the usual definition of a glitch. This problem seems to have started in February if not last year and to have gradually ramped up over the last couple of days. All in all this doesn’t sound like a “glitch” so much as a major software failure that has been exploited by humans.

I’m not alone in this basic viewpont, it seems to be shared by Information Week’s Mitch Wagner amongst others. Indeed there are some livejournal posts that indicate that the explot is the work of either a single hacker or a small group.

However the issue is not so much whether it is a hack or a concerted group so muchas to shine a light onto a what may be an architectural weakness of Amazon’s site. Amazon basically relies on site visitors to provide tags and to flag things as objectionable. It seems likely that for the most part these flags and tags pass through the Amazon system with no human supervision. This is probably partly because there are simply too many for a single human to verify and partly because for legal liabilty reasons Amazon found it better to not have someone make a corporate decision on the matter of “objectionable material”.

If the problem is indeed that people are gaming the system then fixing it while retaining the benefits of the “wisdom of crowds” approach that helps Amazon scale so well is going to be hard to fix - indeed it may be impossible. I’m sure that Amazon programmers are busy rolling back the auto-objectionable code and that someone is about to permit “objectionable” material back into the Amazon ranking systems but that is a short term fix and doesn’t solve the problem that Amazon faces regarding people not wishing to see “objectionable” content.

This problem is partly caused by the fact that different people have very different ideas about what is “objectionable” so no large group of people will ever agree. However it is exacerbated by the fact that Amazon attempts to present a single storeface to all. The situation then gets huge visibility because Amazon is such a major reseller that books often depend on Amazon ranking and Amazon visibility for success. Thus removing certain works from the ranking scheme is bound to get those associated with the works in question very worked up because they can see their revenue disappearing into a rankless desert.

The first, a report by Information Gatekeepers Inc. highlights the recent very rapid increase in sales of “Active Optical Cables” and makes predictions of dramatic future growth.

The second reports that EMCORE Corp., has received a patent award for its Active Optical Cable technology. US Patent No. 7,494,287 B2 with “…broad claims covers all fibre-optic active cable applications…”.

Of course the industry is not short of reports that claim exponential future growth for almost every conceivable technology. In the past most of these seem to have been based on minimal actual data and maximal imagination. However, this time the claims seem credible.

The concept of an “Active Optical Cable” is so simple it is almost trivial. You integrate optical transceivers into the ends of an optical cable and provide standard electronic interfaces to connect to user equipment. With recent improvements in optical transceivers this has become relatively easy. At very high speeds (above 10 Gbps) Copper cables are problematic even in short distance applications. Fibre is lighter, easier, offers very greatly extended distances and solves the problems associated with “ground loops”. Most existing equipment has copper interfaces built into it so an AOC can just “plug-in” without change to existing equipment.

Initially applications are for relatively short-distances (a few 10’s of metres) such as interconnection of high-performance computers, servers, routers etc. within a central computer complex. Such high-performance complexes are no longer the sole preserve of the pure R&D and scientific world but are increasingly being adopted by businesses for applications such as simulation, modelling and computer-aided design. However, one supplier is reported to be targeting longer-distance applications and is reported to have announced AOC’s of up to 3km in length. Of course, you don’t really want to “pull” a cable that has bulky integrated equipment on its ends through a long and convoluted cable-way either. Importantly, AOC’s can mitigate the reluctance of many users to install fibre. To many users fibre seems difficult to use and if familiar copper will do the job then why change?

Someone designing an AOC can design the whole link (transceivers, fibre, connectors etc) to optimise its cost/performance without needing to be constrained by “industry standards” or what other suppliers are doing - all you have to do is conform to the electronic interfaces at the cable ends. This should encourage rapid innovation and development. A potential disadvantage is that centralised Network Management systems do not get access to detailed performance and management information (error rates etc.) as seen on the optical segment of the link. At the distances involved this may not matter.

The worrying part is the “broad claim” of a patent. If this patent is for the detail of a particular implementation then it should be applauded. If it is for the overall concept then we have yet another example of the patenting of a very obvious generic principle. The principle of replacing an “electronic” link with something else even by use of devices integrated within the cable has been in wide use for many years. I have not been able to find sufficient detail to decide. But it’s a worry.

Of course the AOC market may well have a limited lifetime. When computer-room equipment becomes routinely available with optical interfaces built-in then advantage of AOC’s will vanish. In the meantime which may well be 5 or more years there seems to be a market there.

Microsoft may be on its way to vanquishing Linux in the war to dominate netbook operating systems, but the ground could be shifting against Windows.

An NPD Retail Tracking Service report states the Windows installation rate on netbooks has grown from 10 per cent in the first half of 2008 to 96 per cent in February 2009.

Unsurprisingly the Register reports that various Microsoft PR folk are making a lot of noise about this but there are some definite hints that this celebration may be ever so slightly premature. The Register points out that Netbooks tend to run Windows XP as opposed to Vista. It is not clear to anyone whether these Netbooks will be able to handle a build of Windows 7 and Windows XP is anticipated to be retired in the near future.

Secondly there is the problem of the major mobile networks. These operators have seen how the iPhone (not a running a Microsoft OS) has driven data traffic growth, and how popular 3G dataplans are for netbook users. They are looking at producing branded netbooks sold with a multiyear contract at a subsidized price. These may well not run windows for a couple of reasons. Firstly the operators hate ceding control and may well find more lock in opportunities with a linux based OS (e.g. Google’s Android) and secondly there is the cost. Linux allows them a $50-$100 saving which leads to either higher margins or lower monthly pricing on their netbook+contract prices.

That is not the only issue. There is also the question of netbooks that boot Linux AND Windows. We saw an LG version of this as MWC in Barcelona and Asustek has also announced products that do this. To be sure the Linux version booted is limited in functionality but it takes 5-10 seconds to start up whereas Windows takes a couple of miniutes or more. For travellers on the move it makes sense to boot to Linux for simple tasks during short periods of time between needing to stop work.

This dual boot feature may end up being a Linux trojan horse because after a while users may start wondering what exactly is the benefit of the Microsoft OS and applications.

We have two about LTE, which was definitely one of the hot topics at the show. The first is T-Mobile’s demo of LTE handover and performance: Click here to view the embedded video.

The second is LG’s terminal (which features in the first one), showing more details of LTE terminal capabilities and plans:Click here to view the embedded video.

There were a few quite impressive handsets on the show. We tried to get footage of the Google Android phone at the HTC booth (and again at T-Mobile) but no one was willing to demo the phone to us, so while it looked good and was obviously feature rich, it was hard for us to figure out what its best features really were. As an example of a “cool” phone, well demoed, here is the Samsung Ultratouch phone demo:Click here to view the embedded video.

The Nokia booth was particularly crowded so it was hard to get good footage. I think we succeeded with the Nokia Maps demo:Click here to view the embedded video.

The Nokia Music demo was rather less good. But Nokia’s music plans were interesting enough that we decided to keep it despite the background noise:Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s it for this year. Next year we’ll figure out how to do it better, and maybe even figure out how to make scene transitions and other tricks with the editing software. It has to be said, though, that this whole process was surprisingly straightforward.

IBM has more cloud and virtualization experience than any other company simply because many of the concepts used today were pioneered on IBM mainframes decades ago and its blue chip status and general air of reliability means that the trust issues about cloud computing are reduced. Hence IBM’s success in getting customers to sign up to its cloud computing initiatives.

The PC World article mentions IBM using Juniper APIs for network traffic engineering which doesn’t seem like a very strong tie. One suspects that IBM will be suggesting that henceforth its sales partners look at using Juniper rather than Cisco when asked to provide networking gear for the cloud.

The campaign failed miserably. By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world, according to the media measurement firm BigChampagne, turning it into a visible symbol of Hollywood’s helplessness against the growing problem of online video piracy.

It is no doubt true that Dark Knight was widely downloaded over the internet for free. However what the NY Times fails to mention is that Dark Knight was the largest grossing movie of 2008 and the second largest domestic (US) ever behind Titanic.

Given this commercial success could it not be the case that the downloads actually helped sales? In other situations this kind of downloading popularity is something that marketing executives and publiscists dream of because it is the heart of their “viral marketing” campaigns. The article goes on to note that many studios are now deliberately making shows available on line and mentions YouTube and other video sharing sites and notes that:

[M]edia companies are [...] losing the battle over illicit copies of full-length TV episodes and films. The Motion Picture Association of America says that illegal downloads and streams are now responsible for about 40 percent of the revenue the industry loses annually as a result of piracy.

This claim seems somewhat disingenuous. The revenue “lost” is a nominal sum arrived at by calculating what revenue might be obtained if every download were a $10 movie ticketor $15 DVD and ignores the obvious fact that people simply would not watch content if they had to pay $10 for it. Indeed giving stuff away for free (the time tested technique of the free sample used since the days of 1001 Arabian nights) is a highly regarded marketing technique and one that works remarkably well in the digital age. Monty Python recently created a dedicated YouTube channel where official copies of their output can be seen by one and all for free. This move caused considerable buzz (i.e. viral marketing) and the result is that their DVD sales increased by 23,000% at Amazon.

The NY Times says that some prefer to call movie/music piracy “digital theft”, pardon me if I suggest that actually it might be better known as “Unauthorized Viral Marketing”.

However now the price of serious amounts of memory and storage (flash drives at a few Euros/dollars/swiss francs/pounds per gigabyte and gigabytes of DRAM similarly priced) means that we ought to be able to cache “most recently used” stuff locally and rely on the cloud as a repository of the rest. Until recently all this was irrelevant because the only platform we could use was the laptop with its large hard disk, Windows OS, Microsoft Office suite and comparatively limited battery life. Given the full service Windows OS and Office suite there really wasn’t much incentive in Web 2.0 / cloud versions of basic office productivity software.

Now, however, we have the netbook. Netbooks are frequently linux based and hence don’t have Microsoft Outlook/ Word etc. They also have less memory/storage compared to today’s laptops (perhaps about the same as was common 3-5 years ago) and most important of all they cost a LOT less. They also weigh a lot less and are thus ideal for business trips. Their real drawback though is that they are underpowered and so when back in the office the user wants his real computer - and thus faces the “Sync” challenge.

This combination means that ideal solution is some kind of cloud computing with offline storage. And Google is now able to offer this for Gmail accounts. Not only that but it offers “flaky” mode support for travellers with intermittent internet access. As someone who was recently in that situation I can say that this looks like a real winner.

It may also be the bullet that kills Microsoft. But that is the subject of a separate post

Firefox3

A friend of mine who is in the process of renewing his British passport discovered this gem. It seems that sometimes you end up going to http://ips.gov.uk/ and sometimes to http://www.ips.gov.uk/ when dealing with the passport service. If by some mischance you end up at the former address and then want to use a service that requires SSL (such as the application tracker) then you get a warning about an invalid SSL certificate.

I’m highlighting this example because it is current but it is far from alone. For many sites the www is optional (at Extendance’s sites this is the case too for the most part) and increasingly visitors are not typing the “www”. The DNS will return the same IP address for the two options (with and without www) and the web server is able to provide identical pages. Unfortunately for SSL certificates this is not the case - the www means the two are different hosts and hence need separate SSL certificates.

There are plenty of workarounds (e.g. automatic redirects, two certificates) so it should be easy to fix. This means it is especially embarrassing for large government departments to not get it right.