HackingCough
A blog by Chris Edwards
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Modern gaming
Some 25 years ago, I played a game called Elite on the BBC Micro. Some people still go a bit misty-eyed over it, recalling happy days when spaceships that looked like coathangers were the bleeding-edge in terms of computer game realism. The game picked up a lot of fans because, unlike others on the …
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Phishing with MindMeister? Er, um, why not?
I've no idea whether this is a phish or just a regular bit of pharma spam as the site at the other end of the link has keeled over. But it shows yet another salvo in the war between spammers and the rest of the world, and brings us closer to the point where Bayesian spam filters will hit the buffers …
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Endless endless
Take two Macs running Screen Sharing and someone who couldn't be bothered to cross the office to put a laptop to sleep and this is what happens. I'd been scanning some notebook pages to park in DevonThink - using Screen Sharing to control the scanner software because the laptop was physically closer …
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Why synthesise when you can edit?
If there is a difference between synthetic biology and plain old genetic engineering, it is one of scale. Genetic engineering typically relies on just adding a gene here or there. Synthetic biology is about working on big chunks of the genome - inserting or deleting entire sections. As a result, it …
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Pre-Raphaelites: the Horrible Histories version
Anyone trying to dramatise the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has my sympathy. At first glance, the project seems to have everything you need for post-watershed TV: sex; glamour; tragedy. It also has too many characters, most of them pretty unsympathetic gits, not afraid to do a bit of Vict …
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The NHS. It's made of...people
The Office of Life Sciences Blueprint for the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is a remarkable document. It's found a way to turn the nation's single largest consumer of public funds into a profit centre. Although the blandly worded manifesto for a technologically led healthcare system will probab …
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Reasons for going x86 in Chrome OS? There may be some
One thing that's been niggling at me all day on Google's Chrome OS is: if everything just runs in a browser-based sandbox, why bother with an x86 port? You are, on average, going to pay more for an x86-based machine than one based around an equivalent ARM processor for the simple reason that ARM lic …
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What makes cells tick? Genes or mysterious fields we can't detect?
In the spirit of scientific wagers that saw Richard Feynman bet against micromachining and Steven Hawking reject the idea of Cygnus X-1 harbouring a black hole, Professor Lewis Wolpert has staked a case of port that maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake is wrong about the role of the genome in determi …
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Come on Google, wave those arms! Flap them like you really mean it
Techcrunch calls Google's announcement of an operating system designed to run precisely one application a nuclear bomb on Microsoft. A commenter further down tones it down a bit: "a bullet aimed at Microsoft". Or maybe it's a fart in the general direction of Redmond, WA? The Techcrunch claim is bas …
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The long-term danger of a short-term effect
I was going to write on the insidious effect of search-engine optimisation (SEO) on communication but Read/Write Web basically wrote the first half of it for me: "It's happening to more and more of the blogs I read: the personality, quirkiness and unique voice that once made them so appealing to m …
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Free fall
Malcolm Gladwell's lengthy demolition of Chris Anderson's latest book Free has given Gladwell's review a lot more attention than the book itself. Google Blog Search turned up an estimated 8000 hits for "gladwell anderson review free new yorker". Even given Google's legendary inaccuracy in calculatin …
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Nokia plays catchup with Intel deal
The Intel/Nokia deal that will see the two companies work on Linux-based software for mobiles is both good and bad news for Microsoft. But it's a real problem for Nokia's own Symbian group. When you consider that the Symbian OS started life as a mobile internet device (MID) operating system and muta …
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Moore's Law is dead. Long live Moore's Law
Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst at iSuppli, has stuck his neck out and called the end of Moore's Law as an economic driver in 2014. He hasn't said development has to stop technologically, more that the costs will not outweigh the advantages of going further than the 20nm or 18nm node. He is …
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If it stands or if it crumbles only time will tell
The Stretta Procedure on Tom Oberheim's revival of the SEM analogue synthesiser: "The recent introduction of Tom Oberheim's SEM re-issue sparked a spirited debate on the sonic differences between surface mount and through-hole components..." You have got to be kidding me. No, wait. This is world w …
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Bi curious
This has to be the candidate for the shortest web URL evah. I clicked on a heavily truncated link in Twitter to be delivered to a site with a working web server with the internet's own version of the programmer's Hello World message: "It works!" Nothing very special about that other than the fact t …
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Intel and the Wind River acquisition
Silicon and software marriages, particularly in embedded systems, have never been very happy affairs. Freescale Semiconductor bought several software tools companies in its time and has vacillated between having its own software operation and letting third parties do the job. The problem is that sil …
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Dear Jacqui
Dear Jacqui Smith c/o the Home Office, I thought I'd better send you a little note on some of my recent Internet usage in advance of the creation of the great Panopticon that HM Government plans to assemble with the help of ISPs (BTW, did you know Phorm does the kind of thing you're after? Maybe yo …
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"HELLO!? I'M IN THE MARATHON!"
I don't think Tommo (it's what it said on the back of his shirt) meant to sound just like Dom Joly but as he came through the surging mass of runners between Charlton and Greenwich on the London Marathon, it was hard to think of anyone else as he shouted into his phone: "I'm at the five-mile point!" …
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Acer goes for a bit of Wii, er, Cywee, er...action
Acer held a demo session for its upcoming AspireRevo, based on the combination of an Atom processor and the nVidia 9400M graphics processor earlier today. At the same time, the company showed the 3D wireless controller it was going to ship with the top-end model for around 300 quid: a Wiimote-style …
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Where's the science in computer science?
Back in the 1980s as I was thinking about what to do at university, I was told that doing a Computing A-level was a bad idea if I was going on to do Computer Science as a degree. It was all academic as I wound up picking chemistry in a process that wasn't much more deterministic than flipping a coin …
HackingCough
