No speaker notes for today – most of it was done off the cuff after the Apple launch. But if you missed it live, you can download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Today on Radio New Zealand National I’ll talk about how to keep your computer backed up. It’s not a hard thing to do. I’ll also have a few other tidbits from the world of technology.

I’ll be on air after the 11am news, and soon afterwards the you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: So, about backing up our computers. That’s one of the things we all ought to do.

A: Absolutely. Let’s just recap how a computer’s hard drive works – that’s the part of it that keeps your files, photographs etc – it consists of one or more discs of magnetically sensitive material, quite like the stuff that recording tape is made of. The disc spins very fast, and it’s read from and written to by a tiny read/write head – actually a very small electromagnet – mounted on an arm which lets it move from the edge of the disc to the centre. By moving the arm and waiting for the disc to rotate the computer can get the read/write head to any part of the disc. Now here’s the risky part. Not only does the disc move very fast, up to 10,000 rpm, but the read/write head on the arm – also moving – has to very close to the surface of the disc for it to work. Now imagine what happens if the read/write head touches the disc.

Q: What does happen?

A: At a minimum, the disc is scratched and the information in the scratched area is damaged or lost. We used to say that the disc head had gone farming, because it ploughed a furrow in the disk. In the worst case, the disk cracks then just disintegrates under the tremendous centrifugal force its experiencing.

Q: It flies apart?

A: Yes. There is not much hope of getting any of your information back if that happens.

Q: What if the damage was more minor?

A: You will still lose part or all of what’s on your hard drive if that happens, and recovering what’s there will be an uncertain and expensive business. Look for Computer Forensics in Google and you’ll find some companies who might be able to help – but their services are not cheap.

Q: What sort of thing could you lose if your computer disc fails?

A: Those of us who run businesses on our computers mostly realize how painful that could be if we lost our files. It might prevent us getting our work done, lose track of what we are owed, or even put us out of business altogether.

But even for most people who don’t run a business on the computer – imagine how distressing to would be to irretrievably lose all your photographs, maybe of your children or your grandchildren as they grew up. Or all the CDs you have put into your computer – legally of course, over the years. Or just the archive of all the email you have sent and received, if you are like me and keep all that kind of thing.

Q: How do you back your computer up?

A: It used to be pretty tedious, frankly. You used to have to burn the computers contents to writeable DVDs or CDs, or in the dark ages – floppy disks. Thankfully we have far better mechanisms available to us now. The best way is to use an external hard drive and copy the entire contents of your computer’s hard drive to it.

Q: An external hard drive?

A: These are things about the size of a paperback book. They plug into your computer’s USB sockets. Some of them have an external power supply as well. They cost about $200 depending on size. You should get one that’s bigger than your computer’s drive, preferably twice as big. You can get them in 1 or 2 terabyte sizes these days. A Terabyte is a thousand Gigabytes, which is comfortably more than most computers’ hard drives, so that’s not a problem.

Then you need some software. Many of the hard drives come with some archiving software. If you use Windows, make sure that the software runs on your particular flavour of Windows, say XP, Vista or 7.

If you use a Mac – you don’t need any more software, provided you are on Leopard or Snow Leopard. They both have Apple’s really slick backup and archiving software called Time Machine built in. If you don’t have at least Leopard or Snow Leopard – get with the programme. Time Machine is worth the upgrade cost alone.

If you are on Linux, have a look at a program called “Back in Time” which gives some of Time Machine’s capability.

Links

A disk crash. Don’t let one ruin your whole year, and backup regularly. Use a USB hard drive like this one. Backup software for Windows and Linux. For Mac users it’s built-in.

Read below the “more” for my speaker notes, or download the audio as ogg or mp3.Technology slot with Colin Jackson for Thursday 23rd April 2009

Q: Energy – do computers use a lot of energy?

A: The short answer – not very much in most home situations, but it depends how much compute power you have and how old your computers are..

Q: So an average PC in a home?

A: Up to a few hundred watts while it’s running – less for many machines.

Q: We just leave them running, don’t we?

A: Yes, that is rather the point of having a broadband Internet connection – that you can just walk up to your computer and check email instantly, or anything else that takes your fancy, without having to wait for a computer to start up. Modern computers all have a ‘sleep’ mode and you should always set this up to operate automatically on any machine that’s not a server.

Q: So why do computers use power – what do they do with it?

A: The short answer is that they turn it into heat. And some scientists say that’s inevitable – there’s a thing called Landauer’s principle, named after an IBM scientist. Landauer’s principle says that, if you destroy information you increase entropy, which means effectively that something will get hot. This is the consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That law says that the amount of entropy in a system tends to increase, and entropy means disorder. In physical systems, disorder is heat. Incidentally, this law is called “Time’s Arrow” by some, because it points to an inevitable irreversible degeneration of the universe, as it becomes more and more disordered.

The processes used inside computer chips to manipulate information involve keeping some bits of information and getting rid of some other bits. So, as well processing information, they are destroying some, which leads to heat being generated by the processing chips. Now, in a modern computer, there are many chips, but just two which are likely to be subject to this effect – that’s the main processor chip and possibly another one which is a specialist chip to drive the screen. Both of these chips have millions or probably billions of transistors on them and each of those may destroy information as the process it, so these chips get hot.

If you look under the covers of a modern computer, you won’t be able to see the main processor chip because its covered in a large lump of metal, called a heat sink, which has cooling fins and generally a fan attached to it to help keep it cool. If you let the chip get too hot it fries and your computer’s no more good – hence the fan. And your computer will probably have other fans in it to help shed the heat. A good rule of thumb as to whether a computer is an energy hog is: just how noisy is it? Would I be happy to have this machine running in my bedroom? You should aim to get as quiet a machine as you can.

Q: So what uses the energy – the computer getting hot or the fans to get rid of the heat?

A: Both do. That’s one of life’s ironies, really – we don’t actually want the heat in the computer, it’s wasteful and damaging, and we have to spend yet more energy – in turn generating more heat and noise, to get the heat away from the computer.

If you go into a data centre – that’s a room or a building that exists to house computer servers – there’s a few things you’ll notice straightaway about the racks of equipment. Firstly, it’s quite noisy – every machine has fans in, and its usually fairly chilly because there are some really big air-conditioning units spread around the walls. Racks of computer servers can consume a lot of power, and that almost all ends up as heat that the air conditioning has to get rid of. And the air conditioning itself uses as much energy, or more than the machines its trying to keep cool. A modest data centre might use a megawatt, say, which would be enough for hundreds of homes. Bigger ones use tens of megawatts. This is serious amounts of power.

Q: What about the impact on the environment?

A: There are valid concerns about this. A couple of years ago, someone tried to estimate the energy consumption of the Internet. Now, I’m not qualified to check his figures, but they are quite alarming. He found that the Internet was responsible for over 8% of the US energy bill, and over 5% of the world’s energy bill. Frankly, those figures seem high to me. And they don’t allow for all the activities that would take place if people weren’t using the Internet – like flying to meetings instead of meeting by Skype or email.

The cost of running these data centres isn’t cheap either. They need to be sited in locations where they can get good power. Building them is expensive. Companies are trying to be a bit innovative about this. Google has a patent on a offshore data barge – they have a vision for a floating data centre, out where it doesn’t pay land rent or property rates, using power it gets from the waves. I’m not sure if that will ever happen. And Microsoft has announced that it is building its data centres out of shipping containers – they fit up a container in a standard configuration full of racks and what-have-you, then they can move containers in an out as they need.

Q: What advice can you people about reducing the power costs of their computers?

A: Get modern machines and don’t buy more power than you need. You might be the sort of person who enjoys driving a V8 and you’re prepared to pay the fuel costs, but many people just want to get form A to B in a car that suits their needs without using petrol than they have to. So, unless you are into online gaming or movie editing, don’t buy machines that are touted as suitable for those activities. Laptops tend to use less power than desktops, so remember that when choosing.

If you have any old style glass tube computer screens left, consider replacing them with LCD panels. Panels use far less energy, they don’t take up as much room and they are far easier on your eyes.

Unless you have an energy guzzling machine, I wouldn’t turn it off most of the time. They use almost no power unless they are active. But you do need to set it up so the computer will go to sleep after you’ve ignored it for 15 minutes. That’s easy to do, look for Power Management in Control Panel on a Windows machine or in System Preferences on a Mac, and I’ve linked up some instructions in today’s links.

Links

2006 white paper on PC energy consumption, and another about home computers. Top ten ways to save energy if you have computers.

The Internet is estimated to use 5% of global energy. Hmmm.

How to engage power management in Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X

Landauer’s Principle and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Google patents the offshore data barge, and Microsoft is building it’s servers into shipping containers

Listen live at 11:05 or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: Anything else for use this week?

A: Londoners can’t use their mobiles on the London Underground, that’s the tube to its friends. The technology exists to make the mobiles work, but its not going to happen, in the short term anyway.

Q: Would you want someone next to you yapping on their mobile?

A: Would you be able to hear it? The tube is such a noisy place that I don’t know how you’d hear a mobile phone if it was next to your ear!

Q: Is there any thought of making mobiles work on aircraft?

A: I wouldn’t rule it out. It’s technically possible to modify an aircraft so that mobiles could safely be used, but it would be expensive, because you’d have to use satellites to get the signal in and out. And again, do you want to be sat in economy next to someone yammering away? I don’t think this one will fly!

Q: OK – anything else for us today?

A: A good article in the Herald called “How to tell if your machine is infected”. This is a serious issue on the Internet today – people taking over your computer and using it for their own nefarious ends like sending spam. The article gives some signs that this has happened – your system keeps going slowly for a while, or you have dozens of popup ads you just cant get rid of, or you keep ending up at web sites you didn’t intend to visit.

If this is your computer, try getting it scanned. There are several sites on the web that will do this for free, and they may be able to clear up the mess. The only guaranteed way to get it clear, though, is to reload your operating system and all your software from scratch, which is an arduous business and not for the faint hearted. You’d need to back your data up first, of course – you should be doing that anyway.

Q: Sounds scary!

A: It is, a little. The second best way to avoid this kind of thing is to make sure you are running up to date system security software, like Norton, McAfee or Kaspersky. You need to pay for this, and keep paying to keep it up to date. It’s a royal pain. One of the antivirus, called AVG, has a free version which provides a basic level of protection.

Q: You said that’s the second-best way?

A: The best way is not to use the same operating system as everyone else. Use Linux or a Mac and you won’t need to worry about security, or at least not to worry as much as Windows users.

Q: So what do you really want to talk about today?

A: What drives the pricing of desktop software? Unlike physical goods, software has upfront development costs but very little cost of producing each copy. So the traditional cost-based model that we use for, say, cars doesn’t apply. The competition for Microsoft Office, say, is mainly from the free OpenOffice, although the (also free) Google Docs, which runs on Google’s servers rather than on your computer, is getting some attention. Another paid alternative is Apple’s iWork suite which goes for a lot less than Microsoft Office but only runs on Apple hardware. So, the price of Microsoft Office is staying high despite the availability of free competition. That’s a neat trick, and its achieved mainly through the fear of re-training costs and incompatibility. Incidentally, its why Office is available for home users at a far lower cost than it is for commercial users.

But, the question for those of us who use software is: what drives the price? And, how can we justify using software with any kind of price tag in today’s environment when free software is available? That’s particularly a question for CIOs as they see their budgets slashed in the recession. And it’s very relevant to government, which buys an enormous amount of desktop software – so much so that it tries to negotiate specific government wide deals with the main vendors, in an attempt to control its software costs.

The French Police force has recently converted to Ubuntu Linux. A quote from their CIO, Lieutenant Colonel Xavier Guimard:

“Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”

The German Foreign Ministry converted some time ago. Last year I met the man who had taken that decision, a diplomat named Rolf Schuster. He said that cost of maintenance – not just the purchase price – had proved to be much lower than running pay-for software.

Q: Is this happening here?

A: Not yet, but you’d have to hope that the government will take notice and realize that there is some real money to be saved here. You would think that the government would appreciate spending modest amounts of support dollars on local companies to help them with open source rather than remitting a far larger amount overseas in licence fees.

One last thing – Terry Waite has come out in support of Gary McKinnon. Most people will remember Terry Waite as the former Church of England envoy who spent several years locked up in Beirut. We’ve mentioned McKinnon before, as well – he’s a British man who in about 2001 went looking into US military computers to feed his obsession about UFOs and cover ups. It was stunningly easy for him to get in – they mostly had very simple obvious passwords. And he left little messages saying that their security was rubbish – that’s probably what cooked his goose. Anyway, the Brits have agreed to extradite him to the US where he will face a probably lifetime in jail. He’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s, and its clear he doesn’t have the same grasp on reality as the rest of us. A list of celebrities from Terry Waite to Boris Johnson have come out in his support and say he shouldn’t be sent to the US.

Links

Mobes on the Tube? Not going to happen.

IBM trying to buy Sun?

How to tell if your machine is infected. If you are worried, scan your PC.

How to reinstall Windows XP or Vista.

Windows security software – a ‘must have’ if you run Windows. This mostly costs money, but there is a free but basic suite.

French Police save millions by switching to Linux

German Foreign Ministry goes to Linux – ‘it’s far cheaper to maintain’

The trials of Gary McKinnon.

Foo is an amazing experience. It’s so energising to be there with scientists, geeks, and artists. And Nathan, Jenine and Russell do a fine job in organising it.

Part of the deal with Foo is that everyone presents (“no passengers”). I’m going to talk about “Hacking Government”. It seems that the geek community is quite bad at telling government what it wants, in a way that government actually responds to. Perhaps we can start to deal with that.

Now, the same team has started a new project – BloodhoundSSC. They want to break their own record and get up to 1,000mph on land. Wow!

Read on for my speaking notes or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: So, what have you for us today?

A: The land speed record, of course! But first, a couple of stories about the world’s favourite Scottish restaurant.

The first one is about a patent that the Golden Arches chain has just received in the US:

The present invention relates to a sandwich assembly tool and methods of making a sandwich, which may be a hot or cold sandwich, quickly by pre-assembly of various sandwich components and simultaneous preparation of different parts of the same sandwich. The sandwich assembly tool is composed of a member preferably having one or two cavities for containing a quantity of garnish. The cavities are used for the assembly of the sandwich. The tool may have a raised ridge adjacent one or both cavities for placement against the hinge of a bread component. Methods of making a sandwich] are disclosed. The methods may include one or more of the use of preassembled sandwich fillings, assembly of garnishes in advance of a customer’s order or while ether portions of the sandwich are being heated using the sandwich assembly tool, the simultaneous heating of a bread component and the sandwich filling, placing the bread component over the tool containing garnish, and inverting the tool and bread combination to deposit the sandwich garnish onto the bread component.

In other words, McDonalds has patented a machine for making a sandwich. Hmm.

Q: Can you do that?

A: Apparently. It even comes with a flowchart. You’d think that someone will take this on, on the grounds that its obvious and that sandwich have been around for years, but that’s an expensive lawsuit to fight.

Q: And the other story?

A: Ah yes. It seems there’s a couple called Philip and Tina Sherman who live, or lived, in Lafayette Arkansas. He left his phone in a McDonalds. He rang the staff there and told them to lock it up until he could come back for it. He was very insistent about that, and – this whole think is the subject of a lawsuit, so I had better start using words like “allege” – and it appears that someone on the restaurant staff’s curiosity got the better of them, and they went through the contents of the telephone.

Q: What was on the phone?

A: Apparently Tina had been sending racy pictures of herself to her husband’s cell phone. There was quite a collection. And, of course, there was her name, address and telephone number. The pictures and the contact details found their way somehow onto the Internet.

Q: What happened next?

A: The Sherman’s claim that this has ruined their lives and that they have had to move to get away from the unwanted attention. They have sued McDonalds for 3 million dollars.

Q: So, tell us about the land speed record

A: I first became seriously aware of the whole thing in about 1997 when some British guys were gearing up to try to run a supersonic car. The leader of the project was the existing record holder, a guy called Richard Noble, who had in 1983 set a record of 633mph – that’s a whisker over 1,000 kph – in 1983 in a car called Thrust2.

Q: was this a jet car?

A: Yes. It had a turbojet, which is what we would today regard as a very primitive form of jet engine. The engine came from an RAF lightning, some people may remember the classic angular Lightning with a pointed nose. It was one of those engines, and they were originally designed in 1945. So, a very old jet engine, but with it he beat everything to date.

Anyway, the Americans had held the land speed record since 1963 with the first record breaking jet car – that was called Spirit of America and was driven by a man called Craig Breedlove, and he’s still around looking at re-breaking the record. Before the first jet car, the record had been held by a succession of Britons driving ordinary piston engined cars, on the Bonneville Salt flats or at Daytona Beach. Those piston engined cars topped out at less than 400 miles an hour – which is still horrendously fast, of course, and it has been jet cars and a rocket car that have held the record since.

Then a series of jet cars driven by Americans held the record through the sixties, and rocket powered car took the record in 1970 and it stayed there until 1983 when Richard Noble took it with Thrust2.

Q: What happened to the first car called Thrust?

A: I think it died under testing on an aircraft runway in the UK.

Q: So, what happened after 1983?

A: Some of the Americans really wanted the record back, but they couldn’t beat Noble’s record. But it was clear that, sooner or later, one of them was going to take the record again, and Noble didn’t want that. So, he did the only sensible thing under the circumstances, and built a new car to break his own record. And in 1997, that was when I became aware of the whole thing.

Q: How did you fid out about it?

A: On the Internet, of course! The Internet was a lot smaller then, and it was unusual for people to use it seriously. And many, or most, of the people on it were geekier than the average Internet user today.

And people like me would check the web site for this project every day. I was fascinated by the whole endeavour and the sheer adventure of it. I followed them as they looked for a desert where they could run this thing, as they proved the technology in the car, and as they finally transported it to the Black Rock Desert in Utah where it finally did its record breaking run.

The Internet was key to them – even in those early days. When they ran out of money, as they did several times, they put messages on their website seeking small donations from fans, and they got those and kept the project running. It was a real example of a community built around the record breaking attempt, of people who wanted to see this thing succeed, but also were just reveling in the sheer attempt.

I well remember logging on to read that they had succeeded – they had got the car to go supersonic on land and broken the land speed record. To break the record you have to do two passes along a measured track, once in each direction, and there are various other structures. Essentially the record is a speed that is sustained for some time. ThrustSSC first went supersonic on a day that it couldn’t do two passes, but it claimed the record two days later, officially timed at 760 mph or over 1200 kph.

Q: Who drives these things?

A: ThrustSSC’s driver is a fighter pilot called Andy Green.

This isn’t the end of the story, though. The record still stands, but Richard Noble wants to take it further again. He’s planning a new record breaking car to be called Bloodhound SSC, with a rocket engine and a jet engine. They are targeting 1,000 mph for this car. Remember, the existing record is around 730mph. That’s a huge jump.

There are some pretty serious technical problems with this of course. One is about finding somewhere big enough to do it. Even with the car accelerating and decelerating at 2 to 3 g they need 10-15 kilometres of clear flat surface. The team is scouting round the world at the moment looking for somewhere.

Then there is the issue with going supersonic. The point about going supersonic is that the air doesn’t just get out your way like it does at lower speeds – you have to manually shove every molecule of air because now sound wave of your passing has reached it yet. That leads to some very tricky aerodynamics which aren’t well understood.

And then there’s just building wheels which hold together under the strain – the edges of the wheels will be trying to fly apart at 50,000g.

Q: Who is supporting this?

It’s being given a lot of support by Paul Drayson, a British Minister who’s also a racing driver himself. He’s at pains to point out that there’s no public money going into the thing, it will all be private sponsorship.

Drayson justifies this by saying it will rekindle interest in the engineering challenges and energise a new generation of Britons to take up science and engineering. They are using the world “adventure” about the whole thing. But I think the last work should go to Richard Noble, the man who has driven a record breaker and made the supersonic car. He tells a story of walking through one of the corridors of Parliament in the UK, and getting stopped by one of the Parliamentary Police, who told him how much he admired Noble for the record breaking and how it had made his son change his degree from something advertising related to engineering. That’s what Drayson and Noble both want to achieve.

Wikipedia on the Land Speed Record.

The website of the 1998 record breaker, ThrustSSC, and of the 2011 hopeful, BloodhoundSSC, and a BBC article about it all.

Read on for my speaking notes, or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Sound clip – 21 seconds from “Blade Runner”, supplied as seenthings.mp3

Q: And you’re going to tell us why you played that clip?

A: Ah yes, it’s a bit of tortured link. That was of course from the film Blade Runner – it’s the final speech of the humanoid robot which has been hunted through the film. In Blade Runner, and in the Philip K Dick novel the film is based on, they use the term “replicant” for the robot because you can’t tell it from a person. Most other science fiction uses the term “android” – and that’s the name of Google’s new mobile phone platform.

Q: So the android is a phone?

A: No, it’s a platform. We’ve talked before how, with smart phones, there are a few groups of phones which will run programs that can be added to the phone later – and these programs need to be written for the correct group. So, if you write something for, say, the Symbian operating system which powers a lot of high end Nokias, it won’t run on the iPhone, or the Blackberry, or Windows Mobile, without a lot of surgery. Each of those groups of phones forms a smart phone platform.

Q: So the Android is one of those?

A: Yes. It’s not a phone – although you can buy a phone running Android now – its effectively a piece of software, an operating system, and a specification for the hardware manufacturers to build to. And Google has released the software – the Android operating system free – it did that a little while ago. What has just happened is that the first phone built using the Android operating software has come onto the market.

Q: So how does this differ from, say, the iPhone?

A: It’s a completely open platform. The iPhone is quite locked down so only Apple can approve programs that work on it. So, third parties can and do write programs to run on the iPhone, Apple gets to approve whether they can run on iPhones. Apple say they do that for quality control purposes, and its clear from applications that they have rejected that quality control is part of it, but also Apple are rejecting anything they think competes with their own software. They won’t approve a music player, for instance, because the iPhone has Apple’s own iPod and iTunes software built into it. So this means that Apple are keeping a tight grip on the platform.

Q: Is that bad?

A: It’s a interesting business decision. It means that Apple gets tighter control over the quality of the user experience that iPhone users have. The initial reviews of the first Android phone are saying things like: competent, but lacks the “wow” factor. If there’s something Apple does well, it’s the “wow” factor. And perhaps keeping control on the platform allow it to deliver that. But Apple is gambling that it can maintain that edge over a completely open platform that Google is offering, whicbh enables people to right programs that will do just about anything on your mobile phone if you want it to. I don’t know how that’s going to pan out.

There are other phone platforms, of course, like Symbian, now owned by Nokia and which has recently gone open source. They are obviously worried about Google’s arrival and they are trying to capitalize on the innovation you get off an open platform.

The real significance of Android is that mobile phone manufacturers are going to find themselves choosing between doing software and doing hardware. Hardware is pretty much a commodity business and margins will be under real pressure. Software will be written by a huge variety of people, and much of it will be free or cheap. So, this is bad news for the higher end phone manufacturers like Nokia, and perhaps for Blackberry, but its good for us consumers. I just love the way the price of toys comes down every year!

Links

First reactions to the first Android telephone.

The Guardian on Google’s open approach versus Apple’s “walled garden”.

Read on for my speaking notes, or listen to the audio download as ogg or mp3.

…then our technology slot, and this week Colin Jackson, to talk about some technology birthdays. (Google, Gnu and the Silicon Chip)

Q: What birthdays have you got for us?

A: First of all, we’ll talk about the Internet’s most powerful ten year old – Google.

Google started out as a search engine only ten years ago – I remember clearly trying it instead of the ones I used at the time and immediately deciding that it gave better results. It’s stayed on top of the search game since despite challenges from some very well funded players – Google still has the hearts and minds, it’s become the word people use to describe searching on the Web.

Q: Is Google seen as the best because people don’t want to change to something else?

A: There are those would say that Google is only the popular through inertia – its rivals would say that – but I think the Internet public are a fickle bunch and if a seriously better all round search engine emerged, people would desert Google in droves. I’m sure the folks at Google know that.

Q: What makes a better search engine?

A: I can think of three things which drew people to Google in the early days and still hold good – one is the accuracy of its hits, another is the uncluttered design, its not full of things screaming at you for attention, and the last is a clean, honest approach to advertising.

Q: Google’s funded by advertising, right?

A: Yes – make no mistake, almost all its income comes form targeting advertising to people who are searching. But they only allow text based ads, that’s no jumping pictures or sounds, and they make it really clear which listings are paid for or sponsored. You can’t buy a position on the main part of the Google Search, that’s always been the case and it’s often not the case for some of the others.

Q: Google has moved a long way beyond search, hasn’t it?

A: Yes, there’s Google Earth and Google Maps and Youtube – that’s owned by Google now – there’s Google Calendar, Gmail email. Google think that you should do use their services for doing, say, your word processing or keeping your files rather than using the ones on your own computer.

Q: And should you?

A: It has advantages – if you computer dies and you don’t have a backup, all your files are toast. And keeping your files on Google’s servers makes it easy to work with others, and it means that you can work from any Internet computer, not just your home machine. So, the approach has advantages – it’s called “Cloud Computing” because of the notion that the work gets done somewhere out in an indeterminate cloud of servers that you don’t need to worry about. But there are problems. Recently access to Gmail and Google Docs was down for a day or so. That’s a very long time if you are running your business on them. So I’d look at a two-stringed approach – Google plus your home computer.

And Google has obviously decided that existing software on your computer isn’t good enough for what its trying to achieve – it has recently released its own web browser, called “Chrome”, which aims to get right out of your face and provide access directly to the web sites you are using. I’ve had a play with it, its quite nice, but it’s very much a beta and has some significant security holes. Don’t use it yet for anything you care about. If you run Windows XP or Vista you can download Chrome and have a play.

Q: Next birthday?

A: Gnu is 25 years old.

Q: Gnu?

A: Yes, that’s Richard Stallman’s project to build an entire computing environment out of free software. And remember, Stallman’s definition of free means the freedom to make changes and pass them on – it doesn’t refer to the price. Stallman founded the Gnu project 25 years ago, and it has led directly to the operating system called GNU/Linux which is now in huge use around the world. Also , Gnu has built many of the tools which are in use across the open source and free software worlds.

Now Stephen Fry – remember him? – is an avid fan of free software and keeps saying so on his blog. And now there is a video of Stephen Fry celebrating Gnu’s 25th birthday with a rather luscious-looking cake. I’ll link it up today.

Q: And who else has a birthday?

A: Not so much a who as a what. The integrated circuit is 50.

Q: Integrated circuit?

A: If I said silicon chip you’d know what I mean – it’s just that the early ones weren’t silicon.

Q: How important are they?

A: They are core to every aspect of computers, the Internet and electronics in general. The earliest electronics was done with radio valves – you’re too young to remember them, but they are big glowing glass things that get hot. Their function is amplify a signal. They take a small varying current, say the sound of my voice in this microphone, and amplifying it into t a big varying current. Big radio transmitters tend still to have valves, because they are the best way of dealing with the really high amounts of power that radio transmitters put out. But mostly, radio valves have been replaced by transistors.

Q: Like a transistor radio?

A: Yes. The transistor radio’s main strength was its size. You just couldn’t get valves small enough, and they needed a high powered battery.

Q: So what is a transistor?

A: Like a radio valve, it lets a small electric current control a larger one. The mechanism is different – a radio valve works by making electrons flow through a vacuum – that’s what’s inside the glass – and using a charged grid to repel some of them, which controls the current. A transistor is a solid lump of something that almost conducts electricity. It just needs a few electrons added. And the process of making a transistor ensures that there are a few spare electrons in the material. Adding a small voltage to the middle of the transistor can attracts the electrons to the right area of the transistor and permits a current to flow. Some people got the Nobel prize for inventing that.

Transistors are everywhere now. Initially they were made of a rather exotic metal called germanium, but now they are mainly made of silicon, which is an incredibly abundant element you can get by just melting down sand.

A transistor is just a lump of silicon with some cleverly-managed properties. The next breakthrough came when someone figured out that, if you are making a transistor on a lump of germanium or silicon, why just stop at one? Why not make several? Why not a make hundred? After all, with a hundred transistors you can do some quite complex things.

Q: And that’s a silicon chip?

A: Yes. They look like a flat lump of dark grey stuff with a lot of little metal legs, which are the connectors. And chips began by replacing a lot transistors in radios and stereos and similar devices where you basically just want to amplify a weak signal into a loud one, but it wasn’t long before people figured out how to make transistors flip form one extreme to the other – go from fully off to fully on as fast as possible – which is where digital electronics came from. And with the ability of transistors to do digital, and a way to fabricate a lot of them in one place, the stage was set for modern computers and the Internet.

Links

As always, you can discuss this broadcast at it.gen.nz.

Google is ten years young. And its new “chrome” browser is an interesting move, but it has been having having teething problems.

The Gnu project is 25 – celebrate with Stephen Fry.

The integrated circuit is 50 years old.

Read on for my speaking notes, or listen to the podcast!

Q: OK…so computer monitors. These are the screens that computers all have, right?

A: Yes, flat panel screens are the most popular technology at the moment. But they are the latest in a long line. Many years ago, you used to program computers using paper tape or punch cards, and the answer came back the same way.

Q: Sounds a bit hard to read!

A: Yes, you had to really want to use the computer! Sometimes you could put the card deck or the paper tape that the computer had spat out into a printer and it would print out a great pile of paper you could read, or perhaps a lot of gas bills or bank statements or whatever the computer was doing for you. That was back in the days when computers saw their work as a series of jobs, each with its own input, probably on punch cards, then a processing step where the computer took the input and ran it through a program, and then an output step. Then the computer waited for its next job. And computers in those days were titanically expensive things, and it was important to keep them busy, so people would build up a queue of jobs for the computer to do. After a while the computer manufacturers got a little cleverer, and the computers could do several jobs at once, but they still saw what they did as all these separate jobs.

Q: How long ago was this?

A: Well, punch cards were still the primary way you talked to the first mainframe computer I got my hands on back in the late 70s. But even then, teletypes were coming along. They looked like a typewriter, but one that would sometimes type of its own accord. You’d use those to interact with the computer – you’d type a question or an instruction, and the computer would respond. And that was a complete shift in the way computers behaved. It wasn’t very efficient, because this expensive computer was sitting around waiting for a person to hit keys, so that was one of the reasons it was slow to take off, in the mainframe world, at least.

At the same time, there what were called mini-computers, some running Unix, which were both cheaper to build and better designed to be able to cope with getting other things done while they waited for people to tell them what to do next.

Q: And then we got computer screens, like we have today?

A: Yes – but the first computer screens were just glass teletypes. All they did was display text in a kind of typewriter font, usually in green, and it gently moved down the screen as you typed until you had a screen full, then it started at the top again. The computer programs hadn’t caught up with the fact that screen could do more than teletypes. But after a while, they did catch up and they starting putting characters all over the screen. Still in monochrome at first, and then colour started to get added – we are perhaps at the beginning of the 1980s now. And another thing that started to get added was the capability to do graphics – display simple pictures and charts. And this meant quite radical changes to the underlying computers, which until now had really just seen the world as a stream of characters in and a stream of characters out. PCs and early Macs started happening here, but initially the charge was led by other so-called microcomputers like the Atari, the Amiga, the Commodore PET and the BBC.

These machines were mostly used for gaming – although you could get useful work done a PET or a BBC. But they had better graphics capabilities built in, and software that was designed to use it. And these weren’t expensive machines – it didn’t matter if they sat around for a bit waiting for you to tell them what to do. So the graphics capabilities of the computers and of the screen was co-evolving, as an ecologist would put it.

Q: The graphics on those computers were really clunky!

A: By today’s standards, certainly. But they evolved rapidly to support a wide range of colours on screen and very high definition displays – by 1987 we had the so-called VGA standard on PCs which were 640 by 480 dots on the screen, each of which could be one of 256 different colours. They were totally dazzling. Every improvement since then has been one of degree, not kind. That’s when we started to hear the word “multimedia” to mean that the computer could show pictures and play sounds – it wasn’t until we got to the 486 chip in about 1990 that PC had enough grunt to play a stream of sound.

Q: Are computer screens just TVs, really?

A: They are and they aren’t – fundamentally both computer screens and TVs show patterns of coloured light, but you want different things from them. TVs have traditionally been quite low-definition fuzzy things. All they had to do was display a broadcast TV signal which was never that sharp in the first place, and you sat some distance away so the fuzz didn’t matter that much. But they had to be able to show rapidly moving pictures well. Computer screens were the opposite – you sit close to them and you want to see really sharp text and graphics – it’s much easier on the eyes that way, but the text and charts don’t tend to jump around the screen a lot so the display responding quickly wasn’t all that important.

Q: But now people watch movies on their computers.

A: Haven’t we come a long way! There’s a huge amount of processing power used to decode a movie on the fly and play it on a screen – it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Yes, there’s been a kind of convergence of the two things. Computers are used a lot to play DVDs, and TV has gone high definition which means that people are expecting a much sharper picture. But even today, a decent high definition TV doesn’t have the real crispness – measured in dots per inch – that a good computer screen does.

Q: Both TVs and computer displays have gone to flat panels.

A: Yes, let’s just talk about the underlying technology a bit. There’s four kinds – the old glass tube that all TVs had until recently, there’s plasma, there’s LCD, and on the horizon there’s LEDs.

Q: How do these things actually work?

A: They are all quite different. A glass TV tube – called a cathode ray tube or CRT – is a giant radio valve – you’re too young to remember radio valves, but all electronics had them in before about the 70s. So, a glass TV tube is a thick glass vessel with a vacuum inside – that’s why they implode so beautifully if you abuse them – and on the front surface, the screen part, it has a pattern of chemicals called phosphors painted on the inside. And these phosphors glow, they fluoresce, if you hit them with energy. So the trick is to hit them with the right amount of energy at the right time. And that’s done by spraying them with electrons – in the back of the tube, at the pointy end is an electrode called an electron gun – it’s just a lump of metal, really, which is charged up to a very high voltage, and because of that electrons stream from it through the vacuum in the tube to the screen and make the phosphors light up.

Q: How do you control that to get a detailed moving picture instead of just a glow?

A: There are magnetic coils wrapped around the neck of the tube and they steer the electron beam so that it scans its way across the screen from left to right and top to bottom. That’s why the TV tubes have to be made reasonably deep, especially for larger screen sizes – you need space to be able to steer the electron beams in. The brightness is controlled by controlling the current, the number of the electrons, that the electrode gives off.

Q: And how does it do colour?

A: Colour TVs came along a lot later than black and white, didn’t they? It’s harder – what you do is get phosphors in red, green and blue and lay them across the screen in a pattern of tiny dots. Then you arrange for the electron beam to have different strength according to which colour dot it’s hitting at the time, so that you can mix the red, green and blue to achieve the colour you want.

Q: So what about flat panels?

A: The most common kind of flat panels for computers, and for smaller TVs, is the LCD or liquid crystal display. That works by switching light. The trick they use is like Polaroid sunglasses – you know how if you get two pairs of Polaroid sunglasses and turn them at right angles, the whole thing goes dark?

Q: Yes – why is that?

A: Because light has a direction of polarization – think of light as a wave that’s coming towards you – is the wave going up and down or side to side or some other angle? Polaroids work by filtering out everything that’s going from side to side, which is mainly strong sunlight reflected off surfaces. In an LCD panel, there’s a strong light in the back, then a polarized layer, then thousands of tiny cells containing the so-called liquid crystal, which is something that changes its polarization direction when you put a voltage on it. That has the effect of shuttering the light behind the panel or letting it pass through. Now making these panels of a decent size has eluded manufacturers until recently – it involves a making wafer of immensely pure silicon and constructing all the millions of picture cells onto it so that each one works properly. That process is getting easier and cheaper, which is what has driven the price drop of laptops, and of LCD TVs.

Q: So what’s the difference between LCD and plasma?

A: Plasma is a different technology again. It works a little like a fluorescent light. The screen is divided into thousands of tiny cells, which each have a strong voltage placed across them front to back. In the front of each cell is a phosphor like you get in a TV tube. Each cell is filled with a gas – generally neon or xenon, which are chosen because they are totally unreactive and won’t try to chemically combine with the cell walls. The gas is heated to a plasma – that means it is got so hot that some of the electrons dissociate from the atoms, which become positively-charged ions. Because there’s a voltage across the cell, the ions race toward the front and smack into the phosphors so the phosphors give off light.

Plasma displays are a bit more power hungry than LCD, and heavier, which is why laptops are all LCDs, but plasma displays can produce more light and they are much faster at switching cells on and off so they tend to be better for action and sport. Plasma doesn’t usually get you quite as crisp a picture as LCD because its hard to make the cells as small as LCD cells.

Q: So which do you choose between plasma and LCD?

A: plasma and LCD are still a trade off between resolution – that’s how many dots there are per inch, LCD can do far more – and plasma for moving pictures – the cheapest plasma responds faster than the best LCD and you can see the difference when you have a rapidly-moving picture.

If you are after computer screen, or a small to medium TV, I’d definitely go to LCD. If you are after a big TV my best advice is look at several in a shop under challenging conditions, like fast moving pictures. For regular TVs above about 32 inches may you well be better off with plasma, unless you really want to go high definition – and there are some HD plasmas now. It’s tempting to see plasma as yesterday’s technology but I don’t think it’s quite done its dash yet. Big LCD panels are still more expensive and it’s hard for them to show motion without blurring.

Q: What’s tomorrow’s technology?

A: Ah yes, we’ll change again. The next big thing will probably be LEDs or light emitting diodes. These are the little lights – usually red or green – that you get as pilot lights on electronic equipment. They have grown up in size and modern traffic lights, for instance, are now mostly LEDs – next time you are waiting at a light, look closely and you might see that the light is an array of dots rather than just a glass lens over a bulb. Some cars are starting to use them as well. LEDs are very efficient light generators and they are long lasting. The giant displays you get at events are generally clusters of LEDs. We will see them turned into home display panels before much longer – there’s already a small LED DVD player from Sony but it’s only available in Japan.

Q: How do they work?

A: It’s a quantum effect – remember we talked about quantum theory before? A diode is a junction of two different types of material, one side with an excess of electrons so some of its atoms have an extra electron they don’t really want, and the other side of the junction has lack of electrons – it has atoms with holes where electrons should be. When you apply a voltage electrons flow across the boundary and they meet the atoms which are short of electrons, and – here’s the quantum bit – they all give off exactly the same amount of energy as they fall into the holes. That means that all the light from a LED is one wavelength, so it’s a pure colour. You get a mix of colours by combining LEDs of different colours and controlling how much current you give to each one. The problem has been making a large array of tiny LEDs , but progress is happening on that.

Links

An article comparing LCD and Plasma, and another from Consumer.

Wikipedia on CRT, LCD, plasma and LED displays.

Incidentally, by the definition above, a megabyte is 1,024*1,024 which is about 1.04 million, and a Gigabyte is 1,024 times bigger again at 1.07 billion.