Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Science writer Simon Singh and Tracey Brown from Sense About Science tell us about Libel Reform Week and the campaign to change Britain's libel laws and protect scientific freedom of expression. Simon is currently locked in a legal battle over a comment piece published in the Guardian . Matthew Applegate, aka Pixelh8 , is performing an audiovisual study as part of Cambridge Science Festival . We went along to the Institute of Astronomy to hear the telescopes he used as his musical instruments. Ian Sample speaks to Kees van Deemter about the importance of being vague. Kees is trying to program computers to be a little more ... erm ... fuzzy
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Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
Ten years after the millennium bug scare, there's a new computer glitch hitting users of Sony's PlayStation games consoles Age: 10. Appearance: Surprisingly youthful. You do realise the millennium bug is old news? The clue's in the name. Yes, yes, but it's back! And this time it has come for our children! What are you on about? Remember how a decade ago the bug nearly destroyed civilisation? Planes were going to fall out of the sky, nuclear power stations were going to melt down, clock radios were going to wake us in the middle of the night . . . Unless we paid trillions of pounds to IT specialists . . . That's right. And all because other IT specialists had sold us computers that couldn't handle the switch from 1999 to 2000. That's the kind of organised blackmail even a banker could admire. Still, what has it got to do with 2010, especially now we're several months into it? Something very similar has hit Sony's PlayStation games consoles. On Monday, when February turned into March, millions of PS3 owners had their machines' calendars reset to 1 January 2000, and lost their high scores. Oh, the humanity! Have they been offered counselling?
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Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
Imogen Heap: ‘Don’t blame the machines, it’s not their fault’
Why singer Imogen Heap wants to make electricity out of horse manure What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? I was going to say Macs, but everyone says that, so I'm going to go into geek mode. I have these wireless wrist microphones that I wear on stage – they are throat mics that I've adapted. The audio gets picked up and goes into my computer. What's great about them is that I can wander about on stage and grab any instrument – like the wine glasses I use – and the mics are in the perfect position to pick up the sound. They've completely transformed me on stage. When was the last time you used them
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Imogen Heap: 'Don't blame the machines, it's not their fault'
Sir Clive Sinclair: "I don’t use a computer at all"
The entrepreneur and innovator tells Simon Garfield about inspiration, determination and why he doesn't do email… Thirty years ago this month, Clive Sinclair launched a computer that he hoped would change the world. In the majority of cases it only changed the way people played primitive computer games, but it also turned a bespectacled, prematurely balding man into a hero for our times. In those dark days before Windows 7 and the iPad, the Sinclair ZX80 represented the pinnacle of affordable domestic computing. It was a flat box without a screen or proper keyboard, it had the memory of a hamster and at the back of it was something that looked like a radiator grille but was actually a strip of plastic designed to look like a radiator grille. It promised it could do "quite literally anything, from playing chess to running a power station", which was good value for something costing £79.95 in kit form and £99.95 assembled, about one fifth of the price of other home computers. Sir Clive, who was knighted for services to industry at the age of 43, will be 70 later this year. He lives in an apartment overlooking Trafalgar Square, and from his adjacent office he has a magnificent view of tourists and lions (recently he also had a view of people performing on Antony Gormley's fourth plinth, but that "got a bit boring really"). He was a household name before Sir Alan Sugar, and for a while was the unlikely future of modern electronics: a bright, hi-tech uncle rejuvenating British industry blighted by decay, unions and Thatcher. Sinclair helped transform Cambridge into the computing capital of the world, a homegrown version of Silicon Valley and Taipei, and for a couple of brilliant years he made the bestselling computers in the world
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Sir Clive Sinclair: "I don't use a computer at all"
Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Forgotten your password? That'll be the 58th one you've not remembered this year, then In days of yore, we're told, people had less leisure time because everything – everything – was a protracted pain in the fundament. Want to clean that smock? Then you'll have to walk six miles carrying a pail of water back from the village well. And that's before you've tackled the laundering process itself, which consists of three hours laboriously scrubbing your soiled garment against a washboard and wringing it through a mangle. By the time you've finished, it's bedtime.
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Charlie Brooker | Want to read this article? Then enter your password
Kneber botnet catches 2,500 companies worldwide
About 75,000 personal computers in almost 2,500 companies and government agencies worldwide have been caught in a botnet based on a new variant of the ZeuS Trojan About 75,000 personal computers in almost 2,500 companies and government agencies across the globe have been caught in a botnet uncovered by a researcher at the US-based NetWitness network forensics firm. Hackers were able to collect logins and passwords for Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail and other accounts, including online banking sites. They were also able to access some corporate servers used to store confidential data, including one used for processing credit-card payments. Companies reportedly attacked include Paramount Pictures, Merck, Juniper Networks and Cardinal Health in the US, but affected computers in more than 200 countries including Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck and Cardinal Health said they had isolated and contained the problem, and Merck said "no sensitive information was compromised". NetWitness's Alex Cox uncovered the botnet while installing monitoring software to help a large corporation deal with cyberattacks. He found a 75GB cache of data generated by the botnet, which NetWitness has called Kneber after a username linking the infected systems. NetWitness said in a statement: "Disturbingly, the data was only a one-month snapshot of data from a campaign that has been in operation for more than a year." The PCs in question, almost all running Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, had been compromised by a new variant of the well-known ZeuS Trojan, which is one of the "top five" in its class. Cox told the SearchSecurity.com site that the variant used in the latest attacks had a detection rate of less than 10% among antivirus software.
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Kneber botnet catches 2,500 companies worldwide
HP boosts computer industry with rising profit
The technology industry breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday, after the world's largest computer manufacturer, Hewlett Packard, announced a 20% jump in quarterly profit. The Californian company said that revenues and income had risen significantly from this time last year, in what many saw as the strongest sign yet that the economic slump's impact on technology spending was almost over. Revenues for the first quarter of 2010 were up 8% to $31.2bn (£19.9bn), with profits rising to $2.3bn - up from $1.9bn a year ago. The company also said it was expecting more signs of recovery in the coming year, with projected earnings narrowly ahead of expectations. "HP is well-positioned to outperform the market," said chairman and chief executive Mark Hurd, who has worked to cut costs at the company since taking over in 2005. The growth largely came from HP's computer and printer manufacturing businesses, as consumers - who had been reticent about purchasing during the downturn - started buying again. While figures released by industry analysts Gartner suggested that shipments in western Europe were flat, the company experienced what Hurd called "accelerating market momentum". That could be partially due to the impact of Microsoft's Windows 7, which launched last autumn and gave many PC manufacturers a boost by encouraging shoppers to purchase new hardware. The company's services business - which expanded significantly in 2008 with the $12.6bn purchase of EDS - did not enjoy a revival, however, with revenue falling by 1%. HP's results will please investors and analysts, but they have not been without its costs. The company has cut tens of thousands of jobs in the past two years, including 25,000 as a direct result of the EDS acquisition, and plans a further 8,600 by October. Last month more than 1,000 HP staff who work for the Department of Work and Pensions took strike action in protest at job losses. Shares rose marginally in after hours trading, to 50.12.
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HP boosts computer industry with rising profit
If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too
Programs do more and more scientific work - but you need to be able to check them as well as the original data, as the recent row over climate change documentation shows One of the spinoffs from the emails and documents that were leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is the light that was shone on the role of program code in climate research. There is a particularly revealing set of "README" documents that were produced by a programmer at UEA apparently known as "Harry". The documents indicate someone struggling with undocumented, baroque code and missing data – this, in something which forms part of one of the three major climate databases used by researchers throughout the world. Many climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs. I suggest is that this is both unscientific behaviour and, equally importantly, ignores a major problem: that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error. There is enough evidence for us to regard a lot of scientific software with worry. For example Professor Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code . He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies. For example, interface inconsistencies between software modules which pass data from one part of a program to another occurred at the rate of one in every seven interfaces on average in the programming language Fortran, and one in every 37 interfaces in the language C. This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error — just one — will usually invalidate a computer program. What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during the running of programs. Hatton and other researchers' work indicates that scientific software is often of poor quality. What is staggering about the research that has been done is that it examines commercial scientific software – produced by software engineers who have to undergo a regime of thorough testing, quality assurance and a change control discipline known as configuration management
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If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too
Microsoft: Cool ideas are not enough for us
Software giant says innovative ideas are not enough, after stinging attack by former executive Microsoft has said it cannot survive on "cool ideas", just hours after a former executive accused the company of being a "clumsy" and "uncompetitive innovator". Dick Brass, who served for as a vice president at the company from 1997 to 2004, launched a broadside in Thursday's New York Times that accused the company of falling victim to in-fighting and petty political squabbles. In his attack, Brass detailed how innovative projects had been stifled and killed off at the company, handing an advantage to rivals like Apple and Google. "Microsoft, America's most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future," he wrote. "Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers." Responding to his accusations on Thursday evening, however, Microsoft's head of corporate communications suggested that Brass's claims were off target. "At the highest level, we think about innovation in relation to its ability to have a positive impact on the world," wrote Frank Shaw. In a dig apparently aimed at Apple, which last week unveiled its iPad touchscreen computer for the first time , Shaw said that Microsoft did not quantify success simply by the number of exciting concepts that it developed. "For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact," he wrote. Shaw's post admitted that the criticisms made by Brass stung, but said that some of the technologies that Brass had used as examples of failure - such as the ClearType display system - had, in fact, become important products for Microsoft. "For the record, ClearType now ships with every copy of Windows we make and is installed on around a billion PCs around the world," wrote Shaw.
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Microsoft: Cool ideas are not enough for us
Tech Weekly: The iPad analysed and Amazon’s ebook war
There's an iPad flavour to most of this week's progamme as we deconstruct the most anticipated launch of 2010. Was the launch of Apple's iPad a whole lot of hot air or the next evolution in gadgetry? The debate begins as author and technology commentator Nick Carr joins us to debate the highs and the lows of the next must-have gadget, and Bobbie Johnson describes getting his hands on the iPad. The studio is also buzzing with the escalating row between publishing house Macmillan and Amazon . Did the virtual bookseller drawn a line in the sand by removing all of Macmillan's books from its shelves at the weekend? Was the launch of the iPad a contributing factor