Easier than 1-2-3

It is well known that people use stupid passwords on the internet. An alarming number use "Password" for every "secure" site they visit. The 1Password blog has an interesting post discussing the mathematics of a cartoon from xkcd.

But that is all by the way. Apparently until 1977 the launch code for American nuclear missiles was "00000000". That's a zero followed by seven other zeroes.

Naturally I remembered this scene from Spaceballs, where the villains are extorting the code to open the shield from King Roland:


A few years ago this would have been about text messages (or: Another Reason to steer clear of Facebook)

Oh yes please. I would like the "comedians" on the misnamed Footy Show* to remove a photograph of my child from the internet to make fun of it by comparing it to some cabbage eared loon. Sign me up to Facebook AT ONCE!

Yes I know it's David Knox – who has never expressed a non-standard opinion on anything – but any stick will do with which to beat the Farcebook. If you prefer, here is The Australian.

*Given the Australian predilection for Rugby League and AFL (q.v.) it should be The Handy Show.

On the usefulness of Latin

I am shocked at what I am about to do: post a link to something from an Australian newspaper – from the Sydney Boring Herald no less – and not simply to mock it.

Latin helps journalist get scoop on Pope
An Italian journalist who beat the world's media on Pope Benedict XVI's decision to resign got the scoop on the utterly unexpected news thanks to her knowledge of Latin.
It's even a reprint from the AFP, bene ego nunquam.

At the end of the article, the journalist's boss remarks "This is a strong argument for culture in training future journalists". I'll say. Take the following story:

Pope Benedict xvi sent out his first tweet in Latin
The Pope finally sent out his first tweet in Latin from his Twitter account @Pontifex_ln on Sunday, January 20, 2013: “Unitati christifidelium integre studentes quid iubet Dominus? Orare semper, iustitiam factitare, amare probitatem, humiles Secum ambulare.”
The Pope immediately followed it up with translations into the languages of his other Twitter accounts. He translated the Latin via his English language account @Pontifex this way: “What does the Lord ask of us as we work for Christian unity? To pray constantly, do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with Him.”
The Guardian apparently took the phrase corruptio optimi pessima and … erm … corrupted it.
Take the UK’s Guardian newspaper. It is responsible for propagating an erroneous Latin phrase in its reporting on the Pope’s Latin Twitter account. Lizzy Davies in Rome wrote this paragraph for the Guardian, misquoting Roberto Spataro (secretary of the Pontifical Academy for Latin Studies, which Benedict XVI founded last year) and attributing the quote to L’Osservatore Romano:
“Twitter is a tool which requires rapid communication. In English you say ‘the corruption of the best one is horrible’; in Latin, three words suffice: ‘corrupt optima pessima. It is a language which helps to think with precision and sobriety. And it has produced an exceptional heritage of science, knowledge and faith.” 

MUSTARD in space

In 1957 Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of loosely related stories in Tales from the White Hart. From the blurb to a recent edition:
Although written, as the author informs us in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, in such diverse locations as New York, Miami, Columbo and Sydney there is something inherently English about these stories. London's famed Fleet Street district has changed dramatically in the five decades since the collection's first appearance as a Ballantine paperback original… and, of course, many of the regulars of the White Hart (based on the White Horse pub on Fetter Lane) are no longer with us. But the White Hart's most prominent raconteur  Harry Purvis can still be found propping up the bar and regaling us all once again with tales of quirky and often downright eccentric scientists and inventors.
Some sense of the atmosphere of Clarke's stories – and the real life organisations on which they were based – can be got from Poking fun at Britain's Moon Men at Tor.com.

All this came back to me when I read the obituary of Tom Smith, one of the designers of the British Space Shuttle.
The idea of the Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device, or MUSTARD as it was known, arose out of an Air Ministry contract for BAC to study “hypersonic” speed (five times the speed of sound and above). A team was formed under Smith’s leadership at BAC’s Warton airbase, near Preston, Lancashire. … MUSTARD was regarded as a suitable project for joint development by European aerospace companies, with a cost estimated to be around “20 to 30 times cheaper” than that of the expendable rocket launch systems of the time. Unfortunately, as with so many other British inventions, the government of the day decided not to proceed. About three years after MUSTARD was cancelled, the Americans became interested in a reusable aircraft.

Thank Meg and Mog for complete audiobooks

Once upon a time you could get readings of books on LPs. Each record would be no more than an hour long, which meant a single full length play by Shakespeare could span three or more discs. Once the audio cassette came in, you could carry the spoken word with you, always provided you remembered the Walkman personal stereo. Now of course you can carry hundreds of audiobooks on a device the size of a pack of cards. The space saving of an abridged version – a full length reading of A Christmas Carol (one of Dickens' shorter works) would straddle at least two cassettes – is now insignificant.

Apparently the growth of unabridged recordings was down to one person, Helen Nicholl, the writer of the Meg and Mog series.
When her mother became ill, she bought her an early Sony Walkman and an audio version of Jane Eyre. Appalled to discover it had been radically abridged, her mother refused to listen to it. So in 1983, with £15,000 of Meg and Mog royalties, Helen founded Cover to Cover, determined to produce unabridged classics. It became a ground-breaking audiobook company. She invited the actress Patricia Routledge to stay and they recorded the whole of Wuthering Heights in 10 days. With her insight into what pleased the young she concentrated on the A-level curriculum: "Teenagers don’t want the bother of reading Mansfield Park," she noted, "they would rather lie in bed and have it read to them."
She also coaxed Stephen Fry into reading the then unknown Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Rest in peace.

The unpatented tablet

Clearing out some old clippings at work I came across the following article from the Townsville Bulletin reprinted from (I guess) a Colorado newspaper. It turns out that Roger Fidler is a little bit famous on this point. In a nutshell he probably invented the iPad.

…Fidler had a chance to patent his tablet idea way back when, but took a pass. He believed it should be left unprotected so that the entire newspaper industry could benefit from it. Unfortunately, none of the high-powered brains running the newspaper business 20 years ago took him up on that offer…

Video here, for your convenience:

And now, thanks to the hi-tech method of typing the whole thing out, the article in the Townsville Bulletin.

Townsville Bulletin

31st October 1995

News tablet reads the reader as the reader reads the news

From Steffan Wagner, in Colorado

At first glance it looks like an unpretentious flat piece of grey plastic, but according to Roger Fidler, holding it up: "This is the newspaper of the future. The age of newsprint and paper is past".

The Tablet, as 52 year-old Mr Fidler calls his invention, weighs just under a kilogram and is 2cm thick. It is about as big as a foolscap page and looks just like a normal newspaper.

But touch the LCD (liquid crystal display) screen once and the "front page" comes to life. Subsequent touches produce video clips, graphic, analyses and the rest of the newspaper. The first prototypes of the interactive electronic newspaper are due on the US market in 1997 and, if everything runs to plan, more than 50 per cent of US households are targeted to be equipped with a Tablet within 15 years.

According to Mr Fidler, his invention sounds the death knell for conventional newspapers and also bodes ill for on-screen electronic newspapers designed for home computers. "Who wants to have to set up a personal computer, a monitor and a keyboard on the breakfast table if they want to know what's going on in the world?" asks Mr Fidler. On-line computer newspapers are not the ideal solution for other locations either: on the beach, in the subway or in the restaurant for example.

The Tablet is designed to be as idiot-proof as possible to use, "but it is the portability of the Tablet that is our greatest success", says Mr Fidler. "Using the Tablet, one can read an up-to-date paper anytime and anywhere".

Mr Fidler began his newspaper career aged 11 as a newspaper delivery boy in Eugene, Oregon. For the next 41 years he served the newspaper trade in such varied guises as reporter, author, designer, photographer, media adviser and art director.

For the past 2 1/2 years, Mr Fidler has been chief of the Informations Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, spear-heading research and development of the "portable, personal information apparatus". The lab is a think-tank run by media giant Knight Ridder which has a turnover of $US2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) and publishes, among other things, 29 daily newspapers in the united States.

Another feature of the Tablet is advertising, which in a normal newspaper in the US would make up around 80 per cent of the total revenue. One touch on the screen converts a static advertisement into a moving video picture, providing the reader with additional information about the product. Further touches allow the user to order goods or even reserve a table in his or her favourite restaurant. "The reader can then decide – just as with a normal shop window – whether to walk on by or to enter the establishment," explains Mr Fidler.

Readers' selection information, by touches on certain parts of the screen, provide a profile of that user and this allows editorial staff to tailor news supply to that individual. These profiles can also help advertising companies optimally serve target groups. Readers who regularly hog travel pages, for example, would find increasingly more ads for airlines in their Tablet.

There are still a few technical glitches to be ironed out, however. At present there is only enough storage capability for about six 30-second video clips. The battery is still far too heavy and Mr Fidler is still on the lookout for the ideal high resolution screen to provide a sharp image.

However, Mr Fidler is optimistic: "I think we've already solved the Tablet's main problems. Technical development is continuing and in the next few years we can expect storage capacity in the one gigabyte range (one gigabyte equals one billion bytes of information). For a single edition of the Tablet newspaper we need between 20 and 50 megabytes (one megabyte equals one million bytes)."

Paper, newsprint and distribution are all expensive and make up about 60 per cent of a conventional newspaper's production costs. Should the Tablet project be a success, then all these aspects would cease to exist. So, of course, would newspaper delivery people and waste-paper collections. Wet shoes stuffed with the sport section and glasses wrapped in the front page would become a thing of the past. However printed paper would not entirely disappear, in Mr Fidler's opinion: "We still found a use for horses, even after the automobile was invented."

DPA

Coin operated TV

I'd always keep a jar of coins next to the Foxtel IQ. This article describes the very beginning of cable TV

"Pay TV is Here", Michael M. Mooney, National Review, 5th June 1962.
Two very different Pay-TV systems are now on the horizon: the Zenith-RKO ("Phonevision") system which starts its three-year Hartford test this month — also called the "over-the-air" system; and Paramount Pictures' "Telemeter" system, which has been running in Etobicoke, Canada since February 1960 and is scheduled to open next in Little Rock, New York, and San Francisco — the so-called "wire system."
In the "over-the-air" Zenith-RICO system, a subscription decoder (a box about 8 by 10 by 4 inches) is wired in and sits atop the set. The subscriber pays an initial installation charge of about ten dollars. Prices for an evening's programs will vary between 25¢ and $1.50; the price may include "double features," or a feature and a short, etc.
Subscribers receive advance notice of subscription programs, by direct mail, or through newspaper ads that give program details, hour and date, and a special three-digit code number for each subscription program, and the price for tuning in. When he has decided on his program, the subscriber turns on his decoder and rotates a dial until the proper code combination appears in a small window in the front of the decoder. Picture and sound then come through loud and clear.
When subscription programs are not on, Channel 18 in Hartford will send out conventional commercial programs, sponsored or sustaining. At any time, even when subscription programs are on, the viewer may switch his set to conventional commercial programs, then back to the subscription program at will, without additional charges. In effect, therefore, the Pay programs are "added attractions" on the TV set for which the consumer must pay if he wants them. There are conventional commercial stations in Hartford to compete with the new Pay TV station.
Initial installations of the decoders at Hartford are to be of the “credit” type. The decoder makes an electronic record each time it is tuned to a subscription program. At monthly intervals the subscriber removes the billing tape from the decoder and forwards his payment for the programs he saw.
…
In the "wire," or Telemeter, system there is also a box on top of the set, but it eats coins. When the subscriber turns on his set, he may watch the conventional commercial programs, or he may flip a switch to tune in the Telemeter attachment. He then hears a "barker" announce the programs being offered and their prices. Since three programs can travel along the same wire at once, the subscriber may choose the program on Channel A, B or C. A price indicator displays the charge for each program, and until the subscriber puts in the coins his TV screen remains blank. Inside the Telemeter attachment a tape recording automatically identifies all programs purchased. This recording is collected, along with the cash, every 30 to 60 days. It not only tells what the subscriber paid, it tells Telemeter how to pro-rate the royalties among the various entertainment packages. The subscriber may always switch from the program he has paid for, over to commercial TV, and back again, without additional charge.
Generally two different shows are offered on two of the channels every three or four days. The third channel features public service programs and sports. At any given time, therefore, there may be a movie on Channel A, a Broadway show on Channel B, a hockey game on Channel C. Multiplexing over the wires allows the Pay-TV promoter to satisfy different tastes simultaneously. Features on the first two channels are generally shown twice every evening, at prices ranging from 50¢ to $2.00. Public Service programming (news and local events) is free; hockey games cost $100. There is an initiation fee of $5.00 and a monthly minimum of 75 cents. The cashbox accepts anything from nickels to fifty-cent pieces and even credits the subscriber if he overpays.