Do you like free stuff? How about free tech stuff? If so, you’ve come to the right place, for we’re having a giveaway here at 40Tech. Following up on our earlier post on not wasting money on ordinary HDMI cables, Sewell is letting us give away 3 of their heavy-duty HDMI splitters. These splitters normally sell for $24.95, but you can get one for free if you’re one of three lucky winners. Read on for the details.
For those of you who are still interested in Google Buzz, or at least think it’s a good idea that’s still in progress, late last month the always busy bees over at Google released the 16th feature update (in as many weeks) to the Google Buzz platform: the Reshare button. The ability to re-share a post from someone you follow, thereby easily spreading the information to your own network has been a much-requested feature from users since the launch of Google Buzz — and they made it very easy and surprisingly effective.
Mmmm. Computers. We tech geeks love them, but we also love to hate them when they don’t operate as intended. Whether due to an actual bug, or a glitch introduced by human error, the world has seen countless computer glitches, some of which have had dramatic implications. Here we take a look at ten of them. We’ll use a loose definition of the word "glitch" to mean a situation in which a computer didn’t operate as intended, whether through hardware failure, software failure, or user error that the computer didn’t catch.
On August 14, 2003, the Northeastern United States, Midwestern United States, and Ontario Canada suffered a massive power outage that affected 55 million people. Investigators attributed the main cause to be the failure of FirstEnergy Corporation to trim trees in parts of Ohio, causing power lines to come in contact with the trees, and bringing about a cascading effect that forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants. However, a software bug also stalled FirstEnergy’s control room for more than an hour, preventing system operators from detecting audio and visual alerts. This led to a server failure, followed by the failure of a backup server. Because of the lack of alarms, operators dismissed a call from another power company about issues with a shared line.
Image by amir taj.
One of the features of Google’s search engine is that it protects you from harmful sites, by warning you if a site in its search results is known to contain malware that could infect your system. In January of 2009, though, Google went a bit haywire, and flagged every site on the internet as malware. What happened? When updating the list of suspected malware sites, the URL of “/” was accidentally included. Every site on the internet uses this symbol, so every site was flagged as malware.
Computer glitch #3 isn’t a real-life glitch, but one that arose in a book and a movie. HAL 9000 was a mega-computer onboard the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey (both the novel and the film). HAL, which was like a sixth crewmember, attempted to kill all of the other crew members due to a programming contradiction. Specifically, HAL was programmed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment," yet his orders required him to keep the purpose of his flight secret, for reasons of national security. This contradiction caused Hal to become paranoid, and led him to murder most of the crew.
Photo by zzellers.
The Space Shuttle Columbia is known for the tragic breaking apart during reentry in 2003. Columbia was also the first space shuttle, and its maiden voyage was scheduled for April 10, 1981. As the clock ticked down towards liftoff, with thousands watching, the launch was delayed due to a computer glitch. The glitch involved the synchronization between Columbia’s main and backup computers (for a detailed explanation, check out this PDF file).
Image by jurvetson.
According to pop culture, the term "computer bug" arose on September 9, 1947, when a primitive computer experienced problems due to a moth being trapped between the points of a relay. The moth was removed, and affixed to a log, with an entry that read "first case of bug being found." The term "bug" actually, in a technological sense, dates back to the 1800’s. That bug from 1947, though, will be forever famous, even if erroneously so.
Image by orangeacid.
You 40-somethings out there probably have fond memories of the video game, Asteroids. In Asteroids, the player controls a spacecraft in an asteroid field, and shoots at the asteroids and at flying saucers. In early versions of the game, players could hide their spacecraft behind the score area of the screen, and avoid being hit.
Image modified from original at Wikipedia.
On June 3, 1980, inbound missiles appeared on computer screens at Strategic Air Command and at the Pentagon, indicating that two submarine-launched ballistic missiles were headed towards the United State. Seconds later, an increased number of Soviet launches were indicated. The problem was determined to be a computer glitch, but not before Strategic Air Command directed crews to B-52 bombers, and land-based missle crews were put on a higher state of alert. The cause of these false alerts was traced to the failure of a single chip in a computer that was part of a communication system.
Photo by fuzzcat.
In October 2009, T-Mobile and Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary, announced that they had lost all user data that was being stored on Microsoft’s servers, due to server failure. Users were therefore at risk of losing all of their data if they removed their batteries, reset their Sidekicks, or lost power. PC World reported that, of the million Sidekick users, thousands could have lost their personal data. A few days later, Microsoft confirmed that, in fact, it had recovered most, "if not all," customer data. That didn’t erase the heart failure already suffered by Sidekick users, when they thought that they had lost contacts, photos, calendars, and to-lists that weren’t locally backed up.
Photo by dannyman.
On January 15, 1990, a failure of a switching system at AT&T caused a wave of failure that spread across the entire AT&T long distance network. The fault was in the code of new software that AT&T had loaded into its switching systems a few weeks earlier. Over a 9 hour period, 70 million telephone calls went uncompleted, and AT&T alone lost $60 million in unconnected calls.
Photo by blmurch.
The Y2K bug arose from the practice used by computer programmers of abbreviating a four-digit year to a two-digit year. The theory was that this practice would cause date-related processing to operate incorrectly after January 1, 2000. Despite predictions of doom and gloom, the Y2K bug turned out not to be so bad, possibly due to the hard work of programmers around the globe to correct the situation.
Based on image from 91RS.
So what did we miss? If you can think of any other infamous bugs, let us know in the comments.
Some have you may have noticed our minor obsession with productivity applications here at 40Tech — particularly with task management apps. In the past, we have written on GTD in Evernote, Action Method Online, reQall, Dial2Do, ToodleDo vs Remember the Milk, and more. We also briefly made mention of Producteev, then a promising but still incomplete service focused on cross-platform task management and communication. Now Producteev is back and swinging out hard with Producteev 2, promising one of the best personal and business task management apps to hit the web. Producteev's goal is to enable you to work with their task management system without requiring you to make major adjustments to your current workflow. Producteev 2 is powerful,highly flexible, and free for individuals.
Google vs. Apple: Who is More Open?
“Open” is the new buzzword du jour, with a few of the major tech companies claiming to support open standards. Two of those companies are Google and Apple. How open are they?
First of all, what is “open?” As Wikipedia notes, there is no single definition of an “open standard,” and interpretations vary with usage. Even the companies themselves seem to have differing definitions of open, depending on the setting. Let’s take a quick look at Apple and Google, and at how “open” they are.
Apple
Apple went one step further in closing the iPhone ecosystem recently, changing its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement so that developers must use Apple’s proprietary software if they want to get their apps approved for the iPad and iPhone.
So Apple is closed – end of story? It’s not that simple. As Steve Jobs pointed out in his somewhat disingenuous dissertation on Adobe’s Flash, Apple at least supports open web standards. And Apple’s website describes its support for the Open Source community, and its use of Open Source tools and programs. So in some areas, at least, Apple is open.
Google
Google has a reputation for being “open.” Android, for example, is open to the extent that anyone can develop for it, and release an app. And with Wave, Google has announced plans to release most of the source code as open source software, and has already made an open-source release of some Wave components.
At the same time, Google isn’t all about being open, either. While many of its products are open to some degree, its core product, search, is not. As any SEO guru will tell you, Google’s search algorithms are shrouded in mystery (albeit with parts that are known to be important, such as a page’s title). Why is Google so open in some respects, but not in others?
The Rub
Google seems to be more open, but the one area where it is most closed, search, reveals the the answer to openness for both Apple and Google. In short, both are large corporations, and both must make money for shareholders. As a result, both are open when it makes financial sense, and closed when it helps the bottom line.
For Apple, part of the financial success of the iPhone is due to its ease of use and reliability. That reliability would be difficult to achieve on an open platform. For Google, its search business is the core of its existence, which is why we’ll likely never see Google disclose exactly how it works. Google has said before that the more that people use the internet, the more money Google makes. If opening products, like Wave, leads to more people using the internet, then we can’t necessarily ascribe altruistic motives to Google’s open ways.
If you are a fan of either company, keep that in mind. Apple is more closed than Google, but at the end of the day, both Apple and Google are just trying to make a buck.