Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 28, 2012

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news

by Alan Lenton

We cover steak, speed cameras, Verisign, Google, Amazon, Kindle, file sharing, Transport for London, tunneling machines, Korean TV maker LG, an ICT 1301 computer known as ‘Flossie’, Microsoft Surface, iPad 4, CHAMP missile, iPad mini and games, and Windows 7.8 in this week’s newsletter. And there’s absolutely nothing about quantum chromodynamics! Well, hardly anything.

And the bad news is that my favorite New York eatery, Gallagher’s Steak House, is to close. This is the place where the politicians, newsies, and movers and shakers used to meet and plot in the 1920s through to the turn of the century. The rumor is that the closure is caused by the slump, sorry, recession, but my theory is that its caused by the demise of one of the best parts of the meal - sitting back after an excellent steak with a glass of brandy in one hand and one of their excellent cigars in the other. Another victim of the smoking laws.

I don’t get over to New York so often these days, but I will miss it.

But I digress...

Shorts:

At the end of last month there was an article in the New York Times about speed cameras in Europe. The article itself was about crowd sourcing methods of warning people they are coming up to speed cameras. The article was interesting in its own right, but it also got me thinking about speed cameras and the hostility of the authorities towards anything that gives warning of an approach to speed cameras.

The ostensible purpose of speed cameras is to enforce the speed limit and reduce the number of accidents due to speeding. That makes sense - especially when they are installed at accident black spots - there’s one near me just before a sharper than usual bend just as you go over a bridge. That’s a very good case for such a camera - it’s a fast road anyway, and because the bridge is like a hump you have a tendency to whiz off it too fast to take the corner safely.

But if you think about it the camera is just as good at getting you to drive at a safe speed round that corner whether it’s taking a flash photograph, or whether you have been warned about the existence of the camera some other way. And, of course, the same goes for any other camera on any other road. So the question that has to be asked is why are the authorities so uptight when people are warned of the cameras?

As usual, the answer is all about hard cash. Cameras are a good ongoing source of money receipts for cash-strapped local governments. This has nothing to do with their safety uses. Indeed, speed cameras can be quite expensive to run (I’ve no idea why, probably something to do with bureaucratic procurement mechanisms) and speed cameras used to be subsidized by central government here in the UK. At our last national election there was a change of government, and one of the cost saving measures introduced by the new government was to stop the subsidy.

Suddenly, lots of traffic cameras started to vanish - they were no longer economic to run, it seems, in spite of the fact that the cameras were claimed to have been put there to prevent accidents. Surely spending money to prevent accidents is a valid use of public money? It would appear that things are not quite what they were put out to be. Here in England cynicism about politicians is so high that no one was in the slightest bit surprised - by their speed cameras ye shall truly know their nature!
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/technology/in-europe-speed-cameras-meet-their-technological-match.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=technology

I just had to laugh. At its Q3 earnings call earlier this week Verisign noted that there has been a significant drop in the registration and renewal of new internet domain names. And why is this? Apparently, it’s because Google has become even more adept at filtering out mail and such like from dodgy domains, which means that the shysters are not registering the huge number of names they used to use circumvent black lists.

Good for Google, I say, long may they continue to keep up the good work. In the meantime my heart absolutely bleeeeeeds for Verisign, dahling...
http://searchengineland.com/verisign-blames-google-for-drop-in-domain-registration-renewal-rates-137739

Investors in Amazon are not, it appears, happy with top honcho Jeff Bezos as Amazon shows a loss in its quarterly accounts. I doubt that will worry Bezos, who is continuing to make the investments needed for Amazon to stay on the top of the pile, in spite of the recession. Developing and marketing the new range of Kindles is expensive, but the retailer is now poised to clean up over the Xmas period.

I’m certainly happy, I’ve got a new Kindle paper white. It’s gorgeous, and I love it - a clear and present improvement over my old first generation model, and I can read it in bed without having the light on. Sigh... if only I’d had it at boarding school for reading under the bed clothes after lights out!

And I know several people who have an eye on the new Kindle Fire HD tablet. No wonder Apple screwed up their own normal release schedule to get their competition, the iPad Mini, out before Xmas.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57540584-93/jeff-bezos-will-keep-spending-wall-street-will-keep-fuming/

I see that yet another study shows that file sharers buy more music. I can well believe this, but big media continues to believe that the way to restore its formerly bloated profits is to drag their best customers through the courts. I don’t think there’s any more to say that hasn’t already been said, but if you need any more evidence of the stupidity, have a look at the URL.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/16/file_sharers_buy_more_music/

Homework:

No homework this week. I was going to set you a quickie problem in quantum chromodynamics, but I decided to be weak and let you have some asymptotic freedom instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics

Geek Stuff:

Here’s a little something to aspire to - a 550 tonne tunneling machine called Elizabeth. The pictures show it being lowered over 130 ft below the ground in London. Actually, Transport for London (our transit authority) have two of them - the other one is called Victoria. (Have you noticed the way engineers - usually male - always give their toys female names?) Incidentally, the BBC site that the pictures are on (they’re very cool, take a look) introduces a new method of measurement: 1 tunneling machine = 280 London black cabs...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20094933

If, like me you don’t like heights, then don’t watch this video, which is the brainstorm of some marketing wonk at Korean TV maker LG. It’s supposed to show how indistinguishable from reality their televisions are, and it succeeds all too well. I’m surprised no one suffered a heart attack.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/technology-video/9626968/Lift-stunt-terrifies-riders-into-thinking-they-are-falling.html

Looking for an antique computer? Then I have a deal for you. One of the world’s oldest commercial computers, an ICT 1301 known as ‘Flossie’ has been restored to full working order on its 50th birthday. The machine actually featured in the 1974 James Bond film ‘The Man With The Golden Gun’, and now it’s up for sale in full working order! It comes with 100,000 punch cards and 27 reels of mag tape, not to mention 12K of memory. Just one warning, though - the 12k of memory weighs half a tonne!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-20031487

Scanner: Other stories

85-year-old Gallagher’s Steak House may shutter in January
http://gothamist.com/2012/10/26/85-year-old_gallaghers_steak_house.php

Microsoft Surface RT vs. iPad (4th generation)
http://www.gizmag.com/surface-vs-ipad-4/24732/

CHAMP missile test flight knocks out electronic devices with a burst of energy
http://www.gizmag.com/boeing-champ-missile-test/24658/

Game developers on the iPad Mini
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/180015/iPad_Mini_Developers_react.php

Forget Windows 8: Give us Windows 7.8
http://www.infoworld.com/d/microsoft-windows/forget-windows-8-give-us-windows-78-205408

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
28 October 2012

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.

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