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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 24, 2013

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WINDING DOWN

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

by Alan Lenton

A few interesting little bits and pieces for you this week. The Russian meteor, some superb and unusual photos of London, historical material on the US space program, Accidental Empires, Apple shops and patents, Chromebooks and MacBook Airs, with a nibble of Microsoft thrown in for good measure. All topped up with some URLs for the Skylon Spaceplane, some novelty USB sticks (my fav is the toaster hub) , Apple security, and model train steam engines.

So, on with the show...


Shorts:

I guess most of you saw the footage of the meteor that came down over Russia a week or so ago. For those of you who didn’t, the URLs include a video taken from a car dash cam. Dash cams are apparently pretty ubiquitous in Russia these days, which was useful, because the original video I was going to offer you has been zapped because the car radio could be heard in the background playing music. So the copyright owner forced it to be taken down. Such stupidity. I didn’t even notice the music when I watched it! The other URL is an edited transcript of and interview with a professor in the Meteor Physics Group at the University of Western Ontario, made shortly after the event.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66OHiB_p4I
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chelyabinsk-fireball-asteroid&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SPCPHYS_20130221

If you are into cameras and photographs, then point your browser at the URL for some excellent aerial photographs of London taken at dawn. I love London at dawn and at dusk. It’s so quiet and the buildings rise out of the mist at dawn. I always took a camera with me when I used to walk from Waterloo Station along the side of the Thames to get to work in the City around dawn. In the dusk, the best way to see the lights come on in the gathering gloom is from one of the footbridges - Hungerford Bridge (the one on the east side of the railway bridge), heading north, is the best if you are ever in London.

But I digress. Take a look at these fabulous pictures - especially number two which is my favorite!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/9331468/Aerial-photographs-of-London-at-dawn.html?frame=2248134

Many readers of this rag will be too young to remember the start of the US space program just over fifty years ago, so I thought I’d draw your attention to some material on John Glenn’s February 1961 mission - the first American to orbit the Earth (three times, in the event). An achievement that merited a New York ticker tape parade when he got back. And, since there are quite a lot of readers with an interest in space flight I thought I’d also draw your attention to the excellent ‘Vintage Space’ blog run by historian Amy Shira Teitel.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/02/20/john-glenn-orbiting-the-earth-on-this-day-sixty-years-ago/
http://amyshirateitel.com/vintagespace/

Robert X Cringley is making his brilliant book about the start of the personal computing era - ‘Accidental Empires’ - open to all, by posting it chapter by chapter onto the web. I haven’t seen this book for years, but I bought it not long after it came out and I thought it was one of the best books I’d read for a long time. I really recommend that you follow this series of chapters - we all need a sense of history to be able to take control of our future, rather than being batted around by it.
http://www.cringely.com/2013/02/04/accidental-empires-part-1/

I see that Apple are taking patents to their logical conclusion - they’ve just patented the shop. Yes, truly, I kid you not. I presume the shop will have rooms with rounded corners, since they patented the rectangle with rounded corners some time ago. What will they come up with next? My guess is that charging royalties on eating apples has to be a good contender.

And talking of Apple and shops, I see that that a crook in Boulder, Colorado managed to make off with US$60,000 of Apple kit - but that wasn’t the killer. To get in he (or she) smashed in the fancy glass front door - which cost a cool US$100,000 - more than the cost of the goodies stolen! There’s a photograph of the super expensive door in the second URL. Looks pretty ordinary to me, even if it does have an Apple logo painted on to it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/01/apple_trademark_shop_design/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/19/apple_store_theft_expensive_door/


Homework:

Recently a couple of people asked me if they should consider buying one of Google’s new Chromebooks instead of a MacBook Air. Since I possess neither, I wasn’t able to answer immediately, but I said I would see what I could find out. Fortunately for my reputation, in the nick of time Gizmag came out with a side by side comparison of the two machines. And the answer is? “It depends”.

Overall, I wouldn’t currently recommend you get a Chromebook, but that’s not the fault of the Chromebook itself. The problem is that currently there are not very many applications available for it compared to the Mac. This is always a problem for machines with a new operating system, and, in this case, most of what you can do with it is run through the browser.

However, there is an important difference between the two machines, which is what triggered the ‘depends’. In this case it depends on what you want to do with it. The Mac is a fairly conventional personal computer, but the Chromebook is something a little different. It is a platform to access and use Google’s online services. In hardware terms this shows up in the miserable amount of storage the Chromebook has - a mere 32 GB, as compared with the Mac’s 128 GB. However, if you consider that you are keeping everything online, then a local storage of 32GB is quite generous.

The Chromebook is part of an interesting trend on the part of the big players on the Internet: producing devices to act as platforms for their online services, rather than software applications running on general purpose computers. Think iPad for Apple services, Chromebook for Google Services, Kindle HD for Amazon services, and, if it ever takes off, the Surface Pro for Microsoft services.

But I foresee a problem with this. A problem from the user’s point of view that is. Assuming the strategy works, the devices will become even more sophisticated, and oriented towards each service. Eventually, you will need to carry multiple devices around to access multiple services.

More likely, and this is what the providers are betting on, you will skip the inconvenience of carrying multiple devices, and settle for being locked into a single service.

There is an alternative for users, though - a single general purpose computing device with software to access all of the services. Obviously, the providers don’t want this, but at the moment with none of them having a real dominance of the market, all have to provide software for other people’s devices, and for PCs, to access their services. An interesting conundrum.

This also explains why Microsoft is so desperate to have its new Surface Pro succeed. It’s not the hit to its profits or psychological implications for its brand that is the problem. There are already three major players in the market for online services via devices. If Microsoft doesn’t get a foothold in that market soon, it will be completely frozen out of what it perceives as the future for the consumer computing market. With the Surface Pro, Microsoft isn’t just trying out a new device a la the Xbox, it’s placing a bet on a large chunk of the future, and it’s a bet that Microsoft, coming late to the party, can’t afford to lose.

Anyway, the answer to the question we started with, is that I would suggest going for the MacBook Air, and if you want Windows, use Boot Camp on it - I did that with a MacBook Pro for two years, and it was absolutely flawless in running Windows, except that I could never find the vertical bar character on the keyboard!
http://www.gizmag.com/macbook-air-vs-google-chromebook-pixel-specs-comparison/26371/


Scanner: Other stories

Skylon Spaceplane: The spacecraft of tomorrow
http://news.discovery.com/space/private-spaceflight/the-spacecraft-of-tomorrow-130219.htm

These creative USB sticks will make your file transfers way more interesting
http://io9.com/5983615/these-creative-usb-sticks-will-make-your-file-transfers-way-more-interesting

Apple FINALLY fills gaping Java hole that pwned its own devs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/20/apple_java_omnishambles/

3D printed kits of the Ffestiniog steam engines made from laser scans.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theflexiscaleco/3d-printed-kits-of-the-ffestiniog-englands-from-la?ref=category

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers 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
24 February 2013

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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