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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 2, 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

One main article this week - a look at the situation for PC sales. We also have brief pieces on the Facebook phone, printing pizza, losing your job to a robot, a full scale Lego X-wing starfighter, flight paths, and V2 rockets. URLs point to Microsoft and Skype, the destruction of a Maya pyramid, and a -very- important piece about the effect of fracking on beer.

Apologies for missing two weeks in a row, when there should have only been one - last week. Not only that, this issue is a little lopsided, because I suddenly realized I'd written over a thousand words for the first 'short'. So this week you've got one long and a handful of shorts - but fear not, normal service will be resumed next week.

In the meantime, I'd also like to draw your attention to a very important reason why space flight is important. In the middle of our galaxy is a big black hole (it's called Sagittarius A* - SgrA* for short). Circling SgrA* are massive stars and  truly immense gas clouds. The cloud we are interested in is called SgrB2. It weighs three million times the weight of the sun, and, among other thing contains enough alcohol to fill a glass the size of the Earth! What better reason would you want for developing interstellar travel? (P.S. I got this info from 'New Scientist' magazine, so it must be true...)

And now for a long short...


Analysis: Is it the end of the line for the humble PC?

Woe! Doom! Ruination! Perdition! Catastrophe! Wrack! Ruin! Desolation! Self-flagellation! Sales of PCs in Europe dropped by over a fifth in the first quarter.

Reporting this analysts Gartner stated, among other things, "Many consumers no longer require a PC as usage of smartphones and tablets takes over". I would dispute this. Clearly, people aren't -buying- new computers. But it doesn't follow from the fact that they aren't buying new computers that they aren't using the ones that they have already got.

Almost since its inception the computer market has been able to count on people buying replacement computers once every two or three years. Against all logic, the manufacturers, and their supporting pundits, assumed that this would last for ever. However, a couple of generations back two important things happened.

First, the existing processors in computers became fast enough to run most consumer applications for the foreseeable future, giving the first generation of computers that it wasn't necessary to upgrade in order to get the performance needed.

Second, the CPU manufacturers (primarily Intel) gave up on trying to make the processors go faster, and instead opted for putting more processors on their chips. We call these multi-core chips. The first multi-core chips ran at considerably reduced speeds - around the two GHz mark, instead of around three GHz. This was pretty useless for most existing applications, that could only take advantage of one core. Buy a new computer and have your programs run at only a two thirds of the speed! Things have improved since then and modern CPU chips run at higher speeds that the earlier multi-core ones.

Since that time there has been a further important addition - the use of cards optimized for parallel computing. It wasn't long before programmers realized that modern video cards were parallel computing units, and that certain types of calculations could be off-loaded on to them, especially as modern cards are so powerful and cheap that they only use a small amount of their power to display typical consumer applications. Really only games and the big 3D applications tax the power of these new cards. And, of course, it didn't take long for manufacturers to realize that you could make non-video cards with the parallel facilities of the video cards.

Finally, there are a couple of other things to take into account. You -had- to upgrade early PCs, because their physical life, especially that of disk drives, was short - two to three years at the most. In addition once you ran out of disk space, a not infrequent occurrence, you had to upgrade unless you wanted to buy a new disk and open up the case to install it by fiddling with wires inside the machine and then try and figure out how to transfer everything from the old disk to the new one. Most people opted to buy a new machine. Over the years though, the hardware has become much more reliable - I'd say at least five years useful life, quite possibly more.

Hand in hand with this increase in reliability is a revolution brought about by the ubiquity of the USB interface. You can now plug in many of the peripherals that used to be built in, and the computer will find them automatically. And they are cheap! Run out of disk space? You can pick up a USB 1TB drive for around US$65. You don't need to buy a new machine.

Finally, (really finally this time) there is the matter of computer programs... The dirty truth is that most commercial programmers have spent the bulk of their working life writing programs for single processors, and are having difficulty shifting to the new paradigm. Even where they can, to a certain extent, cope with multiple cores, the programs they are writing are single core programs with a dash of parallelism thrown in here and there where it is obviously necessary.

Very few consumer programs out there are architected, designed and coded as multi-core right from the start and all the way through using parallel algorithms.

So, I would argue, people haven't stopped using their computers, they've stopped buying new ones every couple of years. Of course, some of the functions that were previously the preserve of the PC have moved over to the tablet and the mobile phone, but many of the uses of the PC remain solid. The truth is that the relationship between the PC and the 'device' is synergistic, not antagonistic. However, a 'war' between the two for 'hearts and minds' makes much better copy for the pundits than stories about the two cozying up to one another.

Tablets are in the same position that the PC market was in during its infancy, the smart phone market is already maturing - most of the reviews make it clear that the differences between the iPhone5, the Galaxy S4, and the HTC One phone are merely a matter of taste. Technically, they are more or less the same. All that remains is for them to get into a downward price spiral similar to that which has affected the PC.

So is the PC really doomed? No, I don't think so. Apart from anything else, over 12 million of them were sold in Europe in the first quarter. That may have been a drop, but it's still a large figure. Mainly it shows that Microsoft's icky Windows 8 operating system was something of a turn off when it came to encouraging new sales - it's a rerun of the Vista fiasco. There's little hope that Microsoft can turn it around, either, given that they bet the farm on Windows 8. The retailers' hopes are pinned on the upcoming Windows 8.1, but from what I've seen the 'changes' amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Get used to it guys, the PC market is settling in to a new, steady, lower rate of turnover akin to that of the white goods market. Unless the programmers suddenly catch up with the hardware and produce stunning, compelling, must have programs that only run on 16 core machines, (and I don't see that happening any time soon) the market  is just going to be plain ordinary.
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2484815
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/28/idc_predicts_worst_year_for_pcs/
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/plummeting-pc-sales-expose-fiction-of-windows-8-numbers-219424
http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsofts-own-numbers-show-windows-8-sales-falling-rapidly-218050
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57586786-75/for-windows-8.1-a-half-step-toward-a-start-button/
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/180-3396434-7358136?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=usb+hard+drive


Shorts:

I see that Facebook's phone experiment was something of a failure. Such a failure in fact that AT&T, who were their partners in the fiasco, are now flogging off the turkeys for less than a dollar (99 cents to be precise). Rumour has it that they can't even sell them at that price. Man, it's just not cool to be seen with one of  -those- devices...

I suspect that the origin of this blunder was that Facebook fell for their own hype - and equated their entire membership with the relatively few who use the site obsessively, all the time. C'est la vie.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/13/att_drop_facebook_htc_phone/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/facebook_home_htc_first_phone_price_slashed/

I'm always going on about 3D printers, since before they became headline news (my advice, if you must print guns, don't use them, you could kill yourself). I was, however, fascinated to discover that NASA is trying to use 3D printers to make pizza. It's an interesting concept (don't forget to clean the molten plastic out of the nozzles first though), and I guess it would be useful to be able to dial up your pizza on a printer when you're half way to Mars instead of having to wait several years for the delivery guy. Presumably, if you want a low calorie version you would use a regular 2D printer?
http://www.space.com/21250-nasa-3d-food-printer-pizza.html?cmpid=514630

Worried about losing your job to a robot? Better take a look at this piece on the 33rd Square website, which makes a bunch of predictions about jobs being lost - which jobs and what year. If your job's in there, maybe you'd better consider a career change...
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/05/will-you-lose-your-job-to-robot.html#more


For Geeks:

Calling all Lego meisters. Treck down to New York's Times Square and feast your eyes on a 1:1 scale model of the Star Wars X-wing starfighter. Over five million Lego bricks, and with a wingspan of 43 ft, it will be advertising a new Disney Show. Wow!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/25/lego_xwing_starfighter/

The UK's BBC has a cool set of pictures from Michael Markieta, a transportation planner at global engineering and design firm Arup. He has spent the past year developing visualizations of flight paths wending their way across the globe. Impressive - take a look.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-22657086

You know, you've got to hand it to ex-Microsofty Paul Allen, he does has an eye for the unusual. Take, for instance, his latest acquisition - a German V2 rocket. Why is it that the line in Tom Lehrer's song always comes to mind when V2 rockets are mentioned? "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/24/allen_v2/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro


Scanner: Other stories

Microsoft reading Skype text
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/14/skype_snoop_or_phishing_defence/
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Skype-with-care-Microsoft-is-reading-everything-you-write-1862870.html

Construction company destroys one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids for road-building project
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/construction-company-destroys-belize-largest-mayan-pyramids-road-building-project-article-1.1343441?localLinksEnabled=false

Now it gets serious: Fracking could RUIN BEER
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/24/german_brewers_warn_that_frackng_could_contaminate_beer/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi and Roget for drawing my attention to material (and synonyms) for Winding Down.

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 Thunderbird spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
2 June 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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