The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: April 10, 2011

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

Well, this week we start with a shameless plug! Green Man Gaming, the digital download company I work for, are giving away a free PC game this weekend. It's called 'Reign: Conflict of Nations' and its a large-scale real-time historical strategy game covering three centuries of medieval Europe. The give away is organized jointly with the Rock, Paper, Shotgun site, thus you have to go there first to collect the free voucher. So, if you are a strategy game buff, point your browser here.

Apart from that, this week's newsletter comes to you courtesy of Rackspace's 'Fanatical Support'. One of our servers was down this morning, and they helped fix a problem in the startup files fast enough that I still had time to work on this newsletter. If it's a little shorter than usual, you'll know why...


Shorts:

Fancy your hand as an author, using electronic publishing to cut out the money grubbing etc publishing houses? If that's the case you might like to take a look at an interview with authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath. It offers some interesting insights into the mechanics of the publishing industry, its history, and why a prolific author like Eisler is going into e-book self-publishing.
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

Fancy yourself as an amateur cryptographer? Then the FBI could use your help. It has two encrypted notes found on the body of a murdered man discovered in St. Louis, Missouri in 1999. The code has defeated the best efforts of the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), and the American Cryptogram Association, so now the FBI are appealing to the public for assistance in decoding the messages. Knowing how clever my readers are, I have no doubt that a solution will be forthcoming in the near future, even if it only turns out to say 'Pick up trousers from Joe's Dry Cleaners'...
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/fbi-wants-public-help-solving-encrypted-notes

Possible bad news for the future versions of Windows. Alleged screen shots for Windows 8 seem to indicate that it's going to use the yucky 'ribbon menu' system first seen in Office 2007. I hope that the outcry will make them back off this idea.

I loathe the system. I tried using only Office 2007 for three months, because I originally thought it might be a lack of familiarity, but at the end of that time I hated its clumsiness even more than when I started. During my travels around the net I can only recall ever having seen one article enthusiastically supporting the ribbon menu system. Everywhere else it was mentioned gave it a thumbs down. Their ribbon menu system makes their animated paper clip look positively benign!
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/04/04/windows_8_ribbon/

Wow! now I've seen it all. One of the UK banks - Halifax Bank of Scotland - is closing web access to investment accounts while it works on "a fresh new site which is more secure and easier to use". The closure will last until April 2012... I think they must have been talking to the people who run London's subway system!

On the other hand their inability to keep the old site running, while they take a year to build a new one, might just have something to do with the absence of the 4,500 IT staff they sacked (oh sorry, 'let go') in October 2010...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/06/halifax_shuts_site_for_a_year/

I see that Newport Beach, California, is planning to remove all the books from its Balboa branch library. Fortunately the plan is not yet definite. Hopefully, the idea will be squashed. We had a similar possibility where I live. There was a proposal to close the library because of cuts. When the idea went out for public consultation it was pointed out that if all the planned expenditure on electronic stuff was cut out, the council would be able to afford to keep the library open with all its books and librarian!

Perhaps the powers that be in Newport Beach never read Fahrenheit 451 when they were younger...
http://motherboard.tv/2011/4/1/california-library-plan-get-rid-of-books-replace-librarians-with-videophones

And now! A blast from the past! The Commodore 64 lives! Yes! (That's enough exclamation marks! Ed.) Commodore is making a Windows PC that fits into a boxy beige shell that looks exactly like the original C64 from 1982. It will not only be capable of playing the original games written for it, but will also run Windows 7. I luuuurrrved the Commodore 64, it was my favorite of the 8-bit machines. <sigh>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12997245


Homework:

The Science web site has an interesting report about an analysis of an experiment carried out in 1958. Yes - over 50 years ago. In 1952 researches at the University of Chicago carried out a famous experiment to see what would happen if they repeatedly passed electric sparks through a flask containing a mixture of gasses similar to that believed to exist on the early earth. After a week of continuous zapping they analysed the content of the flask and found a number of organic substances, including several amino acids needed to produce proteins. The possibility that this might be the mechanism through which life originated caused great excitement.

Over the next few years the researchers repeated the experiment with different sets of gasses, but many of the experimental results were shelved (literally - the flasks were put on a shelf unanalyzed). Now the flasks have been retrieved and analyzed using the latest equipment, a billion times more sensitive than that available to the original researchers. The results indicate that 23 amino acids, including six containing sulfur were present. Several of the latter play an important part in biological processes. Hopefully, there will be further experiments now to investigate this important issue further.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/03/long-neglected-experiment-gives-.html?ref=hp


Geek Toys:

If you don't mind handling bare disk drives (and what geek doesn't like to run his or her mitts lovingly over the casing of a very large capacity drive), then you need to take a look at StarTech's USB3 docking station. Basically it's a neat looking box with a slot containing a hard drive socket that you plug the disk into, allowing you to switch external disks cheaply and with no effort. It will work over USB2, but I'm sure any self-respecting geek will have a box with USB3 on it by now!

Take a look - I'm seriously considering buying one myself next time I need a new external drive.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19897


Scanner:

Think Before You Build: Have computers made architects less disciplined?
http://www.slate.com/id/2289527/

Single-patent lawsuit hits Apple, Google, Amazon, Priceline...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/01/patent_infringement_suit_hits_apple_google_and_30_others/

Google’s Larry Page begins major reorganization: Engineers, not managers, in charge
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110405/exlusive-larry-page-mulls-google-reorg/?mod=tweet#

Music, media, and 'piracy':
US Government 'pirate' domain seizures failed miserably
http://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-seizures-failed-miserably-110403/
"Big Content" is strangling American innovation
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/03/big_content_is_strangling_amer.html
Canadian-backed report says music, movie, and software piracy is a market failure, not a legal one
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/956637--geist-canadian-backed-report-says-music
-movie-and-software-piracy-is-a-market-failure-not-a-legal-one


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter 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
10 April, 2011

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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