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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 23, 2012

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WINDING DOWN

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

by Alan Lenton

Well, obviously we are covering the iOS6 maps fiasco this week. Other topics include e-books, patents in various guises, 3D printers (twice), Sophos Anti-Virus, CubeSats, the first color motion picture, microwave weapons, Intel, Microsoft, HP, and finally a URL about the destruction of the internet (or not, as the case may be).

Advance warning! Winding Down is going to be produced on a three weeks in every four basis, at least until the new year, to allow me to meet family commitments. This means that there will be no Winding Down the week after next - 7 October.

I don’t know what it’s like on the US side of the pond, but here in England’s green and pleasant land temperatures have plummeted over the last week or so - I blame global warming. My grandmother used to blame the Russians (she pronounced it ‘Roooshuns’), but they aren’t really so blameworthy these days. Probably by the next issue, the rain will have set in and will last until the summer rains start late next spring.

In the meantime, let me tell you about iOS6...


Shorts:

Sheesh! I thought I’d dealt with all that was needed about Apple last week, but they seem determined to stay on the hit list. This week they released a new version of their operating system - iOS6. It looked as though it would be a goodie - Apple claimed ‘over 200 new features’. What they didn’t mention was how many existing features were removed - like the built in YouTube application, and, in a classic blunder, the use of Google maps in the maps app.

The latter turned out to be a real disaster as Apple’s own maps proceeded to royally screw up, with distorted pictures of skyscrapers, bridges and landmarks, misplaced streets and businesses, and, unbelievably, some misplaced cities. We even noticed the problems here in sleepy London town, where London Underground, who run the London subways system had signs out offering paper versions of their iconic maps to users of iOS6!

Less of a high profile was a warning in Infoworld that if you don’t watch your settings, iOS6 can seriously jack up your phone bills and burn through your data allowance in double quick time. There are too many different settings to discuss here, but if you do update to iOS6 I would suggest you read the InfoWorld piece in the URLs that go with this piece.

The fiasco has caused a major slowdown in the take up of iOS6 - exacerbated by the fact that one of the web pages you need to go to when reconnecting to networks after the upgrade wasn’t there! It’s there now, I’m told, but it’s yet one more speed bump that early adopters had to overcome. Apple is really taking a bath over the fiasco - even the Swiss railway stuck their oar in over Apple using their clock face without asking them!

There’s probably a bunch of nice things in the iOS6 upgrade, but they got drowned out in the laughter over the maps fiasco!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57515223-37/apple-delivers-ios-6/?tag=nl.e703&s_cid=e703
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/09/ios-6-maps-problems/
http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/watch-out-ios-6-can-jack-your-phone-bill-202245
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/apple_ios6_upgrade_bug/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/21/apple_copied_swiss_rail_clock/

While we are talking about Apple there were a couple of other things that came up this week that almost got lost in the iOS6 affair. The first was the news that Apple and four major publishers - Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, the Hachette Book Group - have offered to back off on their attempt to fix the prices of e-books, in the face of an EU investigation. They’re still fighting the case in the US, but the capitulation in the EU is bound to weaken their stand against the US anti-trust authorities.

Meanwhile at the International Trade Commission, Google’s newly acquired Motorola Mobility division has won an investigation into Apple’s refusal to work out a license. It’s totally depressing to see money being frittered away on law cases in this fashion, instead of being used to provide better and innovative kit for ordinary consumers. All the big electronics/Internet companies are guilty of this, but Apple has an especially bad reputation. One can only wonder what would have happened to Apple and the Apple Mac if Xerox had applied to the courts to have its sale banned on the grounds that it ripped off the desktop developed by the Xerox PARC research group...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/19/eu_ebooks_antitrust_offer/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/itc_votes_yes_on_google_apple_investigation/

OK - let’s try and move away from depressing legal news. The Reg hardware department has produced an interesting piece on using a 3D printer. These printers are dropping in price, and if the drop continues, whey will soon be within the range of ordinary household goods. “Why on earth would a household want a 3D printer?”, I can hear you ask. Good question, and I don’t really have an answer, although having recently descaled the shower head, the idea of printing a replacement instead does appeal. More to the point, I am old (and decrepit) enough to remember people asking exactly the same question over the concept of home computers! Regardless, it’s an interesting article, and I’d recommend it if you would like to see what’s in store for the future.
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/09/20/how_hard_is_3d_printing/

While people weren’t laughing at iOS6 maps this week, they were laughing at anti-virus (AV) vendor Sophos. No one likes anti-virus vendors - for most people they fall into the category of ‘necessary evil’, so when an update to Sophos’s AV was identified by the existing AV version as malware, people thought this both apt and extremely funny. I gather that they’ve now sorted out the mess, and I guess they’ll be just a leetle more careful in the future!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/sophos_auto_immune_update_chaos/

There’s a new thing in the offing at the US Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO). The office is changing the way it operates to make it possible for members of the public to submit examples of prior art against patents being examined before those patents are granted. This is an important step forward. I can only hope that this excellent idea catches on over on this side of the pond. It’s not just that this will help stop ludicrous patents being awarded, it probably also means that after a while it will stop chancers even trying to patent things that are common knowledge in the technical community. Definitely the way to go.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/patent-busting-crowdsourced/


Homework:

Over the past few years there has been an increasing interest in in the use of small satellites, in particular the so called ‘CubeSats’ - satellites housed in a 10cm cube, and weighing about a kilogram. One of the big advantage of these satellites is that they can be launched on small rockets, or hitch a lift on rockets delivering much more massive traditional satellites. They don’t cost much to build (relatively speaking), and are ideal for zero-g experiments. Consequently they are very popular for one-off experiments by universities and other educational establishments. I think we will be hearing a lot more about these critters in the future.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2155/1

Attention all film buffs! The UK’s National Media Museum has managed to restore the first known color motion picture and is showing it to the public for the first time since it was made 110 years ago. It was made as a test reel by the British inventor Edward Raymond Turner in 1901/2 - yes that long ago. The process used was ingenious. Each frame of the film was shot three times, in blue, green, and red light. Although the film itself is black and white, as each frame showed in the projector a filter of the relevant color was moved into the light beam resulting a colored picture showing on the screen. Of course, it’s not exactly brilliant colors, but it does represent the first attempt at a color movie that we know of.
http://www.gizmag.com/first-color-motion-picture/24148/

I mentioned 3D printing for household use earlier in this issue, but here’s a very interesting use in a non-household environment - printing biological tissues. The idea has been floating around of using it printers for this purpose for some time, but now a team at the University of California, San Diego, have come up with a way of printing three dimensional blood vessels in seconds. If the technique proves to be scalable, I suspect it’s going to revolutionize reconstructive surgery. Fingers crossed!
http://www.gizmag.com/3d-printed-biological-tissues/24155/


Geek Stuff:

Bad news for all geeks - it looks like the attempt by the US and other countries to produce high power microwave weapons has reached a dead end. The idea was to produce non-lethal weapons that would heat up the skin painfully, while not causing any damage - just triggering the pain nerves by heating up the top layer of skin. Some idea of the problems can be gauged from the results of a demonstration of one of the weapons under development in October 2007. The idea was to use the weapon on a bunch of journalists (somebody in the Pentagon has a warped sense of humor), but the day was rainy, and the raindrops absorbed most of the energy in the beam. In fact the stuff that did get through to the ‘victims’ was generally considered to be nice and warming on a raw, cold, wet day! Not exactly something that would break up a riot!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=high-power-microwave-weapons-start-to-look-like-dead-end&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120917


Scanner: Other stories

Deep, deep dive inside Intel’s next-generation processor
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/intel_haswell_microarchitecture_deep_dive/

iPhone 5 vs. Galaxy S III (A useful comparison - AL)
http://www.gizmag.com/iphone-5-vs-galaxy-s-iii-specs-comparison/24196/

Could someone really destroy the whole Internet?
http://io9.com/5944558/could-someone-really-destroy-the-whole-internet

Senate hears Microsoft and HP avoided billions in US taxes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/senate_microsoft_hp_tax/

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
23 September 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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