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WINDING DOWN

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

Well here we are with the last Winding Down of the decade. The more observant among you will notice that it's somewhat shorter than usual. I could tell you this is because there was a two mph blizzard which deposited eight nano-meters of snow, causing the whole of London to graunch to a halt. Or maybe it's the fact that we got stuck in the deepest part of the Channel Tunnel for two and a half hours. As one of the train staff put, "Try not to breathe more than necessary".

However, those weren't the real reasons. It's because I decided to only have happy news in this issue. Sadly there proved to be not all that much good news around! I did consider inventing some good news, but my moral scruples (not to mention laziness) forbade any such action on my part.

Winding Down will be back on the 10th of January next year.

And now for the last good news of the decade...

So first here's a piece of good news for those who want a netbook, and haven't yet got one. Cherrypal are offering a Linux based one with a reasonable spec for a mere US$99. And no, I haven't left any numbers out of that price, it really is ninety-nine dollars.

While it's available now (i.e. before Christmas) from the Cherrypal store, I'd check delivery dates with them before buying. Incidentally - and this applies to any reasonable sized purchase - always use a credit card to buy online, because you get better protection if anything goes wrong.
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Cherrypal-Africa-and-secondgeneration-
Bing/?kc=LNXDEVNL121609

Are you a camera freak? Then you might like to take a look at a panoramic picture of Dresden in Germany. It's 297,500 x 87,500 pixels (21.4 megapixels), and you can zoom in and out to get closeups of the different features. Try zooming into the clock on the Hausmannstrum to get a feel for what's possible. The 102GB of raw data in this picture took a 16 processor computer 94 hours to process. The result is well worth the hard work!
http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/dresden26GP

And from urban panoramas we move to Canada's new networked undersea observatory. It's called Neptune Canada, and there is a story about it in Scientific American. The observatory, located on the Pacific sea floor off Vancouver Island, will study a wide variety of topics including earthquake dynamics, deep-sea ecosystems, aspects of climate change (inevitably), and salmon migration.

Take a look at the site - the News and Multimedia section has some amazing pictures, both of the observatory's equipment, and of the local inhabitants.
http://neptunecanada.ca/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=first-undersea-science-station
&sc=WR_20091217

It occurred to me that I've never mentioned The Engineering ToolBox. It's a web site that, to use its own words, aims to provide, "Resources, Tools and Basic Information for Engineering and Design of Technical Applications!". It does indeed provide an amazing amount of information.

Need some unit conversions? There's all the obvious ones like feet/second to meters/second (NASA take note) as well as a number of more obscure ones that will tell you, for instance, how many kilo-joules there are in a ton of coal, or a barrel of oil!

There are also explanations on things like the difference between mixtures, solutions and suspensions, as well a brief introductions to topics such as the laws of thermodynamics.

A mega-useful little site for anyone needing information on anything to do with practical physics or engineering.
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/

NASA has launched (so to speak) a new web site that will be interesting to teenagers with a scientific bent. It's called ' Mission:Science' (not the coolest of names, but it'll do), and it provides access to spacecraft data for use in projects, summer internship information, and a facility to conduct experiments with NASA scientists.
http://missionscience.nasa.gov/

If you end up in the arms of the ghost of Christmas past this year, then fire up your computer and take look at some of Infoworld's hall of fame picture galleries.

The hardware one contains a couple of pictures of machines we've run our Federation game on in the past - the HP ProLiant DL360 (actually it was Compaq when we acquired it), and the Dell Power Edge, but a rack mounted version. We also ran on a VAX for a time, but a much later version than the one shown in the gallery.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/hardware/infoworld-hardware-hall-fame-502&current
=1&last=8#slideshowTop

Gotta spare USB port, guv? Have I got a device for you - well ten of them actually. Infoworld has a piece entitled '10 Wacky USB Devices'. Some of them are fairly old, like the USB missile launcher. One of the 3D artists had one of those when I was at BitStudios a couple of years back. Others seem to be a little more recent, like the eye and brain massager and the bamboo fountain. Now, what did I do with that Trolltech USB cup warmer I picked up at the ACCU conference last year...
http://www.infoworld.com/d/hardware/10-wacky-usb-devices-806&current
=1&last=7#slideshowTop

And to wind up (so to speak) for this week, here's one of the most amusing, and very clever, pictures I've seen for a very long time!
http://www.sampsonuk.net/B3TA/TrojanHorse.jpg

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
20 December 2009

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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