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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 10, 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

It's a bit of a thin week for news this week, but here's a modicum of material on blogs and comments, Cisco with an interesting statistic, the average length of mobile phone calls, Dell (of course), an Amazon patent, an IBM microscope, magnetic logic, and a new Antarctic research station. And that's it for this week!

Next week I won't be around, so there will be no Winding Down. But it will be back the following Sunday, hopefully with a little more to tell you about, but if there isn't, I'll see if I can make up something that's suitably outrageous.

Shorts:

One or two people have, over the years, asked me why this newsletter isn't a blog, and why there is nowhere for comments to it. The answer to the second question is because it's a newsletter, not a blog. The answer to the first is more complex. Partly it's because that's the way it evolved, and partly because it's not really a discussion forum, it's a way of my drawing your attention to things which I found interesting in that massive sea of data we call the internet.

Which is by way of drawing your attention to a fascinating piece in on the Scientific American web site about commenting on blogs. It's a major discussion on blog commenting, as well as a preliminary report on some interesting research on the effect of nasty troll style comments on the readers of a blog article. It's really interesting. Take a look and see what you think. And, no, you can't comment on it!
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2013/01/28/commenting-threads-good-bad-or-not-at-all/

Cisco, makers of internet router and network security products have come up with an interesting piece of analysis. It seems that it is safer, in terms of your computer being infected with malware, to click on a smut site, than to click on a web advert. I can't say that really surprises me, although I certainly wouldn't recommend that you only click on smut sites, and eschew all internet ads!

What I would recommend it that you exercise common sense in your browsing (although my experience is that 'common sense' is not very common - especially on the internet) and make sure you have some decent anti-virus software installed on your computer. Oh, and incidentally, according to the same Cisco report, only half a percent of the malware encountered on the net is aimed at mobile devices.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/30/cisco_security_report/

And, on the subject of mobile devices, according to the European mobile carrier Vodafone, the average duration of a phone call has halved over the last five years. It's now down from over three minutes to one minute forty seconds. That's really interesting, especially given that most people get more 'free' minutes on their pre-pay phones than they use. I don't really know why this should be so - perhaps anything longer than that is going via Skype? Alternatively, perhaps the alternatives are now viable as communication mediums - or, maybe, just maybe, there has been a sea change in the communication habits of teenagers. Definitely room for some further research into this phenomenon.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/30/mobile_phone_calls_shorter/

So Dell Computers are going to go private. Hardly surprising. No one in their right mind would actually want several thousand busybodies, including government oiks, looking over their shoulder and telling them what they can and cannot do. Not only that but the price of Dell shares is going down because the perceived wisdom is that the PC market is DOOMED, doomed, doomed.

Personally, I suspect that although it may be ultimately doomed, there's a lot more life in it yet - especially in business. There's also the fact that the economy is in a recession, and the first thing that happens is a recession is that people 'make do' with what they've already got, especially when what they have is adequate for what they need. It's also the case that coming out of a recession they start replacing older things with new stuff.

In the meantime I would wish Dell well. Over the years I've used very nice Dell machines. None of them exactly had Steve Jobs styling, but they all worked and lasted much longer than their counterparts from other companies, and Dell built them to my specifications, rather than foisting on to me something that the 'average' consumer wanted. Good Luck Dell.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57567644-92/its-official-dells-going-private-in-$24.4b-deal/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/07/dell_goes_private_hpc_blog/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-33617_3-57567665-276/5-consequences-of-dells-$24.4-billion-deal-to-go-private/

There's an interesting patent in the works from Amazon. It's an attempt to patent the digital resale market. The key sentence in the patent, as 'The Register' correctly points out, is the one that says, "A secondary market which allows users to effectively and permissibly transfer “used” digital objects to others while maintaining scarcity is therefore desired." In other words how do we make sure that we get a buck when someone gives, or sells a copy of a digital item.

The assumption is that soon everyone will be storing their digital stuff on line, so that the likes of Amazon have control of it. I'm not so sure that this is the case. Large USB hard drives are increasingly cheap - and even 'mere' USB sticks are starting to come in at 32GB. Virtually everyone I know who is not an Apple droid has a USB in the terabyte range. USB2 can cope with the speeds necessary for video and MP3, but the new USB3 drives are even faster.

We shall see, no doubt, in due course.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/amazon_patents_digital_resale/
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,364,595.PN.&OS=PN/8,364,595&RS=PN/8,364,595

Scanner: Other stories

Revolutionary IBM microscope technique yields resolution 100 times smaller than an atom
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/02/revolutionary-ibm-microscope-technique.html

Magnetic logic makes for mutable computer chips
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=magnetic-logic-makes-for-mutable-computer-chips&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_physics_20130201

Halley VI Antarctic research station opens for business
http://www.gizmag.com/halley-vi-antarctic-research-station/26090/

Facebook burnout: 61% of users have needed a break
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/05/pew_facebook_churn_story/

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
10 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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