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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 15, 2013

Fed2 Star last page Fed2 Star: Official News page 11 Fed2 Star next page

WINDING DOWN

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

by Alan Lenton

This week we have a full menu. For starters, no less than three bites out of Apple – two legal and one on the new phones. For the main course we look at Amazon, a hologram receptionist, radiation shields, synchrony, retrieving Windows product keys, a typeface for dyslexics, the world’s tallest Lego tower, and hexagonal, self-assembling, robot fliers. The desert is in the Scanner section where we have URLs for concave skyscrapers, the NSA, H1B visas, and rocket engines from 3D printers.

The break was certainly longer than I intended, but I’m finally back. Nearly all the stuff that was cluttering the area around my desk is back in the kitchen where it belongs. Have you noticed that it’s never possible to pack as much stuff back into storage spaces as you took out of them earlier? I think it is to do with entropy. You start off with a neat, orderly stack in the cupboard, but as you try and cram more the contents become more and more disordered until, by the time you need to redo the kitchen, you have a local kitchen version of the heat death of the universe.

Shorts:

Well Apple has certainly been in the news while I’ve been on my summer hols. Lawsuits and new phones seem to predominate. Apple retail employees – or rather ex-employees – are suing Apple because of the unpaid time for which they were forced to queue on a line for security checks at the end of the shift. Sounds a bit weird, doesn’t it, but it starts to make more sense when you realize that the claim is that the lines take up to 30 minutes to go through! Hmmm... Even assuming you don’t want to go out for lunch, and taking the average wait as 20 min, on a five day week that’s 1hr 40 min unpaid. Let’s say 48 working weeks in a year which brings it up to 80 hours (according to the calculator on my Android based Samsung Galaxy Note 1 phone).

Hey! That’s two full weeks unpaid time. Now, Apple retail stores world wide employed around 42,000 people in 2012 – that’s 84,000 weeks unpaid work all together. Dividing by our 48 figure for the working weeks in a year we get a stunning 1,750 years of unpaid work. That’s a pretty impressive little dividend for Apple shareholders. However, I would caution readers that the figures all rest on the figure of an up to 30 minute wait, which hasn’t yet been proven in court.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57596064-37/apple-slapped-with-lawsuit-over-mandatory-employee-bag-checks/

And while we are on the subject of Apple and lawsuits, I note that the judge in the ebook price fixing case has issued the final judgment (they were found guilty a while ago). Basically they aren’t allowed to enforce the terms of the price fixing agreement they had with a number of publishers, and they have been given a time table for re-negotiating the contracts. More to the point there will be an external and an internal enforcer paid for by Apple for the next five years, tasked with making sure that the naughty boys don’t come up with another nifty price fixing wheeze.

Money wasn’t an issue in this particular trial, but you can bet that with the state administrations strapped for cash the state attorneys general are already circling – not to mention aggrieved customers. Apple will, of course appeal. However, I don’t rate their chances very highly, since the general consensus seems to be that they got off rather lightly.

And in the meantime, on the non-legal ebook front, there is Amazon’s recent announcement that when you buy a paper book, it intends, subject to an agreement with the publisher, to give customers the ebook, free or at a reduced price.

Amazon already do something similar with CDs and the corresponding MP3s. I don’t know about anyone else, but I now have my Amazon CD wish list divided into those with the free MP3s and those that don’t. Guess which CDs I buy first?

By the time the terms of the injunction on Apple expire, the ebooks market will be so different that they’ll never be able to try something similar again.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/06/final_injunction_filed_in_apple_ebook_price_fixing_case/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/10284840/Amazon-offers-customers-cheap-ebooks-to-replace-paper-versions.html

OK – just one more Apple bit. They did launch a new set of iPhones this week, after all. If you have a spare arm and a leg, you might be able to afford them. We have a lot of iPhone users where I work (majority iPhone, reasonable number of Android, one Blackberry hold out), but I haven’t noticed any rush to upgrade, in spite of some fairly attractive looking deals from the carriers.

The problem is that the 5S, while it may have a lot of new stuff under the hood, doesn’t actually have a lot new to show the purchaser. OK there is the fingerprint reader. Big deal? I think not. The ‘entry’ level 5C. Well that’s only ‘cheap’ by Apple pricing standards. I won’t comment on the colours... The truth is that the products are no longer ground breaking, which is hardly surprising, given how long it is since they were ground breaking. And in the meantime the other manufacturers have finally caught up – Samsung smart phones alone have twice the market share of Apple.

I don’t think it’s a ‘no Steve Jobs’ problem, Apple has lead the way in the device market for a long time now – but, big as they are, they need to start up a new device market to hold their position. They would have this problem even with Steve Jobs still around. Apple aren’t the first to get into this bind, and rest assured they won’t be the last.

They do have a long term strategy, as I see it – they are moving to be a retail digital services company – with iTunes at its core. However, to consolidate their position (and a lot of iThingie users loathe having to use iTunes), they need to keep producing ground breaking devices which rely on iTunes to provide the services. The next couple of years will be critical for Apple.

This time there’s no Steve Jobs standing in the wings to rescue them if they screw it up. What is waiting in the wings, however, is the rumour that Amazon may be planning to offer a free smartphone!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/apple_iphone_5c_and_5s/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/11/apple_quietly_revives_iphone_charging_and_syncing_docks/
http://www.cringely.com/2013/09/11/apple-burnishes-wait-another-breakthrough/
http://www.infoworld.com/t/technology-business/beyond-the-iphone-what-pundits-dont-get-about-apple-226640
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/06/amazon_free_smartphone/

Mention of which allows me to elide smoothly into the question of Amazon. ‘The Register’ recently published an interesting little graph. The graph reminded me of one I saw in the heyday of IBM, which showed that IBM was making more profit each year than the total sales of its nearest competitor, DEC. The Amazon graph is similarly stunning, although it just deals in total sales, since Amazon doesn’t have profits. (Don’t believe me? Just ask any Amazon shareholder.)

What the graph shows is that Amazon’s annual sales are six times the size of their nearest competitor, Staples. If, as I suspect, the graph refers only to US sales, then the worldwide gap between Amazon and the nearest competitor will widen even more. Not bad for a company that started off packing up books in a garage...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/30/amazon_dot_com_holds_ludicrous_lead_in_online_retail_sales/

Have you ever been worried that you might lose your job to a robot? Then here is something else to worry about. A local council in the UK is spending UK£12,000 (about US$20,000) on a hologram to work as one of its receptionists! I’m really temped to take a visit to the town hall to check whether she passes the Turing Test.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/council-spending/10253365/12000-hologram-employed-as-council-receptionist.html

Homework:

One of the key problems of sending astronauts on long distance journey is that of protecting them from radiation. There are not only cosmic rays from outside the Solar System, but charged particles emitted by the sun, even in the quiet periods when it isn’t spewing out large chunks of plasma. Current estimates are that travelling to Mars in an unshielded spaceship would result in a radiation dose one hundred times the earthbound yearly average – always assuming you don’t live near Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima, of course.

Traditionally, you shield people from radiation using concrete and steel – lots of it. In fact so much of it, that you’d never get the rocket off the ground. So, what we need is that staple of sci-fi space opera , the radiation deflector shields. Of course no one’s built one yet, but attempts are under way to do such a thing by studying the way in which the Earth’s magnetosphere protects us from radiation.

Who knows, perhaps we will soon see yet another breakthrough of something first predicted in science fiction!
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/27/world/europe/star-trek-shield/index.html

Here is a really fascinating little video demonstrating synchrony, using 32 metronomes. Very neat – I bet you didn’t know they could talk to one another...
http://io9.com/5947112/watch-32-discordant-metronomes-achieve-synchrony-in-a-matter-of-minutes

I can’t remember how many Windows product keys I’ve lost in the past. I bet most of you have at some time as well. Then take a look at the URL – it’s for a nifty little package which finds the key for your Windows set up – very handy when you want to move it to a new computer!
http://wpkf.codeplex.com/

And for those among you who are dyslexic, there’s now a typeface you might want to make as the default for your browser. It’s called Dyslexie, and it’s been specially designed to help dyslexics. Each letter has been designed so that it can’t be confused with other letters, even when it’s been rotated or mirrored. I’m not dyslexic myself, but it seems to me to be a good idea, and worth trying if you are dyslexic.
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/09/start/this-headline-has-been-written-for-dyslexics

For Geeks:

Here’s an interesting little toy. Self-assembling mini robot hexagonal pods that can bind together and make a flying unit. The really interesting thing about it, though, is that there isn’t a controller for the assemblage – the whole thing is kept aloft by each little pod making what decisions it thinks are needed to keep the whole unit in the sir. The whole thing is what is known as a distributed flight array. Very cool!
http://www.gizmag.com/distributed-flight-array-self-assembling-multicopter/28380/

Too small for your taste? Then try this – the world’s tallest Lego tower – 112 feet tall, half a million Lego bricks. Not only that, but it was a school project. Phooey! They never had anything like that when I was at school.
http://io9.com/the-worlds-tallest-lego-tower-ever-1171214996

Scanner: Other stories

Skyscraper melts Jaguar car parts
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23930675

NSA crypto revelations: 7 issues to watch
http://www.informationweek.com/security/privacy/nsa-crypto-revelations-7-issues-to-watch/240161009?pgno=1

US IT worker files hiring lawsuit against Infosys, class action proposed
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/08/05/2333216/us-it-worker-files-hiring-lawsuit-against-infosys-class-action-proposed?sdsrc=popbyskid

3D printed guns are for wimps. Meet NASA’s 3D printed ROCKET ENGINE
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/28/3d_printed_rocket_engine_parts/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material 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
15 September 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.

Fed2 Star last page   Fed2 Star next page