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Changes afoot - blog migration to WordPress

Over the next week I'm going to migrate this blog over to a WordPress site. Blogger has been perfect for getting up and running quickly but it's starting to look limited. Getting something simple like a tag cloud working was a faff but a bigger issue is not being able to do something fairly straightforward like related posts - important for when there's a series of items on the same topic. Blogger doesn't support this directly so JavaScript hacks are required.

WordPress is going to be running on Windows rather than the usual Linux, which has thrown up a few pemissions problems and URL rewriting was a bit tricky to get working. This is mostly solved so all that remains is to get all my Blogger content across. The WordPress import tool does a great job and gets you most of the way there in a few minutes, but unfortunately it doesn't bring images across so a bit more work will be required. There is an image importer plugin available which will hopefully so that might do the trick.

When the WordPress site is up and running I'll switch DNS over and fingers crossed all will be well.

Apologies for the hassle but if you wouldn't mind re-following the new blog I'd really appreciate it. RSS feed URL's will probably need updating too.

See you on the other side!

Windows Phone 7 problems: account management and music playback

Windows Phone is a great smartphone platform and even in it's first release does quite a few things better than the competition, but things are not perfect by a long way. My previous reviews have already mentioned a couple of issues, but I want to go into some more detail on two big problems I'm experiencing at the moment.

Microsoft's account management hell

This is a much wider issue than the Windows Phone platform but is something that must be affecting a fair few users of multiple Microsoft products and services. By continually throwing out new platforms like Live and Zune on top of existing services like Hotmail and Xbox Live, Microsoft has created an account management nightmare which manifests itself in a particularly frustrating way on the Windows Phone.

When I first set my phone up I let it create a new Windows Live ID for me. I had a long-dead Hotmail email account, and an Xbox Live ID I use on my 360 linked to an old Yahoo email address, but as I was choosing to invest in a new platform I thought it best to start over with a nice new live.co.uk identity.

What a mistake that turned out to be. A new Xbox Live account was automatically created for me and linked to my new Windows Live ID. This meant my real avatar and achievements off my Xbox Live account wouldn't appear on the phone, and there was no option to switch gamer tags as you get with the Xbox 360 itself.

Over the next few weeks I researched numerous discussion areas on the web to find a way to sort this mess out, but it is presently unfixable. The only option is to reset the phone and set it up again using the Xbox Live account, but doing this completely wipes the phone including any purchased media and apps. I'd been putting this off as it sounded like torture but earlier this week I took the plunge. Fortunately, with almost all my personal information being stored in the cloud I didn't have any issues with reloading data, and the music I'd purchased was non-DRM'd so that could be copied back across from the synced copy on my PC. But paid-for apps are a different story.

When I completed setting up my phone it the Marketplace wanted me to pay again for apps I'd already purchased. I phoned Zune support (0203 450 5855) and asked nicely that they transfer two key purchases across for me - Wonder Reader and Rise of Glory. My other purchases turned out to be apps I didn't really use so wasn't that bothered about them. Zune declined my polite request and refused to offer me any help at all. They said that it was not possible to transfer purchases between accounts - but they also declined to credit me for the apps so I could download them again.

To be fair, the representative I spoke to did apologise for the less-than-ideal situation, but it rings hollow when they won't do anything to resolve it. Zune's response is that I do have access to them if I re-wipe my phone and use the other account - but of course then I'd lose my Xbox live integration again.

Microsoft does not provide any tools for managing/merging accounts and I had no choice but to switch my phone over to the Xbox Live account - this is actually their recommendation although they skirt around the fact that users will have items they've paid for taken away from them.

Once more we get screwed over despite choosing to pay for goods rather than pirate them for free. If I'd jailbroken my phone using the Chevron unlock tool it would allow me to install any app I could get hold of for free.

Microsoft desperately need to provide a web-based tool to handle the tangled account structure across their messed-up ecosystem. They should also credit me the £4.48 that I've spent on apps I can no longer access - fuckers!!!

Zune music player

Firstly some good news to report - the sound quality of music via my htc HD7 and Sennheiser CX-300 earphones is excellent. It blows my iPod Classic 120Gb and iPhone 3G out of the water - mainly due to the worsening sound quality of Apple products in recent years - the first generation Nano sounded much better than my current devices.

The hub interface of the media player is a different story though. As with other WP7 apps it makes use of the panorama control to show a six-screen wide application surface. The problem is that what the panorama shows is almost entirely rubbish.

The first screen is just a history page with an oversized icon of the last item played. The next screen is more history. Then you get two pages of "new" items which is really pointless. The fifth screen is an oddly-titled marquee which shows links to other media items you can play from other installed apps. Finally the sixth screen shows the menu of music, videos and podcasts you wanted in the first place. Eventually you learn to work around this by scrolling left rather than right when the app loads up.

Things also start to go wrong when you browse music. In general I like the cut-off text used across the Windows Phone interface - it's a clever indication that there's more content off the screen. But when it's a track title and you have no way of reading the hidden part it's just dumb. The Marketplace displays track titles in exactly the same way so in some situations it can be a pain to work out whether the songs you're looking at are the ones you actually want to buy.

To make matters worse, track lengths are not displayed anywhere within the player or the Marketplace. I  wanted to buy a movie soundtrack the other day but was wary of ending up with a bunch of 30-second long ditties, so I had to resort to viewing the album on Amazon to see the track lengths. An essential requirement of the Marketplace (or indeed any e-commerce site/app) is to not make it difficult to spend the money I want to spend.

Overall, the Zune music player needs to be more application-like rather than the content-optimised interface it currently uses. Although it flies in the face of the Windows Phone user interface guidelines there desparetely needs to be some more navigation options like a breadcrumb to help with moving easily through the hierarchy of artists and albums.

Maybe if the hardware back button worked on an application level rather than wreaking confusion by trying to function globally it wouldn't be as bad. When task switching back to the music player from another app it can be bewildering to work out how to move upwards from a song to pick a different album or artist.

A contradiction with the Zune player is that many of it's problems stem from the stylistic use of over-large text - yet when a track is playing the list of other tracks in the album is pitifully small and easily missed - and once again there's no track lengths.

A very nice part of the aesthetics of the player are the background images that are automatically displayed for artists. This is a great idea but is hopelessly unreliable - only one song in my collection has this content working and it seems impossible to figure out what is wrong (see nine page XDA discussion thread).

On a brighter note...

Now that my Xbox Live integration is working properly it's a treat to see my real avatar and achievements displayed in the phone, plus gamer points on phone games now count towards my total. If only the thousands of gamer points from my offline Xbox account could be merged into my online account - but that's yet another account management gotcha I've fallen foul of.

It's possible the music player issues can be worked around with an third party player if any arrive in the Marketplace - either that or we'll have to hope that Microsoft rewrites the built-in player in a future release, because it needs more than just a few simple tweaks. It's just doesn't do the basics of music playback well enough.

In the D part three: decline of the American auto industry

In this post I'll be looking at the declining fortunes of the American auto industry brought about by a combination of external factors and an inability to move with the times.

When the best is too good - advanced technology in the US motor industry

Rover's P5B Coupe - British style with American V8 power

One of the most successful engines in the history of the British motor industry was the Rover V8. It entered service in 1967 and added some power to the stylish looks of the Rover P5B coupe and the newer, technologically advanced P6. Perhaps more importantly, it was the high performance engine of choice for a variety of small sports car manufacturers, as well as being used by many enthusiasts to upgrade the power-plants of project cars.

For it's time the Rover V8 was an advanced design - a very compact unit with all-aluminium construction making it one of the most lightweight V8's ever made. If you're familiar with the Rover K-Series engine, this sounds exactly like the kind of engine that Rover would have designed, however it was actually an American design that Rover bought the rights to. Buick had introduced the engine in 1963 but was finding it expensive to produce and it was suffering from reliability issues due to bad maintenance from customers and mechanics who weren't used to dealing with all-aluminium engines. The US steel industry was also unhappy about the use of aluminium for engine production and had considerable political and economic influence at the time.

Buick reverted back to older cast-iron engines and sold the engine design to Rover, where it remained in production for over 35 years. When production finally ended, it had become so iconic that the BBC's Top Gear filmed a tribute to the engine and showed all the cars that it had powered over the years.

The story of the Buick/Rover V8 is one example of how the American auto industry was unquestionably capable of producing advanced technology, but other factors held back this ability and the cars that entered production often played it safe compared to their European and Asian competitors.

In a similar vein, Ralph Nader wrote a groundbreaking book in 1965 called Unsafe at Any Speed that detailed how US manufacturers paid little attention to safety factors and preferred to spend money on annual restyling of their model range to maintain sales. Many of the improvements in standard safety equipment and fuel efficiency that were implemented over the last 50 years only arrived after US Government legislation mandated it.

It's often the case that to stay in business you need to make competitive products, while investing in R&D to make sure those products are still competitive in the future. If that process is constrained, it will almost inevitably cause problems somewhere down the line...

Energy crisis hits

The first oil crisis of the 1970's began in October 1973 and lasted until March of the following year, resulting in fuel rationing across the USA. At it's worst period in February, 20% of petrol stations were empty. Attempts were made to distribute fuel across the states based on estimated requirements, but this wasn't completely successful and long queues at petrol stations were commonplace.

The shortages brought the heavy fuel consumption of American cars into stark reality - the average fuel economy for an American-made car of this era was about 13.5mpg, and the price of crude oil had increased fourfold to $12 a barrel. Highway speed limits were lowered to 55mph to try and reduce fuel usage but it was only a small step in the right direction - it was estimated that Americans were wasting 150,000 barrels of oil a day idling their engines while queuing for hours at petrol stations.

The bigger they are...

The oil crisis arrived at a time when the cars being built in Detroit were monsters of the road. As an example, the 1971 Cadillac Eldorado was 5.7 metres long. To put this into perspective, even a modern BMW 7-series is only around 5 metres in length. The Caddy weighed 2.5 tonnes and was powered by an 8.2 litre V8. Exact fuel economy figures are unavailable but are estimated at between 6 and 8 miles per gallon.

Despite its big block V8 the performance of the Eldorado was seriously impacted by its weight – 0-60 in just under 12 seconds and a top speed of around 120mph. Although the Eldorado is an extreme example, cars of lower US size classifications like mid-size and even compacts were far bigger than their European and Asian equivalents.

Cadillac Eldorado convertible

Prior to the oil crisis US manufacturers had an 80% share of the home market and GM alone owned half of that share, but the American public’s new-found concerns over fuel economy had a dramatic effect on sales as they looked at European and Japanese imports. In 1975, US production fell 24.5% on the previous year while the market share of imports started to build quickly.

The scramble to respond

The AMC Pacer - not as small as it might look, it had
a 3.8 V6 under the bonnet

American manufacturers rushed to downsize their models in response to changing consumer tastes, but this proved difficult. It was a massively expensive process to redesign the entire model range, and almost all engines available were of the large, torquey, low-revving variety – the kind that are very heavy on fuel. Some progress was made though - by the end of the decade the big Cadillac Eldorado above was 70cm shorter and had shed half a tonne in weight, but attempts to produce a genuinely small car were still somewhat at odds with the rest of the world. The AMC Pacer is a well known example from this era and was still 4.3 metres long and powered by a 3.8 litre V6!

The US auto manufacturers had been completely blindsided by the oil crisis and the dramatic effect it had on the priorities of its customers. As demand and production fell, huge job losses and plant closures took place across the industry throughout the 1970’s. Detroit was heavily dependent on the car plants for jobs and tax revenues so was particularly hard-hit by the decline.

A second oil crisis

Problems in Iran led to another oil crisis in 1979 and again the price of a barrel of crude oil increased massively, this time from $15 to $40. By this time imported cars were starting to use fuel-saving technology such as four valves per cylinder and multi-point fuel injection, in contrast to the pushrod valves and carburettors still used by large-capacity US engines. The downsized full-size models being sold by Chrysler, Ford and GM were proving unpopular with domestic customers, and Japanese and European brands continued to gain acceptance with the American public.

Auto design - what the hell went wrong?

Rising fuel costs ended the era of stunning muscle cars, and the revised smaller models just didn't hit the mark. There appeared to be a major loss of optimism and confidence across the industry. It wasn't just weight and engine power that these new models  lost, it was the entire sense of purpose, attitude and style. What is most surprising is how similar different makes and models ended up looking throughout the 1980's, considering the very strong individual identities of earlier models.

Bland and indifferent American car design lasted throughout the 1980's (with a few exceptions) and still continues today to some extent. It's only very recently that the Mustang has regained it's identity and road presence, with others like the Chevy Camaro and Dodge Challenger following suit - but this has been achieved by harking back to the classic designs of the 70's muscle-cars.

Fighting back against the unions

As well as falling demand, job losses were also caused by the historical bad deals made by the manufacturers and unions back when times were good and there was no end in sight for the motor city heyday. Under Walter Reuther, unions were spectaculary successful in negotiating employer-paid pensions, medical insurance and generous unemployment benefits. Agreements made on pensions in particular were short-sighted because they were a concession that could be made without affecting current profits - it was a deferred benefit - but eventually these concessions would become due and the industry could no longer afford it. The end result was the strategic migration of manufacturing from the US to countries like Mexico with non-unionised workforces that would accept less pay and benefits.

Manufacturers also aimed to mitigate their expensive labour costs via investment in automated production facilities, with robots eventually reducing human involvement in car assembly by more than half. As migrant workers arrived in Detroit in the late 1950's expectant of well-paid manufacturing jobs, the entry level posts they were seeking were already starting to disappear due to outsourcing and automation.

Rounding it all up

Packard plant, Detroit
(closed since 1958)

The sledgehammer blows of falling sales, international competition, uncompetitive product ranges and an expensive workforce made life very difficult for the US auto industry, but what were the direct effects on Detroit and the surrounding area?

Well, the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck once employed 30,000 people but was shut down in 1980 - 18 months ahead of schedule due to disastrous sales. Ford's River Rouge plant in Dearborn was so large it once had 90,000 workers but continued heavy job losses have reduced the workforce to only a few thousand today.

Despite being the birthplace of the factory assembly line when Henry Ford moved Model T production there in 1910, Ford's Highland Park is now just another of the many shuttered and decaying manufacturing plants that occupy the city. The building is now recognised as historically important and there is a campaign to turn it into a museum to commemorate it's unique contribution, but funds have yet to be made available.

60 miles away from Detroit, down the Telegraph Road (yes, the Telegraph Road as made famous by the Dire Straits song) is the city of Flint where 30,000 jobs were lost in a series of GM plant closures in the late 1980's. In a city of 150,000 residents this was a huge blow and happened at a time when General Motors were announcing record profits. This apparent contradiction made headlines around the world and was the subject of Michael Moore's début documentary - Roger and Me. Since 1989 many more auto industry jobs have been lost in Flint, bringing the total to 80,000.

It wasn't just the big three manufacturers who closed up shop - component suppliers like Fisher Body and AC Spark were also forced to cease production.

The effects on Detroit have been devastating. Hospitals, schools, cinemas, theatres, train stations and thousands of residential properties all lie empty within the city, just like the car plants the city once thrived on.

In my next post in this series I'll cover the present-day state of the city in more detail, and look at whether there may be any reason for optimism amongst the urban decay.

Space Shuttle Discovery completes final mission

Yesterday the Space Shuttle Discovery touched down at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and completed it's final mission. It brings to a close an amazing record of service which began with it's delivery to NASA in October 1983 in an era where home computers were still 8-bit, the UK only had four TV channels, and Vauxhall were still building the Chevette in Ellesmere Port!

Discovery made 38 trips into space in all, deploying over 30 satellites (often two per mission), the Hubble Space Telescope as well docking with both Mir and the ISS to deliver and pick up astronauts. Nearly 250 crew rode aboard the shuttle over it's 27 year history and the spaceship spent a total of 365 days in space. It was the first shuttle to fly again after the shuttle programme was threatened by the Challenger disaster of 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The total distance it flew is equivalent to 288 round trips to the moon.

On approach to the International Space Station (click for high resolution version)

With the shuttle programme drawing to a close and no direct replacement available it will be interesting to see what direction the US space programme will go in next - private startups like Elon Musk's Space-X are one interesting option now that Obama has scrapped Constellation.

The space shuttles are amazing and iconic spacecraft and were a groundbreaking example of a reusable space plane. Time is running out to get over to Florida and see a launch - the final shuttle mission to deliver parts to the ISS is scheduled for June. The Discovery itself is now headed for the Smithsonian in Washington - somewhere very high on my list of places to visit.

Angry birds on Windows Phone 7

Angry Birds is not on an easy flight path with it's attempt to catapult itself onto the Windows Phone platform.

In promotional material for the WP7 launch Microsoft used the Angry Birds logo and upset developers Rovio - who had not committed to releasing their ubiquitous mobile game on the new platform. They spat out a few angry tweets and things were looking gloomy for those of us looking for an Angry Birds fix on our Windows Phones. Microsoft later admitted they had made a 'mistake' in the promo materials.

Fast forward a few months and two things have happened. Firstly, Rovio has now cheered up and confirmed Angry Birds for Windows Phone will now be released some time this year, and secondly, an unofficial clone called Chicks'n'Vixens has been released by independent developer Jabberworx. He was frustrated by Rovio's slowness at porting the game across to his favourite mobile platform and wrote his own version. Of this he said:

“If I were Rovio and had access to the art and knew about the 2D physics engines settings for the various objects (mass, physics, restitution, etc) I could get Angry Birds running on Windows Phone 7 in under a week.” Jabberworx

Ouch. Jabberworx must be a hell of a coder.

So why are people so bothered about being able to play Angry Birds on their Windows Phones? Surely there are better games out there? The thing is - it's turned into a status symbol for mobile platforms - any mobile ecosystem wanting to be a major player has to have it.

How well will the Windows Phone version run?

All current Windows Phone devices have good hardware specifications featuring a 1Ghz processor and decent graphics hardware sporting 2D and 3D acceleration. Exact comparisons with the iPhone are difficult but the hardware specification indicates that WP7 devices are in the same class performance-wise as the iPhone 4 except for slightly less powerful 3D graphics, but they should definitely be a step above the older 3GS model.

Angry Birds running on the original iPhone 3G with it's 400Mhz processor is a little slow to load with some stuttering sound on the menu pages but the game itself runs very well - sideways scrolling is fairly smooth  although not as fluid as you'd see on a real gaming device like a 1980's Amiga! Play the game on the 3GS and the extra power of the device translates into a higher frame rate and the game really starts to look great with super-smooth scrolling. This is even more so on the iPhone 4.

So you'd expect the Windows Phone version of the game to work very nicely but there is a potential problem. Microsoft designed the XNA gaming framework to lock games into rendering at an upper limit of 30 frames per second, which was apparently done to preserve battery life. This seems like a sensible compromise especially for graphically intensive 3D games but there is of course a trade-off in the ultimate smoothness of motion, which will negatively affect 2D games that make heavy use of full-screen scrolling. Results will quite likely be sub-par compared to current-model iOS devices which are probably pushing 60 frames per second. It could well be the case that Angry Birds on Windows Phone performs about the same as the iPhone 3G despite the superior hardware.

Only 30 fps on an otherwise top-notch smartphone - surely not?

Will Microsoft make changes to address this? They should definitely consider removing the frame limit for 2D games but the problem with that approach could be the difficulty of classifying games as many use a hybrid approach. But the question is - can the hardware do more than 30fps? John Carmack has proved the iPhone can with Rage - a full 3D game running at 60fps which looks stunning. Does the Windows Phone hardware support such a high refresh rate? There's conflicting information out there, some say the hardware cannot support it while other developers are saying it's purely an XNA framework limitation and the phone's main user interface and Silverlight apps can run at 60fps.

It will be interesting to find out how Angry Birds actually performs when it ships. Chicks'n'Vixens has a nice smooth screen update but it doesn't scroll around quite as energetically as Angry Birds. With the games I've tried so far, it seems a rule of thumb that 3D titles such as The Harvest and Rise of Glory can look very nice on Windows Phone 7 but 2D titles like Tiki Towers are disappointingly jerky.

Let's also hope that the Windows Phone version of Angry Birds is priced keenly, unlike some of the other titles in the Marketplace. The iPhone version was only £0.59p.

Windows Phone 7 one month on - followup review

A month has flown by since I got my hands on a htc HD7 running the new Windows Phone 7 OS so I thought it was time to write up my thoughts now that the dust has settled and the honeymoon period is over.

Highlights

The phone is still fresh, fun and very cool to use - my previous review already described how clean, modern and original the user interface is and everyone who's seen the phone in action has been impressed - including long-time iPhone fans. When the OS was launched in November and screen shots appeared everywhere I must admit I didn't really 'get' it - the system looks so different from any other platform and very minimalist. It was only when I had a play with a demo unit that suddenly it started to look very interesting. Animation and navigation are such an important part of the experience. Even Microsoft's marketing department seemed to struggle to figure it out and sold it on the ridiculous premise that the slickness of Windows Phone 7 would get your tasks done quicker so you'd use your phone less and get on with your life. Selling a product by describing it as something you wouldn't want or need to use very much seems a bit stupid. It's taken a fan called Brandon Foy to show them how it's done - watch this Youtube clip.

Early adopter smugness - when the original iPhone launched I thought it was a spectacular piece of technology but for various reasons I didn't buy one, and later lived to regret it. With WP7 the timing was perfect - my contract ended and the OS had been on the market less than three months. 2011 is looking full of promise with the Microsoft presentations at MWC in Barcelona featuring live demonstrations of upcoming features - no vapour-ware here. By the end of the year copy/paste and well-designed multitasking will be delivered making the platform fully competitive in all areas.

Shiny new applications - WP7 benefits from having fresh new versions of mobile applications like Facebook, IMDB, Amazon and Shazam. They usually have more sophisticated and modern interfaces than the iOS and Android equivalents which in many cases haven't seen any real development in a few years. It sounds bizarre to say that applications on a Microsoft platform do a better job of getting out the way and presenting the actual content than their Apple equivalents, but in a lot of cases it's true.

Zune desktop software - this is excellent to use and works very well. As with the phone itself the user interface is very stylish and clear, and the basic operations work well. Microsoft seem to have tried very hard to out-do the much-criticised iTunes and visually I think they've succeeded although feature-wise it's hard to find much in the way of differentiation, apart from Zune's wireless sync ability.

Social networking integration - the phone has actually got me using Facebook again, although I feel like I've been coerced! I am not a lover of Facebook, mainly due to privacy concerns and a mistrust of the company itself. But when Facebook is so well integrated into the phone it's a much more tempting proposition. You can post on someone's Facebook wall directly from their contact page, and status updates are easily done from the "Me" tile on the home page. I've recently added a tile for my wife to the home page and that works a treat as well, allowing me to quickly access all her contact details without having to go and find her in the people hub. Twitter integration is now confirmed for the major "Mango" update later this year which is a very exciting prospect.

Criticisms

Reliability - the core OS seems very stable but there have been a few glitches. The Marketplace application is my biggest annoyance because it's very prone to crashing and when it does fall over it manages it in a way that prevents it from working again until the phone is rebooted. This is not the kind of experience you expect especially when trying to buy stuff. Also, I have seen occasional nasty screen corruption on my device forcing a reboot. This looks like a firmware issue and I suspect it's specific to the HD7 because it's not been widely reported elsewhere.

Back button navigation - to ensure the user interface remains clear and uncluttered there is no onscreen back button in any apps - they rely on the hardware button. This is fine except when the button tries to fulfil the dual roles of moving back through phone application screens and also acting as a browser back button in the web browser. Imagine you're in an app with an embedded browser and you navigate a few links then hit the Start button to return to the home screen. Then hit the back button to return to the app. You can't then use the back button to go back in the history of the embedded browser window, because the back button will take you back to the Start page. This has caught me out a couple of times and there appears to be no easy solution, except to say that browser-type applications (including Internet Explorer) should really be given their own software navigation buttons, and the phone's hardware back button should be reserved for navigating between application screens. The problem is that a precedent has already been set and I doubt Microsoft will be willing to change it.

Super secret hidden menus - on a few occasions I've been frustrated by being unable to find an option only to find out it's hidden behind a press-and-hold menu. A classic example was when the pictures hub on the home screen was showing a picture I didn't like. I assumed it was random and would change eventually but it didn't. I looked everywhere to find an option to change it but couldn't figure it out. Eventually after searching on the web I realised you can press-and-hold the background of the picture hub (not the tile itself!) and a 'Change Background' option appears. I'm not convinced by these menus because in many situations you just don't know they're there. In some of the messaging applications common commands that should be on the application bar are also hidden in these menus.

Third party application performance - a few marketplace apps I've tried can be sluggish and have a choppy user interface. Twitter clients in particular seem to cause issues for developers, including in the official app. Interestingly the phone's default built-in apps like the People hub have no such issues which raises a question of whether Microsoft have developed them natively rather than in Silverlight and .NET like the Marketplace apps. Either that or only Microsoft has the knowledge and skills to make applications smooth and fluid at the moment.

Gaming performance - the hardware itself has more than enough power to run current mobile games well and 3D games can look very impressive, but 2D games I've tried have been less smooth than expected. It appears that Microsoft has limited games to running at 30 frames per second to preserve battery life. A well intentioned move and sensible for 3D titles but 2D games don't look as smooth as they do on recent iOS devices that can push closer to 60fps. This is something that Microsoft need to look into, preferably before Angry Birds is released.

The Harvest, one of the best looking Windows Phone games

Gaming titles - while the Xbox integration offers great potential I've not been very impressed so far with available games. Angry Birds has been promised for the next month or so but nothing so far - in fact the delay has prompted an indie developer to write a very similar title called Chicks'n'Vixens - which he apparently completed in a week. Other titles I've tried have seemed passable but there is often an issue with the price. The Harvest is £5.49 which is a bit excessive for a fledgling platform even if it is a premium title - but it is well worth downloading the demo to see it running. I've recently discovered a flight simulator with some great dogfighting action called Rise of Glory which has improved matters somewhat.

Marketplace app pricing - as an iPhone user I was used to being pleasantly surprised by the price of applications but this is rarely the case on WP7. Hopefully it's a reflection of the smaller market and range of applications rather than greed, eventually greater competition should bring prices down if the forces of capitalism do their job properly. There's far less really great free stuff for WP7 at the moment and non-free apps are often more expensive than I would expect. Developers should think about pricing cheaply and going for market share while it's early days - a great app at a great price could easily become the platform standard at this stage in the game.

Summary

My overall satisfaction level remains very high and should do so for the foreseeable future with the upgrades to look forward to later this year. Since starting this review I've installed an update Microsoft have made available - the installer upgrade which doesn't offer any new features but reassured me that the update process works smoothly. Reports in the media about problems with this package usually fail to mention it only affected one Samsung device running a specific firmware version.

The only frustration is having the patience to wait for the OS updates to roll in, and for developers to release some really compelling games. But it's important to remember how great the base platform is, and that even though WP7's market share is small at the moment, Microsoft is really working hard on this product and is in it for the long run.

Apollo 18 film in the works

I've just learnt that a new film is in production called Apollo 18 (imdb). The last real Apollo mission was of course number 17 which took place in 1972 and saw the crew land in the Taurus-Littrow valley equipped with a Lunar Rover. NASA did have a real Apollo 18 mission planned and more after that but budget cuts and - would you believe - lack of public interest in manned moon landings put paid to the whole Apollo programme. Many people are saddened by the fact that we have never returned to the moon in nearly 40 years.

At first I thought the new film would be a feature documentary or dramatisation about the real mission and the cancellation of the programme, but it turns out to be a work of fiction with a conspiracy-theory style horror/sci-fi plot. The basic premise is that there actually was a secret Apollo 18 mission and when they got to the Moon they encountered aliens that attacked the crew. I am looking forward to the explanation for why after seven very public moon landing missions there was a need for one mission to be conducted in secret. My guess would be that this is explained because astronauts  "saw something" on one of the previous missions that warranted further investigation.

What I do find interesting is that the premise of this film says more about our changing attitudes: in the late 1960's and 70's we took Apollo for what it was - mankind's greatest endeavour. In that era it's likely that a movie about classified Apollo missions and aliens would have seemed ridiculous, but in the new world of secretive Governments and populations who now know for a fact that they are not always being told the truth, a story like this becomes more plausible. The same is also true of the continuing persistence of the conspiracy theories about how the moon landings were staged - which I've always thought of as a huge insult to the achievement of the astronauts and the team of 400,000 people across the USA who worked on the programme.

Hallowed ground

I worship the Apollo space programme and although the premise of Apollo 18 sounds semi-interesting, I have grave concerns over whether this is going to really treat Apollo with the respect it deserves - it looks like it's being used as the basis for a cheap horror movie that's trying to ride on the back of real-life events. I'll reserve final judgement on Apollo 18 until its release date (currently tracking as the 22nd April) but my gut feel is that this isn't going to be very good at all.

Technology that changed gaming #5: The 3Dfx Voodoo accelerator

This is the first in a series of posts I'll be writing that pay tribute to the really big hitters of the gaming world - the kind of technology that was so cool or advanced that everybody remembers the first time they saw it. We'll be starting at number 5 and working up to the top of the tree where the winner will be revealed.

#5: The desktop PC transitions to 3D powerhouse

I absolutely loved my 3dfx Voodoo accelerator card. It turned a struggling Pentium PC into a gaming monster that thrashed the games consoles of the day. PC games usually ran at 320x200 MCGA resolution in 256 colour mode, but the arrival of the 3dfx boosted that instantly to 640x480 in 16-bit colour with eye-popping results. The 3dfx also ensured there was a high enough fill rate to deliver very good frame rates for a silky smooth gaming experience.

The idea of a stand-alone 3D accelerator card was inspired and in some ways it's a pity we don't have that option any more. Back then people could buy a 2D card that suited their needs - usually a card with some basic 2D acceleration for the Windows GUI - and then choose the level of 3D power they wanted for games. With hindsight it wasn't particularly practical - the VGA passthru cable used by 3Dfx cards was well known for degrading the picture quality of the main graphics card, but it was certainly a flexible option.

The 3dfx hardware was originally developed to power arcade machines and was used in machines from Atari and Williams. These systems were significantly more powerful than other arcade cabinets of the time and generated quite a bit of attention, and when the company entered the home PC market with a PCI accelerator card things really took off. In what would become a model for other graphics card businesses, 3dfx designed the chipsets but left the actual manufacturing, branding and distribution to third parties.

In the late 1990's the 3dfx became the dominant 3D acceleration platform for gaming on the PC, and quite a few manufacturers sold 3dfx Voodoo cards including Diamond Multimedia, Orchid, Creative Labs and French manufacturer Guillemot.

The Guillemot Maxi Gamer - this is the Voodoo card I owned

Behind great hardware...

An important part of the 3dfx was software support. Early games written for Voodoo cards used the native 3dfx-supplied Glide 3D - a fairly low-level OpenGL-inspired API which didn't try to abstract the hardware capabilities away too much. Performance was excellent and made full use of the capabilities of the platform, delivering results far better than more abstract frameworks like Direct3D could initially muster. Titles like Diablo, Tombraider II and the excellent Wing Commander: Prophecy looked great at the time.

Wing Commander Prophecy and Tombraider II running on the 3dfx

When Voodoo cards first entered the market, hardware-accelerated 3D was at a very early stage on the PC and each competing platform had it's own native API. While this approach may have made best use of the hardware, the downside was extra work for game developers - which was multiplied by each 3D card they wanted to support.

A very significant factor in the success of the 3dfx platform was arrival the MiniGL driver that was written so that Quake and it's sequel could run in hardware-accelerated mode. When iD Software developed Quake they took a pragmatic view of the state of existing 3D API libraries and decided they didn't want to support an array of different graphics accelerators and their native libraries with varying capabilities, so they opted to support just one: the Rendition Vérité. The Rendition platform was chosen because it offered OpenGL support which - at the time - seemed to offer a middle ground for developers. There was more capability on offer than the immature Direct3D but it still had the write-once hardware abstraction that native API's lacked.

After buying myself a Voodoo card, I can clearly remember getting the MiniGL driver, adding to the the Quake folder and launching the game. Viewing the game for the first time running in hardware accelerated mode was simply stunning. The difference between hardware and software rendering was so huge that it was hard to believe it was the same game. It was at this point that the realisation hit home of how far game development had come when slotting in a 3D accelerator card completely changed the visuals of a game. In the past, games talked directly to hardware and wrote to a computers video memory directly. Quake ushered in the era of powerful modular game architectures, one where a central engine manages the physics and environment of a game, and defers the visual rendering to separate software components that either render in software or talk to 3D acceleration hardware when available.

Quake software vs hardware 3dfx rendering at double resolution and 16-bit colour

Successors

There were a number of successful upgrades to the original Voodoo card. The Voodoo2 launched in 1998 and offered a significant performance upgrade along with the innovative possibility of running two cards in parallel via Scan Line Interleaving mode - a feature that will be remembered well by PC gamers for excellent 3D performance that remained competitive for quite a few years.

The Rush (Voodoo generation) and Banshee (Voodoo 2 generation) were combo cards that had highly effective 2D graphics as well as 3D acceleration, although they were always somewhat less powerful than the dedicated 3D cards so were not an optimal solution.

Decline

Sadly, the wave of success that 3dfx rode on in the early days didn't last forever. By the time the Voodoo 3 was released they were losing the performance crown to NVIDIA who had doggedly upgraded their combo 2D/3D cards over the years. Their cards had always had a big advantage in that OEM PC makers could use them more cost-effectively than separate 2D/3D cards and this resulted in bigger sales figures and more money for R&D.

Although unimpressive in early releases, Direct3D continued to be developed by Microsoft and became far more capable - eventually normalising much of the differences in 3D acceleration hardware. Today Direct3D is the universal standard for PC game development, with OpenGL's early lead being lost due to lack of standardisation and development.

3dfx were also not the most effectively managed company around, and were prone to some pretty big gaffes. Firstly, a business deal with Sega that could have seen 3dfx technology in the Dreamcast went sour and the blame was widely attributed to 3dfx's handling the partnership. Secondly, they acquired graphics card maker STB but the perceived benefits didn't materialise and it was a spectacular failure.

End of the line

Finally, the unthinkable happened and as 3dfx fast approached bankruptcy they were bought out by their arch rival NVIDIA. It was the end of an era for a technology that - along with the sound card - was one of the defining advancements in PC gaming. 3dfx popularised the concept of a separate powerful 3D graphics processor to relieve the main CPU from having to do all the work. Although the NVIDIA cards available when  3dfx closed it's doors were already more powerful and continued development at a great pace, 3dfx is still the 3D graphics company remembered most affectionately by many PC gamers.

Glenn Greenwald on being a target of a WikiLeaks takedown attempt

Whatever you think of WikiLeaks and their motives, it's hard not to agree that they have done more to expose government corruption and deceit than any mainstream journalist has done in a very long time.

While it's a given that they achieve this by publishing classified information, I think the true nature of some governments and their politicians has been defined just as much by their outrageous rhetoric as the information disclosed.

Certain US politicians have all but called for the death penalty for Julian Assange. Their right-wing commentators have actually called for it publicly in the mainstream media. This is wrong on two levels - firstly it is not something we should ever hear in a modern democratic society - and secondly it completely misses the point that Assange is not a hacker or leaker of classified documents. He is simply fulfilling the role of a publisher, taking great care to ensure anonymity for his sources.

Online warfare

At the end of last year, WikiLeaks revealed that it had a trove of documents from a large American bank, and in response that organisation (widely understood to be Bank of America) started to look into ways to take down WikiLeaks. This led them to enter into discussions with a US security firm called HBGary. This security firm has links to other firms that do work for US government departments, so a very interesting picture is starting to emerge.

HBGary is a fairly new organisation and is desperate to start making some money. The business is run by CEO Aaron Barr who is equally keen to make a name for himself. He drew up a WikiLeaks attack plan that included some really nasty recommendations such as knocking out the WikiLeaks infrastructure with secret software exploits, and silencing or discrediting its supporters with coercion and potentially blackmail.

Glenn Greenwald is a prominent WikiLeaks supporter and was personally included in the attack plan as somebody who should be subverted and silenced. In his response to being targeted, he has something very interesting to say in response - which will strike a chord with those concerned by the rising power of corporations around the world:

"But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power.  I've written many times about this issue -- the full-scale merger between public and private spheres --  because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics.  Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized.  There is very little separation between government power and corporate power.   Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former.  The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did.  It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that:  corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power."

And a very good point regarding supposedly balanced and fair process of justice:

"After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks.  But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline.  Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous.  Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest.  Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it's impossible to imagine that ever happening.

Why?  Because crimes carried out that serve the Government's agenda and target its opponents are permitted and even encouraged; cyber-attacks are "crimes" only when undertaken by those whom the Government dislikes, but are perfectly permissible when the Government itself or those with a sympathetic agenda unleash them.  Whoever launched those cyber attacks at WikiLeaks (whether government or private actors) had no more legal right to do so than Anonymous, but only the latter will be prosecuted."

Further information

Read the full article by Glenn here...

Ars Technica has some great in-depth investigations into the amazing cloak-and-dagger story of HBGary trying to take down WikiLeaks and make a name for itself by revealing the identities of members of the Anonymous hacking group.

In the D part two: Detroit burns in the 1967 riots

In a previous post I covered the remarkable rise to power and glorious heyday of Detroit, fuelled by the booming motor industry. In this post we'll take a look at how it all started to go wrong.

Down on the Street

In the early hours of the morning on July the 23rd 1967, the Detroit police force arrived at a small unlicensed downtown venue where a party had been taking place. They were expecting around two dozen revellers to be there and the plan was to arrest them all, but they found the situation was not what they had expected and over 80 people were present. In spite of this, the police dug in their heels and placed 82 people under arrest. The scene attracted a small crowd outside while the officers waited for transports to arrive to take their detainees away.

So how did a raid on an unlicensed bar lead to city-wide rioting? Well, race relations in 1960's America were still imperfect and black people across the country were campaigning for equal rights, often complaining of police brutality and lack of respect from shopkeepers and employers. Against that backdrop it's easier to see how the raid provoked tensions because all 82 people arrested were black.

After the police left the scene, a small group of young black men who had watched and been angered by the arrests began looting a nearby shop. This single act ignited a wave of riots across the city that lasted for five days. In the early stages the media didn't report on events to try and maintain calm and prevent copycat action, but this had a marginal effect. Fighting, looting and arson spiralled out of control and completely overwhelmed the Detroit police force. The State Police and then the National Guard were brought in to assist, and the situation became so serious that President Johnson brought the military into the city.

By the time everything was over the devastation was immense - Wikipedia records forty-three deaths, 467 injuries, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed by arson. So many people were arrested that there was nowhere to put detainees and various makeshift facilities had to be used. At one point on the second day of the riots, 40 National Guard personnel were pinned down by snipers : 26 people armed as snipers were arrested during the riots.

It isn't quite accurate to call the 1967 riots 'race riots' - the causes are more complex but can be categorised as social unrest - itself brought about by factors such as the lack of affordable housing and the changing demographics of Detroit with it's massive influx of African Americans attracted by the availability of jobs in the auto industry.

Impact of the riots on Detroit

What is clear is that the aftermath of the riots certainly had lasting and serious implications for race relations. Residents of the inner city were terrified by the scale and intensity of the rioting and this massively accelerated a social phenomenon that was already affecting Detroit and other US cities called white flight. This is the name given to the migration of white people from inner cities to the suburbs where racially-restrictive housing policies made it hard for back people to live. The construction of interstate freeways across America was the enabler for this demographic change - allowing suburbanites to easily commute to their jobs in the city.

Changing demographics in Detroit

The effects of the declining auto industry and lingering issues from the riots have had a dramatic effect on the city and reversed the population from a white majority to a black majority in within 40 years. The black population within the city became trapped, initially by regulations that prevented them from moving to the suburbs, and in later decades by the falling value of property driven by increased crime and urban decay.

The second important point to note from the table above is that as well as the demographic change there has been a severe overall decline in the population of the city - the 2000 population figure shows a drop of over 40% from the number of residents in the city in 1960. A million whites left the city in this period, but the black population only increased by 350,000.

Whether the city could ever recover from what happened in July 1967 is difficult to say, but it didn't get an opportunity to because just around the corner was the 1973 and 1979 oil crises which caused a terminal decline in the Detroit auto industry, resulting in huge job losses throughout the next two decades. I'll be covering this in my next post.

Windows Phone 7 OS initial review on htc HD7

Last week I was faced with having to decide whether to replace my iPhone 3G with an iPhone 4, or try and live with something else for the next 18 months. I didn't really consider an Android phone for a number of reasons but despite a lot of initial scepticism I had become very interested in the new Windows Phone 7 platform. Conventional wisdom says that you should never buy a 1.0 release of anything by Microsoft, but then WP7 is not a conventional Microsoft product. It's a total rethink of their mobile operating system strategy, which they desperately needed in light of the crushing defeat Windows Mobile 6 has been dealt by iOS and Android devices. Rather than clone what the competition have done, WP7 includes a lot of original thinking and some genuine innovations.

Decisions...

After deliberating for almost a week, I still couldn't resist the temptation of the new and unique experience of using a WP7 phone. It was a classic head vs. heart decision, where common sense told me to get the iPhone 4 for it's great build quality, stunning screen and superb performance. When I first got my 3G I loved it, but the iOS4-on-3G upgrade mess really annoyed me and I just felt that the iPhone 4 was only a small evolutionary step forward from the 3G. It was going to work in exactly the same way and run the same apps.

In contrast, WP7 has some really neat tricks up it's sleeve such as deep social networking integration, live tile updates on the main screen and the beautiful Metro user interface. Providing it can get a decent foothold in the market place, it has massive potential over the next few years if Microsoft keep up the same level of effort as they've put into the initial release. To top it off, the htc HD7 handset I was considering has a huge 4.3in screen that was very appealing for reading web pages and consuming all the other content I view on my phone these days.

I finally made my decision on Friday and signed up for the HD7. The monthly cost was the same as the iPhone 4, but there was an up-front saving to be made of around £140 on the handset cost - the HD7 was free. After owning the phone for a couple of days I thought it would be an idea to write up a quick review that covers a few key experiences so far...

The overall experience of using the phone is outstanding - the interface is slick, amazingly responsive and it always looks beautiful. You can choose an accent colour and a background colour of either light (white) or dark (black). The dark option with white text on a black background looks absolutely stunning, although in a brightly lit environment like the office you see a lot of reflections and fingerprints. The light option solves this problem while still looking very nice. I would like to try and find a third party app that switches this preference on a timer so that in work hours it's light, and outside of that it uses the dark scheme. One feature I like is that while many apps follow your theme preferences, some override it and choose the setting which best suits the content they will be displaying. For example, Office and Mail always use a light theme, while the media hub is always dark to show photographs off to best effect.

Setup was incredibly simple and automatically took care of importing a lot of my data - I added my Google and Facebook accounts to the phone via an amazingly simple page that asked for email address and password only. It then automatically determined that it would sync mail and contacts with Google, and contacts and status updates with Facebook. As soon as these accounts were configured, the phone automatically built the People Hub and the phone was awash with content. It cleverly links contact details together and shows everything it possibly can for contacts. Many entries in my address book now have a photo stored against them (from Facebook), combined with email and phone numbers from Google Contacts. The people hub scrapes up new photographs and status updates and displays them intelligently. There is also a Me tile which shows your own status updates and responses. It's actually possible to use Facebook directly from the built in features of the phone, although there is stand-alone application available too.

Text entry - the onscreen keyboard is top notch and in my opinion betters iOS, although the 4.3" screen on my device is perhaps an unfair advantage. The layout is  clear and uncluttered, and the prediction options are much more frictionless than the iOS equivalents. Above the keyboard is a word suggestion area that serves two purposes - it is populated with suggestions after you've typed a few letters to offer an auto-complete facility that can save you from typing the whole word. In this mode it never tries to forcefully replace what you've typed (unlike iOS), but if you do mistype an obvious word the area usually contains the corrected word in bold to indicate that it will automatically replace what you've typed. It's seems to calculate a confidence factor and only actively fixes what you've typed when it's convinced you've typed something wrong. Clever.

Web browsing - although the reviews I read generally rated WP7 Internet Explorer highly, I was disappointed with page load times which are sluggish compared to mobile Safari. The overall load time might be similar but it takes a lot longer for anything to appear in IE - you stare at a blank page for a lot longer. Safari also does a better job of rendering zoomed-out pages - unreadable small text is nicely blurred and looks better to me than the blockier rendering of IE. I've also noticed font size issues on a few web sites which rendered perfectly on iOS Safari, so WP7 IE doesn't quite offer the perfect desktop-quality browsing experience you get on iPhones. In most other respects the browser is very good - tap to zoom and pinch to zoom are both available and must use serious hardware graphics acceleration because they are very fast and smooth. Tab handling is also excellent and the browser will load multiple tabs with content in parallel!

Search facilities - this is my first major annoyance with WP7. When you hit the search button on the home screen, it loads a superb native Bing application. Although mentally conditioned to use Google I was more than happy with using this app because it displays web searches, news and local search results on separate filtered areas and the presentation is very nice indeed. So when I clicked the search button inside Internet Explorer I expected a similar experience - but this is not what happens. It doesn't load Bing, nor does it load Google for that matter. It loads a disgusting mobile Yahoo page inside the browser. Apparently Microsoft left the choice of search provider inside the browser as a customisable option, and my mobile carrier (O2 UK) set it to Yahoo. This needs fixing desperately, or at least an option must be provided to change it. Microsoft should do themselves and their users a favour and integrate the Bing search into the browser. Apple have found a way to sell mobiles without allowing operators to change things like this so it isn't impossible.

Zune media player - in general, media playback works very well. I was delighted to find that it will natively play AAC files so I could use the PC Zune software to copy music from my iTunes library over to the device and they play perfectly. In fact on my HD7 handset the sound quality is noticeably better than my iPhone 3G. I was also delighted to find that after importing a couple of Joy Division albums, they were presented against a lovely background of a black and white picture of the band, probably taken by the great Anton Corbijn. The image isn't album art - the system must have grabbed it from the Zune Marketplace based on the artist name.

Messaging - this is one area where the phone is remarkably similar to iOS, with messages organised by conversation rather than date, and displayed in a conversation format using speech bubbles. It's nice to see MMS pictures inside the speech bubble of the message rather than in two separate bubbles like iOS though.

Youtube - currently a complete mess on WP7. There is an official Microsoft application which plays videos when invoked from links on web pages - although I've seen reports that it doesn't always work. But more seriously, if you launch the app stand-alone it doesn't have a native interface, it just uses an embedded browser window and displays the mobile version of the standard Youtube site. As you can imagine, this looks really poor. There is an htc Youtube app which has a nice front-end but it has to be installed alongside the MS application because you need that installed to play video embedded in web pages. There are a few third party applications but none of the ones I've seen so far allow you to log in and view your favourites.

Office - the built in office application lets you create, view and edit Word and Excel files directly on your device. The editors are simplistic but get the job done fairly well, although I haven't tried editing complex documents created on a PC. There is a Powerpoint viewer but presentations cannot be edited, which seems like a sensible decision for small devices like phones.

Third party applications - the marketplace is filling up rapidly with applications and many big players such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Kindle, eBay, IMDB are already present, sometimes with a few third party alternatives as well. The official Twitter client is weak because it doesn't update it's live tile on the start page, but an app called Beezz is much better and does implement this. The IMDB app in particular deserves special mention for looking gorgeous, it's currently using stylised faded-out stills from the film Inception as a background and looks very smart.

Marketplace - Microsoft has taken a different approach to Apple and there is no separate music/video and app store - everything goes through the marketplace application. The search engine returns results from all three areas which is a nice idea but fails miserably in practice. Search for "Amazon" to try and find their apps and you get dozens of songs with that work in their title. There are ways round it but they're not obvious. Another bugbear is that the marketplace application is buggy and prone to crashing, but this is made into a much bigger issue because it seems to mess up it's state and therefore won't restart until the phone is rebooted. Fix this NOW Microsoft!

Email - the email client is simple and elegant, displaying information in a fuss free manner. It does most of what you need although I was annoyed to find there are no settings to fine tune loading of images inside messages. Also, HTML formatted messages are initially displayed zoomed in which I'm not convinced is correct, on messages with complex formatting it's better to show a zoomed out view and let the user decide which area they want to read.

Camera - the camera application and photo hub work well and are automatically populated with any Facebook or Windows Live pictures you have. It has been well covered elsewhere that the camera application doesn't remember it's configuration settings such as whether the flash has been disabled, which is pretty miserable and hopefully one of the first priority issues Microsoft will address.

Closing thoughts

My overall first experiences of Windows Phone 7 are very positive, and other people I've shown it to have also been impressed. It's fresh, modern and very powerful, and absolutely moves the smartphone game on from the competition. Yes, there are some important features lacking, but ridiculing the lack of copy and paste  - as half of the internet seems to have done - is a bit harsh considering the massive amount of functionality that has been delivered in the initial release. And the exciting part is that things can only get better.

In general the htc HD7 handset itself is very good although not perfect - my thoughts on this will be in a future review because I wanted to focus on the new operating system this time round.

In the D part one: Detroit - the American dream

This is the first part of a series of posts I'll be writing about a city with a unique story to tell.

If you've seen the Eminem film 8 Mile, you've seen the reality of Detroit. Despite being a mainstream film, it's gritty depiction of present-day motor city isn't taking an awful lot of artistic license. That is actually how it is, or how it was when 8-Mile was made in 2002. Things have possibly got worse since then. The history of Detroit is a roller-coaster ride starting with a small settlement in the 1700's and by no means ending with it's present day incarnation as a bewildering example of de-industrialisation.

A long time ago, came a man on a track...

Detroit was born as a French military outpost founded in the early 1700's, chosen for it's favourable location on the Detroit river - part of the Great Lakes system. By the late 1800's it was quickly becoming a hub for pharmaceutical, tobacco and other industries who set up large scale production and manufacturing facilities.

Coal from the south, iron ore from the north and water from the great lakes made Detroit the perfect place for production of iron and steel goods.

In 1910, Henry Ford's Highland Park car production plant opened which marked the start of a decades long heyday of automobile manufacturing in the Detroit area. Fisher, General Motors and Chrysler soon followed Ford in setting up production. This massive increase in industrial output had huge manpower requirements and the population of the city increased from 265,000 in 1900 to 1.5 million by 1930.

To represent the huge numbers of manual labourers working in the city, the Union Auto Workers was founded in 1935 and in it's early years bitter disputes opened up between the union and the car companies. The legendary sit-down strikes in nearby Flint nearly ended in military intervention but succeeded in forcing Ford, Chrysler and General Motors to officially recognise the unions.

During the Second World War, Detroit became known as the "Arsenal of democracy", with car production was suspended in favour of building tanks, jeeps and aircraft for the war effort. The union made a no-strike-action pledge to ensure that industrial action could not jeopardise the manufacturing capability of the USA while the country was at war.

War is over

At the end of the Second World War in 1946, Detroit returned to car production, and a new UAW president called Walter Reuther was appointed who presided over the longest and most prosperous period in the history of American auto workers, which lasted until his death in 1970.

Throughout the 1950's and 60's Detroit flourished and the auto workers benefited in turn, receiving generous pay rises and excellent healthcare and pension provisions. The car companies could afford this because they were making excellent profits from the loyal American car-buying public, and it seemed like it would last forever. The era produced some stunning examples of car design, featuring large tail fins, lashings of chrome and prominent grills. Models like the Ford Mustang and Thunderbird, Pontiac GTO and Dodge Charger defined the muscle car category that is still ultra-cool today.

Along with it's status as the car production capital of the world, Detroit became a major cultural force - legendary in the music scene for the Motown record labels, which produced 110 top ten hits in the decade 1960-1970 from artists such as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, The Four Tops, and The Jackson 5.

Detroit is also home to one of my personal favourite bands - The Stooges. After they disbanded, their front man Iggy Pop recorded a spectacular tribute to the city's industrial complex with a song called Mass Production on his classic 1977 album The Idiot.

It's a spectacular success story - but in the next post in this series I'll cover how simmering racial tensions and the multiple oil crises of the 1970's inflicted damage on the city that it could never recover from.