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.

Windows Phone 7 - feeling a little bit sorry for Microsoft

In this post I take a look at how Microsoft are in an unfamiliar position with Windows Phone 7, given their history of releasing products where success was almost guaranteed.

Google? Apple? They are the Diet-Coke of evil!

People who call Google or Apple evil really need to look a bit further back in history. Microsoft’s activities in the late 80’s and 1990’s are way in excess of any bad behaviour we see from today’s big IT players. Look at how they deliberately broke Windows 3.1 on DR-DOS - generating lots of bad press and Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt against a perfectly good product. Not to mention how they paid very special attention to the German PC OS market where DR-DOS was selling really well. Within 12 months they wiped DR-DOS out of the German market by a series of tricks including heavily incentivising PC manufacturers to make sure they switched to pre-installing Microsoft operating systems. The subsequent integration of MS-DOS 7.0 and Windows 95 made sure DR-DOS was finally buried under six feet of earth, even though Digital Research were able to demonstrate Windows 95 just fine on top of DR-DOS.

It’s a rule of thumb that Microsoft doesn’t deliver the best products in a given market, but uses pushy business practices and the power of their existing monopoly to ensure success, often at the expense of more innovative competitors. This usually happens while they make a point of telling everybody how innovative they are.

Smartphones

The mobile phone market played out in a similar way, with Microsoft using their Windows brand recognition to become the dominant player in the smartphone segment. But when the iPhone arrived in 2007 it caused massive disruption, making it glaringly obvious that Windows Mobile had seen little change in five years and was hopelessly dated. The user interface of the iPhone had been written from scratch to work with a touch screen, and was designed to be used with fingers rather than a stylus. It was a game changer and is the kind of technology where everyone remembers the first time they saw it and used it.

Fast forward to the present day and the iPhone has been around long enough to have lost the initial wow factor, and since it was released the user interface has changed very little. The home screen is still an elegant but simplistic grid of icons that launch programs, reminiscent of the style used by the Windows 3.1 Program Manager.

Windows Phone 7

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been hard at work responding to the iPhone and has released Windows Phone 7. It's a complete break from the older Windows Mobile product line and incorporates a spectacular new user interface. Rather than mimic the iPhone or Android, it has a completely original style with some genuine innovations. At first it seems simplistic, with all “chrome” removed in favour of large slabs of primary colour and plain text instead of buttons and icons. It really needs to be seen working to be fully appreciated, where the fluid animations and general feeling of flair and simplicity become apparent. WP7’s solution to the problem of restrictive screen size on mobiles is genius –applications are intentionally designed to be bigger than the screen, and the phone acts like a sliding window onto the application. You swipe left and right to move through various pages, instead of the hierarchical approach of iOS where you can end up three or four levels deep in settings pages.

WP7 is all about the software and the experience of using it. The sheer originality and innovation in the user interface really does bring a wow factor to WP7, just like we got with the iPhone at launch. In fact WP7 makes the iPhone look a little dated - it is now Apple on the back foot who need to do something bigger than an incremental update with their next iOS release.

It’s not often that this happens, but Microsoft has the best product on the market at the moment. And this time round they haven’t imitated or bought out their competitors, or used excessive marketing muscle - they've competed on merit and done a great job of it. In spite of this, the success of WP7 is by no means guaranteed – in fact the odds are stacked against it. iPhone and Android have a large installed user base and huge application libraries, while the WP7 app library is severely lacking. To make matters worse, many customers already have a smartphone and moving from one phone platform to another isn't a step to be taken lightly because it can involve repurchasing paid applications and possibly difficult data migration.

Taking the plunge...

In spite of the inconvenience of switching platforms I'm intrigued and seriously tempted to migrate to a WP7 device. My contract is nearly up and my 3G iPhone feels long in the tooth, even though it remained on sale for nearly twelve months after I bought it. I felt badly let down as a 3G owner by the iOS 4 upgrade, which had all the compelling new features disabled, yet performs so poorly that it's horrible to use. Meanwhile some app store developers are getting lazy and releasing iOS-4-only applications regardless of whether they actually need features specific to the newer OS. I don’t like having my arm twisted to upgrade in this way – especially when still under contract.