Alastair Reynolds - Chasm City

Pe planeta înapoiată și devastată de războaie Sky’s Edge, mercenarul Tanner Mirabel își urmărește ținta, aristocratul Argent Reivich, până la ascensorul orbital care leagă suprafața planetei de spațiul interstelar și de evadarea pe o navă Ultra spre o altă colonie umană. Scopul lui Tanner e simplu: să răzbune moartea fostului său șef, traficantul de arme Cahuella, și a soției sale Gitta, pentru care dezvoltase o afecțiune interzisă și nemărturisită. Cu o insistență ieșită din comun, Tanner îl urmărește pe Reivich până la destinația lui, planeta Yellowstone, unde îl pierde în hățișul urban al capitalei Chasm City. Trezit din somnul criogenic pe o stație a Călugărilor Gheții, Tanner pierde timp prețios încercând să‑și recapete amintirile dereglate de hibernarea lungă de 15 ani, ba mai mult, descoperă că a fost infectat cu un virus de îndoctrinare, una din armele de propagandă ale fanaticilor religioși de pe Sky’s Edge, care îl obligă să retrăiască în momentele de inconștiență viața fondatorului planetei, Sky Haussmann. Și ca lucrurile să fie și mai complicate, Chasm City s‑a transformat radical în timpul în care cei doi rivali au traversat spațiul: o epidemie misterioasă a atacat nano‑mașinile omniprezente, făcându‑le să se comporte haotic, atacând locuitorii și modificând clădirile metamorfice în imagini grotești. În urmă cu doar șapte ani centrul științei și comerțului interstelar, acum Chasm City se luptă să‑și regăsească echilibrul, separat în majoritatea săracă a populației trăind de la o zi la alta la nivelul solului în Noroi și aristocrația dependentă de un drog rar și misterios care petrece decadent sus printre vârfurile clădirilor deformate, în Boltă.

Why do they do it, though? Doesn’t potential immortality make your lives all the more precious?

Yes, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t need to be reminded of death now and then. What’s the point of beating an old enemy if you deny yourself the thrill of ever remembering what it was like in the first place? Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you’ve vanquished.

What’s new in Chrome 32

Chrome’s 32nd version finally adds a small, but very useful feature that has been in the works for some time: an indicator for tabs playing audio! The announcement on the official blog mentions another couple indicators as well, for tabs accessing the webcam or casting content to a TV, but those are rather unlikely activities in a browser compared to listening to music or video. In my experience though the indicator is not full-proof: it works flawlessly with native video players (and most-likely audio), to the extent of live syncing with the audio playback, so when a video segment has no audio, the indicator fades out and returns as soon as the audio track is back! Also very helpful: the audio indicator replaces the favicon for pinned tabs. On the other hand, the indicator doesn’t work at all when the player uses Flash – I suppose this was the reason why this feature was delayed for so long, until someone finally gave up trying to support Flash and shipped a version for native playback only. At least for Flash videos on YouTube you can still fall-back to its own in-tab arrow indicator.

Update: As mentioned in the comments, the audio tab indicator works with Flash videos as well, as long as you’re using the built-in Flash plugin, not the older, soon to be deprecated NPAPI version. To enable Pepper Flash, visit the internal page chrome://plugins, look for ‘Adobe Flash Player’ (it should be the first entry on the page), click on ‘Details’ on the left to show all options and then disable the NPAPI Flash plugin and enable PPAPI (out-of-process). With all the efforts Google is putting into moving away from the old NPAPI plugin architecture, I find it a little ironic that the ‘Google Update’ plugin is still using it…

While not mentioned anywhere on the official blogs, this version also enables the new design for the New-Tab page by default, featuring the superfluous Google search box and missing a lot of useful features like direct access to apps and recently closed pages. For now, the flag controlling the Instant Extended API is still available, so users an theoretically disable it and revert to the previous New-Tab page layout.

Version 32 also marks the switch from native rendering to the new UI stack Aura. This will cause an important user-facing change, namely a new visual style for scrollbars on Windows: instead of the native, familiar look they will have a flatter style, without arrows at either end. Personally I don’t mind the visual change, but after updating to the stable channel the new scrollbars behave very strangely: often pages don’t respond to scrolling from the mouse wheel, or even zoom in or out as if I was holding down the Ctrl key! Hopefully these problems will be sorted out shortly, scrolling is almost unusable as it stands now.

This version will also bring a new user-interface in Windows 8, Metro-mode – nothing exciting from the images presented, Chrome didn’t spend any time trying to come up with new ideas to match Metro style, relying on the same boring windows as the classic desktop mode. Another minor Windows-related update is that the browser now supports opening and closing drop-down lists using the F4 key – I personally didn’t even knew this keyboard shortcut existed!

Brandon Sanderson - Firstborn

La comanda unei navei-amiral a Marelui Imperiu, tânărul Dennison acumulează eșec după eșec, în timp ce fratele lui mai mare, Varion, este cel mai faimos amiral al Imperiului, o adevărată legendă de neînfrânt conducând Războiul de Reunificare contra Rebelilor. Atunci când e rechemat înaintea tatălui său, Marele Duce Sennion Crestmar, Dennison speră să i se poată permite în sfârșit să părăsească cariera militară impusă de nașterea într‑o familie nobilă. În schimb Ducele îl repartizează sub comanda Marelui Amiral Kern, care îi comandă să studieze până la epuizare fostele lupte ale lui Varion în speranța de a scoate la iveală în Dennison geniul strategic care pare rezervat doar fratelui mai mare.

Dennison paused, stopping right in front of Brell, then reached out and tapped the man’s chest right in the center of his High Imperial Emblem. But think of this, Dennison continued with a light smile. If I’m an idiot, then you must be pretty damn incompetent yourself; otherwise they would never have wasted you by sending you to serve under me.

Primul Născut, singura povestire scurtă cu care Brandon Sanderson și‑a încercat talentul în lumea science-fiction a fost pentru mine o dezamăgire. Deși stilul e antrenant, cu lupte pe scară largă și câteva scene amuzante, povestea în sine este dureros de previzibilă și încărcată de clișee: rivalitatea între frați, tatăl care își forțează fiul să se muleze pe așteptările lui, un Imperiu amenințat de secesiune, generalul care trădează cauza și plănuiește să preia tronul – parcă aș fi citit un fragment deosebit de prost dintr‑un roman Star Wars. Legile fizicii sunt ignorate și aici cu aceeași dezinvoltură – sau ca într‑un roman fantasy: deși Sanderson e cunoscut pentru rigurozitatea cu care construiește regulile și limitele magiei, la tehnologie se mulțumește să utilizeze soluția facilă a călătoriei cu viteze practic infinite. Dennison se află o zi pe câmpul de luptă, undeva la granițele îndepărtate aproape de teritoriile rebele, pentru ca a doua zi să cineze cu tatăl său în capitala imperiului. Pe scurt nimic remarcabil aici, Sanderson ar face bine să rămână la romanele fantasy unde are experiență și succes.

Nota mea: 2.0

disponibilă online pe site‑ul editurii Tor

Rorgy: “Facebook’s Brilliant, Boring Master Plan”

I don't know if Facebook messages will ever replace text messages for me – it certainly won't right now, because I have no reason to switch away from texting the people I already text. But I've noticed that I write new friends on Facebook much more frequently than I text them: with the exception of people I actually live with, most of my conversations with new friends happen through Facebook, because we don't have much of a reason to exchange phone numbers at all. I could see Facebook gradually creeping up on my social conversations, offering me slightly more fun and functional ways to interact with them, until finally I go full hog and drag iMessages down to the "Bllsht" folder I dump all of Apple's other arbitrary apps into. It's not a flashy move on Facebook's part. But it's a move that I, as a user, can appreciate, and that might keep me using Facebook even as I discover other new social networks to occupy my time with. Rory Marinich

By an amusing coincidence I have only recently installed Facebook Messenger on my iPhone – just this Wednesday – and the next day it was already updating! The only palpable advantage of the previous version was the absence of chat heads, which in the regular Facebook app would take up about a quarter of the already crowded display area, leaving very few space for actual messages.

After the update Messenger finally starts to make sense as a standalone app, with tighter integration with the main app – and direct access to the phone’s address book! I have the feeling Facebook is aiming to build a WhatsApp competitor here: cross-platform (as you can plainly see on the Messenger homepage, depicting an Android and an Apple smartphone exchanging messages) and relatively independent of a Facebook account, since you can now message people directly on their phone number. If you can’t beat – or buy – them, might as well launch a nearly-identical offering, try to keep users hooked on Facebook.

Benedict Evans: “Instagram and Youtube”

So buying Instagram certainly looks like a good trade - it would be worth a lot more if it was selling today. But as a strategic move, it's looking increasingly irrelevant. Is FB going to buy Whatsapp, Snapchat, Line, Kakao and the next ten that emerge as well? Sure, some of those will disappear, but it doesn't look like FB will crush the competitors the way it did on the desktop. On mobile, FB will be just one of many.

Just maybe, Facebook might have been better off rethinking the core product instead of buying what turned out to be just one of a swarm of alternative services.

This, of course, prompts comparison with another (in)famous acquisition - Flickr's purchase by Yahoo. There was a period when AOL and Yahoo went around buying up lots of cool new web services as their portal model came under threat. They then generally mismanaged them, but that wasn't really the point. No matter how well they ran these acquisitions, they couldn't buy every great website that there was. Neither can Facebook.

Benedict Evans

Apparently that hasn’t stopped them from trying: Snapchat rejects $3bn Facebook buyout!

GigaOm: “Why the Chromebook pundits are simply out of touch with reality”

Two recent articles belittling the need and use cases for Chromebooks also belittle those consumers who buy them. It’s a shame that some are stuck in the old-school traditional computing model where the thought of “more is better” overlooks cases where less is more.

Kevin C. Tofel

Apparently less market share is more. And poor quality of accessories is also more.

Official Gmail Blog: “Attachments in Gmail, now with the power of Google Drive”

You’re probably used to downloading email attachments, but each of those files takes time to download, eats up space on your device, and can get buried deep inside your “Downloads” folder. With today’s update to Gmail, you can skip that whole process. Instead, you can view attachments and save files directly to Google Drive without ever leaving Gmail, making it easy to access them later from whatever device you’re on – computer, phone or tablet. Scott Johnston

Hmm, correct me if I’m wrong, but if you save attachments to Google Drive while they are still enclosed in the original email body, you’re effectively making a copy of the file in a new location, using up twice the storage space. Since Gmail and Drive share the same storage, doing this will eat into your quota twice as fast than if you were to simply store files in Gmail! As long as there is no easy way to remove the attached file while keeping the conversation text this just seems like a bad plan!