568 – The Race for Space

Nearly 60 years ago, JFK announced the intention to go to the moon, and the huge effort – at one point employing over 400,000 people – had to invent a load of technology to make it happen. The guidance computer on the Eagle module, for example, was the first digital portable computer, without which it would have been impossible for the landing to take place. Then there’s the old myth about how the Americans spent millions inventing a zero-gravity pen, whereas the Russians used a pencil…

The “space race” continued for some years afterwards (the US had Skylab in the 1970s and built the Shuttle, while the USSR built Mir, the first proper space station), before numerous countries decided to pool resources and build the International Space Station.

After unveiling Azure Space in late 2020, the 20th February 2021 – 35 years to the day after the first Mir mission – saw the launch of the ultimate in Edge devices, ensuring Azure reaches the ISS with HPE’s Spaceborne Computer-2. That will be furthest Cloud-Edge computing node until we finally become an interplanetary species, and once again leave the confines of low-Earth orbit.

Edge back on Earth

If you want to make the most of the space on your screen, you should try moving your Windows taskbar to the side rather than the bottom of the screen – follow the science – as it makes more efficient use of the screen real estate, especially if you have a big widescreen monitor. Open Taskbar settings here and choose Taskbar location.

If you’re a vertical taskbar fan, then you’ll like a new feature in the Edge browser, also designed to maximise the use of space – vertical tabs.

If you’re the kind of user who has lots of tabs open at any one time, you’ll notice that the title of each tab is quickly lost when they are arrayed horizontally.

By enabling the vertical tabs feature, a single click will show them to the side of the browser window. Click the < caret to the top right of the tab list and they’ll collapse to icons only until you mouse over again, and the full width will be shown.

The icon to the left of the horizontal tabs switches the display to vertical, and the icon at the top of the vertical list reverts to horizontal.

If you’re using the beta or dev version of Edge, you’ll be able to show the Vertical Tabs button in the Appearance section of the settings:

To enable vertical tabs on the current public release, enter edge://flags/#edge-vertical-tabs into the address bar of the browser and switch on the “experimental” feature; you’ll have to restart the browser for it to take effect, but after that point you’re free to try switching the arrangement.