Quentin has confessed all. While in Beijing he went to a Starbucks. I’ve seen the receipt. Huh!
Monthly Archives: June 2007
OS X statistics
Steve Jobs let slip some interesting data in his Keynote to the WWDC 07 conference. It is that 90 per cent of the 20 million Mac users in the world are on the current (Tiger) or last-but-one (Panther) version of OS X. He claimed that this was unique in the history of the PC industry. Wonder what the corresponding breakdown for Windows is…
Is this the start of a Tory collapse?
Nice piece by Michael Portillo.
I had concluded, when I left politics, that the Tories were ungovernable and had a death wish. But Cameron is clever and charismatic; I believed he could succeed where I had failed, especially since even the Conservatives might learn something after three landslide defeats.
Now I am not so sure. Cameron has wobbled. Unless he regains control of his party at once, the project will be lost. It would be much better for him to press on even at the risk of being deposed than to settle into the leadership agony of Hague and Howard.
I have always doubted that the Conservatives could win the next election. Now the question in my mind is different: can the Tories ever win again?
Will Murdoch lose face(book)?
This morning’s Observer column…
Facebook is growing so rapidly that Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of MySpace, is concerned. MySpace, you see, is really a site for young persons – which is why its average personal page has the visual and aesthetic appeal of a teenager’s bedroom floor. But most teenagers eventually grow up, and presumably learn how to tidy their bedrooms, so the $1.6bn question is: where will they go when they tire of MySpace? The disturbing thought that has occurred to Murdoch is that they might go to Facebook…
WiFi: Record Range Now 382 KM
From O’Reilly Radar…
The record for point-2-point WiFi transmission is now 382 kilometers (pdf). The transmission was made from Platillon to Aguila in Venezuela. This news comes to us via The Foundation Latin American School of Networks website.
The researchers behind the project used the WRT54 Linksys router in their experiment. If they are able to make long distance connectivity work in a stable manner and are able to keep the equipment cheap this could make a huge difference in connecting emerging markets.
This could be relevant to Ndiyo.
Analyzing the Facebook API
Marc Andreessen has a thoughtful analysis of Facebook’s strategy.
A new approach to email overload
From one of Jon Crowcroft’s blogs…
I’m trying an experiment just now – all my e-mail is deleted – if you want to send me a message you need to put it on a web log (sorry, blog) or wikipedia, and I will get a google alert on a (private, whilelist only) mail address and will get back to you. This both rate limits how often new people can send to me, and scales my mail to google’s search/alert system, which is probably better than the university’s – of course, if everyone did it it might be very interesting!
three things one hopes to learn
a. how fast google scan/alert stuff runs
(it hasn’t found michael dales blog of my email autoanswer yet, but its early days
b. how many people care
c. if anyone thinks of an attack…
Another perspective on development aid
Interesting interview from Der Spiegel with a Kenyan economist, James Shikwati, who argues that aid to Africa does more harm than good.
How to get wired
Robert Scoble posted this photograph of the Ethernet trunking in Adobe’s San Francisco office. I can’t reproduce it because he’s reserved the rights.
WikiMindMap
Tony Hirst, Whom God Preserve, found WikiMindMap.
Type in a search term — like this:
and get this — instantly.
Branches with an ‘+’ can be expanded. Tony thinks that it’s not quite as difficult as it looks (and is already thinking of ways of going beyond it), but I think it’s technically sweet.