Barack Obama in St Louis. From the Huffington Post.
Daily Archives: October 18, 2008
Netbooks on the rise
From Register Hardware
First Gartner and now IDC has highlighted the rise of the Small, Cheap Computer as one of key product categories keeping the European PC market afloat.
Laptops too are helping keep vendors’ heads above water, and together with the SCCs helped shipments of all types of personal computer grow 27 per cent year on year during Q3, IDC said.
Notebook shipments were up 52 per cent when comparing Q3 2008 with Q3 2007. SCC shipment growth can’t really be considered since the first one, the Eee PC 701, didn’t go on sale until Q4 2007, and up to that point the only alternative, the UMPC, didn’t really trouble the score-keeper.
We can say that European netbook shipments went from zero in Q3 2007 to over 2m in Q3 2008, a figure that’s just under ten per cent of the 27.9m PCs shipped into Europe in Q3 this year.
This is a good illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences. All of this NetBook activity dates from the appearance of the OLPC.
BBC view of open source
Interesting insight into a corporate mindset provided by its rules for developers. They include:
# The software must have no or negligible commercial application or value, and is unlikely, if licensed, to bring revenue back to the BBC.
# The software is ‘non-mission critical’, and there are not likely to be any competitive uses of the software which might enable a third party to profit from the BBC’s investment.
# The BBC intends to re-use the software and it is therefore of direct benefit to the BBC to have it examined and tested by the wider population.
# Internal feedback from use of the software solely within the BBC is not as beneficial to the BBC as external feedback.
# There has been full internal testing of the software and the BBC is satisfied that the risk of damage arising from the use of the software by third parties is negligible.
The Twittering utilitarian
O yikes! I’m laid low by a horrible streaming cold after two very intense work-weeks and so I logged onto Twitter (first time I’ve been online in nearly 24 hours) to alert my friends to this fact. I tweeted “Sneezing, coughing and spluttering with a horrible cold”. And then found a tweet from Charles Arthur pointing to a Blog post which suggests that he may ‘unfollow’ me. He takes a strict, non-nonsense line on these matters, viz:
First: what I like is people pointing me to interesting stuff. Which generally means people who include links to interesting stuff in their tweets. When people don’t have those sorts of things in their tweets, and when it really is the unexamined life (”Having cup of coffee” “Eating biscuit”) then I’m afraid I’m not interested. I love ya and all that, but I’d like to get something done. And for me that means finding a fresh perspective, not knowing that you still have a pulse and a functioning brainstem.
What does this mean?
If people start using Qwitter and ask me why I’ve unfollowed them, I’ll point them to this post. It’s simple really. In an attention economy, there’s only so much time I can listen to what colour your curtains are. Then, I’ve got to get on and earn some money. Please, no hurt feelings though.
So there you have it: useful stuff only. To be fair, Charles also provides some cute Applescript for quick-posting of links to Twitter.
I can see what he’s getting at. Some Twitterers (e.g. Dave Winer) are terrific at providing a constant stream of interesting links. But actually one of the things I like about Twitter is that it also enables me to know about the trivial detail of friends’ lives.