All of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" parodies have been done to death and I'm not really a fan on Mitchell and Webb either, save perhaps for their surprisingly good film, Magicians. Still, when I came across this on Digg earlier, I thought it worthy of posting.
Great stuff.
From Torrent Freak 26/04/08:
New data on the ever changing P2P landscape shows that the number of uTorrent users worldwide has more than doubled compared to last year. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe - with an install rate of 11.6% - and least popular in the United States, where 5.1% of the PCs have uTorrent installed.
From December 2006 to December 2007 LimeWire lost approximately 25% of its user base. By the end of 2007, 17% of all PCs in the United States had LimeWire installed, compared to 23.3% last year. Similar drops occurred in Europe, Latin America, and the rest of the world.
File sharing has been in the news a lot recently what with the growing concerns over net neutrality, packet shaping practices by ISPs and the ever-present issues of piracy. I don't consider myself to be a massive P2P user and am very picky - I prefer to think of it as discerning - over what clients I use. For instance, I've always kept Limewire at arms length for a variety of reasons and probably always will. I've known others who have been badly 'bitten' in using it and after their experiences, have always steered clear. That said, I also know of people who love it and have used it for years without a single problem. Still, for me, the memories of Limewire being a hotbed for spyware and worse run pretty deep and have always refused to give in and install it on one of my own machines.
I do, though, use uTorrent on occasions and found it good, on the whole. I have used others in the past, but uTorrent is the only one I return to. I should point out here that I don't download files illegally but merely enjoy the convenience of a P2P client for downloading certain types of content. I find it surprising, sometimes, the number and and particularly the types of people that install and use peer-to-peer file sharing clients. I also remember reading a couple of articles about 3 years ago that predicted such clients would be dead in - you guessed it - 3 or so years time. How wrong they were; while the file sharing landscape is a complex one that's always in a state of flux, one thing it certainly isn't is dead.
I was amused to see the proposed new logo for the Office for Government Commerce in the comment section of The Times today. Costing £14,000 (I could have mocked one up in Photoshop for just a snip of that price) the new, sleek, modern logo is great, until turned 90 degrees clockwise.
Now I'm back at home, I've checked it out on the Times site who claim that OGC are planning to proceed with it:
Apparently they are pressing ahead with it anyway. A spokesman for the OGC said (I kid you not) this:
We concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters 'OGC' - and is not inappropriate to an organisation that's looking to have a firm grip on government spend.
That's a firm grip, all right!
From USA today 21.04.08
BEIJING — China, already the world leader in cellphone use, has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users.
The number of Chinese on the Internet hit more than 220 million as of February, according to estimates from official Chinese statistics by the Beijing-based research group BDA China. The government is likely to confirm the leap at its half-yearly report in July.
The longtime Internet leader, the USA, which founded and developed the network of computers, had 216 million users at the end of 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
The percentage of American users — 71% — still exceeds China's 17%. China has 1.3 billion people, compared with nearly 304 million in the USA.
Given the meteoric growth the China has seen in recent years, perhaps this isn’t such a surprise after all. And, of course, from a percentage standpoint, the number of Chinese internet users is still relatively small. Nevertheless, as China continues its single-track path towards its position as a massive world superpower, this might not remain so for much longer.
And by the way, I had a lot of difficulty deciding on a suitable heading for this post. In the end, I plumbed with an attention-grabbing sensationalist headline. Apologies in advance.
From Computer Active 11.04.08:
A new website boasts it can give anyone looking to buy a property the lowdown on just about any house, in any street, in any neighbourhood in the UK.
Zoopla will go head to head with other property websites, such as will Rightmove, Findaproperty and Primelocation. A host of smaller sites also compete for the homebuyer's attention.
However Zoopla says it has the edge by being able to provide value estimates on more than 26 million homes with data taken from the Royal Mail and the Land Registry.
Oh great. Yet another website pitched at sellers and buyers to further clutter up the internet. But maybe I'm being overly harsh: having checked the site over earlier, it did seem to offer most of the functions that the company claimed. But much of the data available on a particular property will only be meaningful when compared with data from other properties. I'm also not sure how much faith I'd put in their 'my estimate' function. Bottom line: while the site may offer a vast array of information, it still needs to be cross-checked extensively and it still requires a lot of virtual leg-work by buyers.
--RELATED POINT-- House prices, of course, are very much in vogue at the moment. In fact, it won’t be long before we are due to move again – although we’re only renting at the moment. Still, a couple more years and my girlfriend and I are hoping to hop on that notorious ‘property ladder’. Whether we simply slide back down to the bottom getting our hands burnt in the process remains to be seen. But whatever happens, by then we’re hoping prices will be more favourable for buyers, although first timers are always going to struggle somewhat. Returning to the present, we’ve got our work cut out repairing some of the damage of our stay. Job number one, for instance, is filling and painting around a high positioned extractor switch, damaged from when we used to jump up and ‘slam-dunk it on and off’. After that it’s a matter of getting the coffee stains out of the carpet, repainting the damaged window frames from our ‘polythene sheeting’ to keep the draughts out of one room in the depth of the winter, resurfacing the occasional table and anything else that needs doing. Other than that, the place is in perfect condition. Well, nearly.
From Time.com - 17/04.08:
(WASHINGTON) — Microsoft Corp. has yet to convince Yahoo Inc. to agree to a friendly takeover, but the software company is already hiring lobbyists to help it convince regulators to let the deal — hostile if it has to be — go through.
Software company Microsoft Corp., bracing for a regulatory squabble in its takeover bid, recently hired Bryan Cave Strategies LLC to lobby the federal government on the proposed multibillion-dollar deal.
Pity poor Microsoft – they just can’t seem to get this deal closed. One minute reports seem to indicate that progress is being made in their bid to acquire Yahoo; the next, they’re back to square one. But whatever the true state of play, you have to admire the typical Redmond tenacity. If one method fails – try another. So what’s next then - a campaign march?
From vnunet.com 14/4/08
“Two ships have been impounded in Dubai after satellite images indicated that they may have been responsible for the damage to undersea cables which left large parts of the Middle East without proper internet access.
The loss of the cables caused internet access in some countries to slow by as much as 80 per cent, and harmed performance at call centres in Egypt to the extent that the state telecoms company asked ordinary users to stay offline.”
I’d not heard anything more [about this story] since news broke of the internet outage in the Middle East back in January. Still, I had not forgotten about it entirely. In fact, I alluded to it in a previous post commenting just how fragile the internet as an infrastructure can be. It’s alleged that the two vessels under suspicion strayed into forbidden waters and laid anchor during rough weather to ride it out. They got a lot more than they bargained for, though, when their anchors snagged submarine cables. After that, I suppose, the heavy swell became the least of their worries. Now with the ships impounded, it's going to be interesting to see what the next move will be and when.
