Monthly Archive for August, 2005

Mighty Mouse dissected

There’s a great post on Ars Technica on a dissection of Apple’s new Mighty Mouse.

The authors, Jacqui Cheng and Clint Eckers, do a complete technical dissection of the mouse explaining what each part of the Mighty Mouse is and include some great photos and diagrams of its internals.

This all adds to the hype around the mouse but the biggest issue I would have with this mouse is that it is not wireless - who made that decision? Apple come up with one of the most innovative mouse designs in a long time and it is wired? I can see that they might want mass appeal (i.e. older models of Mac don’t have bluetooth) but why not offer a wired and wireless version?

Yahoo! tests blog search in Korea

I see News.com have a story showing that Yahoo! are beta testing a blog search application in their Korean Yahoo! site.

Apparently Yahoo is planning to begin testing the same capabilities for its U.S. blog-publishing service in the coming weeks.

This is all very timely considering Dave’s taking me to task for dismissing Yahoo! recently! It does indeed look like they are innovating - with Technorati announcing it is now indexing 14.2 million blogs, the ability to search blogs is rapidly becoming vital for the mainstream search engines.

What is still not clear is if you will be able to subscribe to an rss feed for the search, in the same way you can with Technorati (and more recently MSN Search) - if it doesn’t have this functionality, the Yahoo! blog search will be a lame duck compared to its competitors.

New Mobile phones - 1 in 7 faulty

Which Magazine have published a report which shows that one in seven mobile phones goes wrong within a year in the UK and 70% of the faults occurred in the first six months.

Video phone operator 3 had the poorest record, with one in three handsets on its network having problems in the first 12 months.

Fault reports within a year of purchase:

  • 3 - 32%
  • Orange - 16%
  • T-Mobile - 15%
  • Vodafone - 15%
  • BT Mobile - 14%
  • 02 - 13%
  • Virgin - 8%
  • Tesco - 4%

Source: Which? survey

In fairness to 3 - they are the only company focussed almost exclusively on 3g networks and some of this has to be due to the newness of the technology both on the network end and the handsets.

Interestingly, there were marked differences between the handset manufacturers as well:

Motorola and Sony Ericsson handsets were the most likely to go wrong; about a fifth of owners reported faults.

Nokia and Samsung were the most reliable, although about one in ten users still had faulty phones.

A one in seven chance your shiny new mobile will fail? I know I’d be fuming if it was my phone!

Damien catches me Googleshaming!

I see Damien caught me Googleshaming (again) and he kindly helps out by linking to my Where to eat in Glengariff post using the link title “review of Casey’s Hotel Glengariff” - nice one Damien, Thanks.

Where to eat in Glengarriff

If you find yourself in the beautiful West Cork town of Glengarriff and you are looking for somewhere to eat, I can heartily recommend you stay well away from Casey’s Hotel Glengarriff.

I was there last weekend with my wife, my son and my wife’s nephew and we had lunch there - the food was vile and the service was appalling.

For instance, I ordered fish and chips - not too much wrong you can do with that, I thought - wrong! The fish was completely tasteless and the chips were so greasy that even the ketchup I tried to put on the chips to disguise their greasy taste, couldn’t stick to the chips and kept sliding back off they were so greasy!

We were asked to pay for our meal after ordering it - i.e. before it was delivered to the table, we had to pay for it! They are obviously used to people refusing to pay because of the poor quality of the food.

The table was dirty when we arrived - no problem there, I asked one of the staff to clean it - he grudgingly cleaned half of it and left the rest filthy.

Just behind the eating area are kept empty soft drink bottles - this attracts hordes of bees/wasps who then buzz around you and your food as you try to eat.

The lunch for the four of us (three and a half really - my son is just over two years old!) was €41.60

In short, Casey’s hotel has no redeeming qualities that I could find.

If you are looking for somewhere to eat in Glengarriff, eat anywhere but Casey’s Hotel.

Edited to correct the spelling of Glengarriff!

Which Search Engine?

In the comments of a recent post comparing Microsoft’s Virtual Earth with Google maps, I was quite rightly taken to task by Dave for suggesting that Yahoo! are not a significant player in map search.

Dave informed me that:

Yahoo’s revenues are way way bigger than Google. Google are a tiny company compared to MS and a small one compared to Yahoo.

and

Yahoo have a better revenue stream than any of the other players in search and are proving just as big a draw for graduates as Google and MS are way behind. This is a battle between Yahoo and Google not between MS and anyone

and he concluded with

Yahoo’s share of the search engine market is almost twice Microsofts and in general with the launch of their new applications growing massively.

http://searchenginewatch.com/img/nrcurrent.gif

Game, set and match to Dave!

I had underestimated Yahoo!’s share of the search market because in my own site statistics for July I received 942 links from Google, 51 from MSN Search and 38 from Yahoo! (and this site is in Yahoo!’s directory!).

Then I saw Mark Jen’s post on AOL and how AOL

might truly be a dark horse candidate for being the “winner� of the current Internet wave

And after all that I got to wondering - who does use Yahoo!? Or AOL? Or any other search/portal site? And why?

Personally, I use Google for quick searches, I use a combination of blog search engines for searches I want to subscribe to and I use MSN Search occasionally for a more wide-ranging search (not just blogs) which I can subscribe to.




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