Via Dave Cormier comes the absolutely scandalous story of how a small West African school was forced to reverse its decision to drop Windows in favour of free and open source software.
…due to numerous recommendations forthcoming from the US Embassy, the State Department, and technology professionals involved in providing services to international schools worldwide, it has been decided that the switch to open source software on such a large scale is premature, and has therefore been reversed.
It is no wonder they are not popular.
Thanks to all the publicity generated by O’Reilly/CMP’s Cease & Desist letter, a Google search for “Web 2.0 Conference” now shows the IT@Cork Web 2.0 half-day Conference as the 4th placed result! Thanks guys!
If you are interested in going, register to go on the IT@Cork website on the conference page. It promises to be a fascinating series of talks.
Google launched an online spreadsheet application earlier today. To overcome the problems experienced with previous launches, they are limiting the numbers of people who can access it by asking people to go through a signup process.
I signed up for a Google Spreadsheet account this afternoon and I received one already.
Interestingly, I signed up for it with my tom@tomrafteryit.net email address and then thought, wait a second, I wonder if they’d give a preference to Gmail accounts. So I signed up for an account again with my Gmail address this time and…
You guessed it, I received my logon for my Gmail account a few minutes ago and no sign of the sign up for the tomrafteryit.net account! So from my completely unscientific experiment, it seems that Google gives preference to Gmail account holders when signing up for Google Spreadsheet.
I see Adam Beecher has started a blog - although, if you were to believe the tagline on his blog
This is not a blog.
I dunno Adam, it has a feed, it has the ability to add comments, it is run out of standard blogging software (WordPress).
If it looks like a duck…!
This is an article which was run in yesterday’s Irish Examiner (Friday June 2nd 2006) in the wake of the controversy surrounding CMP/O’Reilly’s trade marking of the term Web 2.0.
The picture of me included in the article shows just how much the stress of the last couple of weeks has aged me. I can see now, as I am growing older, that I’m starting to look more and more like my father.
Hang on a sec, that is a photo of my father! It seems that, despite my supplying a photo by email for the Examiner and despite spending around 20 minutes posing for photos with one of their staff photographers (laptop on your left shoulder, ok now try on your right…), they still managed to use the wrong photo!
Ironically some of the comments during the Web 2.0 debate lamented the fact that bloggers weren’t taking the trouble to be as accurate as main stream media! Hmmm.
I finally splashed out and bought the Nokia N70 last week and I have been using it since.
I have to say my feelings about it are mixed. I was upgrading from a Nokia 6230 which was a pretty basic handset but it had the advantage of being tidy in size. The N70 is no brick but you wouldn’t call it tidy either.
Gripes
The biggest issues I have with the phone are:
- It is sloooow to do anything - the menu system is dreadfully slow (3 full seconds from pressing the Message button to the New Message option coming on-screen)
- Also, the number of clicks it takes to do anything has increased enormously (combining these two issues means it is often very frustrating to work with)
- The reception is very poor on the phone and it drops far more calls in marginal signal than the 6230 did. I never lost calls due to low signal on the 6230 but already I know two places where this phone won’t hold a call (one is the Jack Lynch tunnel).
- It requires re-starts. From time to time I will try to make a call. I will be told “There is no network available”. I re-start the phone and suddenly the network is available once more.
- The start-up time is inordinate - 31 seconds until you are presented with the Insert Pin dialog and another 10 seconds before it is ready to make a call.
In its favour
Things I like about the phone:
- The battery life is quite good - (it will almost go two days between charges)
- It looks cool and
- The camera is quite good (2 megapixel)
Here’s a pic of my son Tomás taken with the N70
If you are more interested in the camera side than the phone side, I can recommend the N70 but if you want to use it more as a phone, get something else.
Recent Comments