Technology

After Cork, Carlow, Navan, Galway and Waterford were added in March, it appears Dublin has now been added for high res aerial photography on Microsoft’s Live Maps.

Here is the Custom House in Dublin: (Looking North)

The Spire on O’Connell Street: (Looking East)

And of course: Gangster Central (Looking East)

I wonder what Dubs like Twenty Major and The Chancer will be zooming in on?? Sorrento Terrace? Pat Kenny’s House?

No 10 have opened a Flickr account. Now how long before the Taoiseach does the same? *snigger*

http://www.flickr.com/photos/downingstreet

They are also twittering.

So sayeth the rumours.

I will hold off even thinking of a purchase until I see the 3G iPhone.

This leaked internal document details the kind of websites that are censored in the UAE. Interesting reading.

Via Tom comes news that Cork has made it onto earth.live.com bird’s eye view photos. It’s very impressive.

Given certain buildings on the map, and the stage at which they are built, the photos are very recent.

It’s only appropriate that Cork is on there before Dublin. But don’t worry jackeens, Dublin will be on it soon.

Here, for example, is my place of work:

For the geeks: Yes that’s Firefox 3 Beta 4 I’m running. Yes my Delicious plugin works fine, after disabling Firefox’s security settings. Jim Fallows helped out with that.

Have fun looking at more of Cork over at Live Maps.

El Reg story.

As I expected, someone has come clean as the faker of Barry Egan’s profile. “Egan” added me as a friend, but I never replied to the request. Putting “natch” after one of the profile items was the clincher for me.

It seems it was a very successful experiment in adding people as friends who may know a famous person - and then reverse engineering friend requests. Many of the other profiles I came across also appear to be fake.

That’s one of the rumoured names for Apple’s upcoming laptop. We shall have to see.

MacRumours has some photos of the impending event.

Yup…thar she be.

Finally. Midleton, Co Cork has made onto Google Earth in hi res as part of the December update. The town is joined by some others in east Cork, including Cobh and Carrigtwohill, and the whole of Cork Harbour. Satellite pics of Ireland have never been this good.

Other additions include bits of Kerry and Clare, Mayo and Galway, Lough Rea, bits of Roscommon and Longford, a big portion of Laois, Westmeath and Kilkenny, the Arann Islands, large parts of the Burren, Donegal and as far as I can tell some of Wexford too.

Antartica has also been included as part of Landsat imagery.

The images don’t appear to be on Google Maps yet, but no doubt they will be soon.

Is your house on Google now? Mine is… Hmm.

More additions listed over the Google Earth blog.

I received my invite to Hulu over the weekend. Unfortunately for me, the service is still US only, meaning I can’t watch any of the videos. In the past I have used US proxies to watch ABC content, but I am having trouble finding a good proxy this time round. Can anyone suggest a service?

I do have access to all the shows/episodes that are currently available in the Beta though - there is lots there to watch, from full episodes of The Simpsons to Season Two of Heroes, and it is a rather nice interface too.

It is a while before it will be released but I thought I would give Firefox 3 a whirl.

For some reason pages seem to be loading a lot faster, the text is more readable, both on webpages and the interface itself. But, all of my extensions are broken - I expect they will work once it is officially released. There is also a new ‘places’ tab on the bookmarks toolbar folder, allowing ’starring’ of pages etc.

Overall it seems solid enough, including a new facility to specify which programs Firefox uses to open what sort of files.

I will test it on the Mac tonight and see if it works as well.

Please be aware it is a Beta 1, so it may break stuff.

Update: Zdnet give their first thoughts. They get the same impression, Firefox 3 is fast…

The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless

Eoin links to an article in the New York Times about the legality of locking phones. When oh when will the rules be softened here, as in France?

Do I want one? Um. Yes.

So the iPhone launched today in the UK, and my logs show someone in Dublin visited on O2 using an iPhone. Who was that?

Digifone Online
Location
Continent : Europe
Country : Ireland (Facts)
State/Region : Dublin
City : Dublin
Lat/Long : 53.3331, -6.2489 (Map)
Language English
en
Operating System Macintosh MacOSX
Browser Safari 1.3
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C28 Safari/419.3
Javascript version 1.5
Monitor
Resolution : 320 x 396
Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit Nov 9 2007 9:35:23 pm
Last Page View Nov 9 2007 9:35:23 pm
Visit Length 0 seconds
Page Views 1
Referring URL http://m.newsgator.com/iPhone.aspx

Suffice to say I can’t wait for these to come out. Samsung have roadmapped when they believe OLED models will come on the market. Laptops by 2009.

Samsung’s display operation, Samsung SDI, has a roadmap that calls for 14-15.4in, 1280 x 800 (WXGA) OLEDs for laptops and TVs in the 2009 timeframe, along with 21-23in, 1600 x 1200 (UXGA) panels for TVs.

SDI’s roadmap, posted by Nikkei’s Tech-on website, makes a distinction between the 21-23in screens and larger, 40-42in panels due the following year, in 2010. The latter are described as “full HD”, presumably becuase they’re actually widescreen panels - the UXGA’s have an aspect ratio of 4:3.

SDI began mass-production of the Active Matrix OLED (AMOLED) panels to be used in TVs and PCs this past September. That said, it’s currently churning out nothing larger than a 2in panel for phones and other handheld devices.

Recycling solar panels:

This new process is revolutionary won IBM the “2007 Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award” from The National Pollution Prevention Program. IBM says that worldwide about 250,000 silicon wafers are started each day and that up to 3.3 percent of these wafers end up being discarded amounting to about three million discarded wafers each year.

In addition to merely saving the material and time used in the manufacturing of the reclaimed silicon wafers, IBM says that it sees an overall 90 percent energy savings because repurposing the scrap means IBM doesn’t have to manufacture as many new wafers to meet demands of its production process.

Will demand for Hulu invites rival those of Gmail in the early days and more recently Joost? We will have to wait and see.

Update: I have received my invite to Hulu, and am now a member. Unfortunately I don’t live in the United States so cannot view the videos. However, I may try using proxies to view the videos.

I like Google’s Gmail Privacy Policy.

Ok ok, it’s here. But fix the link Mr Google.

Cringely again, this week covering the plan for all those Google data centres. Google have put their finger in the MySQL pie by placing extensions inside the language from 2009 onwards.

Here’s the grand plan: By working with IBM to promote cloud computing to universities, Google is accomplishing two very important goals. It will first put them in touch with every graduate student doing work Google might find interesting. So it is first a hiring tool. But by teaching students about cloud computing Google and IBM are also seeding the technology in the companies where those students will take their first jobs after graduation. Five years from now cloud computing will be ubiquitous primarily for this reason.

But Google wants us to embrace not just cloud computing but Google’s version of cloud computing, the hooks for which will be in every modern operating system by mid-2009, spread not by Google but by a trusted open source vendor, MySQL AB.

Mid-2009 will also see the culmination of Google’s huge server build-out. The company is building data centers large and small around the world and populating them with what will ultimately be millions of generic servers. THAT’s when things will get really interesting. Imagine a much more user-friendly version of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, only spread across 10 or more times as many machines. And as with all its services, Google will offer free versions at the bottom for consumers and paid, but still cost-effective versions nearer the top for businesses and education.

Combine that with bidding $4.6bn for the 700Mhz spectrum and what do you get? A frickin behemoth mobile provider/ISP/host/cloud/second internet/everything.

When large Irish families gather for events, it usually means they come from various parts of the world.

At my grandfather’s wake, I had the opportunity to compare the iPhone to the Prada to the N73.

My quick capsule review: Prada is the nicest. The iPhone is overrated. The N73 is nice too.

iPhone (from NY) and LG Prada (from Belfast) side by side.

iPhone and Nokia N73 (from Australia)

And the iPhone again, in the wild, in Ireland. Well it does look nice I guess.

More on my grandfather when I gather my thoughts.

Hehe. I do wonder sometimes. This week Cringely hints that the iPhone has in built 3G, which will be activated through software upgrade. I speculated on the same thing over on engadget a couple of weeks ago. The announcement might be made when the phone is announced for a particular network in Europe.

I might as well repeat the comment here:

Why do I get the feeling that iPhones sold today will already have the physical capability to connect to 3G… Would it make sense for two models of the iPhone to be built separately, one 3g capable the other not? Why not just build them all 3G capable and then software activate (eg 802.11n on Macs earlier this year). I’m inclined to believe the rumours here, 3G in Europe is more pervasive and network providers will fall over themselves to sell iPhone.

The question is will it be Vodafone or O2/Telefonica. Given that O2 phones are much less branded, I would be inclined to say them rather than Vodafone. But then recent hints from the existing firmware suggests Vodafone. Either way, it will be one or the other.

Here’s an idea. Buy long calls on both. Once the announcement is made one or other will see an overnight increase in share price. Or if you don’t like the risk, buy shares in both. See what happens.

A bit like the horses, I know, but hey.

Update: Business 2.0 says their is no evidence of 3G hardware in the 1st generation iPhone.

CNN seems to be undergoing a redesign. Is it just me or are all redesigns looking very similar? I do like it though.

Some of you may remember that as far back as August 2005, I speculated that Google and Apple seemed like a good fit, and could potentially merge at some point. I was heavily criticised for expressing the idea.

But watching stuff like this really makes me wonder. The partnerships between the two firms continue to grow, and Schmidt hints at more announcements in the coming months.

As I said before, in terms of pure philosophy at least, Apple and Google share the “technology anyone can use” idea. While there are no synergies per se, you must remember that Google at least is heavily reliant on its core philosophy, as outlined in it’s SEC filing before it floated. If their aim is to organise the world’s information, I don’t see how owning or merging with Apple would interfere with that idea, in fact I imagine it would assist it.

This remains in the realm of speculation, but I do remember Schmidt himself, when the iPhone was first announced, jokingly speculating as to what a merged Google/Apple would be called. Applegoo? He laughed. Hmm.

I’ve been invited to test out Joost rival Neokast. It’s in very early beta, and I have been having some difficulty streaming some videos. It is also not yet compatible with Firefox.

Finally got it today, though I hear of backlogs. Looks like I got in early.

So far so good. It’s really nice, thought haven’t tested battery life with the new LED screen yet. It’s nice and fast though, with the same amount of RAM as my Dell 9400 running MCE. Bootcamp shall be installed, and as you can see from the pic, I already installed OpenOffice, VLAN Player, Mac Messenger etc.

Mr Puds approves:

My new MacBook Pro has left the TNT depot in Shanghai. Yay!

I found this website a few weeks ago. It puts together a range of movies and TV series into one site, embeds all the videos from other video websites such as dailymotion - and thus allows you to watch whole series episode by episode.[Graphic adverts though!].

Dunno about the legality of it though…

The blogosphere has been all over the new ads for the iPhone. I like the slickness of the interface, here is the latest one showing off browsing abilities in Safari.

They’re out. Now where’s my credit card…

Apparently the new LED screen on the 15′ constitutes power savings of 50-60 minutes of battery life. Cool.

I guess these ads will shortly be a thing of the past?

Google are pretty confident about the Government rebuilding the railway from Cork to Youghal. Despite the track from Glounthane to Youghal having been idle for 30 years, the map says there definitely is a track there… though we wait for it to become operational again.

Maybe Google are psychic? I like their confidence anyway.

By the way, did anyone else notice that Google Maps for Ireland are alot more detailed than they used to be? The satellite photos seem the same, but the level of detail for roads etc has vastly improved.

Speaking of Apple, they recently announced an upgraded version of the Apple TV. The second model sports a 160GB hard drive instead of 40GB. Hm.

There has been speculation of late as to the fate of the much loved MacMini, which has not been refreshed in some time. Some of commented that the Mini may be discontinued. I would be sad to see it go, especially since I have one hooked up to a HDTV:

And that’s partly why I post. For months I’ve been using the MacMini via FrontRow exactly as the Apple TV is intended to be used - a content box, though mine has mainly music. Besides that it is also used for YouTube videos, playing DVDs (though the region coding sucks), and general internet browsing via wireless keyboard and mouse.

The question is, if the MacMini dies, can the Apple TV takeover from where it leaves off? I would say yes, it can. An increased hard drive might be the first step, but lots could be done to the Apple TV’s firmware to make it a better device. The recoding of YouTube videos away from Flash VP is also a pointer to the use of the iPhone, and the Apple TV itself.

God knows what awaits us.

I have been holding off on upgrading my laptop until it was closer to a flagged announcement of a revamped MacBook Pro line from Apple. Now it appears the launch may be closer than expected. It is believed the new MacBooks will have the much anticipated LED screens, instead of the older, hotter and more power-hungry LCDs. I await with interest.

I guess it will also mean, for the first time, that I will have more Macs than PCs. Still no iPod though.

And this time Boing Boing has a funny story on how it happened. What are the chances? Hehe.

Newscorp make another acquisition. Photobucket sold for $300m

Hehe. Banks don’t have their money stolen anymore.

So this was the surprise announcement Microsoft promised. It does look impressive, a la Minority Report. But will it blue screen?

Unveiled yesterday. Here is a rather nice view from the Golden Gate bridge. They have also included streel level coverage of Denver, Miami, New York and Las Vegas. I really like the interface - you pick up the little figure and drop him/her whereever you want to see the street level view. You can then pan around within the picture, and move it back or forward along the road by clicking the arrow.

This only seems to work on Google Maps US, which means you need to add “&gl=us” at the end of the url to see the streetview option.

Evil Google geniuses are taking over the planet.

Blogoscoped has more - and mapplets too.

This is the broadband speed in UCC, pity it’s not at home. :-(

I wrote a piece in today’s Irish Examiner about the BarCamp event on Saturday. Page 17, no Internet link. Will copy here shortly.

A few readers have been asking about my Mac Mini setup, so I have taken a couple of pictures to demonstrate how it stands currently. I actually love the option of picture-in-picture.

There’s iTunes on (an abundance of country), with al Jazeera on as picture-in-picture via the television. You can have the TV sound on or off while in OSX, the OSX sounds play via separate speakers as you see here:

All in all, a nice setup. The wireless keyboard and mouse are outside the pics, but work well.

Now to consider PVR options…

I’ve been meaning to post about buying a Mac Mini, and hooking it up to a Samsung 32′ R7 HD TV in the living room. It works wonders on your music collection, with Front Row at your beckon call. Setup was flawless, plugging straight into the wireless network and downloading the latest updates. It’s even parent-friendly.

Not only that but I get to fiddle about alot with OSX, after ordering the bluetooth keyboard (sturdy weight on it) and bluetooth mouse. The added bonus was being able to dump the massive DVD player, and VHS recorder, and their remotes, in favour of the Mac sitting on top of the satellite box.

It makes a great home entertainment system, now all I need it so make it into a PVR.

Quietly, Google added some new languages to its translation tool. They are all in BETA at present but it’s interesting to see. The languages are Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Maybe I missed it and this is old news. :-)

They have also updated Google Maps to be more zoomable, not unlike Microsoft’s Live service. Double left click to zoom in, double right to zoom out.

On a tangent to Frank’s discussion on the costs of corruption, I asked myself a slightly related question.

While I am of the opinion that government should be kept to a minimum, and that the market should be largely left to it’s own devices, I am dismayed by the lack of broadband in this country. I would like to put existing arguments concerning the legacy of state monopolies and local loop unbundling aside for a moment and ask a straight forward question.

Should the government have mandated several years ago, that all new housing estates be piped for fibre to the kerb or even fibre to the home technology? I ask that given that the housing boom has led to something like half a million houses being built in quite a short space of time.

Now I can imagine that a person in favour of free markets would say - if the market does not demand this technology, then developers will not provide it. And if people do demand it, they will either ask for it, or specifically choose a development that does incorporate it.

But is there not a bigger picture? Is there not an argument that says economies that have implemented such policies (Korean and Scandanavian models come to mind) have benefitted from the foresight, and that such government interference has actually led to the market benefitting from something that, if left to it’s own devices, may not have happened?

I know it sounds like I’m saying the governments knew best, but it puzzles me that given such massive house building we are still in the same situation we were a decade ago - copper to homes where DSL may not reach.

It may have been sensible for developers to approach ISP’s or TV stations and offer a deal to cable homes with extremely fast connections, both to save money digging roads up again later, and give companies instant access to customer’s homes without a proxy like eircom - or even to enable a huge amount of homes to have technology that may not be available to them over copper.

Did Korean people demand super fast broadband and then benefit from it, or did the government see the benefits in advance and force it on a market that did not see the potential positive future effects on the economy?

Incidentally Cringely’s piece this week covers a similar subject.

Comments welcome!

It’s back, and it’s free. Brings back memories. (Shockwave required)

The Comcast guy has been sacked. Poor guy.

Andrew Orlowski over at El Reg penned an article his week where he claimed Flickr was getting far more publicity than it’s due. He cites a Hitwise survery that suggest Photobucket is the biggest of photo sharing sites, while Flickr lies in 6th place. He suggests that Flickr, being a Web 2.0 darling, receives far more publicity than it’s bigger competitor.

Web 2.0 arguments seem weird in this instance, do even half the people using Flickr know what web 2.0 is, nevermind that Flickr uses it’s technologies? And do Photobucket users realise their site doesn’t have snazzy AJAX, but still works anyway …?

Survey aside, I had a quick look to see make other comparisons.

Google trends puts Photobucket ahead, but not by a huge margin. While Alexa gives Flickr a traffic rank of 50, with Photobucket getting 76.

The survery itself appears skewed. There are other arguments in the comments after the survey suggesting that Photobucket isn’t really the same as Flickr, one being a place to store and display photos for Myspace users, and the other being a photo community in it’s own right.

Engadget links to a story about WiMax transmitters in Sweden:

According to Sweden’s SVT, which reported on the incident, the local hospital emergency room was flooded with calls regarding various symptoms such as headaches, difficulty breathing, blurry vision and even two cases of heart arrhythmia. All of this was mere hours after the base station was activated, and the symptoms went away once the station was deactivated, or if the sufferer moved away from that radio tower of death.

It sounds quite bad, but will it mean an end to the technology or is it merely a blip?

For years now I have watched where my first name is placed on the Google index. Yes it’s vain, but it also gives me an insight into Google’s indexing methods. Earlier this year during a Google Dance, I was completely dropped from the index for 3 weeks, for no apparent reason.

It has returned, and now when searching for ‘Gavin‘ on Google.com I am placed at number three, while over on Google.ie I am now placed at number two.

At least I’m now higher than Gavin Friday. Who’d have thought that possible?

It appears China have lifted a recent ban on Google, but will Google stay in China?

China has lifted its online blockade of Google.com after a two-week crackdown that had prevented direct access to the site and temporarily thwarted popular workarounds, a media watchdog group reported Friday.

The Paris-based journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, said that tests revealed the uncensored version of the search site was accessible again to internet users in Beijing and Shanghai. The crackdown overlapped with the June 4 anniversary of the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

A Google spokesperson confirmed this, saying that “we have heard no further reports from users in China of problems accessing Google.com.”

Apparently Brin has said they are definately staying in China, despite other comments made this week:

Google Inc. is committed to doing business in China despite criticism the company has faced for abiding by Chinese government censorship restrictions, co-founder Sergey Brin said this week.

On Tuesday, after a session with several U.S. senators to discuss telecommunications legislation, Brin made comments that prompted some journalists to speculate Google intended to change or eliminate its operations in China.

In fact, he reiterated Google’s intention to move ahead with its google.cn site — a version of the leading Internet search engine that censors thousands of sites according to Chinese standards — as well as its global google.com site.

Brin told a small group of invited journalists: “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do something different. Say, OK, let’s stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there”.

But he then added: “That’s an alternative path. It’s not the one we’ve chosen to take right now”.

The more I compare Google Maps to the recent Google Earth update, the more I see just how big it was. Huge stretches of countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Australia, Russia and Brazil have been added. Almost the whole of the UAE is now in high-res.

And with the launch of more satellites this summer, the quality and level of updating will only improve yet more.

It’s taken a while, but we are finally seeing more of the world in high resolution via Google Earth. The changes were made last night and include areas of Russia, China, Africa, Taiwan, USA, Canada, Bermuda, the Caribbean Islands, many islands in the Pacific, Puerto Rico, South America, New Zeland, Australia.

Of most interest to me was Dubai, who’s spectacular growth in both buildings and islands sees a major change. Google Maps has yet to be updated so I took a snapshot of Dubai, the photo is circa 1999/2000 I suspect, and is in low resolution.

So here are some rather spectacular before and after shots of Dubai.

Dubai, plus the coast line as far as Jebel Ali port (BEFORE) :

Dubai around now, with the photo showing just beyond Jebel Ali port: (AFTER)

There are other assorted buildings and structures in Dubai, many of which I photographed from the ground. Here are some of the famous ones:

The recently completed Mall of the Emirates, one of the largest shopping centers in the world, with it’s own indoor ski slopes to the left of the picture:

Palm Island Jumeirah, that did not exist just 5 years ago.

The Burj Dubai under construction, center of picture:

The Burj al Arab, Madinat Hotel and Jumeirah Beach hotel:

The skyscrapers of Sheikh Zayed Road, with Emirates Towers just off the center.

And finally, the UAE from 310 miles up, you can make out the two islands.

You can look at my photos of Dubai from the ground.

Probably a mistake, but OSX appearing on a Dell website can create a stir. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that OSX will feature on PCs at some point in the future.

[via Engadget]

I was browsing comments on O’Reilly and came across a link to this. It’s from 1999.

The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop.

Yet another Star Trek device makes the move to semi-reality.

The work provides a mathematical “recipe” for bending light waves in such a way as to achieve a desired cloaking effect.

John Pendry, along with colleagues David Smith and David Schurig at Duke University in North Carolina, US, have been testing suitable metamaterials for the device they plan to build.

This, Sir John explained, would consist of a sphere or cylinder wrapped in a sheath of metamaterial which could cloak it from radio waves.

“It’s not tremendously fancy, but that for us would be quite an achievement,” he told the BBC News website.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt, author of another cloaking paper in Science, described the effect for light as a “mirage”.

“What you’re trying to do is guide light around an object, but the art is to bend it such that it leaves the object in precisely the same way that it initially hits it. You have the illusion that there is nothing there,” he told the BBC’s Science in Action programme.

The work could have uses in military stealth technology - but engineers have not yet created the materials that could be used to cloak an aircraft or a tank, John Pendry explains. Professor Pendry’s research has been supported by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

After my reliable and much loved Nokia 6630 had an unfortunate run-in with a washing machine, it was written in the stars that I was destined to get a new phone. I eventually decided on the Sony Ericsson W800i, incidentally the same as Ryan’s who lauded the phone’s features.

First off is the 2.0MP camera. I took a few photos at the maximum resolution and found the quality excellent. None of the same grainy issues of the 1.3MP on the 6630. I have only taken daytime photos thus far, and have found them all comparable to photos I have taken on standard digital cameras. There is no flash, but a rather powerful light, I will test it later. Here’s a sample pic in Midleton:

Second is the most prominent feature of the W800i, the walkman. It comes with a 512MB memory stick, and the process was smooth, I simply dragged and dropped MP3’s to the memory card, no issues. The sound quality is excellent, both from the loudspeaker and the included headset. The 6630 had a similar feature, but I always found the Nokia software fiddly and slow.

As for other aspects of the phone, the menu system does take getting used to after years as a Nokia afficiando. The space on texts uses a different button, but the predictive texts differs slightly in its use, and I found it just as easy as the 6630. The games included are substandard, but I will be getting more shortly. The screen is high-res, very clear, very bright, it also has nice animated wallpaper.

What the phone lacks is a standard 3.5mm jack for headphones. I am forced to use the Sony handsfree kit, and then attach a 3.5mm headphone to that. I have found the connection to the phone to be slightly loose, in which case the phone automatically reverts to the loudspeaker, which I could imagine being rather embarrasing if it came loose in a public place. The built in radio is fine (the 6630 lacked one), has RDS, and I get decent quality from all radio stations.

The W800i also has IR and Bluetooth (why they include IR anymore is beyond me), and I trust all these things work as normal.

Overall thus far I am happy with the switch. All I need now is to switch to the new Macbooks. :)

Damien and Tom have been on about a rollicking good post from Robert Scoble. He really does care. And his job is on the line now too.

Not only did George Bush get a gift of an iPod from Bono, he apparently illegally rips CDs (or has someone do it for him)

Video here.

(via Boing)

Dick and Damien note a press release from McCann Fitzgerald concerning libel and blogs. Could someone publish more of the press release? It does seem rather interesting.

What strikes me is going after the ISP.

How do, say Esat BT, remove my blog from their service? Do they block it? Could someone just not get around it, Google Cache for example? How does going after the ISP stop me from hosting my stuff in California? Do they terminate my contract so that I can’t upload to my host? Do they go after my host in California, do I then move to another host…in Russia?

It strikes me that this may be, as Dick notes, some confusion on the part of the law firm. Back in the good old days, lots of people used one of their free Telecom Eireann or Indigo websites, which amounted to hosting provided by the ISP as a free bonus attached to their dial-up account. It was typical of ISP’s to act not just as Internet Service Providers but as hosters of content also. This has practically disappeared, to my knowledge.

She did note:

Often a better option is to force the host or internet service provider to take action.

Then forgot that in many cases hosting and ISP’s are two completely different things. It doesn’t seem to mention hosting after that. I think it was here they then got confused between the two terms.

Things changed and now we all host our stuff all over the world.

How will legal action work now?

I have been watching Sun closely of late, especially given their recent share price rise. In-fighting continues however. Ashlee Vance at El Reg has a good story on the latest. I especially like her ending sentence. Referring here to retired server chief John Shoemaker, who is being critical of Sun management:

Shoemaker clearly does not believe in the power of the Schwartz.

Hehe. Only funny to those who have seen Spaceballs.

I’m tempted to do some testing to distract me from studying…so I’ve decided to install Ubuntu, Windows Vista build 5432, and Windows XP Home. Partitioning the drives..

New York Times site redesigned…I like it.

It seems the media have woken up to Bebo, my post at the start of the month recommended buying it. It stands, even if it’s just to sell it on. Several of the broadsheets covered Bebo over the weekend.

It made the front page of Cork’s Evening Echo. (PDF)

Apparently these phrases are quite expensive to buy for adverts. Why the popularity?

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It looks like all the mapping websites, including Google Maps and Virtual Earth, will have access to far more and far more frequent data.

GeoEye says its next-generation satellite, GeoEye-1, will be capable of acquiring each day approximately 270,000 square miles of imagery, an area about the size of Texas. That’s about seven times the area covered by Ikonos, the best imaging satellite the company has running today.

DigitalGlobe, the satellite imagery supplier for Google Earth, plans to launch its next orbital, WorldView 1, later this year. The company says it will be capable of collecting up to 193,000 square miles of imagery per day.

Next-generation satellites will also revisit locations more frequently.

Chuck Herring, spokesman for DigitalGlobe, anticipates that by combining WorldView and existing satellites, the firm will be able to revisit practically any point on Earth’s surface on a daily basis. (Currently, the company revisits about once every three days.)

Of all the things Google have done in the last year, I like Google Finance the most, it is simplicity itself.

When I was in Boston Logan I used the airport Wifi to watch realtime flight data on a map, as flights arrived and departed from the airport. Now this nifty bit of software plugs into Google Earth, so you an watch flight data updated every 60 seconds. It works from a number of US airports.

China are holding off on a space walk - but their prowess (regardless of reliance on Russian technology) is increasing.

China’s planned space walk mission has been put back by six months and will not now take place until 2008.

The scheduled launch of the Shenzhou VII rocket will be the country’s third manned mission, but senior consultant to the country’s space programme, Huang Chunping, admitted that “Shenzhou VII was a complicated program that needed careful tests and trials”, New Scientist reports.

Yes I have been tempted by the Beast of Redmond. But the price point is crazy, just because it’s a new console doesn’t mean you charge on average €70 per game. Screenshots like this make it oh so tempting though.

Aviation week have an interesting story on the secret “Blackstar” project.

Now facing the possibility that this innovative “Blackstar” system may have been shelved, we elected to share what we’ve learned about it with our readers, rather than let an intriguing technological breakthrough vanish into “black world” history, known to only a few insiders. U.S. intelligence agencies may have quietly mothballed a highly classified two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane system designed in the 1980s for reconnaissance, satellite-insertion and, possibly, weapons delivery. It could be a victim of shrinking federal budgets strained by war costs, or it may not have met performance or operational goals.

And apparently it might have had space based weapon potential:

THE SPACEPLANE’S SMALL CARGO or “Q-bay” also could be configured to deliver specialized microsatellites to low Earth orbit or, perhaps, be fitted with no-warhead hypervelocity weapons–what military visionaries have called “rods from god.” Launched from the fringes of space, these high-Mach weapons could destroy deeply buried bunkers and weapons facilities.

[via Digg]

I know if I had some spare change I would be buying Bebo.

Apparently it has gone relatively unnoticed in Silicon Valley, at least according to this report.

But over here I have never heard or seen anything like it. Anecdotally, just walking around UCC in the past week I overheard at least a dozen conversations that mentioned Bebo, where students never normally seem to talk about any other social networking site (besides MySpace), or indeed any other thing to do with the Internet. And that includes blogging.

So what is it about Bebo? I have no idea. But it sounds like everyone from 16 up is using it, and the recently added every school and university in Ireland.

Expect a buy-out from a bigger player soon.