Resource Nation has an interesting article on how Obama Raised 87% of his Funds through Social Networking.
In January, Obama set a record for donations in one month by raising a total of $32 million dollars, $28 million of which was raised online. From these $28 million in online contributions, 90% were under $100, with over 250,000 contributors.
This really shows the power of micro-donations, in a way similar to crowd-sourcing.
It appears that Vodacom, HTC and Google are hashing out a deal that will see the G1 hitting local shores sometime next year. I would love to get my paws on one of these just to play around with, though I don’t see myself purchasing one unless it’s cheap enough that it doesn’t need to be subsidised on top of a the existing cost of a contract *cough*iPhone*cough*.
Read the rest of the rather sketchy details at MyBroadband.
In long-awaited anticipation the free competitor to Microsoft’s Office Suite, OpenOffice.org v3.0.0 Final will be officially released sometime today. OOo v3.0.0 was already available for download on some of the mirrors since late last night. I assume given the time-zone differences the official release details will be shortly forthcoming. Their site is currently down so it’s probably a safe bet that they’re currently updating as I write this article seeing as when I checked 2 hours ago it was working fine and contained no details regarding the official release.
I’ve long maintained that OOo, while not exactly a poor comparison to the very mature and comprehensive suite that is MS Office, it is not the brilliant masterpiece that supercedes MS Office that so many people claim it to be. However for a free office suite it is definitely not lacking in features or functionality, so it should be interesting to see what v3 Final brings to the table and see how much closer it comes to truly rivaling MS Office.
I present to you, dear reader, the three greatest covers of “The Final Countdown” to ever appear on the internet.
Coming in at number 3, mostly because of the sheer audacity:
Number 2, I hope you guys are touring near me!
The pinnacle of human achievement (seriously), #1:
While doing my 5 seconds of research for my previous entry I came across this article. While the article isn’t exactly news considering that the deal has been making headlines for quite a while now, it contains parts that I found decidedly amusing.
At the moment Telkom shareholders own the fixed-line business and 50% of Vodacom. After the deal they will still own the fixed-line business, will hold 35% of Vodacom, and will pocket a substantial amount of cash. The analyst expected Vodafone to pay about R21,75bn once 15% of the debt was deducted.
“We don’t know yet how much cash will be paid out. Telkom is not going to keep that R22bn so it will pay it as a special dividend to shareholders.”
Vodafone did not want to buy Vodacom in its entirety, partly as it would have had to relinquish some of the shares for a black empowerment deal that is now under way.
Doesn’t this just speak volumes? Don’t forget the government’s 39% stake in Telkom. I guess a few politicians will be getting new cars.
Efforts by the Competition Commission to fine Telkom R3,7bn for anti competitive behaviour have been revived, with the commission winning the right to appeal against a court ruling that temporarily halted its campaign.
Telkom owns one of the largest ISPs in South Africa, and all evidence appears to indicate that they’ve been giving their own ISP preferential treatment, in terms of rates, packages, etc.. This has led to the opinion that they abusing the market with their anti-competitive behaviour, and I tend to agree. They will undoubtedly fight this tooth and nail so it will likely be a long time before we see any kind of resolution. My question is, what happens to that money should the Competition Commission be successful?
Full details at Business Day.
“The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.”
“Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers.”
Via ars technica.
A few extra details at Linux Watch.
A couple areas of the site are undergoing maintenance; notably, the comment system is being enhanced with some AJAX functionality and also a subscribe to comment thread option is being added. As such, the commenting system will probably not function very well today, so watch out!
Back to normal operation tomorrow hopefully!
Google Labs has released a plug-in for Gmail that tries to prevent you from sending and then later regretting “late-night” emails (cough cough).
You can enable this by clicking “Settings” in Gmail and then selecting the “Labs” tab.
Scroll down for a while and you will find the module.
In a rather uncharacteristic move of innovation, Telkom has launched GETMO, a platform offering digital content downloads such as movies and music. Targeted at the local South African market in direct competition with international services, I find it incredibly ironic — in true Telkom style — that it’s hosted internationally largely defeating the point of actually launching a “local” service.
A quick perusal of the FAQ is filled with hilarious tidbits such as:
I own an iPod, but cannot transfer music from GETMO to this device. What is the cause of this problem?
Since the iPod does not support WMA, it cannot be used with GETMO. Find a list of supported devices that have been tested for their compatibility with GETMO in section “Supported media devices”.
and…
Can I use my MAC?
With Mac OS xxx cannot be used because here neither the full functional circumference of Windows Media players nor that of the Internet Explorer are available. However, it will be possible on Apple machines with Intel’s processors to install Windows XP. Likewise VirtualPC Windows and therefore Macintosh can be used with the help of additional programs.
Clearly Telkom believes that eliminating a large chunk of your potential consumer base is a good way to do business — incidentally Cyberdyne believes the same thing; open the site an any non MSIE browser and prepare yourself for a slap in the face. I’m not a market analyst, but it doesn’t really take an expert to know that Apple has managed to secure themselves a very large chunk of the market with their range of iPods in the portable media sector. Also, designing a site that only supports MSIE doesn’t seem like the best of ideas given the soaring popularity of competing browsers such as Firefox and OS’ that don’t support MSIE.
In the same motion that Telkom give you a real world-class service they also turn around and kick you in the balls (what’s new?). The FAQ indicates that the content will be riddled with DRM. There’s just too much there for me to list specifics so it’s better to check the complete FAQ.
Via MyBroadband
Google Forms is a recent addition to the Google Docs suite, allowing you to quickly and easily collect and report on user data.
In similar vein to Wufoo and SurveyMonkey you can create hosted forms and surveys and then either link to them, or embed them as I have in this post. This allows you to manage forms and results in a central location, and to also be able to use forms on straight HTML web hosts (are there any of these left?).
More information on creating forms:
Once you have created and saved your form, click the “More Actions” menu button to get the iframe embed code.
T-Mobile put up an emulator for the upcoming G1 where you can attempt to give Android a test run. I say attempt since my experience with this rather novel idea turned out to be rather short-lived. The actual emulator is largely dysfunctional and lacking many functions. Also on the site is a 3D view of the phone; it looks rather ugly to me. Its direct competitor, the iPhone, is certainly a lot prettier, but aside from that and the fact that it has an Apple logo on it the iPhone doesn’t have too much else going for it.
Whilst traveling overseas recently, I spied the Nintendo DS Lite in several shops, and on several big billboards in France, and after some deliberation (approx. 5 seconds worth) I decided to pick one up.
Back home, I found a very cheaply priced copy of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow at Musica. Having played and really enjoyed Aria of Sorrow on the GBA SP, I decided to pick the game up too. After four weeks of not-quite dedicated play I reached 100% soul completion, 100% map completion, and found all the secret items (Chaos Ring, woot) - it was now time to move on.
After a few days of research and bugging people, I decided to get an M3 DS Real cartridge - in the M3 DS Perfect package, which comes with the Real card adapter, a slot-2 rumble pack and an 8MB slot-2 RAM expansion pack, which is a very good deal. The adapter accepts micro SD cards, which means there is plenty of space to handle almost anything you throw at it. Unfortunately M3 have been cutting costs and no longer ship driver CD’s with the package, but they do include a handy piece of paper that asks you to please download the latest drivers, but fails to mention where from. Searching a bit I found the system software at HandheldSources which you must unzip and copy to your micro SD card (into a folder called ‘SYSTEM’). There is more software available at http://www.m3wiki.com/index.php/M3_software, but I haven’t tried any of it out.
Now with the ability to load 3rd-party software on the DS Lite, I went out looking for cool things to try and found out that the completely awesome ScummVM has been ported across!
ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!
Ok.. so what games? Check these highlights out:
Full list here.
In conclusion, AWESOME!
Sherwood Forlee has an excellent idea to prevent your lunch being stolen by co-workers.
Anti-theft bag + sandwich:
Equals:
Although, unless your co-workers are exceptionally dim-witted, they will probably figure this out after the fifth “mouldy” lunch you bring to work.
These days there’s always a slew of concepts hitting the web. Ranging from the completely outlandish and impractical to the mundane and insipid. This one lies somewhere in between. Vizualtech took an existing design and modified it to create an Audi R8 inspired catamaran. Seeing as I know next to nothing about boats I won’t comment on function, however, regarding form this design makes me cringe a bit. A really beautiful design, the R8 seems to be quite out of place sitting on water like that with rather odd looking cutoff gull wing doors.
There is the possibility that this concept might actually see the light of day, however remote that may be. Consider the source, a Dubai race boat company commissioned this design, so I would imagine that there is no shortage of funds should they wish to take this further than just a concept. Let’s just hope they make the plush interior waterproof.
More details and pictures of this concept can be found here.
So it seems that a lucky few (or unlucky depending on your viewpoint) will get their paws on the latest and greatest offering from Microsoft. A pre-beta build of Windows 7 will be given to all attendees, along with a bunch of other stuff from the conference.
The successor to Vista, Windows 7 currently promises a lot, yet what does it truly offer? I doubt many people will be too impressed should it deliver the same sort of results that Vista did. Considering how far they are in the development phase, it looks they could make the widely assumed release dates of late 2009 — early 2010 based on the history of releases. For me, the biggest question now is: what happens to Vista? Does it make any sense to even adopt Vista now that the next OS is around the corner? With the PR nightmare Vista has had, it doesn’t look like there is much incentive to do so.
In the end the real question to ask would be: can Windows 7 surmount the negative image that has built up since the release of Vista?
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