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.
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:
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.
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
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