Poor
Little Rich Boy
Last
Friday the UK
Guardian's
online edition reported that Bill Gates is having a tough time being
the
world's richest man...
In news that will either gladden
or enrage non-billionaires everywhere,
Bill Gates has revealed that he would rather not be the world's richest
man.
"I wish
I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of
that," the co-founder of Microsoft told a conference of online
advertising executives in Redmond, Washington, where the software
company has its headquarters. "You get more visibility as a result of
it." [more...]
Later that same day I finished reading Ronald Wright's compelling and
disturbing
A
Short History of Progress, a book that leaves you in little
doubt that our civilisation's on brink of collapse and that we have to
act
now to
prevent it. In 1998, the world's three richest individuals - Bill Gates
(Microsoft), Helen Walton (Wal-Mart) and Warren Buffett (investor) -
had a combined wealth greater than the poorest 48 countries on the
planet. In a footnote he cites a United Nations Human
Development Report from that same year...
[The
report] estimates that in 1998, only US$40 billion was needed to bring
basic health, education, clean water and sanitation to the world's
poorest citizens. Gates alone could afford that and still have US$11
billion left.
Telecom on the Brink of
Collapse!
The big story last week was
Telecom's
unbundling. I'll have more to say on that later in the week
but
in
anticipation of faster broadband, here's a link to a
bandwidth
speed test. Try it now, then again in six months, then again
in a year. Let's see what
really
happens...
I tried it on a gloomy Sunday afternoon and got 544kbps from my
TelstraClear
cable connection. Not bad. What
is
bad is that one week into the billing month and four of my five
allowable download gigabytes have gone. After that they start gouging
me $20/GB. (I don't know how it happened, honest. Maybe the cable's
sprung a leak...)
Whoops, Apocalypse
Don't you hate it when they start a World War and forget to tell you
about it?
US
President George W. Bush has said the September 11 revolt of
passengers against their hijackers on board Flight 93 had struck the
first blow of “World War III”.
In an
Poor
Little Rich Boy
Last
Friday the UK Guardian's
online edition reported that Bill Gates is having a tough time being
the
world's richest man...
In news that will either gladden
or enrage non-billionaires everywhere,
Bill Gates has revealed that he would rather not be the world's richest
man.
"I wish
I wasn't ... There's nothing good that comes out of
that," the co-founder of Microsoft told a conference of online
advertising executives in Redmond, Washington, where the software
company has its headquarters. "You get more visibility as a result of
it." [more...]
Later that same day I finished reading Ronald Wright's compelling and
disturbing
A
Short History of Progress, a book that leaves you in little
doubt that our civilisation's on brink of collapse and that we have to
act
now to
prevent it. In 1998, the world's three richest individuals - Bill Gates
(Microsoft), Helen Walton (Wal-Mart) and Warren Buffett (investor) -
had a combined wealth greater than the poorest 48 countries on the
planet. In a footnote he cites a United Nations Human
Development Report from that same year...
[The
report] estimates that in 1998, only US$40 billion was needed to bring
basic health, education, clean water and sanitation to the world's
poorest citizens. Gates alone could afford that and still have US$11
billion left.
Telecom on the Brink of
Collapse!
The big story last week was
Telecom's
unbundling. I'll have more to say on that later in the week
but
in
anticipation of faster broadband, here's a link to a
bandwidth
speed test. Try it now, then again in six months, then again
in a year. Let's see what
really
happens...
I tried it on a gloomy Sunday afternoon and got 544kbps from my
TelstraClear
cable connection. Not bad. What
is
bad is that one week into the billing month and four of my five
allowable download gigabytes have gone. After that they start gouging
me $20/GB. (I don't know how it happened, honest. Maybe the cable's
sprung a leak...)
Whoops, Apocalypse
Don't you hate it when they start a World War and forget to tell you
about it?
US
President George W. Bush has said the September 11 revolt of
passengers against their hijackers on board Flight 93 had struck the
first blow of “World War III”.
In an
interview with the
financial news network CNBC, Mr Bush said he had yet to see the
recently released film of the uprising, a dramatic portrayal of events
on the United Airlines plane before it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
But
he said he agreed with the description of David Beamer, whose son Todd
died in the crash, who in a Wall Street Journal commentary last month
called it “our first successful counter-attack in our
homeland in this
new global war, World War III”.
Mr Bush
said: “I believe that. I believe that it was the first
counter-attack to World War III.
You can read more of the
loony's tunes
here.
Video of the Week
The
Huygens probe landed on the surface of Saturn's moon
Titan back in January 2005, but now NASA, the European Space
Agency and the University of Arizona have put together a
four-minute
space-craft's-eye-view of the landing. The actual event took
four hours but it's been compressed into just four minutes.
There's actually two movies; "View From Huygens" and "Descent With
Bells and Whistles", and the former has several options, including low-
or high-resolution and no audio, narration or music-only. Truly,
out-of-this-world stuff.
(And no, that's not where all my download allowance went. The
hi-res narrated version's only 90MB.)
Still More Vista Delays
How is it that most Linux distros - staffed largely by volunteers - can
manage six- or twelve-monthly updates while mega-billion dollar
Microsoft can't manage one in half a decade? Yup, According to
this
link you won't see the next version of Windows till Q2 2007.
Call me a propeller head, but I recently found myself chuckling at a
collection of Linux compile and configuration messages on a 
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