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...

"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...




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...

"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...




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.

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.