An Internet Legend is born

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Zidane may have headbutted himself and France out of the World Cup final, but he won the game on the Internet.

By | Auckland | Friday, 14 July, 2006

Top Stories

- Shooting War
- Late Mac OS X 10.4.7 upgrade
- Pricey packets

An Internet Legend is born

Zidane may have headbutted himself and France out of the World Cup final, but he won the game on the Internet. Clips and animated GIFs of Zizou locking horns with “Matrix” are proliferating all over the Web

- Francisco Javier Moya Suárez’s ultra-collection of Zizouismes

- Favourite: YTMND Radz’s “Zidane wants candy” (mainly because I like the song used)

Mulligan and O’Hare versus Jeremy Paxman

Bit obscure but has moobies allure and a big fake nose, so in it goes.

- It’s Like That!

Shooting War

Korean missiles raining over the Sea of Japan… bombings in Mumbai and Iraq… Israel pounding Lebanon and Hizbollah rocketing Haifa: it’s really a simmering third World War isn’t it?

Makes the Shooting War web-comic all the more poignant, I think. (With thanks to Nic W who pointed me to it.)

- Shooting War by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman

Mumbai’s not giving into terrorism; also contains link to appeal for help blog:

- Mumbai blasts should not affect investment to India

Late Mac OS X 10.4.7 upgrade

Last weekend, I upgraded OS X on the iMac here from 10.3.9 to the latest 10.4.7 (thanks Natalie from Apple NZ for sending a copy). I did it mainly because it seemed prudent from a security point of view but also because I’ve covered web browsers a lot lately, and haven’t had access to the new versions of Safari for that.

The iMac has only 256MB RAM onboard – SO-DIMMs are expensive, so haven’t upgraded- and by today’s standards a puny 800MHz G4 processor, so I was wondering how it’d cope with the new OS version. At first the upgrade looked like a walk in the park: pop in the DVD, clickety-click and let the installer churn through the lot. It took just over an hour, and after reboot, the new operating system loaded… ominously slowly.

Software Upgrade alerted me that there was an upgrade available, taking OS X to the latest 10.4.7 revision. That was cool by me, even though the 200MB in total (150MB OS X and 50MB Java) update was hefty. So download, install and this time the iMac hung during the upgrade. The rainbow colour wheel was spinning away for ages with nothing else on the screen and at that moment, my wife came back home and saw that her iMac was in the throes of a possible upgrade failure.

Panic ensued as I tried to dodge death stares for not backing up the iMac, and I thought it was the dog house for me that night for sure. Anyway, I managed to log in remotely via SSH kill the hung crash reporting process and manually reboot the iMac, which saved the day. The iMac started up, albeit slowly – and it ran like molasses too.

That was just the beginning though, and now OS X has settled down. It’s as fast as 10.3.9 now, and I like it. It sort of did the reverse to Windows XP that starts off fast, but slows down soon as the binary crud accumulates. There are plenty of improvements to the user interface (Dashboard’s a firm favourite), Safari and the Mail app. Having played around with 10.4.7 for a while now, I can’t help wondering what would happen if Apple came to its senses and made the next version of OS X, 10.5, available as an upgrade for PC users. My bet is that it would pull the rug from underneath Vista completely.

- MacUser: Leopard Mac OS X 10.5 feature run-down

- Phill Ryu’s Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest

- Probably bogus Quicktime video of 10.5 pre-release

Pricey packets

Last week’s F-U story on going landline-less stirred quite a few responses. Grant Keymer for instance wrote into say that in the first month of switching to iTalk over his BCL Extend line in the Far North his phone bill was $32, compared to $140 when he was with Telecom. I even got to mumble a few incoherent words on Radio Pacific about how much you can save by switching to Internet Telephony and so far, I haven’t missed the landline.

There’s no doubt that you ignore technical stuff at your financial peril. Take mobile data for instance: both Telecom and Vodafone have 3G plans that set you back $49 a month for 1GB of data. That’s quite a bit compared to fixed networks, but something of a bargain in the mobile world. You get a free or discounted data card too, but the 24-month contract period sucks.

However, there’s no explaining how Telecom justifies its insanely high WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) charging for mobiles. It’s Internet Protocol (IP) data, just like the 3G traffic. Whereas you pay $49 per gigabyte for the latter, Big Tony over at Geekzone forums worked out that WAP traffic is charged at $52,428.80 for the same amount.

No, that’s not a typo: Telecom really charges fifty-two thousand, four-hundred and twenty-eight dollars and eighty cents per gigabyte for WAP traffic. No wonder Telecom GM Kevin Kendrick is rubbing his hands with glee as he counts how much money WAP brings in for the telco – around $1.8 million a month in December last year, increasing steadily over time.

OK, WAP is slow and it’s hard to use up a gigabyte but you’ll go through one or two megabytes fairly quickly, costing $50-$100.

Telecom and Vodafone too, hide the huge charges by splitting up the data usage into smaller units, like 10kbytes. How’s that for using confusion as a marketing tool?

Apropos mobile communications, Kenrick’s presentation also mentioned how Telecom intends to get around being the only CDMA operator in the region. One of the key issues is roaming in Australia, something that won’t be possible in about three years time as Telstra switches off its CDMA network by then. Kenrick however points out that Qualcomm will have dual-mode CDMA/GSM chips by then, and thus, roaming is ensured for Telecom. Well, if you have a new handset with the dual-mode chip, that is. Further on, Telecom expects CDMA and UMTS to merge into a single new 4G standard and hopes to get a return on its present mobile network investment until then.

That strategy doesn’t quite address how Telecom intends to meet the challenge of GSM giant Vodafone, which will have a much greater range of attractive devices to choose from and with upgrades to the UMTS network, about as fast data speeds too.

- Geekzone forums: WAP charging confusion

- Telecom’s General Manager Kevin Kenrick presentation on the Management Briefing Day, 20 March 2006 (PDF)