TechWire

Ode to a freshman DIT student, 2009

[This appeared in yesterday's SBP. However, if you're a student, you may not read newspapers.]

You’ve made it! Your first year in college! You’re cool!
You ready to learn IT’s premier rule?
Though teachers won’t say, tis part of the bargain:
To get on in tech, you’ve got to know jargon.

There’s synergy, cloud IT, networks and tweets,
There’s end-to-end real-time collab’rative suites;
Believe me, young students, tech jargon’s the norm;
So here’s a crash course. In alphabet form.
 
A is for appware,
B is 2B,
C's co-located in cloud number 3.

D is for database, primed and configured,
E's the encryption your wrong password triggered.

F are the fragmented files o'er fixed wireless
G is a file-sharing geek who is tireless.

H is for haptical HDMI
(The kind made for hot-swaps and girlfriendless guys.)

I is an intranet IPv6,
Interlaced, interfaced (damn hard to fix).

J is for Java, oft-used to make graphics,
(The download of which tends to screw up web traffic.)

K is for knowledge and keystroke dynamics,
L is for legacy LAN economics.

M is for mainframe and services (meta),
Mix 'em. Ta-daa! Your 'modular data'!

N is a network-based enterprise force,
O's OEM won't accept open Source

P is for paradigm, portals and packets;
Point-to-point pipelines (a financial racket).

P's also proxies and public keys, too;
Peering and phreaking and Penneys soft shoes.

Q is the quantum your usage of Quark
Will tick off class tutors, whose websites will bork

R's the redundant reverse DNS
Your Ruby-On-Rails thing made into a mess.

S is your scalable, smart SEO
(Your tech mates on Slashdot will all exclaim: "whoa!")

T is for T1-based cloud telematics;
U is for nerdy Ubuntu fanatics.

V is for virtual, now in all things
(Though not online players in Lord Of The Rings.)

W is for wiki, X is ML.
Y is the yada that IT firms sell.

Z is the zoo you're entering now.
Where most act like sheep and all seek the trough.

Be brave o young student,
Your time has now come;
You too can use language
That leave most folks numb.

Palm Pre delayed?

There are early reports that the Palm Pre may not be arriving in Ireland on schedule, which would have been in the next few weeks. These are unconfirmed (no response from O2, which has the Pre for the Irish market). We'll keep you informed on the latest with this.

Update (10.35am): O2 Ireland has reaffirmed that it will, indeed, proceed with a launch shortly. "We are due to launch the Palm Pre in the coming weeks," a spokesman jsut told me. "We’ll confirm the commercial launch date shortly." Serves me right for reporting an unconfirmed rumour!

Virgin's diktat to Irish broadband operators: bump up speeds first, worry about demand later

At UPC's broadband conference yesterday, the broadband director of Virgin Media, Jon James, gave a genuinely interesting presentation about what Virgin has done in Britain.

In a nutshell, the company decided to get a reputation for being the highest quality, highest speed outfit in town. So it pulled its 2Mbs service completely and bumped everyone up to 10Mbs, for no extra charge. That now costs £14 (about €18) per month. For £20 per month you get 20Mbs. And for £28 per month, you get 50Mbs.

It also decided that it had to back up what it was selling. So its 10Mbs product averages 8.6Mbs. That's pretty decent, compared to most other services in the British market. And it's fantastic compared to contention issues here.

And demand? James admitted that there were very few things on the web to satisfy a mass market 50Mbs product. (He said that BBC's HD iPlayer is now becoming a mass market service.) But he said that Virgin was taking a deliberate approach to give the speed out first. Note to Irish operators :)

Laptops (not netbooks) for €299

Last year, we thought we had hit the floor with 15 inch laptops for under €500. Turns out that was just a further level on the way down.

This Fujitsu Siemens is currently being flogged for €299 in Power City. With a 15 inch screen, DVD-burner and 120GB storage, the only feature it really skimps on is the processor, which is a single-core Intel Celeron.

To me, this makes much more sense than a netbook, as it's much more functional.

Bitbuzz growing steadily: 174k reg'd users and €927k in revenue last year

Bitbuzz appears to be adding customers at a very steady pace.

I've always been pretty harsh about wi-fi access prices in Ireland. And I still believe that €5 per hour is a prohibitive sum to encourage widespread wi-fi, and pushes thousands of prospective customers into the arms of 3G broadband vendors (which is far, far cheaper for a frequent user-about-town). However, fair play to Bitbuzz for keeping up the business and for growing it.

A big 'fair play' to them, too, for going public on (some of) their accounts and their registration numbers. For a small company, it is all too tempting to remain schtum on one's accounts, for a variety of reasons. (This can vary from colourful tax arrangements to perceived embarrassment over 'small' figures.) The company doesn't reveal its profitability -- which it should do -- but opening up about its revenues and registration figures is a great start.

From Bitbuzz's press release:

Bitbuzz had a total of 173,747 registered users by the end of this period [first half of 2009], indicating an increase of 22% since the end of 2008.  Revenues for the six months to end June amounted to €501,350 compared with €433,950 for the corresponding period in 2008, representing an increase of 13.4% per cent. Full year revenues for 2008 amounted to €926,560.

Deals announced in the period included contracts with the Fitzwilliam Hotel Group; the Templeton Hotel; Mooney Hotel Group; Ibis Dublin West Hotel; StayGroup Apartments; BB’s Coffee and Muffins and The Streat Café Franchise -- all of which have contributed significantly to growth.  The total number of Bitbuzz Wi-Fi hotspots across the country at the end of June ’09 was 194, up from 178 at the end of 2008.

Reality Bytes column of Sunday

For some reason, the SBP website doesn't put up some articles that are published in the paper. This one, published on Sunday, has a faulty link on our site. So here it is. (Only pasting it here as a few heads on Twitter were asking about it.)

Note to fellow bloggers and Tweeters: could we all please try and stop pretending to be extras in Melrose Place when we chat online?

Since when was something stupid "dumb"? Why is something brilliant "awesome"? And how many times does the phrase "go figure" actually need to be used in a conversation?

Yes, I am 36 years of age. Yes, my candidacy for the next series of Grumpy Old Men grows with each passing year. But "meh" is not a word. Neither is "OMG". And constantly reverting to "what's up with that?" to describe every problem is really bashing my brains in.

A toilet can be a loo, but it is not a 'bathroom' or -- even worse -- a 'restroom'. (I do not go into a pub's urinal area to have a rest.)

And when you're finished with something, you are not "good". If you say you're "all set", what are you set for? Please, please stop trying to audition for a teenage drama on Nick Junior.

Last week, someone on Twitter referred to a soft drink as a "soda". Soda, you moron, is something you use to make experiments in a laboratory. At best, it is a method of describing a type of brown bread.

Similarly, "candy" is one half of a big ball of sweet fluff you get at a funfair. It is not a Mars bar. And we eat chips, not "fries". And why, my fellow social networkers, have we abandoned our childhood love of buns and fairy cakes in favour of something called a "cup cake"? I have never eaten a cake in a cup, no matter what they do in Palo Alto or Santa Monica.

And please, please let us stop referring to business funding arrangements as "investment dollars". We are not living in New Jersey. If we were, maybe then we could legitimately refer to everything we purchase as costing "bucks". But in Ireland, a buck is a large mammal that frolics in the Phoenix Park, or a young man from Tipperary.

This cancer of Americanisms among bloggers and Tweeters is only going to get worse. Phrases that are starting to regularly turn up online now include 'movie theatre', 'show-home' and 'do the math'. Everyone is now talking 'with' people online and not 'to' them. People even claim to 'plead the fifth [amendment]' when they want to avoid commenting on something. (The fifth amendment, folks, concerns the separation of church and state.)

So come on, fellow onliners. Let's not just become mid-Atlantic morons simply because our heroes on The OC and Battlestar Galactica talk a certain way.

I am not asking for a Dickensian standard of English or long-handed verbosity. Abbreviations and verbal short-cuts to make a 140-characted limit in a text or a tweet is understandable. Constantly using "whatever' is not.

Eircom to "apply to High Court" to have Pirate Bay unblocked if site is "legitimised"

And pigs will fly.

Here's the full text of Eircom's statement on blocking the Pirate Bay. I think that it does not explain the issue fully at all.

"Eircom today confirms that the company will block access to the website the PirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs from this morning the 1st September 2009. Therefore eircom broadband customers who attempt to access the Pirate Bay website from this time will be denied entry.

In making the Order, requiring eircom to block access to the PirateBay website, the High Court was satisfied that the website is dedicated to facilitating the illegal downloading of copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright owners."

The company will apparently spend a large sum to re-apply to the High Court when The Pirate Pay goes legit, as unbelievable as that sounds.

"On Friday, 24th July representatives of the music industry, The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) applied for and secured an order from the High Court directing eircom to block access to the Pirate Bay website (www.thepiratebay.org) and its related domain names, IP address and URLs.

The blocking of access to the website is indefinite. However, should the Pirate Bay website content be legitimised in the future, Eircom will apply to the High Court to have the order vacated."

"Eircom recognises the legitimate rights of the owners of copyrighted material and believes that individuals who share or download copyrighted material without the authorisation or the permission of the owner of that content are acting illegally.

"Eircom has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the four major labels to develop an innovative new music service for all Irish consumers. This new music service is expected to launch in the next few months.

"Eircom would like to reassure customers that as part of the block, Eircom will not monitor customers’ activities at any stage, nor will it place any monitoring equipment or software on its network in order to facilitate this block. Eircom will not provide personal details or any information relating to customers to any third party, including the record companies."