Category: General

This from the Beeb. I haven’t personally owned a game console since the Atari 2600, and yet I was really, really looking forward to the Wii, it sounds like the sort of console a non-console gamer like me would want, and yet if the beeb article is correct it will come in at around $420 AUD…just a little bit to much for my liking, if it was $299 or similar I’d be tempted, but I’m not paying over $400 dollars for a gaming machine when my main PC and my Win XP MCE box already do games really well (note on the MCE box when I do play games, its Mame stuff, like the original arcade version of Outrun). Then again, I could win lotto?! 🙂

the show with zefrank

Andrew Sullivan has some interesting figures on the decline in readership of US political blogs this year. The question is though is, have political blogs had their day? I can see some arguing that the drop off is because the US is half way through the Presidential cycle, and yet I remember reading last year, when the slump started, that it was only a slump due to there being no elections in 2005…and yet the US has mid-term elections this year and the figures keep dropping. I’d guess that there will be some pickup in the lead up to the next US Presidential elections, however I think the glory days of political blogging and bloggers has passed.

Cheeky sods!

Tags: b5media, Creative Weblogging

Inspired by Darren’s recent list making competitions, I present some facts for those who think Australia is nothing more than an American State:

The 10 ways Australia would be different if we were an American State

1. Our currency would be made out of paper and would be green. Not only would it be really easy to forge, North Korea would be one of the worlds largest producers of it.

2. We’d be one of only 3 countries in the world that don’t use the Metric System.

3. We would only have been on the winning side in major 20th century wars if we’d turned up late.

4. We’d drive on the wrong side of the road, mainly because we decided to do so to spite the British.

5. We’d also wouldn’t be able to spell in English correctly, and hence we would have adopted our own version of English spelling which we would then try to impose on the rest of the world.

6. Our murder rate would be at least 4 times higher, and most of those murders would involve guns, which many of us would own and keep at home.

7. Instead of having a $10 billion+ Federal Government Surplus, our Federal Government would have a trillion dollar defecit.

8. Terrorist attacks on home soil wouldn’t just include the Hilton Hotel Bombing, and yet we would never have been attacked on home soil during a war.

9. English would not be our official language (the US doesn’t have one). Everyone in Victoria would speak Spanish, although we’d still call them Mexicans.

10. McDonalds would include pickles on their McOz burger, and instead of serving Sausage and Egg McMuffins for breakfast, we’d be eating Burritos.

Via the SMH

COLES MYER is likely to fall into foreign hands in what is shaping as the biggest corporate takeover in Australian history, valued at more than $16 billion.

A group of US financiers, believed to be led by the private investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, is understood to be behind an approach to the retail giant, founded in 1900.

A successful bid for Coles Myer, valued at nearly $15 billion, would easily top BHP’s $9.2 billion buyout of WMC Resources last year. It would be one of the world’s 10 biggest corporate takeovers.

That’s one big takeover, and it a takeover that will affect 100% of all Australians, after all, there would be no Australians who don’t at least on occasion shop at a CML store or buy stuff from them…..

Update: had the radio on since I wrote this, all the normal idiots were on talking about how they’d boycott CML stores etc…how we cant let it be bough by foreigners…these are the same morons who bag CML anyway, calling them things like an evil multinational despite the fact that it’s a great Australian sucess story. I hope the Americans do buy it, then these morons can actually call the company multinational accurately.

What would you rather, a Windows PC that runs for weeks without crashing (like mine do, indeed I’ve not rebooted my XP MCE PVR box for about 6 weeks now, and that then was only because of a critical systems update), or a Mac that crashes every other day?

Lets ask some high profile Mac users, like Dave Winer: “Good question. The answer is that computers crash, even Macs. In my experience, they [Macs] crash more than Windows machines.”, or even Robert Scoble:”Last week on the way home from Montana Ryanne was editing her video on her Mac. The app just suddenly disappeared from screen. In my book that?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢s called a crash. I found that to be very strange cause the hype on Macs is that they never crash. But, those commercials are so strong. The hype is so strong.”

Now sure, PC’s aren’t perfect, particularly when you run Thunderbird on them, but’s it’s just nice to sit here and watch Mac users noting that the hype isn’t all its cracked up to be 🙂

Tags: Mac, Macs crashing