Article: O2 (UK) has shifted 190,000 iPhones in its first two months of sales, just short of its target of 200,000. From the comments: "190,000 surprised me at first - given that we and the Europeans understand mobiles far too well to buy an outdated overpriced paperweight like the iPhone, I thought the number sold … Continue reading Entertaining iPhone theory
Category: Technology
This is a great logical argument: 1) A pretentious man claims that CDs aren't as good as vinyl, despite the fact that they are; 2) If you compress a song to MP3, it doesn't sounds all that great compared to an uncompressed song. People increasingly listen to MP3s on their personal music players, instead of, … Continue reading Half-arsed fallacy
In a Computing Which? survey, Bebo has been rated the best social networking site, ahead of Facebook because its security settings make it harder for unwanted 'friends' to get user information. Yahoo Groups was rated as poorest, due to its lack of social networking features. Relatedly, in a Sarcasm Which? survey, C-BBC has been rated … Continue reading International house of stupid comparisons
[sorry, this post is written in Incomprehensible Geek. If you don't understand what the four letters and three characters before "www.johnband.org" on your screen to the top-left of this post mean, then it's not for you. On the other hand, if you're using a browser esoteric enough that the address isn't displayed Up Top, then … Continue reading Just in case your blog is Top Sekrit
Ignore the pointless new wi-fi iPhone-with-no-phone device (although it'll serve as a good badge of 'who is a tosser'). The truly excellent news is that a 160gb iPod is soon to be available. I reckon that'll last me at least another year of music... Unrelatedly, I've got another Sharpener piece up about the Tube strike … Continue reading 160? We like
Dear Lenovo - Congratulations on making some of the best and most rugged laptops available; buying IBM's PC business was a good idea (even if you have been dogged by Japanese suppliers' ineptitude at battery manufacturing). However, now that your machines no longer fall under the IBM umbrella, there are a couple of bizarre Big … Continue reading An open letter to Lenovo
George Osborne has floated a new public sector recruitment policy to be applied should the Conservatives get into power: all media advertising for government jobs will be pulled and instead a central website will be set up (at an alleged cost of £5m a year) to offer them. Given that he could be the next-but-one … Continue reading Cutting off your principles to spite the Guardian
It's been reported that the major cause for the delay in Airbus A380 deliveries is that the entertainment systems are enormously complicated, require millions of miles of cabling to be squeezed into the aircraft, and are completely different for different airlines so there's a risk of serious screw-ups if staff work on two different configuration … Continue reading Free aviation consulting
I've been getting some bizarrely customised-for-this-site comment spam recently. For example: As well as the main critical mass ride there's now a north london version. Those Friday Thing folk said that boobah is "a bit odd" Today is the European Day of Languages. I wonder if David Blunkett is taking part? Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers … Continue reading Weird comment spam
I've got a new piece up at the Sharpener, on the rather excellent geek-toy that is Google Trends.