Month: October 2007

  • Google's OpenSocial to become the platform's platform?

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in ,

    One of the biggest problems with Social Networks is that your information is never synchronised across them if you are in more than one and if you are in only one, the time you invest adding in information, is time you are investing in locking yourself in. You can’t get your information (profile, friends list,…

  • Emigrating to Spain

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    My wife Pilar and I have decided to move to my wife’s home town of Seville in the south of Spain next year. This is a decision we have been wrestling with for some time now but this summer’s lack of sun tipped the decision. We are going to wait until the end of the…

  • OS X Leopard hacked to run on PCs

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in , ,

    With Apple’s move to Intel chips for its Macs, the last significant difference in the hardware architecture between Macs and PCs disappeared. This meant that Apple’s much vaunted OS X operating system is designed to work on PC hardware. Leopard, Apple’s latest version of OS X was released on Friday 26th last and in just…

  • Free son to a good home

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    Via the FaceBook Observer comes this gem: Free to any kind of home. Lazy, slob, unmotivated, comes with no future plans, does not do chores, parties all night, sleeps all day, curses in his sleep, eats constantly, does not clean up after himself, very expensive, mouthy, knows everything, works sometimes. Added bonus – own car,…

  • See if this doesn't terrify you

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    I have always wanted to fly. And I have no fear of heights – hence I have climbed the CIX mast numerous times (with appropriate safety gear!). However, just watching these guys in wingsuits scares the hell out of me! I don’t think I’d ever raise the nerve to do that. http://www.liveleak.com/player.swf?autostart=false&token=e29_1192781178 via Chris Abraham

  • Support the US Energy Bill

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in , , ,

    Chris Abraham emailed me overnight asking me to blog about the Energy Bill issue as discussed in http://www.energybill2007.org The Energy Bill is a US environmental focussed bill and the energybill2007.org site Chris links to, urges US politicians to: protect America’s energy, environmental, and economic security by ensuring that the final Energy Bill that goes to…

  • Microsoft buys 1.6% of FaceBook for $240m

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in , ,

    The New York Times is reporting this morning that Microsoft has bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240m, this values the company at $15bn. This values Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 23 year old founder at $3bn and Accel Partners, the venture capital firm that invested $12.7 million in May 2005 now owns 11 percent of…

  • Google Translate writes its own translation engine

    —

    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    I noticed on the Google Operating System blog yesterday that Google Translate had switched translation engines from Systrans widely used engine to an in-house statistical based translation engine. Intrigued, I headed over to Antonio Ortiz’ blog (Antonio is based in Malaga and blogs in Spanish), copied some of the text from one of his posts…