ZA Tech Show: Episode 13
We gather in an overcast Johannesburg this week, sans Ben Kelly, to discuss the following:
- Open document formats and the SABS appealing ISO’s ratification of OOXML.
- The ultra-portable and sub-notebook market and who’s doing what in the space.
- Microsoft’s strategy for Windows on portables.
- Online operating systems, ala Jooce.
- Privacy online and why people trust Google.
- Mashing-up social networks and examples of applications that do this, like Flock.
- Instant messaging.
- Red Hat’s Mugshot.
- Vodacom’s WirelessG, iPass and other innovative wireless offerings, like Skyrove.
- Utility bandwidth.
- Final confirmation of Neotel’s consumer offerings, including uncapped solutions.
Some comments made towards the end of this podcast struck home in a big way. I refer to the comments about rural connectivity. I have posted numerous posts on MyADSL about this and how there seems to be no effort (it seems that way, I could be wrong) from companies to penetrate the rural areas. I keep reading and hearing about Wimax, WBS Wimax, Neotel wireless etc and myself and other residents of rural areas still have to fork out HUGE amounts of cash just to access reliable internet via ISDN in the day or unreliable internet via GPRS and EDGE. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? One solution would be for Telkom to expand the flexability of their call plans for ISDN data to make it affordable to people in the rural areas, but they will not budge on it.
Will Wimax offerings ever get to out here? Here being the place you refer to as “komatipoort” which is actually called Harburg in the KZN midlands
Is it Brett that’s got the 8 core machine that you could use to invade Poland? Care to make it easy for lazy people and tell us what motherboard you got? I presume you did all the legwork and read reviews to find out which mobos are currently good to consider. I also presume it’s a dual processor mobo with 2 quad core cpus? Any dual processor mobos you know of that’s SLI? I might want to hook up 3 monitors.
Allo Agent Smith…
I’ve got a Intel Vernonia (S5000XVN) board… no SLI, but as far I know there is a board in that family that does have multiple (or two) PCI x16 ports…
It is indeed a dual socket board, running 2 x 3GHz Xeon Quads…
Fantastic show! Could you not stop your day jobs, and put out a episode every day?
Regarding the social network mash ups you were talking about: I run Win XP / Vista and Ubuntu, and on all of them I have 2 smalls apps installed:
1.For the social networking stuff: http://www.feedalizr.com/. This is a Adobe Air app, which, through the http://www.Friendster.com API, allow me to keep tabs on Facebook, blogs. RSS feeds, twitter, etc etc.
2. For the chat clients, I run http://www.nimbuzz.com on all my desktops (Win and Ubuntu), as well as on smy cell phone. The added benefit of Nimbuzz is that I can, for example, make a free call (making use of my free minutes) from my cell phone to a friend GTalk/MSN/Skype/Nimbuzz app in Europe. If they are willing to pay for a local cellphone call, you can even phone them on their landline/cell.
All of this works fantastically well, and was the solution to my information overload.
Hi Guys - Great show … Glad you all came to your senses and realised that the Wii is an awesome game console. One request please: Can you make the show a wee bit louder. I can’t hear it on my ol’ iPod - maybe also a misspent youth.
– JJ