Funny thing happened at Maropeng the other day. Al Gore was in town at the behest of IBM to talk at the blue company’s local launch of its “Smart Planet” strategy. Excellent, I thought, here was an opportunity to ask the ex-next president of the United States some of those really inconvenient questions about climate change.

But sadly, even though I RSVP’d immediately, it was not to be. A little bird told me that instructions had come down from His Goreness’ legal minders that were to be expressly barred from his presentation. Oh, I was assured that we were welcome to attend the sessions that made up the rest of conference but we were unwelcome in THAT one. And to reinforce the point, there were even eagle-eyed security personnel standing by to forcibly prevent members of the fourth estate from sneaking into the conference hall prior to his arrival.

Bizarrely, the entire thing was broadcast to everyone who hadn’t gained entry into the hallowed hall.

His Goreness evangelising climate change

And so, being the intrepid reporter, I decided to record what he said so I could report on his latest scheme to “get rich quick by banging the climate change drum”.  I’d only been at it for a few minutes when I was informed by an IBM PR person that I wasn’t allowed to record His Goreness’ utterings.

So, I stopped – all the while protesting my innocence. But as it turns out, he had nothing new to say: it was almost exactly the same thing he has said a thousand times before, if anything, with even less substantiation than before. As usual he insisted that “the science [of climate change] is settled”, which anyone with half a brain knows is simply hot air; Science is NEVER settled. Ask any scientist if you don’t believe me but make sure it’s an actual scientist you ask, not one of the politicians masquerading as scientists on the IPCC. In fact, if you want to know how much that originally august body has been corrupted by the likes of His Goreness, you may want to read about the real climate change catastrophe or, better yet, read the book. It’s certainly on my wish list.

But back to His Goreness. Less enlightened readers may wonder what questions I would have addressed to the world’s best known climate change evangelist, had I been given the chance. The list is long, so long. But if I had only had one, it would have been: “Do you find it inconvenient that your infomercial on climate change was criticised by a UK judge who highlighted nine ’scientific errors’ in the film?”

Hmmm. Maybe THAT’s why journalists were banned from his presentation… no. It couldn’t be, could  it?

Well now. Just as the so-called first world is getting ready to phase out incandescent light bulbs, boffins in the US have apparently found a way to make the humble globe more efficient. In short, they simply add a small step to the existing manufacturing process: zapping the filament with a infinitesimally short pulse of extremely high-energy laser light.

source: stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/)

The result is an otherwise conventional light bulb that consumes 40% less energy producing the same amount of light. Read the full story on El  Reg here. What isn’t clear is how this process affects the longevity of the common or garden variety light bulb.

Of course, if this does turn out to be the elixir the boffins expect, it will spell the end of Philips’ monopoly on energy-efficient lighting technology. What a shame that would be.

Back in 2006 I wrote what turned out to be an award-winning piece (one of only two) for iWeek about how the security software industry has a habit of crying wolf (PDF) in its quest to peddle more software. And if one goes by a recent posting on SearchSecurity.com, nothing has changed:

The Conficker-fed doomsday scenarios fed to us by security vendors and trade press has come and gone without the big disaster. The IT world on April 4 looks a lot like the IT world on March 31. It is almost disappointing, just as a forecasted winter storm that misses the mark – nobody wants to see property damaged, but a good storm is captivating and fun to watch. Conficker, also known as Downadup and Kido, was primed to start seeking its payload using a wider range of domains on April 1. The over-hyped storm has thus far turned into a dud, leaving the security industry looking clueless once again.

Read the full story here.

I’ve always seen this global warming lark as a good thing – especially the predicted sea level rises that were going wipe out low-lying areas. I mean, I’d love to see Cape Town reduced to the lost little island in the middle of nowhere. Sadly, it’s not going to happen, despite what the environmentalist lobby would have you believe.

A thought provoking piece running in the Telegraph this week expalins why. It was written by Christopher Booker and is based on the views Dr Nils-Axel Mörner, a Swedish geologist and physicist who knows more about sea levels than any one else on the planet. It’s brilliant, just brilliant. But what’s more, it actually makes sense. Dr Mörner explains in clear incorruptible language, exactly why what the political hacks at the IPCC say is so much garbage. More power to him I say.

To say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. Last night Asus launched the new 9- and 10-inch models of its eeePC in Johannesburg. That’s the good news; The bad news is the distributor, Rectron, is only bringing four of the ten models into SA – all of them with Windows.

The Asus eeePC 1000, which ships with Linux and is the model I would want

I was gutted. It means that if I want one I will once again have to pay Microsoft for the privilege of using Linux. That sucks. It’s not the money – I was told that the difference in price is only about R80; it’s the principle. Why should I have to pay Redmond for NOT using its crappy software? Of course, I could always contact a friend in Dubai, have him buy me a Linux model and send it over but Asus tells me the warranty would not be honoured locally.

Nice. So the eeePC, which was launched with Linux because Windows was too fat and expensive is now only available is SA with Windows on it. In effect, Microsoft has hi-jacked the eeePC.

And then there’s the deal: Asus, Rectron and Microsoft have signed a R330 million agreement with SADTU, puportedly to avail teachers of Windows-based eeePCs – as IT Web is reporting here. Nice, so now our teachers will only know Windows; They won’t be able to choose the more affordable, more secure and more robust Linux. Sounds like another hi-jack to me.

But the numbers on the deal don’t add up. SADTU represents 240 000 teachers, which works out to R1 375 per unit. The cheapest eeePC model (7-inch screen) currently retails for around R3 000 so would imply either a massive discount, which wasn’t mentioned, or that fewer than half of SADTU’s members are expected to take advantage of the deal to buy a eeePC – the number mentioned was 80%.

SADTU is also understood to be lobbying government to pick up the tab for teachers’ eeePCs. Indeed, acting president (SADTU recently fired its president for political naivity), Thokile Nthola, did make one good point when he questioned the expectation that teachers, 90% of whom are not IT literate, could produce gradutes who are IT literate.

Janco Associates‘ latest report on the state of the browser market makes interesting reading. The company’s press release is rather blunt: Microsoft Flops and Loses Another 7% of its Browser Market Share in 12 Months...

What Janco doesn’t show in the press release is the detail (that’s only available in the full report). One table, in particular, is illuminating. In April this year, Janco had Internet Explorer at 65.40%. Now, five months later the company says that market share has dropped to 58.50%. If that decline is sustained it’s entirely possible that Microsoft will drop below 50% in January or February next year.

Also in this report is Janco’s assessment of the Windows Vista failure. The press release headline continues: … Vista Still only used by less than 15% of all users. The full report features another interesting table, one that charts Vista market share against other versions of Windows as well as Microsoft’s total share of the desktop OS market since launch. It shows that not only is Microsoft having trouble converting existing customers but it is also losing some of those customers to the competition: in the time it has taken to get that 15% market share, Microsoft’s overall desktop OS share has dropped by more than 4% – from 96.32% to 92.20%.

And, the data don’t take into account the unwanted licences said to be boosting Vista numbers. This analysis also can’t calculte the possible lack of confidence that will be caused by Vista’s security having been shown to even more useless. If I could afford to be a Microsoft shareholder I’d be thinking about selling round about now.

I picked this up off Slashdot this morning where SirLurksAlot writes that US retailer, Best Buy, is now selling Ubuntu, both through its Web site and in its brick-and-mortar locations. It appears to have quietly been made available since May 6th of this year and is apparently the latest Long Term Support version, Hardy Heron (v8.04 if you prefer).

No mention is made of support facilities over and above those available through the various Ubuntu forums. However, Best Buy does note that the product is published by ValuSoft so presumably that’s where the support can be found. Alas, no. A trip to the technical support web site and a search for the term Ubuntu returns this response: “No products were found to match Ubuntu.”

Nice. So I can buy a nicely packaged copy of Ubuntu from Best Buy for the low, low price of $19.99 or I can download exact the same product, free, grattis and for nothing from the Ubuntu website. Hmmm, tough one.

Interesting research on the pace of open source adoption in different territories was recently conducted by Forrester, the upshot of which seems to be that European IT professionals are ahead of their American counterparts on the adoption curve. Conducted by analysts by Jeffrey Hammond and Diego Lo Giudice, the report finds that open source adoption in most European organisations initially focused on the operating system and Web server tiers of the application platform stack, but soon widened to include development tools, infrastructure components such as application servers and databases, and higher-level components such as portal servers and content management systems.

What gets me is that the tone of the report – or at least the executive summary – seem to imply that the findings were a surprise. Hammond and Lo Giudice write that the professionals they spoke to said that their firms are interested in expanding open source adoption even further and indicated that their firms are less concerned than their North American counterparts about open source security and intellectual property issues.

I guess not living in a litigious society has its benefits.

Interesting news the other day. Nokia announced that it has offered to purchase the 52% of Symbian that it doesn’t already own and that the deal has been favourably received by the other shareholders. It promptly then announced plans to make Symbian open source. You can find details here and here.

But for me the most interesting aspect of this development is the particular license Nokia’s creation, the Symbian Foundation, has chosen. Instead of the ever popular GPL 2.0 or fledgling GPL 3.0, the decision has been made to release the source code under the Eclipse Public License.

I’d love to know why. What does Eclipse have the GPL doesn’t have? Or visa versa? I have queries to numerous sources outstanding on this topic and will report back as soon as somebody comes up with a plausible explanation. What this space.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 right through the beta programme – in fact ever since it was included in Ubuntu with the release of Heron. I love it so I’m not surprised that more than 8 million copies of it were downloaded in a 24-hour period last week. And now there’s an excellent review of the new browser from the Financial Times (of London). Fortunately for those of us outside the immediate catchment area, Duncan McLeod has posted it on his blog here.