Yeah, right, pull the other one

I just don’t believe it.  Pornography is not the most popular thing searched for on the internet.

This is according to Google’s new search analysis tool, Insights.  More Australians use the web to find games than adult content.  The top Australian search terms so far this year are: "games", "youtube", "myspace", "ebay", "google", "facebook", "weather", "hotmail", "yahoo" and "real estate".

The tool allows you to narrow down search statistics by country, region, city, etc, by date range and by areas of interest, such as travel or sports.  For example, web searches including the terms "art" and "politics" are popular in the Northern Territory and Tasmania – but only "politics" is of interest in the ACT, where those for "art" trail every other region.  Google searches for "news" are most popular in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, while those for "shoes" usually come from Victoria (Kelley must have been googling plenty).

Some other interesting things to note:

• Queenslanders and New South Welshmen are the pornhounds of Australia - searches for "porn" are most popular in Queensland and New South Wales and least popular in Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
• "news" is a more popular search term than "porn" only in the ACT, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
• Facebook is currently searched-for more often in the ACT and NT, while MySpace dominates everywhere else.
• Australia is leading the world for searches on "purple monkey dishwasher"

Must go and check up on that last one.

Blue Screen of Death - Olympic scale

Is this the biggest BSOD ever?

It occurred during the Olympics opening ceremony last Friday night. One of the computers used to project images onto the roof of the stadium blue screened, and the moment was captured for all to see.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows XP, blue screen of death, BSOD, Olympics, Beijing

Not an iPhone

I got a new toy today. One of these.

Getting a head start in IT

Information technology students at universities are outsourcing assignments to cheap code cutters in places like India.

Typically, assignments are put out to tender on the internet sites and coders bid to complete them.Students can pay anywhere from under $100 to several hundred dollars, depending on the amount of work required.

Universities are finding it hard to combat the practice. Part of the problem, said Paul Compton, head of the school of computer science and engineering at the University of New South Wales, was that existing automated plagiarism detection tools, such as Turn It In, can’t detect outsourced work. They could only tell if multiple students submitted highly similar assignments or if a piece of work had passages copied from the internet.

IT companies, on the other hand, most likely see students who outsource their work as potential future management material. The business is highly globalised, with offshoring to places like India, China and Latin America very prevalent. Such initiative from students is simply giving them early experience with using low cost countries to supply cheap resources to perform work.

Technorati Tags: cheating, plagiarism, outsourcing, offshoring, global delivery, IT, information technology

Get a life, folks

I’m always baffled to see things like this.

Its people queueing up outside the new Apple Store due to open in Sydney tomorrow night at 5 pm. For fuck’s sake, its a computer, phone and music players store!

Get a life people, especially:

• Rochelle Quantock - who came from Mebourne at 4 am this morning so she could get first position in the line
• Mike Kauffman - who flew in from the USA, and is a serial queuer, and estimates he has attended between 20 to 30 Apple store openings.
• Moyzsckya Belle - flew in from Brisbane only to find the first position had already been taken when he arrived outside the store at 8:25am. He has owned every version of iPod ever released by Apple, and he and his wife had almost 10 Mac computers between them.

Wonder if these people were among those who lined up similarly when Krispy Kreme first opened here?

Firefox 3

Firefox 3 was launched today, with Mozilla aiming to set a world record for downloads for a single day. I’ve done my bit and downloaded and installed it. So far I like what I see.

Breaking the internet

I really liked this photo when I first saw it a few days ago.  Lindsay Lohan did a photo shoot for New York magazine which was a re-creation of Marilyn Monroe’s last nude photo shoot.  It was even done by the same photographer who took the photos of Monroe - Bert Stern.

The images were so popular on the internet that the magazine’s website crashed after receiving around 20 million daily page views in the days after they were published. The average number of daily page views in January was 1.2 million.

While the cover photo above is really good, and some of the others (I was only looking at the magazine’s site for the articles, honest!) are too, it doesn’t alter the fact that Lindsay Lohan is a fairly mediocre actress who has gained more fame and notoriety for her out of control personal life than she’s ever likely to get for acting.

Still, I’m happy to post the photo here - (a) because I like it, (b) because I know it will be a traffic magnet.

Essential computer accessories

Another illustration of the fact that I am very easily amused.  I saw these at one of the shops at Narita airport leaving Tokyo on Saturday night.  Naturally, it had to be bought!

Mmmm …. warm

Yes, yes, I know I am easily amused!

One of the things I find fascinating about Japan is the amazing toilet technology. I mean, a lot of time and effort has been invested at some stage in getting toilet science to the point it is now.

I don’t know how I’ll cope when I go home without the “warm seat” button, especially when winter comes around in Canberra.

Other interesting functionality includes various spray options … I assume the pink button is for girls, the blue for boys, and “powerful deodoriser”.

Aussies lead the world in Firefox uptake

Go Aussies!  More evidence of how smart a country we are …. Australia has one of the highest rates in the world for Firefox usage.  Good to see 31% of us have ditched Internet Explorer and moved to a far superior browser.

Oceania (Australia and NZ basically) leads the world with 31%, followed by Europe 28%, North America 21% and the rest further behind.

Here is a map showing the levels of Firefox penetration by continent.

So whats with the 69% of Australians still using Internet Explorer …. get with the program people and change over to Firefox.  You won’t look back.  Do yourself a favour and download it.