Can Firefox Unite the World?
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..probably not, but it can go for a Guinness World Record of "Most software downloaded in 24 hours". To help achieve this goal, today is "Download Day". To help people check the progress of this undertaking, firefox has a map showing how many download have been made, per country. It paints a fascinating picture. Who are those 9 Somalis, 7 Turkmenistanis, 3 Sierra Leoninites who've downloaded this software (my guess would be that in each case, one is the president/Prime Minister's assistant, and the others are bored reporters). Why does Iran stand out amongst their middle-eastern brethren, with almost 200,000 downloads as of 08:00 CST (neighboring Iraq has only downloaded 181)? Of course, it's all time sensitive and my comments will probably look stupid by the time anyone reads this. Go check it out. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ |
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Read an interesting--and somewhat nauseating--report in the NY Times this past Sunday about IPs charging for the amount of time you spend online. What do you think?
I guess it depends on their price model. ISPs and the Government have been making a lot of wild arguments for the past 5-10 years about the internet. One argument focused on websites; no matter how much they spent on hardware and bandwidth, website owners would have limited traffic capabilities if they didn't pay the ISP directly to be "commercial".
Unfortunately, the pay-for-usage model seems somewhat fair--and I'm saying this as someone who would be screwed by it. There's a huge discrepancy between the amount of "internet" used by the average browse-and-check-email type user (of which, 90% are) and the run-prototype-servers-play-online-games-and-do-massive-bittorrent-downloads users (who use 90% of the bandwidth).
That being said, bandwidth is cheap. They're not going to somehow convince me that "1 gig" of data cost $15 or some other random number. I think it'd be nice for the average user to be able to pay around $10, for metered, high-speed access (I live around people who still think $40/month for DSL is too much, an suffer through dial-up @ $15) and leave guys like me to pay for our excess.
dude! we've got high speed in Africa - hence the 9 Somalis! The map doesn't seem to be updating :(
Cool site though. I'm sure they're gonna make their goal - easy!
It looks like it did update...finally tally in Somalia was 16, though.
Of course, I didn't mean to act as though the Somalis were spear-waving savages, bereft of the concept of the internet, much less Firefox revisions. With almost 10 million in Somalia, it sort of makes those "9" a group of digital celebrities. Who the heck are they?
(Of course, I'm also wondering who the 175 are in Greenland). ;)