From the Telegraph, about the Large Hadron Collider (emphasis mine, for the good bit):

Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

‘nuff said.

So, Download Day 2008 is done, and they managed slightly over eight million downloads. That’s got to be enough to get them the record. I hope you all contributed.

Of course, there currently is no record for the most downloaded piece of software in a single day, so it’s not a hard one to set. The question is: how long will it stand? And will it be Firefox 4 that breaks it?

At some point in the next day or so Firefox 3 will be released, and they’re aiming to establish the record for the most downloaded piece of software within a single day of release.

Firefox 3 is a great browser; a noticeable improvement over version 2, and much better than any of Microsoft’s efforts (and I’m speaking as a web-user here, not just as an open-source advocate.) Even if you can’t see what all the fuss is about I’d encourage you to find out, and if you do it sooner rather than later, you’ll be part of a setting a world record.

So head over to their world record attempt site and grab the browser if it’s up by the time you read this, or pledge to do so if it’s not. It’ll be worth the few minutes of your time it’ll take.

Edit: It’s now live, you can go and grab it any time you like, and if you do so before 6PM BST tomorrow (18th June 2008) it’ll count for the record attempt.

Edit 2008/06/18 12:00: Three quarters of the way through, and just shy of six-million downloads. It’s a great figure already, and there’s still six hours to go. If you haven’t got hold of it yet, you haven’t missed the chance, and the servers all seem to be coping much better now.

So, by now everyone knows everything there is to know about the iPhone 2, so I don’t have much to add. I thought I’d mention how disappointed I am with it though.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, 3G is a big deal, and GPS is nice, but really… is that it?

The thing is, I don’t even know what I was hoping for; it just wasn’t this: the device that should have launched a year ago. I mean, they didn’t even up the storage to sweeten the deal.

Obviously, I’ll be getting one, due to the device’s only really compelling new feature: its price. O2’s somewhat aggressive pricing means that I can upgrade to one with double the storage and a better data connection for a scant £60, which, I suppose, is nothing to be complaining about.

In fact, maybe it’s churlish to be complaining at all; the iPhone was already a very desirable device – I certainly have yet to regret getting mine, even with only 8GB storage and 2G data – and increasing the spec at all while lowering the price isn’t something you’d usually complain about.

I just can’t help feeling that if the most exciting new feature is a price reduction, that the hype might be a little misplaced this time round.

OK; so right now I should be connecting my laptop to work’s VPN and checking up on a database I’m supposed to be diagnosing. Or, failing that, I should be tidying the flat, taking the rubbish out, or thinking about cooking my dinner. Or, failing that, I have some server maintenance, home directory housekeeping and CD ripping that I’m going to have to do eventually. But I’ve had an arse of a day and I’m feeling double-plus-lazy, so I’m going to write something instead. A quick look back in time tells me that I’d promised a second opinion on Mahalo once I’d had time to try it out, and since I’ve had time to try it out; here it is.

The first thing to say is that it’s no google, and I’m guessing they’re not even going for that market. I’ve found it to be close to useless for any search I carry out in the course of my working (as a software engineer) day. Pasting error codes into the search form just throws out a random selection of (usually biographical) pages. The google results at the bottom of the page are as good as you’d expect, but they’re slower to load and less obvious on the page than if I’d just used google in the first place. Searching for information on unix commands leaves it scratching it’s head in bewilderment, and, perhaps more seriously, even relatively well known computer software can leave it similarly speechless.

And it’s not just technical searches, it’s anything … overly specific. If I search for “cat lifespan” it gives me a few options for pages about cats, but nothing that is obviously going to tell me what I want to know. Google, by comparison, gives me the answer in it’s first link (although it’s second one is to a corporate website.) I guess expecting answers to specific questions is just too much to ask of the site’s human indexing engine.

That use of humans to build the entire index is both Mahalo’s biggest weakness and it’s greatest strength, since while I’ve been fairly disappointed in the breadth of subjects it is knowledgeable on, I’ve been hugely impressed with the quality of the results it does return. It’s hard to describe the joy of entering a search term and having the results come back, free from spam or noise, in a neatly categorised list of high quality links. I don’t know, re-reading that last sentence makes me wonder if I’m overreacting to this, but I can’t help it; it just reminds me of what the internet should be; a place where I can get access to information quickly and easily, without having to know the tricks of avoiding spammers and scammers, and without having to trawl through a mountain of ‘sponsored links’ or uninformed twaddle to get to the actual information. Of course, there’s a place for the uninformed twaddle as well (else I’d have to shut up shop,) but I don’t necessarily want a whole load of conspiracy theories polluting my screen when ‘m trying to research the moon landing.

This leads me to believe that the term “search engine” might be something of a misnomer. Certainly, you can search Mahalo, but it’s hardly it’s strongest suit; constructing a search term for a specific piece of information is rarely satisfactory, and that’s what people expect to be able to do with something called a “search engine”; it’s sort-of implied by the name. Where Mahalo really shines, conversely, is on sufficiently broad searches for well defined subjects (say, ‘Evolution’, or ‘Egypt’,) in those cases it’s hand-built nature and high quality put me more in mind of an index, or a guide than of a blind search algorithm. It’s like going back to Yahoo in the really old days, but with a somewhat-useful search feature, and links you actually want to follow. I guess there’s value in the term “search engine”; people know what it means, but I can’t help wondering if they might help differentiate themselves, as well as communicate their unique strengths, if they used a different term.

So, regardless of what it is, would I recommend Mahalo? Yes, absolutely, but not unreservedly. It’s not complete yet; that much is painfully clear in daily use, and I end up falling through to wikipediaor google at least as often as I get the answer from Mahalo, and there are types of searches that I don’t think it will ever be any good for (but then, I think there’s an argument for specialised search engines for many of those anyway.) For the searches it’s designed to handle, though, I think the value of it is well worth the initial inconvenience of having to contribute to the index myself. Suggesting links is quick and easy, and the more people that use it regularly and add the pages that it didn’t find for them, the sooner it’ll be complete and really useful.

So, go on - check it out. If you use firefox, you can configure it to use Mahalo as the default search engine, if not then it might be a little less convenient, but I think it’ll be worth the effort.

I’ve just been pointed at Mahalo (thanks Phil,) a new search engine. What sets it aside from the mainstream engines, is that it’s maintained by humans, rather than robots. Obviously, that raises concerns about it’s completeness, but it also means that you can trust its results not to be SEO-spam. In my limited testing, I’ve found it very good, with nicely presented, categorised and, most importantly, relevant results. It also provides results from the major robot-backed engines as well, in case they don’t have what you need indexed yet.

I doubt it’s going to unseat google any time soon, but I’m going to trial using it as my search engine of choice for a week or so, and see how it goes. I’ll report back when I’ve actually used it in anger.

So it turns out that the MacBook Air’s battery is a single discrete block (albeit a very thin one) that runs across the bottom of much of the case, and it’s relatively easy for an end user to swap out. Some people are calling this good news, but to me it just means that there really is no reason bar cost for not making the thing user swappable in the first place. I guess it might have meant weakening the case, but I’m not convinced; this is Apple, after all — I’m sure they could have come up with a neat battery removal mechanism if they had the will (I’m thinking a covered slot on one side of the device that you slide the battery into — like a really big PCMCIA card). I guess they’re just experimenting to see if people are prepared to put up with it. Lets hope people don’t an Apple fix this in the next version.

While we’re on the subject of those zany Bleimans, this is their video of the week, and my video of the … week _and a half_.

In a surprise (to me) move, o2 have announced a major shift in their tariffs, including a significant change to their iPhone charges. This is great news for customers, as the inclusive minute and text allowances have generally been significantly increased.

Being on the £45/mo tariff, I gain the least; I only get double the inclusive minutes (up to 20 hours a month) now, the £35/mo plan has three times the inclusive minutes (up to 10 hours) and two and a half times the texts. The £55/mo tariff is gone, replaced by a totally over-the-top £75/mo one that I, honestly, can’t see anyone going for. All tariffs continue to offer unlimited free data over GPRS, EDGE and WiFi (via The Cloud.)

It’s not likely to sell the iPhone to anyone who wasn’t convinced, but it’s done a lot to improve the customer satisfaction of at least one consumer.

Of all the announcements this year, this one is definitely the biggie (although arguably, not the most significant — the AppleTV could easily trump it in long-term industry impact.) Apple’s new ultraportable was the announcement everyone was waiting for, and it’s generated the most media buzz, most of it positive. There’s no denying the machine is desirable, one thing Apple know how to do is design, and the Air is impressive even by their standards. It’s also a pretty impressive feat of engineering; a 13.3” laptop, averaging about 1cm thick and weighing a just over 1.3kg that manages to squeeze in a 1.8GHz Core2 Duo, 2GB RAM and a full-size, backlit keyboard, as well as a screen as good as you’ll find on any laptop. Oh and the battery life is quoted at an extensive (for the size) 5 hours. It really is an impressive piece of work.

Obviously, to get the size down so far, a couple of compromises have been made; it lacks an optical drive (to mitigate that can mount one from a nearby desktop machine over WiFi — a neat trick, but I wonder how fast the access will be,) has no speakers and sports a redesigned, smaller power connector, probably making the device incompatible with any existing MacBook adaptors you may have.

The basic model comes in at £1200, which isn’t excessive for a machine like this. It’s obviously much more expensive than the current crop of ultraportables from the like of Asus, and Packard Bell, but that’s not really the market segment it fits into. This isn’t a low powered palmtop, running a pared down Linux distro on A 500MHz via chip; it’s a full-spec PC squeezed into an ultraportable notebook form-factor. The 12” Vaios and Thinkpads are this device’s competition, and in that context, the price looks fairly competitive.

But I wouldn’t buy one.

Why not? That’s a very good question. It looks great, it’s got all the features I care about, is incredibly lightweight, runs my favourite workstation OS, and fits comfortably into my acceptable laptop price-range. The problem is simply one of longevity. Apple consumer goods have been coming without replacable batteries for a while now, and I’ve always been more-or-less OK with that because iPods and iPhones, at a couple of hundred quid, pretty much fall into the “replace every couple of years” price bracket anyway. Is that because I have more money than sense? Quite possibly, but when we’re talking about what qualifies as disposable technology, even I draw the line somewhere significantly south of a £1200 (or more) laptop.

It’s a shame; in so many ways, this would be the perfect laptop for me, but I can really see this really hurting its sales badly — I just can’t imagine anyone parting with that much money for something that’s only going to last as long as its battery. I know I won’t.

Update: OK — so it turns out that Apple will replace the battery for $130 (US, so I guess about £80.) That’s the cost of the battery, so fitting is effectively free. Also, a commenter called Andrew on Engadget pointed out that there’s almost certainly no discrete battery to be replaced; in order to get the thing as thin as that, they’ve likely spread the battery out across the whole inside of the case; everywhere there was a bit of space will have a battery cell in it.

So, maybe the decision was a genuine compromise, rather than a rip-off, and it looks like Apple have made the commitment to make sure people canget a new battery at low-ish cost, but I don’t think this really changes my opinion. People like the flexibility of swapping batteries out, they like the feeling of security of having a spare. Personally, I just wouldn’t be comfortable knowing that my ability to replace a dying battery is dependant on a third party continuing to offer a service that they’re only offering out of good-will in the first place.

Not as bad as I first thought then. But still a stopper for me, and, I imagine, for a lot of other people as well. In a way, it’s even more of a shame if they have a good reason for it not being replaceable; it means that the product just isn’t viable, rather than has been spoiled by a misguided attempt to upsell.