Thanks to Engadget for the pic.

The latest news in the whole debacle is that Google have postponed the launch of two of their new cellular phones using the Android operating system. The monolithic web company and China’s government are apparently in negotiations, and Google is reluctant to release the phones until the terms of their remaining in China have been agreed upon.

For the four people in the world who don’t know, it all began when Google was hit by a series of cyberattacks in China, and as a consequence threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market altogether, particularly because the attacks aimed to collect information about Chinese dissidents and human rights activists. Google reacted by slamming the censorship imposed by the Chinese Government and threatening to withdraw from China.

The next little twist in the story was when it was determined that Google staff could have been involved in the attack. It was claimed by ‘unknown sources’ that hackers targeted people who have access to specific parts of Google’s networks, with employees based in its Chinese offices helping to facilitate the hackers.

But the latest and most interesting twist in the story is that, since the whole debacle started going down, there has been a marked increase in those using Google in China. In China, 60 percent of all internet users utilize massive Chinese search engine Baidu and only about 35 percent use Google. Since the controversy, however, recognition of Google has risen in China, which has led to more users. Their share price, however, is down as a result of the possibility that they will leave China.

For an interesting article clearing up misconceptions regarding the search engine’s involvement in China, see here.

Bad news for South Africans, as pointed out by MyBroadband.co.za is that on visiting the Nexus One’s official site right now one is met with the tragic statement “sorry, the Nexus one phone is not available in your country”.
But, don’t despair. As the MyBroadband article helpfully points out, Vodacom may bring the phone to SA soon, as Google have signed an agreement with Vodafone that covers all of the company’s countries.

But, even if Vodacom don’t release the Nexus One in SA, the phone, which is not network locked and has no APN in the handset, can still be purchased oversees (you will have to get it shipped to SA, though, and since there is no APN accessing all of the services in the Google suite will be a problem unless, like me, you are clever enough to install your own APN. Perhaps I should post a tutorial on how it’s done, so we can overcome Google’s decision to neglect the Southernmost tip of Africa together!

The phone, which uses the Android Mobile Technology Platform 2.1 Operating System, is available in the US and UK on the online Google Phone Store. It will set you back $529 (or roughly R4000, making it almost half the price of the iPhone when it was initially released). For full specs, go here.

Thank you to Engadget for the pic!

I went online to see if a n00b would be able to learn to speak geek using nothing but Google.

There are various sites offering dictionaries of geek terminology. Many of them, like the Webopedia, offer nothing more than boring IT definitions – and let’s face it, if you are a true geek you probably know what DHCP, OEM or CMOS means already, and if you’re not chances are you don’t want to know. Of much more interest to geek and non-geek alike are the definitions on Mainfraim.org’s GeekSpeak – it has definitions of some hilarious and uniquely geeky phrases, many of which perfectly capture the geek’s tendency to apply terms that used to be reserved for computers to everyday life.

Selected highlights:
Alpha Geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. “Ask Larry, he’s the alpha geek around here.”
Doorstop: A computer that is no longer considered fast enough or to contain insufficient storage, etc. for use in normal work. All 286’s and 386’s are doorstops. Most 486’s are now doorstops. Soon we’ll see Pentium doorstops.
Egosurfing: Scanning the net, databases, print media, or research papers looking for the mention of your name.
Let’s take this off-line: Let’s talk about this later, after the meeting.
Uninstalled: Euphemism for being fired.

For a comprehensive list of internet acronyms/ chat slang/ jargon, click here.

Sure, everyone knows what it means to LOL, and most people are familiar with the phrase WTF. But there the list includes some truly obscure examples, my favourite being :

BSEG – Big sh*t eating grin
DDSOS – Different day, same sh*t
IANAL – I am not a lawyer (expect an uninformed opinion)

So yes, we do have our own language, but don’t despair, with the help of Google even the greenest n00b will be talking like an uber-geek in no time. Good luck.

1. 1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d  – tee shirt

2. Microsoft: “You’ve got questions. We’ve got dancing paperclips.”  – Unknown

3. My pokemon brings all the nerds to the yard, and they’re like you wanna trade cards? Darn right, I wanna trade cards, I’ll trade this but not my charizard.  – Unknown

4. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.  - Unknown

5. If at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0  - T-Shirt

6. I’m not anti-social; I’m just not user friendly  – T-Shirt

7. When Life Gives You Questions, Google has Answers  - AJ Carpio

8. Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.  - Unknown

9. The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it’s twice as big as it needs to be.  - Unknown

10. I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code   - Unknown

The verb ‘to Google’ was chosen by the American Dialect Society as the ‘most useful word of 2002’, according to the most useful innovation of the 21st century, Wikipedia (incidentally, my go-to source for first stop info).

Too useful, in fact, for the lawyers of Google Incorporated to sleep easily at night.  If ‘to Google’ is merely to perform an internet search then it doesn’t matter how that search is achieved, right? It’s understandable that Google wants to protect its trademark from entering mainstream use, but does this make marketing sense? Xerox managed to protect their brand, but would anyone looking for a photocopy machine favour a Xerox over another big name? If they did once, it just ain’t like that anymore. And the internet age has increased the rate of change – and the rate at which we forget.

Farhad Manjoo argued persuasively in Slate mag that Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, doesn’t try to out-Google Google, a strategy that has tended for every other attempted player, to fail. Rather, Microsoft’s product is no worse than Google (and sometimes, according to David Pogue in the New York Times, it’s better).

Instead, the company aims to outmaneuver Google by presenting Bing as users’ default search engine at every opportunity they have. And being Microsoft, there are plenty of opportunities. In turn, they want you ‘to Bing’.

Unless Google can maintain a clear technological edge that distinguishes Googling from Binging( try say that fast five times!) then browsers will search with whatever they’re presented with. For now, Google has entered our daily language and, with it, our consciousness. Why give that up? Some things are too sacred for even Microsoft to hold a monopoly on.

Is it their influence, their success, or simply the brilliance of their product? Whichever criteria you choose, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg qualifies.

A protégé for the internet age, Zuckerberg was turning down offers from Microsoft while still in high school. It was while he was a student at Harvard, however that he came up with Facebook, the concept that changed the way we interact with each other and made Zuckerberg the youngest person on Fortune’ list of the 400 richest Americans.

Zuckerberg came up with the prototype for Facebook in order to make it easier for new university students to get to know each other. Initially intended for use only by Harvard students, the concept soon proved irresistible, and within two years Facebook was made available to anyone with a valid email address.
Since launching in 2004, Facebook has received a steady stream of investment, as well as several buy-out offers. In 2006, during buy-out negotiations with Yahoo, Facebook was valued at around $1 billion; in the same year Zuckerberg famously turned down a bid of $750 million, money that most 22-year-olds could only dream about.

In 2007, Microsoft purchased 1.6% stake in Facebook. They paid $240 million dollars for the share, putting the value of Facebook as a whole at around $15 billion. Since then, major players such as Google have also expressed an interest in purchasing a stake, although Zuckerberg currently remains committed to keeping his company independent.

The brilliance of Facebook lies in the way it allows users to follow their friends in real time, rather than simply relying on a static profile page like so many other social networking sites. By providing constant updates via the new feed, it gives users an incentive to stay active, as well as to actively keep up with what their friends are doing.
Status updates, “friending” and wall posts and profile pics have now become part of the geek lexicon and finding old friends and making new ones has become a simple matter of entering their names into a search box. Beyond the social sphere, prospective and current employers regularly check out their employee’s Facebook profiles and the website has become an important tool for corporate networking.

In the political realm, Facebook has been used to organise protests and foster activism and is so effective in giving people a voice that it has been blocked by several repressive governments.

In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg was named one of the world’s most influential people by Time Magazine. Given that he has achieved everything he has by the age of 25, he may also be in the running for the title of Youngest Geek God Ever.

Before the Internet, people used to look things up, during the days of Web 1.0, they searched. Now, if you want to find something on the Internet, you Google it.
The men who changed the way we use the Internet are Google co-founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page. The pair met while they were enrolled in Stanford Universitys PhD programme; Google was actually born out of Page’s search for a topic for his thesis.
Page’s interest was the mathematical structure of the World Wide Web. Understanding the Internet as a huge graph, Page hit upon the idea that web pages could be ranked based on the number of other pages that linked to them. Brin’s focus, meanwhile, was on data-mining techniques.
Combining their research, the pair built a Google prototype on Stanfords intranet. Once they realised that their prototype worked, they followed in the footsteps of so many geek gods by suspending their PhDs, leaving university and founding a company.
The company they founded, Google Inc, has since become one of the most widely respected and publicly visible companies in the world. They regularly head the Fortune list of best places to work and have been held up as a shining example of a new way of doing business, headlined by their simple motto You can make money without being evil.
Had they simply founded a massively successful Internet company, Brin and Pages places in the geek pantheon may not be guaranteed. However, it is their remarkable commitment expanding and cataloguing the sum total of human knowledge that makes them figures worthy of worship.
Not content with just making the Internet easier to use, Brin and Page have steadily expanded their reach, making it easier for us to find each other, via Google Maps and Google Earth, easier to keep in touch, via GMail and GChat and easier to make ourselves heard, via Blogger and Youtube.

Their quest to create an online version of the worlds greatest library, the Library of Congress, is admirable both in its scope and its significance, while their constant search for innovation has tech geeks around the world waiting with baited breath for the latest offering from Google Labs. Not yet convinced? How about the fact that they offer every one of these amazing services for free?
Recently, Page and Brin have begun to branch out. Page is a major investor in alternative energy, while Brin has recently turned his attention to genetics and the Human Genome Project. Having helped make the world a smarter place, theyre now trying to make it healthier too.

Thats good news for everyone, geeks included.