FortySouth

Recently I put up a couple of ads on Craigslist for items I had for sale. Almost instantly, some responses hit my inbox with one-liners such as this gem:

So I’m excited, someone is interested. It would only be momentary though:

Bummer. Rather verbose email sans a single mention of the couch I had for sale. Thankfully, Craigslist (and past experience) had warned me about this. To find out where this email originated, one would typically look at the email headers (in Gmail you can do this by clicking on the drop-down next to “Reply” and selecting “Show original”. It opens in a new window/tab with something like this:

Parsing the output, the email was sent at 4:48a from some place on the West Coast.

There’s an easier way to filter out potential spam that’s available for most emails by using Gmail lab’s  “sender time zone” feature. If the message headers contain time zone information, it can be displayed right within the email by clicking on “show details” at the top of the email:

Clearly, the sender is not in any timezone that covers the US, let alone in my local area on the East Coast. So just where could this have been sent from? I looked it up and alas:

So in such cases, I safely ignore and delete the message. Much better than heading down a rabbit hole and getting bilked for cash. Go to Labs in Gmail to enable this feature for your sanity.

In fact, about 99% of all (actual) internet subscribers in the country get online via GPRS/EDGE and 3G on their mobile devices:

The distribution is lop-sided with the vast majority of these users being Safaricom subscribers, although it should be noted they did have a 7 year lead on the other mobile service providers to lay out their infrastructure and sign up eager customers:

Bharti Airtel will likely gain market share once they begin offering 3G data connectivity in March and with their Sh1/min promotional tariff offering, that’s riling up Safaricom’s chief, they’re bound to sign up quite a few new and disgruntled subscribers.

Home Broadband

Is broadband connectivity in the home going to rise in significance? If it will, this data certainly doesn’t point to any surge in that direction anytime soon, the arrival of undersea fiber cables notwithstanding. The high order bit is the prohibitive cost of broadband service and computing equipment compared to the cost of an internet-capable mobile phone and subscription. This limiting factor is endemic to many developing countries:

The take-away in all this? Confirming perhaps what was known only anecdotally – the audience for software developers remains with mobile phone users.

So after a sting operation by Google over several months, Bing was outed as having copied their search results. As a regular Joe User of Google’s search engine, I find the spat mildly amusing and perhaps a kink in Bing’s armor. The evidence against them was rather compelling and they certainly didn’t deny it (snooping on Google’s activity via customer click-stream data from IE8+Bing toolbar).

In the back and forth and back, rather testy at times, this comment from Bing’s response pretty much nailed it:

Mr.Wheeler, Yes, I copied John’s answers, but that is only 1 of the 1000 people I usually copy from, and remember, he copied ALL his answers from a textbook!! (by studying day & night – but I dont have time to do all that) I am the underdog, so I use all the tools available at my disposal to come up with the answers – as we all should.

Everyone copies, I have been since 2005, so It was interesting to watch the level of protest and feigned outrage from John. One wonders what brought him to a place where he would level these kinds of accusations.

Clearly that’s a question that will continue in heated debate as long as there is Exams

Google offered an engineer with data to prove their claims, the guy responsible for their search algorithm no less. Bing should have countered the accusations, not with corporate responses muddled with marketing spin and ad hominem attacks, but with technical data to disprove it. In the credibility game, the message, as well as the messenger matters.