Read: White Devils, Paul McAuley

[Amazon.co.uk]
Nick Hyde is a volunteer, investigating massacres in a near-future Africa torn apart by wars, plagues, rogue biotechnology and corporate greed. While investigating a fresh atrocity site, his party is attacked by fast-moving, pale-skinned things, and few survive.

Despite the authorities' insistence that they were drugged-up child soldiers, and warnings that it would be unwise to disagree, Nick decides to investigate further.

This is McAuley in perils-of-corporate-biotech mode, which he usually does well, but something here just didn't quite gel for me, with several of the plot turns feeling like pointless detours, only there to delay the ending. It sounds harsh, put like that, but it was more a sort of nagging background feeling while I enjoyed the rest of the book, more as a travelogue through a plausible near-future dystopia than anything else.

Browser Stats

It's a while since I did the sad web geek thing, so...

( Read more... )

Conclusions

These are my gut opinions, based on a lot more details than I've included above, so take 'em or leave 'em:

• IE's total market share (94-95%) is stagnant, or even falling slightly; but then, there's not really any room for it to rise.
• IE6 (70-75%) continues to eat IE5's users (20%), and there are some signs that IE5 is starting a dive to oblivion
• Safari is stomping all over IE over in MacOS-land
• Mozilla (2-3%) and Opera (~1%) are gaining ground steadily, but slowly
• Mozilla's growth is particularly strong amongst heavy 'net users and web authors (10% and rising fast), where it may be reaching a critical mass.
• Anyone still worried about Netscape 6: give it up, all the users (and there were never many) upgraded to version 7, or Moz
• The version 4 browsers are thoroughly dead (hallelujah!)

Predictions: watch out for the mozilla-based browsers, particularly Firefox.

Privatised spaceflight, I hope

If I've got my maths and time-zones correct, Scaled Composites' SpaceShip One will make its first attempt at spaceflight at about 15:30-16:00 UK time tomorrow afternoon, albeit without the necessary passengers/weight for this to qualify as an X-Prize flight.

Well, my fingers are crossed...

Links:
Press Release and FAQ from the Scaled Composites website.
Via BoingBoing, who include links to what should be live web audio coverage, for those who will be able to listen then...

Read: The Praxis, Walter Jon Williams

[Amazon.co.uk]
A brutal galactic empire, millenia old, is left leaderless when the last of its immortal alien overlords commits suicide. The various client races look at each other nervously, wondering what's going to happen next...

Don't expect High Literature, or genre-redefining originality - this is unashamed, old-fashioned Space Opera, fairly well written, and does what it says on the tin. It's the first in a series entitled "Dread Empire's Fall" so you can probably make some educated guesses about the direction of the plot.

WJW has attempted to keep the physics moderately realistic, so while there's FTL (via stationary wormholes) and viable interplanetary drives, they've not beaten inertia - it's acceleration couches, G-forces and missiles all round.

I liked it enough that I'll be seeking out book two at some point in the near future.

Why did the [Iraqi] chicken cross the road

Juan Cole passes on this gem, apparently written by Anonymous in Baghdad:

Why Did the Chicken cross the Road?

Coalition Provisional Authority:

The fact that the Iraqi chicken crossed the road affirmatively demonstrates that decision-making authority has been transferred to the chicken well in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

Go read the rest for the truth according to Halliburton, the 1st Armoured Cavalry, Al Jazeera and others...

[Thanks for the reminder go to Charlie Stross]