ZA Tech Show: Episode 29

In episode 29 of ZA Tech Show Alastair Otter from Tectonic drops by and lends us his insights into the Linux environment. Lots of technology news on the cards this week and we discuss:

• Duncan spoke to Dark Fibre Africa and gives us the low-down on capacity, clients and why your car’s rims are being destroyed in the name of bandwidth.
• MTN is taking on Telkom in the consumer broadband space with the launch of an HSPA router.
• Google partnering with O3B to bring more satellite bandwidth to South Africa. Will it amount to anything?
• Mark Shuttleworth is ploughing resources into changing desktop environments on Linux.
• Simon spoke to the Google project manager of Chrome and provides more information on where Google is going in the browser space.
• Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, Microsoft Silverlight, Flash and other technologies impacting on your experience of the Web.
• The second Microsoft advertisement featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.
• Apple’s September announcements including new iPods and iTunes 8 with the Genius feature.
• Much anticipated game Spore has been released, but tight DRM is harming online sentiment.
• Piracy as a distribution model. Steal This Movie and other players are investigating the space.
• A Facebook movie is being made.
• HP has a new notebook in the form of the EliteBook 6930p it claims will deliver 24 hours of battery life off a single charge.
• Lenovo and Acer are pulling back on their offerings of laptops with Linux.
• More about the Acer Aspire One and our hacking thereof.

And more…

Direct file download (33MB)

4 Comments so far

Comment by Havok, posted on September 16th, 2008 at 11:51

Hi there. Although the Xbox Live service is not available in South Africa it doesn’t mean you can’t get on Live. Technically
There’s quite a big community at http://www.xbox-360.co.za/forum and a petition to MS to bring live to SA at http://www.sayyoursay.co.za

Comment by Tectonic » Tectonic on ZA Tech Show podcast, posted on September 17th, 2008 at 09:17

[...] the latest episode – number 29 and give it a listen. Then download previous episodes from the ZA Tech Show website. It’s [...]

Comment by Didi, posted on September 20th, 2008 at 02:48

Hey,
Nice show guys. I just discovered you guys and I absolutely love it.
Quick question:
In the States, we pay $199 for the iPhone 3g, but you have to activate the device in the store to ensure you sign on to AT&T.
Do you guys have to do this over in South Africa? Is there some wireless provider that you guys have to sign to in order to get the iPhone?

Thanks

Comment by Simon, posted on September 20th, 2008 at 13:19

Hi Didi

The iPhone is being launched in South Africa this week. There are a lot of hacked phones in use in the country, but the 23rd of September will see the first official iPhones making their way into the market.

Our local provider of the iPhone is Vodacom and they have a similar setup to AT&T via their shareholder company Vodafone. However, in South Africa network providers may not provide locked-down phones, similar to France. So while only Vodacom can sell the iPhone, it may not limit usage of the device to only its network. Getting an iPhone will mean signing a contract (probably two years) with Vodacom. We don’t know if there will be a no-contract retail version yet, but it doesn’t seem likely.

We’ll know exactly what the deal is this week, and cover it in episode 31.

Thanks for listening

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