Thursday, September 10, 2009

Winston sticks it where the sun don't shine

This story is a bloody marvelous illustration of how, despite claims from some quarters, the internet revolution has not quite made it to even quite developed parts of the globe. A South African IT company based in Durban raced "an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom."

Guess who won! Winston, the aforementioned pigeon, took two hours to fly 60 miles with the stick whilst the file was only 4% of the way there. Frankly Winston could have walked the stick home and he'd have still won.

I only mention it because Winston has demonstrated with admirable clarity what I was arguing in the Morning Star in July that Africa is not witnessing "a new dawn of connectivity for the masses" despite the inflated claims about the new undersea cable that's just been hooked up.

It's also nice to see people use inventive media stunts to giving big companies the bird. That's a real feather in their cap! OK, I'll stop there.

Anyway, why take it from them when you can check out Winston's website and hear it straight from the pigeon's beak (check out the video, hilarious).

5 comments:

James Mackenzie said...

There's a bit more detail on the history of this idea here:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

That's how it's done if you don't even have a flash drive!

ModernityBlog said...

Damn, you beat me to it:

Was about to add that to my weekly technological round up of things

Jim Jepps said...

I was about to say I thought you'd stopped blogging but I now notice you've moved - that completely passed me by at the time - I'll add your new one to my rss.

ModernityBlog said...

I try to blog daily, and have managed a few better posts on Word Press than I ever had on blogger.

When I am feeling a bit thick (which is more and more nowadays) I tend to do a techie post, they are not hard work, and some are even funny.

Cathryn said...

Love it!

As they used to say - never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of tapes speeding up the M1