Up until the 14th August all was calm in the land of the Brit Twitterer. Then Twitter announced it was pulling the free SMS alert for UK users. Now, a mere two weeks later, Twitterers are experiencing cold turkey withdrawal symptoms and looking for an alternative.

Which is where ISP and VoIP specialist Gradwell comes in with the newly announced Twittex service which promises to fill the void for text hungry Brit Twitterers.

Well, sort of. It ain’t free unfortunately. Instead it adopts a pre-pay service model. Gradwell MD Peter Gradwell (do you think that’s why he got the job, having the same name as the company?) explains what’s going on:

“At Gradwell, we had recently launched a new service, a news website, so that our customers can be kept informed of alerts and maintenance concerning our broadband, email, hosting and VoIP. This new service published updates to Twitter, so that our customers could use Twitter’s SMS alerts when away from their computers. With Twitter no longer sending out SMS alerts, we needed an alternative – so we built twittex!”

Good news if you really cannot manage without Twitter SMS updates I guess. However, some of us have realised that there is more to life (online) than Twitter and instead of going cold turkey have simply trotted away from the service altogether.

Facebook via your iPhone app anyone?

You know something, I am huge fan of those little ASUS Eee PC mini-laptops. Anything that helps to bring affordable mobile computing to the masses has to be a good thing in my book. But like my mother always said, you can get too much of a good thing.

And that, unfortunately, is the situation ASUS has found itself in.

C’mon guys, this is just getting silly. How many Eee PC variations are there now? Good question, but difficult to answer. I’ve pretty much lost count it has to be said.

Heading over to the Eee PC Comparison List at the ASUS website I am informed that there, in fact, no less than 12 of the little buggers.

No less, but I would venture to suggest quite a lot more. That list does not include the 900XP and 901XP for example. These newly announced models appear to be pretty much the same as the 900 and 901, funnily enough, but come complete with flowers on the lid.

I kid ye not. What next, the 900SB (SpongeBob) or 901HM (Hannah Montana) editions?

You could argue that the figure for different Eee PC products is already way higher thanks to the number of colour options alone that are available already, everything from pearl white (how original) to blush pink and lush green (how awful.)

Of course, I can appreciate that ASUS must be getting a little edgy now that there are so many of these mini-laptops flooding into the market. I mean, head over to the Lilliputing Database and there are 44 different models listed in glorious detail.

But surely it would be better to focus on getting one or two models out there to satisfy the market, and getting them right rather than spreading the technology love across a whole host of slightly different products?

Apart from anything else, if it can confuse a technology journalist then where will it leave the average punter looking to buy into the budget titchy computer market?

Silverlight has, to be fair, not exactly set the world on fire. Microsoft was obviously hoping it would, and there’s nothing majorly wrong with the Silverlight 2 Beta to prevent it. Other than the market share enjoyed by Adobe Flash of course.

Ay, there’s the rub. And while quoting from Hamlet, I might as well drag out some of the words that follow that, as they seem to apply so well to Microsoft with regards to Silverlight: what dreams may come?

As it turns out, those dreams were in Chinese.

Could it really be that the Beijing Olympics are the Saviour of Silverlight? Well I’m pretty damn sure the Games of the XXIX Olympiad are not going to do it any harm in the getting the word out stakes.

Or more precisely the ‘getting Silverlight installed’ stakes. Whoever managed to pull off the deal with NBC to drive the online video coverage of the Olympics deserves a medal, a big shiny gold one at that. Not that I suspect it took too much negotiating considering how the two have worked so well before. MSNBC ring any bells?

The Silverlight ability to adaptively stream the video data depending upon the available bandwidth, together with certain copy protection promises, seemed to do the trick.

So just how much of a success has the NBC Olympics coverage been for Silverlight? Ah, Microsoft isn’t actually saying. It would appear to be sticking to its standard ‘up to 1.5 million downloads a day’ line that has been spun out since, well, almost forever. At least it seems that way from here.

However, some reports suggest that the real figures are a whole heap of beans higher.

How does 25 million unique visitors for NBCOlympics.com via MSN during the Games so far grab you? Or how about the fact that more than half the visitors in recent days have already got Silverlight installed?

With 22 million videos streamed so far, that’s a pretty impressive showcase for what was looking like a near-miss technology just a few weeks ago…

Hot on the heels of the news that Twitter is telling its UK users to get stuffed by pulling support for SMS Twittering in the UK, comes word that over the pond a certain big fish has been crowned Chief Twit.

Yep, it seems that Presidential hopeful Barack Obama has more followers on Twitter than anyone else.

More than the previous Chief Twit, Digg founder Kevin Rose who for some unfathomable reason found himself with some 56,482 people who were interested in the Digger Top Dog’s every thought. Rose, on the other hand, not being completely mental or a politician did not follow everyone who chose to hang on his virtual coat tails. Instead, he only follows 97 people.

One of those he follows happens to be Barack Obama.

A man who happens to understand the importance of technology in the modern presidential election process.

A man, who happens to have 56,791 people following his every move on Twitter.

What’s more, it seems that Obama follows every one of them as well. And then some. According to Twitter he auto-follows a total of 59,474 people in all. Or at least his account does, which one has to assume is manned by a small team at his election HQ or alternatively some nerd in a back bedroom carefully locked away from the campaign spotlight. I doubt that Obama spends much time actually using Twitter himself, if truth be told.

Still that is more than Grandpa McCain who seems to have let this technology thing pass him, and his campaign, by. He does not feature in the Twitter Top 100, or anywhere at all. Mainly because it seems that he does not have a Twitter account.

Even his unofficial campaign Twitter account, going by the name of JohnMcCain2008, can only muster a comparatively tiny 1485 followers.

Does this bode badly for the old man of presidential politics? Or does it just mean that when it comes to popularity amongst the younger and more media savvy types that the younger and more media savvy man gets the vote?

Not that Obama has it all his own way in the switched on Internet presidential campaign stakes. There’s always a certain Paris Hilton to consider, even though she is not entirely naked for a change. Hilton appears in a spoof presidential campaign video which she made after McCain featured her in a campaign advert decrying Obama as just a celebrity.

La Hilton has proved as popular as ever, with that video clip fast approaching 7 million views.

Look, I make no bones about it, I have grown to like the iPhone but Apple has left me feeling pretty poorly treated to the core. I mean, the whole version 2 software upgrade lockout thing and the MobileMe storm in the computing clouds were hardly great customer service success stories were they? Then there’s this iPhone kill switch debacle which could see users applications, bought and paid for, switched off remotely by Apple for whatever reason they choose.

Yet nothing seems to be able to stop the Apple revolution, at least as far as the iPhone is concerned. The Wall Street Journal interviewed Steve Jobs and the Apple CEO reckons that sales of iPhone software alone will hit something like £180 million ($360m) this year. Jobs even predicts that a billion dollars worth of iPhone applications sold is possible at some point in time.

Looking at the figures, or at least the numbers that Jobs refers to in that interview, it’s easy to see why he is so buoyant. Jobs says there have been 60 million application downloads in just over a month since the App Store opened its virtual doors. Oh, and made something in the region of £30 million for good measure.

But I’m still concerned about that damn kill switch, especially now that Jobs has confirmed it exists and essentially said it has to have such a thing in case a malicious application managed to get itself distributed through the App Store and onto users iPhones.

Uh huh, really Steve, is that right? Can Apple really get away with anything because its kit looks so damn sexy? Seems that way. Can you imagine the fury that would be unleashed if Ballmer was to announce a kill switch in Vista that allowed Microsoft to remotely deactivate the software you had plaid for and installed, for your own good…

The big news from the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco this week has got to be the IBM partnership deals with Canonical, Red Hat and Novell. IBM has, quite plainly, gone on the offensive and stated that in combining its Open Collaboration Client Solution software suite (with Lotus Notes, Symphony and Sametime) with Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse Linux distros it can convince its customers to make the move to a Microsoft-free desktop experience.

With Canonical already confirming that Lotus Symphony will be distributed via its Web services programme within a couple of weeks, the other players in this trio will most likely follow with similar announcements real soon.

Now, according to various online sources, the fourth largest maker of computers is looking to get involved. The Chinese-based company that acquired the IBM laptop business some years back, Lenovo, is apparently involved in ‘active discussions’ with regard to bringing out a series of systems with a Microsoft-free desktop running the Linux/Lotus combination.

Should Microsoft be worried? Well, truth be told, probably not. After all, IBM has been pushing the Microsoft-free desktop thing in Europe for some months already to no great effect as far as I can see. Why it should make any bigger an impact in the US is beyond my ken.

Throwing Lenovo into the mix could be interesting, but again I doubt that it will win too many converts. There is, to be fair, enough choice of Microsoft systems out there in the market and while the Linux market share continues to grow slowly, the emphasis is on slowly.

Just as Firefox has eaten away at the Internet Explorer userbase, so Linux will claw at the Windows market. But as with the web browsers, Microsoft will still be left with the lion’s share and then some. Convincing the business market to switch from a Microsoft desktop to a Linux one is going to be a lot harder, as their is already much more invested in both financial and cultural terms, than simply switching a web browser client.

Even allowing the for the credit crunch argument of businesses being strapped for cash so looking more favourably at the open source sector does not really hold water when push comes to shove. Buying new hardware does not save money, it costs money. Those businesses are far more likely, surely, simply not to upgrade and therefore not spend a budget they do not have.

The only possible chink in the stick with Microsoft argument comes with the number of enterprises which are not upgrading to Vista, leaving a slight possibility that they might look elsewhere when the time does come for new hardware…

Over 100 years ago sponge divers discovered something much more exciting, and much less spongy, than their usual catch near the island of Antikythera. The Antikythera Mechanism as it became known has fascinated and confused the scientific community ever since. Until now, that is.

It has been dated back to the 1st century BC, no doubt about that.

It has been described as the most sophisticated mechanism known from the ancient world, no doubt about that either.

There is even no doubt that the Antikythera Mechanism is something to do with astronomy. The geared device appears to track cycles of the solar system. A device to calculate and track dates you might say.

The world’s first computer, some will argue.

But now researchers have announced that they think know just what this computer was used to calculate: the dates of the very first. Yes, it was an Olympic calculator it would appear.

The fact that it could work out the cycles and phases of sun and moon is no surprise, that has been taken as a given for the longest time. But the deciphering of inscriptions relating to the original Olympic games does make for fascinating, and really very timely indeed, reading.

Not least because, as researchers writing in Nature report, this thing is more technically complex than any device made over the next millennium.

Using high resolution X-rays and surface imaging, the boffins reconstructed the gear function via the fragmented inscriptions and discovered the Babylonian arithmetic-progression cycle calculator.

Websense has just released its ‘State of Internet Security Q1- Q2‘ report which could, truth be told, have been summed up in two simple words rather than 13 complex pages of graphs and charts.

Those two words being: well, duh!

It’s not that I do not like looking at statistics and graphs as much as the next overly anal security geek, but when the thrust of a report is that the majority of information stealing rascals are using trusted sources to host their malicious wares, and adds that Web 2.0 is of increasing interest to cyber-criminals, well I kind of think that my 10 year old son could have come to the same conclusion after hitting the tech news sites for a couple of hours of research.

I know, I know - you can only report on what is there when it comes to these kind of security trend analysis reports. In fact, I have ranted about them before, complaining that they will have little real world currency until all of them say much the same thing. After all, you cannot take an analysis of the same playing field seriously if everyone comes up with something completely different.

Do we really need to know that 60 percent of the top 100 most popular Web sites during this period were either host to malicious content of some kind or had a masked redirect to sites with the same? Probably, is the answer. At least there is a figure on it that makes you stop and say “oh bugger, are things really that bad” which has to be a good thing.

But adding padding such as more than 45 percent of that top 100 supported user generated content, or more than 75 percent of emails contained malicious or spammy links, and 29 percent of malicious web attacks had some kind of data stealing code element really is not necessary thanks very much.

“Today attackers are overwhelmingly forgoing creating their own malicious sites and targeting legitimate Web sites that have a built in base of visitors,” said Dan Hubbard, chief technology officer, Websense. “There is an element of trust in the Web 2.0 world that the Web sites we frequent every day are safe, but attackers are taking advantage of the ‘good reputations’ of Web sites to launch attacks.”

That was better, no need for the 13 page report after all…

According to a news report from the BBC prisoners in England and Wales, but not Scotland because of the devolvement of parliamentary power within the United Kingdom, will soon find that they are no longer allowed to play 18 rated computer games.

The Prison Reform Trust has suggested that prisoners are spending more and more time in their cells due to overcrowding, and that computer games are of use to prison officers in order to help keep control under such conditions.

Is it just me, or does the fact that prisoners are playing computer games at all come as something of a shock? Perhaps not as much of a shock as discovering that in 2007 the UK government bought a total of 18 PlayStations and 15 Xbox consoles for young offender institutions at a cost in excess of £10,000.

Still, it is only prisoners who have been well behaved and committed to their sentence plans who get access to computer gaming in the first place. Committed to a sentence plan? What does that mean, not having tried to escape?

The BBC story suggests that those inmates which have reached an enhanced level under this ‘Incentives and Earned Privileges’ scheme will still get access to games, as will those on suicide watch, but nobody will be allowed 18 rated ones as from 30th September.

Apparently, the thinking being the suicide watch gamers is that access to a console can help occupy them during a period of increased vulnerability.

The good news is that even then, those eligible prisoners will now have to buy their own games consoles as the new rules now prohibit prisons from purchasing consoles or games.

There, I have said it. Steve Jobs is not dead. The Fake Steve Jobs is dead or at least the character has been buried, the man behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog is doing just fine, by the way.

Now you might wonder why I care about either of them, and while I have no wish to see either shake off their respective mortal coils the truth is I don’t.

So why mention it at all? Good question, and one that I have been asking myself a lot over the last few days as the blogosphere has verily exploded with rumour and speculation surrounding the health of Steve Jobs. In fact, I am going to take the unusual step of not linking to any of the sources as there are just so many you might as well go Google for yourself. If you must.

It is all rooted in two things: the fact that Jobs was diagnosed in 2004 with pancreatic cancer which he survived, and the fact that Apple is such a hot potato right now. Not just because of the iPhone 3G launch, but because it has gone so spectacularly pear shaped in so many ways.

Combine these two things with the fact that apparently Jobs looked a little thin and peaky recently, and all of a sudden the money men are interested.

After all, what would Apple do, or more to the point how would Apple perform, if Jobs was no longer at the helm?

Morbid, yes. Understandable, maybe. Preventable, not on your nelly. The blogosphere is going to run and run with this one, until either Jobs comes out and says ‘I have cancer’ or produces some kind of doctors certificate or otherwise refutes the allegations.

While Apple continues to tell everyone to keep their collective noses out of the personal affairs of the CEO, however, the speculation will only continue. And that, my friends, is going to be bad for Apple I believe.

Too many folk, even in financial institutions and on shareholders lists, believe in the no smoke without fire routine. After all, Jobs did not reveal his earlier cancer scare for nine months and investors may be worried this is history repeating itself.

It shouldn’t make any difference, of course. But Apple is Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs is Apple. There is no getting away from that. Just as Daniel Lyons might find life harder, in terms of great public acclaim, without the Fake Steve Jobs so Apple might find the going tough without the real one.

I sincerely hope that there is nothing wrong with Steve Jobs beyond a cold or the after effects of a bad pizza, but I also sincerely hope that Apple gets off its high privacy horse and lets the public know one way or another before it starts feeling sick itself…