Fedex is cancelling its order of 10 A380s because of Airbus’ delivery delays, and getting 15 Boeing 777s instead. This comes after Virgin Atlantic’s deferment of its order for 10 planes last month. Of the big customers left (scroll down for ‘A380 Orders So Far’ on this page) Emirates is already making threatening noises and has cancelled some A340 orders, Singapore Airlines could cancel or ask for a deferment (which results in no money flowing into Airbus’ coffers, although I’m guessing they’ll book the revenue anyway), and UPS will be under pressure to look at Boeing as well. Only Lufthansa and Air France look like reliable customers.
Given the number of people Airbus employ, none of this is likely to be well-received in Europe. However, given the reorganisations at Airbus the A380 delays have prompted, a leaner, more effective Airbus may be the lemonade that came out of the A380 lemon.
If you’ve created a lot of your own Google Toolbar custom search buttons and want to move them to another PC, simply copy over all the *.xml files in the following folder from the old PC to your new one: %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Custom Buttons. You must close all IE windows and re-open one again for the buttons to show up.
Google Earth has had overlays for a long time — they make it easy to annotate maps with all sort of information, from vacation photos to public transport pickup points. Now, overlays work with Google Maps too. You can type in a URL of a KML/KMZ file into Google Maps and it will show you the overlaid map — here’s an example showing Metrolink stations in Manchester. This just made Google Maps much more useful.
A day after I ran into the beautiful Anonymous font, I noticed that the Microsoft Download Center now has Consolas available for use on non-Vista systems. Consolas (which ships with Vista along with a bunch of other fonts) looks great on ClearType-enabled LCD screens even at small sizes and is highly recommended.
Using Registry Cleaners are a Bad Idea (via S Anand). I agree — if your registry has enough flotsam in it to impair your system’s performance and you don’t know enough to hand-edit the registry, you’re probably better off restoring from backups (you do have backups, right?) than trusting random registry cleaners that promise a sparkly-fresh computer for $29.
If you’re concerned about easily restoring your system, you’d be better off with Windows System Restore or spending money buying Norton Ghost and backing up images of your system.
The Scobleizer’s been raving about Second Life for some time now. I’ve been less than enthusiastic because to me Second Life has always been the CompuServe of online 3D worlds: interesting but ultimately proprietary and therefore ripe for being replaced by an standards-based competitor (much as the Web replaced CompuServe). Like Joshua Allen says, a virtual world should provide a single seamless virtual environment that’s not provided by any single vendor.
Today Google released a product that makes me wonder if they have any intentions to enter the virtual worlds biz. They released a product called SketchUp that lets users create 3D models. There’s a free version available for all and Google will warehouse your models for you. You can even download items into Google Earth.
What stops Google from offering a virtual-earth.google.com that is essentially a coordinate space for users to populate with their models? Well, creating 3D models is much harder than creating a webpage but much, much easier than creating a system that can handle and render a distributed virtual world (here’s a good FAQ on the subject). However, given the large number of PhDs who populate Google it wouldn’t be unreasonable to believe that they have made some progress on this.
Another possibility is that Google will eschew the distributed virtual world model for what I call the (far less satisfying but far more achievable) small closed spaces with portals model: multiple virtual worlds with distinct coordinate spaces each run by a single entity and traversable using portals. Such a model could be used to spice up many Google offerings, such as Google Groups’ mail list feature, IM, personal home pages and the nascent markets on Google Base.
And of course, irrespective of whether or not Google’s working on this, there is tremendous opportunity for startups and researchers to go out and create the next big thing online. The opportunity to do something creative is huge here.
Every time I use OSX my arm hurts from all the mousing I have to do — and that’s not because I don’t know the Mac keyboard shortcuts. The culprit is OSX’s mouse cursor acceleration logic, and here’s how you can fix it to be more Windows-friendly.
Movie trailer mashups are going to be the next big thing after Photoshop contests. Check out the hilarious Sleepless in Seattle recut as a horror movie and Back to the Future inspired by Brokeback Mountain.
