Bloomberg report today that Brazillian Supermodel Gisele Bundchen (the one that went out with DiCaprio) wants to stay the world’s richest supermodel. She intends to do this by refusing to be paid in US dollars.

The rather attractive 27 year old apparently prefers to be paid in Euros which have been gaining against the US dollar in recent years. Her sister, Patricia Bundchen, commented that “Contracts starting now are more attractive in euros because we don’t know what will happen to the dollar”.

Now, I do worry about how many people actually do look to supermodels for financial advice but I have to agree. The dollar seems to have been propped up on a bubble of bad credit and now the consequences are being felt. I have the same fear for Sterling (which is my primary currency right now). The Pound seems to be propped up on nothing but credit, fairy-tales and wishful thinking; there is certainly no industry (or perhaps even reality) left to back it.

Update: Dealbreaker notes that Gisele’s manager issued a prompt denial that she was dumping the dollar  “Some idiot in Brazil reported something just to make news,”.

Image Credit: Tiago Chediak

In the news today, German airline Lufthansa cargo seems to be on the receiving end of some Russian strong-arm tactics. Lufthansa currently operates it’s Asia cargo hub at Astana, Kazakhstan but Russia wants Lufthansa to move the hub into Siberia so Russia has removed Lufthansa’s permission to fly through their airspace. Presumably this permission will be withheld until Lufthansa complies.

The Russian Transport Ministry retorts that Lufthansa are not banned, rather their temporary permission to operate in Russian airspace has expired.

Lufthansa don’t particularly want to move to Siberia, they cite the famously poor Siberian weather and lack of ground transport infrastructure at the mentioned sites of Novosibirsk or Krasnojarsk as sufficient reason for sticking with Kazakhstan. It is worth remembering that these days, while Kazakhstan is a sovereign nation, Siberia remains part of Russia (and would therefore be a boost to tax and trade if Lufthansa operated there)

Image credit: Juergen Lehle

Some of you may be aware that the BBC’s iPlayer service ran into a bit of controversy at launch due to the fact that a client was only available for Microsoft Windows XP.

Today, I came across a story detailing how, in an interview with .net magazine, the BBC’s Ashley Highfield had denied that the corporation was in bed with Microsoft over their iPlayer system. To me, this is a bit superfluous; it’s glaringly obvious that they are not in cahoots with Microsoft as the iPlayer doesn’t work with their latest operating system: Vista.

However, the fact that the iPlayer is tied to any single platform (especially a proprietary platform) is worrying. The BBC should be striving to use open standards but instead they have opted for a Digital Restrictions Managed version of the Kontiki peer-to-peer video download application which only works with Windows XP. Obviously, this means that Mac, Linux and Vista users cannot view the iPlayer service but it also means that the iPlayer system is useless with the myriad of new portable and home theater devices now on the market. Due to the DRM restrictions, you can only view the content on terms that the BBC dictate.

Furthermore, Ashley Highfield tries to justify the Windows XP-tying of iPlayer saying that just 5% of the BBC’s 17.1 million users visit with Macs. He then absurdly states that only 400-600 user use Linux. I thought to myself that this number was ridiculously low. With Dell offering Linux desktops and IBM, Redhat and Novell all offering enterprise-level desktop systems, the installed base these days is impressive. The implication that only a tiny fraction of those installed Linux Desktops would be used to visit the BBC website which is a popular, broad-appeal destination is beyond belief.

So I went to search for some figures on who really visits the bbc.co.uk website. I discovered the website of Martin Belam who had previously worked with the BBC and made a study of the user-agents accessing the BBC website in 2005. Belam’s research suggests that Highfield’s figure of 5% for Mac users is credible (Belam suggests 4.4% use Macs) but the figure of 400-600 Linux users does not tally. Belam saw about .41% of user agents to be Linux based with, he states, more likely in the long-tail of the statistics. By this measure, if we take Highfield’s figure of 17.1m users, we should be seeing over 70,000 Linux users accessing the BBC site.

Of course, that percentage was calculated against statistics from bbc.co.uk in 2005, two years later we should expect that the market share of Linux based operating systems has increased significantly due to the big industry and government interests as well as the general public warming to distributions such as Ubuntu.

I would suggest that Mr Highfield’s logfiles need to be rechecked. That or the Linux users who, I understand are a discerning bunch, have found somewhere else to use as their primary source of news and media.

Update: Martin Belam points out in a new article that the .41% share is a total of requests rather than discrete users so does not constitute an absolute figure. So we could infer from this that 400 (of 17.1m) users might be calling 175 pages each per day. Perhaps Linux users “just scan” rather than reading whole pages

Update: Ashley Highfield of the BBC has now given a response and intends to attempt to find a more accurate figure for the number of Linux user of bbc.co.uk