Thanks to me living in Scotland, I was unable to watch the Germany vs. England football match on television last night. The game was broadcast south of the border on ITV1 but STV had to go with a repeat showing of Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis instead for some reason or other. Scotland played Argentina but this was shown on Sky Sports satellite channel, which my flatmate and I decided was too extortionate many months ago.
I was about to switch on the radio and listen to the game on BBC Radio Five Live when I remembered about Zattoo. This allows you to watch a selection of TV stations on your computer in several European countries for free and – most importantly last night – included in these channels is ITV1 London.
Yesterday the BBC announced that their main channels will be simulcast online from next week. This is simply massive news and will no doubt cause UK ISPs some major headaches with the inevitable increase in traffic this will bring.
Cool as this is, I do have worries about the implications this has for the television license here in the UK. Previously you were usually okay if you didn’t own a television set but with more channels being online it will soon be assumed that you must be watching tv programmes if you own a computer and no doubt it will be up to you to prove otherwise.
You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much here recently. One of the busiest times of the year is just around the corner and as such I’ve spent some time trying to build up a buffer of posts that will appear in the weeks ahead while I’m otherwise engaged in finishing sifting through my RSS clippings that accrued over the last 11 and a bit months, doing research on my predictions for 2009, planning my various December travels and furiously trying to think of Christmas presents.
After what feels like forever, the next US President will finally be decided upon at the polls tomorrow. Obama is the clear favourite but his victory is not guaranteed by any means. There’s the Bradley effect to take into consideration for a start.
A more tangible effect will be observed by the use of the voting machines. Since 2001, $3.9 billion has been spent on solving this non-problem. Non only do these machines not have any verifiable auditing process, they are expensive, insecure and inaccurate. I’m not just talking about the hanging chads fiasco but actual vote switching. I’m far from being alone in thinking that this is a serious issue.
I’m usually all for throwing technology at things but only if it actually improves a process. The voting process in the United States is overly complicated compared to the UK or Canada (as covered by Robert X. Cringely in 2003). Earlier this year, the Dutch governement de-certified voting machines and reverted to a pencil and paper based system (Google translation).
It reminds me of the story of the Fisher Space Pen for NASA. There was apparently an investment of $1 million by Fisher to research and develop these special pens.
The Russians just took pencils.
Okay, I promise that this will be the last post bashing ISPs for a while. This one is special though and displays shocking behaviour on several levels. Not being happy just spying on what you look at in order to sell your data or crippling the service they provide to you if you have the gall to actually use it, some ISPs have started altering pages you request in between the page being requested being sent to you and it displaying in your browser.
Continue reading ‘ISPs: from bad to worse’
“Unlimited” broadband packages were highlighted on The Gadget Show on Channel 5 last night. Mike Fairman, Head of Broadband for O2 attempts a pathetic analogy to some guy in front of you in the queue taking all the food in an all you can eat buffet. If that happened to me I would expect the restaurant to give me more food. Besides, the general concept is not an exercise in gluttony. Instead of all you can eat it should be all you care to eat.
Continue reading ‘ISPs and revenue streams’
It’s hard work being an Internet service provider these days. What with all those iTunes downloads, user-generated video sites like YouTube, IPTV and video-on-demand services like the BBC iPlayer eating up bandwidth. That’s just the legal stuff. Those nasty P2P file sharing services are still very popular1. What on earth are they to do?
Introducing bandwidth caps for their users would prove unpopular with customers. Spending money to upgrade their hardware is unpopular with them. Throttling the amount of bandwidth available to certain services (BitTorrent traffic for example) seems to be the accepted course of action at the moment.
I mentioned recently that Barack Obama is pro Net Neutrality and I’m aware that not everybody knows what this is exactly.
Continue reading ‘On Net Neutrality’
At the end of last week The Dome on George Street here in Edinburgh put up their traditional festive decorations – fully ten weeks before the 25th of December. The shops are full of Christmas cards and scary masks. Access to fireworks has been restricted in recent years so they are less prevalent than before but I’ve still seen them for sale in more places than I’ve seen places stocking Poppies.
In calendar order:
- Hallowe’en
- Bonfire night
- Remembrance Sunday
- Christmas
In order of apparent importance to retailers:
- Christmas
- Hallowe’en
- Bonfire night
He who slings mud generally loses ground.
- Adlai stevenson
Well that’s it. Nobody landed a knockout blow to dramatically alter the polls in the final pre-election debate last night. Race over I reckon. The USA has a new leader. Welcome to the White House President David Palmer. Sorry, I obviously meant Barack Obama. I can’t be the only one to have noticed the similarities with the character played by Dennis Haysbert in 24 – there was even an assassination plot!
Continue reading ‘Election ‘08′
At the weekend I was amused to make the discovery that the Grammar Nazis have made it as far as the men’s toilets in the Star Bar here in Edinburgh:
I’m noticing this apostrophe abuse more and more. I even saw an example in an advertisement in the print edition of The Drum the other week which is hardly going to win you any business – that is if anybody actually noticed. Honestly, it’s not all that hard to get to grips with. There is only one rule to adhere to after all.
