Posts by James

Apple's Leopard rejects latest version of Java

Of course java is a "first-class citizen" on OS X

Suspicion, censorship, offhanded rejection... has Apple been taking citizenship lessons from uk.gov?

British computer society blunders on BCC

Well that's just fine then

"This is just a pointless email to say sorry about the huge volume of pointless emails you got as a result of our first pointless email."

Aussie boffin turbo charges copper broadband

Oh the irony

...considering how impossible Telstra et al have made it to get a decent DSL connection down under.

Record industry pushes ISPs to cut off file sharers

As a noted member of the WCIA

(that's the Wax Cylinder Industry Association to you whippersnappers) I wholeheartedly agree with this move. It is the Government's responsibility to ensure that new, disruptive technologies are not allowed to force the owners of entrenched business models to adapt.

One can look at any disruptive technology and see how its adoption could have been prevented by government to the benefit of existing stakeholders, without seriously impacting the existence of the least-important link in the chain of value, viz. the consumer.

Cars - the unwarranted holocaust of horse traders could have been entirely prevented at the slight cost of halting outright the personal mobility revolution. Result: thousands of jobs are protected, and the little man doesn't have any reason to be going anywhere anyway. Similar arguments apply to rail.

The telephone - Imagine Albert, the poor starving telegraph operator, his morse key dusty from misuse, his children starving at his feet because his specialist skills have been rendered redundant by the incessant march of hateful progress. IMAGINE IT!

Electricity - darkness is what the consumer wants, it's what the consumer has always wanted, and just because now there is some alternative to darkness, it does not automatically follow that this 'uptake' is related to 'demand.' Rather it is the callous act of those who would see the torch making industry destroyed. Bastards.

Instead of these epoch-making, world-changing innovations I request that the government instead recognise the importance of a strategy I will call Status Quo-gress. In this case, all new advances are allowed only when they are the tightly controlled brainchildren of the people who ALREADY hold the monopoly in this area. For instance, the replacement of Vinyl recording technologies with Compact Disc. This has the benefit of stimulating the economy and empowering the consumer without actually presenting any risk whatsoever. The committee deciding which matters are hated progress and which are beneficial quogress will be populated entirely by people who live 50 years in the past - I can supply a selection of music industry executives and Daily Express readers for this purpose.

Bubblewrapped kids fall prey to net predators

Has anyone noticed

Jo "supernanny" Frost is getting a bit heavy these days, don't you think? Such a shame, back when she was fitter there was a nice dominatrix undercurrent there. Nowadays she seems to be directing all her urges towards acquiring another pie.

Cops crash invite-only BitTorrent network

@ mike Banks

Your argument about the indies is an interesting one, but completely flawed. Independent labels - and I'm thinking here of Beggar's Banquet for one example and Warp for another - are doing very nicely out of the digital distribution revolution, thank you very much. Their manufacturing and distribution costs go down, and they can make the same profit but charge the consumer a lower price, increasing the viability of their product. Hell, they can even hit up iTunes and play alongside the big boys in the search results, if not the promoted index, without paying a distributor. Try that with HMV. The smart indies are signing up with services like the Playlouder MSP and getting a chunk of revenue for doing nothing but accepting the new reality. And crucially, they've recognised for years what the majors are still reluctantly coming round to: No-one wants DRM-encumbered music.

It's very sad that your friend finds his business failing but that's an artefact of his failure to identify a changing market and use one of the hundreds of off-the-shelf solutions for doing what the market wants and distributing his content digitally. He can join the wax cylinder manufacturers and cry into his anachronisms all he likes.

US Patent Office decimates Amazon's 1-Click Patent

Tut tut

21/26 vastly exceeds decimation!

I mean come on, if The Master can get it right...

Nokia wants to reach out and Touch

Series 90

After my N80 got ran over last week I pulled my trusty old 7710 out of the drawer while I waited for the insurance to cough up. I was reminded what a lovely platform Series 90 was, only it was utterly hamstrung by the slow hardware and unfinished software. And then, of course, they killed it by "merging" the S90 platform into S60 and are now chasing Apple's tail because whoops, maybe there IS a market for touch screen phones with properly sorted interfaces!

Ironically the N800 is everything the 7710 should have been - fast and (more) finished (than S60v3.1). I'd love to see Nokia release a tiny 3G phone (not even a phone really, call it a Network Access Appliance) whose only real function is to be a hub for the N800 to access the internet and a bluetooth headset for voice calling. Two-box solutions are fine when one of the boxes is so small as to be negligible...

Hopefully some of the interface work going into S60's touch resurgence will filter down into Hildon in IT2008/9, but Nokia's capacity for joined up thinking seems to have died with S80.

Beeb news website goes titsup

Anaemic?

Is that code for "not sucking Murdoch's cock"?

Only Sky can save digital TV

I really shouldn't be commenting again on this troll

But let's remember the real reason ONDigital went under - because they massively overpaid for the TV rights to lower-league football matches in a desperate attempt to break the monopoly on Football broadcasting held by, er, Sky.

Yes, let's talk about public funding of broadcasters

Funny that NI sources love to criticise the TV Licence when they're effectively also state-subsidised by their numerous tax dodges.

Let's also talk about Freeview's 'failure'. According to Ofcom figures 21.4 million homes have digital TV, of which 8.1 million are paid Sky subscribers. 12.9 million are using Freeview. This is an interesting situation if a 'failing' service has nearly 5 million more than the 'saviour'. Especially as Freeview added 1.9 million new users in the second quarter of 2007 (up 700,000 year-on year), while Sky managed a paltry 77,000. An increase in growth nearly ten times greater than Sky's ENTIRE growth in the same period? My, how Freeview could learn from the digger's genius!

But don't take my word for it: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/news/2007/09/nr_20070920b

Not that this post really needs any more commentary to be revealed as the NI shill it is, but it's interesting that you seem to think finances are the only measure of whether or not a broadcaster is successful, rather than reach or hours. The brilliance of PSB in the UK is that it encourages broadcasters to cater for markets that otherwise would be not bring a return on effort, which in a Murdoch-shaped world would be replaced by a million channels of cheap music videos funded by ads for scam SMS lines and a load of bought-in Fox pap. If that's salvation then I'm Francis Urquhart.