Posts by Richard

Facebook eliminates parts of Wales

To our American friends...

who don't understand what all the fuss is aboot:

It's like you woke up Canadian.

Lights out, Britons told - we're running out of power

Stupid inefficient businesses

You can't tell me that the best way to make savings is to make people switch to energy saving lightbulbs when you see shops and office lights left on overnight (which aren't energy efficient) and all day, they've got their air conditioning on. My office has its air conditioning on all year round.. Why? Because it gets too hot because all the computers are left on 24/7/365. Yet it's the general public, not the businesses causing the shortages. Hmmm

Windows 7 'upgrade' doesn't mark XP spot

So what's new?

XP users will be quite familiar with clean installs considering the average XP install slows to a crawl and needs wiping after 6 months anyway. Nothing to see here.

Virgin warns 800 punters for file-sharing

When will they learn?

Let me just start off by saying that 2008 is turning out to be a fantastic year for music IMO.

How do I know this? Becuase I've downloaded quite a lot of albums illegally. Why have I downloaded a lot of albums illegally? Because unless I go and stand in a record shop all day asking them to play the stuff I want to hear, then downloading stuff is the only way I'll ever get to hear the bands I like. The radio, television and music mags have been in the pockets of the record companies for years and not being in their demographic, I'm not exactly well catered for. Now it seems they want the ISPs eating out of their hands as well.

This year I have already spent double the amount on music that I did last year, this is mostly thanks to having downloaded the album first. There's no way I'd have just taken the risk and bought half of the stuff that I have done otherwise, and I'm sure I'm not the only person doing this.

So my questions to Virgin Media are this:

1. What is it you are hoping to achieve?

2. What have the BPI offered you as a reward for working with them?

3. Who is paying for the administration of this ad-hoc policing of your network?

4. Have you thought about the message this sends out to your customers?

but more importantly...

5. This one is more for the BPI... If you want me to stop downloading music illegally, ultimately you will stop me from hearing music by new bands that I am interested in, which means I am not going to be spending so much money on music, so you lose out. You should do some research into the people who are real music fans who have always bought music just to see how many of those people have now decided that because you can get it free that there's no need to pay for it anymore.. I think you'll find that number is quite low.

6. Back to Virgin Media... Just supposing I do stop downloading music. Can you now tell me why I need your 10MB broadband connection? I can quite happily use my mobile phone for all of my home surfing needs otherwise. In fact I can use my mobile phone for all of my calls come to think of it, and I sure as hell don't want to keep your TV package. You lose.

I urge anyone who does the same as me and receives one of these letters from Virgin to write back and echo these sentiments. There's just no sense in what they are doing.

HD media future may be Blu, but it's not rosy

Who cares?

Thing is - HD video is not a seismic shift from what you can get on a DVD for the average person. DVD was so successful because at that time there was no decent format for good quality video. VHS was crap, always was, and there was a real public demand for something decent to replace it. We had digital music, why not digital video?

The bottom line is that DVD offered a huge improvement in quality, reliability, storage and longevity over VHS for less money than Blu ray's comparatively marginal improvement in picture quality and nothing else over DVD.

Blu ray is strictly Nathan Barley technology and will probably end up in the same bin as SACD and DVD-Audio 10 years from now.