Posts by Enrico Vanni 124 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Oct 2008
This is Glasgow City Council's Forth Road Bridge. The parallels are there - reduced maintenance, reduction in failsafe capacity and redundancy in a short-sighted effort to reduce costs following the transfer of responsibility of running the system from several expert external contractors to an arms-length quango. - https://www.access.uk.com/
Coupled with the fact that Chrome browser directs anything that isn't a properly formed URL (or a close enough approximation) typed into the address bar through Google search as well, so even those who think they are not using Google as a glorified address bar actually are (if you see what I mean).
There's a reason equipment sold into the UK DAB only market had the DAB+ ability crippled - whereas DAB's MP1 codec is patent expired and can be used freely, DAB+'s AAC requires licence fees to be paid for each unit sold. No point in paying for a feature that cannot be used, but on the other hand this is the big elephant in the room that has stalled DAB+ implementation.
When I voted against the formation of a Scottish parliament and was accused by friends and family of being unpatriotic, my argument to them was that we already had a bunch of incompetent politicians running things, and the last thing Scotland needed was all the Scottish politicians who weren't good enough to get seats at Westminster finding jobs with ultimately even more power in Holyrood.
Fast forward 16 years.....
As I said in another thread, give in to this latest demand to 'privatise' the BBC and you might as well just hand it to Mr. Murdoch as he currently controls the means to secure broadcast TV (either by adopting the system developed by his crack ex Mossad team, or by choosing a rival system that his crack ex Mossad team will compromise). BBC needs a clean transition to web only distribution (which is still many, many years off) so disturbing that process by giving Murdoch control of the current main distribution system will be a mistake we will rue (just like the Anzacs).
The BBC was the first, the Alpha, the origin of broadcast TV in the UK. Do they deserve special treatment - damn right they do.
Sorry, but Conditional Access systems get compromised, all the time. ITV Digital went tits up largely because it could not stem the leak of customers when its CA system could be bypassed with a microcontroller and eeprom - hell the market for pirate stuff was so large that the hack was manufactured en masse in smart-card form factor. Likewise Sky and Virgin Media. The whack-a-mole game was very expensive for the providers, and even when they thought they had made their smart cards secure enough the pirates discovered how to share the decryption keys from one legit card across the 'net.
CA will spell the end for the BBC as an independent body because they will be forced to throw in with the most secure (for the moment) CA provider (which pretends to be independent from Murdoch these days) or if they choose a rival system they will quickly go the same way as Canal+, Multivision, Premiere, Stream TV and the many, many others on the long list of providers whose systems were 'compromised' and were eventually assimilated by the Murdoch empire anyway (which is maybe what this is about all along...)
<sarcasm>Brilliant riposte.</sarcasm> SNP tribalism (for that is what it is) means people in Gretna are part of the club and should feel solidarity with their fellow citizens hundreds of miles away in Kirkwall, while their neighbours a couple of miles down the road in Carlisle should be regarded as the enemy. That is exactly how the rest of the UK is interpreting SNP attitude, and they are not wrong. SNP might invoke Westminster every time they mean England, but the Northern Englanders are not as stupid as the tribal Scots and know where the border really ends.
SNP and their '45' have made me ashamed to be associated with the recent news coming out of Scotland. The loud minority spoiling it for everyone else as usual.
Sorry, but I am with the 'Little Englanders' or, to give them their proper name, British on this one. Nationalism is a poisonous and base cause and is just racism with a different coat on. The SNP play to the left-leaning part of society, yet make out that their needs and wants are so different to, say, the people in the North of England who live in very similar conditions. I can understand how that would cause those people to feel aggrieved by the rhetoric of the SNP - that somehow they do not matter because despite their plight being similar, the SNP cares not a jot about them because they are a few miles 'south of the border'.
Thing is though, most SNP supporters genuinely do not care about the impoverished north of England as they are closet racists anyway.
(PS. I am a native Scot of Italian parentage).
I can understand why this might seem strange to someone born in the last 20 years who is used to hearing about politician hastily proposing and passing new legislation just to give the impression that some perceived problem is being tackled, sometimes to the extent that the same offence is unnecessarily and wastefully covered by two separate Acts. Case in point being unauthorised use of WiFi connections being illegal under both the Computer Misuse Act and the Communications Act.
Another classic example is Alex Salmond's 'Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act' - a testament to idiotic, ignorant political posturing that actually had the opposite effect to that intended, resulting in fewer prosecutions for Sectarian behaviour than previously were achieved under the Common Law Breach of the Peace.
That celebs who actually contribute something more than their physical image to culture get slated for legitimately reducing their tax input through benevolence schemes, yet Ms. Cole takes money out of the treasury to prop up her do-gooder credentials and that's supposed to be better?
She's a bigger parasite than knuckledraggers on benefits in terms of net cost.
More politician's logic. Something must be done, here's something. Whether this is belying the idea that UK governments still have power when in reality most laws are now dictated by the EU and all parliament has left is the ability to tinker around the edges and enact multiple laws for the same few offences it still has jurisdiction over, or they are just playing to the crowd to bury bad news, this is a complete waste of time.
There's plenty precedent for this though - like clauses in the Communications Act duplicate many parts of the Computer Misuse Act, so this will duplicate other parts of the Communications Act.
The current Scottish Government went one further in the 'duplication of legislation for the sake of being seen to do something' stakes with the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act, which has actually had the effect of reducing the number of convictions achieved for the behaviour being outlawed as previously they would be tried under Breach of the Peace laws, which had a lower test are a greater range of punishment.
Our leaders really are idiots at times and their misuse of legislation like this proves it.
This might have been a crippled IBM PC, but the engineering stacks up well against the marketplace rivals of the day. IIRC though the PC Junior/Peanut was a good deal more expensive than the BBC (even once you added in the cost of a monitor)/C64/Speccy/Amstrads, and a 16 bit processor (PCJr's USP) pumping through an 8 bit bus didn't impress the lowest common denominator computer buyer of the time.
The first of the proper 16 bit home computers were already in the pipeline (Amiga and ST) and when they turned up a year or so later the rest as they say is history.
Woz reveals the truth of the emperor's new clothes. He has a point - Apple is a brand, a fashion item. It matters not a jot to most iPhone owners what OS it uses.
Skin it to look like iOS and make it compatible with iTunes and 99% of owners wouldn't notice the difference.
Macs can run Windows these days and the sky didn't fall when that happened.
This is akin to BMW going front wheel drive for some models. Shocking for the purists but makes sense economically as the buyers of those models don't give a toss.
The F1 on subscription TV is a bit of a red herring - all the deals struck in Europe are non-exclusive, with FTA terrestrial channels in the same territories getting rights to half the races live and the rest delayed. The BBC could (if it wanted to) show races they do not have live rights to delayed in their entirety (as RAI in Italy do, often to the benefit of the viewer for far-eastern races that would otherwise be broadcast at silly times in the morning) but choose to show a highlights program instead - a recognition that portions of the product are not worth broadcasting.
I suspect that when the time comes the contracts will not be renewed on the current terms.
"Sky are all well and good but i absolutely hate the way they lock in their premium channels to their physical platform."
This has always been a bone of contention about Sky TV offerings and is actually against EU regulations regarding conditional access (and Sky still resist change despite an OfCom ruling against them on the matter). Sky say it is to prevent piracy, but that has backfired massively on them as their encryption system is now compromised and it would require replacement of every Sky STB in circulation to lock the stable door again, whereas had they gone down the DVB-CI route as they were supposed to then end-users would only be facing the replacement of the CAM module in their own hardware for the more secure DVB-CI+ versions.
The Pure Highway > Aux in solution is cack. The receiver is an old, insensitive design that has long been superseded (think of early '90s RDS!) and the antenna it comes with is useless. I had one and ditched it for a Kenwood DAB head unit and a roof mounted, properly grounded multi-frequency amplified antenna with DAB output (ie. to the same standard as most cars now provide for FM). The difference is phenomenal.
Most people's experience of DAB is as an afterthought....
C'mon people. Stop treating this as some sort of conspiracy and see it as the clusterfuck that it is. DAB was a brave effort, but too little too soon, and in a world where standards matter the intentions of the people who brought it to market, noble as they were, should not be criticised. instead, blame the rent seekers who want something for nothing and push an inadequate standard for their own ends (ie. OfCom).
I can remember when Radio 1 was not on FM at all, and Radio 2 shared its spectrum with Radio 4, so the lack of coverage is not the fault of the technology. DAB could work if it was resourced properly, starting with a switchover to DAB+ (which is no more an issue than when DVB-T digital terrestrial went from 2k to 8k base modulation, rendering many early and unsupported STBs obsolete). Almost all sets sold in the last decade are already dual standard or can be upgraded (although there seems to be an issue with the AAC codec and the licensing of said codec).
Scottish politics is indeed in stasis while this drawn out referendum campaign plods along. I made up my mind long ago (no to independence - I also voted against devolution as I said at the time all it would do is create another tier of government to drain more from the treasury- Holyrood is just league division 2 politics for the ones that weren't good enough to cut it at Westminster.)
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