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BBC iPlayer to run on iPads. Eventually

Why there is no iPlayer on Xbox

Do the research. For example:

"According to sources close to the BBC’s Future Media and Technology department, a deal between the two parties has still been unable to be reached because Microsoft’s strategy of charging for all content on its Xbox Live platform is incompatible with the BBC’s public service remit."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/6671901/Xbox-360-iPlayer-launch-delayed-indefinitely.html

Such a refreshing turn-around from when it seemed that Microsoft could sweet-talk or bully the BBC into doing anything.

Naive

"We gain *nothing* from DRM"

Yes we do. We gain the ability to download programmes on the BBC iPlayer and watch them for 30 days. If there were no DRM, the holders of the rights to the content the BBC transmits would not allow the BBC to do that.

It's as simple as that.

Quality

Actually the quality is not likely to be as good as the original broadcast, because the original broadcast is likely not to have been transmitted in a format compatible with DVD. (Not all MPEG2 is the same.)

But that is simply a variation on the VCR and not what rights holders are particularly worried about anyway. It may not be logical but that's the way they think.

Yes you have missed something

Yes you have missed something - the many times your question has been asked before and the answers provided. The argument goes that it's a trade-off between the effort and expense needed for a certain level of protection versus the leakage you will get if you don't offer that protection. You can get round the DRM by doing as you say, but as it requires expense, technical know-how and forethought (you can't get broadcasts on-demand) then most people won't bother. If the broadcaster wanted to stop you doing it, it would have to apply content protection to the broadcasts, rendering every Freeview/Freesat set-top box inoperable at a stroke.

Not fuck all

Dirac Pro is alive and well in the professional environment, helping to keep programme-makers' costs down:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/diracpro.shtml

Jodrell Bank gets swanky visitor centre, infuriating maze

Punched tape

Yay - when I read that article I wondered if anyone would mention the punched tape (or "ticker tape" as my parents called it). Thanks PaulH. I remember being fascinated by the stuff and taking some of it home.

Brighton goes Green

naive

Note to Paxo: you can only conclude that the desire for each party to govern is proportional to the number of votes for those parties if there is a linear relationship between the number of votes and the power each party gets, i.e. proportional representation.

Consider for example that at the time of writing, the Lib Dems have had an increase in their vote of 1% compared with the last election, and yet have lost 5 seats! And consider the further distortion in the voting figures themselves due to tactical voting as a result of first-past-the-post: many Lib Dem supporters will not have voted Lib Dem because of the fear it would let in the candidate they really didn't want.

Not that I'm saying that 2M more votes for the Tories than Labour mean that Labour is more popular, but Paxo is sometimes his own worst enemy with his over-simplified repetitious confrontational sound-bites.

Your own funeral pyre

Just so long as you breathed in the fumes I don't mind. And kindled it all with some of your large collection of back issues of the Daily Mail.

A very peculiar definition of "liberties"

Hmm - there's a rabid outburst if ever I saw one. To pick just one example, you're quite happy to moan about "punishing" car drivers (presumably because you are one) and yet the flip side of the coin is that non-car drivers get "rewarded" with better public transport, cleaner air and safer and quieter streets. I could equally say that your non-Green party of choice is "punishing" non-car drivers.

I don't see what your examples have to do with civil liberties. You can remain being selfish if you want, but you will just have to account more for the way your selfishness pisses all over the rights of other people, which is only fair, after all. If you want to know about real civil liberties, take a look at http://www.votefordemocracy.org.uk/ and you will see that the Green Party and the Lib Dems are in almost equal first place with 80% and 80.5% respectively, with the next (SNP) at 57%, descending all the way to the BNP at 7.5%.

As you say - you can't have it both ways...

Stereotypes

No. Perhaps you should take a visit to (C)anal Street or simply look it up on Wikipedia.

London of course has far more gay establishments but then the capital city usually does.

Software makers fall in behind Lucid Lynx

Minor complaint

Yes but that's KDE - Gnome is the official desktop. Consider how many other operating systems give you a choice of completely different desktop environments before you use it as a reason to slag off Ubuntu.

Ten Essential... Netbook Accessories

Windscreen smash

...which is of course much more likely to happen by the driver being distracted by the ridiculous contraption.

£16 for a Bluetooth dongle??

You must be mad. This one from DealExtreme costs £5.50, is the same size and works perfectly out of the box with Ubuntu on my Aspire One, connecting to my Dell mouse and Nokia phone (at the same time):

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12696

But I'm sorry - the annoying flashing LED is green...

Lenovo intros eco-friendly ThinkPads

Greenwash

"Some 30 per cent of the L412 is made from old bottles and so forth"

That'll be 30% by volume or weight I guess - whichever has been chosen to give the largest figure. Certainly not value or embodied energy. In fact it might take considerably more energy to make the recycled case than to use virgin materials.

And how much less power does it consume than a bog-standard laptop?

Don't be taken in. Anyone who buys one of these thinking they're saving the planet is seriously deluded.

UK IT job outfit punts 491 private email addys

Grammar

And who do "individuals email address?"

This guy doesn't exactly command any respect for his grammar.

Perhaps he should go back to being a trainee too?

BT blamed for Davina McCall spamcalls

I too am spammed by BT.

Cold calls where they insist it's not a "sales call" then go on try and sell you something. And when I thought I'd escaped their clutches by moving my line rental to Primus, they started sending me stuff about BT Broadband in the post. It may be the most popular broadband offering but that's for the same reason that Windows is the most popular operating system: general ignorance.

Microsoft and the Windows Phone 7 noise machine

DNA

Ooh who remembers further back than that to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Douglas Adams predicted Microsoft perfectly in the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose definition of a robot is "Your Plastic Pal who's Fun to Be With" and whose products never work properly.

"Go stick your head in a pig", etc etc.

Integrated tube tickets not on the Olympic menu

"neither will Londoners get mobile-phone coverage on the underground"

Thank god!

Google to mobile industry: ‘F*ck you very much!’

Rotherhithe tunnel

If you're talking about "cooling towers", I think you mean the Blackwall Tunnel. And they're ventilation, not cooling towers. They are not power stations.

'Peeping Tom' caught on own camera

@Seanie Ryan

No you dunce - the description of the clothes is to jog the memories of people who might have seen someone wearing those clothes before.

Free software lawyers hit Best Buy et al with GPL 'violation' claim

GPL happily mixes with commercial software.

"It just goes to show, however tempting it may be, GPL or other open-source code and commercial software just don't mix."

No it doesn't. As has been explained a gazillion times on here and elsewhere, you can freely build and distribute a system with open-source code and proprietary code, provided you don't derive proprietary code from open-source code.

Some examples:

- MacOS is a commercial product which is a mixture of open and closed-source code.

- You can happily and legally run proprietary paid-for applications on GNU/Linux without being obliged to release their source code.

- There are binary drivers for ATI and nVIDEA video cards, Intel wifi chipsets, etc, whose source code doesn't have to be legally released to be loaded by the Linux kernel, and although these happen to be free, there is nothing legally stopping their authors from charging for them. They are commercial software written to sell the hardware they support.

GSHP: The green tech even carbon sceptics will like

ground freezing, not ground loops

You misunderstood the comment about ground loops freezing: it's the ground around the loops that freezes if too much heat is extracted, and because ice is a good insulator the effectiveness of heat extraction thus plummets.

Nokia N900 Linux smartphone

"a brace of stereo speakers"

...is four speakers (-:

VW unveils slippery four-seat hybrid

Good effort

I wonder how noisy it is inside though? A lot of weight in cars is for sound-deadening.

Freeview HD - your questions answered

Various responses

James93: chicken and egg. Which would you prefer: transmissions with no equipment to receive, or equipment to receive and no transmissions? I know which one I'd prefer! You need the signals there in order to encourage the manufacturers, who otherwise wouldn't sell any equipment. Not likely you'd buy any without being able to use it. Besides which, it's all very new and it takes time to develop these things.

AC1: there's no such thing as a "digital aerial" - it's all a marketing ploy. The only reason to call it "digital" is if in your area the digital transmissions are in a totally different part of the TV band from the analogue ones, which would require a different (or wideband) aerial.

AC2: There is more to television picture quality than number of lines. For instance, interlace: just because bog-standard telly has about 576 active lines, if sent a full resolution picture consisting of alternating white and black lines, you'd see 25Hz "interlace twitter" flickering because the white lines are being refreshed during one field only. To stop this, you need to blur the picture vertically, which cameras always did (by virtue of their lenses) but early electronic picture production equipment - eg caption generators - didn't, so you'd see twitter around their sharp transitions.

This all means that an interlaced picture has less vertical resolution than the corresponding progressive picture. Don't get bamboozled by the headline figure.

nih: If you want to avoid "fail" then get a better aerial, or position it better, etc.

California votes in HD TV power pruning law

AC: Nope, you've FAILED this time I'm afraid!

Yes, control buttons on remote controls are in a matrix which must be scanned. HOWEVER, while the device is waiting for ANY button to be pressed, NO scanning is needed - you simply apply a DC signal to all the lines on one side of the matrix, and look for a signal on all the lines on the other side. Once you've detected that a button has been pressed, you THEN start up the clock and scan, to find out which button(s) are involved.

Now, how would YOU rate YOUR knowledge of electronics after that? Hmm - slightly above zero I think, but a classic case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

You'd better make sure you're correct before using the "FAIL" icon or... you'd better remain anonymous for fear of being made to look a right plonker!

@Nigel11: standby vs off

"The TV's remote-control does standby for several years on a couple of AAA cells!"

No, the TV's remote control does OFF for several years on a couple of AAA cells. It needs to consume no power at all to be able to detect you pressing a button - closing a switch. It's the equivalent of turning a TV off with its proper mains switch (if is has one).

Christian Berger: I don't know where your mythical 1W TV came from - there's no such thing, and I've never heard of an LCD TV taking only 10W either. And remember that screen area is proportional to the square of the diagonal measurement (for the same aspect ratio), so a 32" TV will have four times the screen area (requiring four times the power to light it up) than a 16" one.

@Dazed and confused: what happens to the old tellies?

Erm, nothing. They don't suddenly stop working, and people don't suddenly have to replace them.

Looks like you're living up to your name this afternoon. :-)

AC: I wouldn't trust your power meter. If it's an ordinary Freeview set-top box, I doubt it would draw 20W, ever. And 35W is suspiciously low for a desktop PC. It probably isn't a true RMS meter.

115,000 nabbed for in-car calling

Oh no not again

Holding things while driving (Sweeping Brush): you can still get done for driving without due care and attention, etc (as you can if you are using a hands-free kit), even if it's not specifically illegal to hold something while driving. A law forbidding holding anything whilst driving (or supporting it on your lap, etc)

Natural selection (Dale 3): erm no - overwhelmingly it is the innocent such as motorcyclists, cyclists, pedestrians, not to mention other drivers, who are the victims of this criminal behaviour.

Conversation on phone vs conversation with passenger (AC): why does this always come up? Are you particularly stupid or are you just trolling? A passenger:

1) knows you are in a car so you can't be expected to give their conversation 100% attention;

2) can see when driving conditions are difficult and can see you so can tell by your body language when you need to concentrate on the road;

3) has a vested interest in not being killed themselves by distracting you.

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Acer Aspire A110; reason to REPLACE rather than UPGRADE

Jez Caudle: I've found a couple of annoyances with the Aspire One A110 so far:

1) The "home" key is no longer functional - apparently its mapping caused problems on some other hardware so they've remapped it, breaking it on the Aspire One (and rendering it unavailable in the shortcuts app).

2) You can't turn the touch pad off any more - only "while typing"! Which idiot decided to take that ability away? For non-savvy computer users who use a mouse, enabling the touchpad is a menace.

And no, it hasn't got rid of all the lag - wait until you've played with Firefox or OpenOffice for a bit! It may be better than 9.04 but I don't have experience of that on an A110.

I've also been using a Dell Mini 10v with an external monitor and that confuses it too - you can end up with the "task bar" on the internal screen and everything else on the external one!

Debating whether or not to replace the OEM LTR on a Toshiba NB100.

Anyway, I don't think anyone's yet mentioned that if you upgrade you don't get the full benefits of reformatting with the ext4 file system; that's why I replaced and it looks like I've avoided some pain by doing so.

Tesla Roadster travels 313 miles on single charge

Small men

If driving at constant speed on a level surface, the weight of the occupants wouldn't make a significant difference; just a tiny bit more friction in wheel bearings and loss in squishing of the tyres.

Sony Walkman NWZ-S544

@Steven Jones: inefficiencies of amplifiers

Good posting; just one point: the digital amplifier it (and most such devices) uses will probably be about 90% efficient.

Steve Ballmer's Windows 7 dance party

Actually that's not all

I do love your opening sentence.

Sex *AND* the city

That is all.

Freecom Hard Drive XS

@Bassey

You'll have to invent a new pejorative term I'm afraid - it's not "fanboi-ism" towards both MacOS and Linux (indeed how could it be towards two such philosophically-different OSs?); it's "!fanboi-ism" towards Windows!

Remember there are plenty of reports of slow file transfers under Windows Vista.

@Tony

Yes I understand that - it's a USB driver for Windows. What interests me is how Windows performs with that driver compared with default MacOS and Linux, as in your summary you say that "for Windows users Turbo Mode speeds up file transfers" from which it could be inferred that Windows has an advantage over the other OSs when using this driver. However, it might be the case that the other OSs are faster in the first place.

Faster USB under Windows; vibration; heat

So, you can install a USB driver to give faster access under WIndows. Begs the question: does this then give better performance under MacOS and Linux, or are they just better written in the first place so there is no NEED for third party code? Can you do a comparison of transfer speed with the other OSs please?

As to vibration, in my experience 3.5" external hard discs can cause annoying vibrations which are often heard as much as felt. I have a rubber pad under mine to cut down on them. So it IS an issue; whether the thin coating on the faces of this drive damps it significantly is a moot point.

Rubber isn't a very good conductor of heat - I wonder how much the casing raises the temperature of the drive compared with a metal enclosure?

Dell refunds PC user for rejecting Windows

Rare occurrence but not unprecidented

This isn't the first time someone has succeeded in doing this. There are guides out there on how to do it - you have to be patient. I tried it and gave up though, because the Dell computer came from Tesco, and they kept trying to pass the buck (once I'd got them to understand what I was asking). Dell eventually said I should have done it within 7 days of receipt.

By the way, in my experience it's much easier to make a Windows PC dual-boot if it's never been booted in Windows, because I presume there is a fixed-size Vista partition which grabs all the extra disk space the first time it is used, and then you have to use a manual partitioner to get it back again.

Cambridgeshire makes road charge last resort

@M A Walters: Hills Road Bridge

No, I haven't seen this bridge - I don't live or work in Cambridge though I know people there who cycle extensively and are disgusted by the local paper's attitude to cyclists, motivated entirely by the advertising revenue it gets from car dealers. I think they mentioned this bridge the last time I saw them but are away at the moment so I can't get details from cyclists' point of view. Looking it up on the web seems to indicate that the disruption is temporarily worse due to road works, and is mostly due to the guided bus which I wouldn't defend in the name of public transport.

Measures that encourage cycling ought to be applauded by car drivers - congestion caused per traveller is on average far greater when those travellers are being transported by car than by bicycle. You've noticed the increase in cyclists during term time - would you prefer that each of them were driving a car instead?

I presume you don't venture out on the roads on a bicycle much, if at all. If you did, you'd know that, irritating though bad cyclists are, because they are not wrapped in a tonne of metal with dozens of horsepower pushing it along, they are an order of magnitude less dangerous than bad motorists, and tend to be suicidal rather than homicidal. Sitting in traffic jams you will be irritated by all the cycles whizzing past, and because you will see more of them then the cars represented by the bumper of the stationary vehicle in front of you, you will be exposed to a disproportionate number of bad ones. Dozy motorists not looking out for bicycles (however well-lit and well-behaved their riders), or aggressive motorists, are the cause of most of the serious collisions; the blame for very few organ donations rests entirely with the cyclist.

Cambridge is flat. If you have a commute of less than five miles or so and are able-bodied, there really isn't any reason why you shouldn't cycle most of the time. Of course there is a risk, but it is low if you are prepared, sensible (get some training), and if you don't spend half your time and salary at the gym anyway, your life expectancy will go up by about 10 years. I commute 10 miles each way, with quite a lot of climb, but that's getting fairly hard-core and I wouldn't expect those other than the dedicated to follow suit.

@Paul4: try cycling

Avoids congestion. Huge fitness benefits. Saves money. Saves the environment.

And for your "weekly shop", attach a trailer to it, take a taxi, lift share with a neighbour, or use a supermarket delivery service. Think outside, erm, the box, and don't cling onto your food shopping as an excuse to have a car.

Or is cycling just "too dangerous", i.e. you're too lazy?

The costs you quote are merely the direct costs to you. You don't count all that car ownership costs everyone else, some aspects of which have been mentioned already. No, having the luxury of your own car is far too cheap.

@Chris Miller: you think a car is required outside Central London? ALL of London has excellent public transport.

@M A Walters: cyclists and "road tax"

Oh give it a rest.

1) "road tax", i.e. vehicle excise duty, is part of general taxation, not to "maintain the roads"

2) Cars that emit less than 100g CO2 per km don't have to pay any road tax either, so perhaps you should moan at them, as they create as much congestion as any other car.

@Goat Man: there are plenty of cheaper train tickets than that to Newcastle (I presume you mean from London, as £106 is the standard fare) but you have to do so when not everyone else wants to travel. Think of it as a congestion charge for the trains... besides which, you don't have to pay for VED, insurance, depreciation, servicing and MoT tests to go by train.

Off-topic: when I search for "Chesterton" in Google Maps, it brings up a place near Bicester as the only result, even though the result for "Cambridge" has the suburb of Chesterton writ large.

Sony HDR-TG7VE

@Aaron10: "your PS3"

Yep - more proprietary lock-in from Sony, just like the memory cards. And I'm another who won't buy anything Sony for that reason.

US Navy boffins put an end to drought

Yes but how does it work?

Rather a disappointing article really, as you missed out the most interesting bit.

At least desalination plants can be effectively powered by sunlight as the problem that they'll only work half the time is easily solved by something as simple as a water tank.

First USB 3.0 hard drives fall short of SuperSpeed speed

kidneys

"first firms of their kidney"

Is this something to do with dingos?

Database containing 1.8m UK postcode locations leaks online

Not just businesses

OpenStreetMap would also be far better with a complete set of postcode data. At the moment it can be added piecemeal by people entering locations (or using a GPS-enabled phone to report its current position) where they know the postcode - but this cannot be done from a dump of the data or Royal Mail's postcode finder (just as you cannot trace from Google aerial imagery) as the map would become copyright-encumbered.

Twits twitter while driving

B*ll*cks... really?

AC: "Rubbish. What is illegal is to use your mobile without the hands free kit otherwise it is perfectly ok."

Nope. Just because it's not a specific offence doesn't mean you can't be done for driving without due care and attention etc - it's far from "perfectly OK".

Thankfully the "why is it any worse than listening to the radio or talking to a passenger?" argument is not wheeled out as much as it used to be, because it's only the most thick nowadays who don't understand the difference.

Belgian boy's iPhone 'explodes'

"isolated"

In other words, no-one pressed the master "self-destruct button" which causes every one to vapourise simultaneously.

Apple to offer own-brand HDTV, claims analyst

It'll sell

The chance to get an Apple logo prominently displayed on drooling fans' walls will mean it will sell like hot cakes. They won't even need to whip out their iPhones any more.

KDE 4.3 promises polish, polish, polish

@Anton Ivanov: 100% "core" usage on GNOME

"bits of gnome like its key management sit at 100% usage all the time"

You have a faulty system. Multiple cores are alien to me as I have given several ancient machines a new lease of life by putting Ubuntu on them, and there's nothing in GNOME which sits consuming 100% CPU or I'd sure as hell have noticed it (if only by laptop fans whizzing away)!

I was a fan of KDE (Kubuntu) until 4 came along, which was an embarrassment. I just hope these bugfixes have finally made it usable again. Under 4.2, I find the panel crashes if you disable wireless networking, and if you're using "focus follows mouse" to avoid clicking to focus, if you don't move the mouse quickly enough between (eg) the K Menu icon and the menu it produces, the small gap due to the menu "floating" above the panel causes focus to transfer to the desktop and the menu disappears!

I notice 4.3 has been backported to Kubuntu 9.04 (Intrepid). I'll try it.

Orange declares mobile broadband price war

Not news

Three offered its existing customers 1GB (i.e. twice what Orange is offering) for £5 (before VAT reduction) a month, 18-month contract and free dongle, MORE THAN A YEAR AGO. Please don't just regurgitate press releases without doing some research. (I have no affiliation with any provider, by the way.)