Posts by SteveB

BBC labels child 'recovering alcoholic' in tech slip-up

The Salford operation uses a piece of kit called Mosart which is a lot more automated than the systems they had at Oxford Road. So I think it's quite plausible that if somebody has screwed up and put the wrong caption reference into the running order that getting it off the screen quickly will be awkward to do.

97% of Three's network traffic is data

Bait and Switch

It's a shame therefore that Three is the only major network not offering data bundles for overseas roaming (see http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/travel/cheap-data-roaming for details of every other network's offerings). So you get used to using data all the time at home and land a big bill when you're on holiday.

Bait and Switch tactics, anyone?

Ex-PM blocked Steve Jobs knighthood

Honorary

It would be an honorary knighthood - much like Bob Geldof's. As he's Irish he isn't officially Sir Bob, although everyone refers to him as such.

ISTR Wogan got dual nationality so that his knighthood was considered proper rather than honorary.

Sheffielders must retune their Freeview boxes tomorrow

Longer wait

Not just a wait for HD boxes I'm afraid. They're moving the BBC mux at Sheffield so that they can use the same (or an adjacent) frequency at Emley Moor, the main station of which Sheffield (aka Crosspool) is a relay to launch the HD service early (before DSO).

If your aerial points at Sheffield, you won't be getting HD until 2011 when Emley and its relays go through Digital Switchover and the muxes move to their final frequencies.

Password reset questions dead easy to guess

Father's First Name

I had one of these sites ask for "Father's First Name" as a mandatory security question. With a 6 character minimum.

Shame he's called John (or at least was for the purposes of that site)

Granada to start losing analog telly tomorrow

@Paw Bokenfohr

It's taking a while because things have to be done in a particular order because of the way frequencies are reused in different areas, so to avoid interference, and because many transmitter sites have required considerable re-engineering, including replacing the masts at many.

With the analogue services they could drop the power when they needed to do work on the mast. People further away from it got a reduced signal which may have been ghosty or had interference. In digital they'd get nothing. So many tx sites have received a second high power transmitting aerial, designed so that engineers can safely climb through it to get to the main aerial higher up the mast. This extra weight has meant the original masts weren't sufficient at many sites.

New police crime-mapping system crashes on first outing

Bandwidth

You can have all the bandwidth in the world and it won't help if your database server isn't up to the job of supporting sufficient simultaneous queries to serve the site to a large number of users.

Windows 7: Microsoft's three missed opportunities

@Russ - Run box

Does Windows Key + R still work?

Prof develops football-match scheduling software

Christmas period

Erm... why not deliberately put the local derbies during the Christmas period so that the reduced public transport is less of an issue?

Woz goes Strictly dancing

Reality Check

"Dancing With The Stars is an ABC reality show"

No, it isn't. It is a talent show based on a knockout format. I really wish journos would get the distinction - the only talent show of this nature that was also a reality show was Fame Academy which had Big Brother elements with the contestants living under the cameras 24/7.

X Factor, Pop Idol, American Idol, Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing on Ice, Britain's Got Talent - none of these are Reality Shows, they merely use the public vote knockout format that is also used by reality shows.

Free software campaigners stonewalled at BBC

umm yeah

I'd be a lot more sympathetic to the conspiracy theories about Microsoft pulling the strings at the beeb if iPlayer actually worked in Vista. Surely if Bill was in charge he'd have made sure that was sorted before it was released?