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Viacom = Big Evil, Judge = Insane

Published
by
Jack
on July 4, 2008
in Blog and Technology
. 0 Comments

Fair enough Viacom is going after money from its interlectual property or however they want to justify it but in the long run they have damaged themselves beyond repair. 

Firstly, they image wasn’t all that great, and they completely miss the point of the internet. For example, by allowing clips to be uploaded of ‘their’ material they generate more hype and buzz and most importantly more viewers, yet again late to the party reaction. Insert foot into mouth and take the people to court.

Secondly, they have forced Google’s hand, by releasing the data on what IPs and therefore people have viewed on Youtube to Viacom, this is illegal at least in the UK, under the data protection act. It sets a very scary president one that brings us very close to the Orwelian 1984 set up. I wish somebody takes this up and fights back, the days when the big companies could dictate what happens in the world should be over, seemingly not.

eBay Selling Fakes - No it couldn’t possibly be…

Published
by
Jack
on June 30, 2008
in Blog and Technology
. 0 Comments

The online auction site has been ordered to pay compensation by a judge in Paris for allowing users to trade counterfeit items

Via Times Online

Louis Vuitton sues eBay, for selling ‘luxury’ fakes. First question what took so long, and what makes them think they have any possibility of winning or even settling the lawsuit.

I think its laughable that companies still think they can get away with such stupid lawsuits, the bottom line is the profits can’t be all that good, on their end.

How not to survive the onslaught of WWDC.

Published
by
Jack
on June 9, 2008
in Blog and Technology
. 2 Comments

Twitter has come under attack for being a great service that has a poor record of up time Link1 - TechCrunch, Link 2 - TechCrunch. Well news on the street is Twitter survived the several thousand posts it recieved during WWDC, including my own meager posts. But at what cost.

I laughingly joked that the next feature for twitter to disable to ensure it stayed up, was to turn off twittering. In reality it was nearly at that point the following features were cut for the duration of the Keynote:

 

  • @ Replies
  • Everyone Tab
  • Archive Tab
  • Public Timeline
  • Limit number of API requests from 30 Request Per Hour to 10
  • Updates by SMS
  • User Deletion and Restoration 
It seems to me that the vast majority of the functionality of twitter was culled to ensure uptime, the community was just lobotomised with no thought. I applaud twitter for staying online, but it shouldn’t have cost the features that make Twitter, Twitter and not just some meta-blogging platform.
Twitter has got plenty of issues with scaling, if anything WWDC has proved that twitter cannot scale with demand. To use a analogy, a TV station does not cut the commentary of a football match because the system cannot cope with the demand, this is essentially what Twitter did to the community.
It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up! Only one unexpected disruption occured and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service distruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single distruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%
I love Twitter, and despite the fact I don’t really get it yet. I don’t want to see it disappear because it couldn’t handle its popularity.

 

WWDC Roundup - iPhone 3G & Mobile Me

Published
by
Jack
on June 9, 2008
in Apple, Interesting and Technology
. 0 Comments

WWDC was a bit of a let down, iphone alleys’ coverage by ustream however was fantastic. I was expecting more information and more products, not a grueling 45mins of demo’s of apps we cant use for a month, not quite the usual Apple finesse we have come to appreciate.

One important thing to note was Steve Job’s committed to pricing the new 8gb iPhone at no more that $199US in all 70 countries the iPhone 3g will be sold in by the end of the year. I hope this is the signal of a much bigger push by Apple to price equivalently in all countries. That said they create products people will gladly pay for in some cases even twice such as myself who will be upgrading come July 11th once again.

Surprisingly the announcement of OS X 10.6 dubbed Snow Leopard was pushed from the forefront of the announcement, giving credence to the fact it will not be a stability release just a fit and polish release to keep ahead of the competition. Also .mac will be no longer and be replaced by mobile me, which has to be an improvement of the aging .mac name and technology.

It was a bit of a let down in the fact that Steve had very little stage time, some reported as usually steve looked ill.

Shock Horror - There was no one more thing.

Once your lucky, Twice your stupid.

Published
by
Jack
on June 5, 2008
in Blog and Technology
. 0 Comments

BBC1 will be web-streamed live through BBC.co.uk as of next year, according to the broadcaster’s director general Mark Thompson.

BBC1 is internet bound

Hoping to capitalise on its impressive iPlayer service the Beeb has decided why not go back to the 90’s and try something they know doesn’t work.

People simply do not want to watch TV in a linear sense anymore, the only content thats worth streaming are sports events, I there isn’t much chance of that happening soon.

The BBC needs to work on iPlayer and getting the BBC online identity sorted out, its abit of a mish mash at the moment. With iPlayer the BBC struck gold and unless they keep pushing they will become a follower not a leader. I think the best idea would be to can live streaming, and just make iPlayer better they would be forgiven for that.

Apple No Go @ Expos

Published
by
Jack
on June 4, 2008
in Apple, Technology, aside and digest
. 0 Comments

Macworld is reporting that Apple will not attend the Apple Expo in France this year. 

Apple: We are attending fewer trade shows each year

My question is, does anybody really think Apple need to attend every expo. They generate more than enough publicity for any company without saying anything.

Unconfirmed List for next week WWDC

  • iPhone 2 & All the trimmings
  • New macs of any description
  • Mac OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard

iTunes Movies - An Inconvenient Truth

Published
by
Jack
on June 4, 2008
in Apple, Blog and Technology
. 0 Comments


It was less then 30 minutes after the official word that iTunes was selling films in the UK store, before I was watching Batman Begins. But is the convenience coming at too high a cost?

In the UK we have become used getting ripped off around every corner, it stinks but we are British so we put up with it. My problem is that some of the films now available particularly Al Gores documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” £10.99 At this point the noveltywore off, I can have this shipped to me from amazon £6.22 in less than two days.

I aren’t apposed to paying £6.99 for a film, but £10.99 for a film that you can buy in the shops for less than £7 I think its pushing it. Us Brits whilst being hard done by after getting the long of the stick for so many years we have all become cynics, and easily see where profiteering is taking place. We saw it with the iPhone, which didn’t do anywhere near as well as planned (see here) We also see it with practically every computer or gadget, when you get nearly 2$US to £1GBP and the prices of things are the same in dollars as pounds you know there is something wrong.

Unless iTunes get more content up in the store and stop stupid pricing, they may just take off. Who am I kidding it will take off whatever apple do, its what their good at. I would like to think that Apple at least get some semblance of order in pricing and price match with the High Street.

How I became Inspector Gadget.

Published
by
Jack
on May 28, 2008
in Apple, Blog, Computing, Ideas, Microsoft and Technology
. 0 Comments

There are certain points in your life where you can’t help but look back on the preceding years. Officially I have now left college on study leave, until 20 June, which is my last day ever. So how the hell did I end up at this point.

My first exposure to a computer was a windows 3.1 machine in 1995, it was god awful but I was only five and young kids and technology don’t really get on. It was a good few years before I got a computer of my own, I ended up with a Pentium 1 MX running Windows 95, which didn’t last long. I couldn’t play any games on it, and it was stable as a long pole with a plate on it. So inevetably it was upgraded to a machine running Windows 98 Pentium 2, with a decent graphics card and MPEG decoder card.

 

Its probably at that point that the bug really caught me, from then on in I had a slew of applications and experiments going on the poor computer, which I still have under my desk. Three computers later and I made the big switch to Mac, something which I haven’t regretted, and still manage to keep up with windows excluding Vista which is almost as bad as 3.1. I also managed to pick up Ruby on Rails and a bit of PHP along the way, and ashamed as I am to say it Visual Basic.

People always ask me how I know how computers work. The simple answer is I have been tinkering with them for far too long. Every computer I have owned has been broken replaced upgraded and attacked by me, leading me to come across practically every common error you can get. Its sad to say but I can usually diagnose a hardware fault before the BIOS has finished its self test at boot up, and a software problem by hitting less then 10 commands.

The trend over the last few years is people are using technology every waking moment, but very few know how the stuff works. I love knowing how it works, and couldn’t really care less about using it. I will strip things down take them to bits, rebuild them, and then maybe use them. Because of this I have a collection of gadgets and gizmos that few other people my age can boast. It also means, that college work can sometimes come a distant second to a new gadget or blog post.

I don’t procrastinate as such, I just love technology to distraction. Wait a minute that is technically procrastinating. I don’t know what career I may choose, convergent technologies mean that practically any field is open to me.

Best bit is I know there will never be a boring job, technology is getting more and more exciting the closer we get to the point on the curve we drop off.  

The problem with IT - More money Syndrome

Published
by
Jack
on May 6, 2008
in Blog, Me, Noteworthy and Technology
. 0 Comments

The more and more I deal with companies and managing networks and working with the wonderful world of windows server, the more and more I realise how poor many companies deal with IT.

Q: “What is the problem?”
A: “I don’t really know, but we can solve it if we buy a new X “

Here in lies the problem, there a number of companies that get this crap answer. There is very rarely a person in the company who will take responsibility and make sure their current system works properly before trying new things or upgrading, at the end of the day new hardware is meant to be better right?. Small to medium businesses have less of a problem with this because the amount spent on IT directly effects there bottom line, and don’t have deep pockets for IT to begin with.

The problem becomes even more pronounced when you get to a school or college. There are obvious complexities with these system your dealing with a couple of hundred computers and about 10 times as many users, but when anything goes wrong more money ‘must’ be spent to solve the problem. Inevitably the systems breakdown within a couple of weeks or even days, because the real problem wasn’t tackled or even attempted to find a fix.

For the average user this is a minor or major frustration depending on which way you spin it, but for anybody interested or working in tech like me, its like having burnt sticks buried into the back of my eyes. It can’t be too difficult to get it set up right in the first place, I like buying new tech as much as the next man (probably even more) but you have to realise somewhere along the line what you are proposing is costing someone a shed load of money and that money could be used better elsewhere, especially in schools.

–Rant Over–

I almost get Twitter, I think.

Published
by
Jack
on May 6, 2008
in Blog and Technology
. 0 Comments

OK, so I will be the first to admit I am quite the geek but I didn’t really get twitter. Fair enough I have had an account but it wasn’t until last night that the penny finally dropped.

So I have twitter in my AIM account, but have never really done anything with it. “track iron man” the 3 words that brought about the revelation that made twitter make sense to me.

Within seconds I had 30 messages, all relating to our favorite subject Iron Man. Not content with just one subject I added a couple more, and then shut down AIM. Unfortunately for my iphone it was ill equipped to deal with that many messages in one go, so mobile messaging is now disabled. I think twitter is one of those weird things you come across that you have to have being using it for a couple of weeks, before you actually get it. 

Heres to Twitter!!

Update:
Its one of those things that snowballs, I don’t think I post that much but the information I get out of twitter is invaluable. Like:

Stay until the end of Iron Man, there’s an extra scene.

Also its nice to just be able to post, that witty one liner you just came up with ;-).

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