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Sky Snooze?

Now Virgin is about to take Sky to court about the loss of TV channels and the price Sky is charging Virgin to show its channels, its worth noting that this wasn't a problem until Sir Brnason took over. I've had years of trouble free viewing and high speed broadband with Telewest. Within weeks of Branson taking over I've lost TV channels and had the price put up on Broadband. Nice. The Virgin support desk (when my broadband connection failed for the first time in months and months) redirected me round the same department!

One has to suspect that its Bransons over brash and casual approach ('Can I call you Ian?' instead of the old 'Hello Mr Brandshaw') in both support and mailings that have caused the problems.

Icidientally, Virgin are using the fact that 70% of subscription viewers are with Sky as a reason for the challenge, I suspect the problem is more the amount of cable coverage in the UK rather than Sky being better.

Someone is bound to point out that London is cabled and use that to say that 50% (or whatever it is) of the country is cabled by head of population or something, but having lived in London most people are 'transient' (i.e. moving around the capital rather than living in one place) and the vast majority are in rented accommodation (where the landlords won't let you have cable).

I think the problem is more the new owners rather than Sky changing is policies.

BBC - Not a fan of Gaming?

The BBC's latest article on there 'blogger' style technology pages left me amused. Defending itself over the issue of whether it 'gets' gaming I couldn't help but realise something...

Does it 'get' web design? The BBC blogger pages must be the most un-imaginative and dull on the net (see here for an example).

Forget whether it 'gets' gaming, with its state-of-the-art graphics, slick interfaces and high-def video, isn't even a question that needs asking... the BBC doesn't even do basic web design; so how can it understand the next generation of the world?

Would you trust your data to an unknown?

With Googles launch of there paid-for 'office' suite of web based applications the future looks rosy for online collaboration and multi-user documents.

Google aren't the only people offering this, but it does raise the question - would you trust your business documents, secrets, data and future business streams to cyberspace?

Essentially your trusting your entire business livelyhood to a 3rd party, of which you know nothing about how the data is stored, where its stored, how its backed-up, how it can be recovered and who's looking at it.

Since the US government requested search logs from providers, how long before they request all your business documents, as is? I assume they can anyway, but if you provide them you can give context, a 3rd party can't.

Not only is your data in an unknown place, if, in the unlikely even Google goes bust, where does that leave you? Where's your data?

Microsoft also offer (or are planning to offer) similar services, and I'm sure Yahoo et. al. will follow. Your data, in the hands of people aiming to index the worlds data for online search by all? Surely its only a matter of time... by fair means or foul

What if they get hacked or a vindicitve employee leaves? Your business could be all over the internet for all.

So, do you spend a few hunded pounds on your business and setup a secure remote access server (sFTP), real-time collaboration (sharepoint, Wildfire IM, etc.), and a NAS RAID drive, or send your business data into the unknown, to be looked after no-one you know, backed-up using methods unknown, held on computers you'll never see, trusted to a 3rd party that may go bust one day, or spend a couple of hunded pounds and ask the geek in your company to sort it?

I know what I'm doing.

Web Hosts & Terms of Service

I was having a poke around at various hosting companies today to see what was on offer, and having a look through there 'terms of service'.

Although I've not found a better host than the one I'm with, the terms of service I found at Easy Internet Solutions were quite remarkable. Under the heading 'Direct Violation Examples' was "Running of software than listens on any TCP/UDP port".

Does that not pose a slight problem for a web host not allowing IIS/Apache or any other web service to run on there servers?

For the curious it's near the end there AUP (or was on 3rd Feb, 2007).