A New Digital Age?

...not if Ofcom can help it. BBC News article here.

The BBC, usually a slow lumbering hulk encumbassing all the usual big company traits of doing things last, doing things slower and at a high cost is trying to push the boundaries of television.

The BBC plans to offer TV programs on-demand, via broadband. This would be a revolutionary service, available nowhere else, that must have taken some balls to push through an organisation the size of the BBC; let alone changing attitudes and cultures within such a large organisation - problems which, should be noted, are encumbant in any large organisation, and usually prevent any progress.

The licence fee payer is about to get what it pays for. Innovation, open broadcasting, high availability, and new programs.

Sounds brilliant. Just what you want for your cash. Not only does this increase the BBCs availability, it will increase the takeup of Broadband network connections, and in the long run can lead to more diversity, as programs could be made on a download only basis.

You'd think there would be widespread support for innovation.

Not from Ofcom. There too woried about the other, non innovating companies producing DVDs et. al. Welcome to the 21st Century. Stop holding us back just when one organisation is striving for change.

There are also bound to be people complaining living in rural areas. Well, no-one forces you to be there. You want loss making services as though there your right. Well, there not. You want a high quality public service, live in the city. No-one forces you into isolation, you choose isolation and the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for it. Period.

Welcome to the 21st Centruy people. Catch up with the rest of us.

Symantec on Apples iPhone

Today I read that Symantec are saying that locking out competitors from Apple's iPhone is the key to keeping it secure (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/?news/news_story.php?id=102053).

Interestingly, this is the same firm that has publically castigated Microsoft for locking competitors out of it's new Vista operating system's kernel.

"If Microsoft wants to make Vista more secure, it should provide equal access to the platform that its own developers have to ensure that security vendors can continue to innovate on the platform, and to ensure that consumers and OEMs can continue to choose the best security solutions for the platform." (Symantec Security Response 2006/08 Weblog)

Perhaps this is due to Symantec not producing software protecting phones, and therefore not having to watch there business dissapearing before there very eyes?

We can but speculate.

$100 laptop - we can have one!

Top stuff! We can buy one when they go on sale! J (well, 2 and one goes to Africa or something, but $200 seems pretty good to me for working on the train with no battery problems!)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6246989.stm

and

http://www.laptop.org/faq.en_US.html

One slight problem with the spec tho…

“The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports.”

Not sure how long they will last?!?!?

Last time I knew, flash memory gets unlimited reads but limited writes, and hence we still have HDDs in normal pcs as there no good for operating systems due to the constant writing…??? i.e. after a few million writes they die, which is ok on your pen drive, but no good for the OS that likes disk activity (swap file, config files, Linux equivalent of the registry etc???).

If it doesn’t then goodbye hdd and I’ll use a ide to flash converter with 0ms access times…???

What would Vista do?

Given the thoughts of the previous post, I can't resist asking the question...

If XP hiccups like the screenshot of one of my pc's having a fun moment due to DEP (Data Execution Prevention) it just restarts whatever bit of it just broke, what would Vista do?


Answers on a post card please!

Cheers

Ian