NetPlay this morning acquired a licence to broadcast on Freeview so from the 8th of January adding another gambling orientated channel to the EPG so you can gamble away to your hearts content 24 hours a day.
I do have to ask the people who decide which companies are given transmit ion licences if another gambling (sorry, I really intended to write “interactive gaming”) channel is really needed or is for the good of society? I’m aware that such thoughts are of little concern to such people but Freeview is a much more available platform as anyone can receive it very inexpensively and so it should be treated, in my opinion at least, with a bit more thought rather than just concern for the bottom line.
It has emerged these past few days that we here on this little island are all behind a wall, a firewall that is censoring the Internet. I often find some of the headlines the Daily Mail prints a little hard to believe, the other week they had “POLICE STATE BRITAIN” splashed over their front page in relation to the arrest of the Damian Green the Conservative MP but when things like this begin to come to light it all becomes that little bit more believable, not to mention frightening.
This instance however is seems perfectly innocent, the discovery that UK Internet users whilom use the “big six” to get on-line are being given generic or hardly informative error messages when trying to access the Wikipedia entry regarding the German heavy metal band Scorpions’ album Virgin Killer released in 1976. The problem being that the original album cover has a picture of a naked pre-pubescent girl which has been deemed inappropriate by the Internet Watch Foundation which monitors and provides data on among many things illegal material such as child pornography.
Now, I can understand that the censorship of the Internet in this regard is a good thing unless that is you believe in the absolute freedom of speech in which case you’re already pretty much fucked living in the UK anyway however, the fact that this censorship is occurring hasn’t been made public and the fact that this album cover can be found all over the Internet including Amazon.co.uk and it hasn’t been censored begs the question, what else are they censoring and why are they only censoring Wikipedia? if you’re going to do a job do it properly and not some half arsed effort and be open and transparent about what you’re doing – the days of the Stasi inspired civil surveillance are over aren’t they?
Car makers woes never seem to cease these days, with the news that new car sales have dropped in the UK by almost 40% compared to last month and the state of the business pretty dark for the immediate future it comes as little surprise to see car makers making cut backs, factory production levels cut, jobs cut, prices cut… etc.
But HONDA have gone that little step further and quit F1 citing the economic situationfor doing so but I have my doubts, sure F1 needs to make some cut backs but HONDA as a car manufacturer isn’t in too bad a situation, unlike the US manufactures which are in their own little world of mostly self-inflicted torment, HONDA generally produces reliable and fuel efficient cars, the sort of cars which are supposedlystill in demand by those who can afford them without resorting to credit but I guess 40% is still a big hit to take.
HONDA are hardly broke though, it’s not that they couldn’t affort F1 anymore but in my personal opionion they couldn’t afford to go though another season of dismal performances and worst of worsts having their backsides kicked by their arch domestic rivals Toyota which actually had quite a good 2008 in F1.
What will happen to all the staff and the drivers is up for debate, the team will continue to function until the end of the month by which time a buyer will hopefully have been found so the team may compete in ‘09.
A bit of a rant this evening and I’ll keep it short but I’m watching BBC News 24 and I just can’t believe this celebrity dross is being considered as “news” along side stories such as the number of unemployed in the United Kingdom tops 1,7 million, the highest it’s been since the Conservatives proper fucked the country up in the 1980’s and is expected to rise to 2 million by Christmas not to mention how many local authorities in England have lost millions of pounds of council tax payers money in Icelandic banks and are having to seize Icelandic assets here in the UK to try to recover some of the cash.
Is just a little prospective too much to ask?
When I read the other morning that Spore had attained the undesirable title (from a publisher/developer prospective) as the most pirated game ever it was somewhat of a surprise, the game hasn’t been around for too long and isn’t this thing just a novelty so why on earth would over 800,000 people download a 3,4 GB torrent.
Screen snip taken of the Pirate Bays Top 100 page on Sunday evening…
Surely publishers have by now understood that DRM just isn’t acceptable, I’m not going to go into it all as frankly the debate has been done to death all over the internets but IMO, DRM doesn’t prevent piracy whatsoever and further more it’s solely an anti-consumer technology needlessly punishing legitimate customers and to that end, EA Games have got what they deserve by imposing absurd restrictions on their customers. What ever happened to the phrase, “the customer is always right” anyway?
Many of the Symbian blogs which I check out everyday in Google Reader have been reporting widely (here, here, here, here, here and here) that Apple are developing a version of iTunes for Symbian 60.
Here are some rudimentary “screenshots” of the software in question…
However, I like many others commenting on these blog posts, call bullshit on this rumour. There is just no justification for Apple to ever a) develop what is without doubt a “killer app” for S60, one of the biggest rivals to the iPhone in the smartphone market and b) open up it’s DRM for anyone again after the farce with Motorolla a few years back with the ROKR.
Apple allegedly doesn’t make much money on the iTunes Music Store, rather it uses the iTMS to sell iPods which is where they can make good money, the iPod is the (aside from the iPhone and Apple TV) only device able to play back Apple’s FairPlay DRM protected files so it makes zero sense for Apple to open up it’s DRM to a rival device manufacturers such as Nokia.
No one seems to be able to product evidence of this software being in development other than gossip from a friend of a friend who knows someone who is related to someone who they only see at Christmas who happens to work for Apple in some way, the lack of evidence though is hardly surprising knowing how secretive Apple are regarding their product developments but really, don’t expect to see iTunes available on S60 powered devices. Ever.
If Microsoft really do have to wonder why so many people have taken the popular idea that Windows Vista is a pile of steaming s***e as being nothing but the absolute truth then this post, or rather screen snip should help.
How can Windows possibly have a new device installed when it doesn’t even know what it is?!
Google have released their own web browser oddly named Chrome, much to many peoples surprise including my own hence why I’m writing two browser related posts in just a week. Even more of a surprise is just how good the browser is although it isn’t perfect but then this is again (as with Internet Explorer 8) a very early beta.
First the positives though, Google have borrowed a few features from other browsers for instance it has Opera’s ‘speed dial‘ for accessing your most visited sites, it takes the highlighting of the domain URL in the address bar from Internet Explorer 8 and takes Safari’s absolute simplicity to use – which is not all that Chrome has in common with Safari as it uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari uses resulting is quite spectacular rendering speeds. Google Chrome is not only measurably faster than any other web browser I’ve personally used to date and I honestly thought it’d be a while before anything beat Opera 9.5 but there we go.
Another cool feature is the ‘create application’ option, say you’re in Google Mail, you can create a shortcut to your desktop, quick launch and start menu if you so choose which will open a new window running Google Mail exclusively without all the usual Chrome UI making it appear to be a stand alone application.
It’s not all good though, Chrome is also notably a resource hog, a quick spy on Task Manager shows Chrome munching it’s way though 320MB of RAM for only three tabs, not even IE mauls that much. Visiting sites which utilise Flash or Adobe PDF’s is a bit of a gamble as it more often than not results in the browser crashing to it’s death as pictured below.
Again though, as I said about Internet Explorer 8 this is a BETA browser, i.e. work in progress i.e. an unfinished product so use with care. But really, Google could be on to something here, given some refinement this could be craved out to be simply be best web browser available… for Windows anyway.
This week Microsoft released the second beta version of the forth coming release of Internet Explorer 8. I don’t need to say much here but Internet Explorer has taken somewhat of a battering over the past few years and mostly deserving so with numerous security issues, lack of support for standards and generally being a piece of crap which Microsoft had bonded into the very fabric of Windows XP and forthwith making it almost impossible to remove.
But all that aside, after using IE8 for a few days I have to say that it’s shaping up nicely and I’m quite impressed, I have little idea what web developers make of it as yet since IE6 made most of them go insane and IE7 was little better but IE8 is supposedly more standards compliant… or so Microsoft says.
What I like about IE8 is the UI, it blends into Windows Vista beautifully unlike Firefox 3, the search function now suggests search terms if you use search engines such as Google much like it does with Firefox, the new ‘slices‘ feature is a novelty, I quite like the eBay implementation of a ’slice’ to keep an eye on an auction but I wonder what benefit it offers over RSS which incidentally IE8 handles much better than IE7 does, having a lot of feeds which update automatically often resulted in IE7 grinding to a halt, IE8 appears to handle the updating of 100+ feeds without any particularly notable performance degradation.
The ‘accelerators’ are also pretty handy but they’re all mostly utilising Microsoft products, ie.. Mail with Windows Live etc, the translation function is quite useful although it has no support for Polish as yet. When IE8 is actually rolled out to everyone I can imagine Google or Yahoo! writing an add-ons which will amend this features to use their services.
Anyway, if you’re not concerned about using unfinished applications you can download the beta at the Internet Explorer website, over and all though, IE8 is looking to be much more of an equal (in terms of functionality) competitor to Firefox than what Mozilla have had to deal with in the past.
