20 things you may not know • Gated Logic • nevali.net

Tuesday September 4th, 2007

  1. Ryanair is both Aer Lingus’ biggest competitor and biggest shareholder
  2. Ford is desperately trying to sell Jaguar
  3. The Qatar Investment Authority, with assets worth around $50bn, is trying to buy Sainsbury’s
  4. The incompetent US Attorney General who sacked nine federal prosecutors for very little in the way of good reason, Alberto Gonzales, has finally resigned to a collective sigh of relief. The only person to say anything nice about him in his departure was George W. Bush, who mistakenly believes Gonzales had a “good name” to be dragged through the mud.
  5. Also in the US, Apple and NBC are having a fight. NBC, responsible for supplying The Office (US) and Battlestar Galactica to the iTunes Store, isn’t happy with Apple capping its prices, and wants more “flexibility”. NBC also claimed that Apple should do more to prevent piracy but failed to elaborate with any suggestions. See also an amusing translation into English of NBC’s response to Apple’s press release.
  6. Red Sweater Software released MarsEdit 2, with a revamped user interface and plenty of new features.
  7. Despite Microsoft’s attempts at disrupting an ordinarily-mundane voting process, the International Standards Organisation’s members have voted “No” overall with regards to fast-tracking the flawed “Open Office XML” format as an international standard. The ISO previously approved the Open Document Format—another XML-based format—as international standard ISO/IEC 26300, which Microsoft considers a competitor to OOXML (despite being a member of OASIS, the organisation with stewardship over ODF).
  8. Microsoft have released patches for a vulnerability in Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server which could allow virtual machines to execute arbitrary code on the host computer.
  9. Sun is still trying to persuade people that they should abandon Linux and put the full force of the community behind OpenSolaris, despite the two operating systems having different development process and appealing to different groups of people.
  10. Eudora released the first beta of Penelope, the MUA destined to be the replacement for the fast-ageing Eudora line of e-mail clients. Penelope is based on Mozilla Thunderbird, and Eudora has stated that competition with Thunderbird is not their intention.
  11. Opera Software has released an alpha test build of the next version of its flagship desktop browser, which will be Opera 9.5.
  12. Jeremy Paxman gave a 20,000-word lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, in which he laid down some serious challenges to the television industry. Lisa Opie, Managing Director of Content at Five, demonstrated that she completely fails to understand the BBC by commenting His observations […] were accurate—it is absurd that the organsation appears to put as much effort and energy into the means of delivery as it does the content it’s delivering. Perhaps this goes to explain why a large number of households are still unable to receive Five transmissions.
  13. Also in Edinburgh, head of Sky News John Ryley said he would be prepared to air live footage of a hostage situation, even if it inadvertently contributed to the death of a hostage.
  14. Many won’t be disappointed to learn that Channel Four will not be airing Celebrity Big Brother in 2008.
  15. Video search engine Blinkx has announced a series of partnerships with “specialist” TV channels that are somehow still in business, despite offering content that a tiny fraction of the TV-watching population wants to see once every six months or so.
  16. After a ten year investigation, a Belgian prosecutor has recommended that the Church of Scientology stand trial for fraud and extortion.
  17. The Virgin Pendolino rail crash in February was caused by faulty points. Network Rail’s supervisors failed to make the connection between a points inspector clocking off early and a set of points not being inspected until after the train derailed killing an 84-year-old woman and injuring 22 other people.
  18. Meanwhile, two rail workers were injured after a derailment in a tunnel near the SECC on Monday.
  19. After hitting 320kph on British railway tracks, Eurostar has reduced the London–Paris rail journey time by 20 minutes, to 2 hours 15 minutes.
  20. Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge, has discovered that the OUP is selling—for £25—his research paper on its site, in violation of the Creative Commons license he released it under, and is demanding an end to the abuse of copyright and opposition to open access by publishers of scientific research.