Tumbled Logic

Karsten Manufacturing Corporation

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:52:28 +0100

Trademark details for “PING”, bearing a “First use” date of 2008:

IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Computer software, namely, file sharing software; communications software for electronically exchanging data, and graphics accessible via a computer network; computer software and hardware for processing images, graphics, audio, video, and text; all of the foregoing marketed to consumers and golf retailers; Downloadable video recordings featuring sports and sports instructions, the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers; Interactive video game programs, the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers; Computer software for wireless content delivery, the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers. FIRST USE: 20081103. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20081103

(From this one)

IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Computer services, namely, providing search platforms to allow users to request content from and receive content to a mobile device or a computer; Providing user-defined generated content and content of others automatically selected and customized based on the known or estimated geographical location of a user; all of the foregoing marketed to consumers and consumer retailers. FIRST USE: 20080530. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20080530

(From this one)

Cripes.

Hat tip to Dj Walker-Morgan

While I think about it...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:37:57 +0100

Why the chuff did Apple license the “Ping” trademark from the clothing manufacturer? The use of the term “Ping” in computer networking (and, as a follow-on, social networking) is as old as the hills. So much so that MBA-laden salesdroids use it with such disturbing incongruent regularity that many of us have an instinctive nervous twitch encountering the word whenever it’s used to refer to people (rather than devices) communicating.

The Apple Event

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:27:34 +0100

Nothing earth-shattering here. A few good, a few bad, and definitely some uglies.

iPod touch

Camera is finally here, but is rubbish. Other aspects are nice, but predictable. Shame it persists with this curvy-backed nonsense, though.

iPod shuffle

Screams of “Okay, we screwed up”. Fair play.

iPod nano

Dinky. If anything’s going to kill the Shuffle, this will be it.

iTunes

That icon is horrible.
Somebody on Twitter said (apologies, can’t find original tweet to link) something along the lines of: “If you’re going to break UI conventions, you’d better do something stellar”. This is true here. defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1
It’s not iTunes X

iTunes Ping

The idea of sharing musical taste and consumption info across your social network is not a bad idea, nor is it a new one. Last.fm is clearly the key example of this, but Spotify also does it. Recommending gigs and other artists based on the aggregated information (which is pretty much just an extension to Genius) is also not a bad idea.

Building a completely new social network to do it is bonkers. It’s not even a fallback for those people who have neither {Twitter,Facebook} accounts. Apparently Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to” (according to Jobs, via word of mouth) — yet Facebook’s terms are more or less fine for everybody else, including Spotify and the BBC? Something smells fishy here. And, really, no OAuth-based Twitter integration? The iTunes Store is alrightly lightly-integrated with both Twitter and Facebook, so not supporting these two seems a little strange.

iOS 4.1

Meh. The bugfixes are the only really interesting thing here.

iOS 4.2

This is where it gets interesting, though “November” is now Autumn, apparently. This is the long-awaited unified iOS supporting iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Folders, multitasking and IPv6 are pretty high on my list of “I wish the iPad would hurry up and get these” list. Printing is a big deal. I don’t doubt that there’ll be more stuff.

Apple TV

Nothing huge here. Certainly not the device certain people were predicting. While it does run iOS — apparently — this is an implementation detail (easiest way to support the A4; porting Tiger to ARM would be No Fun). Still called the Apple TV (no shocker there). On the plus side, it’s a quarter of the size of the old model, has fewer ports, and I suspect runs cooler. Oh, and it’s a fair bit cheaper.

The loss of an internal disk makes sense: streaming (rather than syncing) from iTunes libraries has always worked fairly well on the Apple TV, provided your network wasn’t flaky. 802.11n is a lot more prevalent now than when the original or revised models were released, and it hasn’t lost wired Ethernet.

Even so, if price wasn’t the key factor preventing you from getting one, you’re unlikely to be blown away by one now (unless you live in the US and want a device for Netflix streaming).

Speaking personally, as somebody who does have an Apple TV which sees regular use, the price change has taken my plan of moving the current one into the living room so that the kids can use it in there and getting a new one for the bedroom from “would like to do” to “will probably do”. However it’s worth stressing that we have a vast library of content that the Apple TV can play out of the box already, having spent some considerable time over the past couple of years ripping our entire DVD collection to H.264+AAC MP4s.

Hardware-wise, it essentially does nothing that the old one doesn’t do, and the only significant software change for the time being is Netflix. If you live in the US. Still no 1080p (I suspect that’d be a push on the A4, not to mention streaming bandwidth and the lack of content on the iTunes Store, but even so). Still very definitely a hobby, albeit a cheaper one.

I still think scope for apps on the Apple TV is limited: there’s games, but they’ll need a control mechanism of some kind (conversations at the weekend headed towards a multitouch Wiimote-style device), and there’s VoD. Video on Demand certainly has a market, but I’d much rather there was a sensible way for the device to do that by itself.

From BBC News: The High Court in London refused to grant the BBC an injunction blocking the...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:51:20 +0100

From BBC News:

The High Court in London refused to grant the BBC an injunction blocking the publication by HarperCollins of an autobiography that unmasks the character on the BBC Two show.

The BBC argued that the planned book - an autobiography of former Formula Three driver Ben Collins - would breach confidentiality obligations.

A question that has cropped up in conversation this evening is “Why is the BBC’s Senior...

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:25:21 +0100

A question that has cropped up in conversation this evening is “Why is the BBC’s Senior Technologist, Internet Standards job important?”.

Well, I think that’s a question that cropped up. There was some frivolity and possibly talking at cross-purposes. Such is life where each part of an exchange is compressed to one hundred and forty characters.

Even so. Here goes. This is the longish answer.

The BBC exists because of standards. Not just Internet standards, of course. While broadcasting standards haven’t always been identical the world over (to a certain extent because electricity standards haven’t been the world over), they have all shared the common properties of being non-discrimatory as much as possible. Who didn’t build a radio when they were growing up?

Okay, who out of the geeks and the engineers didn’t build a radio when they were growing up? I suspect there were periods in days gone by when significant chunks of the BBC’s listeners were counted amongst its audience solely on the basis of self-built radios (I have no idea if this still applies to the World Service listenership; it wouldn’t surprise me if it did).

Anyway, the point is: fundamental to public-service broadcasting is the principle of being indiscriminate. This isn’t some airy-fairy piece of doctrine. Rather, it’s the reason for the BBC’s existence, and sits shoulder-to-shoulder with the BBC’s independence from meddling governments.

To put it another way, the BBC has a duty to approach the public with open arms. It’s not feasible to cater to everybody’s individual requirements one-by-one. Conversely, the BBC can’t opt for a single manufacturer (or cartel) and require anybody who wants to tune in to buy their equipment: as the BBC is a publicly-funded broadcaster, it amounts to state aid for the manufacturer in question and potentially breaks all manner of rules. Just imagine if only Sony TVs could receive BBC TV. It would get even crazier when you brought other broadcasters into the mix. Philips TVs support ITV, Panasonic support ITV and Channel Four. You get the idea.

Instead, a set of common — vendor neutral — standards are adhered to. Anybody with the technical skills and access to the right components and manufacturing setup can create a receiver. This applied to radio (where “manufacturing setup” meant “a screwdriver and a soldering iron or a breadboard”), and it applied to TV, although the manufacturing requirements were higher.

As the Internet becomes an ever-increasing part of the BBC’s operations, there’s no sensible way for the same not to apply here too. While it’s true that the Internet is “different” to TV and radio, when you get down to the nitty-gritty of “how we and the BBC communicate with one another”, the need to be speaking the same language in a technical sense is the same.

In a very real sense, for the BBC’s approach to standards on the Internet to be anything less than embracing in all but the shortest of terms — given the steadily-increasingly importance of “the Internet” to it — is as ridiculous an idea as the coalition Government seizing direct control of the corporation and giving Cameron and Clegg a prime-time Saturday night talk show, and ultimately would be just as damaging to the survival of the BBC.

The big question is: why has it taken so long? Perhaps there’s been a longstanding refusal amongst certain quarters to recognise that the Internet is actually a Big Deal. Perhaps it’s been recognised that the Internet is a Big Deal, but it’s been viewed as an opportunity not just to connect and engage with audiences more effectively, but to use new technology to alter the relationship between the two parties in a way which puts the public at a disadvantage. Perhaps it’s overcompensation for the mooted “great levelling” effect of that the Internet has. I don’t know.

But, it’s fair to say that you don’t need to have read the job spec to know that the BBC desperately needs people on the inside promoting and advocating the old-fashioned way of doing things: common standards and open access. Coincidentally, for much of the Internet, this is both the old-fashioned and the new-fangled way of doing things.

It’s not a one-way street, of course. The BBC has traditionally (and does to this day) participated in standards bodies. Where it’s been particular quiet is the W3C, WHATWG, and IETF arenas. When’s the last time you saw an Internet Draft released by the BBC? (It was quite some time ago). Hell, even Apple churns them out (some of them are quite interesting, by the way). Or activity on the HTML WG mailing lists from people @bbc.co.uk? Is Atom working for the BBC? What about RDF? What problems does it have with Multicast? IPv6? RTSP? If it’s not using technologies, is it telling anybody why not, and collaborating with other experts outside of the corporation on solutions? Just as it has in the past in other areas, doing this serves everybody’s interests.

The bottom line: this is an extremely difficult, but absolutely vital, job. It’s a job which needs somebody who believes in the BBC — and why it is what it is. In fact, Internet standards at the BBC could be rephrased as The BBC’s principles and values where we make use of the Internet.

MT the DG on the BBC at the MGEITF

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:09:57 +0100

I was, if I’m being honest, a little disappointed by Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture on Friday. Perhaps I’m too used to the finely-tuned delivery of Steve Jobs at Apple events (and, let’s face it, whatever you think of Apple and its products, Steve Jobs knows how to work a crowd).

It wasn’t just Mark Thompson’s delivery that bothered me, though. The content of his speech, which of course is what really matters, didn’t seem all there either. The Director General had a prime opportunity to reframe the entire Sky/BBC battle as one of meaningless irrelevance — this, to my mind, would have been a good thing. This particular protracted battle is only marginally less dull, and just as worthy of the playground, as Adobe’s war of words with Apple.

Instead, Mark Thompson merely drew it out further — though not really answering many of the concerns raised by Sky (and shared by some in the industry) and taking the opportunity to put the boot in about Sky’s low levels of investment in British television and cross-media ownership, not to mention throwing a few punches at the press.

This was a MacTaggart lecture delivered not just to a room full of industry types. It was carried live on the BBC News Channel and simulcast via the web in several places. The transcript is available online (both from the BBC and others), and there’s been extensive coverage both in the news media and the likes of Twitter and blogs. In this context, I think Mark Thompson missed a trick in a big way. Rather than play to an audience which is sometimes renowned (not entirely unfairly) for navel-gazing, he had an opportunity to speak to the wider public, and to the vast majority of BBC staff who weren’t in Edinburgh. Rather than playground squabbles, I would have liked to have seen a galvanising speech championing all of the good things the BBC is doing.

The lecture contained some interesting statements. He harked back to Dennis Potter’s MacTaggart lecture in 1993, describing public service broadcasting, inlcuding the line “One that would not put anyone on the wrong side of an encryption wall. One that would treat everyone as being of equal value.” — unfortunate given the various Freeview HD and iPlayer non-neutrality issues that have been rumbling on over the course of the last year or so. His emphasis on the “Service” in “Public Service Broadcasting” was good to see, though.

Canvas was described in the dullest possible terms. Now, to be clear, Canvas isn’t terribly exciting. It’s a step towards convergence, certainly, but it’s a baby step and one which appears incredibly short-sighted at this stage. And, as regular readers of my blog and Tweets will be painfully aware, its execution is somewhat incongruous with its proclamations of openness. Even so, Canvas’s stunted innovation is still a hell of a lot more interesting than Mark Thompson made it sound.

The speech did contain one quite canny move, throwing down the gauntlet to some rightsholders groups: the announcement was made that the BBC was looking for a way to allow UK TV Licence Fee-payers who happen to be abroad (the key example cited was servicemen and women deployed out of the country) to access domestic iPlayer content. This was met with near-immediate opposition by PACT. Perhaps PACT doesn’t care what the public, press and politicians think. One thing’s for sure — you need some balls to side with the industry body in a “our Brave Boys versus PACT” showdown.

Inevitably, there came the talk of cuts. Cuts to executive pay, and to the Licence Fee, complete with a cringeworthy reference to public support for the BBC in the form of “Twitter feeds”. Honestly, he might as well have started dancing to Rod Stewart at that point, that’s how painful it was. Even so, the point was — in a nutshell — that Jeremy Hunt’s going to give his views and you’d all do well to remember that the BBC has a hell of a lot more public support than a Tory Culture Secretary.

I think it’s clear that Mark Thompson works a lot better behind the camera than in front of it, and that — like many off-camera BBC staff — he’s not entirely comfortable in the public eye. That’s not really something you can hold against him. But at the same time, many have viewed this year’s MacTaggart as being critical, and possibly even a turning-point in his role as Director General.

I don’t think Thompson’s speech came anywhere close to capitalising upon the opportunity he was afforded — an opportunity not simply to mount a basic defence of the BBC, to attack critics, or to talk in broad terms about some of the stuff the corporation has produced recently, but instead to look to the future.

An opportunity to rouse not just the TV industry but the wider, watching, public — not just low-level “background noise” support for the basic principles of the BBC, but to get people on their feet and proclaiming: “I want the BBC to do that and that and that. Make them happen!”

"why not introduce re-transmission fees … not for the BBC, but for commercial broadcasters who invest..."

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:54:49 +0100

“why not introduce re-transmission fees … not for the BBC, but for commercial broadcasters who invest significantly in British production”

- Mark Thompson, delivering the MacTaggart lecture this year.

The answer: no channel in their right mind would do it. They’d be competing with the free carriage of the BBC.

(The only reason why I bothered posting this was because that quote was picked up by the bbcpress Twitter account…)

Keep Calm and…

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:14:19 +0100

Keep Calm and…

From BBC to YouTube

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:16:00 +0100

It’s been suggested to me, on the back of my post yesterday on BBC and HTML5 video, that I go back and have a look at what YouTube said on the subject back in June.

The YouTube post isn’t nearly as incendiary as Erik Huggers’, but they do raise some points which are worth examining (especially in light of some recent news). The constraints upon YouTube are a little different to the BBC — YouTube has a large body of unchanging content which is growing over time, whereas iPlayer not only adds new content but also expires older content on a regular basis — this means that rolling out new codecs or containers is significantly more of a logistical challenge for YouTube than it is for the BBC with iPlayer.

Standard Video Format

This has been a bugbear since the earliest days of HTML5 video and will continue to be for a while yet. Even so, there’s a question: do you want to target everybody with a browser which understands the HTML5 video element, or is a significant subset good enough? Is serving H.264+AAC in MP4 containers for all of the existing videos which exist in this format and only looking at things like WebM for new content good enough, or does everything have to be the same?

[It’s worth noting that lots of videos on YouTube — those from commercial partners — aren’t available as MP4-over-HTTP at all, which is why iOS devices and the Apple TV (and presumably others) can’t play 4oD content on YouTube, for example.]

This is one big area where YouTube has it harder than most, simply because of the vast body of existing content which you would ideally go back and transcode.

One thing I didn’t cover in yesterday’s post related to this — and my comments regarding fallbacks and feature/codec detection are particularly relevant to this issue — is the announcement from the MPEG LA that AVC (that is, H.264) will remain royalty-free forever for “Internet video that is free to end-users”. I haven’t looked in detail at the announcement yet, where I suspect the devil lies, and I very much suspect that this won’t change Mozilla’s stance all that much. At the same time, I’m not convinced that Mozilla will continue to make life difficult for its users who do want to watch video in this format in perpetuity. I’d be surprised if some sort of plugin mechanism didn’t arise which allows for third-party codec support.

Robust video streaming

YouTube is correct here, and it’s something that was pointed out to me yesterday too — the HTML5 standard itself doesn’t include a decent streaming mechanism. On the other hand, though, Apple’s approach is a open specification (and has been since day one), and is one for which a range of tools exist. Another option is, of course, RTSP, which has been curiously neglected by browsers supporting HTML5 video (even desktop Safari, which defers to QuickTime — itself supporting RTSP — for playback doesn’t do RTSP in the context of HTML5 video).

There also needs to be an event model so that supporting JavaScript can have the same sort of control and introspection afforded to ActionScript, rather than necessarily relying on the UA to do it right (this could be especially useful in conjunction with WebSockets, of course).

Erik Huggers would have got a decidedly different reaction if his post had announced that the BBC was exploring (or even proposing) solutions in this area, rather than pitching vague criticisms. As an organisation, the BBC hasn’t been particularly active (and by that I mean “not at all”) in even describing its needs to those writing the specifications, let alone getting involved in ensuring that they’re properly met. Hopefully the newly-created role of Senior Technologist for Internet Standards will change that moving forward.

Google has a role here too, of course, as both a browser vendor and a content provider it’s in a position to see both sides of the coin.

Content Protection

I don’t know what I can say here which I haven’t said before (and most recently yesterday). There’s a fundamental incompatibility between “content protection” and any kind of open system.

Encapsulation + Embedding

Again, more of a concern for YouTube than for iPlayer, this one. There are ways around it. Many sites accomplish embedding by way of JavaScript lumps rather than the embed and object elements directly. Some specialised markup and content management systems do have specific “YouTube” tags or buttons which avoid the copying/pasting of markup (and keep users of the system from embedding arbitrary stuff), but I think this is a bit of a red herring — content management systems, forums and the like would catch up eventually; there’s no reason to prevent Flash streaming just because HTML5-based video is available, and in all honesty (speaking personally), I’d look get video on youtube.com working right first before getting hung on the embedding side of things — there’s nothing to say it all has to be tackled simultaneously.

Luke Blaney also points out that YouTube updated their embedding code a little while ago to use iframes (and so allowing for HTML5 video embedding).

Fullscreen Video

This is a fair point, especially in the context of overlaid content (such as subtitles or hypergraphics). I can think of a few ways that it could be sorted out sanely, though I haven’t looked deeply at the discussions which have been ongoing. Again, it’s worth stressing that Google (and the BBC, who would undoubtedly have similar issues) should be actively contributing in this area.

Camera and Microphone access

Well. Yes. This isn’t really an HTML5 video thing at all — this is a “why we still use Flash at all” justification, which isn’t really the same thing.

The key — with all of this — is pragmatism. Nobody sane wants content providers to serve just HTML5 video in anything but the longest term — instead, they want things to work, even where Flash is not available or performs badly. It doesn’t have to be a great stand-off.

Connecting Broadcast TV and the Web

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:37:10 +0100

Libby Miller has written an excellent post on the NoTube blog describing some of the things Project Baird and NoTube have been collaborating on. It’s a bit technical in places, but hopefully you’ll be able to get an idea of what’s been going on and some of the exciting things it makes possible.

NoTube is an EU-funded project exploring applications of social and semantic TV. The NoTube Partners include the BBC, the Open University, IRT, VU Amsterdam, and Ontotext.

Project Baird is a collaborative project open to all interested parties seeking to build on (wherever possible) existing specifications in order to provide building blocks for “next-generation” TV, most notably “connected TVs” and second-screen applications.

Project Baird and NoTube have been collaborating in this area over the course of the last few months, as part of NoTube’s WP7c workpackage, developing specifications and complementary (and sometimes competing!) prototypes.

I want to stress that this is very much early days — what Libby’s described in her post is (for want of a better term) early proof-of-concept work. From the point of view of Project Baird, this helps tremendously in creating better, realistic, specifications. I can’t speak for anybody else, of course, but I’m extremely happy that we’ve been able to collaborate in this — open — fashion on what promises to be a very exciting area of broadcasting technology.

Special thanks to Libby Miller, Dan Brickley, Vicky Buser, Michael Sparks and Andrew McParland for their parts in making this work as well as it has so far. Thanks also to the various people and organisations (some of them quite familiar by now!) involved in RadioDNS, and of course everybody else who’s contributed ideas and feedback, via NoTube, Project Baird, the BBC and other organisations in various capacities.

This will probably be the last post on this for a while from me as I focus on the actual work, but I’d encourage anybody with an interest in this area to join the mailing list and keep an eye on the NoTube blog.

BBC, HTML5 video, etc., etc.

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:17:21 +0100

Despite everything, according to the BBC Internet Blog Delicious account, lots of people still don’t get it. So, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

The HTML img element is an awkward but simple beast: it will either display an image, or it’ll display some sort of ‘broken image’ placeholder (in some browsers, this is invisible, but the principle remains): it’s on/off. If the browser doesn’t support the image, you’re out of luck. This means that, although many browsers do support SVG as an image format, you can’t reliably use it with img in your mark-up because lots of browsers out there don’t. Simple.

The HTML5 video element is different. It provides several useful features which mean that not only can you provide alternate versions of a video in different formats (and potentially — although this isn’t really supported by browsers at the moment — transported by different protocols), but you can provide content for browsers which don’t support the element at all, perhaps falling back to a Flash-based player.

As such, if you have the infrastructure to transcode videos into lots of different formats, the lack of agreement amongst browser vendors on The One True Video format isn’t a problem at all. Similarly, the lack of support for video at all in many installations out there also isn’t much of a problem. It gets even easier if you’re used to using JavaScript to embed your Flash player, because you can make this interact in nice ways with video to do codec detection (falling back to Flash even if the video element is supported, but none of the codecs you’re using are).

This means that, in purely technical terms, none of these perceived problems of HTML5’s video element are actually problems at all — the infrastructure for doing lots of transcoding already exists (iPlayer content already comes in many different flavours), and the whole setup is reliant upon JavaScript to work. Furthermore, if you’re using a “blessed” platform (I think exclusively Apple iOS at this point), the logic is already present and in use to switch to the video element to perform playback today.

Does all of this make sense? Good.

There’s a “but”. And it’s a big “but”. The reason only iOS gets HTML5 video while the rest get Flash is because there’s no “view source” on iOS. The perception is that it’s too easy to save copies of videos if they’re served up with HTML5 video to normal browsers. Personally, I think this is bunkum, but this is the BBC’s line on this, and so whether I think it’s bunkum or not is largely irrelevant.

For this reason, even if browser vendors did all settle on a single codec, the BBC still wouldn’t serve iPlayer using HTML5 video.

“Wait!”, you say (you did, I heard you). “What if the same level of protection was afforded to HTML5 video as it was for Flash video?”

The problem with this idea is thus: the only real protection which exists for Flash video is that the Flash player itself doesn’t let you save copies of video. This doesn’t prevent anything else from doing it. If you know how, saving Flash video isn’t particularly difficult at all (which means that, if somebody technically-clued wanted to download your Flash-based videos and put them on The Pirate Bay, there’s not a lot holding them back, except that it may well be easier for them to get those videos from some other source — such as the airwaves — instead).

While it would be theoretically possible to modify browsers so as to make it even harder for people to find video sources (and they don’t make it easy as it is — there’s no “Save video as…” as you get with images), of the browsers out there, the minority are closed-source (although the majority of installations are of these) — and so there’s nothing stopping somebody from producing (and distributing) a version of, say, Firefox or Chrome which undid the hypothetical obfuscation.

For this reason, the only solution to this particular stand-off isn’t a technical one: it’s simply a matter of mindset — the content owners and the BBC will have to accept that sometimes people will keep your content longer than you’d like, especially if you also broadcast it free-to-air; if they’re unwilling to accept this, then HTML5 video for iPlayer will never happen except in very select cases, like iOS.

A Note to Web Publishers

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:35:18 +0100

nikf:

Dear Web Publishers,

When visiting your site, the amount of time I spend waiting for your shitty Share This! Tweet This! Buzz This! Facebook This! buttons in relation to the overall time spent waiting for an article to load is the likelihood of me never visiting your site again.

No love,

Nik

"Asked about Mr Williams’ career, his uncle called his nephew “very, very talented in his..."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:29:41 +0100

“

Asked about Mr Williams’ career, his uncle called his nephew “very, very talented in his work”.

He added: “We don’t know what he was doing - never spoke about it.”

”

- MI6 worker found at London flat ‘had been dead weeks’

A brief note on the topic of the widely-reported "iTV"

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:18:00 +0100

(For the absence of doubt, I am referring to the successor to the Apple TV).

I have little faith in the long-term lifespan of TV-bound applications. Most applications are single-user, and a decent proportion of TVs are shared: this is a not insignificant mismatch.

That’s not to say there aren’t ways in which it can be useful. The bulk of time spent with a video-on-demand app, for example, isn’t in the interaction and programme selection, but the actual watching.

My hunch is that, if this is true, Apple is gunning for the games market. A cheap box plugged into the TV and capable of downloading and running games of a calibre that we see on iOS devices today would be a serious threat to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo’s casual gamer market segment — Nintendo’s in particular.

Perhaps the biggest factor working against this theory is that Apple isn’t well-known for significantly undercutting competitors when entering a market, but you never know (and Apple would no doubt claim that they were competing with Google TV rather than games consoles in particular, perhaps using the slightly flippant “if you consider yourself a gamer, you should definitely go out and buy an Xbox, Playstation, Wii, whatever” in response to the inevitable question from the press-pit).

One thing is for sure: casual gaming on the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad have left Sony and Nintendo in a difficult position. While iOS devices currently don’t really compete with the DS or PSP families of devices directly, the respective sets of games certainly do, and what the iOS games lack in depth and graphics quality, they make up for with very aggressive pricing (and indeed, I’ve got a few iOS games which blow some DS games out of the water).

The Apple TV is dead. Long live the Pippin.

"There is something totally not normal and contrary to economic logic to let Google use our network..."

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:57:28 +0100

““There is something totally not normal and contrary to economic logic to let Google use our network without paying the price,” Stéphane Richard, France Telecom’s chief executive, has said.”

- From the FT. Clearly France Telecom’s paying customers don’t factor in to any of this.

A brief diversionary ponderance upon Flash

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:00:13 +0100

Adobe claims Flash is “open”.

Of course, it’s only open in certain senses.

Content providers such as Hulu, YouTube, Channel 4, the BBC, and so on like Flash. These content providers aren’t keen on HTML5 (pick a codec, any codec).

These content providers like Flash precisely because it isn’t open in certain respects. If it was, there would be no benefit to putting as many eggs as possible into that particular basket: there’d be no reason (at least, none which aren’t comparatively easy to overcome) not to use HTML5 as well.

The very openness which Adobe claims Flash has and Apple abhors is the selfsame openness which Flash lacks and is a big selling point of Flash into these content providers.

If Flash (and I do mean all of it, including RTMPE) were open to the same extent as W3C and IETF specifications, it couldn’t be sold as a solution in the same way. For exactly the same reasons, don’t hold your breath waiting for browser vendors to come up with a DRM scheme for whatever-codec-and-container-becomes-the-standard.

This isn’t a campaign for HTML5: it doesn’t need one. This is a campaign for a bit of honesty for a change.

The strange little man watched as the two women filled in the sizeable hole they had dug earlier on...

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 19:22:00 +0100

The strange little man watched as the two women filled in the sizeable hole they had dug earlier on in the night. As they finished, he turned and crept away.

Vicky Sponge wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. So, that was that. She still wasn’t sure if her sister had talked her into doing the right thing, but one thing was sure: after twenty-five years of marriage, she hated James. In fact, she bristled whenever she met anybody named James. She was glad to be rid of him. She was sure her sister was glad to be rid of Armitage, too.

Armitage Spiker. World-renowned entrepreneur with a ruthless streak a mile wide. Well, he was. Now he was buried under several feet of soil with his sister-in-law’s husband. Mind you, as far as the rest of the world was concerned the two were on a round-the-world boating expedition and would eventually be declared, tragically, lost at sea.

The strange little man had seen it all, though. He didn’t think Louisa had talked Vicky into doing the right thing at all, no matter how odious and unpleasant Armitage and James might have been.

The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, there was a knock on the front door. Vicky answered it, to be greeted by a policewoman and a very small boy who looked like he’d been crying.

“Mrs Spiker?”

“No… that’s my sister. I’m Vicky Sponge.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll need to talk to you, too. I’m afraid I have some very bad news. I understand you’ve never met, but this is James.”

Vicky tensed inwardly. Was this some kind of a sick joke?

The police officer continued. “He’s your nephew”. She leaned forward and lowered her voice, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but his parents — your other sister and her husband — were killed in a terrible accident today. I’m afraid to say… they were eaten by a rhinoceros which had escaped from London Zoo and had embarked on a rampage through the streets of the city.”

Vicky Sponge was stunned. She hadn’t spoken to her other sister for a very long time, let alone knew she’d had a child. “Spiker!” she yelled, “Spiker! Get down here!”.

Louisa Spiker came running down the stairs towards the front door. “What on earth is the matter?!”

“Spiker, this is James — he’s our nephew. James… hello. I’m your Aunt Sponge.”

“And I’m your Aunt Spiker.”

A little way down the road, a strange little man was watching with interest.

Vicky instinctively glanced at the clerk as she signed the slip. Entirely predictably, a glimmer of...

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:59:49 +0100

Vicky instinctively glanced at the clerk as she signed the slip. Entirely predictably, a glimmer of amusement flashed across his face as she did.

“Go on, then.”

“Huh?”, replied the clerk.

“I said ‘Go on, then’. Get it over with.”

It was moments like this that she, for a split-second, regretted marrying James. Or at least, not keeping her own surname. “Vicky Goldsmith” was a perfectly good name. Why did she have to take James’ name without at least putting up a fight? Four months later, it was wearing more than a little thin.

James thought he had it bad, but getting called “Jammy” wasn’t that bad, really. In truth, Vicky thought he was secretly fond of it.

The clerk stammered nervously.

“You know what? I don’t even bloody like cake.”

And with that, Vicky turned and left, leaving the slip on the counter. The clerk looked down, embarrassed. He hadn’t meant to make it obvious. What did she expect, though? He looked at the slip, still facing the customer side of the counter, and chuckled to himself.

“ǝƃuodS ɐıɹoʇɔıᴧ sɹW”.

First principles of social media

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:52:20 +0100

Some simple guidelines:

Be honest: Honesty really is the best policy. And this applies to “half-truths”, too. Ignore this at your peril: if you conveniently skip details, mislead or misdirect, or worse — outright lie, then you will be found out, and not only will you look very foolish, but you’ll lose a lot of goodwill.
Be open: Don’t hide behind procedures: if somebody can get a piece of information by filling in a form or asking Companies House or similar, there’s no sense in not just handing it over. It’s easier all round, and — even if the subject matter is a little inconvenient — helps give people confidence in you. And, if the subject matter is inconvenient, the fact that people might find out shouldn’t be the prime concern.
Read/write: Talk to people. Have conversations. When people ask you questions, answer them openly and honestly.
Don’t feed the trolls: Personal attacks? Straightforward abusiveness? Just don’t bother.
Know when to take it private: Sometimes things are better dealt with out of the public eye, even if how the approach was made. Again, this isn’t about hiding things which aren’t convenient, but to save everybody else from having to read about specific ins-and-outs of a problem or where personal details need to be exchanged. Take it to e-mail.

Round-up

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:24:00 +0100

Following on from the BBC’s Internet Blog’s round-up for the week (featuring yours truly, at least in part), I thought I’d do my own for once. There may be some cross-over — most of the stuff I’ve been paying attention to this week has been BBC-related.

BBC Genome, Archives, Infax

The BBC has announced Genome, a project to scan, OCR and give structure to the entire catalogue of Radio Times past issues, with a view of building a database of the entire broadcast history of the BBC. This aligns with efforts to get historical programmes into the /programmes service, and would seem to be (at least in part) a successor-in-interest to the Backstage Infax Programme Catalogue prototype. All of this comes as part of (what I’m calling) “Archive week” at the BBC, which is marked by some interesting posts on the BBC Archive. This lets me sashay neatly into Brendan Quinn’s presentation from OSCON this year on the (near–) future of Ingex, and also Ant Miller’s post on the BBC R&D blog on the work at North Lab in Manchester.

HTML5, et cetera.

I have a feeling this one will run and run and run… but if you’re not already really bored of it, here’s a run-down.

I wrote a (nearly) line-by-line response picking apart Erik Huggers’ recent piece on the BBC Internet blog where he attempts to — for want of a better term — slates HTML5 on some somewhat handywavey bases. I wrote some other follow-up pieces before that, too. All of this stems from some head-scratching about the way that the BBC decided to get iPlayer content on Android.

It’s interesting, though. I re-read, with some prompting, a blog post I’ve linked to a few times in the past — Brandon Butterworth’s History of Redux, which does include this comment:

BBC TV and Radio services work on any manufacturers device, they compete on quality and features, not on exclusive access to content. It seemed silly to have to make special content for any particular internet device manufacturer but that’s how the market, governed by commercial rather than technical interests, has developed.

Entirely coincidentally, I’ve also been looking at the BBC’s browser support policy — this actually wasn’t to do with this ongoing debate, but in fact work-related — nevertheless, I came across this:

When considering which ‘Level of Support’ a web browser should be assigned, the following are some of the issues that are considered.

The BBC should provide value for money to the licence fee payer

Web standards are good for the web and meeting these standards offers public value for money.

Licence fee payers use a variety of web browsers. The BBC aims to provide the best possible experience to the largest number of people.

All license fee payers are considered to be valuable.

Some licence fee payers do not have the choice of using a popular, modern web browser.

Some people use accessibility tools - these people benefit greatly from web pages that are standards compliant.

The BBC should not, where possible, provide a service that gives a competitive advantage to any particular product or service. (e.g. we should not add to any page ‘works best in x browser’).

The BBC website represents the BBC globally. The BBC’s image abroad is considered to be of importance and, therefore, the non-license fee-paying users of the BBC website are also considered important.

Oh, and to cap it off, there’s this post from BBC RAD Labs on HTML5 and timed media, which I stumbled across for a second time earlier on today.

Lies, damned lies, think tanks, and journalists

Of course, it’s silly season. So we have Sexy A Levels and a post from Martin Belam from the olden days of 2003, both highlighting the silly ways in which A Level results are typically reported.

Meanwhile, the Adam Smith Institute published a… thing (PDF) which made for entirely predictable reading, and Steven Barnett rushed to the BBC’s defence in a rebuttal at OpenDemocracy. For the absence of doubt, the Adam Smith Institute commands in me broadly the same level of respect as Richard Desmond and the Daily Mail. That is, none at all.

Right, that’s enough for now. Back to heckling. Cheerio!

Critical Update!

I almost forget — actually, I lie; when it came to pressing “Publish” I had forgotten. I ran across this photo from Tom Bird of the End of Days at Kingswood Warren. Yes, that’s Brandon peering at a VT220. If you look closely at the big version, though, you’ll see that the terminal is plugged into a SunOS box, www0-rth.kw.bbc.co.uk, with quite a decent uptime and some very old files in /usr/local/apache. I have a suspicion this may have been the machine which ran the very first www.bbc.co.uk. Anybody confirm/deny?

Also! This week’s Shift Run Stop is out, featuring Reiner Knizia. This will be seeping into my brain via my ear-holes on my commute to work in the morning. Go get it, if you haven’t already.

And finally (I hope!), news has reached me that in a rare fit of blogging activity, Paul Rissen has written a splendid piece about News (capital-N, I think, is appropriate in this context). Hemmy Cho has penned a thought-provoking post entitled “Can technology be inherently good or evil?”. Both are worth a read!