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maethorechannen

Listed below are comments made by maethorechannen between Thursday, 5th February 2009 and Tuesday, 20th October 2009.

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BBC Red Button Changes on Freeview 5:08pm on 20 Oct 2009 Exactly who is going to be able to view these Freeview HD services? Last time I checked, you can't yet buy equipment capable of receiving DVB-T2 with MPEG-4.

So you're ruining a service used by millions for a service that will be used by no one for at least a while. Worse, it will be a very long time before there will be as many people benefiting from this as there are people who are loosing out.

Well done.
BBCHD and DRM: A Response to Cory Doctorow 11:28pm on 02 Oct 2009 "with every intention to undertake this open, public consultation"

What open, public consultation? Ofcom circulated your letter to "industry stakeholders" with a very limited time for response - hardly an open public consultation.

Why am I not surprised this blog post was posted at 6pm on a Friday afternoon - a great time for burying bad news in public and in keeping with how this issue has so far been handled.

"However our focus is not to champion causes - it's meeting our public service remit"

So no more "Children in Need"? No more campaigning one way or another on the License Fee? I'm sorry, but the BBC is more than happy to champion causes that either directly benefit it or shed good light upon it (as long as said cause causes no great inconvenience to the BBC). I'm guessing that the BBC has decided that an anti-DRM stance would not shed enough good light to make up for the inconvenience it would cause in negotiations with rights-holders.
Twitter tests users with changes 6:44pm on 13 May 2009 I thought as much - Twitter are saying that there were "serious technical reasons" why it had to go. http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/whoa-feedback.html#links
Twitter tests users with changes 5:32pm on 13 May 2009 @Adam Bowie

One of the criticism against Microsoft is that they don't remove crufty, little used features.

As a counterpoint - look at Apple, who remove little used/obsolete feature with an almost alarming regularity. When Apple removed firewire from MacBooks, a lot of people weren't all that happy but very few people started screaming how it was the beginning of the end of Apple.
Twitter tests users with changes 5:16pm on 13 May 2009 "It is what leads you into new conversations, debates and to meet people you otherwise would not have stumbled upon."

No, RTs lead you to new people etc. Half sided conversations are really just background noise.
Twitter tests users with changes 5:14pm on 13 May 2009 @retroangusr

"Why on earth would they do that?"

Some developer would have to maintain that bit of code. Lets say twitter is working on some new feature, however that new feature might in some way break "power user" replies. Somebody is going is going to have to fix either the new feature or the old replies, and somebody else will have to QA it. This takes money and time. If only a few users are using power user replies then is it really worth fixing?
BBC Podcast Directory relaunch 10:32pm on 16 Apr 2009 Could you expose the directory as OPML? That way I should be able to add the directory to the Nokia N95's Podcast app, which would save me from having to enter the urls on the keypad.
Who owns the train times - or the news? 5:13pm on 24 Mar 2009 Some papers already tried a paywall - it didn't work. Really good information might want to be paid for - but very few people are actually willing to pay for it.

I think the real cause of newspaper's woes is that they're just not as good as the journalists and editors think they are. They blow their own trumpet about how professional they are and how they are the "fourth pillar of government" when most newspapers are little more than sport, entertainment, celebrity gossip, opinion and regurgitated press releases - just the sort of "news" that no one wants to pay for and can be gotten for free elsewhere. They sealed their own death warrants by being little better than blogs.
Mobile Spanish lessons 1:40pm on 18 Feb 2009 "the standalone compact camera may be numbered"

I don't see mobile phones entirely replacing standalone compacts cameras, except maybe at the really low end. Standalone compact camera's often have optical zooms and more photography features than mobile phones. So compact cameras will still have a place, mostly for when people are going somewhere where taking pictures is an integral part - like when they go on holiday.

What might happen though is that standalone compacts get squeezed out of the market by a combination of mobile phones and bridge cameras which pack most of the features of a DSLR into a package not much bigger than a compact.
Google 'puts spy in your pocket' 3:26pm on 05 Feb 2009 I have a feeling that the Privacy International people haven't actually used Latitude. It doesn't work the way they think it works.

I guess by "covertly enabled" they mean Google Maps 3 has been installed and Latitude activated without the phone owners knowledge - it's pretty damn obvious when Latitude is activated as an icon representing you is displayed on the map when it's activated. When you exit google maps it asks you if you want to keep sharing your location with latitude. On a Nokia N95, when latitude is running but maps isn't, the Google Maps icon in Applications still displays as active. If you do notice Latitude running (and you'd have to be fairly oblivious not to notice it running), it's fairly easy to turn off - it's not some form of hidden spyware that the phone owner has no control over. I doubt anyone "covertly enabling" Latitude on somebody's phone would get much out of it for very long.

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