BBC Blog Network

User Profile

bnewbie

Listed below are comments made by bnewbie between Friday, 24th October 2008 and Wednesday, 29th July 2009.

«Newer
Older»

Twitter's front page makeover 1:07pm on 29 Jul 2009 Last Thursday I posted something very similar to what a lot of people have written as to this being simply marketing. Unsurprisingly the moderators chose not to make it visible.

The thing is there is so many other things to talk about - what about the TED talks last week? What about Yahoo and Microsoft in talks again? What about the broadband report that was on the site yesterday. Wouldn't it be nice to engage your audience and find their views on this? But no go on flog the dead horse.

No one cares about Twitter other than those who use it. By use we're talking about the content producers not the people who follow. The subset of the latter from the former is so small but you wouldn't know that because you spend all your time in this microcosm thinking it's the biggest fish forgetting the size of your pond.

At least show us you have an interest in technology and not twitter.
Jackson: Did the internet buckle? 5:03pm on 28 Jun 2009 Interesting (but sadly) incorrect analysis. Sorry Rory, not a personal dig but the data you're posting here is (as you say) from an Internet peering exchange (the biggest). The problem is most ISPs and content providers have private peerings among themselves because LINX and others (such as PARIX, DECIX) charge for throughput. So if I'm viewing the BBC over my ADSL the chances are (especially if I'm in the UK) I'll go direct from my ISP to BBC's network. You guys run one of the most "peered" ASes out there (ask your network guys) and no doubt most of the major news/content providers do the same so LINX is avoided totally and everyone saves money. (Plus performance over LINX is far less than optimal as I'm sure your network guys will allude to).

So, what you really want to see is not the public peer points data which won't have borne the brunt but the private peering throughput which will probably prove a point (either that sites/networks were under excessive strain or not). Just walk down the hall and talk to your own network guys.

B.
Australian Grand Prix predictions 6:01pm on 28 Mar 2009 I think your ability to forward your thoughts in text is a great deal better than your ability to do it over voice. Your blog entries and thoughts on this website are very good but your commentary of the qualifying session was extremely poor. I won't rehash the previous comments about this being television (which I whole heartedly agree with) but please understand that Mr Brundle actually drove one of these cars for some years and also he has more experience at doing television commentary than yourself. I actually thought I was listening to commentary from the London Olympics... in 1948.

I do understand that this was your first outing but I had hoped you would have practised this before. I hope it gets better.
Making apps for Android 2:52pm on 12 Mar 2009 The biggest incentive for developers to work on the Android platform isn't the ease of development - iPhone/Objective C isn't the worst thing in the world and if you really want to learn it you can do so fairly easily. Rather it is the delivery platform.

Apple's walled garden App Store will eventually hurt them because developers don't want to go through hoops in order to please Apple. Just as Apple doesn't want to go through hoops to please operators, everyone wants freedom.

Applications such as the one mentioned in this blog post can be made for the iPhone, as for whether it would be allowed to be distributed through the App Store is another matter, so why would any developer want to go down the route of spending time, effort and money on something which may not see the light of day because Apple doesn't want it on their storefront.

At present the only thing stopping Android from getting the column inches the iPhone gets is the look of Android devices, but of course this can (and hopefully will) change.

Google has shown that it doesn't have to be the first to the market in order to become the most popular or the best (Search and gMail automatically springs to mind).
Microsoft shows off research wares 10:19am on 25 Feb 2009 I'm afraid post #2 is vastly incorrect. Microsoft works with universities a lot more than other companies, even ones like Google. If you have a look at the number of papers published in top tier conferences or journals with work from Microsoft or Microsoft sponsored projects then you will know what you said is just not true.

What I think you are pointing at is what they "release" as products. The fact is a lot of raw research that you see published in the aforementioned papers are far from being "sexy" and even farther away from being profitable.
Hey Microsoft, Yahoo thinks you should buy it 3:23pm on 06 Nov 2008 Of course this smacks of desperation. However it's also clear that Yang isn't all that interested in making a huge amount of money from the selling of Yahoo (not that he particularly is short of a few bob).

The shareprice has tumbled and he'll never get anything around $30/share anymore but I don't think he cares. Frankly he would have to be mindless if he didn't realise that $30+/share from MS wasn't a good deal. I just think he feels too attached to the company he started and once ruled the Internet and maybe has let it become a bit too personal. Maybe some of our football club owners should take a leaf out of this guy's book.

While MS might be the dominant OS vendor we all know who dominates the Internet search market probably to a much greater extent than MS does with the OS market. Figures alone shouldn't be used to judge the dominance in either market. Whereas MS is losing share to MacOS and (slowly) to Linux, in the search market Google is unchallenged for sometime. The only way to change this is if two big players get together and rather than gang up on Google but actually challenge them to up their game.

For those that hate MS, they fund a lot more research here in the UK than Google ever did. In this case it really might just be Google who should be viewed with the "overlord" status.
An apology (in fact several) 3:18pm on 24 Oct 2008 Signed up just to make this comment so I hope it's helpful!

Internet measurement (in this case the amount of data transfer) is actually not as easy as it sounds. Very recently a research paper was published on the bandwidth usage of World of Warcraft (http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/pub-et_12119.pdf). Granted it's a boring read if you aren't interested in this but it goes to show that accurate statistics for this kind of thing isn't trivial, so maybe not all blame should be given to the journalist in this case.

Also there is a valid point that why should "patches" weigh in at 2GB? The fact is 2GB as a compressed download represents a percentage of a desktop PC's hard drive capacity (even with most machines now having 500Gb or more of space). Of course this patch does bring more to the table than just fixes but nevertheless developers and publishers aren't making life easy for themselves nor their paying customers by releasing such a huge patch in one go.

«Newer
Older»

^ Back to top

BBC MMVI

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

BBC.co.uk

BBC Blog Network

Find and talk to the BBC's bloggers.

User Profile

bnewbie