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Yesterday the UK’s Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) demanded sites such as YouTube to be closed, for encouraging CyberBullying.
Proposed by Kirsti Paterson at the national conference held in Harrogate, the motion was “Conference deplores the very real problem of cyber bullying in schools and demands the closure of sites encouraging such behaviour.”
Continue reading Some UK Teachers Want YouTube Closed Down
If you’re fed up with the relentless blueness of the standard XP theme but can’t be arsed with all those fiddly downloadable theme programs, maybe you’ll warm to the Royale theme.
It’s apparently an unreleased Microsoft XP Media Centre theme that was leaked out to the web, and it looks rather purdy in a shiny but dark’n’moody Vista-esque sort of way.
Continue reading Give Your XP Machine A Vista-esque Sheen
We’ve been holding back with Apple news since the vomit-inducing coverage of the iPhone launch that many publications gave (Engadget and Gizmodo appearing top of the list, in that order).
Here’s one worth noting though, Apple has announced that they’ve now sold over THREE BILLION tracks.
Continue reading 3 Billion iTunes Track Sold
BSkyB has agreed terms to buy set top box maker Amstrad in a £125m deal.
The two companies have already been working together for several years, with Amstrad supplying around 30% of Sky’s set top devices – with those orders making up a hefty 75% of its business.
Continue reading BSkyB Scoops Up Amstrad
Jimmy Wales, the founder of the hugely popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, has outlined his plans for a new search engine service to rival Google.
Wales’s new start-up firm Wikia has bought up a web crawling technology called Grub from LookSmart, and released it under an open source licence. Like the famous SETI project, Grub relies on users donating their personal computing resources as well as human editors.
Continue reading Wikipedia Founder Launches Google Rival Wikia
Sky have announced, in the presentation of their final year accounts, a joint venture with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe to offer PSP owners in the UK and Ireland a content download service.
Saying that PSP-owners can “turn their devices into personalised on-demand video libraries,” will be a big boost for the PSP UK-side, where Sony claim that there’s 2 million of the blighters.
The start date has been pencilled as “early 2008,” making it the first in Europe. With delivery to the handheld via wireless or PC-connection, it’s that expected content such as “sports, entertainment, movies, music and animation,” will be available, interestingly from “both Sky and 3rd party channel partners.”
Sky is being really prolific in distributing its content (apart from Virgin customers :) ), arguably better at it than the BBC – whose have a specific remit to do so.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Today the BBC has opened a list for up to 500,000 UK TV license payers to sign up for access to iPlayer – if they have an appropriate computers setup.
Over the next six months, those who sign up will be let on to the Beta trial to use iPlayer. (Those of us who have been on the 15,000 people iPlayer trial will have noticed that there was a new release of the software last night.)
Let’s be clear, we do think that the iPlayer is an advance for the BBC, and the functions and control it gives views are welcome.
Where it really lets itself down is that it is dependant on a very thin slice of technology needs.
Continue reading BBC iPlayer: A Flawed Gem
If you listen to our interview with Mark Taylor, you’ll have heard a very interesting point that was raise in the OSC discussion with the BBC Trust.
The BBC Trust are totally fine with BBC content going out to over the Internet _without_ content protection – ie DRM.
This would be in-line with the BBC’s view of distributing their TV content over satellite in the UK, where in 2003 they made Sky beam out the BBC TV channels without encryption – much to Sky’s displeasure – saving themselves £40m – £85m in the process.
This is of course still an avenue open to the BBC. We wonder how much of the License payers money would be saved on DRM if they were to take this route?
We got the exclusive opportunity to interview the members of the Open Source Consortium (OSC) that has met with the BBC Trust, directly after they had been discussing the BBC iPlayer with them for the first time.
From there we scooped the iPlayer On Linux a must story, but there was a lot more detail in the interview than we could get into the piece.
Various highlights were
If you, like many others, are unhappy about the iPlayer only being available on a particular version of Windows, get yourself over to the iPlayer petition. Every vote counts, so join the current 12,000+ that have said they don’t like it.
Sorry about the popping in part of the recording (like the beginning), but I left the mic windshield at the office – blast!)
[audio:https://digital-lifestyles.info/media/audio/osc-post-bbc-trust-iplayer-meeting.mp3]
We’re all aware that the BBC is planning to make their iPlayer compatible with Macs … and we even know that now that the BBC Trust has committed to make it work with Linux (shock horror).
Well if you’re like most of the tech population, you might be scratching your heads, wondering how the bleep they’re going to be doing it – given that the whole system relies on Microsoft technology to deliver any of it, and in particular the DRM. Especially as, to date Microsoft has steadfastly refused to deliver a media player for the Mac that has DRM built in.
Continue reading Is Silverlight the BBC iPlayer Silver Bullet?