Toms View of the World

Note the pingback on the previous post (the one about Vista).

That pingback appears to be from a (quite badly) set up WordPress blog with a plugin to rip content via RSS from other sites. Notably it stripped out the link to “previous post”. Unusually for these ripper sites, there is no advertising (yet), however there is also no indication of the purpose of the site, nor the identity of it’s owner.

It’s also clearly designed to only show the first part of a post, to remove any copyright messages that appear - so the RSS feed for this site now has the copyright message at the top of each post, rather than at the end.

Apologies to those of you who read the site via RSS…

Following on from my earlier post on the subject, it’s come to my attention that there is now a petition with over 2000 signatures on the Government Petitions Website regarding the overpricing of Windows Vista here in the UK.

Well, it’s being reported by the Guardian newspaper that there is no hope for Cable customers who like shows like 24, Battlestar Galactica and Lost.

A Sky spokesman insisted Sky had not “pulled” its channels.
“We have an agreement that Virgin Media can distribute those channels until the end of the month,” he said.
“Virgin cannot distribute from March 1 if there is no agreement so, sadly for our customers, those channels would not be available.”

I’m glad my Sky dish will be installed the day before I lose Sky One, Two, Sky News and Sky Sports News from my cable lineup. However I don’t think it’s encouraging competition or consumer choice for these two companies not to reach an agreement for the benefit of their paying customers. I have no doubt Sky losing several million cable viewers will have an effect on their advertising revenues - at least until the Cable customers who will move to Sky do so. Cable has a decent channel line-up even without the Sky channels, but there are enough shows I enjoy watching that I’ll make the move.

Plus if in the future I want to get HDTV, Sky’s platform currently has a much wider range of programming available…