Toms View of the World

As the song says “War, What is it good for, Nothing”

Of course, I’m talking about the High Def. Disc format war in this case - today Toshiba issued a press release which basically says “We’re not making the players any more” - and as they were the major player behind the HD-DVD format, that’s pretty much the end of the battle.  The format has been on it’s way out for a while now, as studios have been pursuaded to change sides towards Sony’s Blu-Ray format - which had the major advantage of being supplied “built in” to the Playstation 3 games console - effectively pushing blu-ray players into homes who wouldn’t necessarily pay for a standalone machine.

Now the war is over, people who’ve been holding off buying a HD player to wait and see which format wins - and who don’t want to be lumbered with the Betamax of the new millennium - can now safely buy a Blu-Ray player or PS3.  Until of course the whole “profiles” problem rears it’s head, with a next-generation of blu-ray disc possibly being incompatible with current players - unless the players are updated.  Of course, this is entirely dependent on the manufacturer.

In my opinion, a sensible choice of player at the moment is actually the aformentioned Playstation 3 - as it’s blu-ray decoder is software based, it should be upgradable via a download (which given that the PS3 has both wired and wireless network capability should not be a problem) - plus it’s only a little more money than a standalone blu-ray player, with the bonus of also being a high quality games machine.

Facebook have introduced a new data harvesting system to assist in targetting advertising to it’s users, using 3rd party websites to gather data on their behalf.

With the help of some clever javascript, and some co-operative 3rd party websites who have embedded this javascript into their pages, they can now update your facebook profile for you when you do things.  At the moment this is done with your consent - the little popup (if you spot it) gives you the option to deny - but you can’t completely block the facility from within your facebook privacy settings - you can block it on a site by site basis, but only after the fact -a site has to have already sent an update to your account before it appears in your privacy settings.

Scary stuff. How to stop this happening to you is after the “more” link… (more…)

Yes, the truth about working in IT. (via Gadgetopia)

To pick two from the list…

Your nontechnical co-workers will use you as personal tech support for their home PCs

and of course…

It will be your fault when users make silly errors

Yes, IT is not the glamourous career path it used to be.  It’s not all about new technology (usually it’s about very very old technology)

I was at my local cinema, and had accidentally left the bluetooth features on my phone switched on (I don’t normally. but my sat-nav software switches it on, and sometimes it doesn’t switch back off)

I was therefore very surprised when I was asked to accept a download (given that I was very much alone) It turns out that this a new twist in unsolicited messaging (i.e. spam) - drive-by bluetooth spam.

Of course, I never accept unsolicited bluetooth messages, as they are the most common way for mobile viruses to spread.

Encouraging people to do this is dangerous. Remember. never accept a bluetooth connection unless you’re expecting it.

You’ve no doubt all heard a saying along the lines of “if you keep digging like that you’ll end up in Australia/China/Someother far-flung place”

The big question is “would you really?”

Of course, the answer is out there, in the form of a Google Maps mashup, you can select where you’re going to start digging, and the map shows you where you’ll end up…

http://www.ubasics.com/dighole/

In this little article, i’m going to be using “Facebook” (which I do use) as my example Social Network, but I’ve no doubt other networks have the same risks…

Firstly, unless you change the default privacy settings, anyone in the same “network” as you can probably see some or all of your personal details. (more…)

Well, here we go… it was only a matter of time really before the UK’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) got all het up over the BBC’s new, legal, peer-to-peer video download service.

It seems that ISPs are objecting to the amounts of data this service will require, and that they’ll have to provide the peak-capacity that their customers have been paying for. Now, if I’m paying for a 4, 8 or 20Mb/sec broadband service, I expect to be able to use services which are going to use that speed to deliver content quickly enough to play “streaming”. Of course, I know about such terms as “user contention” - and that home broadband is provided on a shared-bandwidth principle - ISP’s don’t actually buy enough bandwidth to give every user the full bandwidth they’re paying for all the time. If they did, broadband would be far more expensive, ISP’s work on the basis that not everyone who has (say) a 2Mb/sec connection on a particular exchange/head will use all that capacity continuously. The BBC player however will likely increase the amount of bandwidth they need to provide the service the customer is paying for.

Virgin Media (the ISP I currently use, not through choice, but because I live too far from the exchange for ADSL to be worth buying into) have “peak time, fair use” caps, so if you download too much between 4pm and midnight, you can expect your speed to drop. They suggest if you want to download large files that you schedule them to download off-peak (for example, in the early hours of the morning). While this is fine for Linux ISO Installation images, it is unfortunately not so appropraite for streaming video, as those “peak times” are exactly the times when people are likely to want to use the iPlayer…

Now, I know other TV stations in the UK have had their players on-stream for a while, but I suspect the BBC’s will garner quite a bit more interest from the public… being free and all…

(full story on Wired)