I was thinking about putting in a complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ages ago about this but didnt get around to it/couldnt be bothered!

Tonight I saw Ian’s post mentioning he was considering changing to Virgin Media beacuse of the advertised fast fibre optic connection and was reminded of my annoyance over the claims.

It turns out that BSkyB, Talk Talk and a few less idle members of the public did make a complaint. The below two stories cover the situation quite well with ThinkBroadband also carrying quite a few user comments on its page. Essentially Virgin Media as many have probably seen have been advertising fibre optic internet connections direct to the home, the fibre is actually only to one of the street boxes, its copper/steel/aluminium after that. A Virgin Media engineer I was speaking to recently, who works on the core fibre network around London said that it could be anything from 500 to a 1000 households sharing the connection!

• http://informitv.com/articles/2008/02/06/virginmediacleared/
• http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3391-asa-rules-on-virgin-fibre-optic-broadband-claims.html

Amazingly, the ASA quashed the claims, essentially deeming the copper portion of the network insignificant. By the same logic, as ThinkBroadband have pointed out, BT etc could now make the same claim as from the telephone exchange upwards, the ADSL network is fibre.

Wish the ASA had taken a stand with this and the ‘Unlimited’ claims (There’s a nice little piece about this on one of the BBC blogs), hardly surprising so many people are confused about Broadband.

Update (13/04/08): Of course in addition to the above truth twisting, a worrying blow for net neutrality comes with Virgin Media’s CEO Neil Berkett branding it “a load of bollocks”. Crude and worrying words, glad I’m not with them and supporting his point of view any more.

We got a letter from them in the mail today saying, ‘Sorry to hear your leaving, how about sleeping on it?’, this is accompanied by the type of mask you get on night flights. Be nice if they quit with all the marketing gimmiks and actually delivered on the fibre to the home claim!

I was reading on the train this morning (I don’t think I could go back to commuting without mobile internet!), the BBC have reported on a leaked draft paper from the UK Government published by the Times, proposing to force ISP’s to take action against illegal downloaders with a three strikes and out style system. As has been pointed out, the government, seem to be ignoring the serious privacy implications this has for internet access and what would seem an insurmountable task for the ISP’s to economically and practically undertake. I’ve got an image in my head of a satirical political cartoon showing an MPAA/RIAA figure pushing Gordon Brown along but anyway.

But anyway, aside from these points, the question is, are the media industries as a collective gradually responding better to consumer desires and the internet in general as a result of piracy? The rapid rise in piracy of music, films and television has left the industry models looking increasingly dated and almost ridiculous, indeed, if it could be charted it would correlate quite well with broadband uptake. They were left with choices, embrace, fight or ignore it, as we’ve seen, they’ve steadily fought it and probably thought after Napster that they could go back to sleep again.

In the last couple of years we’ve seen numerous press releases by the RIAA and MPAA citing the massive sales losses they’ve sustained as a result of piracy, the press has reported on numerous cases against kids, the elderly and mothers across America and elsewhere, in dubious attempts to deter the masses. Apple introduced iTunes and its worked fairly well with some debate, but that wasn’t the industries idea, that was Apple, and many of the other major online music stores have been third parties approaching the music industry not them reaching out to the consumer. The same sort of scenario has been playing out for video content with the same issues, indeed the upcoming pirate bay case, is seeing the founders gaining steady international notoriety as thieves and the worst of criminals in one light and justified and innocent in another.

Only really in the last year are we seeing perhaps the start of serious attempts at DRM free, decent (ish) quality music and video from the industry and this is encouraged in many ways by piracy (catering for the users so they don’t pirate the material). Its argued so much more now that piracy is slowly forcing the industry to respond better to the consumer, that piracy is a positive driving force for change and that it will eventually lead to a better solution.

Perhaps arguing that the end necessarily justifies the means is not an argument to start, but I do think its valid, the cost to the ISP’s who already have looming demand induced upgrade costs as well as the time and effort for the government to pass through legislation for this ultimatly means it will accomplish little. Others such as Michael Arrington have suggested that you make money from associated products and live events as opposed to the music but I’m far more inclined to agree with the general principles of Paul Glazowski’s rebuttal and in particular the “linear chicken and egg” analogy he makes in his first comment on his post, its unfortunate however to read in the comments a lack of understanding of the items value as opposed to its distribution costs.

As with most people I know, if I like music I’ll buy it, aside from anything else, I still prefer having a physical copy (maybe I’m getting old). I’m not advocating illegal downloads as such, however, piracy is giving the media industries a good kick down the path of progress.

TechCrunch UK alerted me to this first, the Guardian followed up with a piece later on (edited after comment from Mike Butcher, see comments). Finally, the heavyweights of the UK Broadcast industry are teaming up to offer a combined on-demand television service.

A little while ago I wrote among other things the excerpt below in a follow up entry to my college dissertation:

The biggest problem in my opinion facing the large scale adoption of both download and streaming television services is that everyone is offering their own solutions, instead of flicking the TV channel to see something different you end up closing down and then starting up another proprietary application or browsing to another webpage to view content from that one provider which seems from a user perspective a most unworkable and undesirable solution.

Nice to see they got the message one way or another, just a pity so much money had to be spent on the BBC iPlayer before this happened (I know ITV and C4 spent money to built thier respective offerings as well but they are commercial entities not tax beneficiearies and so entitled to do what they want without having to justifiy it to the country).

The piece by the Guardian makes mention of third party content but also interestingly delivering content ultimatly to the TV, it would be interesting to see if there are plans to perhaps integrate this with FreeSat which is due to launch next year. There is of course hope on the TechCrunch post that they’ll employ a more user friendly (read: non-existant) DRM system which might also be a bit more open to other platforms and browsers but I rather doubt this will happen. Both the BBC iPlayer and the 4od service from C4 use the Kontiki system which is very restrictive and very in love with Windows XP, add to this the fact that the chap who’s managing all of this is Lesley MacKenzie of Sky fame who also use the Kontiki system and that seems like the easiest solution to employ from their point of view and their developers.

Whats frustrating in many ways is why they can’t go with Joost or similar as a front end for this. Looking at the Whats On page on the Joost website there’s a lot of known channels popping up here and there and the mecanism is already built. The cynic in me thinks the reason for not going with something like this is slight desperation by the Broadcasters to hang onto whatever control they can, plus of course not loosing too much of the money two of them have previously invested in the aforementioned Kontiki based system!

Update: Jeremy Stone (BBC) posted on the BBC Backstage mailing list about an article Ashley Highfield has just written which explains why they’re not going with Joost or similar as a distribution method. I’m not convinced by his argument, I can see a certain point of view with advertising revenue (will this be there for UK users?), however I believe this will actually only confuse users more having two offerings which at face value provide very similar services.

Anyway, no point in speculating too much at this point, we’ll have to wait a bit for the facts to come out.

Well I’ve just finished re-installing the latest stable version of Wordpress with my new wordpress theme enabled on it. I shouldn’t really say new theme, I should say first as the reason I’ve had to re-install wordpress is beacuse for my sins I didn’t take the time to understand how wordpress templates were meant to function when I installed two years ago and as a result modified wordpress core files.

This has caused me no end of problems over the last two years and I’m pleased I’ve dealt with it finally. I’ll be building the site up a bit more over the next couple of days, but I think I’m almost there after dealing with issues with the simplepie plugin which has its quirks, adding a few choice entries to my .htaccess files to hopefully make sure that previous urls are not broken and a few other little issues.

Ah well, lessons learnt:

• Take mroe time to understand applications before charging in
• Don’t modify application code unless really unavoidable.
• Take time when starting out to think about a long term usable url structure so that you don’t end up potentially breaking trackbacks and other linkage (important for preserving ones pagerank (however low it is!)).

All very obvious in many ways but all the same I ignored them a couple of years ago (web development for me I must admit has been a learning by doing excercise so I’m excusing myself in some ways!).

Anyway, enough for tonight…

I’ve just taken the plunge and upgraded my HTC Wizard/O2 XDA MiniS to an HTC Kaiser/T-Mobile MDA Vario III.  I changed to T-mobile mainly beacuse of the ‘web n walk’ deals with their overall offer a better option than the competition, plus the added bonus that they don’t mind if the phone is used as a laptop modem (not tested yet).

There are hundreds of reviews around the web so I won’t bother doing that but will note some of my own thoughts, I find bullet point lists for this sort of thing work well:

•  The phone itself is a bit smaller than the previous one,  a testement if ever there was one to the fast moving world of modern technology, the new one packs in 3G,  GPS, faster processor and a tilting screen to boot where as the old one managed GPRS  at a push.
• The GPS is very fast to lock on, even inside buildings! It works very well with Google Maps although occasionally the software seems to forget to ask the GPS to update.  I’m awaiting a memory card before testing TomTom.
• The keyboard is actually slightly smaller than the  old one which is odd beacuse there appears to be space for it to be bigger. Its still perfectly usable although symbols have been moved around quite a bit, having had the Wizard for 23 months I was able to touchtype on it (thumbs only of course!) so this is quite an annoyance although I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
• The phone feels more solidly built, the mechanism for the tilt is metal so should be pretty hard wearing.
• The comms manager button is gone, this is a little annoying, I’m going to consider re-mapping the voice dialling button to do this. I’ve never quite understood the point in these voice dialling buttons, if I want hands free then I’ll use the button on my bluetooth headset to activate it, or else I’ll just use the keypad and dial the number normally.

The XDA Developer forums are as ever a fountain of useful knowledge for Windows Mobile smartphones and very much recommended. One of the forum members has produced a program called TrackMe, this is now being contributed to by other forums members. Its essentially a GPS Logger, it can record to either a local file or send data to a web application as a KML file.

I’m thinking of using this when I go to Cape Town in December to record my track and then use this to geotag my photos when I return. Obviously I’ll use the local file option as otherwise I’ll end up with horrendous roaming data charges! Hopefully the version with support for GPX will be released soon otherwise I’ll write a little converter myself. Then I need to tie this in with the photo exif data from my camera by matching the most recent gps log entry to the exif time stamp.

I hate doing a post like this as I see it on so many other blogs, but hopefully soon I’ll have a chance to post more frequently. I’ve been trying to work on a re-design for the site, unfortunatly being an engineer and not overly creative this is proving to be quite a struggle coming up with something clean but identifiable.

The contract has come up on my O2 XDA MiniS, its been a good phone to be honest although I wasn’t sure at first, Windows Mobile is not without its issues for me at least, MMS support is woefully poor (in WM5), the integration with Outlook while great for some is not perfect for me, but there are ways around this such as Gmobilesync for the calendar. All the same, the benefits delivered in terms of flexibility, availability of third party software such as Google Maps Mobile, and increased use of the device as a result make it worth while.

A short while ago the iPhone coverage couldnt be avoided, I’m just thankful its over now, every US blogger of note had themselves worked up into a frenzy over this thing (in another news Kleenex announced a record sales increase for the same period (sorry bad joke)). Me, I can’t see myself parting with that much money for a phone, if I had the money I’d could buy a nice big flat tv for that sort of cash. Additionally, having had the luxury of a full keyboard on my current hand set I can’t bring myself to part with it, I prefer the tactile feedback of a real thumb board to a virtual keyboard, whether it has an Apple symbol attached or not. Someone has been quick to conduct research to prove the value of this tactile feedback as well.

In the perfect world, a replacement handset would have 3G, Wifi, GPS, physical qwerty keyboard, touchscreen and 2 sim card slots so I can ditch the work phone. Closest I can find is the E-ten M700, which has almost everything except the 2 sim card slots. Its either that or the HTC Kaiser which as mentioned on my Google Maps post I have been assured should be released fairly soon on T-Mobile. They both have their positives, the HTC has a better camera, however styling, size and an improved GPS chipset (SiRFstar III) make the E-ten a winner for me, I have a decent camera already. I just need to find a network who’ll carry it now unless I go back on what I said earlier about paying for phones and cough up but its not cheap!

Update (12/11/2007): I bought the Kaiser, click here for the post. 

I had a go at using Google Maps Mobile for the first time yesterday on my O2 XDA Mini S, I must say I was impressed, its interesting to see that this is the only application (that I am aware of) which Google have released as a proper Windows Mobile installer. There’s a java based application for Gmail but its pretty useless for the most part, if they had taken the time to make a full program for windows mobile perhaps it might have had useful features such as integration with the today screen on windows mobile and not such a dodgy connection with the gmail servers.

I digress, anyway, I ended up trying maps mobile on Oxford street in the end after failing to find a particular branch of Maplin, the fact that you can install from the phone without going through active sync is in itself a good thing. I’ve yet to try it out with the bluetooth GPS I use for satnav but I’m impressed so far.

Now the only bad part is standing there thinking of the data costs and cringing, my next phone is probably going to be the HTC Kaiser and with that I think one of the T-Mobile web n walk plans might go down quite well. I’ve been in contact with a couple of T-mobile people via email and have been assured that they will be carrying the phone, although they refuse to comment further on when, they won’t even narrow it down to a month which is quite frustrating. However when it does arrive, with GPS on board this should be quite a decent phone to use with the maps app.

Update (12/11/2007): I bought the Kaiser and yes google maps works very well, click here for the post…

I noted today on via TechCrunch that a Belgian court has just ruled that ISP’s are responsible for preventing illegal filesharing by their users.

Similar to me attacking the postman for putting a bill through my door I guess, but as its based on EU legislation I’ve no doubt it’ll be winging its way over to the UK sooner or later.

So ISP legal and infrastructure costs will go up as they move to try and enforce this and broadband prices will shoot as a result. Yay!

Saw this while out and about in London and it just doesnt seem right, I know McDonald’s claim healthy options on their menu, but we all know that for the most part its damn unhealthy. So here’s one next to Guy’s hospital…