Down with BBCi - keep Ceefax!
on
Ceefax Turns 30
·
· Score: 1
instead we have BBCi which is much much better
Slicker, yes; prettier, yes; but better? OK, maybe as we're on cable, which seems to be the poor relation in the UK interactive TV market, we're not getting as full an offering as people on satellite or terrestrial digital, but we find the BBC digital replacement for Ceefax to be rubbish in comparison to teletext - and teletext doesn't work on digital cable.
It's slow (admittedly, Ceefax isn't exactly fast, especially if you don't have a Fastext telly, but digital is supposed to be better), it's much more difficult to use, as you have to negotiate menu after menu and page after page to get anywhere, whereas with Ceefax, you could just enter the page number you want. Most annoyingly though we don't get anything like as much content as with Ceefax - just news and sport really.
Even then it doesn't always work properly. During the Olympics, BBCi had a theoretically great service where you could switch the live Olympic coverage to a different even than the "default" going out on the actual TV channel. Unfortunately, more often than not we found it simply wouldn't finish loading and we were stuck with no sound and four mini pictures, none of which we could select.
And I should imagine the potential scam market in Ireland (pop what 3 million or so?) is so small that it wouldn't be worth the scammers' time to bother. Now if a country the size of the US did it, or even the size of the UK, then they might try to subvert it.
I have to laugh at this IBM lovefest because I remember when IBM was considered every bit the nemesis that Microsoft is considered today, by the same sorts of people.
Oh yes, and I can remember when I started in the industry, at the start of the 90s, that a lot of people saw Microsoft as the "white knight" who was going to save us from big bad IBM...
However, the life+70 rule was adopted by the UK in 1988 and made retrospective, which resulted in some works that had fallen out of copyright because the previous life+50 rule had expired, re-entering it.
So Wells' books are still in copyright in the UK, and have never left it. I wonder quite who Pendragon films got the rights from?
Hopefully NRO has at least one sat. in geosynch over the area.
Uh, geosynchronous orbits are only possible 22,000 miles over the equator. You could have a satelite in geosynch above the equator on North Korea's general longitude, but I doubt even spy satellite optics are going to tell you much from there.
I'd second the restaurant suggestion. In my company the tech team leaders have small budgets[1] that they can use for socials and our boss takes us out for lunch once every 2-3 months or so. Our team is small enough that we can usually agree on a type of cuisine to go for (typically pizza or curry) and it's nice to unwind for an hour and bitch together about the account managers and the creatives. Our Account Director also has a nice way to ensure we all attend our occasional full team meetings: he picks three names out of a hat; one account, one creative amd one techy and takes them to lunch.
The company as a whole does socials once in a while. Our Chairman loves the Matrix films and hired his local cinema for exclusive screenings of the sequels for us last year. Also, this being the UK, whenever there's a major international soccer tournament, we usually hire venues for the company to go and watch any England matches that are scheduled for during work time. Makes sense for the company as it saves all the footy fans from throwing sickies so they could watch the match at home and thus the company losing them for the whole day.
[1] this is a step down from when I joined, just before the.com crash, when we *all* had social budgets that we could spend as we wished, so long as it was for something the whole team could join in. Unfortunately the crash intervened and we lost the benefit just before I could get a chance to use it...
The BBC has been pushing its new DAB-only stations quite hard. We have approx 85% DAB coverage now, although the take-up is still only about 2%. However a lot of the DAB stations are also available via webcast and bundled with cable and satellite TV subscriptions.
I believe it's the UK government's ultimate goal to switch off analogue radio transmissions eventually, along with analogue TV and have everyone switch to digital TV and radio. I suspect this is going to take longer to accomplish than they want (by about 2010 IIRC) though.
This is a DAB - Digital Audio Broadcasting - not an AM/FM radio. I have no idea whether the DAB standard we have here in the UK/EU is a world-wide standard or not, and whether these things would work in the US or not. Sadly, I suspect that now that DAB sets are coming with the ability to record, that people like the MPAA will be working hard to ensure that they won't...
DAB is great. Got a Perstel Bluenote for Christmas and I'm currently listening to BBC 6Music. You can too via the BBC website.
You also no longer define the type of formelement (radiobutton, selectboxes,...) the browsing tool chooses the most apropriate system. For graphical browsers radiobuttons may be cool, but for screen readers it may read the form like "choose one of the following", and for small display devices a dropdown-menu maybe better as 2 radio buttons plus their label takes up too much screen space.
Sounds great in theory, but in practice the design monkeys are going to insist on their chosen control type be implemented as they want it. I've even had an argument where the designers wanted a bunch of check boxes with validation control to ensure only one could be ticked at a time, i.e. functionally equivalent to a group of radio buttons. Took a lot of time to convince them to change as they felt the checkboxes looked better than the radio buttons.
I had ops for cataracts when I was a child. As a result my pupils aren't the nice round sort the rest of you have but are sort of ragged. I wonder how Mr Blunkett's rinky-dinky little fascist scanner equipment will cope with my eyes?
Well no matter, hopefully me and the soon-to-be-missus will have emigrated to somewhere saner by the time the "voluntary" ID cards will have stopped being voluntary.
In a few years' time there'll be only two crew on the flight deck: a captain and a dog. The captain will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to bite the captain if he tries to touch the controls.
I use it to get information I need whilst on the move.
Typically as I walk to the station in the morning I'll check my local commuter rail company's real-time running information and the National Rail live departure board for my station to see how late my train is (it's only been on time three times since the new timetable came in last September!) so I know how fast I'll have to walk to catch it. As my train approaches Victoria I often check out London Transport's real-time news to see if the Victoria line is OK or not. If not, I know to head for the bus station on arriving at Victoria rather than go to the tube station.
Coming home, I usually check out these things on the web at work before departing, rather than on my WAP phone, but if there is a problem, WAP is useful for finding out when it's likely to be resolved as it seems that the information on it is often more up to date than the information on the station announcements.
On my journey home I sometimes check out the BBC News headlines on WAP as I don't get in until after the early-evening news programmes have finished.
Sometimes if it's a Thursday when my fiancee is lecturing in London, we meet up after work and instead of heading back home, we'll look to see what's on at the cinema and go and see a film if one appeals.
All the above links are to sites on the "real" web, but they all correspond to WAP sites I use regularly. They don't look as pretty in WAP, and it can be slow to get to what you want, as you have to work through more, smaller screens, but they do work.
Last time I was in the US, last August, my UK Orange GSM phone roamed on both AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile in SE New England: Boston, southern RI and Martha's Vinyard. Perhaps AT&T do use CDMA but they clearly use GSM too.
They were sold in the UK for a few years, until the loophole in the pollution laws that had let them be imported was closed, and we bought one second hand (my parents refused to spend more than a couple of hundred quid on a "new" car so we always drove old bangers). A nasty tan brown it was. We called it "Miss Piggy" and even put its name on the doors.
The car was, well, different. It ran not on ordinary petrol but on two-stroke fuel, and you had to pour some two-stroke oil into the fuel tank when you filled it up and then you had to bounce the car up and down on its suspension to mix the fuel and oil - great fun for us kids! (I swear I'm not making this up). Back then there were still a lot of petrol stations in the UK that weren't self-service, and more than once we got refused service because the staff refused to believe the thing took two-stroke fuel and didn't want to take responsibility for wrecking the engine.
When my dad bought it, it needed a replacement rear light cluster, so my dad fitted one and took it out for a spin on the Kingston bypass that evening. Looking in his rear view mirror he could see a bright glow and was pleased that the new lights were working so well. Then another motorist flagged him down and pointed out that there were flames coming out of the exhaust. Some oil that hadn't mixed properly had accumulated in the exhaust and caught fire. Not the last time that happened...
there was even a key that cleared the field from the current position to the end.
Ah, EraseEOF. That key was my particular friend. I haven't worked on IBM kit for nearly a decade now, but I still find muself reaching for it on my PC keyboard and being disappointed it's not there.
Bloody hell, I remember when that series was first shown on the Beeb, we were gobsmacked at the quality of the computer graphics!
Of course it turned out that the computer graphics weren't computer generated at all 'cos the kit to do them didn't exist then (or if it did was way out of the Beeb's pricerange).
I had a similar experience a few years back. The county council I worked for wanted a PC-based employment budgeting system and in best local govt style a comittee (of end-users) was appointed to select a package that we could be build a customised application on. I was lead technical advisor on the assessment and would be leading the application build. However, it was the committee who would select the package... Uh-oh. Oh and I did mention that the leader of the committee was the most psycho person I've ever had to deal with in my entire career?
We reviewed a whole load of packages and shortlisted two. One was a DOS-based package which had been around for years and I was quite confident would do the job with no problems. the other was a new windows-based package which had very little track record but a whizzo point-and-drool GUI and some very slick salespeople. I had, shall we say less confidence in this package meeting our needs and had recommended that we not even shortlist it (to be fair, I had no doubts it was a fine piece of software for the purposes it was designed for, just that those purposes couldn't be streched to cover what we needed to do).
Of course, the committee chose the Windows package, a decision I made it quite clear I disagreed with. But to no avail, and in due course contracts were signed and myself and a colleague were sent off to the Smoke (London for non-Yookay readers) to learn how to use the package.
Within a day or so it was quite clear to me that what I had suspected was true: there was no way this software could do what the salespeople claimed it could and that it could not begin to do what we wanted. I had visions of a long, nasty project, doomed to failure and quite probably legal action with me probably getting the blame. However, a small miracle intervened in that the course trainer turned out to be an old schoolfriend of my colleague, and after we'd explained what we wanted to do, he agreed that we'd been sold a pig in a poke and was willing to back us up when we complained to the suppliers, his employers!
So thankfully the contracts got cancelled and it was decided to write an app from scratch in VB. As at the time I had no VB experience so I had nothing more to do with the project, which still turned into a disaster, just not as bad as it could have been.
The committee leader stayed in her post and led many other disasters until, again in best local government style, she got pensioned off early for "medical reasons" a couple of years later.
ROLLBACK's no use if you've already issued a COMMIT 'cos you thought you were logged in to the dev environment where you WANTED to clear the archive table, rather than the production environment where the records you've just deleted are legally required to be stored for seven years (only two to go though).
Oh well, I thought, just get support to restore from backup. Kind of worked out well in the long run, and helped to mitigate my original error, as it meant support got to discover the bug that had corrupted the backups just a couple of days after it had crept in rather than six months or year later.
I never did get a satisfactory explanation as to why they weren't verfiying their backup tapes.
Hmm, didn't they work out that SARS spreads from infected people leaving the virus on things like door handles and banister rails... and fingerprint scanners ?
Funny, but I thought the Brazilian constitution was closely modelled on that of the US. In fact didn't Brazil used to be called "the United States of Brazil" for a while?
"Who is the more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?"
Slashdot Mirror
instead we have BBCi which is much much better
Slicker, yes; prettier, yes; but better? OK, maybe as we're on cable, which seems to be the poor relation in the UK interactive TV market, we're not getting as full an offering as people on satellite or terrestrial digital, but we find the BBC digital replacement for Ceefax to be rubbish in comparison to teletext - and teletext doesn't work on digital cable.
It's slow (admittedly, Ceefax isn't exactly fast, especially if you don't have a Fastext telly, but digital is supposed to be better), it's much more difficult to use, as you have to negotiate menu after menu and page after page to get anywhere, whereas with Ceefax, you could just enter the page number you want. Most annoyingly though we don't get anything like as much content as with Ceefax - just news and sport really.
Even then it doesn't always work properly. During the Olympics, BBCi had a theoretically great service where you could switch the live Olympic coverage to a different even than the "default" going out on the actual TV channel. Unfortunately, more often than not we found it simply wouldn't finish loading and we were stuck with no sound and four mini pictures, none of which we could select.
And I should imagine the potential scam market in Ireland (pop what 3 million or so?) is so small that it wouldn't be worth the scammers' time to bother. Now if a country the size of the US did it, or even the size of the UK, then they might try to subvert it.
I have to laugh at this IBM lovefest because I remember when IBM was considered every bit the nemesis that Microsoft is considered today, by the same sorts of people.
Oh yes, and I can remember when I started in the industry, at the start of the 90s, that a lot of people saw Microsoft as the "white knight" who was going to save us from big bad IBM...
However, the life+70 rule was adopted by the UK in 1988 and made retrospective, which resulted in some works that had fallen out of copyright because the previous life+50 rule had expired, re-entering it.
So Wells' books are still in copyright in the UK, and have never left it. I wonder quite who Pendragon films got the rights from?
Hopefully NRO has at least one sat. in geosynch over the area.
Uh, geosynchronous orbits are only possible 22,000 miles over the equator. You could have a satelite in geosynch above the equator on North Korea's general longitude, but I doubt even spy satellite optics are going to tell you much from there.
I'd second the restaurant suggestion. In my company the tech team leaders have small budgets[1] that they can use for socials and our boss takes us out for lunch once every 2-3 months or so. Our team is small enough that we can usually agree on a type of cuisine to go for (typically pizza or curry) and it's nice to unwind for an hour and bitch together about the account managers and the creatives. Our Account Director also has a nice way to ensure we all attend our occasional full team meetings: he picks three names out of a hat; one account, one creative amd one techy and takes them to lunch.
.com crash, when we *all* had social budgets that we could spend as we wished, so long as it was for something the whole team could join in. Unfortunately the crash intervened and we lost the benefit just before I could get a chance to use it...
The company as a whole does socials once in a while. Our Chairman loves the Matrix films and hired his local cinema for exclusive screenings of the sequels for us last year. Also, this being the UK, whenever there's a major international soccer tournament, we usually hire venues for the company to go and watch any England matches that are scheduled for during work time. Makes sense for the company as it saves all the footy fans from throwing sickies so they could watch the match at home and thus the company losing them for the whole day.
[1] this is a step down from when I joined, just before the
Surely the pertinent question is do we taste like chicken (-analogue) to us?
oh, and by the way, brits have a LOT of shit sitcoms too.
Though funnily enough, it's the really crap ones like Are You Being Served that seem to do best in the US...
The BBC has been pushing its new DAB-only stations quite hard. We have approx 85% DAB coverage now, although the take-up is still only about 2%. However a lot of the DAB stations are also available via webcast and bundled with cable and satellite TV subscriptions.
I believe it's the UK government's ultimate goal to switch off analogue radio transmissions eventually, along with analogue TV and have everyone switch to digital TV and radio. I suspect this is going to take longer to accomplish than they want (by about 2010 IIRC) though.
Got my AAs mixed up. I meant RIAA of course...
This is a DAB - Digital Audio Broadcasting - not an AM/FM radio. I have no idea whether the DAB standard we have here in the UK/EU is a world-wide standard or not, and whether these things would work in the US or not. Sadly, I suspect that now that DAB sets are coming with the ability to record, that people like the MPAA will be working hard to ensure that they won't...
DAB is great. Got a Perstel Bluenote for Christmas and I'm currently listening to BBC 6Music. You can too via the BBC website.
You also no longer define the type of formelement (radiobutton, selectboxes,...) the browsing tool chooses the most apropriate system. For graphical browsers radiobuttons may be cool, but for screen readers it may read the form like "choose one of the following", and for small display devices a dropdown-menu maybe better as 2 radio buttons plus their label takes up too much screen space.
Sounds great in theory, but in practice the design monkeys are going to insist on their chosen control type be implemented as they want it. I've even had an argument where the designers wanted a bunch of check boxes with validation control to ensure only one could be ticked at a time, i.e. functionally equivalent to a group of radio buttons. Took a lot of time to convince them to change as they felt the checkboxes looked better than the radio buttons.
The makers of Sesame Street announce they are joining the action on behalf of the letters 'E', 'G', 'L' and 'O'.
I had ops for cataracts when I was a child. As a result my pupils aren't the nice round sort the rest of you have but are sort of ragged. I wonder how Mr Blunkett's rinky-dinky little fascist scanner equipment will cope with my eyes?
Well no matter, hopefully me and the soon-to-be-missus will have emigrated to somewhere saner by the time the "voluntary" ID cards will have stopped being voluntary.
Old pilot joke:
In a few years' time there'll be only two crew on the flight deck: a captain and a dog. The captain will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to bite the captain if he tries to touch the controls.
I use it to get information I need whilst on the move.
Typically as I walk to the station in the morning I'll check my local commuter rail company's real-time running information and the National Rail live departure board for my station to see how late my train is (it's only been on time three times since the new timetable came in last September!) so I know how fast I'll have to walk to catch it. As my train approaches Victoria I often check out London Transport's real-time news to see if the Victoria line is OK or not. If not, I know to head for the bus station on arriving at Victoria rather than go to the tube station.
Coming home, I usually check out these things on the web at work before departing, rather than on my WAP phone, but if there is a problem, WAP is useful for finding out when it's likely to be resolved as it seems that the information on it is often more up to date than the information on the station announcements.
On my journey home I sometimes check out the BBC News headlines on WAP as I don't get in until after the early-evening news programmes have finished.
Sometimes if it's a Thursday when my fiancee is lecturing in London, we meet up after work and instead of heading back home, we'll look to see what's on at the cinema and go and see a film if one appeals.
All the above links are to sites on the "real" web, but they all correspond to WAP sites I use regularly. They don't look as pretty in WAP, and it can be slow to get to what you want, as you have to work through more, smaller screens, but they do work.
Last time I was in the US, last August, my UK Orange GSM phone roamed on both AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile in SE New England: Boston, southern RI and Martha's Vinyard. Perhaps AT&T do use CDMA but they clearly use GSM too.
Orange have both AT&T and Cingular listed as GSM roaming networks in the US.
They were sold in the UK for a few years, until the loophole in the pollution laws that had let them be imported was closed, and we bought one second hand (my parents refused to spend more than a couple of hundred quid on a "new" car so we always drove old bangers). A nasty tan brown it was. We called it "Miss Piggy" and even put its name on the doors.
The car was, well, different. It ran not on ordinary petrol but on two-stroke fuel, and you had to pour some two-stroke oil into the fuel tank when you filled it up and then you had to bounce the car up and down on its suspension to mix the fuel and oil - great fun for us kids! (I swear I'm not making this up). Back then there were still a lot of petrol stations in the UK that weren't self-service, and more than once we got refused service because the staff refused to believe the thing took two-stroke fuel and didn't want to take responsibility for wrecking the engine.
When my dad bought it, it needed a replacement rear light cluster, so my dad fitted one and took it out for a spin on the Kingston bypass that evening. Looking in his rear view mirror he could see a bright glow and was pleased that the new lights were working so well. Then another motorist flagged him down and pointed out that there were flames coming out of the exhaust. Some oil that hadn't mixed properly had accumulated in the exhaust and caught fire. Not the last time that happened...
there was even a key that cleared the field from the current position to the end.
Ah, EraseEOF. That key was my particular friend. I haven't worked on IBM kit for nearly a decade now, but I still find muself reaching for it on my PC keyboard and being disappointed it's not there.
Bloody hell, I remember when that series was first shown on the Beeb, we were gobsmacked at the quality of the computer graphics!
Of course it turned out that the computer graphics weren't computer generated at all 'cos the kit to do them didn't exist then (or if it did was way out of the Beeb's pricerange).
Ah, those were the days.
I'm with Telewest and pay 50GBP per month for 512KB (both ways) cable broadband, cable TV and telephone. Not a bad deal by UK standards.
I had a similar experience a few years back. The county council I worked for wanted a PC-based employment budgeting system and in best local govt style a comittee (of end-users) was appointed to select a package that we could be build a customised application on. I was lead technical advisor on the assessment and would be leading the application build. However, it was the committee who would select the package... Uh-oh. Oh and I did mention that the leader of the committee was the most psycho person I've ever had to deal with in my entire career?
We reviewed a whole load of packages and shortlisted two. One was a DOS-based package which had been around for years and I was quite confident would do the job with no problems. the other was a new windows-based package which had very little track record but a whizzo point-and-drool GUI and some very slick salespeople. I had, shall we say less confidence in this package meeting our needs and had recommended that we not even shortlist it (to be fair, I had no doubts it was a fine piece of software for the purposes it was designed for, just that those purposes couldn't be streched to cover what we needed to do).
Of course, the committee chose the Windows package, a decision I made it quite clear I disagreed with. But to no avail, and in due course contracts were signed and myself and a colleague were sent off to the Smoke (London for non-Yookay readers) to learn how to use the package.
Within a day or so it was quite clear to me that what I had suspected was true: there was no way this software could do what the salespeople claimed it could and that it could not begin to do what we wanted. I had visions of a long, nasty project, doomed to failure and quite probably legal action with me probably getting the blame. However, a small miracle intervened in that the course trainer turned out to be an old schoolfriend of my colleague, and after we'd explained what we wanted to do, he agreed that we'd been sold a pig in a poke and was willing to back us up when we complained to the suppliers, his employers!
So thankfully the contracts got cancelled and it was decided to write an app from scratch in VB. As at the time I had no VB experience so I had nothing more to do with the project, which still turned into a disaster, just not as bad as it could have been.
The committee leader stayed in her post and led many other disasters until, again in best local government style, she got pensioned off early for "medical reasons" a couple of years later.
Still, I get a week in London out of it.
ROLLBACK's no use if you've already issued a COMMIT 'cos you thought you were logged in to the dev environment where you WANTED to clear the archive table, rather than the production environment where the records you've just deleted are legally required to be stored for seven years (only two to go though).
Oh well, I thought, just get support to restore from backup. Kind of worked out well in the long run, and helped to mitigate my original error, as it meant support got to discover the bug that had corrupted the backups just a couple of days after it had crept in rather than six months or year later.
I never did get a satisfactory explanation as to why they weren't verfiying their backup tapes.
Hmm, didn't they work out that SARS spreads from infected people leaving the virus on things like door handles and banister rails ... and fingerprint scanners ?
Funny, but I thought the Brazilian constitution was closely modelled on that of the US. In fact didn't Brazil used to be called "the United States of Brazil" for a while?
"Who is the more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?"