The BBC isn't allowed under it's charter to make money from advertising. They are supposed to form a neutral point on everything, including corporate interest.
That hasn't stopped some companies muscling into the popular TV shows to get their product placed - and recently are increasingly underfire about the whole thing.
That said - if you do pay the BBC TV/Radio licence - doesn't that entitle me to use of any content that they carry? For example if Radio 1 play a song on the radio - since my licence payment has already reembursed the artist for it - shouldn't I be allowed to listen again and again?
I think the Good vs Evil thing is about money. of course. Microsoft sells it's OS and Office packages for what a lot of people are now perceiving as a lot of money.
Google has never demanded a payment for the use of one of it's products or services until recently. The surfer has never had the bad taste sensation of "I paid for this, and it's not what I was sold". A free Google search however makes Google money from the marketing and advertising people, and if the user finds what they want or not - they haven't paid for it and are likely to feel less annoyed that they didn't get something from a branded service.
Microsoft as we all know didn't start until late in the Internet game, and I think the only place they have managed to dominate is the browser share, which they had to make free and ship with their OS to beat Netscape and others at the time. They also bought Hotmail, it wasn't one of their planted seeds. Bundled it in with MS Messenger service (to compete against ICQ/AIM), a proprietary login service (now.NET Passport) which nobody uses and I expect few clued up users would trust.
Google are in the position now where we all know they are a looming, large company with global reach and impact. They have the marketing advantage because they've been around for less time and haven't been caught lying very often, and it's never been a big deal.
Microsoft has more history and baggage and I personally do not believe anything they say or market to me.
On a side note an advert does catch my eye when it is by Microsoft. The campaign at the moment against Linux is typical - any semi-reliable study shows that Linux TCO is always cheaper - yet the marketing campaign asks "Who has better TCO? Don't ask us - ask the CEO of some multi-national corp pictured below". It's obvious MS has given them a nice discount to make them an MS only shop.
It's when you see stuff like this - that looking at Google (or Yahoo! or any other web-service provider) makes them look Angelic, and as a rational user I'm more likely to trust MS less, and trust Google the same as everyone else - when it comes to handing over my personal data, money, content, rights...
You see, those damn Arabs don't buy much of our stuff, so we need to bring democracy to them.
Actually, I believe that it was the US who was buying oil from Iraq, and now gets it free (or at a more democratic price to the US oil giants and investors.) An import turned into an export, for a couple of $trillion of the tax payers money.
It's still highly interesting, and obviously the entire situation gives China more control and weight when it comes to international negotiations.
This can be done with a nice little rsync script or even using LVM2 snapshot capability.
I agree with the grand parent poster about losing home user data, *at least* it couldn't be every single users data though.
Parent poster is not insightful, more like off topic.
If each user of GPS had to pay a fee each year to use it, and everyone in the UK didn't - the post would make sense. But they don't, GPS is a service offered (for free afaik) throughout the world to anyone with the required piece of equipment to use it. US citizens may be paying in tax dollars to keep the system up in the air, but that was your goverments choice to fund it and make it freely available to anyone. Most probably because of the logistics of making such a service subscription only.
So explain why again, using an analogy which is relevant, that anyone else in the world should get a service for free when UK citizens pay for it via a dedicated licence fee? (not income tax or any other tax). If anything, US citizens should be able to purchase a licence to use the content rather than whine that they should get it for free because they offer X, Y and Z for free themselves.
The Mighty Boosh is a hilarious, quality TV series. It's slightly off the wall, but it's good to see comedy cover new ground rather than reinvent the old gags.
I'm also proud that the BBC is going to trial the streaming shows, they seem to have been heavily investing in multicast routing with the ISPs to enable delivery. More details about it here: http://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/
If anything, you need to watch it to see just how good Vinces' hair is!
I sent an e-mail to my MP using http://www.writetothem.com/ and received a personalised letter on House of Commons letter header paper. My MP is Michael Jack and this is his response (typed out for your visal digestion):
Dear Mr Palastanga,
Thank you so much for your email of 21 June and for the care that you have taken to lay out in clear terms your concerns about the application of patent law within the European Union to software.
The picture you paint has a parallel. In, for example, the radio telecommunications business there are numerous examples of multinational companies who have attempted to control the development of new standards in the industry to the detriment of small innovative European based companies who, as you rightly observe, are the engine rooms of new concepts and technologies.
I will certainly make representations on your behalf both at a national and European level to alert key decision makers to your concerns and seek their assurances that in future work in this area they will fully reflect upon the very important points you raise in your email. As soon I as I have further news I will, of course, write to you again.
Yours sincerely
The Rt Hon Michael Jack MP
OK, sure, I didn't personally stop the directive - but I have a little faith restored in politics now I have had a personal response from a real MP.
Well done to all of the FOSS projects, developers and end users who have helped raise awareness about Software Patents.
Isn't this why Glen Eagles was chosen for the G8 anyway? If it's held in a major city the potential for millions of people to turn up and protest is possible. If you choose a smaller town or similar for a meeting of such high profile people, the numbers can be limited and more tightly controlled. Personally as a resident I'd be annoyed at the goverments for agreeing on such a location instead of London, Manchester or similar. I don't know who made this decision, but I assume it must have been a combination of world goverments.
For example: Unreal Tournament series has peaked in my opinion, the systematic annual release of UT 200x titles is starting to wear very thin, and the quality of the work and time going into the games seems to be declining.
I don't think the communities which build around playing these game titles are able to stay up to date with the releases. By the time you have bought the game, created a clan and joined a league or ladder, the next version of the game is out and you are simply supposed to discard it and move onto this years title.
Sure other areas such as the console market have done this, but the sucess of a single title now spawns a complete series of games
Why? Because 2 big corps merge it's evil?
Since Macromedia seemed to be Adobes Photoshops main competitor and Fireworks, I'd bet that they are basically buying out the competition.
It can only mean good things if you are an advocate of FOSS applications like Gimp.
If you are desperately waiting for Dreamweaver on Linux, then there is something seriously wrong with you! I'll be glad to see it slowly die when Adobe stiffles Macromedia products in favour of Photoshop.
TFA has more advertisements, navigation and extra widgets around it that content. It's certainly not conclusive, it's someones opinion based on what appears to be very little fact and lots of speculation.
However, like others say - for me as a linux desktop user and server administrator - it doesn't matter to me what the market share of linux is. The only people it matters too are the corporations and I very much doubt we'll see them saying "Yes, it's happened.. our product has slipped from 95% to 20%. We lost out to the better product".
Hrm!
My girlfriend has just left a company which ran the same call center setup as you describe. The "Team leaders" have monitoring applications which show how many calls are in the queue, the longest call waiting, staff logged on etc. More importantly to them - who is logged off either because they are away from their desk, toilet break or aftercall time of 3 minutes to do administration and paperwork.
However, even this wasn't enough. They decided that people were taking too much time between calls and abusing the aftercall status. Management, who in turn monitor the teams efficiency through a desktop application, decided that aftercall would switch off after 3 minutes and a new call would be put through automatically. This put her and the other call center staff in even more stressful situation where they couldn't even have a minute to recover after a stressful, difficult or administratively complicated incoming call.
Their machines are also locked down to dedicated applications, there is also some hardcore email monitoring going on when they chat to their work friends, on or off a call. Playing games is completely out of the question to the ~250 or so employees. It surely cannot help performance when they cannot escape from their jobs even for a moment. They are forced to work 100% of the time, or receive a rollocking.
She is very happy she's had an opportunity to move on to somewhere else now, but from her stories after work it seems that management are forced to trust the accurate stats generated by technology and use it as a benchmark to increase productivity. Staff are leaving left, right and center.. yet they look at their historical performance stats and decide that they weren't worth keeping anyway. Crazy.
I personally do not like how close Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer are to Gates. It seems unhealthy that they should be having meetings at such a level - especially since the use of Linux and FOSS in the goverment has been recommended, and then ignored when it comes down to purchasing time.
Obviously Gates has an interest in the use of MS within the UK Goverment, but surely this is just going over the IT decision makers heads when they sided with FOSS.
Also.. what the hell has Gates done for this country? All the sales are done via MS Ireland, not MS UK afaik.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC isn't allowed under it's charter to make money from advertising. They are supposed to form a neutral point on everything, including corporate interest.
That hasn't stopped some companies muscling into the popular TV shows to get their product placed - and recently are increasingly underfire about the whole thing.
That said - if you do pay the BBC TV/Radio licence - doesn't that entitle me to use of any content that they carry? For example if Radio 1 play a song on the radio - since my licence payment has already reembursed the artist for it - shouldn't I be allowed to listen again and again?
For your own safety*, your consitutional right to peacefully demonstrate has been revoked.
* Replace the word safety with anything you can think of - and is it still right that the Goverment decides that a rights are no longer applicable?
I think the Good vs Evil thing is about money. of course. Microsoft sells it's OS and Office packages for what a lot of people are now perceiving as a lot of money.
.NET Passport) which nobody uses and I expect few clued up users would trust.
Google has never demanded a payment for the use of one of it's products or services until recently. The surfer has never had the bad taste sensation of "I paid for this, and it's not what I was sold". A free Google search however makes Google money from the marketing and advertising people, and if the user finds what they want or not - they haven't paid for it and are likely to feel less annoyed that they didn't get something from a branded service.
Microsoft as we all know didn't start until late in the Internet game, and I think the only place they have managed to dominate is the browser share, which they had to make free and ship with their OS to beat Netscape and others at the time. They also bought Hotmail, it wasn't one of their planted seeds. Bundled it in with MS Messenger service (to compete against ICQ/AIM), a proprietary login service (now
Google are in the position now where we all know they are a looming, large company with global reach and impact. They have the marketing advantage because they've been around for less time and haven't been caught lying very often, and it's never been a big deal.
Microsoft has more history and baggage and I personally do not believe anything they say or market to me.
On a side note an advert does catch my eye when it is by Microsoft. The campaign at the moment against Linux is typical - any semi-reliable study shows that Linux TCO is always cheaper - yet the marketing campaign asks "Who has better TCO? Don't ask us - ask the CEO of some multi-national corp pictured below". It's obvious MS has given them a nice discount to make them an MS only shop.
It's when you see stuff like this - that looking at Google (or Yahoo! or any other web-service provider) makes them look Angelic, and as a rational user I'm more likely to trust MS less, and trust Google the same as everyone else - when it comes to handing over my personal data, money, content, rights...
You see, those damn Arabs don't buy much of our stuff, so we need to bring democracy to them. Actually, I believe that it was the US who was buying oil from Iraq, and now gets it free (or at a more democratic price to the US oil giants and investors.) An import turned into an export, for a couple of $trillion of the tax payers money. It's still highly interesting, and obviously the entire situation gives China more control and weight when it comes to international negotiations.
If you do a network install of Office '97 somewhere you are not prompted for a licence key for installs from that network share.
This can be done with a nice little rsync script or even using LVM2 snapshot capability. I agree with the grand parent poster about losing home user data, *at least* it couldn't be every single users data though.
As I said already, the BBC is not funded through taxes. Rather through licencing. This is not tax!
GPS is payed for via tax, and will continue to do so until someone in the Goverment decides otherwise.
A TV licence to watch BBC content is a choice, you do not have to pay for it as a UK citizen.
It seems GPS though, you do have to pay for it as a US citizen, regardless of if you use it.
Parent poster is not insightful, more like off topic.
If each user of GPS had to pay a fee each year to use it, and everyone in the UK didn't - the post would make sense. But they don't, GPS is a service offered (for free afaik) throughout the world to anyone with the required piece of equipment to use it. US citizens may be paying in tax dollars to keep the system up in the air, but that was your goverments choice to fund it and make it freely available to anyone. Most probably because of the logistics of making such a service subscription only.
So explain why again, using an analogy which is relevant, that anyone else in the world should get a service for free when UK citizens pay for it via a dedicated licence fee? (not income tax or any other tax). If anything, US citizens should be able to purchase a licence to use the content rather than whine that they should get it for free because they offer X, Y and Z for free themselves.
The Mighty Boosh is a hilarious, quality TV series. It's slightly off the wall, but it's good to see comedy cover new ground rather than reinvent the old gags.
I'm also proud that the BBC is going to trial the streaming shows, they seem to have been heavily investing in multicast routing with the ISPs to enable delivery. More details about it here: http://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/
If anything, you need to watch it to see just how good Vinces' hair is!
WOO HOO!
Isn't this why Glen Eagles was chosen for the G8 anyway? If it's held in a major city the potential for millions of people to turn up and protest is possible. If you choose a smaller town or similar for a meeting of such high profile people, the numbers can be limited and more tightly controlled. Personally as a resident I'd be annoyed at the goverments for agreeing on such a location instead of London, Manchester or similar. I don't know who made this decision, but I assume it must have been a combination of world goverments.
Oh.. I thought you said Blix... hardly a word associated with thorough searches.
For example: Unreal Tournament series has peaked in my opinion, the systematic annual release of UT 200x titles is starting to wear very thin, and the quality of the work and time going into the games seems to be declining.
I don't think the communities which build around playing these game titles are able to stay up to date with the releases. By the time you have bought the game, created a clan and joined a league or ladder, the next version of the game is out and you are simply supposed to discard it and move onto this years title.
Sure other areas such as the console market have done this, but the sucess of a single title now spawns a complete series of games
Why? Because 2 big corps merge it's evil? Since Macromedia seemed to be Adobes Photoshops main competitor and Fireworks, I'd bet that they are basically buying out the competition. It can only mean good things if you are an advocate of FOSS applications like Gimp. If you are desperately waiting for Dreamweaver on Linux, then there is something seriously wrong with you! I'll be glad to see it slowly die when Adobe stiffles Macromedia products in favour of Photoshop.
TFA has more advertisements, navigation and extra widgets around it that content. It's certainly not conclusive, it's someones opinion based on what appears to be very little fact and lots of speculation. However, like others say - for me as a linux desktop user and server administrator - it doesn't matter to me what the market share of linux is. The only people it matters too are the corporations and I very much doubt we'll see them saying "Yes, it's happened.. our product has slipped from 95% to 20%. We lost out to the better product". Hrm!
My girlfriend has just left a company which ran the same call center setup as you describe. The "Team leaders" have monitoring applications which show how many calls are in the queue, the longest call waiting, staff logged on etc. More importantly to them - who is logged off either because they are away from their desk, toilet break or aftercall time of 3 minutes to do administration and paperwork.
However, even this wasn't enough. They decided that people were taking too much time between calls and abusing the aftercall status. Management, who in turn monitor the teams efficiency through a desktop application, decided that aftercall would switch off after 3 minutes and a new call would be put through automatically. This put her and the other call center staff in even more stressful situation where they couldn't even have a minute to recover after a stressful, difficult or administratively complicated incoming call.
Their machines are also locked down to dedicated applications, there is also some hardcore email monitoring going on when they chat to their work friends, on or off a call. Playing games is completely out of the question to the ~250 or so employees. It surely cannot help performance when they cannot escape from their jobs even for a moment. They are forced to work 100% of the time, or receive a rollocking.
She is very happy she's had an opportunity to move on to somewhere else now, but from her stories after work it seems that management are forced to trust the accurate stats generated by technology and use it as a benchmark to increase productivity. Staff are leaving left, right and center.. yet they look at their historical performance stats and decide that they weren't worth keeping anyway. Crazy.
I personally do not like how close Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer are to Gates. It seems unhealthy that they should be having meetings at such a level - especially since the use of Linux and FOSS in the goverment has been recommended, and then ignored when it comes down to purchasing time.
Obviously Gates has an interest in the use of MS within the UK Goverment, but surely this is just going over the IT decision makers heads when they sided with FOSS.
Also.. what the hell has Gates done for this country? All the sales are done via MS Ireland, not MS UK afaik.