March 2009
7 posts
6 tags
Why Skype for iPhone
There’s been lots of buzz about Skype for iPhone, due for launch today, and lots of people asking what the point of it is.
There are a couple of answers to this:
Of the 30 million iPhone OS devices sold, only 56% of those are iPhones—the rest are iPod touches.
Cheap (or free) International calls don’t necessarily mesh well with the various carriers’ charging plans. Remember that...
4 tags
Sorry, this programme is not available to watch...
Let me get this straight: you’re happy for your content (archival footage, music, whatever) to be broadcast—for free—to anybody with appropriate receiving equipment in the country, in both analogue and DRM-free digital formats which are both trivial to record (again, both in analogue and digital formats).
But you won’t allow it to be made available online for 7 days in a tightly-controlled...
7 tags
Daniel Hannan may be a Tory, but he makes a bloody...
Daniel Hannan MEP accuses Gordon Brown of sounding “like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.
(Hat tip to @fraserspeirs)
4 tags
What Would Osama Do?
Over the past couple of years, the British Government (amongst others) has made repeated noises about the use of the Internet by terrorist and other criminal groups. Services like Skype, Hotmail and Facebook, are all big targets (and all huge consumer operations).
The fact is, though, that if the terrorists were remotely as tech-savvy as our politicians are claiming, they wouldn’t bother...
4 tags
Lord Carter's Digital Britain
It’s interesting to note that while the “Interim Digital Britain Report” contains lots of waffle about ensuring everybody has access to an “up to” 2Mbps connection (no mention of latency, or what level of real-world throughput we should expect) by 2012, it contains absolutely no mention of IPv6.
A hint for Lord Carter: go and chat to the nice folks at RIPE. I’m sure the...
6 tags
A gentle reminder
We are often reminded by Labour front-benchers of Britain’s period of great prosperity, which was brought to an abrupt halt by the “global credit crunch”. A period of great prosperity, often termed a “boom”, which they’d have us believe was architected by then Chancellor of the Exchequer and now Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
And architected it he did. He—egged on by the (so-called)...
7 tags
Lord Turner's new regulatory regime
This week Lord Turner announced plans for “profound” banking reform, including the increase in the ration of working capital required for banks to operate.
Except they’re not very profound, really. Banks will still (if they choose, and most high-street outfits will) be beholden to stock markets, and can still borrow money in order to lend it. In short, all that will happen is that the safety...
