February 2010
16 posts
1 tag
Broadcast versus on-demand
Kate says:
I believe that on-demand will replace broadcast when >95% of the pop has broadband & there is a good “feed me TV” mode for on-demand
Now, I don’t technically disagree with this statement, but there are a few hidden conditions which means it’s a lot further off than availability of the raw technology belies.
First, there’s not just the general provision of...
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Wow
A couple of days ago, I posted about a collaborative playlist I’d created on Spotify called “Discoveries”.
When I posted the link, the playlist contained just three tracks, and I haven’t added any since. I just took a look and it now contains 66 tracks — four and a half hours of music.
I’m actually quite blown away by this. I love the idea of a huge ever-growing playlist that, whoever...
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BBC signals an end to an era of expansion
This from an article in The Times (prop: R. Murdoch), which may potentially be seen as a means for one of the BBC’s fiercest critics (R. Murdoch) to exert pressure upon the corporation.
It’s also, to my mind, unusual for “Trust sources” to leak the conclusions from a consultation several weeks before the report is due.
Further, it’s not necessarily true that the BBC has seen an “era of...
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The Trap
Do not make the mistake of confusing “works because of” and “works in spite of”.
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Protecting your content, a handy guide
1. If you want to prevent people from accessing your content who aren’t supposed to, what can you employ?
Geo-blocking (only granting access to people whose IPs are associated with a given country or list of countries).
Authentication (users must log in, for example using a username and password).
2. What happens if your content is served from a different place to the front end, and the front...
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Discoveries
I’ve created a collaborative Spotify playlist called “Discoveries”.
There are only a couple of tracks in it, but I’m inviting anybody and everybody to listen, and to add tracks they’ve recently discovered and enjoyed.
Join in :)
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Adobe SWF Verification
So Adobe has this thing, called “SWF Verification”, which is touted as some kind of content security scheme for streaming media.
Now, it’s fair to say that SWF Verification is marginally more useful than, say, checking a referrer, because it does rely on you having access to the SWF itself (at least for a short period) in order to perform the operations that the genuine Flash Player does.
...
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Ones and zeroes and pixels
I’ve had lots of recent conversations (online and off) on this subject. Gruber puts it rather succinctly:
This sort of nonsense gets to the bottom of what’s wrong with these entertainment executives’ outlook on the world. They want to define everything by arbitrary device types — this is a “TV”, that is a “computer”, this other thing is a “mobile device” — and then sell/distribute the same...
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A conversation I have every month or so
dwineman:
Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone) Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off. Me: I just want to know how late you’re open. Website: Nope. Me: But I’m on my phone. Don’t you have a little “HTML Version” link up in the corner or something? Website: I’m ignoring you. Me: What if I’m on my phone because I’m out, looking for a place to eat? Didn’t that ever...
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A short list of Chrome issues (beta 2)
blech:
An update on the issues listed in December:
[snip]
On the other hand, I am pleased to see that a request for the zoom button to instead maximise has been rejected as “Invalid”.
rejected as “Invalid”? I wholeheartedly approve.
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These are the reasons why nevali.net does not have...
(there are several, but people have asked)
Once upon a time, I had a comments box. In two years, I received two, perhaps three, legitimate comments. The number of spam comments (all detected as such and suppressed from view, mind), measured in the thousands. Because of this, I switched comments off—it just wasn’t worth anybody’s while.
I moved this blog to Tumblr a while ago. Tumblr doesn’t...
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Oh sweet lord, it’s WORSE
Regarding my last post, it turns out I was wrong. It was actually Mac OS X translating the extended attributes, not the NFS server.
Mac OS X turned the xattrs into resource forks, and promptly AppleDoubled them.
Gee, thanks, Apple.
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Does it work like this yet?
I want a couple of things:
A (disk) filesystem which works on multiple platforms which supports extended attributes (the easy part)
Mac OS X never ever resorting to AppleDouble if the filesystem supports extended attributes (actually, I’d like it if Apple just ditched resource forks altogether in favour of extended attributes, but there’re probably a whole bunch of compatibility reasons why...
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Using a local nameserver on Mac OS X redux
A long time ago, I wrote a post on using a local nameserver on Mac OS X. That was fine for 10.4, but 10.5 and 10.6 do things slightly differently.
First of all, although both client and server versions of Mac OS X ship with BIND, you shouldn’t use /etc/hostconfig to enable it any more. Have a look at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.bind.plist: by default the Disabled entry in the...
January 2010
17 posts
1 tag
Response to the BBC Trust’s Third Consultation on...
Here is my response (PDF).
