Category: Columns & Opinion
freesat: the 12 most important things you need to know about the subscription-free satellite service
Freesat launched on 6th May.
This FAQ was last updated on 6th May 2008.
1. What is freesat?
freesat is a subscription-free satellite service due to launch in the UK in Spring 2008.
freesat is a joint collaboration between the BBC and ITV, approved by the BBC Trust.
Opinion: Government paedophile plans are a confusing web of ideas
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
OK, so let’s do a straw poll. What do you think would stop a sex offender abusing children? I know this is not a comfortable topic but it is an extremely important one in tech and Internet terms. Stiffer sentences maybe? The threat of castration? A life term in jail? Perhaps even death by lethal injection?
We’ve all had those “If I were Home Secretary” moments and this is one of them because the plans today released by the UK’s Home Secretary Jacqui Smith seem the worst kind of limp proposals for such a serious matter…
Richard Gilzene: My favourite wastes of time…
I thought making a list of my favourite websites would be incredibly easy. I’ve spent exactly half my life on the Internet. Part of the first generation raised on it. I use it everyday.
Tech Digest Live: Testing reflective laptop screens on the beach
Seems like a good idea to test laptops on the beach, until you get to the beach. Where it’s cold. And windy. And raining. And suddenly you’re more worried about your camera and laptop breaking than seeing which screen is best for using outdoors.
Still, I soldered on – and you should’ve seen how happy the shopkeeper was when I bought that Cornetto! Definitely the first Cornetto he’s sold in 2008. Made his week.
So there you go. A stunning victory for the Portege R500, with its modern…
Opinion: Toshiba laptop face-recognition is a waste of tech time!
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
So you’re buying a new laptop. Large hard disk, check! Fast processor, check! Windows Vista, well if I must! Face-recognition to stop unauthorised people from logging into it, blimey – what is this, Star Trek?
Well, that could be the newest addition to your techno-arsenal if you snap up one of
Toshiba’s latest notebooks, the Satellite U300, A300 or P300.
Not only are they full spec’d up to the nines, the most interesting bit of gadgetry inside
has to be the camera that matches your face to the one stored in the memory, before it’ll let you into the desktop.
And it’s also the most useless bit of gadgetry I’ve seen in a while…
Opinion: Manhunt 2's release will kill the current video games classifications
Jonathan Weinberg writes…
It’s a row that’s been rolling on for far too long. It’s a row that does nothing to help the perception of gaming among wider society. And it’s a row that is going to run and run for quite some time yet.
Rockstar has now finally overturned a ban that meant it was unable to release Manhunt 2 in the UK. But while that’s good news for the firm, for gaming itself, this whole bloody saga is just another nail in the coffin of gaming.
The media is already far too focused on the negatives – the violence, the calls to ban so-called “killer games” and the conflicts over having a voluntary code to provide an age rating for the majority of titles.
Occasionally a positive story will slip through, like the OAPs playing Wii to keep in shape, but on the whole, games are treated with far more disdain than rap music and horror movies, both of which have had their fare share of criticism in the past….
How much does Apple care that "iPhone 2.0" has been hacked already?
Just a week after Apple launched the iPhone SDK, it’s been hacked.
Pretty fast going, but unsurprising.
Let’s not think that Apple didn’t see this coming a mile off…
Opinion – Why the Observer's '50 most powerful blogs' feature proves print media knows nothing about new media
Katherine Hannaford writes…
Last week, when reading the upcoming features for the next issue of the Observer Magazine, I was worried to see they promised an article entitled ‘The world’s 50 most powerful blogs’. Old media reporting on new media? It could only mean trouble, and stir a generous helping of some angry-sachet into the big online pot.
When having my weekly Sunday morning lie-in in bed with a copy of that day’s Observer, I realised I overestimated the knowledge of the journalists writing for that paper, and indeed, the magazine. Sure, I can’t tar them all with the same brush, considering the Observer and its brother-newspaper, the Guardian, have internet-savvy journalists like Bobbie Johnson and Jemima Kiss snuggled under their wings, amongst others. But what I saw before my eyes on the morning of the 9th of March angered me greatly.
It appears I wasn’t the only blogger infuriated over the dubiously-named list of ‘powerful blogs’ (available online here). The 26-odd commenters who’ve shared their opinions on the article online all agree, as do thousands more across the world, that the list is possibly the worst, most confusing collection of so-called blogs ever put together. Collaborators Jessica Aldred, Amanda Astell, Rafael Behr, Lauren Cochrane, John Hind, Anna Pickard, Laura Potter, Alice Wignall and Eva Wiseman, you should hang up your Bloglines accounts for good. Although I’m guessing one of them, if not all of them, doesn’t even know what an RSS Feed is, according to one of the many mistakes they made in the summary about Engadget…
Opinion: Please, please me and put The Beatles on iTunes!
Jonathan Weinberg writes… Help, I need somebody, help, not just anybody, help, you know I need someone… who can blooming well tell me if we are ever going to be able to buy Beatles songs on the interweb.
I’m not one of those nuts who says they’re the greatest band in the world, but I can understand why it’s so important to have their tunes in digital form. After all, there’s millions of people out there who’d listen to the Liverpool Fab Four eight days a week if they could…
Opinion: Why Apple's iPhone won't beat Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS at their own game!
Jonathan Weinberg writes… Mobile phones will never, ever, be portable games consoles. Nokia tried it with their N-Gage device, and they are trying it again with N-Gage software on their normal handsets. Gizmondo (while not strictly a phone) tried it – and failed miserably.
Now Steve Jobs has set his sights on trying to battle Sony and Nintendo for a slice of the portable gaming industry by opening up the iPhone to top-notch titles.
It’s a nice soundbite, it’s a good offering for Apple consumers, but it will still only ever be a mobile phone that you can play games on – rather than a games console. And they are, and always shall be, two totally different propositions and never the twain should meet…
