For those who can’t remember Jerry A. Taylor he’s the city manager of the City of Tuttle, Oklahoma, US. About a year ago he became something of a celebrity in the open source world after threatening a CentOS developer with the FBI. This was all because his website was showing the CentOS Apache holding page which he had mistaken for a hacking attempt.
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When former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble posts such a harsh attack on Microsoft’s ‘Windows Live’ policy you know that they’re in trouble. While he worked at Microsoft he was sometimes critical but never to a great extent. It’s always interesting to see what people think once they leave their former employers and speak more openly.
According to Digital Spy, Virgin Media plans to sponsor Big Brother 8. Now personally I think of Big Brother as something that should be killed off now, it wasn’t particularly interesting to watch people stuck in a house the first time, but it was indeed a massive success. However, year after year more people get bored with it and viewing figures got so low that they recently had to stage a racism incident to get viewers up.
The latest news in the ongoing Virgin Media (formerly known as NTL/Telewest) dispute with Sky is that Virgin have threatened Sky with legal action if this issue is not resolved within 30 days. Virgin believe that the market power of Sky means that they can use their channels to unfairly push their satellite service ahead of their rivals.
Because of some regressions in the Firefox 2.0.0.2 security update a new release will be produced very soon with these regressions fixed. Once available, this release will be pushed as an automatic update.
February was a record month for spam on this blog. 1545 spam were caught by the spam filter for the month of February alone by the automated spamfilter. 12,336 have been caught since this blog opened. As for actual comments we’re lucky to get 3 a month, most of our traffic still goes to the reviews ‘A Week with IE7‘ and ‘A Week with Firefox 2‘ which do not accept comments. Although the spam filter is doing a good job, I still have comments set to be moderated this means no spam should get through, however it may take a few days for legitimate comments to post. There’s also a small chance that some legit comments are caught by the spam filter, I noticed this happen just once but with the volume of spam on this site it would be easy to miss.
So with the low number of comments on this site and the high number of spam should comments just be disabled?
So for the first time in ages I’ve been watching Sky News to see their take on the contract dispute between Sky and Virgin Media. Digital on-screen graphics (DOGs) is the technical term to the graphics that appear permanently on the screen during a programme, many channels have just the TV name on screen, but News channels often have more info like scrolling headlines.
Sky have made their on screen logo a lot more annoying that it was before, now every so often it turns round, it’s pointless as it doesn’t show anything different when it rotates, it’s just a distraction.
Anyway, so far the coverage about the Virgin Media dispute has been short and to the point, they don’t imply blame on either side in their bulletins. Most of the news bulletin is concentrating on the issue of contaminated petrol.
Also what seems odd is that the Sky News breakfast show is now broadcast simultaneously on Sky One. As everyone who can get Sky One can also get Sky News this seems rather pointless. I’ll cover the initial reactions today to the Sky switch off on Virgin, then I’ll leave it for a few weeks to see whether people decide to stay with Virgin or leave.
Not browser related, but both companies provide broadband Internet access in the UK so I’ll use that as my excuse for writing about this.
Today Virgin Meda’s contract to show the Sky basic channels package (Sky One, Sky Sports News and Sky News are the main ones in this pack, ex-NTL customers had a few extra ones as well), the two companies failed to reach an agreement of what they were willing to pay to continue to show the channels.