Category: technology

I’m just blog tired here 😀. Just looking at blogshares again. I’m slightly p*ssed off with the inaccuracies in it’s valuation of my blog. I find it ridiculous that given the numbers of people that use the bloglines blog aggregator that the blogshares spiders can’t bypass the single level of indirection implied by their javascript blogroll. It’s a real pain in the ass as I’m damned if I’m going to do any server-side scripting to dynamically embed my roll in the page. Bloglines was recently acquired by AskJeeves which also owns the teoma patented thematic search technology. The idea appears to be the creation of a search engine that is capable of thematically searching and grouping a massive database of RSS blog and news feeds. Which is a pretty nice idea in my opinion. I wish them luck.

Yay, finally a post about technology. No science, religion or philosophy today. Hell, I’m not even going to consider the ethical or philosophical implications of having to pay for culture as opposed to it being provided free gratis to all. Still, Digital Rights Management (or DRM) has caught the imagination of an entertainment industry keen to avoid getting overtaken by the latest and greatest piracy technologies and the increasingly flexible morality of the general public. They wouldn’t sell us a DVD writer if they didn’t want us to copy movies, right???. I was extremely interested to pick the following article from gizmodo. It really does look like Real Network’s “Rhapsody To Go” service just plain doesn’t work. The technology is Real’s implementation of the the Windows Media Player 10 DRM that lets you rent downloaded tracks and even listen to them on your portable music player. These so-called portable subscriptions are a really nice feature that fits with how most users would envisage DRM. You subscribe to the content and then enjoy it on the device of your choice! If the technology works that is. However PC World points out the many limitations of the service. You range of players that support it’s DRM doesn’t include the ubiquitous iPod. That’s a bit like serving a vegetarian a steak sandwich. A bit pointless really! To make matters worse, PC World failed to successfully transfer media to any portable music player. Here’s a quote from the article:

“In my tests, transferring tracks to a notebook and playing them while I was unconnected to the Net worked fine. Of course, that’s no great accomplishment–other music services have been allowing something like that for years. But despite trying with two IRiver H10 MP3 players, two Rhapsody accounts, and two PCs, and getting suggestions from Real engineers, I was never able to transfer any Rhapsody track I hadn’t bought outright onto a portable player. For me, at any rate, Rhapsody To Go just didn’t work.”

It turned out that Real’s support forums include lots of complaints from customers about similar problems with the Rhapsody To Go service. Real have since updated the software but I don’t have access to a more recent test. Also, in support of the service, Rhapsody’s desktop client has a very nice jukebox feature and the service generates a playlist with tunes similiar in genre to those you’ve already subscribed to. A bit like Amazon’s “people who bought X also bought Y” recommendation technology…

Just picked this up on Electric News today. An English company called Colt Telecom are offering irish businesses all local, national and international calls within a select number of countries for a flat rate, per-user, per-month fee of EUR24.50. Other countries covered in the deal include Austria, Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
However, the monthly charge does not cover calls to mobile phones. Having just read the VoIP open access directions from Comreg I’m not surprised as the call tariffs & STRPL (Switched Transit Routing Price List) for voice to mobile are likely to be at mobile-to-fixed rates for VoIP calls so as not to penalise the impoverished mobile operators, who’ve got to make a buck too, ya know.
It looks like Colt will be using IP-Centrex for switching and customers will lease phones at a flat rate of 20 euro/month. Nice idea as it reduces business CAPEX cost considerably while capturing a market for Colt. It appears that carrier-grade SIP-based Siemens HiPath 8000 softswitche(s) will form the switching backplane of the service and there are plans to introduce some unified messaging offerings which integrate with MS outlook. Not sure if a webservice only offering will be available to those that don’t run windows.

Colt, which employs around 40 people in Ireland specialises in providing data, voice and managed services to midsize and major businesses and wholesale customers. It has more than 50,000 customers across all industry sectors and the company owns and operates a 13-country, 20,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 32 major European cities, with direct fibre connections into 10,000 buildings and 12 Colt data centres.

Thanks to mofoghlu for the link.

I posted not so long ago about Georgia Tech’s prescient presentation on the media museum of 2014. While reading the sunday dailies & the sunday blogs today I noticed that the observer has gotten a shiny new daily blog. Here’s the low down from boing-boing

The weekend paper is now supplemented by a daily blog, with podcasts and moblogs. The RSS is fulltext (crap, no it’s not — this is such an important detail, Observer — get it right!). Trackbacks and comments are on and unmoderated. Keywords are tracked and displayed in a “folksonomic zeitgeist.” Headlines from competing papers and Technorati link cosmoses are pulled in and displayed on the front page. No paywall. No adwall. No wall.

. It’s wonderful to see an established & certainly distinguished paper so thoroughly embracing new news dissemination technology and in the true spirit of the web, offering everything free of charge