I just saw the following advert on Facebook
One problem: never, ever, ever use music on a website. Videos, fine. Films, of course. Websites, no. When someone watches a video, they watch that video only and don’t concentrate on anything else. The same goes for a film. When I visit a website, I’m likely to have six different ones open at once. I don’t want them all singing to me.
My political views have been, well, less than subtle on this website, but I’ll try to keep this one from being too aggressive.
I’ve just received my ballot paper for the internal elections, and was promised that a copy of the manifesto of each candidate would be available online. It might have been there, but I certainly couldn’t find it.
I just spent half-an-hour trawling around the internet just so I could vote, when it should be a fairly simple process.
You know who you are, get your act together.
I just went out for one of my occasional walks around the campus with my camera, but it was fairly abruptly halted by two security officers.
You can probably see where this is going.
Apparently I need a media pass to take photos or they could fine me if it was reported. They said they wouldn’t report it (thankfully), but I couldn’t take any more photos, since they could give a good idea of the layout to a terrorist. I’m not annoyed with the security folks - they were reasonable and just doing their jobs. But… hooray for institutional bureaucracy!
To misquote the good doctor: If you ever came up with the idea of a media pass, go and donate some money to charity because you are karmically unbalanced.
The university publishes maps of the campus on their website. Need I say more?
Update: Very confusing. I just received an e-mail which stated:
You don’t need a media pass to take photographs on campus, if you’re in a public area and they’re not being taken for commercial gain.
Apparently security think otherwise. I will be printing off a copy of this e-mail and carrying it with me when I go to take photos. I’ll let you know if anything happens.
Update 2: Much better suggestion from Dad - go to the security office and ask rather than waiting for another encounter. I’ll try and get this done tomorrow and let you know the result.
Update 3: Apparently the guards were wrong. The security office wrote down a name on the printed-out e-mail and said that if I was stopped again I was told to say I had seen that person, and it would all be fine. Odd system.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Pandora to cut off UK listeners
Once again, congratulations must go to the British music industry for successfully screwing-over (sorry, there’s no politer phrase) the consumers.
In the e-mail sent to all those reaching Pandora via a UK net address, Mr Westergren said efforts to negotiate an “economically workable license fee” had proved “impossible”.
The rates demanded per track by UK licensing authorities were too high to support, he wrote.
Wow. That’s a new one. The music industry (by which, like everyone else, I mean everyone except the artists who get paid very little) trying to squeeze so much money out of people that they give up and nobody can listen.
Get your act together. You’re selling to people something which they enjoy and provokes emotions, not office equipment. They want music, the artists want to give them music. Let them without thinking about your wallet for once.
[As a side note, Rob is a great supporter of last.fm, whose free radio let him discover Interpol and Death Cab for Cutie, both of which he has subsequently bought albums of.]
Remember the e-mail I sent to PayPal? I finally got one back:
Dear Rob [surname blanked out by me],
Thank you for contacting PayPal. We believe we responded to your recent
inquiry either through a call into our service center or through another
e-mail from you.Please know that we appreciate your business and we want to address your
questions in a timely fashion. If you still need to speak with a PayPal
representative, please feel free to contact us at 888-221-1161.Thank you for choosing PayPal
Guess what folks? I never received an answer either by phone or e-mail! Even better, they gave me an American phone number to call. Not much use when I clearly mentioned in my e-mail PayPal UK.
The question readers (both of you), is should I follow this up and ask again?
[UPDATE] I followed it up and asked again, pointing out that I had received this non-answer, and guess what? It happened again! Two e-mails from PayPal, both effectively refusing to answer and claiming that I already knew. Morons.
PayPal seem to have expanded their secure cards scheme (whereby you can get a single-use Mastercard number to use which links to your PayPal account) to the UK.
Great news… or it would be if the required plug-in actually worked. Not only are both the plug-in and the website both refusing to create either of these for me, but the plug-in just scared the hell out of me by claiming that the main PayPal website was a fraud and I’d just given some fraudster the password and e-mail address necessary to use my bank account.
One changed password and two changed security questions later and I checked the address. The plug-in didn’t complain a second time, and it was the legitimate main PayPal site.
So thanks guys, but would you mind, y’know, actually getting it to work..?
[UPDATE] What a surprise! PayPal still haven’t got back to me, and as far as I can tell from reading around a bit, even though the secure cards appear to be made available to users outside the US, it is actually only Americans that can use them. Once again, PayPal has ignored the UK. Cheers folks.
Warning: Rambling tech post ahead.
AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing
“We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99,” he said. “We made that offer for months and they said no.”
NBC misses the point completely here.
To illustrate:
An iPod is the complete opposite of a printer. My printer for example, an Epson Photo R220, was bought for roughly £40. If you want to buy a complete set of ink cartridges for it, that will set you back around £30. The printer came with a set of cartridges, so that puts the value of my printer at roughly £10. Possibly the stupidest pricing model ever conceived, but one that makes Epson a fortune.
The iPod on the other hand, is quite an expensive bit of kit (iPod Classic Black 80Gb - £152 from Amazon), but the songs are incredibly cheap at 79p each.
You get the impression, even if it is just an illusion, that once you have an Apple product such as an iPod, Apple do actually care about you as a consumer. They want you to be able to say “I just heard this really cool song, I can go and buy it now for less than a quid”. NBC are clearly in it for the short term money.
Apple don’t rely on the necessity that something like a printer imposes. I need ink for my printer to work. I don’t need iTunes music to run my iPod (although it’s always a big plus).
Television episodes are the same, if not worse. You can watch an episode of Scrubs on television and think it was awesome (and you’d probably be right), and then go and pay to download a different episode which was terrible. You don’t want to risk wasting money on a bad episode. Whilst you might get potentially hooked on a series, it’s pretty unlikely your work depends on it.
NBC appear to be working on the basis that users will just pay for episodes which they’ve missed and jacking the cost up won’t affect the number of sales.
Yes it will, and more to the point, people won’t trust Apple and NBC. Apple have other products to sell, which is why they want to gain the trust of their customers with pricing that reflects what they’re selling. It’s partly because of trust that people like me will get an iPod and then consider getting a MacBook.
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