Portsmouth winding up order

Another match against HMRC for unpaid tax, looks worse than last time - could this be the end? (again)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/16710949.stm

Fred Goodwin to lose title

There were two reasons why he possibly should have kept it:

1. As a memory of the countries collective folly over a "golden economic age", when it was really banks like RBS over leveraging to destruction (theirs and ours)

2. A new "high bar" of what does it take to lose a knighthood

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16821650

But overall a sensible decision, it has taken long enough!

Topfield Retirement

I've had this Topfield 5800 PVR since 2006, I've used it everyday since then and it has been a good piece of hardware. When I bought it Freeview PVRs were very rare and this was one of the better ones. I had a bad experience with a Pace Twin recorder that I suffered for a couple of years (now that was unreliable!)

It had a couple of firmware upgrades to get series link and recommendations, also to improve reliability as it crashed a little in the early days. I particularly liked the record two channels at once with playback of a third (if on the same multiplex as one of the recordings), also it had simple resume and skip functionality.

The user interface was a little clunky and dated but was functional. It did provide a USB interface for archiving, but at USB 1.0 speeds! Still it was a little project to get the tools working on Linux that could do this.

Sadly Topfield have not really kept pace with the market place, here is an interesting blog summarising the decline:

http://gonedigital.net/2010/12/30/how-topfield-lost-the-plot/

So I've switched to a Humax, having been impressed by the earlier model I bought my parents. I'll write up a review once I've used it for a while, but so far it feels a well executed piece of hardware - and gets ready for the switch to HD services.

Still thank you Topfield for the years of service.

Facebook IPO

Rumours are the IPO is close to IPO, maybe next week. Expecting to raise an unbelievable $10bn valuating the company at $75bn. Those are incredible figures when you consider what the business really is. They have a lot of mindshare, and certainly a lot more credence than the early dot com companies, but even so?

Still good luck to them, I won't be investing and hopefully my pension funds won't either!

Film: Hero directed by Yimou Zhang

A film about the time before the first emperor of China, about trying to unite the various kingdoms and form one China. The plot centres around an assassin who has defeated the major threats to the most powerful leader of one of the kingdoms.

There are many twists and turns, some epic fighting scenes. The fighting is fantasy martial arts with flying and supernatural powers - this for me detracts from the film a little. Also every defeat in battle, the defeated is granted an over symbolic final last words scene - rather than just dieing!

Still a good film with good action sequences with a good background plot to keep the intrigue doing.

Microsoft CEO

I always try and read the Cringely predictions for the year, and a new Microsoft CEO is one of them:

http://www.cringely.com/2012/01/prediction-7-a-new-microsoft-ceo/

I kind of agree, Microsoft have being treading water in too many areas - except maybe gaming. Of course they are still immensely profitable, but relying on stalwarts such as Windows and Office cannot go on forever - and currently they look like failing to make the Cloud transition very convincingly.

High ranking executives have been leaving the last few years, Bach, Allchin, Ozzie - those are the ones I can remember. This maybe a strategy by Ballmer to keep the replacement options limied, of course a company can appoint outside of the current management structure. It will be interesting to see if this prediction comes true, and who replaces him.

TV Wishlist 3

It is now getting time for me to replace my old TV setup, and 7 year old early LCD TV, and trusty Topfield have lasted me well.

I wrote a blog almost two years ago, anticipating the arrival of a TV with PVR features, just supply your own hard disk!

http://dontgetdemoralised.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-wishlist-2.html

But sadly it only got as far as recording, and live pause - no schedule features, no twin tuners, and definitely no series link.

That is a real missed opportunity, I suspect it the big manufacturers Samsung and Panasonic not wanting to "compete with themselves" on their STB offerings which might already offer this.

So the replacement with be both a box, and a HD freeview TV - although I can tune down the TV requirements given the vendors have failed to live up to the early promise!

Wikipedia donation

Over Christmas I made my first ever donation to Wikipedia. I had been meaning to when they first started running the campaign a couple of years ago. I suppose what stopped me was the additional problem of setting up a PayPal account - I just about justified it to myself by thinking that account might come in handy in future (in general I like to limit the number of services I use, and only commit to signing up to something if I think I am going to make good use of it and check on it regularly - PayPal was borderline for that criteria)

So I made my small donation, when you read about the number of servers they have compared to the big corporations it is incredibly small. Of course they are serving mostly static content, but it seems a small number even for that.

The thing that made me donate was the fact that it is the first place I turn to for initial facts on something, and the articles are usually very high quality. If Wikipedia was pay for then I probably would - but I hope it never goes down that route. Of course this raises the question of how can any web enterprise ever be viable if it was not for a benevolent owner with deep pockets - but that is another question.

CES Keynote

I watched the annual keynote by Microsoft at CES. This year it was announced that this would be the last time Microsoft would do this event, after appearing at the conference to keynote since the late 1990s.

Sadly it felt like a sign off end of an era rather than Microsoft showing new technology, it was done in a "conversational style" with Ballmer being asked questions by a main presenter, and then other people doing some demos.

The first segment was all about Windows Phone, and how they are taking a "social" integration view of the whole thing. I'm sure the handsets and platform is good, but you could not help feeling there was an elephant in the room (getting out sold and having to rely on patent litigation to get revenue from other vendors who have more successful products).

Then we went onto Windows 8, for me this is what Windows 7 should have been to anticipate a fashion for tablet computing (something Microsoft failed to start in the mid 2000s). But as we know Windows 7 put Vista right, and Microsoft fell behind. Stil Windows 8 may get this right, although you can see it being niche for these devices, I do not think they will get across the platforms right or popular.

Finally to end on a high, there was an Xbox and Kinect demo. Every year we get told that this will become the content center piece of the living room. Maybe it is true this time, and they did announce content provider deals this time. The voice control demo also looked good, although I think I would find it frustrating to use even though it looks fairly slick.

2012 A New Year

The politicians are already setting the expectation that this is another tough year for European countries. David Cameron who previously was hoping 2011 would be the turnaround year, having to admit that this is some way off.

It is important to keep perspective, but government cuts are going to bite harder this year - as they wrestle with overspend versus economic investment for the future.

The housing benefit caps will start to appear, and it is not clear whether having such high claims (in London in particular) was paying the market rate, or creating a distorted market where landlords were charging over the odds because they knew the government would pay up. Either way it is no consolation for those who are having to vacate, the news had an example today of a £2000 a month property in London that was nothing more than a modest mid terrace block house. Lack of affordable housing is a continuing problem that we've ignored for too long.

What affordable housing there is, the government is now promising to make sub-letting illegal and force people on good wages to pay market rates. This is a story recycled from earlier in the year, but progress on this would free up housing to the most needy.