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Nov

Fast Always On Internet Everywhere & The Death Of Television

and remove the plug from it's socket

Next year analogue terrestrial TV in the UK is to be shut down. I like to think of this as The Death Of Television and hope that it will occur at midnight, after they have played the National Anthem, the screen has gone dead and the bloke has reminded us to switch off our sets and remove the plug from the socket. We will then have to take up Digital TV if we want to continue to endure the mindless drivel currently delivered by our existing apparatus.

With the Death Of Television, radio “bandwidth” will be freed up and the question arises (to misquote Churchill): To what use will it be put?

The Death Of Radio is not going so smoothly. The BBC goes through phases of telling us that the roll out of Digital Audio Radio (DAB) is almost complete and pretty soon they are going to switch off FM. After the ensuring uproar from various Radio 4 listeners living in peat bogs on Dartmoor the Beeb go a bit quiet for a while but are usually back a few months later claiming it is nearly finished again.

Personally I think DAB may have been an enormous, publicly funded, blunder (EPFB). Yes, we all know that you can shove more rubbish down a DAB transmission than you can down AM or FM but the truth is that no cars have DAB radios and the quality and reliability of FM re-transmitters is appalling.

I am always bemused to hear some, otherwise intelligent, BBC boffin banging on about the superiority of DAB and then suggesting that we use FM re-transmitters to receive it in our cars. They’re TALKING BOLLOCKS. It’s a non starter.

I rant, as is my want, but I have a point. I believe that, “the way forward”, (as our poor corporatised youth have been taught to talk about the future as if we are actually on a well planned journey somewhere rather than merely meandering around aimlessly grasping at straws on a our way to God knows where) is to, not only close down analogue TV, but to close down DAB too. And I wouldn’t stop there. Shut down AM, shut down FM. No more Short Wave Lilliiburlero to the Commonwealth, no more radio controlled toy cars and aeroplanes. Take away the police walky talkies. Let the Ambulance radios fall silent. Abolish VHF at sea. Bluetooth, traffic information, throw the master switch on the lot. Shut it all down.

Has Jones taken leave of his senses you ask? Is Talking Bollocks now advocating complete anarchy? There will be questions in The House.

But wait, there is method in my madness. I suspect that the allocation of radio bandwidth has taken place in a fairly piecemeal way since the origin of radio and we are now in a position where a selection of rival technologies compete for bandwidth.

This sort of thing happens with all technologies. The infrastructure evolves ad hoc during a learning phase and then, once it’s all pretty much understood, it’s time for a redesign taking into account all that has been learned.

Why not discontinue all technologies save one? Why not use a single technology for everything? I am suggesting that some kind of packet radio, such as used by Wifi or GPRS, would be capable of handling TV, Radio, walky-talkies and everything else if it just had enough bandwidth.

If we free up the bandwidth currently used by everything else we can allocate it all to packet radio and have Fast Always On Internet Everywhere. (FAOIE). You want to watch a film? Download via The Internet. You want to watch BBC1? Connect via The Internet. You want to fly your model aeroplane? Set up an Internet connection. Does a hospital need to talk to an Ambulance? Use Skype.

Abolish broadcast and embrace multicast and unicast.

OK, OK, this may not be completely practical. There are probably reasons that Bluetooth uses the frequency it does and I expect that Jodrell Bank will insist on certain dead zones for radio astronomy but you get the idea. Use all the bandwidth for wireless Internet and use the Internet for all communications.

The only limitation would become: is there enough bandwidth for every human and every autonomous device? Good question.

I guess it depends how closely they pack us.

Nov

Everything Everywhere?

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

Categories: Bollocks, london, Politics, Social comment and Technology
Tags: Cars, commuting, Everything Everywhere, GPS, roads, tele-working

We are constantly told about how technology allows us to do anything anywhere. In fact T-Mobile and Orange have created a new company called Everything Everywhere. Yet we still insist on transporting tons and tons of metal around the country every morning and evening. We don’t need new road we need Tele-working.

Open Road

Nov

All In It Together

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

Categories: Bollocks, Commerce, democracy, Finance, News and Politics
Tags: All in it together, directors pay, directors salaries, sky news

Sky News, 28th October 2011.

All In It Together

Oct

Occupy London – Hypocrisy & detachment of the establishment

By jonesxxx 3 Comments

“You can't wash your hands of the consequence of your actions” - What a hypocrite!

You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions - Mathew Hancock, MP

“You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions” said Mathew Hancock MP this afternoon on Radio 4′s PM program. The topic was the financial crisis but Mr. Hancock was not talking about the bankers, he was talking about the protesters!

Mathew Hancock, Conservative MP for West Suffolk, was interviewed by Eddie Mair along with Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK. Mr. Murphy was sympathetic to the protesters, talked about changing the financial system and got in a plug for his book The Courageous State.

Mr. Hancock was not sympathetic and went on to say some very stupid things. He said that it was fair to ask the protesters what they’re campaigning for and how it should be achieved. He said that it was reasonable that they’ve made their point but that now it is time to look forward to the detail of achieving the world that they want to create.

Mathew Hancock was TALKING BOLLOCKS.

Firstly, the idea that the protesters have made their point and should leave him and his buddies to address the situation is self satisfied tosh! If the protesters just pack up and go home then the bankers and the politicians will merely carry on as usual. The current Conservative pre-occupation with getting out of the EU is evidence that the unfairness of the bailout has slipped right off the governments agenda.

Secondly, the idea that it is not possible to protest unless you have a solution is utter rubbish! It is like the triage nurse at a hospital telling a sick man to go away until he had developed a cure for his ailment.

It is an indication of how out of touch our politicians are that Mr. Hanock expects ordinary men and women to do a better job of running banks than those paid millions for their supposed expertise. It was not the job of ordinary tax payers to keep an eye on the banking industry and we should not expect them to set policy but it is their right to protest and make themselves heard so that those who do have the knowledge and the power can recognise their concerns and adjust policy.

However, it was another of Mr. Hancok’s statements that really angered me but first let me tell you about another Radio 4 program over the weekend. In BBC Radio 4′s, The Bottom Line on Saturday Evan Davis interviewed the chairman of a boutique merchant bank, the chief executive of a financial advisory firm and the chief executive of a savings and investment group. When these men tried to dismiss the accusations that the bankers were to blame for the financial crisis Mr. Davis got fairly miffed and stated that just prior to the credit crunch, after a boom which had run on for ten years (and was therefore due to bust), a major bank had lent £40 for every £1 it had in deposits. This meant that if the value of its investments were to fall by just 2% the bank would be insolvent. This is incompetence and complacency on a massive scale. Further, at the same time, while the economy was booming, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, was running a deficit. (If you can’t repay debt in the good times then when can you?)

This evening on PM, Mr. Hancock said that the protesters outside St. Paul’s had caused the cathedral to close, losing the church around £20,000 a day, that actions have consequences and “You can’t wash your hands of the consequence of your actions”!

According to Wikipedia, before becoming an MP, Mr. Hanock was an economist at the Bank of England, specialising in the housing market. It is further testament to his utter hypocrisy that he can utter such statements without a hint of irony. This out of touch pillock is quite content to let the politicians and bankers destroy a whole industry then walk away with fat bonuses yet has the gall to accuse others of not taking responsibility for their actions.

Even now, the bankers do not understand that they only have jobs because they were bailed out by ordinary citizens, such as those spending their nights outside St. Paul’s.

Something’s gotta change.

Oct

The Dreary Legacy of Marcel Duchamp

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

old ideas

I just caught bits of The Culture Show on BBC 2. One bloke was interviewing another bloke as they sat on a large luxury motor yacht. It seems that one of them was working for the program and the other was an “artist”. The artist had a concept for an art work which was this luxury motor yacht with his name stamped on it and no other changes. The artist was a German named Christian Jankowski at this year’s Frieze Art Fair.

In fact the art work had not yet been created. First he intended to sell the concept to a punter and then the work would be created. The interviewer asked if he got any flack along the lines of anyone could do this and it’s not art. Yawn!

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp created a work of art entitled Fountain consisting of a urinal which had been signed by M. Duchamp. This, apparently, kicked off the discussion: Is it art? Who says what is art? If I am an artist then anything I created is art. The circular logic of such and argument etc etc.

M. Duchamp opened the door for nearly a century of boring and uninspired people to duck out of real creativity and spend their time climbing up their own arses.

It is true that the vast majority of the world’s population will not have heard of M. Duchamp and his exploits and it’s true that many popular newspapers will rant against such art. But for artist of today, to fall back on ideas that are nearly a century old as justification for their work woud be laughable if the media did not insist on treating the argument so seriously.

The type of artist who get off on this sort of piffle is the same sort of person who, were he a computer geek, would spend his time condescendingly boring all and sundry with details of the technical implantation of his latest box of chips.

Of course a luxury motor yacht is a work of art but it’s artistry is no more imbued by a supposed artist plonking his name on it than a Range Rover is by attaching the word Vogue or a Panasonic camera is by rebadging it as a Leica and marking it up £150.

These activities are not art they are mere marketing.

For a contemporary artist to make Duchamp’s ideas the centre piece for his work shows a pitiful lack of imagination and it is not surprising that many artists in this tradition appear so passionless and vague. In this evening’s Culture Show it became evident that many artists will never challenge an interpretation of their work. Apparently they want to leave the interpretation open. Here we run into yet another stock cliché of the contemporary art world: the idea that each person will have their own impression of an art work. Many artists have misinterpreted this as meaning that an artist should have no ideas or incites of his or her own. These seems to me to be the antithesis of an artist.

I listened to the first part of Mike Oldfield‘s Ommadawn this morning and it struck me that, without wanting to detract from Mr. Oldfield’s skill and achievements, his work was a product of it’s time. Technology had progressed to the point where musicians could afford recording studios in their own houses and this allowed Mr. Oldfield to create a work where he played all the instruments. When Tubular Bells was released in 1973 this was amazing yet today kids have more powerful studios in their bedrooms.

Technology enables art.

In the 80s the Western world became rich. Many of the newly rich had no knowledge of, and therefore no preconceptions and prejudices about, art. Further, many were not really interested in art yet wanted the qudos that art provides. This left the way open for self appointed gate keepers such as Charles Saatchi to milk the rich while pursuing his passion for modern art.

Artists embraced this culture and began creating all sorts of stuff but I can’t help thinking that Damien Hirst‘s sharks were, really, no more that the product of new money looking for sensation. The money was there to pay for Hirst to turn his childhood hobby of fish taxidermy into a business. So he did.

None of this is to denigrate contemporary art. 90% of it may be shit but in the words of the late, and great, Theordore Sturgeon “90% of everything is shit” and Mr. Saatchi has done the nation a huge service by presenting more than 10% of it at the fantastic Saatchi Gallery.

What I object to is lame and passionless artists, unable to think of new ideas and so falling back on the ideas of an artist who’s been dead for over forty years.

To be more explicit: Forget whether it’s art, is it any good?

Aug

The riot bandwagon

By jonesxxx 4 Comments

The Riot Bandwagon

One thing about a riot is that EVERYONE has some bollocks to say about it and I am no exception. Labour are banging on about the riots being a reaction against the cuts. I don’t think that Labour even know what cuts. Ed Milliband has jumped on the issue like he jumps on every bandwagon and is talking bollocks about the “absolute priority” for citizens to go about their lawful business while using the disturbances to call for cancellation of the cuts which were due for the police force. The trouble with Ed is that his absolute priority is always the last thing anybody said to him. This week it’s the police next week it will be something else.

I have heard people blaming the immigrants though I’ve seen bugger all evidence that immigrants were involved in any greater proportion than anyone else and though sociologists warned that racism thrives during times of poverty and violence we are now seeing the insidious way this is being acted out. I heard about a group of vigilantes in Enfield protecting their area and to start with had some sympathy for what they were doing. I heard that they termed themselves the Enfield Defence League, a named strikingly similar to the racist English Defence League (EDL). Later I heard that the EDL had amassed in south London also to defend the area against rioters. We should be wary of this sort of thing. Their next step will be uniforms and we should remember that we want security and not fascism.

We British are a bunch of yobs. Every time there is a recession something like this kicks off. I wonder if this may be partly due to our class centred culture. Despite what the “blitz spirit” crowd would have us believe, when things get tough we Brits don’t pull together, we just blame the other classes.

In the case of the riots the yobs blame the rich, the politicians, the police and the press. One difference this time is that they are perfectly justified and any dispassionate observer listening to David Cameron declare that the rioters will “feel the full force of the law” is forced to ask why the bankers, politicians, police and press did not feel the full force of the law over the past few years.

Another difference this time around might be technology. An outbreak of civil disorder 20 years ago would probably remain an isolated incident. In the 21st century these cretins can instantly tell their friends who will tell their friends who will tell their friends and a flash riot will ensue. For this reason the police probably need to react more swiftly than they have done in the past and there are dangers here that they may overstep their authority leading to tragedies such as the death of Ian Tomlinson.

There was a discussion on Radio 4′s PM program this afternoon where some bloke speculated that two years ago, during the G8 demonstration, the police were too heavy handed leading to the death of an innocent man. He thought that perhaps the police had reacted by becoming more restrained.

If this is true then somebody should explain to the police the difference between a legal demonstration and a riot.

A little bit of British folk law that has knocked around my brain ever since I can remember is the phrase “reading the riot act”. According to Wikipedia, the Riot Act was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain introduced in 1714 that authorised local authorities to declare any group of twelve or more people to be unlawfully assembled, and thus have to disperse or face punitive action and remained on the statute books until 1973.

It seems to me that there may be a case for bringing it back.

Jul

Where was Milliband when Cable declared war?

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

No Balls?

Looking back over the past decade and more the United Kingdom seems now to be emerging from a period of temporary insanity. Perhaps the rot started with Thatcher and the Greed Is Good mentality but it really took off when New Labour gave up on substance and focused entirely on appearances. Blair, Mandelson and Brown. The sultans of spin.

These days the whole bullshit Britain edifice seems to be collapsing. First it was the bankers who were exposed as incompetent and greedy charlatans. Then the MPs were found to be seedy little fraudsters fiddling their expenses. Now we find that the press have been routinely breaking the law and the police have been colluding with them! In a way it was obvious. Both the press and the police use private investigators and for the same reason: To employ illegal methods without getting their hands dirty. Now we just need proof that the monarchy orchestrated the killing of Princess Dianne and the whole of the British establishment can be considered corrupt. To put it another way we just need a Queen for a full house – baboom. Oh, please yourselves.

Ed Milliband is getting good press for his stance on News International and his calls for new media ownership rules but, once again, Mr. Milliband is behaving like a hypocritical chancer without conviction or a coherent strategy.

In December 2010 Ofcom was considering the attempt by News International to buy outright British Sky Broadcasting (BskyB) and the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, was caught off guard saying that he had “declared war on Mr Murdoch”.

There were calls for Mr. Cable to resign and Mr. Milliband joined in saying “David Cameron has made the wrong judgment and he has kept Vince Cable on, not because of the national interest but because his Conservative-led Government needs the prop which Vince Cable provides.”

Yet now Mr. Milliband appears to have declared war on Mr. Murdoch himself. The BBC quotes an interview for the Observer in which Mr. Milliband says:

“I think that we’ve got to look at the situation whereby one person can own more than 20% of the newspaper market, the Sky platform and Sky News. I think it’s unhealthy because that amount of power in one person’s hands has clearly led to abuses of power within his organisation. If you want to minimise the abuses of power then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous.”

Pity Mr. Miliband didn’t have the courage to condemn News International before Rupert Murdoch’s fall from grace but I suspect he didn’t have the balls. Talking of which we haven’t heard a squeak from Ed Balls for a while.

Jun

When Labour call for tax cuts you have to be suspicious

By jonesxxx Leave a Comment

Categories: Bollocks, Conservative, democracy, Economics, Labour, Media, new labour, News, People and Politics
Tags: Blue Labour, David Milliband, Ed Balls, Ed Milliband, Gordon Brown, Labour, marketing campaign, media monkey, National Health Service, new labour, NHS, Project Volvo, rebrand, spin, talking bollocks, V.A.T, VAT

Cut taxes? Labour? With their reputation?

Cut taxes? Me? With my reputation?

I just watched Ed Balls on Channel 4 News calling for VAT cuts. Labour’s argument is that they agree that they need to bring the deficit down but not so fast. Recently I heard Labour talking about the National Health service. Once again they agree that change is needed but not the change that the government are pursuing.

It’s easy being in opposition. All you have to do is disagree with the government. I don’t think many of us have enough understanding to know whether the governments fast track to deficit reduction is better than Labour’s ideas for going more slowly.

We do know that the opposition are bound to disagree with the government. The truth is that Labour have no alternative and so they are forced to criticise the speed of the process rather than the process itself. This is not surprising since the Labour leadership are a bunch of nobodies.

Both Millibands and Balls have never had proper jobs. They all worked as media monkeys for New Labour before being shoe horned into safe seats. They perform so lamely in opposition because they have no policy ideas of their own. They only know is how to present ideas, know how to play the media. Remember that idiotic attack on Ken Clark a few weeks ago? Any sensible person who listened to Clark’s arguments could not have believed that he meant to make light of rape yet Ed Milliband picked it up and was banging on about it during PMQs the very same day. This was nothing but spin.

I have heard several times in the news that Ed Balls is a “considerable intellect” and that he is generally well clued up on the economy. Last week The Telegraph released transcripts of some of Mr. Balls documents from when he was working for Gordon Brown. I read the document entitled Project Volvo where Mr. Balls lays out his ideas for getting Gordon Brown elected.

Not much evidence of a great intellect there.

In fact, project Volvo was no more than an off the shelf marketing campaign which could have been put together by any marketing graduate. The same approach could have been used to sell magazines or margarine.

I realise that this marketing stuff works and therefore political parties are forced to hire marketing staff. I guess this took off in the UK when Margaret Thatcher hired Saatchi and Saatchi but Thatcher was never so stupid as to confuse marketing staff with politicians. Labour’s mistake was to allow the marketing men to run the party.

You have to be suspicious when you hear that Labour want to cut taxes. So when I heard, this evening, that Ed Balls wanted to cut VAT I did not think that this was part of a well thought out economic strategy. I thought that he was TALKING BOLLOCKS! Balls knows that reputable bodies such as the IMF and the EU do not agree with him and he knows that the government will ignore his calls. But that is not the point.

Mr. Balls does not expect the government to follow his advise. His call for a VAT cut is merely headline grabbing fluff to cast the Tories in a bad light. More spin. More marketing.

Under Tony Blair the marketing men worked too closely with the leadership. In today’s Labour party the marketing men ARE the leadership. I am even starting to hear of yet another rebranding attempt, this time to be entitled “Blue Labour”.

In marketing terms Labour is now a tainted brand and repairing a brand is a very big job requiring going back to honesty and principles. The product itself must have intrinsic value.

While Labour remain a party led by nobodies like Ed Balls even Saatchi and Saatchi couldn’t repair it.

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