Song Networks

One organisation that seems blissfully immune to the harsh economic climate is the BBC. We learnt today that the Corporation has more people covering the Winter Olympics in Vancouver than the UK has competing in  it – 74 against 52.  In best Auntie-speak a spokesman said: “We are expanding our coverage to 160 hours on

Google has admitted that their Buzz testing process was equivalent to mine: Click enable, then disable it ninety seconds later. They said to the BBC that their testing sucked donkey balls, which is why many people hate it . The excuse: We’re very early in this space. This was one of our first big attempts. We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild. If it becomes clear that people don’t think we’ve done enough, we’ll make more changes. That’s what Todd Jackson, Buzz product manager, told BBC News. Google only tested this thing internally, and didn’t put the service through the Google Trusted Tester program, like they have done with other services in the past. He also admitted that tens of millions of Buzz users were “rightfully upset” and that Google was “very, very sorry.” Todd’s right, but I don’t think all those “tens of millions of Buzz” ex-users would care about the too late apologies. They do care about the privacy problems and the inbox spamming. Would these users give Google another chance? I doubt it would be soon. And, personally, I doubt there’s enough interest for yet another Facebookish Tumblred Twitting clusterfuckassered online service. [ BBC News ]

We’ve all got at least one vacuum cleaner lying around the house (gathering dust, in some cases), but hopefully no-one will be inspired by BBC presenter Jem Stansfield who scales buildings using sucking force from the machines. I don’t want to be receiving any photos of your bruises after you fall flat on your face 2ft up the side of your garage, but this is how Stansfield cobbled together his “Spiderman gloves,” which he’s used to climb up to 120ft previously. An earlier feat, climbing the side of the BBC building: Just a reminder: if you try this at home, don’t send me the x-rays of your fractured fibia. [ The Telegraph and Daily Mail ]

If there’s one thing that stinks even more than Climategate, it’s the attempts we’re seeing everywhere from the IPCC and Penn State University to the BBC to pretend that nothing seriously bad has happened, that “the science” is still “settled”, and that it’s perfectly OK for the authorities go on throwing loads more of our

Say all you want about how bad your local forecast is, it’s way more accurate than our local solar forecast. The last time we checked, solar storms are said to knock out GPS temporarily sometime in the next two years — the kind of window that would make even the most suave meteorologist smirk. With the launch of the new Solar Dynamics Observatory we’re hoping NASA can shrink that window down by, oh, at least a few months. The probe lifted off yesterday, perched atop an Atlas V rocket, and is now orbiting Earth. There it will study our sun with a series of optical and magnetic sensors, beaming data back at a rate of 150MBit/sec, making us ever so slightly jealous that this thing can get a better signal in space than we can down here on the surface. The launch fireworks are embedded below for those who weren’t glued to NASA TV yesterday morning. [Thanks, Pavel] Continue reading Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video) Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Wearing crisp, advertisement-free white shirts to celebrate Twickenham’s centenary, England beat Wales 30 – 17 this afternoon. This was a “massive” game, as Lawrence Dallaglio just pointed out to the BBC. And England have begun the Six Nations Championship showing far more confidence and spark than I expected. Alright, it wasn’t faultless play: there were a

Wearing crisp, advertisement-free white shirts to celebrate Twickenham’s centenary, England beat Wales 30 – 17 this afternoon. This was a “massive” game, as Lawrence Dallaglio just pointed out to the BBC. And England have begun the Six Nations Championship showing far more confidence and spark than I expected. Alright, it wasn’t faultless play: there were a

What can we say about you, DOS ? You’ve rocked the personal computer world and changed the way we all feel about white on black console screens. Your retirement is a well deserved one and… wait, you’re getting a patch? Amazingly, Microsoft is fixing a bug that has existed in the Windows Virtual DOS Machine (VDM) subsystem since it was added to Windows NT way back in the simple days of 1993, when flannels were everywhere and 32 bits were more than we knew what to do with. Google engineer Tavis Ormandy found the exploit a few weeks ago, which grants an attacker the ability to run code in kernel mode, and a critical update has been issued to fix this most aged of vulnerabilities. Perhaps now, DOS, your work is finally done. Ancient DOS bug gets squashed originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

Going for a spectacular sunset shot, a man ventured onto the ice of the North Sea. But he quickly became lost on the monochromatic landscape. Ironically, two cameras would rescue him from the very danger a camera put him in. The man started firing off the flash of his camera, hoping to grab someone’s attention who could beckon him back to the coast. And someone spotted him—from hundreds of miles away at her computer—as she watched this webcam feed of St. Peter-Ording , the tourist spot where the man disappeared. She contacted authorities who guided him back to shore safely. [ Physorg and BBC ]

I got caught up in a rather strange to-do last week concerning the Conservative MP David Davies. BBC Radio 5 called to say that they had just done an interview with him about the horrific case of Balal Khan, a 14-year-old from Stoke on Trent who had just been convicted of raping a woman. Davies

On the motorway last night I caught Radio 4’s latest Analysis programme, and I nearly drove off the M4. For a minute I thought I’d tuned in to a pirate broadcast by Radio Free Delingpole. It was presented by Justin Rowlatt, the guy you may remember as the BBC’s Ethical Man, who used to pop