Monthly Archives: October 2007

Current Affairs

Best Place to Live?

Leave a comment

The front page of the Wokingham Times this week proclaimed that Wokingham had been crowned the best place to live in the UK – a story that even made the national news – the source of the story being Halifax Estate Agents. Having said that, two pages on in the paper was an article under the headline “Cost, Weather and Crime cause Mass Exodus to Australiaâ€?:

The rising cost of living and bad weather has been blamed for a surge in the number of Wokingham residents moving abroad.

Needless to say, the irony of a ‘mass exodus’ to leave the apparently best place to live in the UK is not lost on some of comments on the Get Wokingham site!

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology, Movies & TV

BBC Trust Getting Tough Over iPlayer

1 Comment

It was good to see that the BBC Trust are getting tough with the BBC over their iPlayer project. The BBC have said that they may not do a download service for anything other than PC’s, offering only a streaming service for other platforms. The BBC Trust have come back saying that iPlayer was only approved on condition that it was platform neutral – when asked if offering just video streaming across all platforms would fulfil the BBC Trust’s terms of approval for iPlayer, a spokesman for the regulators said: “We required platform neutrality across downloads, streaming and cable [set-top boxes].” Having said that, since the current iPlayer that the BBC Trust approved is heavily based on Windows Media Player the prospects of that ever being platform neutral always seemed minimal to me!

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Vista Adoption Numbers

Leave a comment

As a result of a posting by Thomas Lee on a way to get some sort of measure of Vista adoption, Craig Murphy highlighted the OS section from his visitor stats.

It’s not really a stat I particularly look at for my site, but just out of interest I dug out the table for the last thirty days and produced this pie chart of the results.

operatingsystempie.gif

Aside from the overwhelming numbers of XP visitors there are some other interesting things to note.

Firstly I’m getting more PowerPC Mac users than Intel based, not surprising when you consider that most Mac users tend to keep their Mac for a long while before upgrading – certainly something to bear in mind when developing for the Mac.

Secondly there are quite a few people using older versions of Windows including quite a few on Windows 2000, a few still on Windows 98, and even three visitors who are using Windows NT. On that subject the browser stats make interesting reading too – an almost equal split between users on IE6 and IE7…