Sky News Ireland will cease broadcasting on the 30th November 2006, with the Dublin and Belfast offices being re-focused and all Irish news content being replaced into the main UK broadcasts.
The average audience figure from Jan-Sep 2006 for the 6.30pm bulletin is 8,000 and 17,000 for the 10pm bulletin
Loads more over at the full blog post. Looks like Gráinne Seoige jumped ship just in time. But from what I’ve heard, her new show aint much to brag about.
We reported back in November 2005 that Smart had been awarded Ireland’s 4th 3G licence. Comreg withdrew the licence after problems with Smart’s cashflow. They subsequently appealed, and have just lost that appeal in the high court.
Casey said that Smart has challenging times ahead and that it was too early to say what long term damage has been sustained to Smart’s brand reputation.
A lot is the short answer.
A fascinating anonymous post from an alleged insider on the real goings on behind the youtube/google deal. None of it is guranteed to be accurate/true but it is incredible to read anyway:
> The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to
> get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the
> talent (musicians and actors)? If monies were received as part of a
> license to Youtube then they would contractually obligated to share a
> substantial portion of the proceeds with others. For example most
> record label contracts call for artists to get 50% of all license
> deals. It was decided the media companies would receive an equity
> position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them.
> This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by
> allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position. A
> few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a
> token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired.
>
> Since everyone was reaching into Google’s wallet, the big G wants to
> make sure the Youtube purchase was a wise one. Youtube’s value is
> predicated on it’s traffic and market leadership which Google needs to
> keep. If they simply agreed to remove all unauthorized content and
> saddle the user experience with ads Youtube would quickly be a
> skeleton of its prior self. Users would quickly move to competing
> sites. The media companies had 50 million reasons to want to help.
> Google needed a two pronged strategy which you see unfolding now.
>
> The first request was a simple one and that was an agreement to look
> the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement
> continues to flourish. This standstill is cloaked in language about
> building tools to help manage the content and track royalties, some of
> which is true but also G knows that every day they can operate in the
> shadows of copyright law is another day that Youtube can grow. It
> should be noted that Google video is a capable Youtube competitor with
> the ONE big difference being a much more sincere effort to not post
> unauthorized works - and Google fully appreciates what a difference
> that makes. So you can continue to find movie clips, tv show segments
> and just about every music video on Youtube today.
If they’d only enforce the laws eh?
459 fuckers caught drink-driving at the weekend. The Gardai are doing well. It’s not their fault, it’s not the roads being in a poor condition… it’s our fault for being shitty, dangerous assholes behind the wheel. So fucking well done to the Gardai, who everyday deal with us; absolute cunts that we are. The big Irish Road Safety tcal post.
It had to happen. A mobile phone manufacturer had to actually sit up and listen to consumers eventually.
Mobile phones in the United States are more power-hungry and complicated than ever. But one of the latest phones from Motorola, aimed primarily at other markets and due out by the end of the year, is just the opposite. Looking for more customers, the company did extensive market research in poor countries. The result: the company’s slimmest phone yet, boasting cutting-edge technology that–rather than adding complexity–extends battery life and makes the phone simpler to use.
Read the full story. The new technology behind the screen is E-Ink; Wikipedia entry, official site. (via /.)
The display technology has been in development for about 10 years and is starting to find its way into other products, such as the new Sony Reader and a thin, curved watch from Seiko. It is well suited in several ways to a phone designed for poor countries, says Motorola’s chief technology officer, Padmasree Warrior. The efficient display was attractive, she says, because, “power is an issue in rural India.” The saved power allowed Motorola to use a small, less expensive battery, even though the phone offers eight hours of talk time and 12 days of standby time. According to Colorado, a user could charge the phone by riding a bicycle, a dominant mode of transportation in India. In a bike equipped with an inexpensive dynamo-based system Motorola is also developing, it would take about two hours of biking at a leisurely pace.
Nice.
Website of a storm chaser in the states with incredible photographs. Extreme Instability.
I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn’t done or which it hadn’t even occurred to you to do.
The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.
We’re all big babies at the Telegraph. The authors list at the bottom of how to be an adult is worth linking to alone. Example:
Don’t be affronted Being affronted (or offended, or complaining about ‘inappropriateness’) is no response for a grown-up. Only children believe the world should conform to their own view of it: a sort of magical thinking that can only lead to warfare, terrorism, unmanageable short-term debt and the Blair/Bush alliance
It’s been a long time since we checked in with Aine at Sligozone. She has a special halloween video up - direct .wmv click. Or just go to the main site.
We propose ‘evolving time fronts’, a new framework for spatio-temporal warping of video. The proposed framework is simple yet general, allowing a large variety of spatio-temporal warps to be specified in an intuitive manner. Specifically, we manipulate the time flow of a video sequence by sweeping an evolving ‘time front’ surface through the video’s aligned space-time volume.
Slow down there braniac. Watch the videos to understand: Link. (via.)
As you all probably already know, those intergalactic warlords of pantometal, the Warlords of Pez, are touring the country promoting their new album. The actual album launch is in Whelan’s on Halloween night. It’s fancy dress, so grab your gorilla suit and be there. If you’re not, Turbo Apocalypse will eat your firstborn child.
Tuppenceworth.ie have announced VoteTube, a competition seeking Irish political viral videos. Link to the tuppenceworth.ie post about the competition. A snip:
A competition for the most entertaining, most persuasive and most effective political and civic message videos made about Ireland.
There are two categories for entry.
One is specifically for third and second level students and the other is for everyone else.You can enter as often as you like. Videos may be entered by teams of any size from one person up.
Entry requirements:
30 second or less video.
Address a political issue- in the widest sense. Could include voter registration, or a pitch for a certain party, policy or area.Target Audiences:
18-35 or any part thereof.Aim: Influence viewers. Go Viral.
Update: There is also a bebo page and myspace page.
We reported on Bill O’Reilly vs. Letterman back in January. Crooks and Liars have round 2.
Letterman: Let me ask you a question — was there more heinous, more dangerous violence taking place before in Iraq, or is there more heinous, dangerous violence taking place now in Iraq?
O’Reilly: Oh, stop it. Saddam Hussein slaughtered 300,000 to 400,000 people, all right, so knock it off… It isn’t so black and white, Dave — it isn’t, ‘We’re a bad country. Bush is an evil liar.’ That’s not true.
Letterman: I didn’t say he was an evil liar. You’re putting words in my mouth, just the way you put artificial facts in your head!
Sacha Baron Cohen was in-character as Borat as Jonathan Ross’s first guest on his show on BBC 1 last night. Clever people YouTube’d it. Enjoy.
The first known organisms that live totally independently of the sun have been discovered deep in a South African gold mine.The bacteria exist without the benefit of photosynthesis by harvesting the energy of natural radioactivity to create food for themselves. Similar life forms may exist on other planets, experts speculate.
Priceless anti net-neutrality video from the consortium with the same aim.
Mumbo Jumbo
Fucking assholes. Watch now. (via.) Lots of Net Neutrality stuff previously.
In 1984, director Stanley Kubrick placed ads throughout the U.S. for young aspiring actors to send in audition tapes for “Full Metal Jacket”. Juilliard-trained thespian Brian Atene answered the call.
Boing Boing has been following the saga over the last couple of days and it’s turned out pretty interesting. A 24 year old guy put up a fake boarding pass generator to highlight theridiculous loophole this step in the airport security process that boarding passes represent. He’s subsequently been visited by the FBI and had to take it down of course, but check out this Boing Boing post for a raft of links on the story.
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