So this one I got this morning has listed ten reasons to switch from Sky to Virgin Media. Each one of them pissed me off at their tactics, so I thought I’d go through them, like the pedantic, easily-pissed-off bastard that I am.

1. We’ve got all your favourite Sky channels including Sky1, Sky News and Sky Sports News. Yes, and Sky Sports and Sky Movies too.*

But I have those channels already (excepting the Sports and Movies packs, because I cancelled those along with Setanta after I lost my job to save me money). Sky also have Sky1, Sky Movies and more in HD. You don’t. You also charge more for Sky Movies (Sky charge a fixed £16/mo for all the channels, regardless of what other tiers you’ve signed up to; Virgin charge between £19.50/mo and £30/mo dependent on which TV tier you’re on).

2. Only V+HD can let you record two channels while watching a third (Sky+HD can’t).

But various Freeview+ and Freesat+ PVRs can.

3. Only Virgin TV gives you access to a huge, ever-changing library of over 500 movies and thousands of great TV shows, documentaries and music videos stored to watch whenever you want (Sky’s equivalent doesn’t even come close).

Yes, Sky don’t have a “pull VOD” system, where you can watch video on demand by having it streamed to your set top box whenever you like. They have a “push VOD” system, where they send select movies and shows to your PVR’s hard drive, but you have no real choice in what you get. However, Sky does have a VOD website (currently called Sky Player), where you can stream or download hundreds of movies on a pay-per-view/own basis, or for free when you subscribe to Sky Movies. It’s not equivalent to Virgin’s Replay, but it’s a stopgap until Sky complete developing their broadband-based VOD next year.

4. Only Virgin TV lets you watch BBC iPlayer, ITV Net Player and 4oD right there on your telly.

No, I’ve been doing this without Virgin for quite some time. Again with the “only” thing. Yes, Sky don’t have VOD yet, but my laptop has it. As does the Mac mini plugged into my TV. However, the actual necessity of watching anything on ITV Player is very much debatable.

5. And only our TV comes down a state-of-the-art fibre optic cable, not through a dish or aerial. So when the weather’s bad, your picture won’t be.

6. The same fibre optic cable brings you fast, future proof Virgin Broadband at up to 50Mb, that’s the UK’s fastest. (Broadband from BT, Sky or one of the others comes down copper telephone wire, which means your speed gets slower the further you live from the phone exchange).

Two ‘reasons’ talking about fibre optic cable. Bloody hell. Are Virgin still droning on about fibre optic cable? Let’s clear something up. Virgin insinuate they deliver all their services to your home via fibre optic cable. They don’t. Well, not really. Virgin deliver services over a hybrid fibre-coaxial network, using a national fibre network to “headends” in each regional area, just as BT use a national fibre network to interconnect telephone exchanges. “Headends” are akin to exchanges: they slurp in content, phone calls and Internet access using satellite feeds, fibre optic links and network connections, then spit all that out along fibre trunks to cabinets in each Virgin-covered street. From there, coaxial cable (aka copper wire) transfers the signals back and forth from each house to the cabinet.

ADSL, on the other hand, which is the primary thing Virgin are attacking with this component of their campaign, is delivered over fibre optic links — just like Virgin — to BT’s telephone exchanges, and from there to your home using pairs of copper wire. This will slowly be replaced by BT with fibre optic cabling to cabinets in the streets, and on occasion, to your home.

So yes, Virgin use fibre optic cable further up the chain than anyone else at this consumer level of Internet service provision does. But it doesn’t really make it all that “better”. It’s as prone to congestion (aka contention) as ADSL is. They really need to find another way to market this, because leaning on the fibre optic angle just ain’t the truth.

However, at least their “UK’s fastest” line is mainly true: only BT’s “Fibre to the Cabinet” trials could be faster; no UK DSL provider offers more than 24Mbps on a single line at the moment. But is 50Mbps really that important?

7. Servicing and repairs are free all the time you’re a customer.† (Sky charges you £65 for a call-out the minute you’re out of warranty.)

Yeah, but Virgin subscribers don’t own their receiving equipment, they merely lease it from Virgin. Once you’re no longer a customer, none of that equipment will work, and they’ll want it back. Meanwhile, Sky customers own their receivers from the get-go, and once out of their subscriptions, they can still receive all Free-to-Air and most Free-to-View channels, including at least one in HD.

8. Delivering TV, broadband and phone down the same fibre optic cable is better value and keeps everything in one simple bill. Our prices for TV, broadband and calls start at just £14 a month when you switch to a Virgin phone line for £11 a month.

Sky’s package of TV, broadband and phone starts at £17/mo (+ phone line for £11/mo). Virgin undercut this by offering an entry level, no-cost TV package (called ‘M’ as in Medium) which mirrors a list of channels freely available on Sky, Freesat and Freeview. If you want channels like Sky1, G.O.L.D., Hallmark, etc, on Virgin, you need to shell out at least £5.50/mo for the M+ package, bumping the comparable package price to £19.50. Oops.

9. We’re so confident you’ll love it, we’ll give you your money back if you don’t. Everything is covered by our 28 day guarantee.

Or I could just not change anything at all and keep my money in my pocket.

10. Your street’s already connected to our fibre optic network so it’s easy to get switched on.

Well, woop de doo … but I’ve had a Sky dish attached to my house for over 8 years. What’s your point?

Job done? Great, just call …

Pass.

YouTube hasn’t had their DNS hijacked; Yelvington describes a wildcard match in the whois tool which let’s you see not only youtube.com but other records where youtube.com forms part of the overall domain name, but doesn’t actually affect the lookup of *.youtube.com at all, e.g. YOUTUBE.COM.IS.N0T.AS.1337.AS.WWW.GULLI.COM. Check out something similar which happens when you lookup microsoft.com.

The simple fact is that YouTube is inaccessible due to the leak of network route announcements from outside a Pakistani ISP’s network border to implement a government-sanctioned block of certain YouTube ISPs. In other words, someone messed up. YouTube can easily re-appear on the net once either the Pakistani ISP resolves their route announcement snafu, or Google shift the servers onto alternate IPs not part of the /24 block being announced. Simple.

Three tomatoes are walking down the street: a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him … and says “Catch up”.
    — Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Verk

I’m now working at Concept Systems in Edinburgh, very much a Linux-friendly shop. It’s great to be working full-time with operating systems I love, and this is the third company in a row that has given me the opportunity to do so. The commute is probably the longest I’ve ever had to do on a regular basis — 41 miles from door to door — and the last 9 miles are through Edinburgh city centre traffic, but it’s worth it to be in a friendly professional environment, surrounded by people who have a genuine passion for what they do.

Oh, and Google have updated their Earth imagery for Edinburgh, and it turns out that every morning when driving up Maybury Road, I’m passing a big Poo! in a field.

Interweb Technological Gadgetry

Now that I’m no longer working for an ISP, sadly I’ve lost the perk of free broadband, so I signed up with Web Tapestry. They’re a great little outfit, courteous and knowledgeable, and I’d recommend them in a heartbeat. In fact I’ve been recommending them for months, and everyone who I’ve referred has been very pleased. I even get a nice wee kick back if you mention my name to their support team after signing up with them

Something else I’ve enjoyed this year has been Sipgate‘s Voice over IP service to give me 1000 landline minutes a month for under six quid. Real phones plugged into a Linksys PAP2 phone adapter make life so much easier than having to piss about with headsets and PCs just to call people.

Schtuff

I’m watching a programme from Artsworld that I taped last week, Morricone Conducts Morricone. It’s fantastic to listen to (and watch) a great composer conduct his own music with a full orchestra — the Münchner Rundfunkorchester in this case, with guest performers — but something that stands out is the number of other composers work I can hear in the performances. This isn’t to say Ennio Morricone is a plagiarist, but rather that his work has had such a profound influence on so many other composers. I could hear twinges of Don Davis, Michael Kamen and even Jerry Goldsmith. Genius.

On a different tack, something dawned on me the other day. I thought how cool it would be if you could simply wish yourself back in time to an earlier period in your life to perhaps unfuck something bad, or to revisit something good, but then an interesting thought entered my head. Perhaps we can all do this already, but we can’t change anything when we get there, so events unfold exactly the same, and we have the same memories as we would have anyway, meaning we don’t really remember actually going back in time in the first place.

Public Service Announcements

The Nokia N70 is poo. Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie in 25 years. McDonald’s mint chocolate milkshakes are vile. Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgt Eft” is the first Linux distribution that makes me feel comfortable on a computer away from Windows XP. My Sky+’s 40GB hard disk is too small. I sold my Xbox and a pile of Xbox / PS2 / Gamecube games I didn’t want/need and got a PSP for virtually nothing. Did I mention the N70 is poo?

That is all.

Lang May Yer Lum Reek

It’s now 2007, so a Happy New Year to you and yours. Chi-ching!

Still, in other news, I’ve found out a great way to get a cheap flatscreen TV that looks like this …

… the only problem is, that to install it, you have to do this …

Cheers to Derek for that!

The folks at Lumison are great (and some of them are good drinkers too, as I found out on Friday night!), and the atmosphere in the office is very friendly. I’ve been plopped straight in the deep-end of work, in a good way tho’, and I’m loving the water. We’re moving to new datacentre soon, and that’s just gonna rock. Me and a building full of racks of kit — the phrase kid in toy shop springs to mind!

However, an interesting comment in the article is:

BT said in its first three weeks its new system, which bars access to particular sites, registered nearly 250,000 attempts to view web pages containing images of child pornography.

[...]

A BT spokesman added: “It could be that one dedicated pervert is making hundreds of attempts to get on websites each day.”

I never thought I’d hear the phrase “one dedicated pervert” anywhere, much less in a BBC News article!

This is fantastic news, but it also raises quite a few questions. Will this mean the current programme of LLU will continue? It would be very interesting for third parties to not only deliver end-user services over the BT IP network, but to have greater capability to groom data and voice from BT’s network to their own, either at the customer’s local exchange or at a downstream transit point.

From the point of the end-user, this is a move towards richer and hopefully cheaper—despite BT planning to chuck £3bn at this project—suites of voice and data services. Imagine seamlessly making a call in your home over your ‘landline’ and roaming to a wireless (GSM, UMTS, 802.11) network and continuing the call; checking your answering machine from anywhere in the world by handset or computer; data roaming anywhere in the country with authentication over the network via your ISP, and so on.

The future’s bright, the future’s IP-based!

Hat tip to edward.