A amazing article in Wired about the NIST in the USA and their atomic clocks. These are so accurate that they have to take the relativistic effects of moving from the 3rd to the 2nd floor of the building into account – and in the best computer science traditions, the clocks get more accurate continuously. The next generation being tested is effected by the height changes from the building expanding on warm days!
I read this stuff with the awe of a child – it’s gleeful amazement that people are able to build things this perfect and then make them better. It’s amazing to be alive in the 21st century.

Desmond Tutu has accused the USA and Britain of acting like the creators of apartheid.

I love television – I’m one of those people who generally has it on if I’m in the room – I tend not to actually watch it but it’s there while I do something else.
Having moved to a new place about a month ago, I discovered various facts which put a damper on my television related activities:

1. The television antenna connections in the apartment don’t do anything
2. The television reception even with a little booster antenna are awful
3. The NTL cable connection coming from the wall is useless – Virgin media deny it exists and tried to sell me phone services (since I get free phones from work this is not useful)
4. The sky people swear there is a sky connection in the apartment and there is a sky looking cable – however it doesn’t work.

So I’ve watched no live television for a month. Also no Tivo so nothing broadcast. I’ve survived on a diet of DVDs, downloaded shows and not much else. And I came to a conclusion.

I don’t miss live television.

It’s dull, and there’s nothing there I particularly want to watch. I’ve read far more and written far more than I have in ages. And it’s great. I suspect that though I’ll get the old BT vision box working at some point, I’m not going back to TV.

This is pretty bad news for the telcos out there. I’m a great customer for this stuff. I have plenty of spare money, I watch a lot of video and would otherwise be exactly the guy who bought some kind of IPTV offering. Except I won’t. This market strikes me as something that’s simply not going to take off. People will experiment with it but no-one will pay serious money to watch anything. The telco’s can make money off the occasional purchase if their systems are cheap to deploy and run – except they are never cheap to deploy and run. BT’s Vision service has hardware with a tangible cost and microsoft liciences to pay as well as data centres for content. This model cannot survive on an incremental revenue stream of £2 a month from 25% of the users.

I’ve vaguely been planning to buy an iPhone for some time but since I’d want to use it with my work sim card, it would need to be unlocked. I was waiting for the UK phone but unlocking this has been complex up to now. On Tuesday a friend mentioned the iPhoneUnlock crowd and I looked them up. On my return from Munich, I bought an iPhone at the apple store and headed on down to their oxford street office.
It’s a strange world where you hand over £300 worth of phone to someone and just assume they’ll give it back to you in an hour. On my return all was well though – there are 3 guys in a little Regus office with a couple of Macs unlocking for all they’re worth. My iPhone is working with an O2 paygo sim now and hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be able to drop in my Vodafone SIM and the world will be right.
On the whole, I could have unlocked the phone myself, but these guys were efficient and well worth the £70. We’ll see how their “free upgrade when we figure out how to sim unlock” offer works but I can recommend them to anyone who’s thinking of doing this.