The BBC are going to screen the upcoming football World Cup in high definition TV (HDTV), as part of their trial of HDTV services which will last for about a year.

The HD pictures will only be viewable by people who own HD-compatible TVs and a set-top box with a HD-compatible service, such as Sky (a satellite TV provider). Unfortuantely programmes in the high definition format can’t be streamed over Freeview, the free digital TV service, due to limited airspace, although there will be a trial of HD Freeview in some areas of London.

Along with the World Cup, the BBC plan to release programmes like Planet Earth in HD as well.

Well, not really breaking, but very exciting! InsideGoogle’s Nathan Weinberg ordered a pebble off Google Base using Google’s new payment system (just because he could!). It arrived, and his blog shows it off in glorious technicolour.

If Google Payments can work for a pebble, PayPal better watch out!

What did I tell you?

Following up from this story, it seems as I predicted, Apple aren’t too happy about the proposed law by French MPs to force companies to open up their DRM systems.

They even gave a statement saying that the law would result in “state sponsored piracy”:

iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with “interoperable” music which cannot be adequately protected. Free movies for iPods should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy…

Surely the idea of opening up the technology will allow the content to be “adequately protected”, as the copy protection would be built into the iPod? Or is it just that Apple don’t want WMA files being played on iPods…

Anyway, no doubt there will be more on this story, considering Microsoft haven’t said anything yet.

Google Reader, Google’s news feed aggregator, today added support for the sharing of feeds. From the blog:

Additionally, if you use the tagging labelingfeature of Reader, you can label items and share them. For instance, Imark all of the blogs I read from my hipster friends in Reader ‘hipsters‘ (if my hipster friends aren’t your speed try my tech list).Even if your friends use a feed reader other than Google Reader, wewon’t be upset. You can direct them to a feed of any of your shared labels.

You control the privacy or shared nature of your lists. To begin sharing your reading lists or add a clip to your blog, go to reader.google.com and open the Share tab. Check the ’shared’ check box to opt-in to sharing your starred items or selected labels. Enjoy!

I think this potentially really moves Google reader on. It has become known as more of a study in how to use AJAX rather than a popular and useful tool, with the vast majority those people who do read RSS feeds prefering Bloglines (including me). With this new feature, however, Google Reader has stolen a march on Bloglines, which only allows sharing of feeds or feed items via email. If Google can manage to create a news reading community of people always swapping individual feeds via their aggregator rather than their email client then they have a way of drawing more and more people into their service. Having said that, Google Reader still has a long way to go before it has a decent market share, and feeds have a long way to go before they are common practice on the internet.

Microsoft have pushed back the release date for their next-generation operating system, Windows Vista, to January 2007. This could prove disastrous, considering that this move will move Windows Vista’s release past the Christmas buying rush, meaning that Microsoft’s sales may be hit. Also, PC manufacturers (OEMs) will not be able to sell the new PCs running Vista, so they may also be hit by this move as well. Interestingly, though, Microsoft are allowing some of the business versions of Windows Vista to be released to companies in November 2006.

UPDATE: Huw here. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is fiddling around with the Windows Division Management. Obviously Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) and Gates (you know who he is!) aren’t happy with the Windows Divison performance, and are moving in Steve Sinofsky, formerly of the Office Division to lead Windows Development, presumably in the hope that he will instill some of the promptness and urgency shown by the Office teams in recent years when providing updates.

Mozilla has released a 0.1 version of Lighting, a calendar extension for it’s mail client, Thunderbird. A Calendar component already exists, as well as a standalone product called Sunbird, so I’m not sure I entirely understand why everyone is so excited.

I don’t think that Lightning really a new product line, more of an evolution from the previous products, but it raises an interesting debate about which sort of calendar is better - online or offline. Online calendars like 30boxes have a few advantages. Firstly, they are easily accessable from multiple locations and ,potentially, devices. As they are on a webserver they can be accessed from any computer connected to an internet, and making them viewable on a mobile phone or PDA is as easy as providing an alternative stylesheet. They are also probably better suited to sharing calendars, as friends’ online calendars can be synchronised and updated from each other easily.

However, offline calendars also have advantages. Despite recent advances in web technology (eg AJAX) offline UIs can be more complex and ’slicker’ than their online counterparts. The look and feel of the calendar is not constrained by the browser rendering engine, and remains constant across one operating system. They are also likely to have more features as the architecture to provide them can be simpler and requires no ongoing cost to the developer.

The two options need not be mutually exclusive. With syncronisation feeds being built into more calendar tools and offering more power, there is no particular reason not to have an online calendar which feeds to an offline calendar. Then you get the best of both worlds.

[Maybe I'll do a review at some point, but in the meantime, 30boxes is an excellent calendar tool and offers a whole load of the syncronisation features I was talking about]

I found this post on Blogger Buzz (the official blog of Blogger) responding to the recent furory about a blogger being told he had to remove MSN Search from his blog quite reassuring:

You have always been able to run non-Google services on your blog. In the same way you can use Yahoo’s Flickr to post photos to your blog, you can include an MSN Search box in your template. We consider it a violation of the terms to modify the Blogger navbar, but that’s not what was reported to have happened here.

We did not send a request to have the MSN Search box removed. We reviewed the information that’s been made available, and we found no such request from our support teams.

We did not delete nor remove the blog in question from Blog*Spot.

I think it’s very important that companies don’t start restricting the use of competitor’s services on their own services, as it would create an artificial market, possibly leading to a monopoly caused not by the overwhelming merit of a company or service above that of its competitors but because it was reasonably popular and had the strictest policies in stopping the use of competitors services.

French parliament have backed a draft law which would force companies like Apple, Sony and Microsoft to reveal the secrets of their proprietary copy protection and digital rights management (DRM) systems.

Their idea is to open up the standards so that any music downloaded from any online music store can be played on any portable music player. Apple will certainly not be happy about this, as it seems to be their strategy to lock iTunes downloads so they only play on Apple iPod devices. Microsoft do have their proprietary DRM format, Windows Media Audio DRM, but they license this to hardware manufacturers (so WMA files play on Creative players, iRiver devices, different manufacturers). This is a bit like the situation with Windows and Mac OS, Microsoft allow any hardware manufacturers’ products to run Windows, where Apple limit it to running on Apple hardware.

Nevertheless, I doubt that Microsoft will be happy to open up their source code, considering their stance on the European anti-trust case(s), so it will remain to be seen what the response by these major companies is if this law goes through.

Engadget is reporting that Windows doesn’t have the necessary fan drivers to run the fans on the Intel Macs, with a risk of overheating:

According to a thread on MacRumors, the current XP install doesn’t include a fan driver, which means your Mac’s fan never goes on. That may not be a big issue if you’re using an iMac for limited periods in a well-ventilated space, but if you’re planning on running XP on a MacBookPro, you may find things getting mighty hot. We’re not dissing narf and blanka here; they won the contest and deserve their $13,000. But you may want to be a little careful before trying out their solution at home.

I can imagine this causing a few fried CPUs until someone makes a driver, which fortunately probably won’t take very long. This sort of bug serves to bring those of us excited at the prospect of running Windows on our Macs back down to earth with the realisation that, even if it is possible to install Windows, it might prove very difficult to actually run it. I hope that someone sorts out all the potential bugs promptly, ‘cos I would so love a Mac that can run Windows too!

The first release on the testing cycle that will culminate in the next version of Firefox was made available today. In other words, Mozilla released an early test of the next version of Firefox. Normally an Alpha should be approached with caution as they can be unstable, but this release seems to be fairly stable. Codenamed ‘Bon Echo’ (no, I don’t know why either), it has several new features well worth a look. The improvements fall into two main categories; Bookmarks and everything else.

Bookmarks
The Bookmarking system in Bon Echo has been completely redesigned, and is called Places. It’s built on some kind of new architecture (SQL-lite) that apparently gives it better performance. It also enables the program to store more information efficiently. Each time a page is visited, the time is logged, and so it is possible see how frequently pages are visited over time. In turn, this allows clever features such as special ‘queries’. In other words, it would be possible to create a query of ‘My favourite 20 pages’ and the Places system work this out for you. As in previous versions it is also possible to search the bookmarks, and don’t fear because existing bookmarks will be imported into the places system when you upgrade.

Other
Last release the development team spent little time on the UI, chosing to concentrate instead on the rendering engine (the bit that actually displays the site). This time they have worked harder on the UI, producing some good improvements, particularly in the area of tabbed browsing, where they’ve added a close button on every tab (although an extension was already available to do that) and clarified how they think users would like tabs to behave.

The development team is beefing up the security around extensions. If you aren’t a Firefox user, extensions are little programs written by third-party developers which add functionality to Firefox. The Mozilla developers are concerned that extensions could be used as a way to gain control of the browser and ultimately execute arbitary code on a user’s computer. This has not happened to date, and so the improved security features are primarily a precaution, but a wise one.

Feed handling has also been changed, with the wiki talking of features such as the ability to use Firefox to subscribe to feeds in third-party news readers, including web-based products such as Bloglines. I don’t think this area is completely feature complete in 2.0a1, but with the involvement of players such as Microsoft showing how feeds are becoming more central to how users consume the internet, Mozilla is right to be treating it as an important issue.

In summary, if you are an enthusiastic Firefox user (like me), you should definitely look at downloading Bon Echo, as it seems to be perfectly stable and does offer some exciting new features. If you’re yet to get excited by Firefox, download the current program, 1.5 here, which is still better than Internet Explorer 6 and 7 in my opinion, and probably Opera. At the moment the release is not linked to on Mozilla’s website, but it can be downloaded from their FTP site here.