If it ain’t broke, break it.

The BBC, in their never ending quest to be trendy have decided to change their homepage. They’ve developed something of the NASA syndrome* and gone for clicky/slidey widgets everywhere. They have also increased the width of the rendered page to approximately fit 1024 wide displays.

Now, each of the widgets on the page requires a pretty hefty chunk of processing power to render, my E6750 dual core desktop doesn’t notice but my Nokia N800 certainly does. Loading the BBC webpage on the internet tablet takes about 17-20 seconds while each widget unit is rendered. Once rendered, any state-change in a widget (a ‘reveal’ for example) takes a further 5-6 seconds.

To add insult to injury, the ‘New BBC Homepage’ is just a facade over the old site, click on any news item or department link (after slogging your way through the cripplingly slow main homepage on your mobile device) and you’ll be presented with the old webpages. The only other option is to use the ‘mobile/pdas’ link which is in itself, a content-crippled portal to the BBC site.

The TV licence in the UK now costs a staggering £135.50 a year for which you now get very little intelligent programming. I find that I watch about 20-30 minutes of television in an entire week, the only channel of any real factual value seems to be BBC parliament which is nothing more than a relay of proceedings.

I had enjoyed the BBC website and BBC News in particular but the inexorable decline of the journalistic standards has, over the years, diminished it’s value for me. The new homepage system has pretty much removed all remaining value by making the site at best uncomfortable to use and at worst inaccessible from the now common mobile devices.

As a British citizen, it is unfortunate that the BBC now fails to provide me with any useful service.

*At least on nasa.gov with the N800, the site fails over gracefully and allows you to quickly and easily reach the existing, still high quality factual content.

Just picked this up from this article on the BBC News Politics section.

As at 19:08

It said the government has promised funding for two pupils from every sixth form and college in the country to visit the Nazi concentration camp where millions of Jews were murdered during the World War I.

(Emphasis mine)

Close, but no cigar.

Update: They fixed it by 19:30

…or in other words, the probability of a religious leader saying something mind-numbingly stupid is always close to a value of 1.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (principal leader of the Church of England) has stated in an interview for the BBC World at One programme that the adoption of Sharia Law in the UK is unavoidable. [warning: link contains inexcusably daft view-points]

He bases his view on the idea that some British citizens (in this case Muslims) do not relate to the the British legal system. Therefore, he argues, they should be given a choice of which law they would like to be tried under ie: British Law or Sharia law.

He seems to think this is a sensible idea.

Well, perhaps I feel that I don’t relate to British law too easily either. Perhaps the courts would give me the option of being tried under the laws of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

If you are a British citizen, you should be expected to be a part of British culture and abide by British laws. If you dislike an element of British law, you have the right to protest against that rule and lobby for it’s change. You do not have the right to mix and match or choose between different sets of laws to suit yourself.

Update: Rowan Williams has apparently received death threats as a result of this interview. Presumably some slightly less loony Bishop has offered to bat him over the head with a scepter.

Photo Credit: bribriTO cc-by-sa-2.0

I was just reading this article one the BBC about the Treasury Committee blaming the FSA for Northern Rock’s unsustainable business model when I came across this statement:

Unlike the great majority of UK banks, Northern Rock relied upon borrowing funds from the wholesale money markets to fund its mortgage business, rather than the usual method of using savers’ deposits.

Surely the BBC’s Business editors can’t be so naive as to not understand that the greatest majority of mortgage lending in the Western World is funded by fractional reserve banking.

Fractional-reserve banking refers to a financial system where the bank uses a fraction of its deposits to finance borrowers ie: It does not have the money as deposits to give out as loans. It ‘creates’ the money for the loan by starting a line on a ledger or in a database. The money is ‘created’ on the promise of the loan’s repayment.

Now, I can understand “Joe Bloggs” on the street believing that mortgages are only lent from deposits. After all, the banks do seem to spend some time and effort supporting this myth. However, I’d imaging that a great many people in business and finance circles are fully aware that mortgages are almost entirely funded by fractional reserve banking these days.

This begs the queston; why are the BBC business editors propagating a myth about banking which plainly isn’t true? Are the business editors really this naive?

Okay, so I don’t really believe this to be an intentional dark conspiracy but the fact remains that the BBC did provably edit an interview between David Frost and Benazir Bhutto to remove a reference made by Bhutto to the murder of Osama Bin Laden by Omar Sheikh.

The original interview was broadcast in full on al Jazeera TV in November with the Bin Laden reference but when the interview was rebroadcast on the BBC, the reference was edited out rather crudely by the insertion of a still image of Frost to cover the audio join in Bhutto’s response.

A youtube user has uploaded both versions of the video (unfortunately, I can’t find one neatly edited together to demonstrate the cut quickly)

The original is first, the reference to the murder is just after the 6:00 minute mark:

In the next clip, we see the BBC’s edited version with the dodgey still of Frost turning up at 5:00 minutes

A Czech lecturer at the University of Glasgow enquired with the BBC about the apparent censorship*:

The video of David Frost’s interview with Bhutto on your website HERE contains a cut shortly after minute 5 where a still photograph of David Frost is inserted.

The uncensored version of the interview is available on YouTube and elsewhere.

In the cut out sequence, Bhutto says that bin Laden is dead.

Can you please advise who has cut out this sequence and what was the reason for this act of censorship?

You may be aware that among other places, this act of censorship is being energetically discussed on the discussion forum of Spiegel Online (in German).

Thank you very much

Dr Jan Culik
Senior Lecturer
University of Glasgow

The BBC sent back the following response.

The BBC has an agreement with al-Jazeera which enables both broadcasters to share certain news material including pictures and interviews. It was on this basis that we offered an extract of Sir David Frost’s interview with Benazir Bhutto to users of the BBC News website.

During the interview Ms Bhutto made an allegation that Osama Bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Sheikh. A claim which was unchallenged and so unexpected that it seemed most likely that she had mis-spoken.

Under time pressure the item producer responsible for publishing the video edited out the comment with the intention of avoiding confusion. On reflection this was clearly a mistake and should not have happened. There was no intention on our part to distort the meaning of the interview, and we will endeavour to replace the edited version currently available via the BBC News website with the original interview as broadcast by Al-Jazeera.

I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for what was an error of judgement and the confusion that this has caused.

Adam Batstone

Editor BBC News Website Audio Video

Which, to my mind is actually a pretty good explanation. Frost seemed to miss the reference (he looked pretty comatose in fact) so Bhutto was never challenged on the statement and she did not expand on it herself which suggests it was uttered as a statement of accepted fact. I’m actually surprised that al Jazeera didn’t make the same cut to avoid confusion too.

I believe she did not intend to name ‘Osama Bin Laden’, rather she intended to say “Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Daniel Pearl“. Omar Sheikh was found guilty of the videotaped 2002 murder of the journalist. It’s possible that she just had Bin Laden on her mind at that moment in the interview and confused his name for Pearl’s without even realising the mistake.

The conspiracy theorists are very excited about this and of course, from their point of view, it really is golden. Now that Bhutto has been assasinated, it is impossible to ask her whether she actually intended to say ‘Osama Bin Laden’ or not.

Update: Steve Herrmann, the Editor of the BBC News Website has put his view forward too. I remain of the opinion that the whole hoo-ha was David Frost’s fault when he didn’t pick up on Benazir Bhutto’s mistake. If Frost had just asked her if she meant what she said (and I’m nearly certain now that she meant to say Daniel Pearl) the conspiracy nuts would still be bleating but wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

*Please note, the letters quoted were ‘collected on the internet’, I’ve not found the primary source

The BBC has finally pulled it’s finger out and made their iPlayer view-on-demand system work on Linux and Mac platforms. The iPlayer streaming service is now available via web-browser using the Adobe Flash plugin. The download service is not available as it has apparently still not been possible to port Verisign’s proprietary, DRM encumbered Kontiki software to other platforms.

Apparently, releasing a flash-based version will not be enough to appease the BBC Trust on cross-platform availability either.

The streaming iPlayer requires the latest flash version which is a minor version of Flash 9.x (9.0.115.0). The iPlayer will run with earlier flash 9.x versions but the full-screen mode is disabled. Apparently, users were formerly required to register before using iPlayer but when I went to try it, I was given direct access. The experience was somewhat underwhelming. The bitrate was obviously lower than required to maintain the quality and the frame rate felt like 15fps. That said, this is probably the best the BBC can do at the moment as services such as iPlayer require a huge amount of processing power and bandwidth due to the potential userbase.

The personal gripe that I had is probably more of a problem with the BBC in general rather than iPlayer itself. Despite the large iPlayer catalogue, there seems to be very little worth watching. I’m sure it appeals to the lowest common denominator (whoever he may be) but I’m left puzzled by what the modern BBC regard as ‘entertainment’.