you know, this sort of BBC bashing is what made leave the backstage list the last time and I regret rejoining again. Aside from the lack of critique of other broadcaster's services like 4OD with similar issues, do you realise just how demoralising your constant, unhelpful rants are for staff within the BBC who are subscribed? for that reason alone, I say goodbye and wish you all well, if you want to continue rants / off topic bbc bashing, you could do no better than subscribing to uk.tech.broadcast and joining in with the DAB single topic people... I won't see your witty retort to this email... so sorry about that.... goodbye all - it WAS good... regards m
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Andy Sent: Sat 18/08/2007 20:41 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [backstage] From the front lines... Defective By Design Protest On 18/08/07, Peter Bowyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > No again. The *real* way to provide a platform-independent *service* > could involve making tactical decsions along the way to get your > service launched on popular platforms and follow this up with an > implementation on others. That last bit gives away you have no clue what your talking about! If you have different implementations for different platforms how are you ever going to make anything neutral? It will always work only on select platforms which is never neutral. The only way to get "neutrality" is to favour no particular platform. The only ways are doing this is either ensuring your application runs independent of platform specifics, or that other can generate software for any specific platform. So which is it going to be? Did you not see the order from the BBC Trust, they ordered you to develop a platform neutral solution. Option 1 would require you to scrap either your entire C based implementation or develop an abstract machine and a C compiler for such a machine and then allow such a machine to be platform neutral. Or to release the C code (to allow compilation for any platform) and remove any platform specific code that's in you C implementation. Remembering that C is _only_ portable provided it was written portably, which is why you at least needed to have considered this from day one. You would need to remove _all_ Windows API calls, which your entire graphics system no doubt calls. And also clean up problems that arise from being cross chip. Many people forget that just because a char is signed on your Windows x86 machine, it may not be on your Linux Strong ARM chipset. Option 2 would require you to release the specifications for all formats and communications protocols. This in turn would involve scraping most of the current implementation or paying Microsoft and Verisign to tell you how their technology works. So could you please explain how it is cost and time effective to produce a huge amount of code that is no rendered useless in complying with legal requirements? > Fortunately, the people making these kinds of decisions at the Beeb > seem to be able to see beyond the software-engineering issues which > are (probably naturally) debated here. How precisely is ignoring the one thing that can't be changed (the law of mathematics) a fortunate thing? It would be significantly wiser to disregard the rules of "rights holders" as they are changeable, and thus must take lower priority. Why have you also refused to answer the simple questions: how are you going to achieve platform neutrality? when will you do so? and precisely how much of iPlayer does need to be scraped to do so? And why has the BBC not even confirmed it's intent to comply with orders to develop a platform neutral solution? People seem to have got it into there heads that developing for 2 platforms is like developing for one platform twice, and 3 is 3 times the work. This is completely untrue. I can develop a Java App that will run on many many OSes much faster than I can develop a C App that runs on one! (And ironically I have more experience with C). Does no one at the BBC know the term "Write Once Run Anywhere"? You only needed to write iPlayer once, provided you wrote it right, you chose to completely foul it up wasting enormous amounts of public money, I hope you are going to give this money back? -- Computers are like air conditioners. Both stop working, if you open windows. -- Adam Heath - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
