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BBC Click

Broadcast on BBC News and available online through the iPlayer, Click is a high-budget magazine-style show. As you might expect, it’s focused less on nitty-gritty details and tech problem-solving and more on issues. You get a lot of interviews with important people, and examination of the impact of technology. There are the obligatory tech and website reviews, but it’s focused more on providing a balance view of things than pushing the latest gadget. Interesting stuff.

Category 5 Technology TV

Category5 Website

Sandwiched between two big players like Click and Tekzilla this homegrown Canadian minnow might look out of place. But what it lacks in budget it makes up for in accessibility.

Broadcast from the home of alpha-geek Robbie Ferguson Category 5 streams out live for an hour a week and interacts directly with users in the site’s chatroom. They also answer emails from users, and even take phone calls (!). The focus is mostly on Ubuntu Linux, but there are hardware reviews, and they”ve recently started dealing with Macs and other Linux distros, as well as fielding the occasional Windows question. Robbie is a nice guy, and extremely knowledgeable and helpful. His co-host Carrie Webb is there to keep things grounded and stop Robbie from talking too much technobabble, so the show stays accessible to all levels of geekiness. I like.

Tekzilla

As the name suggests, this is a behemoth of a show. Hailing from the massive American web video stable of Revision3, this is a big show, with big production values. What I like about it is that they aren’t afraid to say if something is crap. A lot of bg shows seems like adverts for whatever latest gizmo the tech companies are pushing. Tekzilla aren’t afraid to tell you not to jump on the bandwagon if they think the technology isn’t quite right yet.

Content covers mostly Windows/Mac, although they’re not averse to talking about Linux. They also produce some handy short videos dealing with specific (albeit pretty basic) issues.

Our word “salary” comes from the Roman custom of paying soldiers in salt. Presumably the empire found it’s boys wanted to be paid in a currency which (in ancient times) was valuable everywhere.

Times change though, I wonder how practical would it be to get paid in salt today?

• Average wage in the UK (Apr 08): £25,100 source
• Retail price of iodised table salt at Tescos: £0.87/kg
• Equivalent amount of salt = 28,850kg

That’s a lot of salt. In fact it’s:

• At 1201 kg/m³ = 24.02m³
• Too much salt to carry in any size ISO shipping container
• Equivalent to 8.24 ISO standard elephants

Elephants are the official measure of equivalent weight for trivia

Following on from my review of Windows 7, here’s some interesting benchmarks:

Windows 7 vs Vista vs Ubuntu Benchmarks

Short version: Win 7 beta already outperforms Vista on most  benchmarks except for some types of file transfer.

One thing of note is that both Vista and Win 7 have a relatively large disk footprint, meaning they will both be of limited use on netbooks and laptops fitted with the new solid state drives. I suspect manufacturers will stick to slow and fragile old HDDs for Win 7 netbooks to avoid pricing themselves out of the market. Either that or Microsoft will have to extend XP availability again.