I'm pretty interested in the Americas Cup, because I sail (windsurf mainly), I used to do research into the non-destructive testing (NDT) of composites (ie testing fibreglass etc. without destroying it, things like yacht masts etc.), and one of my jobs was building and maintaining a website suppling weather data to all the syndicates in the last AC event in Auckland. We are also supplying waether data to Team NZ in Valencia this time.
So with the event running on the other side of the world and timezones being what they are (I've been nodding off at 1-2am NZDT each morning waiting for them to cancel yet another days racing) I was keen to try out the TVNZ Desktop TV. So I clicked through to the website and signed up, the process involves the usual email with a link to click on ... waiting ... waiting ... no email. So ok, maybe they have a problem with my domian - registered again with one of my other email addresses, waiting ... waiting ... still no email. Went back to the website to try and contact them - no contact details!
Several days later I received an email saying some people may have had problems (yeah right) and that the issue should be sorted, then a registration email turned up so I downloaded the necessary application (Flash 9 - ~100MB!) and installed it. Every time I tried to complete the registration process it hung - requiring an ALT-CTL-DEL to get control back. I played around with it a while and got bored - so roll on the real event, I'm really looking forward to this puppy do it's stuff. No such joy. When they finally had a race at Valencia I left the computer running all night as instructed (there is a daemon running) and went to look at the results the next morning - nothing! Seems I have to actually have the application running too. Fired it up, another 100MB later it reinstalled (upgraded) my previous installation - still no video to look at.
The real ball-breaker in all this is that my PCs (I've tested on 2 machines) gets taken over - sometimes the daemon is using 90% or more of system resources, even when I'm not running the application.
And they expect people to pay for this?
Bring back the Animation Research virtual AC application from last time - please?
