Nice to see that despite regularly capitulating to idiots, BBC Trust still has some balls. According to BBC News, BBC Trust has rejected plans to close 6 Music, with chairman Sir Michael Lyons saying the case for closure had not been made.

Given that even so-called rivals were saying 6’s closure would have been a huge error, and the fact that in the grand scheme of things, 6 Music costs bugger-all to run (unlike, say, the money-sink that is the mostly awful BBC Three), it’s great that common sense has mostly prevailed. I say ‘mostly’, because while 6 is safe, Asian Network hasn’t been so lucky and may still be axed, with BBC Trust saying it would “consider a formal proposal for [its] closure”.

Marco Arment comments on the state of so-called ‘open’ systems Linux and Android in his post Great since day one. The article is a must-read for anyone interested in new technology, but also a reality check for geeks.

Too often, kit from tech companies—often Apple, but others too—is slammed online, due to the geeks who write the tech press getting their knickers in a twist about a ‘lacking’ feature from a product (despite it only being of interest to them), or praising a product for something so niche that a consumer would never discover it (let alone care if told about it by someone considerably geekier than they are). Note that I myself have been guilty of this, especially during my earlier years of hackery. These days, I am extremely careful about checking my tech writing against an internal geek filter.

To me, Arment’s post wonderfully sums up why it’s going to take a lot for Apple to be beaten to a pulp by Android. The latter is a good system, and there’s a lot of noise online about it, but much of the drive is by geeks who like the geekiest aspect of the system. By contrast, the iPhone and other iOS devices are typically favoured by normal people. In the long run, I think there’s space for both systems (and others), but to expect Android to conquer iOS due to offering features because it can rather than because it should is bafflingly stupid.

Another slice of fried gold (smeared in shit, sadly) from the BBC in iPhone 4 signal fault leaves Apple ‘stunned’. What left me more stunned is how, once again, the BBC’s reporting is little better than copy-and-paste blogging, although they let someone else bang the same old drum about iPhone 4 ‘problems’ rather than bothering to do any actual reporting themselves.

In the report, Pocket Lint’s Stuart Miles says Apple raises questions about the iPhone 4: “Why, for the first time, has Apple released a bumper for their phone, and why does no one else have this problem?” My question: why doesn’t the editor of Pocket Lint (and a BBC reporter) not only know that every phone suffers from human-oriented antenna interference, and that some companies even note this in their instruction manuals? Maybe they should have asked the guys from AnandTech to comment instead—at least they know what they’re talking about regarding iPhone 4.