Luke Haines, Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop, produced by Richard X. Listen.
This should really be a big hit, but it won’t be. I suppose that’s life.
Month: September 2006
Vista diary #1: Hardware hassles and hard choices
I’ve just installed Vista RC1 on my main desktop machine, and for the first time it’s speedy enough and almost ready to be my main operating system. I’m typing this in Vista IE7 now.
Vista has had a bit of a troubled history for me. I have an Athlon-64 3500+ homebuild machine, with 1GB RAM, a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 I paid quite a bit of money for a few years ago, and an NVIDIA 6800GT graphics card – something which should be fast enough for anything much thrown at it (it’s certainly fast enough for Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 at my LCD monitor’s resolution with anti-aliasing on.) Yet previous Vista builds have been horrendously slow, swapping to disc or just unusable.
Much of this seems to have been the fault of two companies: NVIDIA and Creative Labs. NVIDIA have fixed their problems and now their graphics drivers are quick, stable and very much up to the task. Creative have not, and it’s entirely their fault – they have decided not to write any Vista drivers at all for the Soundblaster Live! series, including the 5.1 Platinum I own, in an obvious attempt to make us all buy Audigys and X-Fis (too bad their Audigy and X-Fi Vista drivers don’t work properly, if at all, according to everyone who’s tried them). Microsoft themselves have tried to cajole Creative into writing the needed drivers, with no effect. The end result is that I had to use the kludge that is the kX drivers, and they don’t work too well on Vista.
No more. Now I’ve replaced my long-cable hi-fi link with Xbox Media Center, I no longer need to have two front outputs – one in the rear to my hi-fi, one in the front for my headphones. Now I can plug my headphones directly into the rear, and use XBMC to play music through the hi-fi in the next room. And because I can do that, I can use my NForce4 on-board audio, of which NVIDIA’s RC1 drivers work (if a little minor-buggily).
So when I was swapping a TV tuner today, I yanked out my Live 5.1; the last act in a long struggle, the very final straw for me being the fact that Creative despite all the complaining have refused to change their position (whilst their Audigy and X-Fi drivers still don’t work properly for everyone). So, goodbye Creative; I’ve bought a lot of your stuff over the years, but you’ll never see a penny of my money again. Good riddance to you all.
Mercury Music Prize 2006
So, the albums in competition are low-key numbers from Richard Hawley, Thom Yorke and Isobel Campbell (the former of which should win); “popular act we’ve ignored previously” entries from Muse and Scritti Polliti, the Big Name entry from the Arctic Bloody Monkeys, and the “truly godawful, WTF they put it there over a decent album” entry from Hot Chip. And the real should-be winners, Kate Bush and the Pet Shop Boys, aren’t on the list.
SPOILER WARNING: Unfair winner revealed after the break…
The greed wins out: or does it?
If you don’t want football matches to be shown between 2:45 and 5:15, maybe you might wish not to allow TV companies to broadcast them. This thought has apparently not come to the SPL:
A licensee in Glasgow has been stopped from using a decoder to access and screen overseas broadcasts of Scottish Premier League matches.
The Court of Session in Edinburgh granted an interim interdict against The Spirit Bar in the east end.
[BBC News Scotland, “Licensee handed TV football ban“]
The basic situation is that all games are taped. Through a UEFA ruling, we can’t actually show most games live within the UK (those between 2:45 and 5:15 on Saturdays) because it’ll stop people being extorted by the clubs, but at the same time rights to all the games are sold to countries outside UK jurisdiction which aren’t subject to this limit.
Since the satellites that serve the Middle East are very much accessible from UK skies using a large (but standard) dish, you can entirely legally purchase a subscription from a Turkish satellite provider and thus gain access to SPL/EPL/other non-Sky football. Often with English commentary, too. A few people in the know – mostly satellite enthusiasts and pubs – have taken this up, and the football authorities are not happy.
Sky in particular are furious at this: the fees they charge pub-owners are astronomical (for a lesser service, too – the pub versions of Sky Sports are 4:3, not widescreen) and they don’t want to lose that easy, monopoly income. They’ve actually failed at this in the English courts, but obviously they’ve decided that the Scots might be an easier target.
Going straight to the point: it is not illegal for a pub-owner to posess a foreign decoder, the decoder owner pays the subscription fee to the foreign satellite company, the SPL/EPL/whatever are paid for the rights from the foreign broadcaster, and therefore if it gets picked up in Britain it should be none of their business. All prosecuting people does is shows us
- how silly the rule is
- how expensive Sky areand, most importantly,
- that more people really should do this
Yes! Buy a motorised dish! Screw Sky! Screw £30+ gate fees! Screw the SPL and EPL! And then maybe, just, they’ll see some sense.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 