04/05/2005
This really does say it all...
Jamster, the scumbags (do a search)
behind every other advert on UK digital TV, are
owned
by VeriSign.
This is appropriate, since VeriSign, just like the godawful characters they
advertise, are really bloody annoying... Also, it's not the first time
VeriSign's tried to con anyone with misleading T&Cs and hidden extras,
or tried to stop people from getting away from the service (something
which NetSol are notorious for). Shame, isn't it?
And, in case you're wondering who I'm voting for, the answer is 'Lib Dem'.
So blame me if the Tories get in in Edinburgh South West, I don't
care - they probably won't, though, considering how crap they are...
Since I'm going to attempt to stay up tomorrow evening, you may or
may not see Election Blog 2005. Hopefully.
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08/05/2005
Welcome to ISX.networks/3.0!
Courtesy of a piece of software called Thingamablog,
I am now in the progress of converting the weblog over to a more, um,
'organised' look and feel... It's still not as easy to update as, say, a
MT weblog, but it's also a lot more secure and at least I can keep my
look and feel. I'm going to shift over all the old articles, so it won't
be a problem. Also, the Time page is staying -
I'll move it over to the new look in due course.
In the meantime, enjoy RSS feeds, a proper working archival and category
system, and much much more!
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14/05/2005
Election 2005 - post-mortem
I did, in fact, stay up for the election. Instead of blogging, however,
I was on the #ukbloggers IRC channel gratefully hosted by Nick
Barlow, qwghlm.co.uk and
others, for whom I'm extremely grateful.
So, it's a third term and another big but more controllable majority for
Tony Blair. Not really a surprise; a surprise would have been if Howard
got in. Not very many surprises on the night, in fact; the only biggies
were that George Galloway somehow got back into Parliament (I'm not a
fan) and the fact that the Lib Dems made as few gains on Labour as they
did, despite having a very large percentage of the vote. And,
unfortunately, Blunkett's back in the Cabinet; ironically overseeing
Child Support; even worse, Blair replaced Geoff Hoon with one of the
only less suitable men in Parliament, the indescribable John Reid, and
Ruth Kelly's still there. My MP, Alistair Darling, got relected with a
reduced majority. Such is life.
The fact that Labour got a majority of 68 on only 37% of the vote means,
of course, that we need a much more proportional electoral system than
we have now; something Jack
'master of doublespeak' Straw doesn't seem to be able to comprehend
(link courtesy Nick
Barlow) in an article so godawful I'm surprised the Guardian
even agreed to print it. Nick makes the argument about as well as I
would, pointing out the 1997 manifesto commitment to an electoral reform
referendum (swiftly forgotten post 170-majority) and the ignoring of the
Jenkins commission. We may well not see a decent voting system from this
government, and it's a real shame - FPTP should have been consigned to
the history books long, long ago.
And may I just extend my commiserations to Tim Ireland (of Bloggerheads
and Backing Blair fame),
who is about to suffer four-to-five years of Anne
Milton... shame, really.
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Chris Woodhead is a tosser
That is all.
Quote:
But Mr Woodhead, speaking at a conference at Brighton College, in
East Sussex, said failing schools should be shut and state education
privatised.
Remind me why the Daily Mail still listens to him?
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15/05/2005
Fischerspooner - Odyssey
By rights, you should hate them and everything they stand for - a couple
of New York art prats glad to define themselves under the 'electroclash'
term discredited by almost everyone else on the scene, who almost
bankrupted a record label with their completely silly first-album
recording costs (although it was Ministry of Sound, which redeems
them a bit), who have once on the album given Linda Perry a songwriting
credit, with self-indulgent
bullshit on the inlay card, and who admitted in an interview that
Casey Spooner is such a puss that he couldn't sing the word "war"
without much persuasion...
And yet I can't help but like the album, Linda Perry, warts and all.
It's just too good to hate. Quandary, isn't it? Fischerspooner have,
against the odds, managed to make a coherent and surprisingly
wide-ranging electropop album that's actually worth buying; something
they were threatening to do with Emerge and Turn On but
didn't quite manage to do elsewhere. It sounds like they've used more
instruments on the album, which helps it a lot; in fact, even the
variation in lyrical style (from Spooner's own compositions to David
Byrne) helps the project; Mirwais, miracle-worker on Madonna's Music
and American Life (rescuing awful, awful songs and making
them sound interesting), does additional production on most of the
tracks; and at least it doesn't have the arrogance surrounding it that #1
had (from the title on).
Besides, "Just Let Go" is one of my electronic singles of
the year so far, although I haven't heard the new single mix of
Ladytron's "Sugar" yet - I did hear the Thinking XXX
version, but apparently it's very different; and from my impressions of
the demo if they release "Destroy Everything You Touch"
it'll steamroller everything else out there. Besides, it's a step up
from a fucking awful remix of "Axel F" featuring C****
F***, isn't it?
It's embarrassing to say this, I know, but this album's actually worth
buying. Besides, at least I still hate the Libertines...
Other albums that aren't as bad as Pitchfork Media says they are:
Garbage, Bleed Like Me (actually a fantastic album). Funny world,
isn't it?
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18/05/2005
The real winner of the 2006 Console War will be...
...IBM. No question about it. Three cut-down, speed-emphasised PPC970
cores in the XBOX360, one cut-down PPC970 core and several vector
arithmetic units in Sony's 'Cell' PS3, and some form of PPC in the
Nintendo Revolution.
So, now they're all announed, where do the awards go to?
Design: Unquestionably Nintendo Revolution - that's one SLEEK
puppy, and it might even get smaller.Take
a look over at that and say it's not truly beautiful...
Second place: PS3, which might look nice in its black version. 'Nice
try' award goes to XBOX360, which might look a lot better in the flesh
than it does in pictures.
Games: Who the hell knows? Unreal Engine 3.0 looks amazing on the
PS3, though, and that was pretty much the only actual in-engine demo
there.
Feature list: It's well known that the PS2 is a pig to code for,
and Sony look like continuing that tradition with PS3 - which uses a
completely different paradigm to that used by most game developers, and
requires HiDef to boot. OTOH, now dual-core is coming to PC it's more
likely that games makers will make parallelisable engines; Unreal 3.0,
in fact, will probably be the first mainstream example of this, and
hence Cell might not be such a pig to code for if you're writing a lot
of maths-heavy (and especially physics-heavy) code in parallelisable
form. And the NVIDIA G70 graphics core they're using in the PS3 looks to
be another speed-demon; almost as big as the GFFX-6800 jump again
(says a 6800GT owner), so will be capable of the huge HDTV resolutions
Sony will demand of it. Also, it's got Blue-Ray, GTA and Gran Turismo.
XBOX360 may or may not be backwards compatible, but its aim is to become
your home media centre - it has MCE Extender built in, it also gives
HiDef, and it has Halo 3. It's tri-core, but they're all the same
(3.2GHz and watercooled) - so it's just like programming SMP on a PC.
And, like PS3, it has wireless controllers. Never underestimate the
power of the Vole.
Nintendo is being vague about what's actually in the Revolution, but we
do know it'll be able to play the complete Nintendo game library through
an Internet service, and have direct GCN compatibility. This is a Unique
Selling Point - a lot of geeks own modded XBOXes for XBMC and emulators,
and Revolution will make that second option unneccessary (while XBOX360
makes the first unneccessary, unless you don't have Windows MCE). There
is also a rumour going around that Revolution will provide a fan-game
capability, which could quite possibly be huge - take a look at the
homebrew GBA scene and realise exactly how vital it is, and take a look
at what's happening with the DS even so soon after release. Could
Nintendo finally have worked out that these people are to be cultivated,
not legalled out of existence? If they have, it could be, indeed, a
revolution.
Pricing: With the consoles being of such power as they are - 3GHz
RISC processors, watercooling and all - I don't expect them to come in
at any less than £299 for 360/PS3. Sony don't lose cash on consoles -
they made humongous profits on the PS2 right from the start, and there's
a shop down the street from me selling PSP Value Packs at £199 (which
isn't that far away from the official Sony UK price when it comes out) -
so this is almost certain. Revolution might come in less, because it's
almost certainly a much less powerful machine; but it will be the most
intriguing one. And XBOX360 will be out the gate first, coming out this
year; PS3 is a paper launch, and Revolution was just a sneak peek.
So fasten your seatbelts... it's going to be war.
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19/05/2005
Whew, that was a scare...
Finally got the blog back up and running, and looking even better than
the adapted thingamablog layout - I binned the non-working-in-IE kludge
involving my layout, one of Movable Style's and a lot of HTML coding,
and instead worked from V2.0 pages and added in the thingamablog control
code in order to create templates from scratch, and it's working and
looking even better than ever. So call it ISX.networks/2.5, like the
Winamp dudes.This version is better for people with text browsers, too,
although I'm not sure I get that many people who need them.
Now it's possible for IE users to actually see my blog, welcome all!
Although I do recommend you get
Firefox anyway, just because (although if you're using
Safari/konqueror/Opera etc, there's no urgent need.)
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PSA: Kill the Asylum and Immigration Bill
New
Labour's asylum bill is lethal.
Successful asylum seekers will no longer gain a permanent right to
remain, but will be awarded temporary leave of up to five years.
It's a spiteful little measure for the Daily Mail crowd that will damage
the people who most need sanctuary in this country and will do nothing
to stop illegal immigration; it panders, in fact, to the DM crowd's
belief that asylum-seekers are taking our jobs etc., which couldn't be
further from the truth (in fact, they're not even allowed to have one).
There isn't even anything positive about the bill - most of the
rest of it, points system and all, is truly vile populist
immigrant-baiting of the kind I despise the most.
In any case, Britain needs immigrants of all types - we are suffering a
skills collapse - and measures like this are truly unwelcome. We treat
asylum seekers badly enough already - we're better than Australia, but
that's not saying much - and we really shouldn't be caving in again
to people who are one step away from joining the BNP. But then, I don't
believe in bigotry...
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20/05/2005
On the occasion of seeing several hundred too many Jamster adverts on TV...
Once a day is too much. Twice every ad break on every single commercial
channel is taking the piss. I watch TV with sound piped through my
hi-fi, and it doesn't have a remote control; as a result, and also
because I don't own a PVR yet, I have to rapid-switch the channel when
the frog and friends come on. Unfortunately my TV provider is Telewest
Broadband so it takes about five seconds to get to a safe haven like,
say, News 24. Five seconds of frog to suffer through is five seconds too
much, and with the BBC strike on Monday almost certain to trigger a N24
shutdown I have a feeling I may well be about to go insane.
ITV have had 600 complaints since they started striprunning Crazy Frog
every...single...ad-break...twice, but they won't willingly give up a
source of revenue just because real viewers are pissed off about it
(only the BARB raters count, although at least they're not watching Celebrity
Wrestling either). And the ASA, which has real power, won't listen
to Crazy Frog complaints about their frequency, which is supposedly up
to the broadcaster; and they rejected these months before they
did the ITV deal and started pushing it harder than an American crack
dealer. So complain, complain, complain to OFCOM, with a quickie dropped
into the ASA about the outrageous £3-a-month small-print scam they're
pulling (earning them millions.)
And if you want to hurt them financially, don't buy a tone from them,
complain at every opportunity, switch your domains away from Network
Solutions (Jamster is part of the Verisign
family), and don't buy your digital certificates from
Verisign/Thawte (two sides of the same coin). Make sure to let them
know...
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24/05/2005
Campaign: Buy The Coldplay Single. Now.
Not because it's any good, but because you can prevent C**** F*** from
getting to Number One by doing so. Having Chris Martin on Top of the
Pops instead of the marketing-led horror of galactic proportions that is
the C**** F*** single would restore some of my faith in the people of
Britain that has been so, so hit lately.
BBC:
C**** F*** 'heading for top spot'
Do it now. Before it's too late. And if you do it, please post here!
And to the HMV guy in the article: I'm a student, and I want that frog
boiled now. There's your kitsch appeal.
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30/05/2005
Random stupidity #(∞-1)
Courtesy
BBC, an article showing off exactly how you can rather easily ruin a
hundred schoolchildren's Friday:
More than 100 GCSE pupils received a last-minute call to sit an exam
two weeks early after a mix-up meant they were given the wrong date...
Pupils were contacted when the error was discovered on Friday
morning, and the exam was allowed to be delayed until that afternoon.
That afternoon? Wow, how generous. You've been expecting to have
your totally unimportant RE exam two weeks in the future, so probably
haven't revised yet. You have, in good faith, been given an exam list
which states in bold Helvetica TWO WEEKS IN THE FUTURE. You probably
haven't even started revising yet and then you get a phone call on
Friday morning - "Oops, sorry, it's today. Can you come in this
afternoon?" I'm surprised 80% of them turned up - that's an abominable
way to treat a student.
Take a look at the sidebar, too; there's a recent history of this. This
sort of thing is getting common because no-one checks anything anymore.
There's a really lame excuse in the article: "The error had been made at
the school, but not by the examinations officer." Well, if so, why
didn't the exams officer recheck the book, or ask the question: "Are
they sitting Paper A or B?" to someone like, say, their teacher? It is,
after all, their job. Oh well.
And in today's random education stupidity roundup, we return to the City
Academies - nothing less than the Government's attempt to privatise
education without the advantages of doing so. In case you're not
familiar with the way the scheme works, it's quite simple: Peter Vardy
or some other scumbag contributes £2m, the Government contributes the
remaining 90% of the school's building cost and 100% of the running
costs, and then Vardy runs the school, including full curricular
control, forever. Seem fair to you? Not me either. Vardy is using his "Emmanuel
Schools Foundation" academies to teach creationist
crap in science classes, and others are just using them as a licence
to print money; most new schools on PFI deals, for example, have
near-permanent unbreakable contracts with Sodexho/Scolarest/Initial, and
don't even have a kitchen let alone the capability to make edible
school food.
The bad news
is that it isn't the Emmanuel Schools Foundation one that's failing in
Middlesborough, it's the one run by a construction company... and
guess who's going to take over... Stupidity in the extreme, isn't it?
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