Was it worth it?

Thinking of Vista?

Some interesting reading regarding the potential cost of Vista DRM to both the industry and consumers.

The ever increasing hold that the content providers are having over the IT industry is scary. Give it a few years and don't expect to own any media. Renting is the best you'll get.

Thankfully, there are lots of folks along the lines of DVD Jon who are likely to see this sort of restriction as the next big challenge.

WMP 11

I posted this on the MS newsgroups, but everyone ignored it, so I thought I'd give everyone a second chance to ignore it here:

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Been playing with WMP11 on XP for a while and now onto Vista RTM:

1) No support for multiple audio streams in an AVI, it just plays them all
at once
2) No VOB support, have to rename as mpg and hope for the best
3) Can't define your own file extensions for the library, .flac, .ogg, etc.
(Luckily there's WMPTSE and it works on Vista)
4) No support for hardware DD 5.1 decoding (e.g. Creative X-Fi). Still need
to use something like AC3Filter.
5) No Aspect Ratio adjustment
6) Timeline slider bar is too narrow
7) No support for RIFF tags in AVI files. Tagging has been missing from
video for far too long (wmv excluded) and this would have been a good
opportunity to get some support going for it.
8) Codec support is also poor. FLAC being unsupported out of the box is one
thing, pretending it doesn't exist and just saying it can't play the file is
abysmal. Surely it wouldn't have been that difficult to provide a link to a
page with some suggestions on what to do about any codecs that Microsoft
can't supply? Yes, I know there's Google, but that's not really the point.
9) Still doesn't appear to be any form of codec manager. Codecs are absolute
hell, even if you've got some idea what your doing. Just something that
allows you to say (for example) XVID and DIVX FourCC files should use
c:\xvid\xvid.ax

There are other things, but these are my biggies.

It really does seem as though all the effort has gone into DRM and making
the interface as unintuitive as possible rather than actually adding new,
useful features. Winamp still beats WMP into a cocked hat for functionality.
I really, really want to use WMP as I vastly prefer the all in one interface
rather than Winamp's multiple windows, but the functionality simply isn't
there. VLC also has much better features and will play almost anything
(terrible interface and no media library though).

I know it's a Microsoft product and it's geared towards Windows Media and
keeping the RIAA and MPAA happy, but would it have been that difficult to
spend some time on features rather just interfaces to online music stores?
Not that I ever buy music online and never will until they are at least FLAC
quality and with no DRM (I know, I know, it's never going to happen...)

I want a rifle

This is offically the worst week of my life. My Dad has been diagnosed with cancer and the missus had her car nicked this morning. I'm not a very happy bunny at the minute.

So why do I want a rifle?

It's Summer. We have our windows open at night.
The rifle is for the sole purpose of taking out the bastards who walk along our street at night after a trip to the pub and are determined to talk as loudly as possible about who's been looking at their slapper of a girlfriend.

I want to sit by the window, take aim and put a nice little bullet in the head of each one of the obnoxious pieces of scum.

I also want one of those spikey things that the police throw across the road to blow the tires on cars.
There seems to have been a massive increase in the number of cars and bikes:

• Speeding
• With loud exhausts
• Engines that sound like they're being battered to within a inch of their lives

I want them all to crash and burn horribly simply for the act of being so damn ignorant of the other people.

Gone to Hell

This country (the world) really has gone to hell. Between Coppers Blog, Mr Chalk and Random Acts of Reality you have the perfect picture of everything that is wrong with society and how it's not likely to get better any time soon.

Do I have a solution? Does anyone have a solution? Don't know.

Touchy feely doesn't seem to have done the trick.

Maybe it simply comes down to coming down HARD on miscreants. If you want to to be an all -round obnoxious moron who is of no benefit to society in any way, shape or form then don't expect any sort of human right and caring about your feelings?

Being right-wing has got corrupted. It now means racist and facist. Dictatorial and controlling. What if it just meant attempting to be a reasonable human being? Expecting a good level of behaviour, mutual respect.

The Daily Mail gets a lot of bad press for its attitude and rightly so, but if you look at their underlying cause, is it really so bad? Respect. A reasonable sense of morality. Put down the race card and step away.

Maybe it's all about simply not being an arsehole.

Dead Blog

I really not sure why I still have this site. I haven't touched it since August and really don't think there's much to talk about. Life meanders on.
The world hasn't really improved any; in fact it's just proceeding downhill at a pace, what with Danish cartoons, ID cards, DRM, DMCA and season 2 of Lost being complete shite.

I found out today that I didn't get a job I wanted.

The one good thing that's happened is that we have a baby on the way. Still doesn't really seem real even though we've got pictures to prove it. Makes everything else pale into insignificance in comparison really.

Fuck it. I'll just concentrate on being a good father and everything else will just be secondary.

Mansfield

The council can complain as much as it wants. Mansfield is still a complete dump. Would you go drinking there on a Friday or Saturday night???

And then it get a mention on TV last night's TheBest and Worst places to live in Britain

BBC Retraction

The story in my previous post has now be replaced.
NOT another story as a follow on from the original article, but an actual re-write of the story at the same URL.

Not good and smacks of rewriting history.

Minority Rebrand

What complete and utter drivel. The BBC are reporting that the government are thinking of renaming ethnic minorities. Excuse me? Do we just say "you're Indian-British now" and expect everyone to start referring to themselves as such?

Phrases like that will start getting used in official documents and that will be as far as it goes.
Any French-British out there? German-British maybe?
Or, as is usual with this sort of thing, is it all based around branding "communities" who can easily be identified by the colour of their skin or their religion, i.e. lazy?

Or is it that these particular groups get identified as communities simply because they still have a sense of one? The average town does not have anything that you would call a white community. It may have a large proportion of white people, but you'd be hard pushed to apply the word community to it. You're lucky to know your next-door neighbour's name.
I never hear reference to the Catholic or Protestant communities outside of Northern Ireland or Glasgow either.
Do "communities" only arise when there is a need to bond together in the face of a common foe, fear or some other perceived threat?

Mono

I've always heard references to "Mono" as an infection on American TV. I've eventually looked it up and found out it's glandular fever.
Nothing earth shattering there, but it's been bugging me for years and I thought I'd share the fact :-)

Cool gadget

Given my new found interest in running I bought myself a Garmin Forerunner 301 . Standard me thing really, got a new hobby, need new toy to make it more fun.

If you do any sort of regular running or cycling, get one.
Pulse rate, GPS, view your route in Google Earth and more stats than you can shake a stick at it.

Here's where I went the other day (Google Earth required):

Download episode.kml

Buy, buy, buy (using the link above of course :-) ) you won't regret it.