Eurogamer had a post today about the release of Windows Vista and its impact on gamers and so forth. The comments section was full of fuckwits saying “get a mac” — hardly a smart move when your primary use of the computer is to play games. One guy came out with this comment.
MrWonderstuff
I love mac users, they’re like scientologists of the computing world.
Genius 
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Today is January 30th, Windows Vista’s official date for release to the unwashed masses (i.e. you and me). I’m still waiting for my free copy from Technet, but even then I will be holding off on installing it until I hear that nVidia have pulled their thumbs out of their asses and written some proper drivers for it (see previous post). The version I installed last week was the Enterprise edition, from work, but I don’t think that would affect the 3D performance.
I installed Windows Vista yesterday, and once I got all my stuff installed it was running quite smoothly — until I tried to play a game, then everything went to hell. The game in question is Day of Defeat: Source, from Valve Software. On Windows XP Pro SP2, this game ran smooth as butter in my screen’s native resolution of 1680×1050 with all of the bells and whistles turned on. On Windows Vista RTM it was like treacle. I was getting no more than 20 frames per second, with the latest drivers from nVidia installed. On XP i was getting a solid 60fps (60fps ceiling caused by having vsync turned on and my LCD’s default refresh rate being 60Hz).
The hardware I’m running this on is as follows:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Abit AB9 Pro motherboard
2GB DDR2 RAM
nVidia 7800GTX/256MB
Certainly more than capable of running this game at very high settings. Vista’s “experience” rating widget rated this system 5.3 overall.
I really hope the crap performance is down to nVidia’s Vista drivers rather than Vista itself. For now, if you’re a serious gamer, steer clear of Windows Vista. DirectX 10 games won’t be out for months yet anyway, by which time things will have been ironed out. I’ve gone ahead and reinstalled XP on my computer for the time being. I’m quite disappointed, as I have Vista RC2 on my laptop (on which I don’t play any games) and I quite like it for day to day running.
Yep, 24 days to go till I skive off work for a week and feck off to New York. I haven’t been there for five years, so I’m really looking forward to it. You may have seen my post earlier in the month about my Nikon camera that self-destructed. I’m still pissed at them, but that does make for a great excuse to upgrade when I’m in New York
I’m going to drop into B&H, who are widely regarded as the best camera shop in the city, and have excellent prices. I bought a 64MB (phwoar!) Sony MemoryStick and battery for my long-gone 1.3 megapixel Sony Cybershot there five years ago. This time I plan to get a Fuji S6500fd, known as S6000fd in the US for some stupid marketing reason. B&H price: $400 (approx. €308 at the time of writing). Ireland price: Bend over and take it (i.e. roughly 500 euros).
/drool
RTE News (heh) tells us today to lube up and bend over in preparation for a shafting from a bunch of greedy television licence bastards:
Television is now much more than a ‘box in the corner’, and the concept of a television licence fee may have to be changed to include such developments as mobile phone streaming and websites such as YouTube, an Oireachtas committee has been told.
So they want to force people to get TV licences for things that have FUCK ALL to do with public service broadcasting? Fuck off. RTE shouldn’t get any TV licence income at all, unless they produce a service like the BBC does. RTE gets TV licence cash and advertising income, and most of its home-made output is still complete crap. Fair City anyone? Celebrity-jigs-and-complete-bollix? Please.
Here’s some more bullshit:
Technology expert Ronan Coy said television can include anything that is made visually available to the consumer, including developments such as Internet-based television stations and video blogging.
Update 15/01/2007: I had called Ronan a wanker for the above, but he informs me that RTE took his comments out of context. See his comment below. Sorry Ronan, I apologise for that.
Today is Elvis Presley’s birthday. If he was still alive, he’d be 72 years old.
Today is also David Bowie’s birthday. He’s 60.
Stephen Hawking was also born on this day in 1942, making him 65.
On a somewhat less interesting note, its also R Kelly’s birthday. He’s 38.
Jeremy Clarkson claims that the first episode of the new series of Top Gear, which screens on January 28th will show footage of Richard Hammond’s 300 MPH crash in a jet-powered dragster which occurred during filming for Top Gear last summer.
The BBC won’t officially say one way or the other.
Speaking of the Hamster, he is apparently fully recovered now, as he was spotted riding a powerful Honda Fireblade last week. Nice one.
Top Gear is back on BBC2 on January 28th, at 8 pm.
Suck my balls.
BBStats report: Bad Behavior has blocked 1954 access attempts in the last 14 days.
That’s up from a normal level of about 200 per 14 days.
I was going to write a lengthy rant about what a load of bollix Big Brother is, and what a bunch of saps it viewers are, but I can’t be bothered expending the energy on such a big, steaming pile of shit.
In short - Celebrity Big Brother:
FUCK OFF.
Today is the 21st anniversary of Phil Lynott’s death from heart failure following a heroin overdose. He was 36 when he died. As usual every January 4th since his death, the Vibe for Philo is on tonight.
You can learn lots more about him at Wikipedia.
Statue of Phil Lynott, Harry St, Dublin. Image from Wikipedia.
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