Strange site Slashdot carried a link, a few days ago, to this ‘hilarious’ piece - “Windows rapidly approaching desktop usability”.

I see what they’ve done there! They’ve taken the generic article about Linux nearly being good enough for desktop use (provided you have an MSc in Computer Science), and applied it to Windows. Positively side-splitting.

The really funny thing is, it’s hard to argue with its general thrust. Imagine Linux were the status quo. Would you be impressed at forking out £100 for a shiny new alternative operating system from Microsoft, only to be open the box to be met with no manual, a serial key you could not afford to lose, and product activation? The joy of it all.

What about lack of drivers - the most common cause of Linux woes - on Windows? Remember the good old days when hardware support for XP was patchy at best? Would we have put up with that if there was real competition in the operating system market? Thought not! And isn’t it great when you get hold of a new Windows install and, er - can’t do anything until you install shedloads of other software, free or otherwise. Another point to Linux.

Don’t get me wrong, Linux is still rubbish - at least as the alternative operating system, it stands no chance - but what if it had beaten Microsoft to top spot, we all positively loved recompiling our kernels by now, and Windows was a strange and exotic proposition? What if indeed.

I’m starting to wonder whether the Crazy Frog is just a nefarious ploy by the BBC to finish ITV off once and for all.

I mean, think about it!
Step 1: Make an incredibly annoying ad
Step 2: Pay ITV to show it every ad break until everyone is heartily sick of it.

At this point, ITV haemmorages viewers every time it comes on. Ad breaks become worthless because people learn to switch over during them.

Step 3: Thanks to ITV’s new pricing structure for ads, saturate ad breaks with nothing but ads for Crazy Frog, Sweety the Chick and that bloody dragon thing. And maybe a few “No Win No Fee” dodgy soliciters’ ads too.
Step 4: Stop paying! ITV dies!

The only way to make the plan absolutely flawless would be to stage it while ITV is devoting a ridiculous amount of airtime to a pointless reality show that nobody watches - but has reportedly cost them around £15 million to make - just as it is about to be crushed underfoot by the new series of Big Brother. Oh wait!

Still, if you’re as sick of Crazy Frog as I am, maybe you can find the perfect antidote here. Warning though: contains sweary-do’s!

Bloody Microsoft. What they have done, in effect, is remove the only reason I had to buy bone fide Xbox games.

Here’s my reasoning. If you have a chipped Xbox and you play on Xbox Live with the chip activated, they can detect this immediately and turn you away (as far as I understand it). This makes sense - with the chip active, you may well be playing a pirated copy of the game in question.

If you turn the chip off, however, you can’t possibly be playing a copied game because your Xbox will only boot official game discs. For the same reason, you can’t possibly be running the game from hard disk, even if you have naughtily upgraded it against Microsoft’s crazy rules. Your only option if you want to play a game on Xbox Live is to buy a kosher copy of it.

However, Microsoft have banned me merely for having a modified hard disk in my system, even though I cannot use it while playing on Xbox Live. What does that leave me with? A broadband connection I can no longer use with Xbox Live, and no reason to buy Xbox games - I might as well just download them.

Not that I will, of course. I do believe in supporting game publishers and developers, and I barely play the games I have already bought. But this policy still doesn’t seem terribly well thought-out.

(Yes that’s a terrible attempt at a headline for my quick review, sorry.)

I vowed not to buy another driving game for the Xbox - a quick count reveals that they make up two thirds of all the Xbox games I own - but what the hell, it was £7 at Amazon and it wasn’t bad on the PC. FlatOut is an arcade-style racing game with the emphasis on ‘realistic’ physics and, above all, the fun to be had in smashing your opponents off the road. But is it any good?

Fire it up and you’re met with a soundtrack that unfortunately screams “Hello, I’m Burnout 3. Except with unsigned bans that sound like shit.” (To be fair, a lot of the real bands in Burnout 3 sound like shit, too.) Once you get over such hardcore lyrics as “weed will blow your mind!” and get to the racing itself, FlatOut isn’t such a bad proposition. Crashes are beautiful. The fact that you are forced to watch as your driver is gratuitously catapulted from your car whenever they occur is less so - why, man, why? - especially as the ragdoll effects are best described as ‘rubbish‘.

Here, performing my trademark cornering maneuver (plowing into the car ahead rather than braking) is actively encouraged, rather than shunned as in the online play in titles such as Project Gotham Racing, where any such behaviour incurs you the (frequenently hilarious) wrath of ’serious’ gamers. I imagine this is a great game to play on Live, but I haven’t ventured on yet. Maybe when I stop being bloody banned (the sods).

The game is sadly let down by two main points, both of which arise from its insistence on ‘realistic’ physics. What’s so realistic about nobody wearing seatbelts is anyone’s guess, but I guess the developers felt the game was lacking a certain something. All right, that’s three things. The other two are even more fatal.

The game is called FlatOut. You might expect it therefore to feature some pretty fast driving, but thanks to the game’s settings - primarily on dirt tracks and, shock horror, ice - all you achieve by going flat out is a quick trip off into the dirt. Although it’s possible to have great fun on the tarmacked tracks, for the remainder the driving instructor part of your brain constantly reaching for the dual control brakes will spoil your enjoyment somewhat.

Second - the obstacles. All right, so crashing into a tyre wall in reality probably will result in nasty things getting stuck under your axle until you can’t move, but is it a fun situation to be in? Nope! Combine that with the slippery, loose surfaces of the game and you will frequently find yourself cursing your luck as you struggle to free yourself from some shattered fence or other.

The verdict? Fun, in a smashing-yourself-over-the-head, I-can-do-better-than-this, God-damn-it-I’ll-come-first-some-day kind of way. If you want pure, unadultered ‘flat out’ fun, try Burnout 3 instead. Better music too.

Hello! This site is back from the dead, apparently. Yes, I finally decided that the effort of fixing the site actually outweighed the effort of typing in a terminal window to update a minimalist HTML-only page. That’s how painful it was.

What better way to reopen the site than with a bit of moaning? Well, exactly, there is no better way.

Microsoft. They’re BLOODY BASTARDS.

That’s me being banned from Xbox Live, that is, by the capitalist pigs of the Establishment. Er, or something. The terrible crime I committed was to install a larger hard disk in my Xbox, enabling me to run games directly from disk rather than mucking about with CDs all the time. I did know ahead of time that this would cause me to be banned from Xbox Live - although, as it didn’t happen immediately, I thought I might have got away with it - but it didn’t make it any less annoying when it happened.

Why, Microsoft, why? Why can’t I muck about with my Xbox if I like? Piracy, that’s why. OK. Fine. Piracy might just be a problem for a company that’s been selling its console at a massive loss since it first went on sale, so depends on software sales to scrape a bit of cash back.

Here’s the thing that annoys me. Microsoft, in customary fashion, have stolen all the good ideas made possible by modifying one’s Xbox and trumpeted them as killer new features in the Xbox 360. Xbox Media Centre? Check! Expandable hard disk? Check - but you can bet it won’t be anywhere near as cheap as a bog-standard PC hard disk, and you can also bet that using such a foul, common hard disk will get you banned from Xbox 360 Live. Pirating games? I doubt they will pick up this one. Downloadable games, albeit ones that you pay for? I suspect so.

Until the Xbox 360 comes out and I can fail to buy it - ridiculously overspecified as it is - I’ll stick with my modified Xbox. Just not on Xbox Live. The sods.

Yay for updating this thing with vim. Obviously I said I wasn’t going to update any more, but if everything everyoen said turned out to be true then the world wouldn’t be a very interesting place, would it?

Now the BBC has said that top documentary series The Power of Nightmares is going to be distilled down into a two-and-a-half hour film and shown at Cannes. Hey, can I paste links into a PuTTY window? Hey, I can, so check it out.

Being able to scroll around a wrapped line would be good though. Bloody vim. Bloody Linux. You know I really should resurrect that “Why Linux is Bad” article, because it was the one good thing on this site. And it got random people commenting on it ages after it was posted, presumably because some disgruntled Windows fans, tired of being preached to, were rebelliously typing “why linux is gay” into Google. Or something.

God, tlak about being sidetracked. Where was I?

Seriously though, bloody vim hotkeys. Give me a proper content management system any day.

Oh yeah, I was (haha - lucky you if you happen to browse the site right now - I’ve just saved what I’m typing without thinking that it will go LIVE! Straight onto the fearsome Internet! Bohh! Close bracket. I can edit this one easily enough because it’s at the end of a line. Don’t think I’m going to be fixing that ‘everyoen’ in the first bloody paragraph though.)

Yeah so The Power of Nightmares. Unsurprisingly no American TV network would touch it with a bargepole - too bad because I was wondering what Fox News would make of it if it got within moral outrage distance - but as a feature film, now, it at least stands a chance of being seen by those who might care. It’s no Fahrenheit 9/11 - though I’ll let you in on a secret (don’t tell anybody), I thought it was better - but it’s an incredibly thought-provoking piece. Not only that, it’s visually interesting with some great music, real feature film material. Michael Moore could learn a lot from this. Admittedly the series is full of gimmicks, like continual clips from Ali Baba and the Forty Theives whenever it starts to talk about Bin Laden, but none of it really makes you go “oh sod off Moore, you tosspiece.” Like the whole “guess what, soldiers die in wars” section in Fahrenheit 9/11, which by my best estimate lasted about four hours.

The real question is, would I be suffering more if I was using emacs? No, wait, that isn’t the real question at all. Ignore me.