Monthly Archives: April 2007

Movies & TV

Lost Back on Track?

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I’ve made a couple of comments recently about Lost somewhat losing it’s way, especially when comparing it with the new kid on the block, Heroes. However, the episode of Lost that went out tonight, One of Us coming close on the heels of the shocking ending of Exposé a couple of weeks ago, is definitely making it seem like things are improving.

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This week the episode concentrated on Juliet who we learned last week had been left behind with the crash survivors as the Others clear out from their village. We see her first steps joining the crash survivors on the beach, and the initial distrust of her, especially from Sawyer and Sayid, as she helps treat a sick Claire. In flashback we continue her story as she leaves her sister on what she thinks is only six months, and how she has repeatedly tried to persuade Ben to let her go home over her years on the island. We also see more of what went on amongst the Others following the crash, including seeing familiar events from earlier episodes from the Others side.

However, after all of that, as the first season episodes often did, in the last few moments the show totally throws everything up into the air again, and unlike Exposé which was just a shock without really moving on the main plot, this twist actually goes towards moving things forward!

Doctor Who, Movies & TV

Doctor Who v The FA Cup

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Next time someone from the BBC argues that it is worth spending vast amounts of the licence fee on the football (the last round of FA Cup rights cost the BBC and BSkyB £300 million, ITV won them away for £425 million), rather than spending it elsewhere, or they argue that moving popular shows for the football is a good idea because ‘more people will watch the football’, show them these figures from last night. The viewing figures increase by almost a third – nearly 1.9 million extra viewers for Doctor Who over the FA Cup game, and by 8pm there were another 0.4 million again.

Doctor Who, Movies & TV

Gridlocked

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So, thanks to the Watford/Manchester United clash finishing on time, we did get to see Doctor Who this week.

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The plot for this episode was relatively simple. The Doctor takes Martha to see New Earth, much as he has done with Rose before – a fact that Martha picks up on. However it is not the bright sky and open air view that Rose got that Martha gets to see. This time the travellers touch down in the grimy underside of the city. Martha is swiftly kidnapped by two people who need a third person to allow them to use the fast lane on the city motorway, something which seems rather bizarre, until Martha finds out that traffic in the regular lanes is absolutely gridlocked, and has been for years – people are living on the motorway. The couple want to use the fast lane, only open to vehicles with three or more passengers, but it is rarely used – and they quickly find out why. Living in the fast lane, and feeding off the fumes are the Macra.

Meanwhile the Doctor is desperately trying to catch up with his kidnapped companion, but after leaping between cars in the three-dimensional traffic jam, he is kidnapped himself by Novice Hame, sent by the Face of Boe to find the Doctor. The Doctor now discovers the reason for the ongoing traffic jam – the rest of the city, indeed the whole rest of the planet is dead – the Face of Boe and Novice Hame are the only survivors on the surface, and have managed to save the people down below in the motorway system, and keep everything ticking over, but they need the Doctor to release the trapped vehicles and repopulate the city.

That is really it for the plot, the Doctor manages to release the trapped vehicles, and then the Face of Boe dies, and reveals his secret to the Doctor, which is effectively the main point of the episode.

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Essentially at it’s heart this is a character episode. The Macra are primarily there for a bit of peril, but the Doctor doesn’t really defeat them so much as take all their potential victims away by releasing the vehicles. Essentially it could have been anything down there really, it’s just that Russell T wanted to bring back a more minor monster, and the Macra first appeared 40 years ago this year.

There are a number of nice elements of community shown, with for example the people trapped in the jam joining together to sing the hymn The Old Rugged Cross which is broadcast regularly to all the vehicles in the jam, and the people in the jam each have their own lives within their vehicles. Considering that Russell T is well known as an atheist, the fact that the episode closes with another hymn, Abide With Me is even more of a surprise. However the whole crux of the story is to build the relationship between the Doctor and Martha and to sow some seeds for the future.

As the episode opens, Martha asks the Doctor about his home, and the Doctor gives a poetic description of Gallifrey. However, rather than telling Martha the truth of what has happened to his home, the Doctor makes an excuse and dodges the question. However, Martha is then confused when the dying Face of Boe reveals his secret – he first empathises with the Doctor being alone, before revealing that the Doctor is not alone. Of course he doesn’t expand further on that – we’ll have to wait and see exactly how the Doctor is not alone, but the Doctor then does have to explain to Martha that he is the last of the Time Lords, and to explain about the Time War, and the defeat of the Time Lords by the Daleks – just in time for her to meet the Daleks next week!

To some extent this was a pretty average episode, but in terms of the ‘big picture’ much more important. Quite entertaining, but perhaps somewhat overshadowed by what comes next week.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Sluggish Site Performance

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Apologies if the site seems rather sluggish at the moment. Unfortunately having done maintenance work on their systems today, my ISP has suffered a couple of hardware failures, and is currently operating on reduced capacity on their server cluster – especially with regards to sites like this one that use a lot of PHP. As a result, although things are up and running, they’re a little slow at the moment. Normal service should be resumed later in the week, once the hardware faults have been rectified.

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology

The Annual Mac Attack from PC Pro

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Last year it was Vista v MacOS X that compared a shipping version of MacOS X with a beta version of Vista, this time around, PC Pro has rolled out “32 Reasons Why PC’s are Better Than Macsâ€? as it’s annual cover article bashing the Mac, and what a pretty pointless waste of paper it is too – however it is a further example of PC Pro’s schizophrenic relationship with the Mac.

Point number one is “Service Packs Don’t Cost £90â€? which is wheeling out their argument from last year that the MacOS X upgrades are service packs, and it then rolls through the familiar selection of PC owner grumbles including the one button mouse, which of course isn’t, but Apple defaults the Mighty Mouse to a single button configuration. Insecurity pops up too, with the standard PC retort that PC’s are perfectly secure if you get hold of a decent anti-virus application. They also pad out the list a bit with grumbles about the Mac startup sound, version numbers of MacOS X, and one whole item of the 32 is devoted to a whinge about Steve Jobs! In terms of the interface grumbles and ‘it’s not intuitive’ arguments that pepper the list, most boil down to the fact that it doesn’t work the same way as Windows – which means that anyone with a lot of Windows experience is still back to feeling like a novice trying to use a Mac. For example, the single mouse button doesn’t bother long term Mac users as everything that is on the right-click menu is able to be carried out elsewhere anyway. The menus being at the top of the screen is seen as consistent to Mac users, and so the list goes on. The article also waves Office 2007 as an advantage because Mac users are having to wait for Office 2008 for compatibility with some features. Of course as a look back over the releases will show, Microsoft always operates like this, and Office 2008 will bring new features that aren’t available on Office 2007 that will be included in the next PC release. Some of the points are just plain wrong. Number 28 compares memory handling, unfortunately taking a pop at the Classic MacOS memory handling and claiming that Mac applications crash from lack of memory. Certainly the old MacOS Memory Management was lousy, but certainly I’ve had no such problems with MacOS X.

To find the reason for this latest effort, you have to take a look at the editors column at the front of the magazine – it seems that Tim Danton is a little upset by the Get a Mac adverts, and is finding that the office Mac’s used to put the magazine together are crashing. I have to say that some of the Mac faithful are getting a bit fed up with them too, with even the occasional Mac magazine suggesting that a change in advertising would be a good idea. With regards to his unreliable office Mac’s he doesn’t say what they are actually running, or what age the machines are, certainly they could still be running MacOS 9 which is still widely used in the publishing industry. As to why they bother with these periodic efforts, I really don’t know. It’s true to say that the numbers of Mac owners are rising, but the numbers are millions behind the numbers of PC’s, and there isn’t any real chance of the numbers overtaking. Maybe it is this PC Pro Schizophrenia, as the magazine finds themselves giving good reviews to Mac’s they have to do these big Mac bashing articles to balance out!

However, whatever the article may say, it doesn’t change my experiences. Sat in front of me is a recent PC, and a similarly aged Mac. Both are running the latest versions of their respective operating systems. This, like most things I do at home is being done on the Mac because it is just plain more reliable, and just works. Compare this to the PC’s. As you know, I’ve got a love hate relationship with Vista on my laptop. Driver wise it is better supported, but the machine is noticeably more sluggish since I installed Vista, and, as I discovered on the Time and Talents day, more unreliable too. What I need in a home computer is something that is reliable and stable, and I’ve got that in the Mac. True I could probably build a PC that is as reliable with a bit of work, and by picking the right combination of hardware and software, but why bother when you can buy a Mac off the shelf that meets my needs?

To round off though, even PC Pro has to concede the one thing that sets the Mac apart. The article finishes off with highlighting the one thing that a Mac can do that a PC can’t, and the reason why a number of Microsoft staff are now running Mac’s. Whilst there are hacks to get MacOS X running on a PC, the Mac is the only official way to get the current big three operating systems, Windows, MacOS X and Linux running on the same machine, and schizophrenic to the last, PC Pro shows you how, even trumpeting the stability of of MacOS X when running four virtual PC’s and three virtual Linux boxes simultaneously…

Update: PC Pro are already starting to get feedback over this on their forum
 – expect more when this issue hits news stands! It is worth noting that last time around they ended up defending themselves on their letters page.

Also, for a more detailed analysis, take a look at a point-by-point rebuttal over at themak.org. The first part is here, with the second part here, and the third and final part here.