Tag Archives: News

Liverpool sign Robbie Keane

Being a liverpool fan i was delighted to see Liverpool sign robbie keane. Hes a great player for ireland and now that he signed for Liverpool its even greater.
He had a great season at Totenham last season. My Two sisters recently bought me a Liverpool jersey and i cant decide if i want Keane on the back or Gerrard its a tough choice.
Hes the only real hope the Republic of ireland has goal scoring but hes a proven goal scorer.

Im so proud to know that An irish footballer has joined Liverpool.

Windows Vista-Is just more trouble than its worth!

windows_vista_logo.pngI have been running Vista now for about one month and although there was problems from the start, for example All USB devices wouldnt work on PC while of course on Windows Xp they worked no problem i was beginning to like it.

About 95% of the programs i use regularly run fine on Vista but any piece of hardware you have thats old may not work at all on vista as i found out. Vista lacks alot of support for certain drivers and devices and probably will for a long time.

It looks nice and seems to run a little bet better than Xp and of course it has DirectX 10. Now it was the Directx 10 part that got me interested being a huge PC Gamer and owning a few Dx 10 Games like; Crysis,Flight Simulator 10, Assasins Creed and Halo2. With the exception of Halo 2 which looks so dated for a game thats Dx10 only and came out in 2007. While DX 10 is the next big thing unfortunately its just not really worth the hassle of Vista at the moment.

Windows Vista is fine if all you want to do with it is play Dx10 games anything else and your asking for trouble. Apart from the inital USB problem after a few Windows Updates everything was running fine and USB was working again. The real problem with Vista as i painfully found out is that any software that uses drivers to run will probably have problems.

Sony Ericsson PC Suite
For example i recently was given a Sony Ericsson k800 phone and the software to transfer files to it works perfectly under windows Xp but with Vista it was a nightmare to get it to work. I managed to track down the lastest version of the “Sony Ericsson PC Suite 3.2” and even though it claims to support vista i had many problems getting it to work. In the end i did and it just doest work as well as it does under XP but thats to be expected.

Peerguardian 2
A popular Bit-torrent tool to stop certain IP addresses being able to see what your downloading does not work on Vista yet and again there is a Vista version but after many restarts and fiddling around it still wont work.

Now while both arnt critical applications they really show how bad Vista support is. Sure Vista SP1 is about and it may or may not fix the problems i had but i cant help but wonder if its worth the bother and it really isnt. Even a program im still developing in visual basic 6 which works fine on Windows 98-Xp has problems in vista at the moment im trying to track them all down and fix them even though they are little problems its still the same old story.

Windows Vista Stability is quite good, i havnt had any major crashes or “Blue Screens” i had at the start when i installed vista but everything is fine now. But using Vista seems to be like the using Windows Xp x64 (the 64 bit version) not many do and the support and compatabilty is bad.

Lisbon Treaty and Ireland-Scared to Vote No?

I dont know where to start with this one but it seems as if were being steamrolled into voting yes for it depsite most of the population including myslef not knowing what the hell its about. In a nutshell it wants to give more power to Brussles and take away Irelands say in matters of the EU. Of course its a lot more complicated than that and in the next 2 weeks im going to see what its about.

What makes me angry is the way the ordinary person who hasnt a clue is being made to fear a no vote. Posters are up everywhere and most politicians are telling us to vote “YES”. they dont say why other than it “would be bad for ireland if we voted no” Well the Dutch and French did in 2005. Its like a parent telling its children “not to put your hand in the fire” the child has no idea why not to so wonders why.

According to Wikipedia the central changes are as follows;

with a 2½ year term replacing the
low-key President-in-Office.

created by merging the External
Relations Commissioner
with the
CFSP High Representative.

from 2000 made legally binding.

increasing the EU’s competence
to sign treaties.

officially from the EU Council.
Legislative meetings of the EU
Council to be held in public.

to less than one commissioner per
country. Nationalites would rotate
regardless of country size.

by extending codecision with the
Councils to more areas of policy.

by removing the Nice Treaty
limitation to 27 Member States.

to new areas of policy in the
European Council and the
EU Council, from 2014 on.

  • Common defence foreseen

in that the ESDP leads to a
common defence when the
European Council decides to.

  • National parliaments engaged

by expanding scrutiny-time of
legislation and enabling them to
jointly compell the Commission
to review or wihdraw legislation.

  • Mutual solidarity obliged

if a member state is object of a
terrorist attack or the victim of a
natural or man-made disaster.

  • Citizens’ initiatives

to be considered by the
Commission if signed by
1 mill. citizens.

explicitly stated as an objective.

 

by removing the Nice Treaty
limitation to 27 Member States.

Even most of that is quite unclear but there are few key issues that raise an eyebrow. As if the EU isnt big enough already with the Eastern European countries joining they want to enlarge europe even more? I cant see why this a good thing other than to create some kinda of “United States of Europe”. The EU already is trying to pass laws over its countries some of which interfere with the constitution of those countries.

to less than one commissioner per
country. Nationalites would rotate
regardless of country size.

They want to Reduce each countries EU Commissioner to “less than one commissioner per country” all i can see with this is that they want to reduce a countries say in the EU Parliment again how can this be a good thing?