"Source Radio has been the starting point for many rising stars but one show has stood out this year for its creative content and unique features. The Monday Night Show with Pete White, Ben Powell and Chris White has been on air since October every Monday night between 6pm and 8pm. The almost famous tag line “Power Pumping Passion” is one the defining points of the show."
We started the show simply out of curiosity for Source Radio and it was an instant hit because of the humour and entertainment we brought to the station. From early on we made an effort to discuss student issues on air where appropriate. In November we debuted our version of on air dating, people would send in profiles and we would read them out on air making the occasional joke. It worked really well and people found it really entertaining and we even matched some people up!
By December we had edited out our best bits and put them on the Internet for others to listen. The feedback we had was great, allowing people who hadn’t been able to listen to the show experience it as well giving our regulars some of the funniest moments again. The editing wasn’t easy and took hours to shift through our previous shows but it was well worth it just for the exposure it gave us.
January came and we wanted to promote the show even more as well as cover more student issues. This is when I came up with the idea to invite the Vice Chancellor Madeline Atkins on the show for an interview. She accepted our invitation and we started to plan questions and features. When we told the rest of the stations members about the VC interview we had planned there was almost a sense of shock but they realised a great opportunity for the station. This VC interview was not the only planned content for the show we also had an exciting new game show. Being a student station we thought we could push the boundaries slightly more than other stations, which is why we thought of “Feed Chris”, each week we would ask Chris three questions and a bonus question, for each question he got right he got a meal on Tuesday. If he got none of the questions right he didn’t get to eat! While of course he never went through with it and the questions were rigged against him it provided a lot of spontaneous entertainment.
Our first Interview that we mocked up was with Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer from 24), being heavy 24 fans and the new series about to start we made a very funny interview with some sound clips from 24, the interview is still available online. We were also fortunate with the help of Bill Bennett to get an interview with Tim Westwood for the show when he was DJing in the SU. Bill got Westwood to “pimp” a toy car as well as asking him about Coventry and the Students, the Westwood interview is also available online. In February our Vice Chancellor interview came round, we spoke for about an hour covering a range of topics including the new student centre, crime on campus and the future of the University. We had some great feedback about the interview from students and staff as well as over 600 downloads for listen again of the show. The show still continues on a Monday Night and has recently played sets from this year’s Trance Energy Festival in Holland. You can listen in between 6-8 on www.sourceradio.co.uk, if you want to listen again to any of the interviews or best bit segments visit www.imafish.co.uk.
*This article was featured in Coventry University's Source Newspaper in the March Issue.
The PC giant Dell has regained its number one spot in the PC market against HP according to the research firm Gartner. Dell produced 450,000 more desktops, notebooks and servers worldwide than its main rival HP.
Dell accounted for about 16% of worldwide sales while HP only by about 15%. This is a massive 24% growth in the first quarter of this year for Dell. Many other manufactures have seen loses so far this year and the overall PC market has grown by 2.1% which was above the predicted rate of 2%.
HP have also seen loses of sales in Europe however this could be due to the problems caused between the merger of HP and Compaq. The electronics giant Toshiba has also made good sales and has become one of the top 5 pc manufacturers in the world showing the increasing market for laptop computers.
The battle between HP and Dell is very choppy with both sides doing better one quarter than another. An HP executive characterized the battle with Dell as an up-and-down one, noting that HP benefits during the holidays, when consumer sales are strongest.
"It's a two horse race," said Jim McDonnell, vice president of marketing for HP's PC unit. "It's close and it's going to continue to be close."
What ever happens in the computer market it can only mean good things for the consumer, with better technology and increasing competition the PC market could get tough for some manufacturers.
The sequel to the massively popular first person shooter game Half Life is set to be launched on September 30th. Half Life fan sites such as here have been reporting about the rumors of the sequel for a while now.
The game is set to make an appearance at the upcoming E3 gaming show in Las Vegas. You still play Gordan Freeman and the story assumes you went to work for the mysterious G-Man. The story takes place in a European city called ?City 17? and still features many of your favorite aliens.
While the new engine has all sorts of fancy features, it's still designed to work on lower-end machines. Apparently a 700mhz processor and a video card capable of running DX6 is enough, although a 2ghz with a GeForce4 is recommended.
Half Life has been one of the most popular games ever and has allowed many other games such as the online game Counter Strike to become the most popular multiplayer game. Other addons such as Opposing Forces and Blue Shift have added more to the game making it popular for 5 years now.
Half Life 2 isn't the only big game to be launched this summer. The long awaited Doom 3 is set to be launched soon too giving tough competition to Half Life.
Half Life's game producers Valve Software are keeping a lot secret at the moment but will probably let a lot more know about the game at E3. Until then we will just have to speculate about whats going to happen in the game.
I have read quite a few reviews on SuSEs (here) latest product with different people giving their opinions so here are mine. SuSE in my opinion has made the biggest improvements to its distribution in recent years but will SuSE Linux 8.2 carry on with this trend or not?
I had 2 test machines lined up for the review, firstly my main PC, a Pentium 4 (here) ? 2gig with 512DDR and a 60gig hard drive, secondly an older Celeron 450 with 96mbs of ram and a 2gig hard drive. Both machines boot from the CD so I didn't have to worry about floppy disks or anything else messy.
Firstly I installed on the P4 machine, between first booting from the CD to getting to the KDE desktop took about 45 minutes which compared to other distros isn't too bad but I felt it was longer than 8.0 or 8.1 took to install. I liked how SuSE flawlessly sorted out my partitions for me and set the mount points so I didn't have to worry about it. SuSE detected all of my hardware including my extremely annoying Brooktree TV card that wont work in windows.
My Conexant ADSL modem was also detected however would not establish an ADSL connection, I have had the same with all other recent Linux distributions so I wasn't too upset. However this was one thing that I was hoping that SuSE Linux 8.2 would solve, while I did see a lot of improvements to the section in YaST for setting up ADSL connections it still didn't like my modem.
After KDE 3.1 (here) loaded I had a chance to explore, KDE seemed a lot more flexible, you could easily resize the bar at the bottom and you had handy links to your partitions and drives on your desktop which was a big help. Most of my music on my fat32 partition was now only a few clicks away to being played easily in XMMS.
Xine played my DVDs with almost no problems (I had to install a rpm to let me navigate DVD menus) but otherwise I could play DVDs and Divx's. My CD burner even worked fine and I could easily copy songs and films onto Cds with no problems.
I was impressed with how SuSE ran on my P4, it wasn't the quickest Linux distribution to boot but once it had it ran nicely and did as much console work as it could for you meaning that it was good for desktop users.
Next onto my Celeron 450, installation took a bit longer on this mainly because of the slower CD drive but the system was up and running within around 90mins. I had a few problems with the installer trying to resize the windows partition on the 2gig drive so that it barly had enough room to install Linux, but I soon sorted that by deleting Windows ? a necessary task.
I installed quite a bit less than I had done on my P4 mainly because of the hard drive but also because the processor was far too slow for many programs such as The Gimp and the popular penguin surfing game ? Tux Racer. I did still however install Open Office as I wanted to use the machine for any word processing I needed to do and as I use Open Office for my other documents on my P4 it seemed an obvious choice.
Open Office (here) took a while to configure itself on first use but otherwise it loaded in no lengthy time. KDE 3.1 also seemed fine on my Celeron 450 and was perfectly usable for simple stuff such as web browsing (over the lan) sending and receiving emails and word processing.
Other Linux distributions have always seemed slow running on the Celeron but SuSE 8.2 didn't seem too bad, it wasn't too slow and was a joy to use. It managed to configure my graphics and monitor fine unlike Mandrake (here) and it made a 800*600 resolution usable. Overall I was impressed with how SuSE 8.2 handled the slower machine and it made the machine a lot more useful then by putting Windows on it. SuSE 8.2
I thought SuSE 8.2 worked nicely on both my test machines and is well worth the upgrade. The changes between SuSE 8.1 and 8.2 are sufficient to make it a worth while upgrade, this is helped by the improvements in KDE 3.1 and how SuSE are incorporating as many configuration features into YaST as possible to make it easy to use.
In my view SuSE is the best in the way its heading towards ?desktop Linux?. I wont get into the argument of whether Linux is ready for the desktop user but I will say that SuSE 8.2 is another step in the right direction.
Other Recent Linux Articles
SuSE Linux Office Desktop here
Linux for older PCs here
Red Hat 8 or SuSE 8.1 here
For more Linux articles check out the ImAFish Linux section:
[Last edited on May 10, 2003 at 9:35:30pm by pwhite]
On Tuesday Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will release the Athlon XP 3200+ for desktops which will be the last in the Athlon line. Instead of the Athlon AMD will work on a new architecture called the Athlon 64 which is based on 90-nanometer manufacturing.
The chip is set to launch in September and will form the basis of AMD chips in the future. Athlons will be slowly phased out and will become AMD's budget range until they are slowly phased out in early 2005. AMD havn't released information about their Duron range but it is expected that they will also be phased out.
The 3200+ features a 400MHz bus, faster than the 333MHz and 266MHz buses found in earlier Athlon chips, and runs at a slightly faster clock speed than other high-end Athlon chips, said John Crank, senior branding associate for AMD.
The Athlon was first launched in 1999 in an attempt to try to revive the californian company. Since then the Athlon has grown from strength to strength however is still way behind the market leaders Intel.
"Without Athlon, AMD would be out of the business," said Kevin Krewell, senior editor of the Microprocessor Report. "The K6 kept AMD in the game but never put AMD ahead...It was a huge step forward for the company."