HackingCough

Before anyone has a pop at Alexandra Burke for murdering Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, they need to have a listen to this. It makes you wonder where the William Shatner version is and, if there isn't one, why not?

Let's face it, it's the week before Christmas so where would we be without a Christmas Number One Controversy? And the X-Factor has not let us down by spraying both cheese and saccharine over a song that does a whole lot better with just a slice of lemon.

Burke's version has offended quite a few people, including Sally Whittle, who is among the Twitterers campaigning for a Hallelujah Christmas minus the X-Factor:

"It's not like any of those X-Factor watching muppets actually cares about music, is it? So why go out of your way to offend those of us who do?

"Praise be for the Twitter tweeps and especially Emma, Anne, Jed, Badger and all those urging us to go and download Buckley's version repeatedly to keep X-Factor off the Christmas number 1 spot."

And praise be to YouTube where you can go and listen to the new and quite a lot of the old versions. At first, Burke's version seemed OK. Strip it of the baggage that goes with the X-Factor and you have a cover that isn't all bad. Whoops, thought that thought too soon. Suddenly, the producer found the Dion-a-Tron and cranked it up to 11. Burke talks grandly of updating old classics. I was instantly transported to movie blockbusters of the 1990s. And the awful vision of a single song lodged at number one for months on end appeared before me.

Then the really scary part kicked in. I had a second listen, and it didn't seem as bad. I may have got this wrong, but the soul diva warblings in the verse after the strings kick in could be a partial reference to a key part of the first verse: "a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, a major lift". It sounds as though she drops in a fourth and a third above the root that's in the original melody. Or it could just be bog-standard soul diva warbling. But I don't think it's as blind a copy as some of the detractors think.

What really does for the song is that, courtesy of Big Production, the emphasis shifts entirely to the chorus, which wrecks the appeal of the song. In all the good versions – otherwise known as the ones I like – the chorus is always sung in a desultory way. Bob Dylan tries just about every way possible on his live version.

So it was interesting to see how people responded in the vox pop on the 6 O'Clock News. One liked the Buckley version saying it was "clear". The others seemed to prefer Burke's because it was more upbeat, more shiny.

Seriously, there's got to be some sort of musicology paper in all this that looks into the way people hear music. You have versions that, in musical terms, are pretty similar. Yet people have wildly differing opinions of the value of what they hear. It demonstrates what people get out of music, if nothing else.

Other reasons to be cheerful: Cliff Richard hasn't released a version. Not yet.

Actually, that's all the reasons.

It's tough to disagree with Rik Myslewski at The Register's take on Apple's decision to buy around eight million shares in Imagination Technologies. Although Apple is already using Imagination's PowerVR through the Samsung applications processor in the iPhone-class devices, all the signs point to Apple wanting to shift more of the software burden to graphics processors in not just its desktop products but the mobile ones as well. This is why the Snow Leopard release of Mac OS X is likely to be more important in the future than the laundry list of features that characterised its predecessor, Leopard, as I wrote in The Guardian yesterday.

For anything that can make use of large quantities of parallelism, graphics processors (GPUs) are more energy efficient than general-purpose processors. In fact, they are so good that we may well see a subtle rebranding of these devices, underlining the idea that do not have to be used just for graphics. The term "stream processor" is turning up more often. Take nVidia, which makes the GPUs used in the latest generation of MacBook machines. The company refers to the processors inside the chips as stream processors, a nod to Prof Bill Dally of Stanford University who has come up with a number of key concepts for doing efficient parallel processing and is working on some ideas for improving their energy efficiency.

For the past two-and-a-half days, my mobile phone has been in clear sight of a basestation but for most of that time, been unable to connect to the network. There's nothing wrong with the phone. It can find the Cingular basestation at Isla Vista, just outside Santa Barbara, California. The basetation won't let it log on. That's because I have a T-Mobile contract. Move to the top of the hill, and the phone finds the local T-Mobile basestation.

It turns out that the two companies have a roaming agreement but it doesn't operate where the companies' coverage overlaps. Welcome to the bizarre world of mobile comms where a combination of greed and stupidity means these companies would rather lose money than possibly contribute to their competitor's top line.

You can explain a lot about mobile comms using examples like this. For years, they have operated a beggar-my-neighbour attitude that is only overcome through absolute necessity or regulation. In the early part of this decade, we could guarantee stories about mobile stupidity more or less every week as they tried to push multimedia messaging (MMS) as the supposed high-profit alternative to SMS.