* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

One third of Russians say Sun revolves round Earth

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Does that say......

....most Climatologists eat their own dogfood?

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

Re: Radiation

Nope, that's still not man-made. We may have released a shitload of it in one inconvenient place near Kiev, but it ain't man-made. Those heavy nuclei would have decayed over time, releasing the same radiation, whether we were here or not.

Let me know when we start fusing light elements into heavy, fissionable ones on an industrial scale, you can have your boffin icon back then......

HTML5 kicked into 2014

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

Three years of hype?

More like three years for MS to lose patience, make the decision that "this is it" and declare a "fuck you" to any subsequent updates and / or changes, so that the world has to code once for "vanilla" HTML5 and once for the MS version....

IE: It may not be a coincidence that a "9" can be a "6", depending on how you look at it.

Bloody standards bodies. It's their glacial decision-making processes that are the root cause of most interoperability fuckups. We should just chisel the spec in rock somewhere and wait for continental drift to distribute it to the world, it would be faster.

Google open video codec faces second challenger

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

Yeah, right.

Why do people use MP3? Because every shonky playback device supports it, unlike OGG. You need to wait 'til every PMP and Car stereo in use has OGG support for that, I reckon about twenty years' time, if you start mandating the device support now.

Why do people use h.264? The same and also you are waaaaaay more likely to get HW acceleration.

SPEEX? WTF? You won't be wanting to actually talk to anyone else I take it? You *really* should have used the "joke" icon here.....

.NET Come back when you've convinced the corporate world. Good luck with that one.

MySQL? What? Ditch M$ for Oracle? Better the Gorilla you know there methinks (please try to keep up with the rest of us)....

Latest boffinry: Feeding TNT to sheep

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Sheep grazing on TNT?

Who'd be a bloody sheepdog in the 21st century, eh?

The repeal bill: what's left in, what's left out

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

@Tom 38

I thought that the whole point of the smoking ban was that Death *is* supposed to be the penalty for smoking.

(Posted while still not dead.)

Adobe Flash: 20m phones flip Steve Jobs the bird

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

I shall correct you then, as I want you to be happy.

Implementations of OpenGL on mobile devices have been around for a number of years now.

Look up OpenGL ES for starters.....

Microsoft, Nokia, and MeeGo: Are they all doomed?

TeeCee Gold badge
Thumb Up

Re: On the other hand...

Congratulations. I think you just came up with the answer to "WTF?".

It probably won't work, but at least it all makes sense now.

Ford Focus 2011

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Horsepower.

Nice to see that the honest British horse puts out more work than its German counterpart*.

Presumably the German horse spends four thousandths of its time in Workers' Council meetings, arguing over whether it's still ok to pull the plough if the farmer were allowed to paint it green.

*Although, to be fair, ISTR that yer average horse turns out about three quarters of a Horsepower...

TeeCee Gold badge

Autopark.

The Prius does this and it works quite well.

It does it with a rear-facing camera and some fancy image interpretation. It also displays the camera output on the main screen. This is handy 'cos you can prove that it's got it right and also use it for reversing in other situations too (it has a fisheye lens and gives a rather better field of vision than turning yer head round).

The snag here is that Prius drivers all learn very rapidly that it's a damned sight quicker and easier to do it yourself, following the helpful cue lines it draws on the screen for you, relegating the core function to "look what this can do" moments in the pub car park....

Nominet asks what you think of police domain grab

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Of course they should be allowed.

Make it as easy as possible for 'em too.

It'll give 'em something to be getting on with that'll make 'em feel like they're "doing something about it" (whatever "it" is this week), without actually having any significant effect on teh intahtubes at all.

Of course, a few people might need to move to a domain name outside the aegis of Nominet, but that's a trivial price to pay for keeping the plod busily barking up the wrong tree......

Hack reveals passwords from locked iPhones and iPads

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

Finally, something really clever from Apple.

A phone-sized device that you can easily drive a Coach and Horses through.......

Opera uncloaks browser for Apple fondleslabs

TeeCee Gold badge
Stop

Re: Very useful....

Yes, as in "Chocolate Teapot".

If it were used for this on any scale, said countries would merely bar the Opera servers.....

Everything Everywhere dips toe in retail waters

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

"new creative concept in communications retailing"

There's some important information missing here.

What colour is it and can it be fitted nasally?

Italian white van man nudges sound barrier

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

Not surprised.

It all depends what was in front of him.

Everyone knows that white panel vans are the fastest vehicles ever made by man. This is easily proved as it doesn't matter what you are driving or how fast you are going, there will inevitably be a white van right up your chuff and flashing its lights to pass.

The interesting question is what the heck was he trying to overtake at the time.....?

Discovery survives feeler gauge disintegration

TeeCee Gold badge
Headmaster

"13 pieces of metal about the thickness of a piece of paper..."

Er, that's not a feeler gauge, that's a set of feeler gauges. A single feeler gauge is one piece of it.

All the ones I've used have been rivetted together to ensure they don't fall apart. Presumably having the lot drop onto the floor next to the shuttle is rather less serious than having a selection of metal pieces drop down the pushrod tubes into your engine's tappet chest.

No 'tipping point' for Arctic sea ice - latest science

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: But...

You probably want to ask an AGW evangelist that. They're the ones famous for discarding out of hand anything that doesn't fit their theories and prognostications, simulated or real world.

Sony tweets 'secret' key at heart of PS3 jailbreak case

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

Mentioning the key is illegal under the DMCA.

Now that appears to have been confirmed by a judge, only one question remains to be answered:

Who at Sony is behind the "Kevin Butler" account and going to jail?

Fort Wayne officials refuse to slap Harry Baals on public building

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: I wish politicians

Yes, but you have to wonder at the validity of the vote in this case.

Put it this way. If I were given some candidate names for a new building to put all the local government types in and one of them was the "Hairy Balls Center", I know where my vote would be going.

Unless of course the "Richard Head Building" and "Gareth Hunt Offices" were on the same ballot. Then it would be a tough call.

TeeCee Gold badge
Coffee/keyboard

Jim Balls^H^H^H^H^HBaals

".....I've gotten through it. I think everybody else can, too."

Yes, but you weren't gifted with a first name that may be easily misread or pronounced as "Hairy". That's the bit that moves it from the sniggering category to the gales-of-laughter-spraying-coffee-everywhere one.

Alabama sex shop owner swaps 'Guns for Toys'

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

W........T..........F..........?

Anyone can easily buy a gun in Alabama, but getting your paws on a dildo requires a medical certificate?

I am awestruck. What the heck do their legislators smoke? I really want some of *that* serious, mind-altering shit.

Just out of interest, if you go into this "guns 'n toys" place and ask for a long barreled .45 revolver, does the proprietor's head explode?

Council dives into crematorium-heated pool

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: Whats' the fuss

That one always puzzled me. Being cremated meant that there was no body to raise come the End of Days, so you were damned to hell.

I never did get a straight answer as to why it was that Satan could reconstitute you from ashes whereas that feat was beyond God.......

EC parades common phone charger

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

That Commission statement in full.

"We've copied China's rules. We had to, they make most of the phones anyway. Kthxbai."

Add spin and hype, slop on some greenwash, job done.

Microsoft re-org: more code, less death by PowerPoint?

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

WTF?

Hang on, isn't putting people who know how to make shit that works in charge rather de trop these days?

Get with the times MS! Hire a load of Management Consultants to sort your problems out.

Yes, it is a joke. MS seem to have forgotten the punchline though.

iPhone owners get walked through confessional

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

This could be funny.

This week: Religious iPhone app officially endorsed by Catholicism.

Next week: Bearded cleric issues Fatwa banning muslims from using infidel iPhones. Calvinists, Lutherans and Hussites burn Apple products.

Week after that: App store bans all apps with religious content.

Week after that: Papal Bull issued stating that users of Apple products will be excommunicated.

Popcorn please......

Firefox 4 goes to 11 (betas)

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

Re: DNT Header

Worse than that even. Spamming is illegal in many jurisdictions, so at least your request there has legal force behind it.

Ignoring a DNT header has no comeback on those ignoring it bar the slight possibility of a few pangs of guilt.

Google Translate for iPhone: hits and misses

TeeCee Gold badge

Python. Missed a trick.

The standard translation test is of course; "My hovercraft is full of eels". That one tends to seperate the men from the boys when it comes to translation software.

An ex-colleague knew how to say that in 22 languages.......

Man stabbed to death by chicken

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: FOUND IT!!

So how did it get from Bengal to California?

I thought that flying cocks were a phenomenon unique to Second Life........

'Suspicious toilet' provokes Maryland bomb scare

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

"....with a sniffer dog...."

Poor bugger. It's bad enough around yer average publicly placed dunny with a human nose.

Getting a dog to stick his smelling equipment in there and take a good sniff has got to qualify as "cruel and unusual punishment".....

SCO: 'Someone wants to buy our software biz!'

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

UnXis Group.

There's a common saying used to reflect the fact that someone or some group is / are completely and utterly incompetant in a given area. To whit: "Hell, they can't even *spell* (whatever-it-is)".

This mob want in to the UNIX business? Made me laugh........

Ofcom okays Derren Brown psychic-baiting

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: One question remains

Several possibilites:

1) Even the dead are unable to fathom the processes of Ofcom.

2) Being dead doesn't make you any more all-seeing and prescient than you were when you were alive, but it does make you much better at bullshitting the living.

3) It's all cobblers and being dead means you can't talk to anyone, psychic or not.

I *really* like (2) here, as an eternity of winding people up sounds like oodles of fun to me, but I suspect that I am to be disappointed and that (3) is actually correct.

I'd also like to point out that genuine psychics are very easy to spot. They're the ones who have used the proceeds of their several double-rollover Euromillions wins to retire to a private island in the Caribbean and not the ones scrounging an appearance fee off Channel 4 to make ends meet. I believe that the number of such thus qualifying remains, as it always has been, at sod-all.

Overzealous anti-paedo scheme not dead yet

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

Inaccurate?

Ok then, explain why justifying it on "Oh noes think of the ${pet_disadvantaged_group}" is any better than "Oh noes think of the children"?

Kneejerk, fundamentally flawed bollocks is still kneejerk, fundamentally flawed bollocks, however you dress it up.

Super-thin materials could POWER our WORLD

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

"...many hypothetical uses..."

Seriously sharp swords for easily removing the heads of godless infidels springs immediately to mind.

The world's first 100 blade razor (You think a baby's arse is smooth? Try this!) can't be far behind......

AOL buys Huffington Post

TeeCee Gold badge
Badgers

OMFG!

"A Brand New Media Universe"

and

"A Merger of Visions"

Sounds like the hype might be worth the money. Shame about the content really.....

Videogame developer defies hacker threat

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

WTF?

".....that special extra-secure one-time payment system - the personal cheque?"

Yeah, 'cos those are impossible to forge/alter, even when given a specimen signature off the original......

Would you care to take a stab at why these are being phased out and why they went the way of the Dodo eons ago in countries with a more-than-halfway serious organised crime problem?

If that's your idea of "extra-secure" I strongly suggest that you get someone else to look after your money for you. Ideally someone who knows slightly more than fuck-all about security.

ROBOT COP scatters LIVE GRENADES in San Francisco STREET

TeeCee Gold badge
Megaphone

Oops!

Sack the juggler!

Android's on top – will Nokia and RIM let it in?

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

"More likely that Nokia will go for WP7"

Makes sense to me. After all, we've had quite a number of articles recently suggesting that Nokia couldn't find a viable product strategy at the moment, even if the CEO walked up to his desk to find a fat envelope on it labelled "viable product strategy" and containing a viable product strategy.

WP7 is a no-brain decision for Nokia and it sounds like they might have the requisite number of thinking organs to run with it.

Google to site devs: 'Please code for Google TV!'

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

Two versions....

.....Flash or JScript.

Is that 2FAIL or FAIL²....?

Verizon: 'We're not throttling bandwidth except when we are'

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

"...recently slipped to number two among US wireless carriers..."

Hmm, I seem to recall from posts here and elsewhere that their user base has been describing them as Number Two for quite some time now....

UK police crime map website: Who's the victim here?

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

"Rock Kitchen Harris"?

Damn. I've only just mastered Paper and Scissors and now they've changed the bloody rules.

SGI plunks Windows on big Altix UV supers

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Windows on an Altix supercomputer?

Someone's gotta say it:

How many simultaneous instances of Crysis can it run?

Stephen Fry cans Japan trip over nuke survivor quip

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

Overheard in Nagasaki in 1945:

"Ah Tsutomu, you brought the weather with you then?"......

Consumers urged to step up wireless security

TeeCee Gold badge

Re: Second WiFi unit.

There's an even simpler way, get a Draytek router.

Some of their products support up to 6 (OTT or what?) SSIDs, each with their own security settings.

You can even enable / disable them individually on a scheduled basis if that floats your boat.

Rather handily, as it's one unit supporting all the individual SSIDs, the whole shebang's on one channel. This is essential if, like me, you live somewhere that's a bit heavy on the use of the jolly old 2.4Ghz spectrum.

I tried going to a seperate 5Ghz setup for the "n" stuff, but something round here knocks the whole band out intermittantly and frequently. I reckon it's something at the airport up the road meself.

Sony PS3 rootkit rumours rubbished

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

@Neoc

Nice analogy there. Just think of teh Intertubes as the public highway and you are on the money.

You can hack the shit out of your console within the privacy of your own network, just don't take it out on the "road".....

Twenty-tonne space truck poised for ISS trip

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

Johannes Kepler?

They should have called it the "Zaphod Beeblebrox".

As the largest Ariane 5 launch yet, it stands a good chance of being the best bang since the big one........

Mexican woman gets litigious on Top Gear's ass

TeeCee Gold badge
Pint

Ok, I aksed myself.

However, to get the question correct I also appended the words; " who's PC-fixated and right up her own arse" to "jewellery designer".

The answer came back Clarkson. Far more likely to be a good laugh over a few beers and he's very unlikely to have me arrested for suggesting a curry later, whereas any suggestions I may make to Ms Prissy there after a skinful are bound to cause trouble.

New auto-crowd tech writes better articles than pro writers TRUE

TeeCee Gold badge
Alien

WTF?

Have you got amanfromMars on staff now?

Aussie advertisers call for more bloat in web ads

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Clarification of inundated area?

What's that in deluged Wales'?

Also, how many Olympic-sized swimming pools' worth of water does it take to submerge that many Wales'?

Hack spies 'iPad 2' at mag launch

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: Where's the pictures?

That would be the Smudger's job. What you have there is just the hacks. Their job is to consume as much free booze as possible to fuel the important task of ripping off someone's blog entry, slapping on some quotes off Twitter* and submitting the result as copy.

*Actually this item may be Old Skool: Make up something interesting that can't be verified or discredited.

Murdoch & Co unveil iPad news rag The Daily

TeeCee Gold badge
Badgers

The Daily..........

..........what exactly?

Fanboi? Fondle? Heil? (oh....hang on.....someone's got that one), Badger?

I think a short competition here to complete the name for them is in order, as it would seem that the Dirty Digger can't be arsed to do it himself.