* Posts by TeeCee

9432 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

First Dreamliner delivery slips into 2011

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: All Nippon Air.

Not just them.

ISTR seeing that Airbus drove a brand spanking new 340, hot off the production line, through a concrete wall in Toulouse doing just that.

Driving expensive aircraft at full chat into solid objects on the ground must be rather more common that I'd thought at the time.

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

Re: title is required

"...The 787 is a radically different airliner...."

Too right. The big issue here is its largely composite construction. We all know well that the curing process in producing large scale composite structures of this nature is critical to the strength of the result (see Philips' famous "wave-piercing" yacht and a recent Airbus composite tail failure for history here).

It's entirely possible that the airframe as tested will be sound, but the production process may well cut the odd corner as cost and time savings are chased resulting in some undesirable results.

I, for one, will not be going near any Dreamliners until they've either been in service a few years in quantity without mishap or they've had their high profile disintegration and the realisation that this is one production process that cannot be sweated for cost/time has been beaten into Boeing's corporate mindset with the cluestick by the NTSB.

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

And now, in plain English.....

"an assessment of the availability of an engine needed for the final phases of flight test this fall"

Translation: "We had a quick look round the workshop and we haven't got any spare engines. We thought Steve had one under that tarp in the corner, but it turned out to be an old Chevy V8 he was working on in his spare time.".

'...working "closely with Rolls-Royce to expedite engine availability".'

Translation: "We've told our lawyers to sue the fuckers if they don't deliver."

Colonel who slammed Afghan HQ PowerPoint culture is fired

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

@twelvebore

Oops, you seem to have figured out what they actually meant there.

Presumably the military PR type who issued that statement has just been fired and they are now putting together a team to work on better opaque language specifications in order to prevent that ever happening again.

Half of UK road users support usage-based road charging

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: Doh!

You would have a point, if all vehicles of a given size and occupying the same road space used the same amount of fuel.......

Mine's the one with the keys to the AC Cobra in the pocket.

TeeCee Gold badge
Flame

Re: On-street parking

Gosh, identifying untaxed cars must be a *serious* problem for all those countries that don't issue tax discs.

Oh, wait, it isn't. You know that thing with the aerial on the end that issues the tickets? Well, the traffic warden can look up the tax status of a vehicle from its registration number.

The tax disc has served absolutely no genuine purpose for many years now. The only reason it still exists is so that when it drops off the windscreen onto the floor they get to fine you for it. Over here I get billed quarterly for car tax and no little pieces of paper have to change hands to accomplish this.

Oh and SORN? That never served any valid purpose bar ensuring that everyone who owns any sort of vehicle gets to be pissed off by the DVLA rather than only those that actually use them.

Gang get prison, face deportation for mobe thefts

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

@M7S

Something like: "You are hereby sentenced to serve a minimum term of two years. At the end of the sentence another year will be added on automatically, unless you apply for release in writing to the Home Secretary at least two months prior to the end of sentence. Such automatic renewal terms to be enforced as each end of sentence date approaches. At the end of the first two years and at the end of each of every subsequent year added on in which you do not apply to be released, we will give you a new bucket to shit in if you ask for it."

Is that what you're after?

Mail on Sunday inadvertently bolsters annual smutfest

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: Not quite

There is a link though when it comes to snotty-nosed, holier-than-thou stories about filth. The Sexpress and the Fail have a famous "non-aggression" pact here. The Fail is not allowed to print anything about "Dirty" Desmond's seedy porn empire and the Sexpress in return spikes any salacious information it may come across regarding Lord Rothermere's, er, extracurricular activities.

Think of the two, fat files of unpublished dirt as Mutually Assured Destruction for journalists.

Danish rocketeers poised to reach for the skies

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Doubting qualifications?

"....these boys previously built a submarine...."

Er, that's not exactly Rocket Science you know?

(Oh come on, someone had to say it).

Microsoft gets Speedos in a twist over half-naked 'Meter Maids'

TeeCee Gold badge
Unhappy

Careful!

"....I want to see more women in gold bikinis working in IT."

I read that and looked round the office.

Pass the mind bleach if you please.

Internet, China and Russia destroying US, rock and roll

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: China-Russians

Well, quite obviously there is a group of Russian quality antique tableware collectors acting in concert to destroy rock and roll, in an attempt to protect their fine porcelain from the potentially dangerous vibrations caused by loud music.

Simples.

Undead Commodore 64 comes back for Christmas

TeeCee Gold badge
FAIL

Contradiction?

"...loaded with the most amazing components available today..."

They'd better not print that claim on a box with an Atom/Ion peecee inside it. Trading Standards would have a field day.

BBC adopts El Reg units

TeeCee Gold badge

@David 30

"...if I saw 26 swimming pools worth of water *coming right at me*..."

You write that and mean "flood". I read that and think: "Hmmm, all we need here is a really, really big race track and 26 motorised Olympic-sized swimming pools and we have ourselves a new sport".

PARIS team cracks Vulture 1-X wing

TeeCee Gold badge

".....the ribs are a tad flimsy....."

I can't help wondering if making the ribs out of several sheets of paper laminated together (or some stiff card) would be lighter/simpler than adding all that additional bracing to get round the rib stiffness problem....

Home Office unveils new UK passport

TeeCee Gold badge
Flame

Re: uk passports

Count yourself lucky. You might have had to renew one as an expat living in Western Europe since they consolidated the whole shebang in Paris and then outsourced it to a bunch of complete and utter fucking thieves!

So a "where's my fucking passport, you useless bastards?" question now costs you whatever the maximum a premium rate number is allowed to charge per minute in your country, plus 2EUR a minute charged to your credit card.

Then it gets sent to you at the sort of eyewatering rates a courier company usually reserves for having someone carry it personally door-to-door.

Then you find they've hiked the *renewal* cost to well over 100 quid on top of that. Obviously they don't do new issue, but I'd hate to think what they'd charge if they could.

Now I guess this outsourcing may well save the FO money, but it's at the expense of handing a right, royal arsereaming to the likes of us.

If I *ever* find out who was behind this idea I'm going to pour a gallon of unleaded on the miserable bum-sucking git and chuck a lit match after it. If any other expats want to tip up for that, I'll bring marshmallows too.

Stockholm schoolgirls fined for bugging staff room

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: Nice but dim

They have grades for basic common sense in Sweden? Who knew?

Firefox, uTorrent, and PowerPoint hit by Windows DLL bug

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

Re: Unix Sysadmin Anyone

I see your "security feature" and raise you:

$export PATH=.:$PATH

$moody_shiteware

That's an OS security feature in much the same way as turning off SSID broadcast "secures" your wireless LAN (i.e. anyone with the smarts to produce an exploit for the f***ing thing ain't even going to break step bypassing it).

LucasFilm sets lawyers on Jedi nameswipers

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home.....

.......until I got a "cease and desist" letter from LucasFilm.

Inmate-frying microwave pain blaster turret installed in US jail

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

Re: not too surprising

Ah, that old chestnut.

You'll be talking about exposed core or "dumdum" rounds, designed to flatten on impact. Banned for military use, totally legal for civil use. Also used by preference by the majority of the world's police forces and with good reason. When shooting at a miscreant in a civil environment it is extremely undesirable that the round fired passes through the target and on to hit anything else behind it! Best practice here is to have whatever it is give up most, if not all, its kinetic energy when it runs into the first thing encountered along its trajectory.

Meanwhile, the world's military have moved en masse to usiing deformable nose or "tumbling" bullets which, while still legal for military use, are far nastier as regards what they do to the poor bastard on the receiving end.

Horses for courses once you take the "ooo iz war crimez yes?" tabloid language out of it.

Vodafone volte-face on Galaxy S

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

Get the message!

Dear arsehats at Vodafone.

This is the new model. The hardware and OS are one thing, your beloved "enhancements" are just "apps" in the new world. You need to update/push/sell these seperately.

Top tip: You might want to either make a bit of effort to ensure they're worth having or just give up and sack the team that does this to save costs.

It's called "consumer choice", you're just selling a pipe of bits these days. Suck it up!

Iran unveils 'robot bomber'

TeeCee Gold badge
Alert

"...a robotic bomber with enough range to - almost - reach Israel."

So it's no use for thumping the Israelis with, but they've built it anyway.

I see here that Iran has a border with Afghanistan.........

NASA seeks soundtrack for final shuttle mission

TeeCee Gold badge
Flame

My vote.

Goes to "You're shit and you know you are" arranged for the kazoo, vocals provided by a choir of drunken Glaswegians.

Seems fitting for an alleged Space Agency's celebration of having no method for getting into space....

Intel swallows McAfee: Why?

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

Oh crap.

"...data pointing to 50 billion network-enabled devices in the next few years."

I can't say I'm looking forward to the day that I can't make my toast in the morning 'cos the sodding toaster's thrown a false positive for the H0v.1s virus......

Likewise, when Macrappy's shiteware decides part of your O/S is a bleedin' virus, you can restore and uninstall the piggin' thing. S'gonna be fun when your mobo chipset's doing it and you can't bring the damned thing up far enough for the updater to pull the fixed version of their useless definitions. This idea's got to be quite a long way up the "you haven't thought this one through" list.

MOON SHRINKING FAST - shock NASA discovery

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Ok, which arsehat was it.......

......that put it in on "90 - Cotton" rather than "30 - Wool, delicates and satellites"?

Linux kernel purged of five-year-old root access bug

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Laughter on every reboot?

Ah, this must be why Microsoft continually refer to "happy Windows users".....

Apple yanks music streamer from App Store

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: "...copyright a fart..."

Isn't that the App Store's business model?

ECJ ruling puts VAT on salary sacrifice schemes

TeeCee Gold badge
Grenade

Hmm.....

"....said accountancy firm Deloitte, which advised Astra Zenica in the case....."

Are we sure that should not read something like: "....said very pissed off accountancy firm Deloitte, who flogged Astra Zenica this tax avoidance scheme and are now about to be nailed to the cross for dropping their customer up to their ears in the poo."

That's more usually the way this works.

Boffins baffled by 'magnetar': Ought to be black hole, but isn't

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

"... this "neutronium" is highly unstable....."

Cobblers. If that were the case you wouldn't be able to build humungous, crumpled-cone shaped, anti-proton beam equipped, planet munching doomsday devices out of it.

Java daddy says Sun engineers ran 'goofiest patent' contest

TeeCee Gold badge
Coffee/keyboard

Here also

The thing that got me was that while I was looking through them, the "Ads by Google" at the top of the page dropped a Rambus ad on me. "Rambus, A company of inventors - Watch the 5 minute video", I came perilously close to asphyxiation.

The only thing I'm trying to work out is whether this means that Rambus have paid to sponsor phrases like "patent troll", "idiotic patents" and "obvious prior art" or whether something at Google has a wicked sense of humour......

Americans demand Twitter-watching police

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: group of twitterers

You're using the wrong noun there. The correct one is twats, therefore the collective noun is "bunch".

Best Buy slaps 'God Squad' priest with cease-and-desist order

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

Insurance?

I wonder what it says on Best Buy's Insurance policy as regards an "act of God"?

They might want to drop this one........

Ikea forecasts fluffy, fully teched kitchen of the future

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

"...noted purveyor of plywood...."

Crikey! Been shopping at the smart end of the store have we?

"Foil coated particleboard" is the more usual fare or chipboard at the really cheap end.

Electric mass-driver catapults to beat Royal Navy cuts?

TeeCee Gold badge
Pirate

CATOBAR?

Or just the AR bit?

It's possible that they're looking at the idea of fitting arrestor gear to get around the "bring back" problems associated with the STOVL "ski jump" approach.

An F35B with a hook on the end would be able to perform a short takeoff and an arrested landing with no expensive (and currently non-existant) electropult carrier refit required. Arrestor gear works on wires 'n hydraulic dampers, requiring no power bar that required to "rewind" it.

They could just be training for "traps", with any catapult takeoffs in there purely 'cos in order to practice landings it's also necessary to perform an equivalent number of takeoffs.

Pirate, 'cos of the nautical connection and, of course, "AR"......

America's top model fights off 'pervert' at Star Wars convention

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

"breeze lifting up my skirt"

There's a skirt on the Princess Leia "slave" costume?

I guess I can't have been paying attention to the important details........

NASA 'nauts wrap ISS pump job

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

Re: But

There's a fundamental error in there.

You've assumed they can get the parts.......

"Tsk, tsk. Haven't seen one of these for years mate, no call for 'em since the 4000F came out. Cheap was it? No? Saw you coming there they did. Tell you what, I know a lad who might have one on Earth....could get it up here maybe next week, maybe week after that? I'll tell you straight though, it ain't gonna be cheap.......Put the tea on while I make a couple of calls....."

Prototype semi-hovership delivered to Commandos

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

Re: Sea State 2

<Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen>

Oh, would you look at the state of that sea? Doesn't anyone tidy up once in a while? Terrible colour combinations it's got going there too and what's with those waves I *have* to ask? Very 1970's, I'm sure......

</Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen>

Buxom buttocks bolster Beemer bonnet

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

"...a starting bid of just 420 quid:"

So, not exactly going for a thong then?

Underground credit card clearing house hacked

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

How does that work?

"....also puts the personal data of legitimate customers and of many ordinary Russians at risk."

Er, their details were already on file with a bent card processor. In exactly what way were they not already pwned?

Security flaw creates Android, Palm Pre snoop risk

TeeCee Gold badge
WTF?

Palm Pre?

Someone's gone to the trouble of finding a vuln on the Palm Pre?

Oh well I guess that's the last nail in the coffin of "security through obscurity" then....

Rise in Latvian botnets prompts Spamhaus row

TeeCee Gold badge

"we are one of the biggest internet providers in Latvia".

Presumably measured in terms of traffic. I wonder where they'd be without all those spam and DOS packets bumping their numbers up?

Mozilla Thunderturkey and its malcontents

TeeCee Gold badge
Happy

The real problem's in there.

Kevin Hall hit the nail on the head. As the corporates move to hosted webmail / mobile / cloud stuff the demand for a standalone email client drops. Since the corp market's where the only really serious money and market share is, development of the standalone apps moves very much onto the back burner as a result.

Incidently, my system also runs absolutely fine, handling several years of archived mail amounting to several gigs without a twitch. Starts up in seconds and retrieves from the servers like lightning. It's currently using 64megs of memory although I note that it did have a nasty peak of over 300 in this session, must have been that big search I did.

But then I am using Outlook.......

NTLM authentication: still broken after all these years

TeeCee Gold badge

"Why did Microsoft adopt it in Windows....."

Er, back-compatibility? Windows had to get its toe in the door of LAN Manager / OS/2 shops and needed to play nice to do so.

Exactly the same reason that the big-boys' UNIX versions (HP-UX, AIX etc.) have maintained and working functionality that was officially deprecated a decade or more ago. When you're targetting the corporate market, you have to cater for glacial change speeds and Rule 1 is: "Don't b0rk anything that works now, unless you're 100% sure that nobody's using it".

Are plasma TVs killing radio?

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

@Geoff Campbell

"...in light of the other programmes."

Ah yes, the BBC Light Programme. I've heard of that.......

ASA: You can't say 'f**k'

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: darkside

Yeees, but milk is spelled M-I-L-K.

So you see, the problem you describe cannot occur as there is no fuck in milk..........

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

@King Jack

Actually I was wondering how there could be such a thing as a tastefully drawn cock and balls icon.....

iPhone users get more sex than Android fans

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

iPhone users screw around more?

There's the clap for that!

Accenture denies British Gas 'millions of errors' billing system claim

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Re: Those were my first thoughts.

For me, I saw "millions of errors" and thought that sounded unlikely,

Then I noticed "Accenture" and thought it was plausible.

Finally I saw "SAP-based" and decided it's an open-and-shut case.

Independent bigs up the 'Wanky Balls festival'

TeeCee Gold badge
Coffee/keyboard

@Whoever did that.

Thank you for brightening up a really shitty day!

I'm so pleased that I'll let you off the cost of the keyboard.

Pesky ISS cooling pump: NASA has a plan

TeeCee Gold badge
Joke

"Isolate ammonia, unbolt unit, beers all round"

Now you bloody tell me!

If I'd known there was free beer in it, I'd have become a bloody astronaut rather than going into IT.

Google experimenting with spy drones, says German maker

TeeCee Gold badge
Coat

Nostalgia.

The likes of The Beano hark back to the days when no kid would be seen out without a catty in his back pocket, for those serendipitous moments that a target of opportunity and a handy pebble/conker/acorn/sheepshit would be found together.

Looks like those days may be about to return.

Off now to find a cleft stick and nick a piece of 'laccy from my mum's sewing box.