Posts by TeeCee

Re: In addition...

Yes, but a Shagbat is the same thing as a Walrus when it comes to things that fly. Just to add to the confusion....

'...such use was "inappropriate"...'

Oh yeah? Sounds a bloody sight more "appropriate" than the service being punted on the telly at the moment where you text in a registration number and get back all the details on the car and a ballpark value based on what it is.

I wonder where the information to tie a registration number to a specific make, model, year and specification of car required to do this is coming from?

@Yes Me

"....we really do need sensible, technically competent, fair-minded internationalists there....."

What? Plural? Fat fucking chance finding one. Even fatter fucking chance getting somebody to nominate 'em.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows exactly what the outcome will be here. ICANN will be lumbered with bureaucratic oversight from appointees of major governments. No useful decision will ever be made again. The Chinese will veto anything that doesn't have a major contribution to local governmental control in it. The Europeans will veto anything American. The Russians will veto anything dependant on which other diplomatic stink they want to make a point about this week.

For an illustration here, look at the process of getting a serious decision out of the UN Security Council. Now imagine this in a situation where none of the issues are such that anyone involved stands a risk of getting nuked next week if they argue the toss for longer.

@Your "typical user"

".....we made Flickr! Not Yahoo!"

With an unneeded exclamation mark on "Flickr"? Way to go arsehat......

Yeah, like that'll work.

Watch some time soon for the sales of PMPs in Europe to tank as world + dog imports the version that'll go all the way up to 11 (rather than stopping at an EU-friendly 5) from FleaBay vendors in countries where the administration isn't quite so Stalinist*.

Shortly after that little cockup there'll be some legislation introduced making the use of a PMP which doesn't have an "EU approved" sticker an offence (think some years ago, modems and green triangles). Those living in countries with more liberal governments** will wonder WTF we're up to.

*E.g. China. (Oh the irony.)

**E.g. China. (Just as ironic the second time around.)

Re: There's water on the moon...

Oops, my bad. In my defence, I'd had a few too many, had a bladder like the TV Times* so I just had to go and didn't think anyone would notice.

*I never knew there was so much in it.

Half the truth anyway.

"He went on to say that DoubleClick does employ a security monitoring system that screens all ads, and in cases where it identifies problem banners, they are pulled immediately."

It's a shame he didn't go on to apologise for this system being a useless sack of shit that's not fit for purpose. An existing Trojan targetting an old vuln and they *still* didn't spot it? You could forgive 'em not picking up the odd zero day, but this?

Doubleclick were always greedy scum peddlars. Being owned by Google doesn't make them any more than Google-branded greedy scum peddlars. They've been blocked on my router for some years now and I've still seen nothing that would make me think about changing this (notwithstanding that the whole "getting off my arse and doing it for no benefit" bit is unlikely to happen in any event).

Picture pedantry.

As the article's about a Yank ammo shortage and the quotes are all from Remington, why is the .45 ACP cartridge in the accompanying icon an Israeli Military Industries product?

I'd send you a better pic, but I've just turned over the Czech firing range souvenir on my desk to find that it's (unsurprisingly) a Sellier-Bellot product......

@Dave 32: While I'm feeling pedantic, you omitted .45 GAP (Glock Automatic Pistol).

Was he attached to it?

Is he really upset to see it taken away, or are those crocodile tears?

Hey! No need to throw things.....

I'd kill for that error.

At least it would be getting somewhere. I'm stuck with something that appears to be port related and the corp firewall, it say no.

I'm guessing here, but my money's on the voice 'n video side. Looking at what this wants, it needs a right shedload of open ports. I reckon that the older versions (8.5 and lower) just used to accept that they were closed, disable the cruft and get on with the real job at hand that you installed the sodding thing for in the first place. The new versions sit in a corner and sulk. Can't for the life of me figure out why they'd make this change though, assuming that I'm on the right track (although sheer blind stupidity's got to be a prime suspect).

re: Warranty vs. contract.

I'd have thought that if you've been given the thing on a two year contract, then in order for it to be of "satisfactory quality" the sodding thing would have to work for at least, er, two years.

I'd threaten the iThieves with an action in the small claims court to get your money back. If they don't play ball, take said action. It costs next to sod all, you'll win and it'll be *really* funny to watch the avalanche of similar claims that follow.

I might give this a try.

Oh, hang on. "Available for download with the Google Toolbar......". Oh. No I won't then.

Even Adobe have got the message these days that I might want to install product X without having pointless fucking toolbar Y installed as well.

Re: (KGB+SS)^2

I don't know about Stalin, but I'm sure that Hitler would approve of a pan-European police state run by the Germans with the active collaboration of the French.

There's yer problem.

"But you're paying both while you're running both."

So, if you're a radio station do you A) pay to broadcast analogue where all the listeners are, B) pay to broadcast digital because........ah......anyone got any ideas? or C) pay for both 'cos you are as rich as Croesus* and enjoy pissing cash up the wall.

As for in-vehicle reception, there's a world of difference between 'sometimes gets interference, can be quite bad' and 'either works or doesn't'. The first is a pain, the second is completely and utterly bloody unfit for purpose.

Shame he found retuning the FM car radio such a PITA, most of us have had one that automatically retunes as stations switch frequency for quite some time now. Even more of a shame that this was the only reason he could give for DAB being "better" in-car, given that it isn't one at all if you're getting a new radio anyway.

Talking of getting a new radio, they're going to need a minimum of twenty years after setting a date. It's been quite trendy for some time for cars and such to have built in, unswappable units for some time now. There's no "set top box" option with radio and I wish people luck trying to source a DAB unit for a ten year old Ford Fiesta with the built in dash option......

*Or publicly funded - amounts to the same thing when it comes to wasting money.

"webcam"

Probably a misnomer in this context. Streaming 1080p over a USB 3 connection onto a monitor in real time is fine and dandy. I wish them luck doing that over the, er, web.

What they've got there is an ordinary video camera. Albeit a very large and inconvenient one once you put all the bits together. Which may or may not offer a recording facility (doesn't seem to say in the article). Gangbusters for waving at through a shop window and watching yourself on the monitor, but a practical application escapes me.

Ah, the answer at last.

For the whole of recorded history, armies of various stripe have claimed that God is on their side.

Now we know whose squaddies he's really going the extra mile for.....

Re: Oh, come on

Maybe longer. I reckon the reason that Noah took two of everything that moved was that he was working on an angle for a scam selling a "big wooden thing that duplicates animals".

Re: short stroking SSDs

Yup, bloody silly that. You might just as well add a shedload of RAM and run a massive RAM disk cutting out those expensive SSDs. That'd be quick. Since all the seriously clever stuff here is getting the interface up to speed, replacing this with processor to memory I/O (a.k.a. fast as fuck) seems like the blindingly obvious and far simpler option.

Copy regular to RAM disk on boot, copy same back before shutdown. Since they're using write cacheing on their SSDs, it's no more screwed if the power goes off than their setup (less even, the data on the non-volatile storage remains consistant, if outdated).

Option for going somewhat faster than fuck would be to do this on a multi-socket box with some secret sauce software drivers to run a RAM disk on each CPUs memory, with I/O for the individual "disks" handled by the associated CPU and RAID 0 the beggars together. It should be possible to get performance levels in excess of OMFG! with that (I suspect the I/O limit here would be what you can squeeze out of HyperTransport or QPI).

It's be just as impressive to anyone who didn't bother to read the small print, but it wouldn't sell any SSDs though.......

Re: downrightnow.com

Presumably this is because it follows the Web 2.0 fluffery. If enough of the other things it monitors are in full on pear-shaped mode for enough time*, it has to accept that this is the will of the hive mind and shit itself in sympathy.

*Presumably with some weighting. Something like 5 minutes Tw@tter outage = 1 day of Arsebook being down the crapper = 3 years of Windows Live Spaces being hors de combat = a millenium of Orkut being fscked.

Message to vendor:

Re: Your offering of "A New California"

Ooooo goody. I've always wanted one of those. Will you ship it to Europe? I see you only accept PayPal, would it be possible to pay via Bank Transfer? Does the new version come with adequate electricity and water supplies as I've heard that version 1.0 has some limitations in this area? Also, I've heard that the original version was prone to overheating and catching fire, has this been fixed? Are there any known faults* in the new version?

*Large geological ones of course.

Mooring.

".... allowing the ship to suck itself down firmly in place......"

As Mike the cool person would say:

"That's one hell of a sucker and I don't mean that it's easily fooled."

Re: what problem? (AC 02:20)

I see. Who are you astroturfing for, Microsoft or Intel?

Well, that's just great!

"AMD has signed up for it....."

I guess we can wave goodbye to any chance of driver fixes for both the shocking performance and the tendancy of the array rebuild/migrate routines to regularly hang the machine stone dead* courtesy of the Promise controllers they currently implement in the SB600 and SB750 then.

Hint: Hard disabling writethrough cacheing is not a bloody fix AMD, even if it does stop you losing data when the thing inevitably goes titsup.

Hint 2: If you can't write a reliable RAID driver and controller firmware to save your fucking lives, changing the controller ain't going to fix this.

*Not that it doesn't do this in normal operation too, just not every five bloody minutes.

@Pete 6 Re: @ Matthew 4

I dunno what was funnier there, that or that the other alternative offered was a Sony. About the only thing you can get with tech support that makes Dell look good.

LOL indeed.

Re: WTF?

Crikey! The Phorm lads must be green with envy.....

@Aaron 10

".....this car ain't gonna see the light of day for at least 10 years."

By which time it'll seem rather dated in a slightly quaint "product of its time" sort of way. Just like the 2CV. NOW I UNDERSTAND!!!!!11!!!!

Thank you for clearing that up.

@The Original Steve

I'd be quite happy to pull the "DO NOT REMOVE" stickers off my car. I've never seen any in all my years of fiddling with automotive componentry though. In my experience it's the computers that tend to come with warranty invalidating stickers containing threats of doom liberally applied to all the important bits.

Incidently, you should save yourself some cash and give it a go. Cars are easier and more therapeutic to fix/service yourself than computers. For a start, many of the important bits won't break if you get pissed off and wallop them with a hammer....

@Quirkafleeg

No, "Green Death" is right. Big green maggots down mineshafts. The requirement for Jo Grant is a giveaway here as it makes it a Jon Pertwee / Katy Manning outing. "Ark in Space" is a Tom Baker / Liz Sladen piece.

I do appreciate the opportunity to think about Jo Grant again though. Thank you.

Re: "Planet of the Spiders". I went to a convention once where one of the guests was Matt Irvine (spelling?) of the BBC effects department. He brought the animatronic spider with him. Quite large, but nowhere near as scary once you find out it's called, er, "Boris" (announced to a roomful of groans at the sheer cheese involved). Bloody tempremental, rather difficult to control and a tad fragile (says he wot drove it off a table edge).

@Wibble

I take it that you posted that while scrabbling round on the floor looking for your contact lenses?

TwonkyBeam.

That rings a bell. Is this the same PacketVideo who've managed to completely banjax the whole DLNA thing by ensuring that you can buy DLNA-certified products that won't talk to each other? You know, because various bits are using their shonky^H^H^H^H^H^Htwonky plugin for the purpose?

Ah! The Reg's internal search comes up trumps, turning up an article to prove that yes, it is!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/18/dlna_finger_pointing/

I wonder how many DLNA certified tellys they bought before finding one they could use for their demo?

@Mark 65

Will that be the same "thou shalt not use generic cartridges" chip that causes mine to throw a wobbly, threaten the End Of The World As We Know It and generally sulk, throwing "out of ink" errors every five minutes, when presented with anything other than the vanilla item?

Oh, did I forget to mention that it's an Epson?.......

It does play nice with Linux though. I'll give it that.

@Michael Chester

That's just soooo last Millenium. Now it's:

Tea: So that some right-on git can act all smug while berating you for purchasing a product responsible for slavery and propping up the capitalist exploitation of the third world to this day.

Bacon: So you get to wake up covered in manure with the lock on your door glued shut courtesy of the local branch of Leaf Munching Animal Rights Nazis Who Hate Everyone.

It's not a sad world, it's just got a lot of sad people in it.

@Kurashima

Actually that one was foisted on them by Customs and Excise.

The reason's the number of things you can (presumably "could" now) buy from places like Hong Kong for 1.50 plus 24.99 p&p. The actual price is in the p&p (not subject to tax or duty) rather than in the charge (which is below the threshold where they can be arsed to raise the paperwork).

I'm going to miss being able to buy spare parts for games consoles, PDAs 'n such for next to sod-all from HK without the vultures (no offence) taking their cut....

@The Cube

Ah yes. But with Windows Mobile, updating to the latest version *fixes* that rather than *causes* it.

Apple still have some way to go.....

Half the problem

One change that needs to be made here is that it should only be possible to sue for libel over something written and published in the country, not something published elsewhere that someone brought over in their bag, imported mail order or was reproduced on the web.

But that would run the libel tourism gravy train into the buffers, so it ain't going to happen.

The other change that desperately needs to made is that it should be abso-bloody-lutely, 100% impossible for something to be considered libellous if it's, er, true*. Personally I think it should be down to the plaintiff to prove that, on the balance of probability, it isn't.

*So it should be perfectly ok to describe someone convicted of fraud as a "convicted fraudster" or a "crook" even if they are considering an appeal or have one pending. I mention no names, for obvious reasons, but if it helps any the conviction I'm thinking of is a French one.....

CSI 2058

"It's no use, we haven't enough evidence to prosecute robot RXG-1175Q for murder. We only have the byte marks to go on......."

I don't think so.

".... the dark hand of the data commissioner's....."

More likely the brown trousers of Google's "make sure that Switzerland is properly blurred" team at work here.

That answer.

So when asked if he was too much of a pen-pushing bureaucrat and not enough of a policeman his answer was that he'd been: "very active in the national security space over much of the last couple of decades"?

I'd have taken that as a "Yes"........