Posts by TeeCee 9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
I've got news for you. They still fall for "U can haz codec, yes?" and "FREE!!1! Antivirus scanner." too.
All now older than the hills and giving the mountains a run for their money.
Unfortunately nobody has yet built an OS that's proof against "Yes of course I want that installed and I'm happy to grant you the privilege to do it!".
How?
I'm guessing that it gets in touch with its makers and a server owned by them does the job.
This will, of course, stop working as soon as its makers go deservedly titsup.com. What's more useless than an internet-connected air quality meter that texts you alerts? An internet-connected air quality meter that doesn't any more.....
Interesting, but a few caveats.
A generic device (and an el cheapo Bluetooth OBD interface coupled to a copy of "Torque" on Android is a good place to start) will read some/most of the sensors and usually the fault codes too. If you're very lucky, the fault reset function may work on your car.
Trouble is that, while the interface is standard, manufacturers do like to make much of the data format proprietary, so to get at everything you will need that hideously expensive manufacturer's service computer....
Imagine what the internet would be like if it hadn't been for GNU and the GPL.
Trouble is that he just couldn't help adding bells 'n whistles whenever anyone did something legitimately with GPL software that got his knickers in a knot, so the GPL these days looks as restrictive as yer average commercial EULA....
It'd be ironic if it wasn't so bloody sad.
Moral: Never let idealists do the day-to-day stuff.
No, no, no. Horses for courses.
We outsource any retreating / losing / being occupied to the French.
We outsource the "finally getting our arses into gear and getting stuck into the fight way too late to save the French" bit to the Americans.
If it goes a bit Pete Tong we fall back on the strategy of getting the Russians involved, as they have more soldiers than anyone else has bullets.
Our army is the best in the world at finding a convenient spot to stop and brew tea while talking about how the war's going.
I would question the sanity of any parent....
Was it not around here a few years gone that the words (from memory - YMMV): "In an age where parents register twitter and tumblr accounts for their newborns....", were uttered?
The ship of parental insanity induced by crap tech sailed some time ago.
One of favourite "fix it on the fly" gags was a software upgrade that had gone through testing and proved to be a pile of poo in live. Many weeks of tweaking later all was sorted and the go-ahead for further rollout was given.
The developers had provided a nice, self-extracting, install, migrate and configure package that tidied up after itself. Trouble was, its only real run in anger had been the original "pile of poo" installation and much tweaking of its contents had occurred since.
The result was something where you pressed a button, it shat all over the environment and then removed all traces of itself (leaving only the thoroughly stuffed remains of the system) so you couldn't see what had gone wrong. Oh how we laughed......
Or maybe they did plan it correctly, but:
Having done so, there is the small matter of the budget allocation. You have in your hand a proposal for a project which will take X months and cost Y, so first on the agenda is off to TPTB to get the budget approved.
1) Twiddle thumbs until next approval board.
2) Get sent away with flea in ear to cut costs / improve payback / add cat pics / whatever.
3) Tweak proposal and twiddle thumbs for another month.
4) Repeat 2 and 3 a couple of times.
Presto. A project that takes X and costs Y with X - n months and Y - ${large_random_number} to do it with.
And TPTB then wonder why every bloody thing is either over time and budget or piggin' unreliable 'cos the testing was skimped.
Four decades is pretty much on the money and would seem to affect Russia too.
That engine is a direct derivative of the oxygen rich, closed cycle units[1] developed for the Soviet moon rocket a shade over four decades ago.
The reason it's used is that, when it comes to efficiency in chemical rocketry, it kicks the living shit out of anything anyone else has produced before or since.
[1] Often described as the "holy grail of chemical rocketry", making the fact that the Soviets got it working years ago even more embarrassing.
Oh I'm with you on that one, this place must be full of bloody cyclists today. I really pity the poor sod arriving at a junction and just missing the slot before the mobile chicane and its ensuing procession of purple-faced drivers.
Still, one thing that'll result will be a whole load of pseudonyms for "Google driverless car", all in fluent Anglo-Saxon.
Gosh! You're not seriously suggesting that products sporting a line-art pic of a wheelie bin with an "X" through it might get thrown away are you? The EU spent a fortune on that legislation and obliging all the manufacturers to correctly label their products, I'd hate to think that was a monumental waste of time, money and resources....
</mock horror>
Transport Systems Catapult.
It looked very promising initially. Low cost, zero emissions and fast too. It's just proving tricky to solve the "sudden stop at the destination" issue....
Note to Civil Servants: If you play wankword bingo in public, I reserve the right to take the piss unmercifully.
What? The same Peugeot whose hybrids feature diesel drive at the front and leccy at the rear?
This has got as much in common with an F1 KERS system as that....... i.e. sod all.
Just 'cos Fords are tied into a long deal to buy that monumentally godawful PSA diesel powerplant doesn't mean they want anything else from that quarter
Well, that's what you get for having a wobbly coalition government. Decomming all the nuke plants to keep the leaf-munching luddites on message[1].
Looks like we might be about to get a taste of this arsehattery.
[1] A very strange leaf-munching luddite requirement that involves choosing lignite (brown coal - dirty as it gets) as your power source of choice. Makes you wonder which foot the German greens are going to shoot off next time they get their sticky paws on the levers of power.
If you read the full story on Popehat you'll find they already managed to accuse themselves of incompetence in an earlier case. You can judge the efficacy of that strategy by the fact that they got truly fucked and are now appealing.
Yes, they really are so stupid that the obvious gags have already been done. By them. In court. While keeping a straight face.
If someone actually needs XP SP2 it is very likely that the computer in question isn't used for web browsing.
Or, if it is so used while so far behind on patches, it'll be so riddled with crapware by now that the potential for hash collisions is the least of its user's problems.
Phones turning into proper PCs when you plug them into a monitor and keyboard.
About bloody time too! They had the perfect shotgun to blow the industry apart in Win 8, with its schizophrenic conventional desktop / slidey touchy tiles duality. Typical that they didn't bother to do the obvious and instead applied the business end to their own foot and pulled both triggers as a first attempt at addressing the issue.
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